Wizard of the Wind

by Don Keith

  He was flat on his back in the middle of the dirty floor, looking up at the spider webs on the ceiling of the room at the back of the radio station. There was more light in the room now. Somebody had switched on the bare bulb that dangled overhead. And someone with a familiar face was becoming a little clearer through the painful smog. Then he could make out the features. The goofy grin. It was Duane George who squatted there next to him.

  Jimmy Gill was thankful that it was Duane George and not his twin, DeWayne. Another man, smaller and much darker than Duane, and infinitely more sinister looking, hovered dimly in the shadows in the fuzzy, out-of-focus distance.

  "En-reeky figured you wasn't no D. E. A. agent, what with all the hollerin' you was doing coming around the building out there. And you sure ain't dressed like no burglar. But he's supposed to kill graveyard dead anybody that tries to break in out here. Anybody. You are one lucky son of a bitch."

  Jimmy managed to sit upright with Duane’s help, but his head wanted to fall off his shoulders. Duane continued to jabber on endlessly as a strong wave of nausea threatened to overthrow Jimmy’s stomach.

  "He decided on his own that if you turned out to be one of Garcia's men, me or DeWayne might would want to have a little talk with you before he turned you into shark bait. That’s the only thing that saved your life, Jeemy. You are one lucky son..."

  "Dammit, Duane! What's going on out here? What kind of scam are you bastards into? And who the hell is Garcia?"

  Oh, Lord, it hurt to talk. And by his last words, he had quieted down to a weak whisper.

  Duane George stood and took a couple of steps backward from the force of the angry questions.

  "You are going to be okay, now, Brother Jeemy. Sit back against this wall now. Take it easy. Garcia's the one who controls most of the coke trade around here. Me and DeWayne and some of our friends are already taking a big chunk of his business away from him, and he don't even know who we are or where we are yet. That damned old Cuban never even seen us coming. And with this here radio station to make sure all our runners are in the right places, we..."

  The bile on Jimmy’s heaving stomach threatened to erupt and he retched involuntarily. Then, slowly, he pulled himself back to his feet, teetered on the brink of toppling over for a moment, and finally staggered over to the rear window. The one he had crawled through only a fractured skull ago. He realized that the roar in his ears was not so much from the knock on the head. It was the thunder that rolled constantly, the pounding of huge rain drops on the roof of the building, and a gale that doubled over the trees that grew wild around the station. Thankfully, the cool, damp wind helped revive him and blew some of the cobwebs from his head. He caught a handful of water from a torrent that poured from one of the broken gutters and washed out his mouth and then splashed another handful into his face.

  When he turned back inside, Duane was standing awkwardly, apparently not sure what to do next. Enrique seemed to have his mind made up already. The man had cold death in his eyes.

  "Duane, I don't really want to know any more facts about all your dirty business down here," he said. The words were weak, almost lost in the wind and the clamor of the downpour outside. He had made up his mind. They would have to kill him if they did not want to answer his next question. "Just tell me one thing, please. What do you mean about the station and the runners?"

  "Well, Jeemy, that's the beauty of what you and DeWayne done with getting in here with a radio station for a front business. Old Garcia never knew where we was comin' from, see? And we`re able to put little commercials out over the air that sound like real commercials to anybody else that might be listening. But they really tell our people exactly where the deliveries are going to be made and when. Even boats and airplanes coming in off the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico can find out where to land or dock. Or if we have got word of some kind of trouble we can steer them away until it's all clear. Hell, Jeemy, I'm surprised we don't have any ratings 'cause there are times I know we got half of Little Havana listenin' in to us!"

  Glen Frey's "Smuggler's Blues" was pounding out from the speaker in the corner of the dusty room as Jimmy stood there, his throbbing head held back out the window once again, letting the cooling rain try to chase away the sick ache in his stomach. The damn song was the perfect soundtrack for what was happening there. For what was going on in his bailiwick, under the banner of the company that he and Detroit Simmons had built, with a government license that had his name right up there on top of it.

  “Maybe we ought to get you to a doctor, Jeemy. You still look kind of peeked around the gills there, buddy.”

  “No. No, Duane. I’ll be okay. That is, I think I’ll be okay.”

  But James Gill, the president of Wizard Broadcasting, was not actually feeling okay at all. And it was not necessarily from the blow on the back of his head. He knew at that moment the exact feeling a drowning man must know as he swims against a rip current, clutches for air but grabs only seaweed and salt water instead.

  #

  Detroit Simmons had been soldering the same transistor onto the same heat sink for the last fifteen minutes and he was sure he had burned up the component's delicate innards already.

  "Dammit, Jimmy Gill!"

  He had uttered the same curse a dozen times since he had started to try to work on the power supply, but only the shop walls were there to hear him. He could not remember when anything or anybody had frustrated him more. Detroit knew it was simply because he loved Jimmy Gill like a brother. And he had not yet come up with a way to stop the son of a bitch from ruining everything.

  That morning, Jimmy had flown off to Miami without telling him or anybody else the truth about where he was going. Detroit had had to quiz a buddy at the airport flight service to find out that much. He had a strong suspicion he knew who Jimmy was going to see. He just did not know why. And whatever it was, there would certainly be short circuits and flying sparks that Detroit Simmons knew he could not fix with a pair of pliers and a volt meter.

