by John Dunning
He came to a crossing ablaze with coppery light. To his left was the sun, beaming through the windows from the west; down the other way, a closed mahogany door with a brass plaque, the lettering sharp in the sun.
LOREN HARFORD
PRIVATE
He turned away from the office, and at the end of the hall found a small radio studio, twenty by forty feet. The room was empty—no singer, no band, no audience—and the red-glass sign that said ON THE AIR was dark above the door. He opened the door and stepped inside. Clutching shadows were all around him: microphones, he saw, standing like scarecrows between himself and the windows. Now another surprise: the music didn’t fade as the door swung shut behind him. The singer sang and the band played on, and the constant rumble was the noise of a live dancing crowd, as if a world of ghosts had filled the room, and it pulsed with the same color and life on both sides of the glass.
The spirit of Kendall seemed to be there, telling him things he could not have known. To the left is the director’s booth, dark behind its own soundproof window; to the right, a production room. The piano’s for fillers, and for cheapskate clients who won’t foot the bill for an orchestra. The drapes hanging in the windows, now drawn back to give the room a sunbath, can be closed during a broadcast and will affect the sound accordingly. It’s up to the director, what he wants to do and how good his ear is. He thought these things first in Kendall’s voice, then he was vaguely aware that the voice had become his own. He sensed the two long microphones, suspended from booms over his head, and it seemed he had known they were there long before he looked up and found them.
There was a cheer from the crowd and another song was announced. “This was a hit on Broadway a few seasons ago, then Helen Forrest put it on wax with Artie Shaw. Holly and the boys give it the full treatment, right here on the beach. ‘It’s All Yours,’ Holly.”
Listen to them yell, listen how they love her. Who wouldn’t love her? What’s not to love?
“Jordan!”
Miss Nicholas.
He smiled and beckoned her but she grabbed his arm and bullied him out of the studio. As she pushed him down the hall, Holly began to sing, and Harford’s door was now cracked open.
( ( ( 9 ) ) )
FROM the rooftop he could see the whole town and the miles of beach north and south. To the west, the ramshackle huts of the off-beach dwellers, the cheap rooming houses, the hash joints; then the creek and the marsh with its sloughs and mud banks, and a long crooked finger of hard dry land that made a road back to the deep distant woods of the mainland. To the east the empty sea, and far down on the southern tip, at least three miles away, the lighthouse, rising out of a shoal that hooked half a mile into the ocean. Night was hours away yet, but already lights were coming on downtown, on the street of clubs, on the boardwalk, and out along the pier.
The elevator had let them out in a small vestibule facing the sea. The wind was now billowing in from the southeast, rattling the cage as it squealed to a stop. The roof was cluttered with tools and equipment, boxes, canvas, aerials, and wires. A catwalk took them to a tin shed on the southwest corner. There they found Stoner, hunched inside, rocking back and forth on a squeaky chair near the far wall as he listened intently through a set of earphones.
“Hey, Gus, I brung you a fellow toiler.”
Stoner held up a finger and cocked his head at something that had been said. He listened for another few seconds, squeaked back in the chair, and gave it up. “The man really is a lunatic,” he said.
“What man?”
Stoner threw a switch, amplifying the program, and a flood of screaming German invective filled the room: the unmistakable voice of Adolf Hitler.
“You’re a little slow on the uptake, Gus. The rest of the world realized he was crazy seven or eight years ago. So, what’re you doing listening to that crap?”
“Putting it away for posterity—if we have any.” He looked at Jordan.
“This is the man I brought to help you lug all that junk up here . . . Jordan Ten Eyck . . . August Stoner.”
They shook hands. Stoner was shorter than Jordan but bulkier, in his fifties, with thick slate gray hair and the pan-flat face of a street pug. “Sorry,” he said, “you caught me in the middle of something. But maybe we can work around it.”
He gestured at the recording machine, which was etching the speech onto a large black disc. “This will make a great recording for the sound library. Just in case Harford ever does get this station on an even keel again. Maybe we could do a political play and use this for background noise.”
