‘Thank you,’ said Lucky, disclosing a nervous cough. ‘It’s my first time in Sydney.’

The imposter Lucky and his accomplice Gregor were on a two-week furlough from an Army Air Force base in Bankstown, where they’d held low-status, danger-free hospitality jobs for eight months. Mallios was a mess steward: twenty-one years old, no family. The airmen liked to call him ‘Benny’. It was their idea of an insult. As a joke—though it was barely that—the pilots invited ‘Benny’ to play at the barracks or they suggested he perform at the dance hall for the locals. To these requests he usually responded with a shrug, saying he couldn’t play a note. At times he kidded along and told them sure, he would, he’d perform the night after next, and the airmen laughed at the incongruity between a famous guy and a worthless mess steward.

To the other mess kitchen auxiliaries, Lucky said if he did resemble Benny Goodman, then he was sick of hearing about it all the time. Another thing—he told his mess steward buddy, Gregor—he, Lucky Mallios, used to play the clarinet, and the trumpet on occasion, for a union-sponsored big band in Chicago. His bandmates gave him the nickname ‘Lucky’ because they said he was lucky to ever get the job. After a few months they kicked him out. That’s rough stuff, said Gregor. Music is an unkind scene, said Lucky. He joined other bands, and the nickname followed him, but he couldn’t fit in with other musicians, whom he considered either swine or aloof. They all seemed to think themselves more talented than Lucky. Still he was sturdy, self-believing: he thought he was good enough to one day join the Glenn Miller Orchestra, for example. Such self-belief mitigated his music-related disappointments.

In the air force, he introduced himself as Lucky, claiming that the nickname referred to his luck in poker; he intended to take ownership of the slur, to wheel the dumb joke around on all these jackasses. And at the base in Sydney he might have responded to the airmen’s false offers with an actual performance, he could have played for these puffed-up pilots, but he imagined the scene would do him few favours; it would be a naked display of cornered indignation.

One night, after they’d incinerated a discouraging amount of dinner waste, Lucky stayed up late with Gregor in the mess hall kitchen. They drank dark coffee in the billiard-hall glow of the room, and there Gregor outlined his big idea: in February, they would take leave and tour a few eastern cities in Australia. It would be a fake United Services Organizations tour, a solo event and thus modestly publicised. Lucky would play Benny Goodman, and Gregor his manager, and no one would ever find out their true identities.