Wolves of the Calla (10 page)

“Might be good not to attract unnecessary attention,” Eddie muttered in his ear.

“I know,” Jake said, “but look at
Charlie the Choo-Choo,
Eddie!”

Eddie did, and for a moment saw nothing—except for Charlie himself, of course: Charlie with his headlight eye and not-quite-trustworthy cowcatcher grin. Then Eddie’s eyebrows went up.

“I thought
Charlie the Choo-Choo
was written by a lady named Beryl Evans,” he whispered.

Jake nodded. “I did, too.”

“Then who’s this—” Eddie took another look. “Who’s this Claudia y Inez Bachman?”

“I have no idea,” Jake said. “I never heard of her in my life.”

One of the old men at the counter came sauntering toward them. Eddie and Jake drew away. As they stepped back, Eddie’s spine gave a cold little wrench. Jake was very pale, and Oy was giving out a series of low, distressed whines. Something was wrong here, all right. In a way they
had
lost their shadows. Eddie just didn’t know how.

Kid Seventy-seven had taken out his wallet and was paying for the two books. There was some more talk and good-natured laughter, then he headed for the door. When Eddie started after him, Mid-World Jake grabbed his arm. “No, not yet—I come back in.”

“I don’t care if you alphabetize the whole place,” Eddie said. “Let’s wait out on the sidewalk.”

Jake thought about this, biting his lip, then nodded. They headed for the door, then stopped and moved aside as the other Jake returned. The riddle book was open. Calvin Tower had lumbered over to the chessboard on the counter. He looked around with an amiable smile.

“Change your mind about that cup of coffee, O Hyperborean Wanderer?”

“No, I wanted to ask you—”

“This is the part about Samson’s Riddle,” Mid-World Jake said. “I don’t think it matters. Although the Deepneau guy sings a pretty good song, if you want to hear it.”

“I’ll pass,” Eddie said. “Come on.”

They went out. And although things on Second Avenue were still wrong—that sense of endless dark behind the scenes, behind the very
sky
—it was somehow better than in The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind. At least there was fresh air.

“Tell you what,” Jake said. “Let’s go down to Second and Forty-sixth right now.” He jerked his head toward the version of him listening to Aaron Deepneau sing. “I’ll catch up with us.”

Eddie considered it, then shook his head.

Jake’s face fell a little. “Don’t you want to see the rose?”

“You bet your ass I do,” Eddie said. “I’m wild to see it.”

“Then—”

“I don’t feel like we’re done here yet. I don’t know why, but I don’t.”

Jake—the Kid Seventy-seven version of him—had left the door open when he went back inside, and now Eddie moved into it. Aaron Deepneau was telling Jake a riddle they would later try on Blaine the Mono: What can run but never walks, has a mouth but never talks. Mid-World Jake, meanwhile, was once more looking at the notice-board in the bookstore window (
Pan-Fried William Faulkner, Hard-Boiled Raymond Chandler
). He wore a frown of the kind that expresses doubt and anxiety rather than ill temper.

“That sign’s different, too,” he said.

“How?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Is it important?”

Jake turned to him. The eyes below the furrowed brow were haunted. “I don’t know. It’s another riddle. I
hate
riddles!”

Eddie sympathized.
When is a Beryl not a Beryl?
“When it’s a Claudia,” he said.

“Huh?”

“Never mind. Better step back, Jake, or you’re going to run into yourself.”

Jake gave the oncoming version of John Chambers a startled glance, then did as Eddie suggested. And when Kid Seventy-seven started on down Second Avenue with his new books in his left hand, Mid-World Jake gave Eddie a tired smile. “I
do
remember one thing,” he said. “When I left this bookstore, I was sure I’d never come here again. But I did.”

“Considering that we’re more ghosts than people, I’d say that’s debatable.” Eddie gave the back of Jake’s neck a friendly scruff. “And if you
have
forgotten something important, Roland might be able to help you remember. He’s good at that.”

Jake grinned at this, relieved. He knew from personal experience that the gunslinger really
was
good at helping people remember. Roland’s friend Alain might have been the one with the strongest ability to touch other minds, and his friend Cuthbert had gotten all the sense of humor in that particular ka-tet, but Roland had developed over the years into one
hell
of a hypnotist. He could have made a fortune in Las Vegas.

