Dschungel still played at being important, though most of its legend now lived in what people said about it afterwards. The floor’s gold mosaic had dulled, and the mirrors along the wall held more smoke than reflections. The DJ moved between eras the way people moved between languages. He put on Bowie’s “Heroes,” then slid into Depeche Mode’s “Stripped,” let New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle” run almost to the end before cutting it into something rough and newer that nobody quite recognized. Now and then he threw in a piece that sounded like Carl Orff recorded off the radio, and only half the room understood it as a joke.
Vallis stood at the bar with a glass of whisky-colored liquid that never seemed to go down. The ice had melted long ago. He wore a patterned shirt under a dark jacket, his hair falling forward so that the light caught only his cheekbones and the edge of his mouth when he laughed. His laughter came in sudden bursts, hard and bright, and people nearby turned as if they had missed the punchline.
Next to him, a man in an office suit spoke as if he had been holding his breath all day and had only now found air. His tie was loose, his eyes tired in a way that made them shine too much. He named departments, upcoming mergers, whole sections that might not exist in a year. He said there would be new structures, new agencies, people who would need certain things to move quickly while nobody looked too closely at the documents. He never called it corruption. He called it adjustment.
Vallis watched him without giving much away. His gaze drifted over the room while the man talked. In one corner, a group in patched jackets yelled the words to a Die Toten Hosen track, then fell silent halfway through the next song when the tempo changed and nobody felt like following. On the dance floor, a woman with short hair and heavy boots moved with the calm certainty of someone who knew this space better than the DJ did, then disappeared into a cluster of shoulders and raised arms.
When the man finally said, “I know someone who will soon be handling paperwork in a bigger place, near water, not just files” Vallis let his fingers tap once on the bar and then stop. He did not ask where or when. He said only, “They will want quiet hands for that,” and let the words sit there, neutral on the surface.
Ruth arrived with the next track, Talking Heads pushing through the speakers and changing the rhythm of the crowd. She stepped into the gap at his side and put her coat over one arm instead of the back of the stool, as if she might leave again at any moment. She greeted him as though they had agreed to meet.
She named stages he had played, Quasimodo on a Tuesday when the room was too full for a weekday, SO36 on a night when the sound kept slipping out toward the street. She remembered a set where he let a single chord hang longer than it should, stretching it until the audience stopped talking without knowing why. She spoke of it like a weather change.
Between remarks about broken monitors and late fees, she said, “There is a place called Treuehand you should see. People from the offices go there when they want to say things they cannot say at their desks. The music is quiet, so they have to fill the space with talk.” Vallis smiled without showing his teeth. “I am not sure I belong in their conversations,” he said. Ruth shrugged. “They are not sure they do either.”
He laughed then, loud and sudden enough to make the bartender look up and then look away again. It could have been real amusement or something closer to alarm. With Vallis, nobody could tell for certain, and that suited him.