Nat and Archy groped after Singletary down the basement stairs of Cochise’s house. The wall of the stairwell was smooth, cold Oakland sandstone.
“And you got the Chinese, right? I like that Green Street band. All military and proper. Ain’t one of those motherfuckers really Chinese, though.”
“No, they were booked. I had to go in a different direction. Hired this outfit, Bomp and Circumstance, you know them?”
“The lesbians?”
“They got the set list together, they know how the Chinese do it, the hymns and whatnot. Kai, Kai Fierro, works for Gwen? Plays the sax. She promised me they would send Mr. Jones home right.”
“But still,” Singletary observed, “lesbians ain’t quite what he asked for, either.”
“True, true.”
“That must nag at you.”
“At times it does.”
The downstairs light switch snapped. Ceiling fixtures gapped by dead tubes flirted with darkness. Then, with a click, they shone steady. Something on the order of, at Archy’s eyeball guesstimate, seven, eight thousand records, lovingly and helplessly amassed.
“I had no idea,” Nat said. His suit was an Italian number from the sixties, narrow lapels, no trouser cuffs, textured black silk flecked with gray. Skinny tie. Pointy little black loafers. He looked like Peter Sellers trying to recover from a very long night in 1964 and needing a haircut. “I mean, I knew, but I didn’t comprehend.”
“Man’s habit was out of control,” Archy said admiringly. His own suit was his least interesting, just a plain old Armani bought on sale at Men’s Wearhouse, two-button jacket, center vent. He wore it only to funerals and once, a long time ago, when he and Nat had gone to a Halloween party as the Men in Black. “God love him.”
“Fuck God,” Nat said. “Bastard killed our best customer.”
“You have fifteen minutes. Ten if you keep on blaspheming.” Singletary took out his phone and frowned at its display. “You ain’t interested, I’m calling Amoeba.”
The only son of the captain from Sacramento and the Portuguese lady had a son who died in Korea and a daughter, Fernanda, who passed the house on to Cochise Jones when she left him a widower. The Joneses never had any children, and Mr. Jones’s heir, his late sister’s daughter, lived somewhere down toward San Diego and wanted everything sold. So Garnet Singletary had gotten the house cleaned, painted, and patched and, in his capacity as executor, had hired himself to sell it. Archy got the strong impression that Garnet Singletary was also arranging to have one of his many shiftless relatives and hangers-on, whom he kept in a state of cash dependency on him for such eventualities, front a company that would buy the house from the estate, Garnet Singletary preferring, if possible, as a rule, to negotiate with himself. It seemed like a pretty good system to Archy. The King of Bling knew how to get over.
“We aren’t here to conduct business?” Archy looked at Nat. “Not today, right?”
Garnet and Nat said nothing, though neither appeared to see any cause for alarm in the prospect of dealing for the old man’s vinyl on the day of his interment.
“I thought we had just came to, like, admire,” Archy said.
“You go right ahead and admire,” Garnet said. “It’s your fifteen minutes, you spend it however you want to. Then I’m calling Amoeba records.”
The albums were in poly sleeves, for the most part, and for the most part had been kept edge-on in crates, but here and there in tottering piles, discs lay ruined by the horizontal, and some of cheaper stuff was not in plastic or was missing its paper inner sleeve. The crates were stacked into alleys and bends that lacked only a Minotaur.
After a ten-minute walkabout, Archy was prepared to pronounce the collection first-rate. He guessed that not quite half of the records had flowed through Brokeland on their way to this subterranean catchment. Another 20 percent, call it, bore price tags indicating provenance in the bins of other used-record dealers here in the Bay Area and all around the country. Ten percent was flotsam and jetsam, the random shit—fifties gospel, old Slappy White and Moms Mabley records, a surprising amount of Conway Twitty, George Jones, Merle Haggard. The rest—about 25 percent—was in the nature of Mr. Jones’s personal collection, as it were: recordings of sessions and dates he had played, the work of friends, colleagues, and rivals, maybe a hundred rare stride and boogie-woogie 78s, and a couple of complete sets of ten-inch LPs from the forties of classical works for organ, Bach, Buxtehude, Widor. These had belonged to Mr. Jones’s father, for many years house organist of Flowers Funeral Home as well as a number of local churches. There was no way to be sure after such a cursory sniff, but Archy figured the collection be low five figures, at least. Likely more.
