Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon Read Free Book Online Page B

of pencil.
    “Mr. Jones!” Flowers said, starting in, with that politician resolve, to fill the boxes of this human sudoku.
    “Your Honor,” said Cochise Jones.
    Flowers reached for Mr. Jones’s octave-and-a-half hand, its nails like chips of piano ivory.
    “The honor is indeed mine,” Flowers said, “as always, to bask in the reflected luster of the legacy you represent. Inventor of the musical styling known as Brokeland Creole.” Mr. Jones was also, as far as Archy knew, the first person to use the term Brokeland to describe this neighborhood, the ragged fault where the urban plates of Berkeley and Oakland subducted. “Hello, Fifty-Eight.”
    There was a silence. The bird regarded Flowers.
    “Say hello,” Mr. Jones said.
    “Say hello , you little jive-ass motherfucker,” Fifty-Eight said.
    The voice was that of Cochise Jones, the unmistakable smoker’s croak, but way more irritable than Archy had ever heard Mr. Jones become. Everybody laughed except Chan Flowers. His eyes kept aloof from the smile on his lips.
    “Keep it up,” Flowers told Fifty-Eight. “You know I have a deluxe cherrywood pet casket sitting on my stockroom shelf right now, waiting to house your remains.”
    This was true; Cochise Jones had made funeral arrangements of Egyptian exactitude for himself and his partner in solitude.
    “Brother Singletary.” Flowers pointed a slender finger. “The King of Bling, how are you, sir?”
    “Councilman,” Singletary said, looking at Flowers the same way he looked at Fifty-Eight, with a mix of curiosity and distaste, as if touching his tongue to something bitter at the corner of his mouth.
    The two of them, Singletary and Flowers, had beefed often and openly over the years, always in a civilized way. Lawsuits, real estate, a long cold war fought against a backdrop of redevelopment money using proxies and attorneys. West Oakland rumor traced the source of beef to the late 1970s, tendering the story that Singletary had married his wife out from under a preexisting condition of Chan Flowers. Rumor further added the dubious yet somehow creditable information that her reason for choosing Singletary over Flowers came down to an ineradicable odor of putrefaction on the undertaker’s hands. “I’m all right, ’less you here to tell me otherwise.”
    “Now, you know,” Flowers said, half addressing the room, the voice modulated, genial, but not, in spite of the rhetoric, orotund. Cool and dispassionate, as ready to express disappointment as flattery. “Back in the Bible, only a king could even wear the bling . They did not call it that, of course, did they, Mr. Oberstein? King Solomon, in his book of Ecclesiastes, do you know the vernacular he employed to allude to that which we now style ‘bling’?”
    Moby guessed, “Frankincense and myrrh?”
    “He called it vanity ,” said the King of Bling. “And I got no argument against that.”
    “Well, that’s fine, because I did not come in here looking for an argument,” Flowers said. “Mr. S. S. Mirchandani, a latecomer to these shores, but wasting no time.”
    “Councilman Flowers.”
    “Good for you, sir. And Mr. Oberstein . . .”
    Flowers frowned at the whale attorney, plainly searching for the kind of fitting summary he liked to bestow on people, an epitaph for every headstone.
    “ ‘Keepin it real,’ ” Nat suggested.
    “No doubt,” said Moby, beaming. “True dat.”
    “Mr. Jaffe,” Flowers concluded. He pressed his lips very thin.
    “Councilman.”
    A silence followed, deeper and more awkward than it might have been because Archy had forgotten to turn over the record on the turntable. It was rare, very rare, to see Flowers at a loss for words. Was there guilt on his conscience over changing his mind about the Dogpile deal? Had he come in, this lunchtime, manned up to break the bad news himself? Or was he so caught up in running his own big-time playbook, in setting up his line to defend against the scramble, that he’d