Jordan came to the door and looked in. “How can you listen without a translator?”
“Gus is a genius,” Rue said. “He speaks about a hundred languages.”
“Includink der master tongue,” Stoner said, with a good accent. “This is a rebroadcast of the big speech in Berlin a couple of weeks ago. I’m taking it off the shortwave from Cologne. They’ve been playing it somewhere every other day to remind the good people exactly what they’ve allowed to happen to them.”
Jordan had read some of it in the papers but it took on a greater dimension when you could hear the monster’s words in his own voice. The gist of the speech was simple: After ten years of encroachment, Hitler was taking absolute power. All existing law was suspended. For Germany this was life or death. People who failed would be eliminated.
Stoner flipped off the switch. “Now he’s going to annihilate his own people. What else is new? What do you say, Jordan, let’s get that junk up here, then the three of us can go somewhere and get looped.”
“Can’t do it, Gus,” Rue said. “Duty calleth. The man’s got me doing Little Miss Nicotine at five. And I’m screaming for them again on the horror show.”
“He wants me to come back too,” Jordan said. “I’m not sure why.”
“These are exciting times we’re living in,” Stoner said. “It says something about the national character when people are too busy to drink.”
“You’re one to talk,” Rue said. “We never see you around the jailhouse anymore.”
“Too busy keeping you on the air. And doing my own little gig.”
“Gus does the insomniac hour, starting at midnight. Reads poetry and prose in that great pugnacious voice, and plays the damnedest lineup of music you’ll ever hear. Tchaikovsky by the Boston Symphony followed by Louis Armstrong. He’s great company for nighthawks like me.”
She looked at her watch. “Well, gentlemen, I’ve got to go.”
“Don’t worry about Jordan, I’ll get him back to base camp.”
She waved at them from the elevator.
“What a gal,” Stoner said. “Sweet as a plum, pretty as a summer sunrise. That’s her problem, she’s too pretty for radio.”
Jordan laughed.
“You’d be surprised,” Stoner said. “Radio directors don’t trust a really pretty woman to get a line straight. They figure if she was any good she’d be in Hollywood wiggling her heinie for a camera. What they want in radio is a blind man’s dreamboat, a sweet voice and no face at all. I keep telling her she should think about the screen, but she’s got radio in her blood. And she will be good if they let her. If she stays away from Clay Barnet. He’s our program director. Pomposity in motion, dispenser of more bad advice than we got in the entire Hoover administration. It’ll be interesting now that Kidd’s here and apparently been put in charge of the whole shooting match. Clay won’t think much of that.”
He flipped the amplifier and found Hitler still raving in Cologne. “From one son of a bitch to another,” he said. “This could go on for two hours. I’ve got a disc switch coming up, then we can get moving.”
He sat at his table and Jordan watched from the doorway. The cutting head etched its way toward the center, carving the voice into the wax and leaving behind it an unbroken strand of residue that Stoner had twirled around the spindle in the center.
“What’ll you be doing here if Kidd does hire you?”
“I’
m a writer.”
“Ah! This is your lucky day. Writing’s a seller’s market around here.” He leaned over and looked at his work. “Come on in, watch what I do here. This might help you if they put you into anything sophisticated.”
In fact he was fascinated by the scribbling movements of the machine, making its cold objective affidavit of the day’s events from the day’s air. Stoner eased over onto a straight-backed chair and Jordan sat beside him in the squeaky recliner.
“We get fifteen minutes on each of these transcription discs. If a program runs longer than that, I’ve got to find a place to break it. So I wait for crowd noise, laughter, or applause, and I open the pot on my second machine and let one disc blend into the other. If it’s played back by an engineer with a good sense of timing, the audience won’t even know there’s been a break. Later I’ll take you through the system, give you the grand tour.”
“That’ll be great. If I get that far.”