  Finally, frustrated, he dropped the soldering iron, stepped to his desk, typed a few strokes on his computer keyboard, found the number he wanted on the screen, picked up the telephone and dialed.

  It rang a dozen times, throbbing, like an out-of-control heartbeat.

  "Come on, Cleo, answer," he said over and over, between each of the fluttering rings.

  The voice that finally came on was not Cleo's. It was some recording telling him that the mobile phone he had dialed was not in service, to please try again later.

  Detroit gently replaced the telephone in its cradle, walked to the window, and gazed across the tops of the buildings below to the mountain south of town. He could just make out the new strobe lights that winked at him along the length of The River's tower. Their tower. His and Jimmy Gill's.

  That reminded him of the day he and Jimmy crossed the sage field and Jimmy made his stupid climb up WROG's spire. Detroit remembered how he had fled in panic when they were caught, deserting his friend, leaving him to the mercy of gravity and Charlie McGee, the angry, spitting little engineer.

  "Not again, Jimmy. Not again," he told the darkening sky outside his window. “I won’t desert you again.”

  And he meant it.

  Thirty-three

  Business was business, after all, and there was plenty of it to do. Duane and DeWayne George and the frightening mess that Jimmy had flown into down in Florida had to be put aside for a while. First, though, he had to try to ignore the blinding headache from the whack on the head while he piloted the King Air back on the hairy trip home through the remnants of the tropical storm. But Jimmy almost welcomed the buffeting he took. The rough ride kept his mind on the airplane's lurching stick and balky foot pedals and off the snake-pit he had stepped into in that swamp in Miami. He listened to the near-panic in the voices of the other general aviation pilots he was listening to on the radio. The noise did not help the ache behind his eyes but the distraction was somehow welcomed.

  Even w
hen he got back to Nashville and finally, thankfully, stepped down onto solid, non-bucking ground at the airport, he had little time to put into play the plan he was starting to formulate. There were plenty of other towering mountains for him to climb.

  James Gill and the rest of the Wizard team played exactly like a well-tuned guitar the National Association of Broadcasters convention in San Francisco. The massive exhibit booth was built in the shape of a dollar sign. Richard Graffeo found out who had to be bribed to make sure they were the centerpiece, right in the middle of the Moscone Convention Center exhibition floor. Beautiful models were hired to distribute packets of information and sample tapes of each of the satellite channels. Some of the packages contained gift certificates for free merchandise from network sponsors and some held varying amounts of cash.

  Everyone who asked for one got a genuine “Wizard Magician’s Kit” to take home to the kids. That was Graffeo’s idea, too. "You want to get to a guy, do something nice for his kids,” he preached.

  Detroit Simmons had his own wing of the booth to welcome the station engineers, a place where they would find someone who spoke their language. Dee explained the algorithms and circuitry that the networks would employ to make the sound pristine and the switching flawless. A couple of times, Detroit paused in his pitch to watch Jimmy through the glass partition, but they had no chance to talk. There was work to be done, more questions to be answered, more lines and circles to be drawn on the easel in his cubicle.

  Richard Graffeo worked for Wizard full time now. He was being groomed for COO. At the convention, his primary job was to bring by and introduce to Jimmy all the people who had been hired to finish putting the satellite channels together and on-line. People who had been ordered to build them solidly from the ground up.

  And Graffeo also had the responsibility of rounding up and bringing in all the key decision-makers in the most crucial radio groups, the people that they wanted to attack most strategically with their well-honed sales pitch. They did come by, new employees and prospective clients, in an almost constant procession, while Mr. Gill held court at the convention headquarters hotel’s penthouse suite. The one with the spectacular view just over his shoulder of San Francisco Bay and Marin County past the Golden Gate.

  Jimmy was supplied with painstakingly researched index cards for each person. Cards which told Jimmy each man’s wife’s and children’s names, his favorite pro sports teams, even his drink of choice. Jimmy dutifully impressed each of them when he interrupted the conversation about the Dodgers or the Knicks, got up and mixed each of them exactly whatever it was that he preferred to swill. Head man of a major new radio programming network bartending for his honored guests!

  New employees were proud. Prospective clients were amazed.

  "Piranhas, Jimmy. Every single new guy you’ve hired is a damn killer," Graffeo told him giddily. “Bastards who would eat their young to win. You could go to war with these guys. Hell, you will be going to war with these guys! Shit, you already have gone to war with these guys!”

  It was the first time he had ever heard Richard Graffeo display any emotion at all. It was actually a bit frightening to see him work, like watching a hungry tiger patrolling the convention floor.

  The last night of the broadcasters' show, Saturday night, they put the chief executives of every serious group or station in the United States and Canada and several foreign countries on a Red Line ferry boat over to Alcatraz Island. Then they fed the captive audience so many prawns and guacamole and Swedish meat balls and served up so much Jack Daniels that a second-rate dog and pony act would have looked like high class entertainment to them by the time the evening’s party was up and rolling.

