Lucian sat in the corner on a folding chair. He had found the Mr. Coffee and cleaned it out with salt and ice from the windowsill, an old ship's trick, he said, and made a pot so strong and clean that Sobczak came in at twelve-thirty for a cup and stood drinking it in the doorway with his eyes closed. He checked on Roman twice. He did not speak while Harper was on the microphone. He listened, with his head a little tilted, the way her mother had listened to the opera on Saturday afternoons, and once when she turned around in the chair she saw that he was smiling, not at her, but at something past her, at the radio, at the whole small, warm, lit room in the middle of the blizzard.
By one-thirty the city had stopped. The calls stopped coming. The midnight Mass ladies were home; the drunks were wherever drunks went; the plows had given up on everything but the Kensington and the Thruway. Seven cabs sat idling in seven places across Buffalo with their heaters going and their drivers drinking coffee from thermoses, and the radio was a sea of soft static, broken now and then by somebody clicking his button just to hear that somebody else was there.
Then Mose Hubbard's deep voice came on, slow, the way he did everything. "Y'all are too young," he said. "But a night like this, I miss the old Harbor Light."
Harper's hand stopped on the trip sheet.
"The what?" said the Cholewa kid.
"Radio show. Way back. Late nights on the AM. Fella read messages out to the boats on the lake, played some Ink Spots, some Ella. I drove nights then too, my first cab, a DeSoto with no heater. Some nights his voice was the only thing kept me awake on the road. I used to wonder what that fella looked like." Mose chuckled, and the speaker buzzed with it. "Probably a little bald man with a mustache. They always are."
"I remember it," Harper said into the microphone. Her voice came out odd. "I remember it, Mose."
"You too young, Miss Harper."
"I was eight," she said. "I listened under the covers."
Behind her, the folding chair creaked.
She turned around. Lucian Zeller was standing. He had taken off his glasses and was holding them in one hand, and he was looking at the microphone in her hand, not at her, the way a man who has quit smoking for twenty years might look at a cigarette in someone else's fingers.