Via Dolorosa(24)

The band rattled, shook like a roller-coaster. Claxton’s horn was like the single bleating of an angel’s trumpet, sighted to burst all the hearts of humanity at once and to kill everyone dead and allow God, once again, to start anew. Nick could hear the downbeats in his head: one-two, one-two, one-two. The band thumped and beat, and Nick could feel them in their entirety reverberating in his chest now. And then, just like that, the music ceased. It hit a wall and died on impact. The sound was like cottony silence after an explosion. Then the audience erupted in cheers and applause. Many stood, still clapping. The cheering was like music unto itself. On stage, instruments clattered down. With some effort, the backup band achieved a uniform bow. Nick sat watching, rapt. Claxton dripped off the stage, some creature having just shrugged off a dead layer of scales, and was followed with almost comic obedience by the three wizened myrmidons, each with their heads down and their bald white pates reflecting the pink-orange fluorescent lights housed in the tracks along the ceiling.

“Are they done?” Nick was still shouting. His ears had heartbeats. “Is Claxton done? Is he done?”

“Mercy,” Isabella breathed. “They played that son of a bitch longhaired.”

“Is he done?”

“Hey,” Isabella said, looking at him for the first time that evening. He was taken aback by the stark, refreshed youthfulness of her features. “Do something for me.” She looked darker, deeper, more intense than he remembered her looking. “Can you stand?”

“Stand what?”

“Stand,” she said. “On your feet. Can you stand?”

“Why couldn’t I stand?”

“Because you look drunk,” Isabella said.

“Oh, no,” he said. “No. No. I, uh…no…” It seemed all he could say. He felt like an ass. “No,” he said again. Then: “What? What is it?”

Claxton’s backup band had congregated together at one table; Nick could see the old-timers smoking cigarettes and drinking pints of black petrol. Claxton lit his own cigarette at the foot of the stage. He cupped the flame in two enormous black hands, the spit of the flame reflecting orange on his face. He looked like the devil. Then he turned and vanished through a narrow, curtained archway just beyond the stage.

“Here,” Isabella said, sliding a small Ziploc bag across the table to him. It was empty.

“What’s this?”

“You’re closer than I am,” she said. “Can you stand up and go to the stage and pick up the cigarette butts that are on the floor?”

“What?”

“They’re Claxton’s cigarette butts,” she said.

“Are you serious?”

“The greatest things in history were accomplished just sheer seconds after the asking of that very question, Nicholas,” she proclaimed, and something about it sounded a bit rehearsed.

“But isn’t that sort of excessive?” he said.

Isabella fluttered her eyelids and looked away. Nick could not tell if she was being playful or if he had annoyed her with his insolence. “Principles, principles,” she half sang, confusing him further.

Nick stood, grabbing the Ziploc bag off the table. “You must be a huge fan,” he said, and moved toward the stage. There were perhaps half a dozen little white twists of tobacco-filled paper scattered constellation-like around the pulpit. Opening the bag, he proceeded to peck at them with his fingers, jabbing at them like a bird would crumbs of bread on the sidewalk, and stuffing them into the plastic Ziploc bag. Once, he glanced over his shoulder, anticipating security or Claxton himself at his back wondering just what the hell he was doing, but there was no one there. In fact, no one in the club—with the exception of Isabella Rosales—was paying any attention to him. He grinned and executed a half-nod at her. Maybe the alcohol was taking its hold after all. She lifted something from her lap—a camera—and snapped a succession of photographs. He lifted his left hand to block the flash from his eyes. Still no one looked in his direction. He was invisible.

When he finished collecting Claxton’s cigarette butts from the stage floor, he turned to see Isabella rising from her table and moving across the club. She paused against one wall, very close to the curtained doorway through which Claxton had just recently vanished. Nick went over to her.

“Your souvenirs, madam,” he said, handing her the Ziploc baggie.

“Muchas gracias,” she said, and stuffed the baggie down into the cleavage of her dress. There was much cleavage, Nick noted.

“Are you working tonight?” he asked her.

“We are shooting after the gig, yes,” she said.

“He’s very good. I don’t know anything about jazz, but he’s good. How does he…?” And he brought his hands up and feigned fingering an invisible saxophone.

“Two notes at once?” Isabella said. “That’s his big secret. That’s what makes him supernatural. His music is real good, and that’s what makes him real good. The way he blows, though—that’s what makes him sublime.”

“Are you shooting here in the club?”

Isabella said, “Shouldn’t you be with your wife, Nicky-Nicholas?”

Against the wall, the curtain shushed open. A hardfaced, beer-gutted Hispanic stood on the other side of the doorway, his eyes dark and too close together in his skull. To Isabella he said, “His chops is hurting. Said to wait an hour.”