Jack Andolini went on staring into the face above him—the bloodshot eyes, the grinning, snarling mouth—
but now with mounting horror. The fact was, he did believe. And whoever he was, he knew a great deal about Balazar and about this current deal. About the current deal, he might know more than Andolini knew himself.
“There’s more of us,” Eddie said, “and we’re all about the same thing: protecting…” He almost said protecting the rose. “… protecting Calvin Tower. We’ll be watching this place, we’ll be watching Tower, we’ll be watching Tower’s friends—guys like Deepneau.” Eddie saw Andolini’s eyes flicker with surprise at that, and was satisfied. “Anybody who comes here and even raises his voice to Tower, we’ll kill their whole families and them last. That goes for George, for ‘Cimi Dretto, Tricks Postino… for your brother Claudio, too.”
Andolini’s eyes widened at each name, then winced momentarily shut at the name of his brother. Eddie thought that maybe he’d made his point. Whether or not Andolini could convince Balazar was another question. But in a way it doesn’t even matter, he thought coldly. Once Tower’s sold us the lot, it doesn’t really matter what they do to him, does it?
“How do you know so much>” Andolini asked.
“That doesn’t matter. Just pass on the message. Tell Balazar to tell his friends at Sombra that the lot is no longer for sale. Not to them, it isn’t. And tell him that Tower is now under the protection of folk from Gilead who carry hard calibers.”
“Hard—?”
“I mean folk more dangerous than any Balazar has ever dealt with before,” Eddie said, ” including the people from the Sombra Corporation. Tell him that if he persists, there’ll be enough corpses in Brooklyn to fill Grand
Army Plaza. And many of them will be women and children. Convince him.”
“I… man, I’ll try.”
Eddie stood up, then backed up. Curled in the puddles of gasoline and the strews of broken glass, George Biondi was beginning to stir and mutter deep in his throat. Eddie gestured to Jack with the barrel of Roland’s pistol, telling him to get up.
“You better try hard,” he said.
NINE
Tower poured them each a cup of black coffee, then couldn’t drink his. His hands were shaking too badly.
After watching him try a couple of times (and thinking about a bomb-disposal character in UXB who lost his nerve), Eddie took pity on him and poured half of Tower’s coffee into his own cup.
“Try now,” he said, and pushed the half-cup back to the bookshop owner. Tower had his glasses on again, but one of the bows had been twisted and they sat crookedly on his face. Also, there was the crack running across the left lens like a lightning bolt. The two men were at the marble counter, Tower behind it, Eddie perched on one of the stools. Tower had carried the book Andolini had threatened to burn first out here with him, and put it down beside the coffee-maker. It was as if he couldn’t bear to let it out of his sight.
Tower picked up the cup with his shaking hand (no rings on it, Eddie noticed—no rings on either hand) and drained it. Eddie couldn’t understand why the man would choose to drink such so-so brew black. As far as Eddie himself was concerned, the really good taste was the Half and Half. After the months he had spent in Roland’s world (or perhaps whole years had been sneaking by), it tasted as rich as heavy cream.
“Better?” Eddie asked.
“Yes.” Tower looked out the window, as if expecting the return of the gray Town Car that had jerked and swayed away just ten minutes before. Then he looked back at Eddie. He was still frightened of the young man, but the last of his outright terror had departed when Eddie stowed the huge pistol back inside what he called “my friend’s swag-bag.” The bag was made of a scuffed, no-color leather, and closed along the top with lacings rather than a zipper. To Calvin Tower, it seemed that the young man had stowed the more frightening aspects of his personality in the “swag-bag” along with the oversized revolver. That was good, because it allowed Tower to believe that the kid had been bluffing about killing whole hoodlum families as well as the hoodlums themselves.
“Where’s your pal Deepneau today?” Eddie asked.
