"It was my wife's," he said again. "Cecilia's. She bought it with her first paycheck from the telephone company in 1947. She was a long-distance operator. She used to say she spent all day connecting other people's voices and she wanted one at home that she didn't have to plug in." He touched the dial with one finger, lightly. "It stopped working in 1979. About a month after she did. I've always thought that was a little theatrical of it."
"Can you fix it?" Roman asked.
"I used to be able to. My hands are not what they were." He looked at his own fingers, which were long and bony and spotted with age, and which shook. "I know what's wrong with it, I think. It's a tube. The rectifier, most likely. A little glass tube about this long, behind the back panel. They burn out. In the old days you'd take it down to the drugstore. They had a machine to test them, right there by the soda fountain, and you'd stand with your burnt-out tube and wait your turn behind the ladies buying cold cream."
"There's a tube tester at Mr. Cholewa's," Roman said instantly. "The TV repair on Niagara. There's a big machine in the window with dials. I saw it."
"Mr. Cholewa's will be closed tonight, Roman."
"Tomorrow, then."
"Tomorrow's Christmas."
"The day after."
Lucian laughed, a real laugh, startled out of him, and it changed his face completely: it took twenty years off it and made him, for a second, somebody else, somebody Harper had the strangest feeling she had met before. "You," he said to Roman, "would have done well in my line of work. You don't take no for an answer, you just reschedule it." He set the radio carefully on the kitchen counter, beside Harper's Panasonic, and Harper saw him look at the two machines side by side, the old brown Bakelite and the new black plastic, and something passed across his face like a cloud across a field.
"You make tapes," he said.
"Sometimes."