When I wait like this I usually listen to some of my tape collection. I started it by accident. I’d gone to a meeting that I wanted to record and the Mole had rigged me up with one of his devices, using sequential blank-tape banks with minicassettes. It was voice-activated and would record for six hours straight. I kicked it in before I even got out of the car, but I forgot to turn it off. So when I dropped by this cellar club later to unload a couple of gross of phony tickets to a rock concert, the tape was still running. They had a kid playing at the club that night who looked like he left Kentucky to work in the Chicago steel mills, but he was a blues singer, pure and simple. Someone once said the blues are the truth-maybe that’s why I listen so close when I hear that music… truth’s in short supply in my line of work. Anyway, when I got back to the office and played the tapes I found a couple of the kid’s numbers at the tail end. The Mole was right about the perfect fidelity-listening to the tape was exactly like being back in the club. And listening to the music was exactly like being back in my own life, like the blues are supposed to be. The blues don’t make you think-they make you remember. If you’ve got no memories, you can’t have the blues. I avoid physical pain like a vulture avoids live meat, but I call up the past sometimes and let it wash over me on purpose. Maybe it helps me survive. Maybe it makes me believe that survival isn’t a waste of time. I don’t know.

When the tape broke into the cellar club’s sounds I heard the rattle of glasses and the voices of the waitresses hustling drinks and the muted electric hum that meant nobody was listening to anyone else. The kid fronted a classic Chicago-style blues band: he sang and worked a mouth harp off the same microphone, a piano, a slide guitar, rhythm guitar, electric bass, drummer. The kid didn’t have much of a rap-he didn’t have the years and confidence for that yet. But he understood that if you could make people in a basement club stop boozing and snorting and hustling long enough to listen, you had something real. Whatever that something was, the kid wanted it-bad. He leaned a bit into the microphone, said “This is ‘Bad Blood Blues,’ ” and the piano man started into a series of rolls and falls, going with just the bottom line from the bass player. It wasn’t loud, but it was intrusive, insistent-impossible to ignore. So much so that by the time the guitarists and the drummer were there, too, the crowd was waiting to hear what the kid had to say. He cupped the harp around the microphone, then appeared to change his mind and just got to it. Unlike most white blues singers, the kid didn’t try to sound black. The words came out firm and clean, not covered by the band:

I always tried to do right,

But everything I did seemed to turn out wrong.

I always tried to do right,

But everything I did seemed to turn out wrong.

I didn’t mean to stay with that woman,

At least not for very long.

and you could hear the crowd shut down and shift over to a listening stance. By the middle of the second verse the kid was getting shouts of agreement when he sang:

Oh I knew that she was evil,

People told me she was mean.

Yes, I knew that she was evil,

And people told me she was mean.

I knew that she was evil…

But I always thought that she was clean.

Then the kid bridged into a hard, anticipative harp solo, taken against the bass and rhythm guitar, letting the crowd know he was going to explain the mystery to them in just a little while. And he did:

Well, she never gave me nothing,

She just about ruined my life.

You know she never gave me nothing,

She just about ruined my life.

And when she finally gave me something…

(By then, we all knew what he was talking about.)

I brought it home to my poor wife.

And behind shouts of “That’s right!” and “Had to be!” the kid picked up the harp again and the blues came out. Just that simple, and damn-near perfect. By then the people knew where he was going, where a story like his had to go:

Now my life is so empty,

My wife don’t want to see my face.

My life is so empty,

And my wife don’t want to see my face.

I got to walk this road alone,

Bad blood, it’s my disgrace.

And the kid rolled the harp down with the rest of the band and finished. He had them all moving now and he went uptempo but stayed with the blues. The harp barked into a fast lead, the piano floated off the top, and then the kid sang his own road song:

I got a long way to travel, honey,

I’m sorry you can’t come

And people in the crowd who knew what he meant chuckled in agreement.

I got a long way to travel, honey,

I’m sorry you can’t come.

You are all used up, babe,

And I have just begun.

Like a lot of the blues, sex got mixed up with everything else. The kid grabbed a breath:

I got a long way to go, babe,

And I know that you don’t care.

I got a long way to go, babe,

And I know that you don’t care… just where

You wouldn’t like it anyway, babe,

They ain’t got no suburbs there.

And the harp barked its challenge to the crowd, wailing out the don’t-mind-dying credo of all bluesmen as the tape finally ran to its end.

That was the first tape in my collection-I’ve added dozens since. I got some early Paul Butterfield, Delbert McClinton, Kinky Friedman (and if you think this guy’s just a quasi-cowboy clown, listen to “Ride ’Em Jewboy” just once), Buddy Guy, Jimmy Cotton-all live. I had a Muddy Waters tape too, but it sounded like he was playing Prom Night in the suburbs someplace, the same way Charley Musselwhite did when I caught him at some college hangout near Boston. I don’t blame either of them, but I erased the tapes. I have some stuff I didn’t record myself too, some Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, stuff like that. I keep the tapes in the Plymouth to help me do the waiting-I’ve got more sense than to listen to them inside a closed room.

About an hour later I saw a black Lincoln Town Coupe pull up under the elevated portion of the West Side Highway, the part they’re never going to finish building. Saw a flash of nylons as a woman climbed out of the front seat, working before she hit the ground. She disappeared into the shadows and the Lincoln pulled away. I thought I recognized the woman, but it was long distance and I didn’t have time to put the monocular to my eye. I turned off the tape, set the system up to record instead, lit a smoke, and waited.

I was right. Margot approached from the far right. She must have crossed the street under the El, doubled back to the side, and walked along the river’s edge by the piers. She was swinging her purse like she was planning to do business. It might have fooled the pimp in the Lincoln if he was watching her, but it wouldn’t have fooled anyone who’d seen me sitting there for a couple of hours.

As Margot got closer, I saw she was wearing giant sunglasses that covered half her face. I slowly rolled down the window in time with her approach so that she arrived as the glass disappeared.

“Waiting for me, Burke?”

“I don’t know, Margot, am I?”

“Listen, I think he’s watching me, okay? Let me in the car-I’ll get on the floor like I’m giving you head and talk to you.”

“No good. I’ve been here too long. Other people have seen me-they know I’m not waiting this long just to get off.”

“I got to talk to you.”

“Go back where you were, okay? I’ll meet you-”

“No. Forget it-no, wait. Let me get in the car and just drive away. They’ll think you were waiting for me, right? A hotel job.”

“What’s the rate for that?”

Margot lifted up the sunglasses so I could see her face. One eye was swollen shut and there were traces of dried blood over a plucked eyebrow. She spoke in a flat, deliberate voice. “It used to be fifty, but now Dandy says I’m a full-fledged three-way girl so it costs a yard.” I just looked at her face-her eyes were dead. Her voice didn’t change. “And he says if I don’t make a success of myself going three-way I can try the Square and do some chain jobs. He gets two yards a night or I get worse-get it?”