He laughed in a quick staccato. “I didn’t stay for you. I’m here most nights till eight or nine at the least. Everybody wants everything by the morning. If it weren’t for overtime charges, I’d lose money on the whole operation. By the way, thanks a bunch for scaring off a customer.”

“I thought I saw her paying you,” I said.

“Yeah, but I bet she never comes back. What did you do to her?”

I ignored his question and asked, “How’d she sound?”

Gilbert looked at me. “What do you mean?”

“When she spoke to you. What was her voice like?”

He must have thought I was crazy, or in love with her.

“I think she had, you know, some kind of speech impediment. She said as little as she could.”

“By the way, that copying job you would have given the professor if he hadn’t taken mine, rearranging a stage-show chart so it would work for smaller combos . . . was that the chart Adeline brought in?”

“Yeah, it was a specialty dance number. Comanche something.”

“Apache,” I corrected him and left with the Swing parts under my arm. The orchestral score itself and a Photostatic copy of same were to be delivered to my hotel the next day.

I rode the birdcage elevator down to the ground floor and hailed a cab to take me back to the Claremont, where the band would be playing in less than half an hour.

I sat back in the taxi and thought about what had brought Nancy and me to the unlikely meeting place of the Centaur Luncheonette. We’d been there because a dancer who worked in the building wanted to meet with Nancy. Except that she hadn’t shown up. It was a strange coincidence: a no-show dancer and a vanishing waitress in the same lunch hour.

Strange unless they were the same person. People in show business often fall back on jobs as waiters and waitresses in between bookings.

What if the dancer had fled the luncheonette before she’d even seen Nancy, fled because of something she saw.

Me.

Just as she had fled from me today and at Lake Merritt. Was she frightened to see me? Or frightened I’d see her?

What had prompted these thoughts was the check from the French café that I’d looked at on the ferry. The café’s bored waiter had indicated that a tip was not included by writing the standard abbreviation for Service Non Compris. SNC.

I’d originally thought our waitress at the Centaur had jotted down “5NC” for table five, “No Charge.” But her 5 could easily have been an S. And I now knew that we had been seated at table one.

On her first day at a low-paying job where her tips would be important, a waitress might have reflexively written SNC at the bottom of the check.

If she were French.