Stoner waved this off, a mere formality. “It helps if you’re a writer to know what the capability is. There’s no sense writing something we can’t do, but I’ll bet between Livvy and me we can make up something to cover just about any situation. Do you know Miss Teasdale?”
“Met her a while ago.”
“Amazing woman, incredible talent. She should be at NBC, but that’s another story. Get her to show you how she makes the latch on a briefcase sound just like a car door closing. Christ, she drives old Poindexter crazy. A great example of what this station was and could be again. Did you see the article the Beachcomber did on us? . . . It’s in that drawer over there. Take it with you, it’ll give you an idea what you’re getting into.”
Jordan folded the sheets and tucked them into his shirt. Stoner leaned into his desk. “Here we go now . . . you can hear him building to a pitch.”
Hitler pounded the podium. An ovation filled the shed and Stoner opened his second machine, giving the discs a five-second overlap. He took a paintbrush and guided the string of residue to the center, where it wrapped around the spindle and kept the cutting head clear. “Perfect,” he said, shutting down the first machine. “Now, if you write us a play about patriots under the iron boot and you think a bit of bellowing Hun might be just the ticket for background, a competent engineer will know exactly how to cue it up. So, let’s get out of here. I need to be back in fifteen for another disc hookup.”
In the elevator Stoner continued his monologue about the station’s capabilities. “We’ve got a fully functional microphone studio in this building. We can switch over at a moment’s notice, and that can be a real plus if there’s trouble at the main plant. If a listener got up to take a leak, he wouldn’t even know we were off the air. And talk about class, it’s got cork floors. You don’t want any noise in a studio, and when Harford built this place six years ago, he had the whole floor corked. It’s so quiet in there you can walk right up to someone before they know you’re there.”
They floated past the fourth floor. Holly’s voice boomed into the shaft and the light flashed in Stoner’s face.
“It’s not quiet now,” Jordan said.
“That’s coming through the door, not the wall. Even then you wouldn’t notice it if he didn’t have it cranked up like that.”
“What’s that all about?”
Stoner shrugged. “God knows. He’s been playing it all day. He can’t get enough of it. Sometimes I can feel the beat coming right through the ceiling.”
They bumped on the ground. Stoner walked through the dark chamber and pulled up the ramp door. “This is the job, champ—plain old grunt work. This stuff ’s heavier than Our Gal Sunday on a Friday afternoon. Whadaya say let’s take the biggest of these bastards first?”
They manhandled the crate onto a dolly, then into the building, then onto the lift, and on up the shaft. The music came and went again.
“That’s my most important job right now,” Stoner said. “I take that baby off the line and make two virgin masters every week.”
They reached the roof. Jordan said, “You’ve got me feeling pretty ignorant. I guess I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“No reason you should. Harford wants a line check made of that show every Saturday night—no excuses, no failures, no acts of God permitted. He wants it done and it better be right. So I take it off the line and leave it for him first thing every Monday. The best sound money can buy.”
“And then what? He sits there all day and just listens to it?”
“Some days he does. I guess he can’t get enough of the singer. Strange, huh?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“No, but I don’t think you’ll argue much if I say it. Some people think he’s a little crazy anyway. Did you hear what happened to his wife?”
“I heard she died.”
“Sleeping sickness, they call it. She went to visit her family in Virginia and came home with a terrible headache. Lay down in her bed and never got up again.” Stoner shook his head. “They say a mosquito causes it. Imagine losing your wife to a mosquito bite.”
“I guess that’s enough to make any man crazy,” Jordan said.
They worked up and down through the darkened building, and with each trip Stoner captured another segment of Hitler until he had it all. Jordan felt a superficial bond forming between them, something that always happens when two men struggle on a four-man job. Stoner was naturally gregarious and didn’t mind talking about himself. He had been here ten years and had learned what he knew from scratch. “I didn’t know my keister from a kilocycle in nineteen thirty-two. But I’m a quick read and it wasn’t long before we had this station booming up and down the coast. Now we’re louder than the Feds like us to be, and every once in a while they send inspectors over to make sure we’re not cheating on our wattage.”
