tower of cards trembled again.
“Quiet down!” ‘Cimi yelled. “Da Boss is buildin!”
They quieted at once.
“Right,” George said. “You got that one right, Henry. It was a toughie, but you came through.”
“Always do,” Henry said. “Always come through in the fuckin clutch. How about a fix?”
“Good idea!” George said, and took a Roi-Tan cigar box from behind him. From it he
produced a hypo. He stuck it into the scarred vein above Henry’s elbow, and Henry’s last
rocket took off.
2
The pizza van’s exterior was grungy, but underneath the road-filth and spray-paint was a
high-tech marvel the DEA guys would have envied. As Balazar had said on more than one
occasion, you couldn’t beat the bastards unless you could compete with the
bastards—unless you could match their equipment. It was expensive stuff, but Balazar’s
side had an advantage: they stole what the DEA had to buy at grossly inflated prices. There
were electronics company employees all the way down the Eastern Seaboard willing to sell
you top secret stuff at bargain basement prices. These catzzaroni (Jack Andolini called
them Silicon Valley Coke-Heads) practically threw the stuff at you.
Under the dash was a fuzz-buster; a UHF police radar jammer; a high-range/high
frequency radio transmissions detector; an h-r/hf jammer; a transponder-amplifier that
would make anyone trying to track the van by standard triangulation methods decide it was
simultaneously in Connecti- cut, Harlem, and Montauk Sound; a radio-telephone . . . and a
small red button which Andolini pushed as soon as Eddie Dean got out of the van.
In Balazar’s office the intercom uttered a single short buzz.
“That’s them,” he said. “Claudio, let them in. ‘Cimi, you tell everyone to dummy up. So far as Eddie Dean knows, no one’s with me but you and Claudio. ‘Cimi, go in the store- room
with the other gentlemen.”
They went, ‘Cimi turning left, Claudio Andolini going right.
Calmly, Balazar started on another level of his edifice.
3
Just let me handle it,Eddie said again as Claudio opened the door.
Yes,the gunslinger said, but remained alert, ready to come forward the instant it seemed
necessary.
Keys rattled. The gunslinger was very aware of odors— old sweat from Col Vincent on his
right, some sharp, almost acerbic aftershave from Jack Andolini on his left, and, as they
stepped into the dimness, the sour tang of beer.
The smell of beer was all he recognized. This was no tumble-down saloon with sawdust on
the floor and planks set across sawhorses for a bar—it was as far from a place like Sheb’s in
Tull as you could get, the gunslinger reckoned. Glass gleamed mellowly everywhere, more
glass in this one room than he had seen in all the years since his childhood, when
supply-lines had begun to break down, partially because of interdicting raids carried out by
the rebel forces of Parson, the Good Man, but mostly, he thought, simply because the world
was moving on. Farson had been a symptom of that great movement, not the cause.
He saw their reflections everywhere—on the walls, on the glass-faced bar and the long
mirror behind it; he could even see them reflected as curved miniatures in the graceful
bell-shapes of wine glasses hung upside down above the bar. . . glasses as gorgeous and
fragile as festival ornaments.
In one corner was a sculpted creation of lights that rose and changed, rose and changed,
rose and changed. Gold to green; green to yellow; yellow to red; red to gold again. Written
across it in Great Letters was a word he could read but which meant nothing to him:
ROCKOLA.
Never mind. There was business to be done here. He was no tourist; he must not allow
himself the luxury of behaving like one, no matter how wonderful or strange these things
might be.
The man who had let them in was clearly the brother of the man who drove what Eddie
called the van (as in vanguard, Roland supposed), although he was much taller and perhaps five years younger. He wore a gun in a shoulder-rig.
“Where’s Henry?” Eddie asked. “I want to see Henry.” He raised his voice. “Henry! Hey,
Henry!”
No reply; only silence in which the glasses hung over the bar seemed to shiver with a
delicacy that was just beyond the range of a human ear.
“Mr. Balazar would like to speak to you first.”
