Chapter 4: The Cap

The left end of the bar was the only place in Nightingale where a man could stand with his back to the room, and that was where Halliday had been since eleven, working on the same lemonade he had bought when he walked in.

He couldn’t hold a drink and had no interest in learning how badly, so the glass was lemonade. It had gone warm an hour ago. He was still holding it, because holding something made a man look like he belonged somewhere, and belonging somewhere was most of the work.

Mina had been out on the floor since before midnight and hadn’t come back. She’d read the post about Rhys Calloway and Sloane Adler out loud in the cab, twice, and then she’d walked in, dropped her jacket on a stool, and started dancing like the floor owed her money. It was how Mina handled things.

“Not that it’s true,” Wes said.

“Right.”

“It’s not.”

“Sure.”

Wes drank his beer. Out on the floor, Mina’s arms went up and stayed up.

“You two are done next month,” he said.

“Same day. Different departments.”

“Kestrel’s going all out this year. Caps, gowns, somebody’s father giving a speech.” Wes turned the bottle a quarter turn on the bar. “You walking?”

“If nothing’s on.”

“There’s nothing on.”

“Then probably.”

Wes finished the beer and stood. “I’m going to take a leak. Keep your head down.”

“Relax.” Halliday rotated the lemonade the same quarter turn, because the bar was sticky and the glass had begun to feel like part of it. “Nobody in here knows my face. That’s what I’ve got instead of a career.”

“That’s not what I meant.” Wes took his cap off — black, plain, a size too big — and fit it down over Halliday’s head. “There. Now somebody’s going to try talking to you again.”

Halliday pulled the brim low and looked up from under it. “So you think I’m popular.”

Wes’s whole face closed. “We’re a couple,” he said. “The hat’s part of it.”

Halliday smiled at him and said nothing.

“You win.” Wes put a thumb up, already backing off toward the back of the room. “I’m going to be sick.” He tipped his chin at the middle of the floor. “Watch her.”

“Yeah.”

The cap sat low and smelled like Wes’s shampoo. Halliday got his phone up under the brim, settled his weight against the bar, and did nothing with great care, the way you did nothing when the whole job was not being a problem. The DJ ran the night into another chorus and the room sang it back to him word for word, all of it, and the song was eight years old.

“Hey.”

The guy was blond, bleached and gone brassy at the ends, and he had an elbow on the bar before Halliday had finished looking up. “You here on your own?”

“With friends.”

“Yeah.” The guy took the stool beside him like it had been held for him. “They’re all over the place, though.”

He nodded at the corner before Halliday could answer. There was a booth there with more bottles on the table than people.

“Birthday,” he said. “The guy it’s for saw you come in. He wants you to come over. Whatever you want tonight, he’s covering it.”

Halliday kept his eyes on his phone and told himself, in the voice he used for this, to let it go. The guy didn’t know him. That was the whole of the good news he’d had all year. And a scene in a room this full wasn’t a scene. It was footage.

“Come on. One drink.” The guy didn’t finish it. He reached over and took hold of Halliday’s shoulder, and the reach came across the top of the bar and took three glasses with it — gin, lime, something pink and sticky — and all of it came over Halliday’s front, and the cap went off his head into the wet, and the guy’s heel came down on it flat before Halliday could get a hand to it.

Rhys had watched the whole thing start from the booth and had stayed in it. He’d seen the face already tonight — from the rail, the small actor Sloane had been talking about, one of ours, the kind who couldn’t afford a scene in a place like this — and a man didn’t get up for a stranger’s birthday. Then the glasses went over, and the kid took it without a word, the way people took things when a scene cost more than they had, and Rhys was already out of the booth.

Halliday’s eyes went flat. “I said—“

“He’s not interested.”

A hand closed around the blond guy’s wrist and took it off Halliday’s shoulder, hard enough that the guy’s elbow cracked back against the bar. The hand belonged to a tall man in black, and up close the black wasn’t plain at all: a thin white-gold chain at the throat, three rings stacked on long fingers, a jacket cuff that had never been near a mall. The cologne arrived half a second behind him. Sandalwood, and under it something with an edge on it.

“That’s—“ the blond guy said, or tried to. His wrist was bent at an angle it did not want to be bent at. “Get off me, you—“

The man let go by shoving him, and the guy went back four steps and barely kept his feet.

“Don’t make this a thing.”

The blond guy came up with his mouth already open, and then he looked properly at who had done it, and shut his mouth, and didn’t move.

“Thank you.” Halliday had a hand up at the mess on his shirt, and the word had come out before he’d decided anything.

The man looked at him — down at the shirt, up at his face — and nothing changed in his expression, and he said nothing.

Halliday looked up at him and said it again, quieter, because he wanted it on the record even if the man never thought about it again. “Thanks.”

And then his eyes widened, once, and he knew the face. Everyone knew that face. He said the name to himself to be sure he had it right, and didn’t say it out loud.

“Here.” The man was holding a cap — red, bright, the brim still holding its shape — and he put it on Halliday’s head, one hand, the way you would do it for a kid, or for somebody whose hands weren’t free. He looked at him a second longer, at the eyes under the brim, and something very small moved at the corner of his mouth. “Haven’t worn it yet.”

He walked, and two men came off the wall and made a lane for him.

For about ten feet, nothing. Then the blond guy got a hand up and pointed, and his hand wasn’t steady.

“That’s—“

“Rhys?”

“Rhys Calloway?”

“no way. no way—“

“RHYS.”

Then the whole room had it. The reporters who’d been drinking quietly in the corner were both standing, phones already up. The ones with real cameras were moving the way people moved when the thing they’d been waiting on finally walked past them. The DJ cut the track in the middle of a bar and dropped the original instead of the remix, and the floor went up with it.

A hand closed on Halliday’s sleeve and pulled.

“Move,” Wes said. “Now. Those cameras turn around in about fifteen seconds.”

“Where’s Mina—“

“Who’s forgetting me?” Mina said, at his other elbow. She pinched her own thigh, hard, the way you’d do it before a test, and made herself breathe twice before she said anything else. “Okay. We’re going. Outside. Both of you, now.”

They went out with the crowd, because there was no way through it and the crowd was going one way.

Outside was worse. It was past two and the block had filled while they were inside — three and four deep along the curb, phones up, traffic stopped in both directions because nobody wanted to be the car that tried to get through. All of it was facing one way. Somewhere in the middle of it a door opened, and the noise coming off the crowd went up a whole step and stayed there.

Halliday stopped at the edge of the sidewalk, because past that there was nowhere to go that didn’t mean walking into it. Wes’s cap was still in there somewhere, under a stool, in the drink, and Halliday was going to have to hear about it.

“Come here.”

Wes got a hand in his sleeve and pulled him out of the light under the club’s sign, back into the doorway, and the three of them stood there while the block went past — cars, cameras, people who were going to be telling somebody about this within the hour — and none of it got any smaller.