Michael Chabon - Telegraph Avenue

The crafty old fucker, acting surprised. It was barely possible that he felt surprised by the decent turnout Nat had managed, but Nat did not buy for a second that the guy was embarrassed, that he just happened to walk in on the organizational meeting of COCHISE, oh my goodness , so sorry to interrupt, I see I will have to come back later. Flowers made a more rapid but careful survey of the human contents of the room. When he reached the King of Bling, he paused.

“Mr. Singletary,” he said with cold affection. “Well, well. An august presence.”

Singletary said, “Mm-hmm.” Savoring it, all at once content to be there in the room, the King of Bling kicked back on the stool. He smiled slowly. Chan the Man smiled right back.

“So many faces I don’t know,” he said as if fault for the ignorance were entirely his. “Oh, now, Elisheva , isn’t it?”

“Yes, hello,” said the lady rabbi from Neshama, wagging three fingers Girl Scout–style.

“Making your preparations for the High Holidays?”

“They’re getting close,” Elisheva said.

“That’s right! Rosh Hashanah!” On Flowers’s lips, the name of the holiday sounded like something much grander to Nat’s ear, roarsh ha-sha nah! , a Klingon affair involving ritual combat and lunar howling. “And who else? Oh, excuse me, there, brother.”

The Steven Hawking guy joysticked his chair around to make room, causing Abreu to take a step back and thus come into Chan Flowers’s line of sight for the first time. He had been concealed by the certificate, mounted on a piece of foam core, advising all comers that in 2003 readers of the Express had declared Brokeland records to be the Best Used Record Store in the East Bay, a conclusion they had reached in seven out of the past ten years. Then Chandler Bankwell Flowers III looked, for real, dumbfounded.

“Councilman Abreu,” he said. “And very much at large.”

“This is terrific,” Abreu said with that untouchable chipperness, so like tedium, which must serve him well in his line of work. “I was just about to open it up to questions from these good people here. And you are so much more informed about this project than I am. I’m sure you all know, do you all know? what a big supporter of Dogpile and Mr. Goode the councilman has recently become after a certain period of sharing the reservations that I know many of us in this room also feel. So, Mr. Flowers, I don’t know, maybe you’d like to tell us some of the things you learned, or the decisions you came to, that helped you change your mind about this project.”

“I’d love to,” Flowers said. “Nothing would make me happier. Unfortunately, today I do not have the time. I’m just on my way from one appointment to another. Not even time to stop and browse the new-arrivals bin. Leave a little more of my hard-earned pay in that cash register over there.”

This got a bigger laugh than any Abreu had managed to scrape together from this crowd, admittedly, a tough Berkeley/Oakland crowd, its sense of humor reduced, like the sperm count of a man who wore his underwear too tight, by the heat of two dozen outraged brains. It occurred to Nat that Chan the Man appeared to be in fine form and might take it into his head to make a speech. Might even have come today prepared to make one. An address that would reach out to the core of Nat’s constituency: the soreheads of the neighborhood, the purists, the lovers of minutiae, the inveterate hearers of invisible bees. All gathered together in one room, to be scooped up into the stern but forgiving arms of Flowers. Delivered at one blow like the brave little tailor’s flies. Courtesy of Nathaniel Jaffe, let his epitaph be: It seemed like a good idea at the time.

“Actually, I was just looking for you, Mr. Stallings,” Flowers said. “If you’ve got a minute?”

It was an artless and genial question, and when the meeting resumed with a question from Dr. Milne about a peculiarity of Oakland zoning ordinances, no one paid it any mind apart from Nat, who happened to be looking at Archy when Archy, wary, unwilling, replied, “Yeah, you bet.”

In the cool penumbra of Chan Flowers’s office, Archy dropped into a wingback chair. It was big and soft as a grandmother, trellised cream chintz overwhelmed with pink roses. A chair for swooning in, for surrendering one’s dignity to, safe within the air-conditioned preserve of sympathy where, installed behind his desk, Chan Flowers received death’s custom with magisterial detachment, a gamekeeper crouched and watchful in a blind. Sweat cooled in cobwebs on Archy’s arms and forehead.

“Thanks for taking a minute, son,” Flowers said. “Didn’t seem to me you were necessarily involved in that mess over there.”

“Not necessarily,” Archy allowed. He fought the armchair, resisting its invitation to conform his frame to its armature of grief. Grief was itself a kind of chair, wide and forgiving, that might enfold you softly in its wings and then devour you, keep you like a pocketful of loose change. He found himself slouching in it, off-kilter, legs outflung, bare knees akimbo, covering his mouth with one hand like he was trying to bite back a smart remark.

“I thought maybe if it was convenient,” Flowers said, “you and I might have some details to go over for the funeral and all. One or two points that have come up in the fine print, so to speak.”

Archy nodded, already feeling some undercurrent in the conversation, this audience with the councilman, that he didn’t like. Bankwell and the other nephew, Feyd, stood guard at either side of the office door like a couple of foo dogs, too close to looming for Archy’s taste. They were the undertaker’s muscle, no doubt or question about that. At a funeral, if things turned unruly, a Flowers nephew might have to step in, keep the peace. If Flowers was burying a murder victim, somebody dropped by the logic of retaliation, if there was some history of blood and bad feeling abroad, a nephew might have to go strapped among the mourners. Bankwell and Feyd, in their copious suits, wore faces you could interpret as reflecting the tranquility of iron harbored at the hip. Archy remembered Bankwell obese and twelve, head too small for the rest of him, a neighborhood scandal after it was discovered that Bank had been getting his addled granny to pay him five dollars per book to solve her Dell Word Searches for her. Helping her to maintain her dignity, he claimed, so she could leave the books around her house with letters neatly circled, words crossed out. Archy wondered why Flowers felt that muscle was a necessary or desirable element for their rendezvous. He craned around to extend the nephews, by means of a bored slow stare, an invitation to go fuck themselves, saluting Feyd by hoisting his chin high. Feyd raised his own with an amiable coldness. He was reputed to be a tight and encyclopedic dancer, up on them all, from the Southside to turfing. Probably knew how to fight, too, did some capoeira, boy had that lean, springy malandro look to him. Bankwell, unquestionably, was grown to a very large size.

Archy returned to Chan, ready with a reply. “Do I have a choice?” he said.

“Of course,” Flowers said mildly, so mildly that Archy at once regretted his words and wished to retract them. Paranoid, imagining shit, guns and undercurrents. Come at the man sounding flip and disrespectful.

“If this is a bad time,” Flowers said, “I’m happy to—”

“Nah, no,” Archy said, “just kidding. Let’s do it.”

“Fine.”

“You were saying about Mr. Jones.”

“I was. Now, I’m sure Brother Singletary already told you, but Mr. Jones took care of everything, from the financial point of view and also in the matter of choices and selections.”