“We’ve played there a couple of times,” said Max. “Usually the lunch spot on Monday.”

“Get much of a crowd?” I asked.

“We were getting there,” said James. “We had gigs at the Bull’s Head, the National Theatre foyer, and Merlin’s Cave in Chalfont Saint Giles.”

“Last Friday was the first evening slot that we’d scored,” said Max.

“So what was next?” I asked. “Record deal?”

“Cyrus would have left,” said Daniel.

Everybody stared at him for a moment.

“Come on, guys, you know that’s what would have happened,” said Daniel. “We’d have done a few more gigs, somebody would have spotted him, and it would be It’s been fun, guys, let’s not lose touch.”

“Was he that good?” I asked.

James scowled down at his noodles, then stabbed them a few times with his chopsticks in obvious frustration. Then he chuckled. “He was that good,” he said. “And getting better.”

James raised his bottle of beer. “To Cyrus the Sax,” he said. “Because talent will out.”

We clinked our glasses.

“You know,” said James. “Once we’re done here, let’s go find some jazz.”

SOHO ON a warm summer evening is alive with conversation and tobacco smoke. Every pub spills out into the street, every café has its customers outside at tables perched on pavements that were originally built just wide enough to keep pedestrians out of the horse shit. On Old Compton Street fit young men in tight white T-shirts and spray-on jeans admired one another and their reflections in the shop windows. I caught Daniel pinging his radar off a couple of tasty young men checking themselves out outside the Admiral Duncan but they just ignored him. It was Friday night and after all that gym time they weren’t getting into bed for anything less than a ten.

A tangle of young women with regulation-length hair, desert tans, and regional accents slid past—female squaddies heading for Chinatown and the clubs around Leicester Square.

The band and I didn’t so much proceed up Old Compton as ricochet from one clique to the next. James nearly fell over as a pair of white girls ticked past in stilettos and pink knit mini dresses. “Fuck me,” he said as he recovered.

“Not going to happen,” said one of the girls as they walked away. But there was no malice in it.

James said he knew a place on Bateman Street, a little basement club in the grand tradition of the legendary Flamingo. “Or Ronnie Scott’s,” he said. “Before it was Ronnie Scott’s.”