by Stephen King
"Okay, okay, stop leaning on me."
"Don't lean on him," Kevin Blake said to Jimmy.
"Okay, I won't," Jimmy said.
"You ready?" George Biondi said, and gave the others an enormous wink as Henry's chin floated down to his breastbone and then slowly rose once more--it was like watching a soaked log not quite ready to give in and sink for good.
"Yeah," Henry said. "Bring it on."
"Bring it on!" Jimmy Haspio cried happily.
"You bring that fucker!" Tricks agreed, and they all roared with laughter (in the other room Balazar's edifice, now three levels high, trembled again, but did not fall).
"Okay, listen close," George said, and winked again. Although Henry was on a Sports category, George announced the category was Arts and Entertainment. "What popular country and western singer had hits with 'A Boy Named Sue,' 'Folsom Prison Blues,' and numerous other shitkicking songs?"
Kevin Blake, who actually could add seven and nine (if you gave him poker chips to do it with), howled with laughter, clutching his knees and nearly upsetting the board.
Still pretending to scan the card in his hand, George continued: "This popular singer is also known as The Man in Black. His first name means the same as a place you go to take a piss and his last name means what you got in your wallet unless you're a fucking needle freak."
There was a long expectant silence.
"Walter Brennan," Henry said at last.
Bellows of laughter. Jimmy Haspio clutched Kevin Blake. Kevin punched Jimmy in the shoulder repeatedly. In Balazar's office, the house of cards which was now becoming a 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 Connecticut, Harlem, and Montauk Sound; a radiotelephone . . . 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 storeroom 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 Farson, 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."
"Are they 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 fascinating. 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 anymore, either."
"So who does?" Claudio asked, then blushed when his brother looked at him with dour ferocity.
"He does," 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 the office, a genuine expression illuminated Balazar's face: surprise. 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. Delivery 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. I know 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 fifteen holes 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 bullshitting. 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 brother's name. It's like poking an open sore with a stick.
"I'm going to walk into your bathroom," Eddie said. He pointed at a door in the far left corner of the room, a door so unobtrusive it could almost have been one of the wall panels. "I'm going in by myself. Then I'm going to walk back out with a pound of your cocaine. Half the shipment. You test it. Then you bring Henry in here where I can look at him. When I see him, see he's okay, you are going to give him our goods and he's going to ride home with one of your gentlemen. While he does, me and . . ." Roland, he almost said, ". . . me and the rest of the guys we both know you got here can watch you build that thing. When Henry's home and safe--which means no one standing there with a gun in his ear--he's going to call and say a certain word. This is something we worked out before I left. Just in case."
The gunslinger checked Eddie's mind to see if this was true or bluff. It was true, or at least Eddie thought it was. Roland saw Eddie really believed his brother Henry would die before saying that word in falsity. The gunslinger was not so sure.
"You must think I still believe in Santa Claus," Balazar said.
"I know you don't."
"Claudio. Search him. Jack, you go in my bathroom and search it. Everything."
"Is there any place in there I wouldn't know about?" Andolini asked.
Balazar paused for a long moment, considering Andolini carefully with his dark brown eyes. "There is a small panel on the back wall of the medicine cabinet," he said. "I keep a few personal things in there. It is not big enough to hide a pound of dope in, but maybe you better check it."
Jack left, and as he entered the little privy, the gunslinger saw a flash of the same frozen white light that had illuminated the privy of the air-carriage. Then the door shut.
Balazar's eyes flicked back to Eddie.
"Why do you want to tell such crazy lies?" he asked, almost sorrowfully. "I thought you were smart."
"Look in my face," Eddie said quietly, "and tell me that I am lying."
Balazar did as Eddie asked. He looked for a long time. Then he turned away, hands stuffed in his pockets so deeply that the crack of his peasant's ass showed a little. His posture was one of sorrow--sorrow over an erring son--but before he turned Roland had seen an expression on Balazar's face that had not been sorrow. What Balazar had seen in Eddie's face had left him not sorrowful but profoundly disturbed.
"Strip," Claudio said, and now he was holding his gun on Eddie.
Eddie started to take his clothes off.
5
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.
6
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.
7
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?
