her as if he could extract the answer by telepathy. “I’m going to be in and out of town for the next month or so. I’m covering the voter-registration activities in Alabama. How long do you think this will take?”
“I don’t know. I tire easily. And I’m old. There’s a lot to tell.”
“From what you’ve told me so far, you could get the same results from plugging in a tape recorder.”
“No, that’s where you’re wrong. I’ll need your help. I couldn’t tell this to a machine. I need someone with your intelligence and insight—”
“Look, Mrs. Gerritsen. You don’t need me. I don’t know why you called, and I don’t know what this is really about, but I’m a black man. And by any standards in this town, including my own, that makes me the wrong man for this job.”
“I do need you. I’ve read your interviews. You’re unique. People tell you things they wouldn’t tell anyone else. You know how to get the information they’re withholding.”
“Why would you pay me good money, then withhold information?”
“Because I’ve spent a good portion of my life living a lie, and sometimes I’m not even sure where the truth can be found.”
He sighed and shook his head, but Aurore knew that he wasn’t refusing to write her story. He had made a different decision, and already it annoyed him. “Five thousand dollars,” he said at last. “And some kind of assurance there’s a point to all this.”
“I’ll have the check for you at our next session.”
He stood. “That will be tomorrow. The sooner we start…”
“The sooner we finish.” She nodded, and stood, too. She wished she had her cane, but she hadn’t wanted him to see her with it at first. She had wanted to appear stronger than she was.
She held out her hand, and he took it again. “Will ten be too late for you?” she asked.
“Ten will be fine.”
“Then I’ll look forward to tomorrow.”
He nodded and said a polite goodbye. Then he was gone.
She counted the lies she had told him already. The biggest had been the last. She was not looking forward to tomorrow.
She was not looking forward to it at all.
CHAPTER TWO
Phillip left the Garden District and turned north, toward Club Valentine, the jazz club that his mother had made famous. It was early, and Nicky was probably rehearsing. He wanted to talk to her, and he didn’t want to wait until the club was crowded.
He parked several blocks from Basin Street and strode past rows of white frame houses. From porches and open windows, the Four Tops warred with the Supremes, and teenage girls in short, bright skirts frugged and watusied on the sidewalks. Someone was boiling crabs in an old sugar kettle in the middle of a driveway. The aroma reminded Phillip that he’d had too little to eat that day.
The club was a two-story building on the corner, with a cast-iron balcony overlooking the tree-lined street, and shuttered doors thrown open to catch the evening breeze. From the sidewalk, Phillip heard Nicky’s voice rising above the street noises.
Inside, he waved to the bartender, who was busy doing inventory, and briefly scouted the front rooms for Jake Reynolds, his stepfather. When he didn’t find Jake, he followed Nicky’s singing to the back room. Her dress was red and tight, with a skirt that some people might have said was too short for a woman nearing sixty—although every man in the club would disagree.
He took a seat at the back of the room while she finished the song. Nicky Reynolds—whom the world knew as Nicky Valentine—had a voice that wrapped around the listener like a sable coat. She could wring from each note, each word, the regrets of a lifetime, the heat of tangled limbs on a summer night, the joys of discovering love.
He recognized the song as something of James Brown’s, defining the term soul, which had just replaced rhythm and blues as a category on the charts. When Nicky sang, splinters of her soul rose up in her music. Phillip didn’t know how anyone could see so clearly the problems and paradoxes of the world, but Nicky did. And when she was done singing, the audience always saw them a little better, too.
She spotted him just at the end of the last chorus, and she shook her finger in his direction. When she’d finished, she huddled with the band for a few minutes before she came down to join him.