“Can we follow me now?” Jake asked. “Check out
the rose?” He looked up and down Second Avenue—a street that was somehow bright and dark at the same time—with a kind of unhappy perplexity. “Things are probably better there. The rose makes everything better.”

Eddie was about to say okay when a dark gray Lincoln Town Car pulled up in front of Calvin Tower’s bookshop. It parked by the yellow curb in front of a fire hydrant with absolutely no hesitation. The front doors opened, and when Eddie saw who was getting out from behind the wheel, he seized Jake’s shoulder.

“Ow!” Jake said. “Man, that hurts!”

Eddie paid no attention. In fact the hand on Jake’s shoulder clamped down even tighter.

“Christ,” Eddie whispered. “Dear Jesus Christ, what’s this? What in hell is
this
?”

Jake watched Eddie go past pale to ashy gray. His eyes were bulging from their sockets. Not without difficulty, Jake pried the clamping hand off his shoulder. Eddie made as if to point with that hand, but didn’t seem to have the strength. It fell against the side of his leg with a little thump.

The man who had gotten out on the passenger side of the Town Car walked around to the sidewalk while the driver opened the rear curbside door. Even to Jake their moves looked practiced, almost like steps in a dance. The man who got out of the back seat was wearing an expensive suit, but that didn’t change the fact that he was basically a dumpy little guy with a potbelly and black hair going gray
around the edges.
Dandruffy
black hair, from the look of his suit’s shoulders.

To Jake, the day suddenly felt darker than ever. He looked up to see if the sun had gone behind a cloud. It hadn’t, but it almost seemed to him that there was a black corona forming around its brilliant circle, like a ring of mascara around a startled eye.

Half a block farther downtown, the 1977 version of him was glancing in the window of a restaurant, and Jake could remember the name of it: Chew Chew Mama’s. Not far beyond it was Tower of Power Records, where he would think
Towers are selling cheap today
. If that version of him had looked back, he would have seen the gray Town Car . . . but he hadn’t. Kid Seventy-seven’s mind was fixed firmly on the future.

“It’s Balazar,” Eddie said.

“What?”

Eddie was pointing at the dumpy guy, who had paused to adjust his Sulka tie. The other two now stood flanking him. They looked simultaneously relaxed and watchful.

“Enrico Balazar. And looking much younger. God, he’s almost middle-aged!”

“It’s 1977,” Jake reminded him. Then, as the penny dropped: “That’s the guy you and Roland
killed
?” Eddie had told Jake the story of the shoot-out at Balazar’s club in 1987, leaving out the gorier parts. The part, for instance, where Kevin Blake had lobbed the head of Eddie’s brother into Balazar’s office in an effort to flush Eddie and Roland into the open. Henry Dean, the great sage and eminent junkie.

“Yeah,” Eddie said. “The guy Roland and I killed. And the one who was driving, that’s Jack Andolini. Old Double-Ugly, people used to call him, although never to his face. He went through one of those doors with me just before the shooting started.”

“Roland killed him, too. Didn’t he?”

Eddie nodded. It was simpler than trying to explain how Jack Andolini had happened to die blind and faceless beneath the tearing claws and ripping jaws of the lobstrosities on the beach.

“The other bodyguard’s George Biondi. Big Nose. I killed him myself.
Will
kill him. Ten years from now.” Eddie looked as if he might faint at any second.

“Eddie, are you okay?”

“I guess so. I guess I have to be.” They had drawn away from the bookshop’s doorway. Oy was still crouched at Jake’s ankle. Down Second Avenue, Jake’s other, earlier self had disappeared.
I’m running by now,
Jake thought.
Maybe jumping over the UPS guy’s dolly. Sprinting all-out for the delicatessen, because I’m sure that’s the way back to Mid-World. The way back to
him.

Balazar peered at his reflection in the window beside the
TODAY’S SPECIALS
display-board, gave the wings of hair above his ears one last little fluff with the tips of his fingers, then stepped through the open door. Andolini and Biondi followed.

“Hard guys,” Jake said.

“The hardest,” Eddie agreed.

“From Brooklyn.”

“Well, yeah.”

“Why are hard guys from Brooklyn visiting a used-book store in Manhattan?”

“I think that’s what we’re here to find out. Jake, did I hurt your shoulder?”

“I’m okay. But I don’t really want to go back in there.”

