“Hey,” Flynn yells back, and points at him with his index finger like an annoyed traffic cop.
“You fucking hypocrite,” Hazel yells. “There’s not that big a jump between jamming the signal and dynamiting the tower.”
“What we do is a joke,” Wallace says, standing up. “It’s for amusement. It’s spirited mischievousness. What you want to do is terrorism.”
“Stop it now,” Flynn says, getting up to move between them.
“You’re a joker, all right, you little freak—”
“You’re street trash. I knew it the second I saw you—”
“Yeah, call the goddamn cops, you old fart. They’ll cuff us together—”
“This is not a political gang. Why don’t you and the rest of your uneducated ilk take your act down to South America and leave us—”
“What this group is or isn’t doesn’t get decided by you—”
“Dynamiting transmitters, vandalizing relay stations. This is ridiculous—”
Flynn stops the screaming with a reflex action, the only thing that occurs to him in the moment. He grabs a firecracker from his pants pocket, lights it behind his back, and tosses it onto the floor between them. The bang is given a boost by the size of the room. There’s a scream from both parties and Hazel and Wallace are left dazed and crouching near the ground, backs turned to each other.
Flynn sits impassively with his head cocked down near his left shoulder.
Ferrie comes running up the stairs, yelling, “What the hell’s the story?” in a cracked, high voice.
Flynn walks over to him, waving blue smoke out of his face. He claps Ferrie on the back, smiles, and says, “Just a little family argument. Nothing to worry about.”
19
Quinsigamond City Hall is a four-story rectangle of gray granite that stretches two hundred feet down the heart of Main Street. Its central entryway consists of an enclosed portico carved into an arch and capped by a two-hundred-foot Florentine tower that houses a huge and ornate eye-of-God clock and culminates in an open-air balcony.
Hannah stands on the first step of the enormous curving baroque staircase that leads to the City Council chambers. It’s noon, but the street is practically deserted. In the glare that breaks through the cloud cover, Hannah can make out the enormous marble eagle that perches on the knob of the balcony’s roof as if watching over the city. She can remember her father bringing her to City Hall when she was young, maybe to pay a tax bill, maybe to get a birth certificate. When they exited the building, he turned his daughter around and began to point things out — the red tile of the hip roof, the fanged gargoyles carved into the granite at each corner. He pointed out the balcony and began the story of Isaiah Timmons or Tomkins — what the hell was his name? — the first printer in America, how he stood on that balcony in July of 1776 and screamed out the Declaration of Independence for the crowd gathered below. But Hannah couldn’t concentrate on the story of the rebel printer. Instead, she stared at the carved eagle at the top of the building, impressed by how lifelike it looked, and beyond that, how frightening it seemed, not really like an eagle at all, but more like a vulture, a bird of prey. It seemed as if the bird were perpetually looking out over the city for a new victim, an easy mark, a fresh carcass to swoop down on and cleave meat from bone.
And now, looking up at the marble bird almost twenty years later, Hannah still has this feeling. So she zips up her jacket and runs up the curve of the stairs.
Inside, the building is all quartered oak and mahogany. The ceilings are ridiculously high and the halls are lined with oversized oil portraits of the long line of Quinsigamond’s mayors, each framed in heavy gilt. She wonders if this environment has any effect on the people who work in the city’s offices each day. Would it give you a constant sense of history, of the progression of events that have shaped your home? Or do you quickly become immune to the out-of-date grandeur? Or is there another possible effect, a subconscious depression that results in watching decay chew on this structure with unbearable patience and persistence day after day?
The City Council chambers are on the third floor. Hannah opens a rear door and takes a seat on the last wooden bench just as Mayor Welby begins to call the meeting to order. It’s not the normal time for a council meeting. The mayor’s office announced the session yesterday morning with a brief press release sent to the Spy. It was a short statement informing “all concerned parties” that the matter of “unlicensed radio disruptions” would be addressed at an unscheduled session. Hannah, like the rest of the department, saw it as a grandstand play to appease the station owners and she had little intention of even reading the Spy’s coverage, let alone attending, until she got the message on her answering machine.
She can’t imagine why G.T. Flynn would ask to meet her here. But she knows Flynn was connected to Lenore and that’s enough to bring her downtown.
The room is packed. Welby is in position behind his raised walnut desk, something like a judge’s bench, which makes him tower over the city manager and the rest of the council. Though she doesn’t make a hobby of studying local politics, Hannah has a native’s grasp of the back-room alliances and infighting. Welby has Counselors Krieger and Lotman on his side and in his pocket respectively. Donaghue, Pfeil, and Campana line up with City Manager Kenner. And, at the moment anyway, the rest — Frye, Searle, Altier, Jardine, and Kurahashi — are in perpetual motion, always playing one side off the other, cutting deals and bartering votes as if the business of running the city were a never-ending swap meet.
The local cable access station has two television cameras mounted on small parapets at opposite sides of the chamber. The camera crew look like scruffy kids, fooling with their headsets and cranking knobs below their monitors, testing the focus on each of the councillors, who all seem to be leaning dangerously back in their seats and simultaneously using a hand to blanket their microphones as they whisper to their neighbors and make odd, squinty expressions.
Someone touches Hannah’s shoulder and she flinches and turns to see a dark-haired guy who she’d nail at about thirty-five years, 165 pounds, maybe five eleven, with no visible facial markings.
It’s G.T. Flynn. He’s dressed in a deep gray double-breasted suit with a starched white shirt and a red-patterned tie knotted so tight at the neck that Hannah thinks he should be gasping. But gasping, she knows, is not Flynn’s style.
She met him once before, about two years back. She was having lunch with Lenore at the Rib Room down in the Zone. Flynn slid into their booth with a run of smooth greetings and Hannah almost choked on her chicken salad to see Lenore actually stammer back her response. She thinks he was dropping off some insurance papers, maybe a life policy — she vaguely remembers some mention of Lenore’s brother, Ike, as a beneficiary. Then he was gone, his exit as slick and abrupt as his entrance. It wasn’t until they’d paid the check and were back on Rimbaud Way that Hannah asked her partner about Flynn.
Lenore said, “He’s just a guy I know,” in that definitive tone that sealed the topic forever. G.T. Flynn was never brought up again.
Now, he smiles and eye-motions for Hannah to slide in. She does and he takes a seat next to her, squeezed in, their thighs touching.
He leans back to her ear and says, “Thanks for coming,” then sits forward and turns his attention to the meeting.
Hannah’s not sure what to do. She has no desire to sit through a boring council meeting in order to find out what this guy wants. But there’s a feeling that she may have to play things his way to satisfy her curiosity. She decides to sit back for ten minutes and see what develops.