“Hello there, Ray,” he said as if we hadn’t just seen each other on the bandstand five minutes earlier. “Not a bad booking for us, wouldn’t you say?”

Jack, who came from Vermont, had somewhere picked up the British habit of ending many of his sentences with a question. I’d always considered this to be a veiled way of daring someone to contradict you, but it was the only thing about him I didn’t like.

I pointed toward the island of Atlantis, glimmering incandescently in the bay. “What is that, Jack? Do you know?”

“First time you’ve seen it, is it? That’s the Golden Gate International Exposition. The West Coast’s answer to the World’s Fair in New York.”

“That’s interesting,” I said. “I was thinking of meeting someone there for breakfast tomorrow.” I stared at the island’s tallest spire, which was greater in height than any structure on either side of the bay. “You know, I remember standing on this very spot when I was seventeen, and I could swear there was nothing out there. It’s twenty times the size of Alcatraz. Where the hell did it come from?”

Jack lit a cigarette. “From the Army Corps of Engineers, I believe.”

I shook my head. “No, I didn’t mean the buildings, I meant the island itself.”

He exhaled. “That’s what I meant. That’s what they built.”

Before he could enlighten me further, I heard the unmistakable and much admired voice of Jack’s wife, Vera, calling out to him. Jack Donovan and Vera Driscoll fronted our outfit. Jack played xylophone, which was a very useful instrument if you were underscoring a Mickey Mouse cartoon. The story on Jack Donovan’s talent was that, as jazz musicians go, he had a wife who sang great.

Her looks were great, too, if what you liked was a genuine blonde with eyes the color of fresh cigarette ash, the sharp nose of someone who always gets her way, and the kind of permanently pouted lips that would cause intelligent, reliable men to ruin their lives. I mean, if that’s what you liked, I guess Vera was okay. Her trademark hairstyle was a crimped pompadour angled to the right with the sides sweeping back into a chignon that made the nape of her neck as feminine as her forehead was challenging.

The fact that she was performing in the hotel allowed her to be one notch more intensely dressed than any other woman in the Terrace Lounge. But if she hadn’t been performing, she probably would have dressed that way all the same.