Read Online Tropic of Darkness by Tony Richards - Free Book Online Page B

flashbulb, his expression transfixed.
    A mistake, perhaps. Alfonsine simply hadn’t noticed that the photo was being taken at that moment.
    Carlos thumbed quickly through the rest, trying to find any more like it.
    There were several. So he took one of them and put it in his pocket.

CHAPTER
    NINE
    By noon, Jack was up and about, blinking rather dazedly. He was a little hung over, not too badly, but there was more than that. He remembered the dream, and Pierre laughing at him. And felt neither anger nor resentment. Merely a strange emptiness that left him feeling thoughtful.
    The Frenchman’s words last night had caused it. And Mantegna’s passion—where had that name even come from?—for the woman in that incredibly vivid dream. It had all seemed so real , like he had actually visited the past in another man’s body. In the waking world, he had never wanted any woman quite that badly. And could what Pierre had said have been correct . . . might he have begun to yearn for someone special?
    Realistically, of course there was little chance of that, living the kind of life he did. So Jack decided to just get on with it, moving carefully about the room and getting ready to meet the band that Pierre had put him in touch with.
    He found them waiting in the downstairs bar, sprawled nonchalantly around a low glass table, showing no impatience, no apparent sense of time at all. He’d lived in these parts long enough to be entirely used to that.
    The eldest and their leader was at least four years his junior, but Jack got along with them well enough. For their part, they seemed politely fascinated by him. They had quite simply never played with a Yanqui before.
    â€œWe cannot pay, you understand,” the leader explained apologetically. “You have no work permit and it is not allowed. We’ll cut you in, however, on more than your fair share of the tips. Shall we say, thirty percent?”
    Jack agreed that that would be just fine. He wasn’t here for money. The experience was the thing.
    â€œYou know where Club Felix is? Just across the square from here. First set is tomorrow evening, ten o’clock.”
    â€œHow about rehearsals?” Jack asked.
    The man grinned and shrugged simultaneously, a typically Latin gesture.
    â€œWe never rehearse, my friend. We go with the flow.”
    So there was that. A good first meeting though, everything considered. He was a little relieved, nonetheless, when they lined up to shake hands with him and left. He’d managed to hide it but, deep down, he still felt pretty shaky.
    Pierre’s sly, mocking words kept on repeating themselves in his head. “Is that it, Jack? Is that what you’re looking for, these days? A lady who understands your deepest self, your inner being?”
    He’d never really stopped to think about his life in terms like those before. Now he began to wonder. He was already in his thirties. Where to go, from this point on?
    It somehow all came back around to that strange dream he’d had. Except it hadn’t even been a particularly scary one. So why—he wondered once again—had he woken up with such a yell?
    He turned it over glumly for a while, and finally came to the conclusion that it had to be the local booze.
    A shadow moved across Jack’s table, bringing his head up. A slim young black man, casually but neatly dressed, was standing with his hands propped on the back of the chair opposite, smiling down at him. Jack saw that he was about to get hustled again— inside the hotel this time, for chrissakes.
    Then he noticed the book clutched in the fellow’s hand. Henry V . Shakespeare. It looked so out of place that his interest was immediately roused.
    â€œI don’t want to bother you, sir,” the boy asked, “but are you an American, by any chance?”
    Jack nodded and allowed him to go on.
    â€œMy name is Luis. I’m a student at the university. English