Martin Smith - Stallion Gate

23

How high the MOON ? the horns asked. Tables sat on circular tiers around the dance floor and bandstand, each table set with red cloths and candles, some with sweating pails of champagne. HOW high the moon ? trombones wondered. Waiters in red jackets balanced steaks on trays. Wrought-iron sconces lit the curved adobe-like wall. Out on the hardwood, a generation of young officers danced with women in full skirts and puffed shoulders, blondes coiffed like Ginger Rogers, brunettes like Lamour. The club comfortably held two hundred diners and dancers, and another forty at the bar. How HIGH the moon ? The lead sax stood to pursue the matter with a stutter of riffs. When the clarinet argued in falsetto, Joe thought of Harvey. The bass man thumped at the musical question, passed it to the drummer, who tapped it in the top cymbal, let it slip out on to the snare drum and when it bounced from there, socked it into the bass drum. How high THE moon ? In front of a red plush curtain the band wore white Eton jackets, the music stands were white with glittering clefs and the piano as white as a tooth, although the pianist was in khaki. Joe caught the tune in his right hand way up the keyboard, as if everything had been delicate introduction. He went at the tune like Basic, like a chick pecking at a diamond, until he turned the hand to boogie woogie, paused for a horn reprise, and at the horn's last brassy gasp came down the keys in slowly assembling minor chords.

"Remember how I enlisted, the parade at midnight?" Joe had asked Anna. The interesting thing was not that he was willing to bribe Shapiro and leave the Hill and drive to Albuquerque five days before Trinity, but that Anna was willing to go with him. For the occasion, she wore her hairpin and a long green velvet Navajo skirt. Pollack had given her a gardenia for her hair and she sat with the owner of the Casa Mariana at his table near the rear by the bar. In his tux, Pollack looked more like an African ambassador than a nightclub owner. He poured champagne for her and drank seltzer himself.

"One more time!" the sax section shouted. And this time, Joe played "Moon" with little quotes from "Blues in the Night", "Swingin' the Blues", "Blowin' the Blues Away", sliding across the luminous melody. He could feel everyone moving with him, as if a lid had been taken off the club to unveil a starry, cerulean night, because these people were ready for the impossible. Better than a moon in June was a moon in July. They'd been at war for five years and now the war was over, the war was almost over. "Blue Skies Smilin' at Me", Joe injected, and the entire club seemed to rise. If blue skies were going to explode on them, they were ready, so he made the melody… bluebirds singin' a song even as he brought the "Moon" down a chromatic descent, a chord at a time. The tunes merged and split again, accelerating until keyboard and crowd swung between flight and plunge. Joe cued the horns, who stood and hit the Charlie Parker riffs that settled the argument by demanding How High the Moon? How High the Moon ? as if it were the sun.

"Is this the Casa Manana?" Pollack asked Joe when he joined the table. "Is this not a wonderful club?"

"No, thanks," Joe said and waved off a drink. "You said you were partners with Joe's father." Anna played with her new hairpin, which she had taken out for the gardenia. "With Mike Pena," Pollack said. "Doing what?"

Pollack glanced at Joe. "Distribution, mainly."

"A dangerous business," Joe said. "Mike was distributing a load of booze up from Mexico one night when a tyre blew or he hit a cow or someone drove alongside and shot him in the head. The truck crashed and the gas and alcohol blew like a Molotov cocktail."

"It wasn't clear whether a bullet was found," Pollack said.

"The investigation was led by a Judge Hilario Reyes," Joe explained. "It was very inconclusive."

"I sent Joe down to El Paso before he could get himself into trouble," Pollack told Anna. "I had a brother working in the circus. I thought Joe was going to feed the elephants, but he caught on to music real fast. Of course, he used to play the organ in the pueblo even before that. He was a choirboy and everything."

"Did Mike like your music?" Anna asked.

"No." Joe had to laugh. "He hated it."

He took her on to the floor and they danced to "Flamingo", the Ellington version.

"Are there clubs like this in Chicago?" she asked.

"Great clubs up there."

"Would you go to Chicago to play?"

"No. When I get out of the Army, I'm not going to take orders from anyone. I'm going to have my own club. For the first time in my life I know what I want."

"What is that?"

"This." He took in the seraphic row of white music stands against the red velvet, the warm languor of the women in their long hair and short dresses, the waiters gliding under trays of iced drinks, and the music curling within the circular Hollywood-adobe walls, eddying and overlapping into echoes that asked for a sharp piano riff, the stab of a minor chord.

"It must be wonderful to know what you want," she said.

"One fight will pay for it."

"Then the Casa Manana will make you rich?"

"It's the music, not the money. Sooner or later, a great club loses money the way a beautiful balloon loses air. You mind my fighting?"

"It sounds like a bad movie. We had such movies in Germany. The man who fights one last time to pay for an operation for his sister so her sight can be miraculously saved. Natrually, he loses his.."

"I'm going to win. And I won't go blind or break my hands."

"If this is what you truly want -"

"It is."

"Then I don't think anyone in the world could stop you."

It was midnight when they came out of the club into the parking lot, half a block of cars surrounded by a low adobe barrier.

This part of Albuquerque's Central Avenue was called "Old Town", as if the Old West were lined with curio stoves and pawn shops with steel shutters. At night, except for the Casa Mariana, the street was deserted. Black, except for the tents of light around streetlamps. As Anna got into the jeep, she touched her hair.

"My new pin. I left it on the table."

Joe returned for the pin and when he came out of the club again he took a shortcut through the kitchen and out the back. There were fewer cars there, the jalopies of waiters and kitchen help. Among them, he heard voices and laughs and then something hitting the ground.

Between a pair of Fords, a tiny beam of light played from a horizontal face to a shirt, to a double-breasted jacket and a hand in the jacket pocket. As Joe approached, the beam slid back up to the face, which was round as a plate, subcutaneous blue on the upper lip and chin, eyes closed and mouth slack. Spread on the man's chest were licence, business cards, postcards, money. Kneeling over him was Captain Augustino, still in civvies.

"Harry Gold." Augustino read the cards under the light. "Harry Gold of the Philadelphia Sugar Company. Harry Gold, licensed driver of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Street map of Santa Fe, $1,250 in cash. Harry Gold on vacation."

An empty champagne bottle rolled away from the captain's knee and came to rest against a tyre. Joe assumed Augustino had used the bottle against the back of Gold's head.

"You know about him," Joe said.

"Heinrich Golodnitsky, to be exact, Sergeant." Augustino flicked the light back to the plump face and crumpled hat. "Heinrich Golodnitsky of Russian-Jewish lineage. Golodnitsky, who came at the age of three to an America of sugar-sweet opportunity, not only to find gold on the streets but to be Gold. Golodnitsky, Gold. Heinrich, Harry." Augustino pointed the beam at Joe and some of the light escaped to touch his own lean, passionate face. "See, you always thought I was crazy , Sergeant. Yet, here he is. It's like catching a real devil. A small devil, but a devil all the same. We were at the bar. You played well. Dr Weiss looked lovely."