“The best.” Joe waved off a drink.

“You said you were partners with Joe’s father.” Anna played with her new hairpin, which she had taken out for the gardenia.

“With Mike Peña,” Pollack said.

“Doing what?”

Pollack glanced at Joe. “Distribution, mainly.”

“A dangerous business,” Joe said. “Mike was distributing a load of Schenley up from Mexico one night when a tire blew or he hit a cow or someone drove alongside and shot him in the head. The truck crashed and the gas and booze blew like a Molotov cocktail.”

“It wasn’t clear whether a bullet was found,” Pollack said.

“The investigation was led by a Judge Hilario Reyes,” Joe explained. “It was very inconclusive.”

“I sent Joe down to El Paso before he could get himself into trouble,” Pollack told Anna. “I had a brother working in the circus. I thought Joe was going to feed the elephants, but he caught on to music real fast. Of course, he used to play the organ in the pueblo even before then. He was a choirboy and everything.”

“Did Mike like your music?” Anna asked.

“No.” Joe had to laugh. “He hated it.”

He took her onto the floor and they danced to “Flamingo,” the Ellington version.

“Are there clubs like this in Chicago?” she asked.

“Great clubs up there.”

“Would you go to Chicago to play?”

“No. When I get out of the Army, I’m not going to take orders from anyone. I’m going to have my own club. For the first time in my life I know what I want.”

“And what is it?”

“This.” He took in the seraphic row of white music stands against the red velvet, the warm languor of the women in their long hair and short dresses, the waiters gliding under trays of iced drinks, and the music curling within the circular Hollywood-adobe walls, eddying and overlapping into echoes that asked for a sharp piano riff, the stab of a minor chord.

“It must be wonderful to know what you want,” Anna said.

“One fight will pay for it.”

“Then the Casa Mañana will make you rich?”

“It’s the music, not the money. Sooner or later, a great club loses money the way a beautiful balloon loses air. You mind my fighting?”

“It sounds like a bad movie. We had such movies in Germany. The man who fights one last time to pay for an operation for his sister so her sight can be miraculously saved. Naturally, he loses his.”

“I’m going to win. And I won’t go blind or break my hands.”

“If this is what you truly want—”

“It is.”

“Then I don’t think anyone in the world could stop you.”

It was midnight when they came out of the club into the parking lot.