They traded stories, and he told Stoner his fiction of the Ten Eyck family, transplants from Holland.
“Do you really speak a hundred languages?”
“Rue exaggerates. Counting sign language and dialects, it’s closer to fifteen.”
“You speak to deaf people?”
Stoner made signs with his hands. “That means, ‘Don’t ask me, I just work here.’ ”
Jordan laughed and the fellowship ripened between them.
“Once I was offered a job as a translator in New York. But I’m like Rue, I like radio.”
Jordan told of working on the racetrack, years ago at Belmont and that one summer at Saratoga. That seemed safe enough. But then Stoner said, “How’d you end up here?” and he knew he had to tell about Kendall since he’d already told Livia and Rue. “I came looking for a friend. Fella named Marty Kendall.”
Stoner jerked upright as if he’d been slapped. “Jesus Christ, Kendall! How the hell did you know Kendall?”
He launched into a new mix of truth and lies: how he’d met Kendall on the racetrack, but he moved the locale to Hialeah in Florida. He told how they’d shared a tack room and a winter in their lives, how Kendall had spoken so fondly of his radio days, and how one day, without a word to anyone, he had simply vanished. Stoner looked incredulous, as if he couldn’t accept what he was hearing. “What was he doing on a racetrack, for Christ’s sake?”
“He never explained that.”
Suddenly Kendall’s spirit was there on the roof between them. “He must’ve cracked up,” Stoner said. “How else can you figure it?”
They stood there for a long quiet stretch. Then Stoner gave a helpless little shrug and said, “Let’s button this place up and get the hell out of here.” But Jordan knew they were not yet finished with Kendall. Stoner fidgeted at the elevator landing, and the ride down was sober and quiet and dark. Even Harford had left the building, and they slipped past the fourth floor with the silence broken only by the whirring elevator.
“I’ve got one more grunt job, if you will,” Stoner said. “Couple of barrels to go to the dump.”
They got in the truck and drove north out of town. At the station
, Jordan could see that the party he had left earlier was still growing. The place was swarming with people, the parking lots were half full, and cars were still coming in a steady stream. “This is one of the good traditions that they’ve kept going,” Stoner said. “Harford always puts on a big feed just before the summer starts, something to kick off the season. Half the town’ll be here tonight.”
He pulled around to the east side and backed across the hard sand to the fire door at the end. In the glare of the headlights Jordan saw two fifty-gallon drums filled with trash. “This is where you’ve got to have some balls,” Stoner said. “Nothing to do but lift those babies up there.”
They got out and Jordan looked at the junk—rolls of old wire, broken glass, and the remains of shattered transcription discs.
“Old sound effects records that’ve seen better days,” Stoner said. “We’ll be getting some new ones from New York in a couple of days.”
They got down on either end and heaved the barrels onto the truck.
“I’ll come with you to the dump,” Jordan said. “Might as well see it through to the end.”
The road north was relatively quiet. The early dusk was pushed by a gathering cloud cover and the sea was purple, the sky in the east like deep velvet. Far away a light flashed, some gallant skipper braving the U-boats. They passed the cutoff to the bridge, the pavement ended, and the truck rumbled over the washboard ridges of another oystershell road. Houses gave way to huts, and in a few miles the huts disappeared as well.
Stoner found the road he wanted, a pair of hard-packed sandy ruts cutting back through the trees to a landfill near the creek. He backed the truck around and stopped. “I knew Marty when he was still in New York,” Stoner said. “I was at WEAF then. I had quit here, wanted to see what the big time felt like, and Marty showed me around. He was happy-go-lucky then. I knew he drank too much, but he always seemed to enjoy life, till it all started coming apart. By then I was back here again. I had had enough of the big city, and I was able to get Barnet to bring Marty down and give him a chance for a new start.”
