“Oh yeah,” is all Wayne can think of to say. “Right.”
The guy’s got some feelings for Ronnie, Flynn thinks. The poor bastard has to work with her every night and will never give any indication, any sign of attraction or desire. He’s probably furious that I’m here tonight.
“Ronnie was telling me …” Flynn starts, looking down at the board, appearing to study the banks of knobs and sliders and meters.
“Yeah?”
“She was saying how it usually goes during the show. How you two operate. Quite a team, huh?”
Wayne likes to hear this. He’ll remember the exact words. He says, “We’re pretty good. We work well together.”
“You can tell,” Flynn says, nodding and pulling down the corners of his mouth. “You can see the rhythm. That’s why I had to come down here tonight. I didn’t want to get in the way or anything, but I really wanted to see you two do it. After listening for so long. I’d hear her mention your name all the time. I always wondered what you two looked like.”
“Now you know.”
“Yeah. Now I know,” Flynn repeats. “Tell me, is it always so natural? I mean between the announcer and the engineer. I mean, you two seem like you could do this with your eyes closed.”
“Well, we’re pretty good. Not everyone—”
“I mean does every night go this smooth? All the calls lined up, all the ads timed right.”
“Well, we—”
“And when do you go out for the food?”
Wayne just stares at him, then finally says, “The food?”
Flynn smiles. “Yeah. Ronnie was telling me how the night goes and she was saying you know all the great takeout places. Chinese. Mexican. You can get them to hang around after closing till you pick up. She called you the King of Takeout.”
“Oh yeah? The King of Takeout?”
“Yeah. I thought that was great. So, when do you go? ’Cause I insist, no argument now — I want to treat you two tonight. This is on me.”
Wayne stares at him a little bewildered, then says, “Well, we really didn’t discuss—”
Flynn cuts him off. “Ronnie said she was dying for some Tandoori. That Indian place down San Remo Ave—”
“She wanted Indian? We’ve never gotten—”
But Flynn has already pulled a fifty from his pants pocket and is tucking it into Wayne’s hand.
“Yeah, we were driving down here tonight and she started going on about how she could go for some biryani and some Tandoori shrimp.”
He puts an arm around Wayne’s shoulder and starts to steer him toward the door.
“Usually we wait until—” Wayne begins, but Flynn talks him down, saying, “Looks like everything is under control here. All the lines are lit. You take your time, we’ll be fine. And you know, if you could find a bottle of wine, your choice, that would be great.”
Wayne stares at him, bewildered and cowed.
Flynn chucks him under the chin, gives him a small push out into the corridor, winks, and says, “I think there’s a liquor store over on Seventh that stays open till midnight.”
26
Hazel and Eddie do a sweep around the block, then ease the van over the curbing and drive down a gravel and weed slope into the burned-out cavern of old Gompers Station. They drive in as far as they can and Eddie jockeys the van behind the remains of the marble stairway where it can’t be seen from the street.
In its day, in the twenties and thirties, Gompers Station was Quinsigamond’s answer to Grand Central. For decades it was the second largest train station in the state, a depot for every major line that passed through New England. Survivors from that era will tell you it had style. And a deceiving sense of permanence.
When the Gompers was opened in 1911, the public was let into a holy palace of the high industrial age: From atop a heavy granite base rose a white marble basilica consecrated to the religion of fast travel. Two symmetrical baroque towers shot up two hundred feet from street level. One hundred and sixty Ionic columns trimmed the exterior walls. The main waiting room was an elliptical vault that contained eighteen thousand square feet of space, capped by a domed ceiling in gilt frames.
Sometime after World War II, the railroads began the steady decline that led to the downfall of Gompers Station. By the early seventies, the last freight company pulled out and the worst of the erosion got under way. Anything of value was drilled or blasted out of place and carted away, and once the main ceiling was destroyed, the Quinsigamond winters began to go to work.
It might have been better if the station had been leveled and remanded to memory and museum photos, eternally new and forever whole. Instead, the place was left to rot into a bizarre modern ruin on the northeast corner of downtown. It looks like a chillingly realistic vision of a postnuclear landscape. The original flooring is gone, leaving uneven bedrock and gravelly dirt. Massive chunks of granite and marble are missing from the walls. The master stairway that led to the upper-level dining pavilion is more a gritty, crater-filled incline than anything else. The Ionic columns are crumbled and broken, and in some cases, lying on their sides. Indistinguishable rubble is strewn everywhere and the air is thick with grime and soot.
During the coldest months of the year, Gompers is an atom-smashed boardinghouse for dozens of homeless vagrants and drunks. From time to time it becomes popular with the growing pack of mental health cases deinstitutionalized from the Toth Care Facility. There are rumors that a group of wandering satanists celebrate Black Mass here on the Solstice.
And occasionally, like tonight, Gompers Station is a neutral meeting ground for gang rites and summits and unconventional transactions.
Eddie reaches for his door handle and Hazel shakes her head without looking at him. She’s got a brown paper super-market bag in her lap and her hands are inside it counting the money.
“No one tell you the days of big debt are over?” Eddie says, pleased with himself.
Hazel keeps counting and mouths the words Shut up, ass-hole.
Eddie ignores her. “What if they don’t show?”
There’s a second of quiet while Hazel finishes the tally, then she looks across at him and says, “They don’t show up, we blow it all on smack and tattoos.”
Eddie loves it when she talks like this. If he thought there was even a small chance of his meaning more to Hazel than muscle and handiwork, he’d drop Diane and steal a ring tomorrow.
“Who are we into for the wad?” he asks.
“This isn’t we,” Hazel says, emphasizing the last word. Then she continues, “I went to Elmore. And this dyke painter I know who’s getting lucky at the Baldwin Gallery.”
Eddie waits a beat, then can’t help himself. “You go to Flynn?”
“No, I didn’t go to Flynn,” Hazel says, getting angry. “How the fuck could I go to Flynn? Use your goddamn brain for once.”
“How do I know?” Eddie says, defensive. “You could tell him anything. You could say—”
“I don’t lie to Flynn,” Hazel says, almost yelling. Then she remembers where they are and forces some control.
“Look,” she says, “we’ve got to do this clean. Okay? This is partly a small test, allright? We put up the coin, we take the merchandise, we glance, we just glance, okay, at the merchandise. And then we’re out of here. We clear on that? No talk. No extra words. No ‘goodbye, see you soon’ crap. Okay?”
Eddie squints at her like he’s insulted. He’s about to tell her to save the instructions for the lightweights she’s drafted, but then a knock sounds on Hazel’s door and they both start in their seats.
“Shit,” Eddie whispers. “I didn’t even see the bastards come in.”