Radiomen (18 page)

“No, Ted,” I said. “I don’t, really. Myself, I don’t feel in need of anything special. Why do you ask? Do you?”

“Oh, maybe,” he said. He downed the rest of his drink, then picked up the pen again and resumed doodling on the napkin. “I find that it’s hard to be specific about what I might need these days. But sometimes, someone gives me something and it turns out to be exactly what I needed at a particular moment.”

“Do things like that happen to you a lot?” I asked.

“You know,” he said, “they seem to. I guess I’m just lucky.”

He finished whatever he was sketching on the napkin and then held it up to examine his work. “Not bad,” he said. “How about if I sign it and give it to you as a present?”

I didn’t reply, but apparently, that wasn’t necessary. He placed the napkin on the bar in front of him and added an elaborate signature. Then, he lit up his smile again, this time making it a little lopsided, which also brought out a web of crinkles around his eyes. The smile was beginning to seem like it led a life of its own, cleverly deploying itself in many different, useful versions. This was clearly the endearing version, one that had won countless fans. I, however, was not among them.

Ted Merrill put a hundred dollar bill on the bar and pushed it over to me, along with the napkin. “Time to go,” he said. “But it’s been nice talking to you, Laurie.” He tapped his finger on the napkin. “I hope you’ll keep this as a souvenir of our time together.”

As soon as he got off the stool, the members of his entourage all stood up and made ready to leave with him. Each one seemed to have assigned places and they formed themselves into a kind of human exoskeleton that surrounded the movie star. Then they all walked out together, moving as a unit.

Once they were gone, the waitress came back to join me at the bar. She was a young, pretty girl with very long hair dyed the color of ink; in her black uniform, she seemed to only partly emerge from the darkness of the bar. I focused on the pale disk of her face, a little moon bobbing in the nearby shadows.

“Wow,” she said, seeing the money on the bar. “The guys at the table only left me a ten.”

“I’ll split it with you,” I said.

I was actually tempted to give her the whole thing, since I had a feeling that the money came wrapped with an invisible helping of very bad vibes. But I didn’t have much time to dwell on that idea because the waitress was now examining with a studied interest the sketch on the napkin Ted Merrill had left behind.

“Well, look at that,” she said.

“What is it?” I asked her, since I hadn’t yet glanced at what Merrill had drawn. I didn’t really have a lot of interest in some doodle he’d signed—just more bad vibes as far as I was concerned.

But I’d asked, and so she showed it to me. The drawing on the napkin seemed to depict a kind of ribbed cone lying on its side, spilling out a variety of things that I took to be apples and peppers and maybe a small pumpkin or two.

“I guess he’s no artist,” the waitress said, “but you can see what it is.”

I certainly could. It was a cornucopia.

I asked the waitress to spell me for a moment and carried the napkin to the back, where our lockers were, folded it carefully and placed it in my shoulder bag. Then I did my best to put a mental shield between myself and the last half hour so that I could finish the rest of my shift. The less I thought about Ted Merrill and the message he’d drawn for me on the napkin the better off I was until I could call Jack. Because that was my plan, to call Jack. I couldn’t think any further than that.

When I finally got off work, I dialed Jack’s number as I was heading down the road at the far end of the airport that ran between the warehouses where the food service trucks dropped off their pallets of packaged meals. He didn’t pick up, but I hadn’t expected him to since he was still on the air at this hour, so I left him a message and kept on walking in the direction of my bus stop. It was a cool spring night, netted with stars.

He called back when I was on the bus, just as we were passing by Flushing Meadow, where there was a lake that looked like black glass. Tiny red lights seemed to skip across the lake’s dark surface like bursting bullets, then disappear, then suddenly sizzle back into view again; but this was an optical illusion, the reflection of the blinking airplane warning lights that topped the high-rise apartment buildings on nearby Queens Boulevard, which were right under the flight path leading to the airport.

“Guess who came into the bar tonight?” I said. “Ted Merrill.”

“Oh?” Jack replied. For a moment he sounded puzzled, as if he were wondering why I had bothered to call him about this, but he quickly made the connection. “
Oh
,” he repeated. “I gather it wasn’t a coincidence?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “For one thing, he knew my name. For another . . . well, he drew me a picture, on a napkin. He even signed it.”

