‘No reason why you should.’ He blew out smoke, into the grille. From inside: ‘Fuck!’ – coughing sounds.

‘Are you going to let me in?’

‘Members only. Scram.’

Joe – Mo’s notebook – recollection: Met R. At BN. He said: ‘I want to see Rick.’

Silence, a sigh. The voice: ‘Everybody comes to Rick.’

Joe – what-fucking-ever.

The grill slid shut – the door opened. Joe stepped through.

Beyond the door: tables, a long bar, a small stage. The lights dim. A piano player pounding keys. The tune familiar, but he couldn’t put a name to it. Chairs around the tables – occupied. It was hard to make out faces in the gloom.

The voice resolved itself into a shape. ‘That wasn’t nice, blowing smoke in my face.’ Big face. Deep-set eyes. Looking down at Joe, reproachfully. ‘I’m asthmatic.’

Joe: ‘You’re in the wrong line of work.’

The man coughed, put his hand on Joe’s shoulder, squeezed. Joe clamped his teeth shut.

‘Nobody likes a smartass.’

‘I’ll try to remember that.’

‘Do.’ The hand released him, slapped him on the back – the impact propelled him forward and into the room. ‘Rick’s in his office, he’ll be down soon. Get yourself a drink in the meantime – show’s about to start.’

Joe muttered, ‘Thanks.’ Walked to the bar. Silent figures sitting at the tables: drinks, cigarettes. Waiting.

Passengers in an airport lounge, going nowhere, he thought. There were no clocks in the room. It felt as if time had stopped and been preserved there.

At the bar: a tall thin man. ‘Help you?’

‘Whisky, double shot. Neat.’

‘You look like you need it.’

Joe let it pass. ‘And a café Américain.’

Bartender: ‘That’s just black coffee, isn’t it?’

Joe, tired. ‘Just do it.’ He laid cash on the counter. The bartender made it disappear.

The whisky burned through Joe like lit oil on the surface of a sea. The coffee was black and bitter: oil again, slick and dark, made from the decayed bones of mega-fauna dead long before humanity was born. ‘You could power cars with this shit,’ Joe said, pointing at the coffee. The bartender, grinning, a slight Russian accent: ‘Let’s not fight over it.’

Joe shrugged, turned away on his seat, scanned the seated audience.

Impressions: dummies in a store window. No, that wasn’t it. But there was something about them that didn’t read right. Bars of shadows fell on raised, expectant faces. The sense of a lingering wait, the eyes that stare into a fartherness. Clothes that did not quite fit. The thought of a tree felled, the roots torn out of the ground – helpless in the air. Expectant people – they looked like they did not belong, not here, not anywhere.

He thought – refugees.

The piano-man, singing about love and glory – the singing stopped, piano keys jingled into nothingness. The bartender: ‘She’s coming on.’

A hush at the Blue Note. Lights dimming further, a single projection – a cone of light catching the stage.

Joe said, ‘Keep them coming –’ gesturing to the whisky – more money on the counter, but the bartender wasn’t listening.

The piano picked up again, stilled.

Joe, waiting.

A single note on a guitar, lingering in the air.

over the rainbow

——

A fine haze, a mist fell down on the stage. Nozzles in the ceiling, opening like flowers. The falling water – a drizzle, a shower. The light picked out every drop of water, glinting in hundreds of tiny rainbows. He saw her.

She came on the stage, all big eyes and brown hair and pointed pinned-back ears, and there was a silence at the Blue Note like that of an empty and expectant grave. The girl didn’t look at the audience. A stool materialised like magic on the stage. Joe watched her through the mist and the beam of concentrated light, and something hurt inside him, and he reached for the shot glass and faltered. The girl sat down. The guitar was a light colour. She plucked some strings. Someone at a nearby table sighed.

The girl sang. Afterwards, Joe found it hard to recall her singing, the words, the music that seemed to wail and gnash its teeth and mourn, in a way that sent tiny men with tiny knives into his guts to work him over. She sang about a place over the rainbow; fingers teasing sadness from the strings though there was no need: it was in the audience that night, touching chill fingers to the napes of émigrés and one alone detective with his hand suspended in its reach for the glass. She sang of a place where the clouds were far, and when she sang she opened her eyes and looked towards the bar, and she saw Joe and he saw her, and the tiny men with tiny knives worked him harder inside, jabbering and mumbling as they cut him up. She sang of a place beyond the rainbow, a place she could not go, or could not come back from. She looked at Joe through the film of water, and her fingers on the strings were an intimate recollection he knew without remembering. She sang of a place over the rainbow, a place far-away and yet so close, so close you could almost touch it. She sang – he thought she sang – for him, asking him to find her.

When it was over the silence draped over the audience like a net rising from the depths of the sea, hauling its catch of mute, silver-scaled fish with it. The girl let her hand fall, and the last notes of the strings hung in the air, unfinished for a long moment. Then she stood and disappeared back-stage and the artificial rain ceased falling and the lights came back on and Joe’s hand completed its journey to the glass, grasped it, and he downed the shot in one and felt his eyes burning.

A voice behind him said, ‘So you are the detective,’ and he turned.

‘I’m Rick,’ the man said. He wore a white evening jacket, was smoking a cigarette.

‘I’m drunk,’ Joe said, and the man laughed. ‘Did you enjoy the show?’

‘No.’

Rick nodded. ‘Joie de vivre is something lacking in these parts.’

‘Do you enjoy living, Mr. Rick?’

‘I did.’

The piano player picked up again. Conversation resumed, what there was of it. The bartender brought over a bottle and a glass and placed them beside Rick without comment. Rick refilled Joe’s glass, filled his own.

‘What do you know about Mo’s death, Mr. Rick?’

No reaction from the man – a slight smile, a shake of the head. ‘I told him to back off, he wouldn’t listen. Dead once, dead twice – who cares.’

‘I do.’

‘Then you’re a fool.’

Joe had no answer, let that one pass. ‘What do you know about Snake Heads, Mr. Rick?’

‘I know they don’t exist.’

‘Not even Mike Longshott?’

A hit. Rick’s smile fading like Mo’s corpse. ‘Forget it, detective. Stop chasing rainbows.’

Thinking of the girl, wanting suddenly to see her with a desperation that ached. ‘Do you know where I can find him?’

‘No.’

‘You said that awfully quickly.’

‘It happens to be the truth.’

A hunch, Joe playing it. ‘But you tried to find out.’

‘I stick my neck out for no one, detective.’

‘What did you find in the Castle?’

Visible reaction – Rick holding the shot glass too tightly. Ash from his cigarette shuddering down to the floor. ‘Nothing.’

‘What were you hoping to find?’

‘What do you want, detective?’

Joe said: ‘Answers.’

Rick raised his glass, regained his smile. ‘To answers, then’ he said.

‘Why?’ Joe said, after they’d drunk.

‘Why what?’

‘Why all this?’ Gesturing with his hand, the movement taking in the whole of the Blue Note, the bartender, the piano, the clientele. Rick shrugged. ‘Everybody needs something,’ he said. He stood up to go. There were loud bangs on the door, from outside. Rick tensed. ‘Excuse me,’ he said.

Joe trailed him to the door, felt a hand on his shoulder, stopped.

He could barely see her. An outline, the suggestion of a shape. She said, ‘Joe…’ and nothing more.