Andrew Klavan - Empire of Lies

The guy guarding the approach was a masterpiece of cliche-without-irony. Muscle-bound, block-headed. Wearing a tight black T-shirt even in the brittle autumn night. I flashed him a hundred-dollar bill and told him I was doing a review of New York clubs for a magazine in the Midwest. He muttered darkly into a walkie-talkie, then thumbed me in, playing it a little extra cool, I thought, now that he figured someone might describe him in the press.

Inside, the place was done up to look like a cave, with lights flickering in alcoves like fire, throwing the shadows of the dancers up on the fake rock walls. The dancers packed the place; the floor was dense with them. They thrashed and coiled like snakes touched by a live wire. The girls' bare shoulders and bare legs caught the colored lights and gleamed. The boys with their untucked shirts were sunk in glimmering nothingness. All of them, judging by flashes of their sweat-shiny faces, seemed to be in a kind of narcissistic trance, eyes closed, lips parted, their attention wholly inward. The music hammered at them. It hammered at me. Ephemeral bursts of electronic Morse code in a spastic melody. A jungle sideman amped up under it with a migraine beat. And out of the midst of all that noise, a woman's voice, thin as a drifting specter and full of a specter's longing. She was singing about sex, but she made it sound like love.

I moved along the outskirts of the dance floor, pushing through clusters of young, light, almost insubstantial flesh. The smell-I remembered that smell-not the patches of perfume and cologne here and there, but the pervasive smell beneath that: cold, processed air and fresh, hot skin together, an atmosphere like a zombie's eyes, torpid yet weirdly alive, full of aching and emptiness. It did that thing to me, that thing smells do, wafting through my limbic system like a smoky key, unlocking images and memories. Suddenly in my mind, I saw a girl I'd known when I was very young, a girl I'd danced with at a club like this one. She was in my mind with startling clarity and my heart ached to have her, just as it had ached back then.

I shouldered my way through the crowd to the bar, a bar of silver metal and glass. It was sunk into an alcove of its own with the fake rock jutting out on either side of it. The close space deadened the thumping, jittery music, brought down the volume a little. Which was a relief to my relatively ancient ears.

One of the two lady bartenders emptied some kind of soapy goop out of a cocktail shaker into a glass and pushed the concoction toward a girl too young to drink it. Then she stepped over and asked me, "What can I get you, partner?"

Anne. That was her name. That was the first time I saw her-saw her and heard her voice and caught a whiff of the scent she wore, which was flowery and sweet and made me think of that girl again, that girl I'd danced with and longed for. Anne was almost as young as I had been back then, in her early twenties at most. Tall with broad shoulders, but not strong-looking or mannish, soft and ungainly in an endearing way. She had the awkward, slightly goofy air of a girl who didn't realize how beautiful, how sensual she was. Her skin was olive, her face oval and big-eyed and innocent, her hair black and lavish, tumbling to those broad shoulders, which were bare in her black tube top. Maybe it was because I'd been thinking about that girl I'd danced with, or maybe it was just Anne, but I suddenly wished with a wish like fire that I had my youth to do over again.

I ordered a bottle of Dos Equis. She clunked it in front of me with a bright, sweet smile. Her eyes-her doe brown eyes-lingered on me frankly, looked me over up and down as I laid my money on the glass in front of her. The frankness of her appraisal was exciting. I couldn't tell if she was being flirtatious or just friendly and curious, but I felt so old in that place-I was probably twice her age at least-that it was exciting to have her look at me at all.

I wondered if Dos Equis was still a cool beer to drink. I hoped so. It used to be, back in the day.

"What're you looking at?" I said with a smile.

"I don't know," she said with an adorably silly tilt of her head. "What am I?"

"You're not gonna card me, are you?"

Likewise adorably, she put one hand on her hip and dropped the other in front of me, demanding my ID. I still had my wallet out, so I slapped it into her palm. Still adorably, she examined my license.

"Jason Harrow. I guessed you were from out of town. You're much better looking than your picture," she said as she returned the wallet to me.

"Thank you. You're much better looking than my picture, too."

She laughed and tossed her hair back. She had a ladybug tattoo on her left shoulder. She had a warm, open laugh like a girl from the country and a sort of raspy voice with a lot of humor in it. I wished the music would pipe down so I could hear her better. Also, I wished I were younger and still single.

As if she heard the thought, I saw her glance down at my left hand, at the gold band on my finger. Then she raised her eyes and saw that I'd seen her glance down. She smiled mischievously and jogged her eyebrows. Adorably. I laughed.

"Now, don't be bad," she said.

She was called away to make a drink for another guy. I shook my head into my beer. I told myself to stop flirting with her. Then she came back and I went on flirting with her. It was as if I was being carried along on a current. Telling myself to stop didn't matter. It was beside the point. The current carried me along.

"I'm Anne," she said, drying her hand on a towel. "Anne Smith." She stuck the hand out and I shook it. Her palm was cool from handling the glasses, but I could feel the heat of her underneath.

"Good name," I said. Even here I had to raise my voice to be heard above the music. "Anne Smith. No-nonsense."

She wrinkled her nose. "I hate it. It's too plain. I gotta marry a guy named Zucabatoni or something."

"I like your ladybug."

"Oh, thanks. It speaks highly of you, too."

She hit me with another of those smiles. I had to force myself to change the direction of the conversation.

"Listen," I said. I leaned toward her so I wouldn't have to speak so loudly. "I'm looking for someone. The daughter of an old friend. She left home, and her mother's worried about her. Her mother says she comes in here a lot."

I had a photo Lauren had given me, a snapshot of three friends she had taken from Serena's room. I laid it on the bar.

"She's the one in the middle," I said. "Her name's Serena."

Anne leaned on the bar and bowed her head over the snapshot. I used the opportunity to smell her hair. It had a rich, earthy smell.

Her elbows still on the bar, she raised her face. Now it was close to mine. "Yeah, she comes in here all the time. Every night, almost." She glanced at the neon clock on the wall to her right. It was about ten thirty. "Usually around now. Another half an hour, maybe. I'll tell you when I see her."

"Great, Anne. I appreciate it."

"She'll be messed up, though, if you're gonna try and talk to her."

"Drunk, you mean?"

She lifted the soft, broad, bare shoulder with the ladybug on it. "Drunk. High. You know."

She was called away again to draw a couple of beers. I slid the snapshot off the bar and slipped it back into my jacket pocket. I tipped my own bottle back a time or two, stealing glimpses of Anne as she pointed at customers, took their orders, poured their drinks. Now and then, she glanced my way and caught me looking and sent me a corner of a smile. After a while, she wandered back.

"How's your beer? You ready for another?"

"No. I'm good. What do you do?" I asked her. I was curious but I was flirting with her, too, riding the current. "When you're not here, I mean."

"How do you know I do anything? Maybe bartending is my life."