I borrowed my dad’s iPod and thumbed through his selections looking for the track I wanted. I took it through the kitchen and out onto the balcony with its unparalleled vista of the flats opposite. I found it—“Body and Soul” off Blitzkrieg Babies and Bands—Snakehips Johnson giving the tune such a danceable swing that Coleman Hawkins had to invent an entire new branch of jazz just to get it out of his head. It was also the version I’d heard in the Café de Paris while dancing with Simone.

The vestigium left on the body of Mickey the Bone had sounded like a trombone. At Cyrus Wilkinson’s demise it had been an alto sax—the instruments the musicians had played in life. Henry Bellrush had played the cornet, but I hadn’t sensed a cornet at the Café de Paris.

I’d sensed Ken “Snakehips” Johnson and his West Indian Orchestra who had all died there, in the Café de Paris, more than seventy years ago.

That couldn’t be a coincidence.

THE NEXT morning I talked myself out of practice and headed for Clerkenwell and the Metropolitan Archive. The Corporation of London is the organization dedicated to ensuring that the City—that’s the financial bit of London—is untainted by all this newfangled democracy that’s been rearing its ugly head in the last two hundred years or so. If an oligarchy was good enough for Dick Whittington, they argue, then it’s good enough for the heart of twenty-first-century London. After all, they say, it works in China.

They are also in charge of old archives of the London County Council, which are kept in a workmanlike but still elegant art deco building with white walls and gray carpet. I flashed my warrant card at one of the librarians, and she quickly pulled up a list of documents and showed me how to order.

She also suggested that she could check the digital archive to see if there were any images available. “Is this a cold case?” she asked.

“A very cold case,” I said.

First up from the storeroom was LCC/CE/4/7, a cardboard box full of manila folders tied up with dirty white ribbons. I was looking for item #39 report from March 8, 1941. The identification was handwritten in black ink and I untied the folder to find the report printed in purple type on pale yellow paper, a surefire sign, said the librarian, that it had been duplicated with a mimeograph. It was marked SECRET and dated March 9, 1941. SITUATION REPORT AS AT 0600 HOURS. It listed, in order of importance, damage to factories, railways, telecommunications, electricity supply, docks, roads, hospitals, and public buildings. St. Thomas’s Babies Hostel in Lambeth had been hit and, I was relieved to read, no casualties taken. Oddly relieved, given that it all happened half a century before I was born. I found what I was looking for halfway down the third page.