The big guy countered: ‘We can say for sure you’re not Benny Goodman.’

‘How do you know?’ asked Lucky. ‘I’m only asking out of curiosity.’

‘’Cause we’re MPs and there’s a thousand Americans leaving Sydney each week, give or take, and hardly anyone new coming in. We’d know if a big personality like Benny Goodman was arriving.’

‘And you look nothing like him,’ added his colleague.

‘Sure he does!’ said Gregor.

‘Kid, I know what Benny Goodman looks like. The man is a star.’

‘We must be going,’ said Lucky. ‘I’m late for something.’

‘You ain’t late.’

Gregor said: ‘Come on, we’re all Americans. We’re good people here.’

‘Right there, yep, that’s changed my mind.’

‘I tell you what’s going to happen now,’ said the other MP. ‘The four of us are walking to our vehicle and we’re going for a drive.’

‘Absolutely not,’ said Lucky. ‘We’re not going anywhere.’

Lucky sat rigid in the sedan, reluctant to ask questions about how they were caught or what would happen next, in case such queries invited answers he didn’t want to hear, in case the two strangers hadn’t yet decided what they were going to do with the Benny Goodman imposter and had only cruel, by-the-book remedies close at hand. Lucky decided to say nothing. He was still in that space between being caught and being punished, when a reprieve seemed like the obvious and best solution for everyone. That way he’d still get to play Benny Goodman. They, these trumped-up police, couldn’t understand what lay behind the fraud; it wasn’t another scheme, a dumb prank—it had meaning.

On the ride westwards, he absorbed as many details as he could: a face in a shop window, fabric tangled in a poplar. Each detail appeared oddly distant, mocking his present situation. A slate-grey morning leaned on the European trees along a boulevard. The military police asked how Lucky could have dared to impersonate Benny Goodman. Goodman was a famous person!

They stopped on a short street. The man in the back seat, the marginally more aggressive of the two MPs, produced a revolver when he exited the car—he was a small-framed but large-eared man with a cold red complexion, whom Lucky would later refer to as ‘Frank’, since he never gave a name. The other MP was a minotaur with a square forehead—he would be known as ‘Harry’ to his pair of captives. The prisoners were ordered to the doorstep of a two-storey building behind a leprous wooden fence. Harry assisted Lucky’s passage with a helpful punch in the back, before he opened the front door and led the imposters down a long hallway to a dark room, locking them inside.