New York in 1924 tasted like gin and money, and if you listened closely enough, you could hear the music pouring out of every basement door on 52nd Street. It was the sound of people trying to drown something, and Leo understood that sound better than most.

He'd arrived from Sicily with one leg that didn't work right - a shipboard accident, or so he told anyone who asked. The truth was simpler and harder to explain: he'd fallen from a roof chasing a stray cat, and no doctor in Palermo could fix what was broken. But in New York, you didn't need to explain yourself. You just needed to play.

Leo played piano. Not the polite parlor music of his father's dreams, but the new thing - wild and syncopated, the sound of a city that had forgotten how to stand still. He played at clubs where the smoke hung so thick you could cut it with a knife, and the crowds didn't care about his leg. They cared about the way his hands could make the keys weep.

But the music had an edge to it that frightened even him. Every chord carried the memory of the men on that dock - the ones who'd laughed when he fell, the ones who'd walked away. They weren't villains. They were just Americans, or at least they acted like it, with the casual cruelty of people who'd never been told they were less than human.

His salvation came in the form of a bandleader named Duke Morrison - not the famous one, just a smaller man with the same name and the same hunger. Duke took Leo into his band, and for six months, they played together from Harlem to Coney Island, riding the jazz boom like a wave that might never break.

Then the wave almost broke.

Duke got in over his head with a nightclub owner who ran numbers on the side. The debt was small by criminal standards but enormous for Duke. The nightclub owner sent men to collect, and when Duke couldn't pay, they broke his fingers. Not badly, just enough to make a point.

Leo sat in his tenement room that night, listening to the silence where the music used to be. His own leg throbbed with a pain he'd forgotten existed. He thought about walking away, about getting on a bus to Chicago or even back to Palermo, where the sea was blue and the old women still sang lullabies in a language he half-remembered.

Instead, he went to the nightclub owner's apartment. Not with a gun. With a piano key - one of those metal ones that pops out when you play too hard. He held it like a weapon and said, "I'm going to play every night until Duke can play again. You tell your men to stay away."

The nightclub owner looked at the piano key and laughed. Then he looked at Leo's leg and stopped laughing. "You're crazy, Siciliano."

"Probably," Leo said. "But I can play."

He did play. Every night for eight months, until Duke's fingers healed and came back stronger. They played together until the music changed again, until jazz moved somewhere Leo hadn't reached yet. But that was okay. The tide had promised him something, and he'd kept his end of the bargain.

He packed his bag one morning and headed north. Chicago was calling, and this time, he'd go with both legs forward.