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there was a quick swell of music or talking as she passed stations that were broadcasting programs.
Shirley didn t care about those. She could listen to them on the set in her aunt s living room anytime.
What she wanted to hear was that sweet mystery voice that came on at nine, three and sometimes four
nights a week. She wanted to hear the Archangel.
She was notorious a pirate broadcaster with no call letters and no license, who played thrilling records
from places that didn t exist anymore, Harlem and New Orleans and Chicago, and told the grandest,
most spine-tingling stories Shirley had ever heard about what life had been like in those places during the
first years of the epidemic. She told those stories with irony and humor, and a grand sense of tragedy,
while laying the blame for what had happened on the complacency of government and business and
organized religion and the failure of almost everybody else to admit that there really was an epidemic at
all. In this vein, the Archangel saved her most scathing commentary for the Milltown city government and
the efforts of the Greater Northwest Development Company to somehow stabilize the situation in
Minnesota again while ignoring the disease.
Such comments made her a sensation, the subject of newspaper editorials decrying the spread of false
cynicism and defeatism, and a woman wanted by the law. There were rumors that the governor had put a
fifty-thousand-dollar reward on her head, and that a radiodetecting truck loaned to the city by the
Treasury Department prowled the streets every night trying to locate the source of her transmissions. But
Shirley knew the Archangel was too clever to ever be caught like that. She was too smart and too tough.
And too rich. Her family had all been killed by Hun, but she had taken her inheritance and bought, from
the Soviet government, a new kind of powerful, portable transmitter that was small enough to fit inside an
ordinary makeup case and was capable of reaching from Alaska to Mexico. She intimated that she made
her broadcasts from secret locations all over the city, and sometimes, when things got too hot, she even
left town. In March and April, just after Danny s interview with her had appeared on page one of the
Sunday Journal, she had taken a vacation to Chicago, broadcasting from the ruined ballroom of the
deserted Blackstone Hotel.
Of course, Kal said that was a lie. He insisted to Shirley that the Archangel had never left town. There
was no such thing as a radio transmitter that fit into a makeup case, or even a steamer trunk. Why, Kal s
own rig was as compact as they came, and with the batteries and all took up a third of the shed. Shirley
hated when Kal talked practical like that. He always pretended to know things about the Archangel, but
they were stupid things, things that, if you believed them, made her seem so ordinary. Kal would say that
the Archangel was really sponsored by the Red Cross, or that he had helped install her transmitter,
though he had signed a contract that forbade him from telling anyone where he had done the work. He
always hinted, though, that the Archangel s lair was really in the basement of the main library at Tenth and
Hennepin, that big, ugly sandstone fortress of a building. Why, the Archangel would never set foot in a
place like that! Kal didn t know anything. Shirley was sure he made those claims because, like most
people, the Archangel made him feel uncomfortable about the way things were. Even though he liked her,
he was really trying to bring her to earth somehow, spoiling the mystery the same way it would spoil your
idea about what angels were, if you knew what they really looked like.
Anyway, Shirley thought, the Archangel would never broadcast from the basement of some musty old
library. If anything, her lair was on the roof garden of the Metropolitan Building, with its twelve-story light
court and its glass-floored arcades. That was the place for an angel!
This has got to be it, Shirley said, wincing as the static popped sharply once more in her ears.
Storm s coming, Kal said. I ain t ever seen the sky look so green before.
Shhh!
I m telling you, Shirley, I m taking that mast down
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