“…fuck the ofay, juke the ofay…”
Saturday, April 4th inst. at 1:00 P.M.…
“…shoot the ofay, spike the ofay…”
Saturday, April 4th inst. at 1:00 P.M., narcotics seized in…
“They burn it!” he shouted.
“…dothe ofay…”
“What!” Brown shouted.
“The narcotics! They burn the stuff!”
“…like the ofay do you !”
And in just that instant, Florry’s timer kicked in and the Deaf Man’s digitally stored voice erupted.
THE WAY FLORRY had explained it to him, you had to think of it as upstream and downstream. The sound from the stage ran downstream to the console where it was mixed, and then it ran out of the console, back upstream to the speakers in the various towers. Downstream, upstream. Into the console, out of the console again.
“You’ve got your snake running into the console and then your matrix outputs running out of it,” Florry said. “The matrix outputs are carrying the sound that came downstream and got mixed and is now running back upstream again. It’s like a bottleneck right there, where the mixed sound narrows down to just these four signal lines going out to the main speakers left and right, and the delay speakers left and right. You follow me so far?”
“Barely,” the Deaf Man said.
“Stick with me,” Florry said, and grinned. “Suppose we direct the sound going upstream into our little black box, hmm? So that instead of going straight to the speakers, it goes through the box and out of it again. Business as usual, no depredation of sound. Everything coming from the stage is mixed at the console, goes out of the console into the box, passes through the box and out of the box, and then on to the speakers. Everything still going downstream and then upstream again. Until we decide to abort it.”
“How do we do that?”
“Simple,” Florry said.
The way Florry did it—and the way it was working this very instant—was not, in fact, quite as simple as he’d claimed it was.
To make it easier for the Deaf Man to understand, he explained that the heart of his “little black box” was a 24-volt DC battery pack that drove all the elements necessary to abort the sound coming from the stage and to substitute for it the message the Deaf Man had recorded. In addition to the resistors, capacitors, and opamps that were the essential components of any sound circuitry, the various other elements in the box were:
A digital clock, which had been preset to go off at one-twenty sharp…
Four relays, which in effect created a two-pole switch, and…
An EPROM, the electronic chip upon which Florry had digitally stored the Deaf Man’s voice.
“There are two positions in that box,” Florry said. “The A position is your normal output, the mixed signal going from the console, through the box, and to the speakers. Before the timer kicks in, nobody’ll even guess the signal is running through our box. That’s the first position. But the instant that timer kicks in, your relays switch to the B position, which is the message on the EPROM we burned. The timer throws the switch, which kills the sound coming from the stage and sends out your voice instead. From that second on, a twenty-four-volt battery’ll be running sound to every speaker in the joint! Just think of it! All those speakers in each tower, and your voice booming from every one of them, a goddamn box from hell!”
The Deaf Man’s voice was booming from them now.
“NIGGERS EAt SHIT !”
If you were sitting on the stage, as Chloe was, or if you were sitting no more than fifty feet back from the stage, you might have heard the sound generated by the group’s own amps and speakers, but this was almost totally overridden by the voice that thundered from the stacks of speakers the little black box was now controlling.
“ALLNIGGERS EAT SHIT!”
The voice was high and strident. The Deaf Man had shouted into the mike when they were burning the EPROM, and now his voice bellowed from the speakers.
“EVERY FUCKING NIGGER On EARTH EATS SHIT!”
At first, the audience thought this was part of the act. Strange things sometimes happened at these concerts, and Spit Shine was still up there performing, wasn’t it? Even the two men behind the console were initially confused. The board was showing input from the stage mikes, so maybe the group was just being totally outrageous. But the engineers could see the stage, and all at once Spit Shine stopped dead. And where an instant earlier there’d been their faintly amplified rap competing with the thunderous sound coming from all those high-powered speakers, now there was only the Deaf Man’s voice, as insistent as Hitler’s had been when he was exhorting his masses.
“THAT’S WHY NIGGERS ARE THe COLOR OF SHIT!”
The input lights on the board went out the minute Spit Shine quit.
“It’s not coming from the stage,” one of the engineers said.
“THAT’S WHY NIGGERs STINK LIKE SHIT!”
The intercom call light flashed.
The other engineer picked up.
“What’s the joke?” a voice asked.
“It’s not us,” the engineer said.
“THAT’S WHY NIGGERS ARe DUMB AS SHIT!”
“Are your masters down?” the voice asked.
The first engineer slapped at the master faders.
“Nothing’s going out of the console,” he said.
But the shouting continued.
“NIGGERs ARE SHIT…”
“Must be somebody on the stage,” the second engineer said.
“NIGGERS’LL TURN THe WORLD TO SHIT, NIGGERS’LL…”
“Let’s pull all the wires,” the first engineer said.
But just then the first shot was fired—and it was too late.
CARELLA AND BROWN were already in the car when the crowd exploded. On the other end of the radio Alf Miscolo in the clerical office was giving them the location of the incinerator. As an aside, he reported that Hawes and Meyer had just left the squad room on their way to Grover Park.
“There’s some kind of trouble there,” he said.
THE SOME KIND OF TROUBLE was the same kind of trouble that had been eroding America’s spirit for the past half-century. In an unmarked sedan speeding crosstown and downtown toward the Department of Sanitation incinerator on Houghton and the river, a white man yelled “Hit the hammer!” to a black man, and the black man flicked the siren switch and rammed the accelerator pedal to the floor. The white man and the black man in that speeding police sedan had been raised in an America that promised a melting pot, that told them stories about people from all nations living together in harmony and peace. In this land of the free and home of the brave, men and women of every religion and creed would loudly sing the praises of freedom while reaping all those amber waves of grain. The persecution, the starvation, the deprivation that had brought this human refuse to our teeming shores would be obliterated here for all time. Men and women would come to respect each other’s customs and beliefs while simultaneously merging into a strong single tribe with a strong single voice, a voice distinctly American, a voice more powerful precisely because it was composed of so many different voices from so many different lands. Here in America, the separate parts would at last become the whole, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.