Gregor bought a clarinet for three pounds plus ten US dollars from Maeve Doyle, a friend of sorts, whose fiancé had died in France the previous year. Gregor had met her at the hotel in Canterbury where she worked, but Maeve wasn’t interested in romance and straightaway told him so—in a friendly way. He worked in an air force mess; he could be useful to her as an agent of regular trade in basic items. He brought her rationed goods, such as nylons and spaghetti, biscuits and bacon, matches that didn’t break, toilet soap and toothpowder, tinned ham and herring, and also one alarm clock, the scarcest of items. In return she gave him fresh sauces, sweets, baked food. She found him novels—westerns and thrillers, chosen simply for the preposterousness of the author’s name.

Gregor came out to meet Maeve at the Bankstown Airport gates. She had the clarinet inside a suitcase, cushioned with a green velvet scarf.

‘Will you tell me why you need this thing?’ she said.

‘If you keep it quiet.’

‘Not a soul, friend.’

‘My buddy is going to impersonate a famous musician on tour.’

‘A bold plan!’

‘It’s been well thought out and we’re confident nothing can go wrong. You should come along to a concert.’

‘I’m going to wish you well.’

Lucky and Gregor applied for leave: the leave was approved. Every night for the next week, after dinner service, Lucky walked from the barracks dormitory to a dry stockroom inside a yard controlled by a vicious dog that had lately mauled a hungry pilot. But the dog loved Lucky, the man who never failed to bring food. In the storeroom, he practised arrangements from Roll ’Em and Swing into Spring. His newly acquired folio of sheet music, Benny Goodman’s Recorded Clarinet Solos (Bregman, Vocco & Conn, 1938), was not well-bound: Lucky let the challenging booklet flop open at random pages and he played what he saw. In the daytime, when a musical idea came to him, he stopped and went to the storeroom and played for a few minutes. Meantime, Maeve got hold of some uniforms. She supposed British army khakis might pass for USO dress.

2.

In their first substantive act of fraud, Lucky and Gregor took a train to Central Station and outside, in character, approached a jeep in which the driver sat sunning himself. Gregor introduced Benny Goodman and asked for a lift. The driver said sure thing, he’d be real honoured.

The jeep’s excited driver steered with one hand and with the other flaunted his knowledge of Sydney as the eastern suburbs brushed past Lucky’s nervous eyes (terraces, churches), until the tourists graced their destination: a community hall. The driver reminded Lucky of a movie villain; he couldn’t remember which film.

‘Odd thing,’ said the driver as he stopped the car, ‘but there was a military police car behind us a couple streets back.’