Wolves of the Calla (77 page)

He had more to say, lots, but stopped there. When he’d held his hand out for the book,
The Dogan
or
The Hogan
or whatever it was, an expression of miserly reluctance had come over Tower’s face. What made the look unpleasant was the undercurrent of stupidity in it . . . and not very far under, either.
Oh God, he’s gonna fight me on this. After everything that’s happened, he’s still gonna fight me on it. And why? Because he really
is
a packrat.

“You can trust me, Cal,” he said, knowing trust was not exactly the issue. “I set my watch and warrant on it. Hear me, now. Hear me, I beg.”

“I don’t know you from Adam. You walk in off the street—”

“—and save your life, don’t forget that part.”

Tower’s face grew set and stubborn. “They weren’t going to kill me. You said that yourself.”

“They
were
gonna burn your favorite books. Your most valuable ones.”

“Not my
most
valuable. Also, that might have been a bluff.”

Eddie took a deep breath and let it out, hoping his suddenly strong desire to lean across the counter and sink his fingers into Tower’s fat throat would depart or at least subside. He reminded himself that if Tower
hadn’t
been stubborn, he probably would have sold the lot to Sombra long before now. The rose would have been plowed under. And the Dark Tower? Eddie had an idea that when the rose died, the Dark Tower would simply fall like the one in Babel when God had gotten tired of it and wiggled His finger. No waiting around another hundred or thousand years for the machinery running the Beams to quit. Just ashes, ashes, we all fall down. And then? Hail the Crimson King, lord of todash darkness.

“Cal, if you sell me and my friends your vacant lot, you’re off the hook. Not only that, but you’ll eventually have enough money to run your little shop for the rest of your life.” He had a sudden thought. “Hey, do you know a company called Holmes Dental?”

Tower smiled. “Who doesn’t? I use their floss.
And
their toothpaste. I tried the mouthwash, but it’s too strong. Why do you ask?”

“Because Odetta Holmes is my wife. I may look like Froggy the Gremlin, but in truth I’m Prince Fuckin Charming.”

Tower was quiet for a long time. Eddie curbed his impatience and let the man think. At last Tower said, “You think I’m being foolish. That I’m being Silas Marner, or worse, Ebenezer Scrooge.”

Eddie didn’t know who Silas Marner was, but he took Tower’s point from the context of the discussion. “Let’s put it this way,” he said. “After what you’ve just been through, you’re too smart not to know where your best interests lie.”

“I feel obligated to tell you that this isn’t just mindless miserliness on my part; there’s an element of caution, as well. I know that piece of New York is valuable,
any
piece of Manhattan is, but it’s not just that. I have a safe out back. There’s something in it. Something perhaps even more valuable than my copy of
Ulysses
.”

“Then why isn’t it in your safe-deposit box?”

“Because it’s supposed to be here,” Tower said. “It’s
always
been here. Perhaps waiting for you, or someone like you. Once, Mr. Dean, my family owned almost all of Turtle Bay, and . . . well, wait. Will you wait?”

“Yes,” Eddie said.

What choice?

When Tower was gone, Eddie got off the stool and went to the door only he could see. He looked through it. Dimly, he could hear chimes. More clearly he could hear his mother. “Why
don’t you get out of there?” she called dolorously. “You’ll only make things worse, Eddie—you always do.”

That’s my Ma,
he thought, and called the gunslinger’s name.

Roland pulled one of the bullets from his ear. Eddie noted the oddly clumsy way he handled it—almost pawing at it, as if his fingers were stiff—but there was no time to think about it now.

“Are you all right?” Eddie called.

“Do fine. And you?”

“Yeah, but . . . Roland, can you come through? I might need a little help.”

Roland considered, then shook his head. “The box might close if I did. Probably
would
close. Then the door would close. And we’d be trapped on that side.”

“Can’t you prop the damn thing open with a stone or a bone or something?”

“No,” Roland said. “It wouldn’t work. The ball is powerful.”

