I spent weeks looking over my shoulder as I went to and from the bookstore, always expecting Chester to be lurking in a doorway, ready to wreak his revenge. But he never appeared. I saw in the New Year at a party of laughing West Village bohemians who danced to the Modern Jazz Quartet and threw confetti at people down on Bleecker Street. As I looked out of the window at the happy roiling crowd of drunks below, I believed—once again—that I was done with Chester and Charlie Shaw and the whole rotten apparatus of the past.
Then a letter arrived. It was a sort of mimeographed circular that must have gone out to all Chester’s wide circle of collectors. Though it was not a personal message, it made me almost physically sick. The flyer announced that he intended to sell his record collection. I thought I’d misread, it seemed so unlikely. His entire collection. He wanted to sell as a single lot and would entertain offers in the region of ten thousand dollars. I crumpled it up and threw it away, pretending to myself that I wasn’t scared. The price was ridiculous, no collector had that kind of money. But what could have brought him to sell? Anyone else, perhaps. People do fall on hard times, but Chester Bly would have plucked out a kidney or an eye before he broke up his collection, let alone got rid of the whole thing. What in the world did he have but those disks? I thought about my own records, possibly already unplayable, deliquescing behind the batik cloth like a guilty conscience.
One evening Tom Grady came bursting into the shop. I was furtively reading a science-fiction novel under the counter and dreaming of Los Angeles, a city where I would not have to trudge through slush and horizontal sleet to get home. Tom, the youngest and most socially integrated of Chester’s disciples, was a bulky Irishman with a fund of surplus energy that should have been directed into digging canals or writing stream-of-consciousness novels instead of working in a photographic lab or whatever low-commitment day job it was he held. He was wrapped in a heavy woolen coat that seemed to exhale steam as he entered the shop, throwing off moisture like a large dog. Since my exit from the collecting scene I’d nodded to him a couple of times in the White Horse, but we’d never spoken beyond a few pleasantries. I’d let him know that I was no longer interested in old records, and since there was little else he cared about, we had no reason to detain each other further.
—Did you hear about Chester, he said at once. No preamble, straight up to the counter, quick enough to startle me.
—No.
—Dead. Burned to death. He had some kind of accident with a space heater.
—You’re kidding.
—No I am very much not kidding.
—How did you hear?
—Pinkus called me. He went by the building. He’s over there most days. He thinks Chester is going to give him his collection.
—Sell it to him?
—No, give. Pinkus says Chester had some kind of change of heart about being a collector. He just wants it—wanted it—off his hands. Pinkus doesn’t think he’s sold them already, though apparently Chester was very unclear. Pinkus thinks they were probably in there with him. All of them.
—The records.
—Keep up man. Yes, the records. He can’t be sure, though. He says he can’t be a hundred percent. But I expect it’s all burned to hell.
—Why can’t he be sure? Either the records were in the room or they weren’t.
—Chester never even lets the poor bastard in. He makes him talk through the closed door.
—Seriously?
—Chester’s kind of let himself go.
—But the room was gutted by the fire? Everything’s gone?
—I don’t know.
I had to serve a woman, who bought Schopenhauer and the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I wrote the names down in the ledger alongside the prices and stamped a receipt. Grady paced about behind her, pretending to look at a dictionary. As soon as she left, we took up our conversation.
—I saw him a while back in the Village. He didn’t look good. Have you been going to his parties?
—Jesus, no. That pretty much ended when you left. My God, that night. What happened? You slammed the door and Chester ranted on and on about your ingratitude and then kicked us out. All over a Mississippi Sheiks side.
—It wasn’t the Sheiks.
—So what was it? He played a Patton that evening, didn’t he? One I hadn’t heard. And he finally told me the name on that fingerpicking record.
—Bayless Rose. Anyway, you stopped going.
—Well, I never got another invite. Maybe Pinkus did. I don’t think so. It sounded like Chester stopped having anyone over at all. The last time I saw him he turned up at that bar on Sullivan yelling about how you’d stolen a record from him.
—He told you about that?
—About what? It wasn’t anything. Pinkus says he found it again a week or two later.
—He found it?
—Then he decided he’d lost it again. Told Pinkus he couldn’t stop it slipping away. Odd thing is, he wouldn’t say what it was. I mean, how are you supposed to talk about a stolen record with a fellow who won’t even tell you its name?
I realized I was sweating. I felt as if I might be running a fever. Grady lit his pipe and shrugged.
—Crazy as hell, Chester. He always had that in him, you know? I thought so, at least. But those records. Jesus, just that Bayless Rose record on its own! To think that’s all gone!
—You didn’t want to buy his collection?
—Sure, I wanted to.
He rubbed fingers and thumb together.
—There’s a lot of things I want.
There was a great unspoken urgency to him. The thing he could not talk about because it was indecent, because proper form would be to dwell further on the personal qualities of the deceased.
—Look, you don’t have to approve, but it’s an important collection. There are things that will be lost forever.
—If it’s a fire, they’re already gone. Just the heat in the room.
—But if they’re not.
—Well, what’s stopping you? Why don’t you go and check?
—Christ, you have to make me say it. I don’t want to go on my own, OK? Pinkus says they found his feet. Just his feet, nothing else, in those awful old leather slippers he wore. The rest of him was completely incinerated. That’s a terrible thing to happen to anyone.
—You want me to go out to Brooklyn on a night like this?