“Neither do I. So let’s go.”

They went back into The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind.

Oy was still at Jake’s heel and still whining. Jake wasn’t crazy about the sound, but he understood it. The smell of fear in the bookstore was palpable. Deepneau sat beside the chessboard, gazing unhappily at Calvin Tower and the newcomers, who didn’t look much like bibliophiles in search of the elusive signed first edition. The other two old guys at the counter were drinking the last of their coffee in big gulps, with the air of fellows who have just remembered important appointments elsewhere.

Cowards,
Jake thought with a contempt he didn’t recognize as a relatively new thing in his life.
Lowbellies
.
Being old forgives some of it, but not all of it.

“We just have a couple of things to discuss, Mr. Toren,” Balazar was saying. He spoke in a low, calm, reasonable voice, without even a trace of accent. “Please, if we could step back into your office—”

“We don’t have business,” Tower said. His eyes kept drifting to Andolini. Jake supposed he knew why. Jack Andolini looked the ax-wielding psycho in a horror movie. “Come July fifteenth, we might
have business.
Might
. So we could talk after the Fourth. I guess. If you wanted to.” He smiled to show he was being reasonable. “But now? Gee, I just don’t see the point. It’s not even June yet. And for your information my name’s not—”

“He doesn’t see the point,” Balazar said. He looked at Andolini; looked at the one with the big nose; raised his hands to his shoulders, then dropped them.
What’s wrong with this world of ours?
the gesture said. “Jack? George? This man took a check from me—the amount before the decimal point was a one followed by five zeroes—and now he says he doesn’t see the point of talking to me.”

“Unbelievable,” Biondi said. Andolini said nothing. He simply looked at Calvin Tower, muddy brown eyes peering out from beneath the unlovely bulge of his skull like mean little animals peering out of a cave. With a face like that, Jake supposed, you didn’t have to talk much to get your point across. The point being intimidation.

“
I
want to talk to
you,
” Balazar said. He spoke in a patient, reasonable tone of voice, but his eyes were fixed on Tower’s face with a terrible intensity. “Why? Because my employers in this matter
want
me to talk to you. That’s good enough for me. And do you know what? I think you can afford five minutes of chit-chat for your hundred grand. Don’t you?”

“The hundred thousand is gone,” Tower said bleakly. “As I’m sure you and whoever hired you must know.”

“That’s of no concern to me,” Balazar said. “Why would it be? It was your money. What concerns me is whether or not you’re going to take us
out back. If not, we’ll have to have our conversation right here, in front of the whole world.”

The whole world now consisted of Aaron Deepneau, one billy-bumbler, and a couple of expatriate New Yorkers none of the men in the bookstore could see. Deepneau’s counter-buddies had run like the lowbellies they were.

Tower made one last try. “I don’t have anyone to mind the store. Lunch-hour is coming up, and we often have quite a few browsers during—”

“This place doesn’t do fifty dollars a day,” Andolini said, “and we all know it, Mr. Toren. If you’re really worried you’re going to miss a big sale, let
him
run the cash register for a few minutes.”

For one horrible second, Jake thought the one Eddie had called “Old Double-Ugly” meant none other than John “Jake” Chambers. Then he realized Andolini was pointing past him, at Deepneau.

Tower gave in. Or Toren. “Aaron?” he asked. “Do you mind?”

“Not if you don’t,” Deepneau said. He looked troubled. “Sure you want to talk with these guys?”

Biondi gave him a look. Jake thought Deepneau stood up under it remarkably well. In a weird way, he felt proud of the old guy.

“Yeah,” Tower said. “Yeah, it’s fine.”

“Don’t worry, he won’t lose his butthole virginity on our account,” Biondi said, and laughed.

“Watch your mouth, you’re in a place of scholarship,” Balazar said, but Jake thought he smiled a little. “Come on, Toren. Just a little chat.”

“That’s not my name! I had it legally changed on—”

“Whatever,” Balazar said soothingly. He actually
patted Tower’s arm. Jake was still trying to get used to the idea that all this . . . all this
melodrama
. . . had happened after he’d left the store with his two new books (new to him, anyway) and resumed his journey. That it had all happened behind his back.

“A squarehead’s always a squarehead, right, boss?” Biondi asked jovially. “Just a Dutchman. Don’t matter what he calls himself.”