“A picture of what?” Jack asked, sounding like he already knew he wasn’t going to like the answer.

“A cornucopia,” I said. “In other words, a horn of plenty.”

There was a long pause in our conversation. My bus had passed the lake now, and was turning off the parkway into the residential streets of Queens where the monolithic ranks of apartments gave way to rows of small brick and stucco houses leaning one against the other, and all shut up against the night.

Finally, Jack said, “They’ve got the radio. Now they want the antenna.”

“That’s what I thought,” I replied. “But why?”

Jack fell silent again. The bus rolled on through sleeping neighborhoods, past shuttered stores and empty streets.

“Well,” he said finally, “maybe when your intruders broke into your apartment, they were after the Blue Box, but once they saw the radio, and saw that it said Haverkit—just like your box—they knew to take that, too. Or someone told them to look out for it. The Blue Awareness considers itself to be a religion and religions have sacred objects: maybe Avi’s Haverkit radio is one of those things. Only it’s missing an important component: a very unusual antenna.”

“I still don’t understand. How would they know about the radio?”

“Remember I told you that Avi and Howard Gilmartin had some kind of relationship way back when? Well, before it fell apart over the Blue Box thing, Avi and Howard likely exchanged alien encounter stories. Howard saw something—someone—tinkering with his radars. Avi had a niece who told him that she saw a very similar figure years later, adjusting the tuning dial on his radio receiver . . . and don’t argue with me right now about whether or not that actually happened, okay?”

“Okay,” I agreed. I wanted to hear where this was going.

“So let’s say for a while, at least, Gilmartin and Avi were kind of friendly. Collegial, at least. You have to bear in mind that they had something else in common: whatever else these guys were, at heart, they were both ham radio operators. Hams love to talk about their equipment, love to compare the parts they use, the quality of the parts, who builds them, stuff like that. And of course, one of the main things they always focus on is the kind of antenna they use, the kind the next guy uses, what kind of reception they get, what’s the best time of night to send and receive broadcasts using what kind of antenna. The fact that Avi had constructed a horn of plenty antenna—one small enough for an amateur to use, because back then, the only ones that anyone knew of belonged to observatories and you needed a flatbed truck to haul them from one place to another—that would have been a fascinating piece of information. So if he shared it with Howard Gilmartin . . .”

Now, I couldn’t help but interrupt. “So what if he did? That would have been more than thirty years ago, Jack. And maybe the Blue Awareness doesn’t think Howard is dead, but really, we know he is.”

“Yes, but his son isn’t. And from what I understand, Raymond Gilmartin has studied every scrap of information about his father’s life, every document, every memoir. Whatever went on between his father and Avi—good and bad—you can bet Raymond knows about it. And you did tell Ravenette that you’ve got a device she thinks—no,
believes
—is a Blue Box, because she can’t imagine how anyone but an Aware trained to use one to scan a devotee would have a Box. But Raymond knows how—he knows that Avi Perzin built it. Well, if Ravenette is a Second-Level Aware, she’s certainly got access to the only person who’s ever been awarded First-Level status, and that’s Raymond. So put all this together, Laurie, just like Raymond probably did. It’s not hard to figure out who your uncle’s niece is—I did it in about ten seconds. To begin with, Perzin isn’t exactly the world’s most common surname. Now add in the fact that Haverkit was the only manufacturer thirty, forty years ago that was producing high-quality electronic and radio kit parts and it’s more than likely that whoever was in your apartment was told to look for anything that said Haverkit—after all, if you’ve got Avi’s Blue Box, there’s a chance you’ve also got his radio, no? And then whammo; right on your shelf, there it is. Think about it, kiddo: you gave them all the clues they needed.”

Jack was right. I might as well have drawn them a map to my apartment, handed them the keys and told them to look around. “Crap,” I said, which seemed to sum up exactly how I was feeling about this.

“So back to the antenna,” Jack continued. “I’m sure these days, on the web, you could certainly find the plans for building a small enough horn of plenty antenna to make the radio work the way they want it to—meaning, to be able to draw in signals outside our atmosphere. But I guess they don’t want any antenna—they want the original.”