And it’s working on you,
Eddie thought. Roland’s face looked haggard, the way it had when the lobstrosities’ poison had been inside him.

“All right,” he said.

“Be as quick as you can.”

“I will.”

When he turned around, Tower was looking at him quizzically. “Who were you talking to?”

Eddie stood aside and pointed at the doorway. “Do you see anything there, sai?”

Calvin Tower looked, started to shake his head,
then looked longer. “A shimmer,” he said at last. “Like hot air over an incinerator. Who’s there?
What’s
there?”

“For the time being, let’s say nobody. What have you got in your hand?”

Tower held it up. It was an envelope, very old. Written on it in copperplate were the words
Stefan Toren
and
Dead Letter
. Below, carefully drawn in ancient ink, were the same symbols that were on the door and the box:
.
Now we might be getting somewhere,
Eddie thought.

“Once this envelope held the will of my great-great-great grandfather,” Calvin Tower said. “It was dated March 19th, 1846. Now there’s nothing but a single piece of paper with a name written upon it. If you can tell me what that name is, young man, I’ll do as you ask.”

And so,
Eddie mused,
it comes down to another riddle
. Only this time it wasn’t four lives that hung upon the answer, but all of existence.

Thank God it’s an easy one,
he thought.

“It’s Deschain,” Eddie said. “The first name will be either Roland, the name of my dinh, or Steven, the name of his father.”

All the blood seemed to fall out of Calvin Tower’s face. Eddie had no idea how the man was able to keep his feet. “My dear God in heaven,” he said.

With trembling fingers, he removed an ancient and brittle piece of paper from the envelope, a time traveler that had voyaged over a hundred and thirty-one years to this where and when. It was folded. Tower opened it and put it on the counter, where they could both read the words
Stefan Toren had written in the same firm copperplate hand:

Roland Deschain, of Gilead
The line of ELD
GUNSLINGER

There was more talk, about fifteen minutes’ worth, and Eddie supposed at least some of it was important, but the real deal had gone down when he’d told Tower the name his three-times-great-grandfather had written on a slip of paper fourteen years before the Civil War got rolling.

What Eddie had discovered about Tower during their palaver was dismaying. He harbored some respect for the man (for
any
man who could hold out for more than twenty seconds against Balazar’s goons), but didn’t like him much. There was a kind of willful stupidity about him. Eddie thought it was self-created and maybe propped up by his analyst, who would tell him about how he had to take care of himself, how he had to be the captain of his own ship, the author of his own destiny, respect his own desires, all that blah-blah. All the little code words and terms that meant it was all right to be a selfish fuck. That it was noble, even. When Tower told Eddie that Aaron Deepneau was his only friend, Eddie wasn’t surprised. What surprised him was that Tower had any friends at all. Such a man could never be ka-tet, and it made Eddie uneasy to know that their destinies were so tightly bound together.

You’ll just have to trust to ka. It’s what ka’s for, isn’t it?

Sure it was, but Eddie didn’t have to like it.

Eddie asked if Tower had a ring with
Ex Liveris
on it. Tower looked puzzled, then laughed and told Eddie he must mean
Ex Libris
. He rummaged on one of his shelves, found a book, showed Eddie the plate in front. Eddie nodded.

“No,” Tower said. “But it’d be just the thing for a guy like me, wouldn’t it?” He looked at Eddie keenly. “Why do you ask?”

But Tower’s future responsibility to save a man now exploring the hidden highways of multiple Americas was a subject Eddie didn’t feel like getting into right now. He’d come as close to blowing the guy’s mind as he wanted to, and he had to get back through the unfound door before Black Thirteen wore Roland away to a frazzle.

“Never mind. But if you see one, you ought to pick it up. One more thing and then I’m gone.”

“What’s that?”

“I want your promise that as soon as
I
leave,
you’ll
leave.”

