The Drawing of the Three (15 page)

“Strip,” Claudio said, and now he was holding his gun on Eddie.

Eddie started to take his clothes off.

I don’t like this,
Balazar thought as he waited for Jack Andolini to come back out of the bathroom. He was scared, suddenly sweating not just under his arms or in his crotch, places where he sweated even when it was the dead of winter and colder than a well-digger’s belt-buckle, but all over. Eddie had gone off looking like a junkie—a
smart
junkie but still a junkie, someone who could be led anywhere by the skag fishhook in his balls—and had come back looking like . . . like what? Like he’d
grown
in some way,
changed.

It’s like somebody poured two quarts of fresh guts down his throat.

Yes. That was it. And the dope. The fucking dope. Jack was tossing the bathroom and Claudio was checking Eddie with the thorough ferocity of a sadistic prison guard; Eddie had stood with a stolidity Balazar would not previously have believed possible for him or any other doper while Claudio spat four times into his left palm, rubbed the snot-flecked spittle all over his right hand, then rammed it up Eddie’s asshole to the wrist and an inch or two beyond.

There was no dope in his bathroom, no dope on Eddie or in him. There was no dope in Eddie’s clothes, his jacket, or his travelling bag. So it was all nothing but a bluff.

Look in my face and tell me that I am lying.

So he had. What he saw was upsetting. What he saw was that Eddie Dean was perfectly confident: he intended to go into the bathroom and come back with half of Balazar’s goods.

Balazar almost believed it himself.

Claudio Andolini pulled his arm back. His fingers came out of Eddie Dean’s asshole with a plopping sound. Claudio’s mouth twisted like a fishline with knots in it.

“Hurry up, Jack, I got this junkie’s shit on my hand!” Claudio yelled angrily.

“If I’d known you were going to be prospecting up there, Claudio, I would have wiped my ass with a chair-leg last time I took a dump,” Eddie said mildly. “Your hand would have come out cleaner and I
wouldn’t be standing here feeling like I just got raped by Ferdinand the Bull.”

“Jack!”

“Go on down to the kitchen and clean yourself up,” Balazar said quietly. “Eddie and I have got no reason to hurt each other. Do we, Eddie?”

“No,” Eddie said.

“He’s clean, anyway,” Claudio said. “Well,
clean
ain’t the word. What I mean is he ain’t holding. You can be goddam sure of that.” He walked out, holding his dirty hand in front of him like a dead fish.

Eddie looked calmly at Balazar, who was thinking again of Harry Houdini, and Blackstone, and Doug Henning, and David Copperfield. They kept saying that magic acts were as dead as vaudeville, but Henning was a superstar and the Copperfield kid had blown the crowd away the one time Balazar had caught his act in Atlantic City. Balazar had loved magicians from the first time he had seen one on a street-corner, doing card-tricks for pocket-change. And what was the first thing they always did before making something appear—something that would make the whole audience first gasp and then applaud? What they did was invite someone up from the audience to make sure that the place from which the rabbit or dove or bare-breasted cutie or the whatever was to appear was perfectly empty. More than that, to make sure there was no way to get anything
inside.

I think maybe he’s done it. I don’t know how, and I don’t care. The only thing I know for sure is that I don’t like any of this, not one damn bit.

George Biondi also had something not to like. He doubted if Eddie Dean was going to be wild about it, either.

George was pretty sure that at some point after ’Cimi had come into the accountant’s office and doused the lights, Henry had died.
Died quietly, with no muss, no fuss, no bother. Had simply floated away like a dandelion spore on a light breeze. George thought maybe it had happened right around the time Claudio left to wash his shitty hand in the kitchen.

“Henry?” George muttered in Henry’s ear. He put his mouth so close that it was like kissing a girl’s ear in a movie theater, and that was pretty fucking gross, especially when you considered that the guy was probably dead—it was like narcophobia or whatever the fuck they called it—but he had to know, and the wall between this office and Balazar’s was thin.

“What’s wrong, George?” Tricks Postino asked.

“Shut up,” ’Cimi said. His voice was the low rumble of an idling truck.

They shut up.

