The club was called The Halo, though nobody called it that anymore. By 1925 it was just "the club," or "down on 125th," or—if you were Tommy Callahan and feeling particularly poetic—"the place where the music goes to die and comes back as something else."

I played trumpet there three nights a week, sometimes four if the crowd was hungry and the bartender was generous. My sound was thin but honest, the kind of sound that doesn't try to impress anyone and accidentally does anyway. Lila used to say that about me. "You don't try, Whitey," she'd say, using the nickname she'd given me because of the pale skin and the white-blond hair that I couldn't keep sun out of even if I tried. "That's why you're good."

Lila sang on the other three nights. She was twenty-two, which in New York is either very young or very old depending on who you ask. She had eyes that could make a man forget his name and a voice that could make him remember it. She wore red dresses like other women wear white shirts—because they're practical and everyone expects them. But Lila's red dresses weren't practical. They were declarations.

In the back room, behind the club where the musicians stored their cases and the bartender stored his extra bottles, there was a terrarium. Inside the terrarium was Remy, a white corn snake I'd brought back from Paris on a whim, because why not have a pet in a club on 125th Street? Remy was six months old and already two feet long, and he had the sort of beauty that makes people uncomfortable because it doesn't ask for anything.

Penny was a Chihuahua. She belonged to Lila, who had picked her up in Central Park one morning while I was still asleep and Lila was still deciding whether to stay or go. Penny was white, which I think is why Lila chose her. Two white things in a room full of colour, and they became friends in the way that white things do—by existing quietly beside each other and not demanding that anyone understand why.

Every night after the band packed up, I'd sit in the back room with Remy on the table and Penny on the floor beside it, and Lila would sit on the couch and drink gin and smoke and tell me about Paris. She'd been there twice, which in the language of New York in 1925 is basically a lifetime. She'd tell me about the cafés and the painters and the men who wore scarves indoors and the women who cut their hair short and laughed at things that would have scandalized their mothers.

"Everything's different there," she'd say. "People are honest about being dishonest. Here, everybody lies to themselves first and then to everyone else."

Harold Vance heard her say that once, and he didn't laugh. Harold was forty-five, made his money in real estate the way men in his generation made their money—by buying things cheap, waiting, and selling them expensive while telling himself it was a service to society. He was married, which he mentioned exactly once, in a conversation with me on the club's back steps at 2 AM, when the city was quiet enough for truth.

"I don't love her," he said. "But she's useful. And she's expected."

I didn't know what to say to that. I played trumpet. I didn't know how to say things.

Harold was courting Lila. He brought her flowers and diamonds and tickets to races in Long Island, and he looked at her the way a man looks at a building he wants to own—not with love, exactly, but with the quiet certainty of someone who has calculated the value and found it acceptable. I looked at Lila the way a man looks at a song he can't quite play—the way she made me want to be better at something I wasn't sure existed.

She was going to choose. I knew it. Everyone knew it. The club knew it. The bartender knew it. Remy, coiled in his terrarium, seemed to know it too, because he started moving more restlessly at night, uncoiling and recoiling like a question that couldn't find its answer.

Penny died on a Saturday.

I found her in the basement, curled on the concrete floor beside the wine cooler, her tiny body stiff and cold. There were marks on her neck—two small puncture wounds that I first thought were snake bites, until I remembered that Remy's terrarium was locked and Remy had never been in the basement.

Lila screamed. She screamed once, a sound so sharp and clean it cut through the club like a knife through silk, and then she was on her knees on the concrete floor, holding the tiny white body in her hands, making sounds that I've never heard from a human being and hope never to hear again.

Harold was there within the hour. He came in a car with a driver, wearing a coat that cost more than my trumpet, with a face that tried very hard to look sad and succeeded in looking annoyed. He knelt beside Lila and put his hand on her shoulder and she flinched away from him the way a living thing flinches from something that doesn't understand pain.

"It was an accident," Harold said. "Rats in the basement. There are rats everywhere in this building."

