Reverend Cotton of the Episcopal Church has his bald head bowed and his eyes squeezed shut and his hands clasped to his chest as he stands before the speaker’s microphone and intones an invocation. The majority of the councillors look respectfully bored, except for Yuko Kurahashi. She’s hunched over the conference table making notes on a legal pad, clearly annoyed with the traditional prayer that Welby refuses to eliminate despite her threats of court action.
The audience gathered on the benches behind a partitioning guardrail seems anxious to get things rolling. There are more suits and ties in the crowd than normal, but then, Hannah reminds herself, this isn’t a normal meeting. These must be the station owners and managers, waiting to hear what the city is going to do to protect their interests.
As if on cue, Mayor Welby bends the accordion stem of his microphone until his lips almost touch the surface. He looks out over the council and the audience, then, ever the pro, locks his eyes on the TV camera with the red light on top, takes a deep breath, and says, in his slightly nasal but still-powerful baritone, “My fellow councillors, City Manager Kenner, our in-chamber audience, and all our city’s taxpayers, I thank you for joining us tonight on such short notice. I’ve asked you all here to address the recent onslaught of the unlicensed and illegal disruption, or jamming, to use the current terminology, that has plagued many of our local radio broadcasters.”
He pauses and picks his bifocals up off his desktop, slides them onto the tip of his nose, picks up a sheet of paper, and reads, in a more halting tone, “First and foremost, I want to assure everyone watching tonight that the Mayor’s Office and the City Council and the local law enforcement agencies have been actively pursuing any and all avenues to end these disruptions, and any statement to the contrary is both untrue and provocative.”
He drops the paper and takes a second to glower down at the audience. Hannah knows this is a reply to charges in yesterday’s Spy that Welby was taking the jamming incidents lightly. Charles Federman, the owner of WQSG, had gone so far as to call Welby a “bought and paid-for hack.”
Welby pulls his glasses off and seems to toss them down, emphasizing his annoyance. His voice raises slightly. “I want it made absolutely clear, right here and now, that my office will not tolerate this behavior. I’ve been in daily contact with Chief Bendix and the unit he’s assigned to investigate these incidents. We’ve requested the necessary equipment needed to track the broadcasts and we’re waiting to coordinate with an agent from the FCC.”
The voice gets just a bit louder, more belligerent. “And if the private sector has any suggestions for further action, we welcome them with open ears.”
Flynn leans into Hannah’s side and whispers, “Here we go.”
She turns to look at him but he’s riveted on the speaker’s microphone as a tall, bulky man with enormous shoulders walks to it. The guy’s got a head of gray stubble and his face is shaved military-close to reveal red, almost-scarlet cheeks beneath a Nixonesque nose lined with a deep purple web of veins. He’s wearing a navy suit and a maroon silk tie. And though he has the immediate bearing of a man who’s never been infected with self-doubt, his forehead is gleaming with a wash of sweat.
He stands as if a steel pole has been attached to his spine, his hands clasped together behind his back, his legs spread slightly apart. He begins his oration as if in midspeech, voice already booming, making the sound system ring now and then.
“Our mayor has the standard politician’s talent for soliloquy. But this is real life, not the debate club, and every day that goes by costs me money and the confidence of my advertisers. And I simply do not understand why this should be such a problem. Mr. Mayor, Councillors, you have a suspicious fire, you round up known arsonists. You have unlicensed radio transmissions, you round up the radio freaks. Is there an error in my thinking that you could point out to me, Mayor Welby?”
The bulk of the audience bursts out in spontaneous applause, fellow station owners, normally competitors, tonight ready to back their unofficial spokesman, Charles Federman.
Welby begins to bash away at his desktop with his gavel, saying, “I’d ask the viewing audience to control itself, please.”
He says the word please like every harried schoolteacher Hannah has ever known. And it dawns on her, the way it must have just dawned on the mayor, that though he called this meeting to defuse an image problem, he could end up more sullied than vindicated. Charles Federman isn’t Louis Lotman, cowed with a fast, harsh word or the threat of a review board. Federman is the real thing, a business animal with an instinct for determining weakness and manipulating image. Welby is going to have to scramble to turn this thing around.
And he does exactly the right thing. He dilutes the blame hanging in the air by calling up Chief Bendix and asking, with a bureaucrat’s practiced weariness, to explain to the loud but ill-informed Mr. Federman the definition of “probable cause” and the difficulty of warrant attainment.
As the chief starts to speak in a raspy drone, Flynn slouches down a bit and says softly, “Do you remember me? We met down the Zone once? You were with Lenore Thomas.”
Hannah says, “I remember you,” in a noncommittal voice and continues to look at Bendix’s neck as it bulges against his shirt collar.
“I was wondering,” Flynn says, then hesitates and Hannah reads it as calculated. He swallows and starts again, “I was curious if you ever hear from Lenore anymore?”
She turns and gives him a look that she hopes says, Cut the shit, pal.
“Lenore moved away,” she says. “As far as I know, she’s never been back to the city.”
“Not even to see her brother?”
Hannah’s annoyed at the question. She says, “Why don’t you ask Ike?”
Flynn nods, rubs a hand over his jaw, changes direction. “Look,” he says, “I’m sorry if it was inconvenient for you to come down here. I didn’t want to miss this meeting and I thought this might be a good place to get together.”
“Nice and public,” Hannah says. “Neutral territory.”
His voice drops to a whisper. “Look, I don’t know what you thought I—”
She interrupts, “You look, pal. I don’t know what was between you and Lenore. But number one, I haven’t heard from her. You want to get a message to her, you’ll have to find someone else. And number two, I’ll decide who I share information with—”
Now he interrupts, looking down at the bench beyond her as he speaks through semiclenched teeth. “Hey, Officer, I didn’t come here to antagonize you, all right? I thought there might be some way we could help each other. There might be a few things we have in common.”
Get up and leave, Hannah thinks. Just get up and slide past him and go out the door. But instinct keeps her seated. That and the mention of Lenore. Everything keeps coming back to Lenore. It’s like a bad Frankenstein movie: Lenore, the head-case scientist. And Hannah, the misunderstood monster. But there’s a twist to this new version of the story. Lenore didn’t take her body parts from fresh graves. She supplied them herself. So, of course, the project was doomed from the start. The more of herself that Lenore gave away, the more Lenore disappeared. And when the creator did finally, literally vanish, the creation was left incomplete.
* * *
Down on the chamber floor, Bendix is relinquishing the public microphone to a walleyed little man who identifies himself as “Dr. Pasqual DeMango, tenured professor of postmodern performance arts at St. Ignatius College.”