King of Swords

But the interior proved far classier — dark wood floorboards, tables draped with spodess white tablecloths, laid out with sparkling silverware, napkins in rings and, in the middle, a blue or orange lantern.

He let Sandra do the talking and asked the kind of questions which prompted her to give long answers. She gave him the Passnotes guide to what she did. She talked about her office, about her bosses and co-workers, the different clique, and their power plays. She told him about how she was going to have to fire someone in her team soon and how she was dreading it. Max thought about joe. Then he

thought about Tanner Bradley and how he hadn't wanted to kill him. Then he chased the image away by looking over at a couple sitting, as they were, side by side at a table, holding hands, but he saw again Neptune and Crystal's final frozen clasp.

Sandra noticed the change in his face.

'Are you OK?' she asked him.

'I'm good,' he lied. 'You?'

'Do you dance?'

'Like a gringo,' he said.

'Racist!' She laughed.

They went down to the club. It was very dark and packed solid with moving bodies, everyone doing that damn Casino Dance to that damn saldisco music. Max rolled his eyes and shook his head. Sandra grabbed his hand and tried to teach him some moves, but he could barely master more than the initial steps and was drunker than he'd realized, because he quickly forgot what he was supposed to be doing and had to start all over again.

“You're right,' she yelled-over the galloping bass and ear-shredding horns coming out of the speakers. 'You do dance like a gringo.'

Then the music slowed as the DJ spun a Spanish-language ballad which reminded him of Julio Iglesias, like every Latin crooner did. Sandra draped her arms around him and pulled him into her and they began to dance together, close, body to body, eyes locked. He felt the heat of her on his skin as they moved — her gracefully, him swaying in lugubrious time.

She held him by the neck and stroked his nape and smiled.

I le held her loosely by the waist, telling his hands to keep off her ass. It would have been the perfect moment for a kiss, but as he started to lean towards her the DJ turned up I he beat and another saldisco classic announced itself with ;i shriek of horns and gate-crashed their moment like a drunken relative desperate for attention.

3°9 ”You wanna get out of here?' she offered.

'Please,' he said.

Sandra lived in a two-bedroom condo in the pink and blue San Roman building on South West 9th Street. It was the tidiest place Max had ever been in. She paid a cleaner to keep it that way.

They went into her living room, which was painted and carpeted in beige and smelled faindy of incense and peppermint.

The right-hand wall was lined with books; adases and encyclopedias on the top shelf, travel guides, biographies and history books on the next two down, and the rest was given over to fiction. On the other walls were a large map of Cuba and a painting of two women and some kind of upside-down fish, which Max thought so amateurish he assumed it was something she'd done in tenth grade art class.

Sandra went out to the kitchen to make coffee and told him to put on some music.

Max flicked through her albums. There was a lot of Latin music, none of which he knew, and some classical stuff, which he didn't know either, but she had Diana Ross's Chic-produced Diana, plus Bad Girls, Innervisions, Songs in the Key of Life, Let's Get It On, some Bill Withers and Grover Washington records, Barry White's Greatest Hits . . .

She came back in, carrying two white mugs on a tray.

She'd changed into faded jeans and a baggy white T-shirt, which made her skin seem a shade darker.

'Probably not your kind of music, huh?' she said, setting the tray down on a table opposite the couch.

'What do you think I'm into?'

'Gringo music: Springsteen, Zeppelin, the Stones — stuff like that?'

'Nah. And don't ever talk to me about Brucey baby. My partner's in love with him, plays that shit all the time.

Drives me nuts. You got any Miles? Kind of Blue, Sketches of Spain?“

'I forgot. Your jazz genes. No, sorry, I don't. Do you think I should?'

'Everyone who likes music should have at least one Miles Davis album in their collection. Better still, ten,' Max said. 'And, seem' as you're into Grover, you should be lookin' into John Coltrane too. People say Charlie Parker was the corner stone of jazz, but nearly everyone who's ever picked up a sax from '65 onwards sounds more like Trane.'

He carried on looking. He found just what he wanted at the end — Al Green's Greatest Hits.

'This OK?' He held up the sleeve.

'The Reverend Al? Sure.'

Max went over and sat next to her on the sofa as 'Let's Stay Together' kicked in. They looked at each other for a moment and there was silence between them, not the kind of uncomfortable, embarrassing void that opens up between people who've run out of ways to hide the fact that they have nothing to say, but a natural pause in dialogue.

Max looked at the painting behind her.

'You do that at school?'