Free Ghosts of Manhattan by George Mann Page A

whilst idly toying with their drinks.

    The place was busy. Gabriel scanned the crowd. All the usual faces were there. Businessmen, politicians, sportsmen. Johnny Franco and his cronies had taken their usual table near the front. The man himself-tall, gangly, mid-forties, wearing a pinstriped suit-sat with his back to the room, nonchalantly exchanging conversation with a man Gabriel didn't recognize. But his men weren't so relaxed. There were at least five of them clustered around the table, each of them covering Johnny from a different angle, their hands nervously resting inside their jackets, just in case they needed to produce their weapons in a hurry. Gabriel thought they looked jumpy. He wondered if they were expecting something to go down.
    Taking another draw on his cigarette, Gabriel wound his way through the tables toward the bar.
    "Usual please, Joe."
    "Coming right up, Mr. Cross."
    Gabriel lowered himself onto a bar stool and watched the burly barman slosh a measure of bourbon into a tumbler. He slid it across the lacquered bar with a smile. Gabriel nodded his appreciation and dropped a handful of coins into the other man's hand. Then, snatching up the glass, he downed the whisky in one quick motion and dropped the empty vessel back on the bar with a clink.
    On stage, the performance had come to an end and had been met with a general apathy from the audience. Most of them weren't there to see the women. They were there to drink and do business. For some of them, of course, women were their business, but that was another matter altogether, and not something that Gabriel liked to dwell on for very long. Celeste was up next, however. Celeste always turned heads. Celeste was the jewel in Joe's crown, and everyone there knew it.
    The lights dimmed. A hush rippled across the gathered audience. Someone smashed a glass across the other side of the room, and Gabriel could hear the tinkling fragments as they scattered to the floor. Joe placed another shot of bourbon by his elbow.
    There was a mechanical grinding, the sound of gears choking and a chain being wound tightly around a barrel. Three enormous panels rose up from the stage, forming a petal-like arrangement behind the microphone stand. They were disk-shaped, and comprised of delicate iron fretwork and colored glass. Music stirred, slow and soulful, echoing around the cavernous interior of the underground club, the musicians hidden behind the stage or else somehow out of sight, ghosts murmuring sadly to the living. The glass panels began to turn, slowly and inexorably, like enormous multicolored wheels, cogs in some vast, unusual machine. Lights blinked on behind them, flooding the stage with dancing rays in reds, blues, pinks, and greens. And then, as if seeping from the ground like an ethereal puff of smoke, Celeste appeared, rising up through the center of the stage on a small wooden platform. She stepped forward toward the microphone.

    She was wearing a red dress that fell just above the knee and accentuated her shock of auburn hair. Her lips were bright with crimson gloss, and her hands and forearms were covered in long, sensuous silk gloves. She reached out and took the microphone, silhouetted against the bright lights, and brought it closer to her parted lips. And then she sang, and not one person in the club stirred from their seat.
    Gabriel felt a surge of desire. He watched her as she swayed on the spot, moving slowly with the rise and fall of the music. He'd known her sway in different ways; longed for her to sway that way again. And her voice ... It was sultry and pure, knowing and innocent, dark and forgiving; it was life, in all its manifest glory. The words meant nothing. She could have been singing about anything at all. But the sound of her voice was like a portal to her soul, and Gabriel knew that he would never, ever find another woman like her in this world.
    He reached for his drink and gulped it down. All thoughts of the previous evening were