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pretty features looked like they’d started to melt. He had an arm around Krishna, but as I approached she slipped away from him.
    â€œShut up, Lance.” Krishna seized the bar rail to steady herself. She gave me a crooked smile, plucked at a blond tendril that had escaped from her bouffant, and pouted suggestively. The gesture was more childlike than seductive. “Derek—whatever she wants.”
    Derek poured a shot and handed it to me. “Compliments of Miss Morgenthal.”
    I sidled a safe distance from Lance and raised my glass to Krishna. She picked up her drink and teetered toward me, her platform boots echoing through the empty room.
    â€œYou American?”
    â€œYeah. Thanks for the drink.”
    â€œNoo Yawk Sit-Ay?” I nodded and she smiled in delight. “I always guess right!” Her own accent was so hyperbolically East End, I wondered if it was put on. She took a slug of her drink. A gimlet, light on the Rose’s. I could smell the vodka seeping from her pores. “You at the show tonight?”
    â€œMissed that one,” I said.
    She grinned. “Now that’s your problem, innit?”
    Up close she looked very young. Cleopatra kohl made her gray-green eyes appear huge. Cerise lipstick couldn’t hide where her lips had been bitten raw. Beneath the ugly plaid coat she wore a sleeveless tank top and a red leatherette miniskirt. No stockings—inside those platform boots, her feet must have been rubbed as raw as her mouth.
    I glanced down at her bare arms. There were bruises just above the elbow, the livid ghost of a handprint. When I looked up again, she was staring at me with those spooky green eyes.
    I asked, “You got a band?”
    â€œNah. I do some open mics and pickup gigs, backup for people who come through London. Lulu, I sang with them tonight, they let me do a solo. Not everyone does.”
    She gulped her drink. I glanced to where Lance slumped against the bar, staring at us. Derek was nowhere in sight. “Your boyfriend a musician?”
    â€œHe’s a fucking cunt.” She raised her voice. “A fucking cunt!”
    I stiffened. Lance only turned his back to us.
    â€œFucking cunt,” Krishna murmured a final time.
    She set her empty glass on the counter and made a wobbly beeline toward the jukebox. I knocked back the rest of my drink and followed, watching as she stooped to reach behind the Seeburg and plug it back in. The blue glow gave a leaden cast to her thin arms and sharp-featured face as she gazed at the rows of song titles, hand slapping repeatedly at her thigh. After a moment I realized she was searching for a pocket that wasn’t there.
    â€œHey.” I fumbled in my leather jacket for a quarter. “Here.”
    She grabbed the quarter and expertly flicked it into the coin slot, stood on tiptoe to run her fingers across the glass coping, and punched in a string of numbers. After a few seconds, six thunderous drumbeats echoed through the room: “Be My Baby.” I closed my eyes.
    Max Weinberg said that if Hal Blaine had only played drums on that one song, his name would still be uttered with reverence. It’s the Big Bang of rock and roll—a rhapsody of tambourines, shakers, chimes, and guitars, abruptly snarled in static as the needle skipped across vinyl.
    I turned to smack the jukebox. Before I could touch it, Ronnie Spector’s voice once more filled the room.
    Only it wasn’t Ronnie Spector singing. It was Krishna Morgenthal, silhouetted in the Seeburg’s ice-blue halo, hands raised and body swaying as though she faced an audience. Her voice held none of the transcendent joy of Ronnie Spector’s. Instead, the song became something far more ominous. A threat seethed beneath the girl-group lyrics, the words twisted into a pop aria of obsession and barely suppressed rage. For someone who’d loved the song for most of a lifetime, it was a profoundly unsettling command