“But I don’t have it. I’ve told you that. My father cleaned out Avi’s apartment after he died. I took a few things, like the radio and the box, but that’s it. I never even saw the antenna.”

“All right then,” Jack said. “Let’s tell them that. Exactly that.”

“How?”

“I’m going to call Ravenette. As I said, she’s got to have something to do with the creep show they seem to have given you a starring role in. Or at least she’ll know who to pass the message to, and I’m guessing that person’s name is Raymond.”

“You don’t have to call her for me. It’s a good idea, but I could do it myself.”

“Sure you could,” Jack said. “But we’re friends, and friends don’t let friends deal with the Blue Meanies by themselves.” He paused for a moment and then repeated, “Friends. That’s what we are, right?”

“Sure,” I said. “I thought we cleared that up.”

“You’re right,” he replied. “We did. So now, a couple of friends are going to wake up a psychic who seems to have a bunch of friends of her own. Nasty ones.”

I stayed on the line while Jack dialed Ravenette’s number. Once it began ringing, he conferenced me in. When she answered, though, she didn’t sound like she’d been in dreamland. Busy, sleepless—who knew why she sounded wide awake. But Jack decided that he did.

“So you’re up,” Jack said after telling her who was calling. Then, not waiting for her to reply, he added, “Of course you are. You’re a psychic. You knew that we would call.”

Ravenette ignored the jab. But she did pick up on the fact that Jack had implied he wasn’t the only one on the call. “We?” she said. “Who’s
we?
”

“Laurie Perzin is on the phone with me.”

“Oh really? Well what do you want?”

I thought she sounded annoyed, but in a fake sort of way. There was a note of caution behind her bravado. Jack must have picked up on this, too, because he wasted no time in going after her.

“So tell me something,” he said. “Why is it that you and your buddies can’t do anything in a normal way? Everything has to be weird and mysterious, right? Or downright threatening. And when even that doesn’t work, you send your moviestar poster boy to play games for you. Did it ever occur to any of you that you could just pick up a phone and say
Hello, I’d like to talk to you
? Isn’t that a lot easier than breaking into someone’s house? And don’t tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“I did talk to Laurie,” Ravenette said smoothly. “I’d be happy to talk to her again.”

Exasperated, I finally broke into the conversation. “I’m on the phone,” I reminded her.

“Oh, yes. Yes, you are. Well, Laurie, how are you doing, dear?”

“Come on, Ravenette,” Jack snorted. “Can we just stop this? Laurie doesn’t have the antenna for the radio. She hasn’t even seen it since she was a kid. So you’re just going to have to make contact with your alien overlords some other way, okay?”

“Now I
am
going to have to tell you that I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Please. I know the backstory, Ravenette. But maybe it’ll make you feel better if I rephrase. If the aliens are our ancestors, I guess you’re just going to have to wait for them to call you instead of the other way around because Laurie can’t help you out there. So maybe we should get off the line. They could be dialing in at any moment.”

“Don’t mock what we believe, Jack.”

“What you
believe
,” Jack said acidly, “is that you’re the only ones who know the truth and that makes you special. Smarter than everyone else, so you can do whatever you want
to
anyone else. Well, you know what that really makes you? A bunch of fanatics. A cult. You’ve just got more money—and a better public relations operation—than most.”

I could hear the controlled fury in Ravenette’s voice as she said, “So that’s what you really think, is it, Jack? Then I guess you won’t be inviting me on the show anymore. Such a pity. I do so love taking those piece-of-shit town cars you send to drive me all the way to the ass end of Brooklyn to that palatial studio of yours. Really, I’ll miss the star treatment. I’ll rue the day. But good luck with all that, Jack. The show, I mean. You’ll need it.” And then she hung up.

The bus had now arrived at my stop. Still holding the phone to my ear, I waved good night to the driver and descended the steps. The bus pulled away—a glowing box of light disappearing down the dark road—leaving me standing alone by the chain-link fence that separated the bay and its bordering marshland from, to use Ravenette’s term, the ass end of my particular urban landscape.