“You got him gagged and tied up somewhere, don’t you?” Eddie asked, and before Claudio
could do more than open his mouth to reply, Eddie laughed. “No, what am I thinking
about—you got him stoned, that’s all. Why would you bother with ropes and gags when all
you have to do to keep Henry quiet is needle him? Okay. Take me to Balazar. Let’s get this
over with.”
4
The gunslinger looked at the tower of cards on Balazar’s desk and thought: Another sign.
Balazar did not look up—the tower of cards had grown too tall for that to be
necessary—but rather over the top. His expression was one of pleasure and warmth.
“Eddie,” he said. “I’m glad to see you, son. I heard you had some trouble at Kennedy.”
“I ain’t your son,” Eddie said flatly.
Balazar made a little gesture that was at the same time comic, sad, and untrustworthy: You
hurt me, Eddie, it said, you hurt me when you say a thing like that.
“Let’s cut through it,” Eddie said. “You know it comes down to one thing or the other: either the Feds are running me or they had to let me go. You know they didn’t sweat it out
of me in just two hours. And you know if they had I’d be down at 43rd Street, answering
questions between an occasional break to puke in the basin.”
“Arethey running you, Eddie?” Balazar asked mildly.
“No. They had to let me go. They’re following, but I’m not leading.”
“So you ditched the stuff,” Balazar said. “That’s fascinat- ing. You must tell me how one ditches two pounds of coke when that one is on a jet plane. It would be handy information
to have. It’s like a locked room mystery story.”
“I didn’t ditch it,” Eddie said, “but I don’t have it any- more, either.”
“So who does?” Claudio asked, then blushed when his brother looked at him with dour ferocity.
“Hedoes,” Eddie said, smiling, and pointed at Enrico Balazar over the tower of cards. “It’s already been delivered.”
For the first time since Eddie had been escorted into theoffice, a genuine expression
illuminated Balazar’s face: sur- prise. Then it was gone. He smiled politely.
“Yes,” he said. “To a location which will be revealed later, after you have your brother and your goods and are gone. To Iceland, maybe. Is that how it’s supposed to go?”
“No,” Eddie said. “You don’t understand. It’s here. Deliv- ery right to your door. Just like we agreed. Because even in this day and age, there are some people who still believe in
living up to the deal as it was originally cut. Amazing, I know, but true.”
They were all staring at him.
How’m I doing, Roland?Eddie asked.
I think you are doing very well. But don’t let this man Balazar get his balance, Eddie. I
think he’s dangerous.
You think so, huh? Well, I’m one up on you there, my friend. Iknow he’s dangerous. Very
fucking dangerous.
He looked at Balazar again, and dropped him a little wink. “That’s why you’re the one who’s gotta be concerned with the Feds now, not me. If they turn up with a search warrant,
you could suddenly find yourself fucked without even opening your legs, Mr. Balazar.”
Balazar had picked up two cards. His hands suddenly shook and he put them aside. It was
minute, but Roland saw it and Eddie saw it, too. An expression of uncertainty—even
momentary fear, perhaps—appeared and then disappeared on his face.
“Watch your mouth with me, Eddie. Watch how you express yourself, and please
remember that my time and my tolerance for nonsense are both short.”
Jack Andolini looked alarmed.
“He made a deal with them, Mr. Balazar! This little shit turned over the coke and they
planted it while they were pretending to question him!”
“No one has been in here,” Balazar said. “No one could get close, Jack, and you know it.
Beepers go when a pigeon farts on the roof.”
“But—”
“Even if they had managed to set us up somehow, we have so many people in their organization we could drill fifteenholes in their case in three days. We’d know who, when,
and how.”
Balazar looked back at Eddie.
“Eddie,” he said, “you have fifteen seconds to stop bull- shitting. Then I’m going to have
‘Cimi Dretto step in here and hurt you. Then, after he hurts you for awhile, he will leave, and from a room close by you will hear him hurting your brother.”
Eddie stiffened.
Easy,the gunslinger murmured, and thought, All you have to do to hurt him is to say his