  Somehow, Richard had found out which ones of them wanted hookers for the rest of the evening. Which ones wanted limo rides to church the next morning. Which ones of them wanted both. At the same time, he managed to convince each of the unsuspecting victims that he was the only one getting such royal treatment from those great guys at Wizard.

  James Gill gave his brief presentation from a small stage, set up under the stars in the old Alcatraz prison’s exercise yard. Giant television monitors banked behind him played scenes shot in the new studios and of the disk jockeys at work and examples of the stock commercials for affiliates to run on their local television stations. As the images flickered on the upturned faces, a gentle fog rolled in over the bay between the island and Fisherman’s Wharf. The entire function was taking on an almost surreal feeling by then.

  With the cold microphone caressing his lips as he spoke, Brother James flashed back for a moment. He could almost imagine that he was back on the air-waves once again. On the radio, talking to an unseen audience that would remain hidden from him out there in the thick mist. He unconsciously dropped into his deepest radio voice as he recited the carefully memorized script with the powerful inflection and practiced salesmanship he had used thousands of times before on so many commercials, between so many records, on so many radio stations. He closed his eyes and he was on WBHM or The Super Q or The Fox or 92 Rock, and he had the listeners mesmerized, hanging on his words, listening to him and him alone, allowing his velvet voice to carry them away.

  There was no DeWayne George then, no engineer's union, no payroll to meet, no sulking Detroit Simmons, and no FCC to mollify. There was only Brother James and his audience out there on the other side of the microphone.

  Then, when the time was right, he dropped his voice yet an octave deeper for the closing clincher. He could feel rather than see that jaws dropped throughout the audience. But no matter that the people in the audience had been temporarily swallowed up by the fog, the liquor, his sales pitch, he knew he had scored, that he had their attention, that they were listening.

  Brother James also knew that no matter how well-fed or how drunk or how impressed they were with these magical surroundings, how captured they might be by his vocal magic-wand waving, they would still be expecting the other shoe to drop, to hear how much Wizard was going to demand from them to put its wonderful programming on their stations. But that was his closer. Unlike every other radio network in the business, Wizard was proposing paying station operators a set monthly fee based on their ratings in exchange for minimal commercial time on the network they chose to run. They would even pay the stations a bonus for ratings plateaus. The station owners and operators could be automatically making a profit the instant they sent Wizard’s programming down their signals to listeners' radios! They would be partners in the networks’ success!

  The awe-struck executives had had just enough time to realize that James’ offer was serious, that it contained no hidden catches, when he raised his hands to quiet the murmuring out there behind the mist. It was time to bring on the evening's musical entertainment, just as the thickest of the fog passed on by, as if pre-arranged by the magicians at Wizard.

  Cleo Michaels was as wonderful on stage that night as he had ever seen her. He had to force himself not to look at the writhing, dancing audience of drunken media executives as he walked among them, shaking hands and allowing them to pound him on the back like a long lost friend.

  Jimmy knew exactly how these men would be looking at the woman he loved. He did not want to see that in their eyes.

  She danced and swayed, sang happy and sad, hot and sultry, cool and mellow. She pulled loose every emotion she could wrench from each song then reached somewhere even deeper inside herself for still more. Somehow, she was able to get that passion across to the audience. That’s why she was so good. Every person in the crowd felt as if this beautiful woman was singing just for him.

  Jimmy thought he heard her dedicate one of her songs to him, but he could not be sure. He was in the middle of a group of broadcasting executives from Taiwan and trying to understand what they were saying. When he finally turned back to the stage she was into some rocking country song and doing a wild dance with the guitar player in her band.

  They only met for a brief moment after she finished her
third encore. He had more hands to shake so they had time for only a few much-too-short embraces, a couple of deep kisses, a quick reading of the fatigue in each other’s eyes. Between the kisses, she told him matter-of-factly that she was off to Fresno for an afternoon county fair performance the next day, then back to Sacramento, and on to Reno. She was going to say more, probably give him the rest of the tour itinerary, but he closed her lips with his own again before she could.

  When he broke the kiss again, he checked her eyes as she kept her face turned up to his in the dim light. That was when he realized that there was something different about her tonight. Something he had missed when they had first held each other, as the fog drifted past and the party swirled on around them. The way she stiffened ever so slightly when he had pulled her to him. The faraway look in her eyes. Something he could not quite put his finger on. He assumed it was weariness. God, didn't she see how hard she was pushing herself? Did he have to write her a memo to get her to go ahead and quit this madness sooner than later?

  "When are you going to slow down, Cleo? When you drop dead on the bus?" he asked her, but she did not answer. Instead she pulled quickly away from him, turned her back, and walked a few steps away. Jimmy checked to make sure no one was watching them. Someone who might have misinterpreted and thought they were having an argument.

  She turned back to him and walked back closer. Her eyes were clouded even more then and she paused a long beat before snapping at him in a voice he had never heard from her before.

  "How dare you ask me that? We need to talk, Jimmy. And we need to talk soon."

  "I'll catch you on the phone..."

  "No. I mean we need to really talk. About you. You and me. The company. Everything. Dee and I..."

  "So that's it. He's still pissed at me and now..."