I was looking at Remy's terrarium. The lid was closed, the lock was intact, and on the glass, barely visible in the dim light, I could see a faint smudge that smelled like cigar smoke. Harold's cigar smoke. I knew the smell because Harold smoked the same brand I did—Gitanes, French, slightly sweet—and I'd caught him smoking one in the basement two nights ago, leaning against the wine cooler, looking at Lila through the door to the back room with an expression I couldn't quite read.

Jealousy, maybe. Or calculation. Or both, braided together like the coils of a snake that doesn't exist.

"He was in the basement," I said.

Lila looked up. "What?"

"Harold was in the basement. Two nights ago. I saw him."

Harold's face went very still. "I was looking for the fuse box. This building is a fire hazard."

"You were smoking a Gitanes," I said. "I know the smell."

The silence that followed was the kind of silence that comes before a decision. Lila looked at Harold, and I saw something change in her face—not anger, not sadness, but clarity. The clarity of a woman who has been looking at a painting and suddenly understands that the perspective has been wrong all along.

That night, I opened Remy's terrarium. Not to release him—I wasn't that kind of fool—but to take out the small stack of paper strips he'd been using as bedding, which I'd been collecting for a week because I'd noticed something: Remy didn't just sit on the paper. He arranged it. He pushed it into patterns, small and deliberate, like a man writing with his fingers in the sand.

I couldn't read the patterns. But I could copy them.

What followed was not revenge. Revenge implies emotion, and what I did was cold and precise and had nothing to do with emotion. It had to do with information. Harold Vance had a wife, yes, but he also had a mistress—a woman named Edith Prescott who lived in an apartment on Central Park West and thought she was the only one. Harold also had financial arrangements with a man named Leo Bernstein that he hadn't told Edith about, and a property deal in Queens that was structured in a way that would have caused a scandal if anyone knew about it.

I didn't steal this information. I found it. It was sitting in a desk drawer in Harold's office, unguarded and unguarded because men like Harold don't guard things they think are invisible. And then I did what Remy had taught me to do: I arranged the information carefully, deliberately, and let it find its way to the people who needed to see it.

Edith got the financial papers. A reporter at the Tribune got the mistress information. And Harold's business partners got the Queens deal details, which were structured in a way that made Harold look less like a businessman and more like a man who had spent his life taking things that weren't his.

The night Harold proposed to Lila was the night everything collapsed.

The proposal was supposed to be perfect. Harold had rented out the entire club for a private party—his party, in my club, with my musicians playing his music, for a woman who was supposed to say yes. He'd ordered champagne and flowers and a cake that cost more than my annual rent. He stood in the centre of the dance floor with a velvet box in his hand, and Lila stood in front of him in a red dress that was, frankly, obscene.

And then the papers started arriving.

Not all at once. One by one, delivered by boys in jackets who moved through the crowd like Remy moves through grass—quietly, deliberately, leaving people to discover them at their own pace. A letter from Edith Prescott to Harold's wife. A photograph of Harold and his mistress at the Plaza. A copy of the Queens deal with the problematic clauses circled in red pencil.

The party dissolved the way parties dissolve when the centre can no longer hold. People left. Some stayed and watched. Harold stood on the dance floor with the velvet box in his hand and the red dress in front of him and the papers scattered at his feet like confetti from a parade nobody wanted to attend.

Lila looked at the box. She looked at Harold. She looked at me, standing in the doorway with Remy's empty terrarium in my hands.

And then she did something I didn't expect. She laughed. Not a cruel laugh. Not a happy laugh. A laugh of recognition—the same recognition I'd seen on Caleb Drewett's face in the story old man Ruiz told me once, about a man who found gold in his backyard and died before he could dig it up.

"I'm going to Paris," Lila said.

She left the next morning. Single ticket. One suitcase. No note.

I stayed in the club. I played the trumpet. Remy came back from wherever he'd gone and coiled himself in the terrarium, which I had refilled with fresh paper. He was quiet again. The club was quiet. The city was loud. And I played the trumpet the way I always played it—not trying to impress anyone, accidentally doing it anyway.

Some songs don't have endings. They just stop being played.