George slid a hand inside Henry’s shirt. Oh, this was getting worse and worse. That image of being with a girl in a movie theater wouldn’t leave him. Now here he was, feeling her up, only it wasn’t a
her
but a
him,
this wasn’t just narcophobia, it was fucking
faggot
narcophobia, and Henry’s scrawny junkie’s chest wasn’t moving up and down, and there wasn’t anything inside going
thump-thump-thump.
For Henry Dean it was all over, for Henry Dean the ball-game had been rained out in the seventh inning. Wasn’t nothing ticking but his watch.

He moved into the heavy Old Country atmosphere of olive oil and garlic that surrounded ’Cimi Dretto.

“I think we might have a problem,” George whispered.

Jack came out of the bathroom.

“There’s no dope in there,” he said, and his flat eyes studied Eddie. “And if you were thinking about the window, you can forget it. That’s ten-gauge steel mesh.”

“I wasn’t thinking about the window and it
is
in there,” Eddie said quietly. “You just don’t know where to look.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Balazar,” Andolini said, “but this crock is getting just a little too full for me.”

Balazar studied Eddie as if he hadn’t even heard Andolini. He was thinking very deeply.

Thinking about magicians pulling rabbits out of hats.

You got a guy from the audience to check out the fact that the hat was empty. What other thing that never changed? That no one saw into the hat but the magician, of course. And what had the kid said?

I’m going to walk into your bathroom. I’m going in by myself.

Knowing how a magic trick worked was something he usually wouldn’t want to know; knowing spoiled the fun.

Usually.

This, however, was a trick he couldn’t
wait
to spoil.

“Fine,” he said to Eddie. “If it’s in there, go get it. Just like you are. Bare-ass.”

“Good,” Eddie said, and started toward the bathroom door.

“But not alone,” Balazar said. Eddie stopped at once, his body stiffening as if Balazar had shot him with an invisible harpoon, and it did Balazar’s heart good to see it. For the first time something hadn’t gone according to the kid’s plan. “Jack’s going with you.”

“No,” Eddie said at once. “That’s not what I—”

“Eddie,” Balazar said gently, “you don’t tell me no. That’s one thing you never do.”

It’s all right,
the gunslinger said.
Let him come.

But. . .but. . .

Eddie was close to gibbering, barely holding onto his control. It wasn’t just the sudden curve-ball Balazar had thrown him; it was his gnawing worry over Henry, and, growing steadily ascendant over all else, his need for a fix.

Let him come. It will be all right. Listen:

Eddie listened.

Balazar watched him, a slim, naked man with only the first suggestion of the junkie’s typical cave-chested slouch, his head cocked to one side, and as he watched Balazar felt some of his confidence evaporate. It was as if the kid was listening to a voice only he could hear.

The same thought passed through Andolini’s mind, but in a different way:
What’s this? He looks like the dog on those old RCA Victor records!

Col had wanted to tell him something about Eddie’s eyes. Suddenly Jack Andolini wished he had listened.

Wish in one hand, shit in the other,
he thought.

If Eddie had been listening to voices inside his head, they had either quit talking or he had quit paying attention.

“Okay,” he said. “Come along, Jack. I’ll show you the Eighth Wonder of the World.” He flashed a smile that neither Jack Andolini nor Enrico Balazar cared for in the slightest.

“Is that so?” Andolini pulled a gun from the clamshell holster attached to his belt at the small of his back. “Am I gonna be amazed?”

Eddie’s smile widened. “Oh yeah. I think this is gonna knock your socks off.”

Andolini followed Eddie into the bathroom. He was holding the gun up because his wind was up.

“Close the door,” Eddie said.

“Fuck you,” Andolini answered.

“Close the door or no dope,” Eddie said.

“Fuck you,” Andolini said again. Now, a little scared, feeling that there was something going on that he didn’t understand, Andolini looked brighter than he had in the van.

“He won’t close the door,” Eddie yelled at Balazar. “I’m getting
ready to give up on you, Mr. Balazar. You probably got six wiseguys in this place, every one of them with about four guns, and the two of you are going batshit over a kid in a crapper. A
junkie
kid.”

“Shut the fucking door, Jack!” Balazar shouted.