“Oncologist. Two years ago, Aaron started seeing blood in the toilet bowl when he moved his bowels. A younger man, he thinks ‘Goddam hemorrhoids’ and buys a tube of Preparation H. Once you’re in your seventies, you assume the worst. In his case it was bad but not terrible. Cancer moves slower when you get to be his age; even the Big C gets old. Funny to think of, isn’t it? Anyway, they baked it with radiation and they say it’s gone, but Aaron says you don’t turn your back on cancer. He goes back every three months, and that’s where he is. I’m glad. He’s an old cockuh but still a hothead.”
I should introduce Aaron Deepneau to Jamie Jaffords, Eddie thought. They could play Castles instead of chess, and yarn away the days of the Goat Moon.
Tower, meanwhile, was smiling sadly. He adjusted his glasses on his face. For a moment they stayed straight, and then they tilted again. The tilt was somehow worse than the crack; made Tower look slightly crazy as well as vulnerable. “He’s a hothead and I’m a coward. Perhaps that’s why we’re friends—we fit around each other’s wrong places, make something that’s almost whole.”
“Say maybe you’re a little hard on yourself,” Eddie said.
“I don’t think so. My analyst says that anyone who wants to know how the children of an A-male father and a B-female mother turn out would only have to study my case-history. He also says—”
“Cry your pardon, Calvin, but I don’t give much of a shit about your analyst. You held onto the lot up the street, and that’s good enough for me.”
“I don’t take any credit for that,” Calvin Tower said morosely. “It’s like this”—he picked up the book that he’d put down beside the coffee-maker—”and the other ones he threatened to burn. I just have a problem letting things go. When my first wife said she wanted a divorce and I asked why, she said, ‘Because when I married you, I didn’t understand. I thought you were a man. It turns out you’re a packrat.'”
“The lot is different from the books,” Eddie said.
“Is it? Do you really think so?” Tower was looking at him, fascinated. When he raised his coffee cup, Eddie was pleased to see that the worst of his shakes had subsided.
“Don’t you?”
“Sometimes I dream about it,” Tower said. “I haven’t actually been in there since Tommy Graham’s deli went bust and I paid to have it knocked down. And to have the fence put up, of course, which was almost as expensive as the men with the wrecking ball. I dream there’s a field of flowers in there. A field of roses. And instead of just to First Avenue, it goes on forever. Funny dream, huh?”
Eddie was sure that Calvin Tower did indeed have such dreams, but he thought he saw something else in the eyes hiding behind the cracked and tilted glasses. He thought Tower was letting this dream stand for all the dreams he would not tell.
“Funny,” Eddie agreed. “I think you better pour me another slug of that mud, beg ya I do. We’ll have us a little palaver.”
Tower smiled and once more raised the book Andolini had meant to charbroil. “Palaver. It’s the kind of thing they’re always saying in here.”
“Do you say so?”
“Uh-huh.”
Eddie held out his hand. “Let me see.”
At first Tower hesitated, and Eddie saw the bookshop owner’s face briefly harden with a misery mix of emotions.
“Come on, Cal, I’m not gonna wipe my ass with it.”
“No. Of course not. I’m sorry.” And at that moment Tower looked sorry, the way an alcoholic might look after
a particularly destructive bout of drunkenness. “I just… certain books are very important to me. And this one is a true rarity.”
He passed it to Eddie, who looked at the plastic-protected cover and felt his heart stop.
“What?” Tower asked. He set his coffee cup down with a bang. “What’s wrong?”
Eddie didn’t reply. The cover illustration showed a small rounded building like a Quonset hut, only made of wood and thatched with pine boughs. Standing off to one side was an Indian brave wearing buckskin pants.
He was shirtless, holding a tomahawk to his chest. In the background, an old-fashioned steam locomotive was charging across the prairie, boiling gray smoke into a blue sky.
The title of this book was The Dogan. The author was Benjamin Slightman Jr.
From some great distance, Tower was asking him if he was going to faint. From only slightly closer by, Eddie said that he wasn’t. Benjamin Slightman Jr. Ben Slightman the Younger, in other words. And—