I knew the Fauborg because I drank there. The lounge at the back was smallish and dim with nothing to prove, paneled in dark rift oak and hung with middling Barbizon landscapes. The eighty-year-old hunchback behind the bar concocted the best Sidecar in town and Robin likes Sidecars. An assortment of pianists, mostly former studio musicians on pension, worked the big black Steinway in the left-hand corner, never intruding upon the pleasant buzz of conversation and the harmonious clink of crystal glasses. The staff was attentive without being nosy, the snacks were decent, and you left the place feeling as if you’d been recivilized.

Robin and I spent a lot of Sunday evenings in a cracked leather rear booth, holding hands, nibbling on cheese crackers, and inhaling Gershwin.

One Saturday morning in the spring, Robin was delivering a new guitar to an aging rock star who lived in the flats of Beverly Hills and the drive took her past the Fauborg. A sign strung up over the fanlight announced:

LAST NIGHT TOMORROW:
COME CELEBRATE—OR MOURN—WITH US.
THANKS FOR THE GOOD TIMES.

The Family of Marcel Jabotinsky

Robin shouldn’t have been surprised; the previous week we’d shown up at a Thai place we’d enjoyed for half a decade only to find an abyss surrounded by chain-link where the building had stood. The month before that, she’d run into an old high school friend and asked how her husband was.

“Which one?”

“Jeff.”

The woman laughed. “Jeff’s ancient history, sweetie. Cliff’s recent history but he’s gone, too.”

Tissue paper city.

Robin said, “Not much of a choice, is it? Surrender to the inevitable or risk a whole bunch of mawkish nostalgia.”

We sat on the living room couch with Blanche, our little French bulldog, squeezed between us and following the back-and-forth.

I said, “I can go either way.”

She pulled on a curl, let it spring back. “What the heck, I’ll never get a Sidecar that good and it’s a chance to put on a dress.”

“I’ll wear a suit.”

“I like you in a suit, darling. But not the black one. Let’s pretend it won’t be a funeral.”

Who knew?

Chapter 2

e showed up at nine p.m. The light behind the fanlight was dingy.

Crescent Drive was depopulated except for a man with a walkie-talkie leaning against a parking meter just north of the hotel. Thirties, tall, broad, with short yellow hair, he flashed us a slit-eyed appraisal before returning to watching the empty street.

His suit was black and it draped his bulk uneasily. An interesting bulge swelled his breast pocket, a spiral cord ran from an earpiece down the back of his collar.

Robin whispered, “If someone needs serious guarding, where are the paparazzi?”

I said, “Good question. They swarm like blowflies at the first whiff of moral decay.”