The sax dipped low as it played, the melody sweet as sugarcane. The musician's cheeks belled as he blew, caressing his instrument like a lover.
"Where's he from?"
"New Orleans, deep south."
Nick Fury looked him over, remembering a Georgian childhood of cotton and lynchings, of sun and fear heady as wine. "Poor bastard," he said. After all these years, his accent was indistinguishable from any other Brooklynite. The south had been erased from his voice—Harlem had never taken him over. In a city where your neighborhood and even your street could be pinpointed just by your accent, he alone was carefully generic, part of nothing and belonging to no one. He preferred it like that.
The speakeasy curled around them, comforting as a womb. It was all dark corners and intimate tables, and the big wall of everything from moonshine to Caribbean rum to real English gin and French champagne, courtesy of Tony Stark, the weapons dealer and rumrunner well known for never wrapping the labels of fancy liquor over backwater swill.
"Stark's coming in tonight?"
"Later," Fury told Hawkeye. "He's coming in. The Black Widow is coming with him." He ignored the lightness that took over Barton's face, that slightly dopey look of a man wrapped around his lover's finger. Fury knocked back his vermouth. "You, you, you, and you, with me," he said, pointing out some other agents. "Hawk, you too."
They slid around a couple of coifed guys in zoot suits who eyed Fury and backed off. Hawkeye covered corners while Fury sent one of the grunts out at a run to bring the car around as they climbed the stairs. The sax still sounded under their feet when their boots thudded over the gaping planks of the upper level. The bouncer ushered them out into the cold, but when the door swung back behind them, the sax still followed them, low as humming heard from down the street.