“What do you think?” Nat said, turning out to be the Minotaur trapping Archy at the heart of the labyrinth. “Call it, what, fifteen? Offer twelve-five?”
He spoke in a low voice, not quite a whisper, but Singletary was busy grilling somebody on the phone, possibly Airbus.
“Who did?” Singletary was saying. “Well, where’d they see it? Uh-huh. Did it say anything? What did it say? Goddammit, Airbus, what did it say?”
“Twelve-five,” Archy said. “Nat, look here. Maybe this isn’t the right time to be… You are talking about putting more money into the business.”
“That’s right.”
Archy studied Nat’s face, trying to see if his partner was fucking with him. Nat believed that he owned a top-notch poker face, but in this belief he was sadly mistaken. His eyebrows in particular were unruly and signifying. The man thought he could conceal the contempt he felt toward his benighted fellow creatures, but the best he could arrange was to immobilize every part of his face, apart from the eyebrows, into a leaden mask through whose eye slits leaked an incandescent scorn. Right now, though, all that Archy could see on Nat’s face was enthusiasm, a certain smug pursiness to his lips that Nat got whenever he believed himself (again mistakenly, most of the time) to be about to get the upper hand in a negotiation. Nat had descended like Orpheus to this basement full of forgotten music, dressed in a funeral suit, hoping to bring Brokeland Records back to the upper world, the land of the living, with a vibrant infusion of collectible stock, stock that they would catch the scent of as far away as Japan.
“But, uh, I don’t—I’m not sure, even if I had that kind of cash—”
“I have it. Or I can get it. If you—Oh.” The truth that Archy was not ready, not today, to confess, had begun to seep in through those eye slits. The mask gave way, Nat’s jaw softening. “Archy, there is some shit here, in Japan, France, we could sell it for easily—”
“Did it know German?” Singletary called out to them from the stairs. “Mr. Jones’s parrot, could it speak German?”
Archy looked at Nat, who shrugged impatiently.
“Not to our knowledge,” Archy said.
“That ain’t him,” Singletary said to Airbus. “I never heard that bird do anything but sound like a Hammond B- 3.”
“Can’t rule it out, though,” Archy called. “Bird knew all kinds of unlikely shit.”
“Maybe I should have gone into business with
“Oh, okay, now you’re all mad at me.”
Nat didn’t answer. He ran a furry finger along the printed spines of the records in a nearby crate. Archy saw that it was all Mr. Jones’s label-mates from his time on CTI. Hank Crawford, Grover Washington, Jr., Johnny Hammond. A number of them would be records that Mr. Jones had played on. Archy had probably owned most of the Creed Taylor catalog at one time or another, but it made an impression, seeing the records all together in that crate and those immediately above and below it, all those discs produced by Taylor or Don Sebesky back when Archy was a youngster, recorded by Rudy Van Gelder, pressed at some plant in New Jersey, then shipped by the scattered millions to the vanished mom-and-pop record shops of America, to the local chain stores of the seventies that had long since folded or been absorbed into national chains that had in turn folded, all those tasty beats and (mostly) tasteful string arrangements marbled together in a final attempt to reclaim jazz as popular music to be danced to and not just an art form to be curated, all those beautiful records with their stark jacket photography and their casually integrated personnel, reunited through the efforts of Mr. Jones. Archy had been breaking up estates for years and selling them off in pieces, but until now he had never felt the vandalism inherent in that act, his barbarity amid the crates of so many ruined empires.