“That’s right,” Eddie said as Jack Andolini kicked the door shut behind him. “Is you a man or is you a m—”

“Oh boy, ain’t I had enough of this turd,” Andolini said to no one in particular. He raised the gun, butt forward, meaning to pistol-whip Eddie across the mouth.

Then he froze, gun drawn up across his body, the snarl that bared his teeth slackening into a slack-jawed gape of surprise as he saw what Col Vincent had seen in the van.

Eddie’s eyes changed from brown to blue.

“Now grab him!”
a low, commanding voice said, and although the voice came from Eddie’s mouth, it was not Eddie’s voice.

Schizo,
Jack Andolini thought.
He’s gone schizo, gone fucking schi
—

But the thought broke off when Eddie’s hands grabbed his shoulders, because when that happened, Andolini saw a hole in reality suddenly appear about three feet behind Eddie.

No, not a hole. Its dimensions were too perfect for that.

It was a
door.

“Hail Mary fulla grace,” Jack said in a low breathy moan. Through that doorway which hung in space a foot or so above the floor in front of Balazar’s private shower he could see a dark beach which sloped down to crashing waves. Things were moving on that beach.
Things.

He brought the gun down, but the blow which had been meant to break off all of Eddie’s front teeth at the gum-line did no more than mash Eddie’s lips back and bloody them a little. All the strength was running out of him. Jack could
feel
it happening.

“I
told
you it was gonna knock your socks off, Jack,” Eddie said, and then yanked him. Jack realized what Eddie meant to do at the last moment and began to fight like a wildcat, but it was too late—they
were tumbling backward through that doorway, and the droning hum of New York City at night, so familiar and constant you never even heard it unless it wasn’t there anymore, was replaced by the grinding sound of the waves and the grating, questioning voices of dimly seen horrors crawling to and fro on the beach.

We’ll have to move very fast, or we’ll find ourselves basted in a hot oast,
Roland had said, and Eddie was pretty sure the guy meant that if they didn’t shuck and jive at damn near the speed of light, their gooses were going to be cooked. He believed it, too. When it came to hard guys, Jack Andolini was like Dwight Gooden: you could rock him, yes, you could shock him, maybe, but if you let him get away in the early innings he was going to stomp you flat later on.

Left hand!
Roland screamed at himself as they
went through
and he separated from Eddie.
Remember! Left hand! Left hand!

He saw Eddie and Jack stumble backward, fall, and then go rolling down the rocky scree that edged the beach, struggling for the gun in Andolini’s hand.

Roland had just time to think what a cosmic joke it would be if he arrived back in his own world only to discover that his physical body had died while he had been away . . . and then it was too late. Too late to wonder, too late to go back.

Andolini didn’t know what had happened. Part of him was sure he had gone crazy, part was sure Eddie had doped him or gassed him or something like that, part believed that the vengeful God of his childhood had finally tired of his evils and had plucked him away from the world he knew and set him down in this weird purgatory.

Then he saw the door, standing open, spilling a fan of white light—the light from Balazar’s john—onto the rocky ground—and understood it was possible to get back. Andolini was a practical man above all else. He would worry about what all this meant later on. Right now he intended to kill this creep’s ass and get back through that door.

The strength that had gone out of him in his shocked surprise now flooded back. He realized Eddie was trying to pull his small but very efficient Colt Cobra out of his hand and had nearly succeeded. Jack pulled it back with a curse, tried to aim, and Eddie promptly grabbed his arm again.

Andolini hoisted a knee into the big muscle of Eddie’s right thigh (the expensive gabardine of Andolini’s slacks was now crusted with dirty gray beach sand) and Eddie screamed as the muscle seized up.

“Roland!”
he cried.
“Help me! For Christ’s sake, help me!”

Andolini snapped his head around and what he saw threw him off-balance again. There was a guy standing there . . . only he looked more like a ghost than a guy. Not exactly Casper the Friendly Ghost, either. The swaying figure’s white, haggard face was rough with beard-stubble. His shirt was in tatters which blew back behind him in twisted ribbons, showing the starved stack of his ribs. A filthy rag was wrapped around his right hand. He looked sick, sick and dying, but even so he also looked tough enough to make Andolini feel like a soft-boiled egg.