Tower once more grew shifty. It was the side of him Eddie knew he could come to outright loathe, given time. “Why . . . to tell you the truth, I don’t know if I can do that. Early evenings are often a very busy time for me . . . people are much more prone to browse once the workday’s over . . . and Mr. Brice is coming in to look at a first of
The Troubled Air,
Irwin Shaw’s novel about radio and the
McCarthy era . . . I’ll have to at least skim through my appointment calendar, and . . . ”

He droned on, actually gathering steam as he descended toward trivialities.

Eddie said, very mildly: “Do you like your balls, Calvin? Are you maybe as attached to them as they are to you?”

Tower, who’d been wondering about who would feed Sergio if he just pulled up stakes and ran, now stopped and looked at him, puzzled, as if he had never heard this simple one-syllable word before.

Eddie nodded helpfully. “Your nuts. Your sack. Your stones. Your
cojones
. The old sperm-firm. Your
testicles
.”

“I don’t see what—”

Eddie’s coffee was gone. He poured some Half and Half into the cup and drank that, instead. It was very tasty. “I told you that if you stayed here, you could look forward to a serious maiming. That’s what I meant. That’s probably where they’ll start, with your balls. To teach you a lesson. As to when it happens, what that mostly depends on is traffic.”

“Traffic.” Tower said it with a complete lack of vocal expression.

“That’s right,” Eddie said, sipping his Half and Half as if it were a thimble of brandy. “Basically how long it takes Jack Andolini to drive back out to Brooklyn and then how long it takes Balazar to load up some old beater of a van or panel truck with guys to come back here. I’m hoping Jack’s too dazed to just phone. Did you think Balazar’d wait until tomorrow? Convene a little brain-trust of guys like Kevin Blake and ’Cimi Dretto to discuss the
matter?” Eddie raised first one finger and then two. The dust of another world was beneath the nails. “First, they
got
no brains; second, Balazar doesn’t trust em.

“What he’ll do, Cal, is what any successful despot does: he’ll react right away, quick as a flash. The rush-hour traffic will hold em up a little, but if you’re still here at six, half past at the latest, you can say goodbye to your balls. They’ll hack them off with a knife, then cauterize the wound with one of those little torches, those Bernz-O-Matics—”

“Stop,” Tower said. Now instead of white, he’d gone green. Especially around the gills. “I’ll go to a hotel down in the Village. There are a couple of cheap ones that cater to writers and artists down on their luck, ugly rooms but not that bad. I’ll call Aaron, and we’ll go north tomorrow morning.”

“Fine, but first you have to pick a town to go to,” Eddie said. “Because I or one of my friends may need to get in touch with you.”

“How am I supposed to do that? I don’t know any towns in New England north of Westport, Connecticut!”

“Make some calls once you get to the hotel in the Village,” Eddie said. “You pick the town, and then tomorrow morning, before you leave New York, send your pal Aaron up to your vacant lot. Have him write the zip code on the board fence.” An unpleasant thought struck Eddie. “You
have
zip codes, don’t you? I mean, they’ve been invented, right?”

Tower looked at him as if he were crazy. “Of course they have.”

“ ’Kay. Have him put it on the Forty-sixth street side, all the way down where the fence ends. Have you got that?”

“Yes, but—”

“They probably won’t have your bookshop staked out tomorrow morning—they’ll assume you got smart and blew—but if they do, they won’t have the lot staked out, and if they have the lot staked out, it’ll be the Second Avenue side. And if they have the Forty-sixth Street side staked out, they’ll be looking for you, not him.”

Tower was smiling a little bit in spite of himself. Eddie relaxed and smiled back. “But . . . ? If they’re also looking for Aaron?”

“Have him wear the sort of clothes he doesn’t usually wear. If he’s a blue jeans man, have him wear a suit. If he’s a suit man—”

“Have him wear blue jeans.”

“Correct. And sunglasses wouldn’t be a bad idea, assuming the day isn’t cloudy enough to make them look odd. Have him use a black felt-tip. Tell him it doesn’t have to be artistic. He just walks to the fence, as if to read one of the posters. Then he writes the numbers and off he goes. And tell him for Christ’s sake don’t fuck up.”