by Stephen King
8
It was a short distance but he had gotten barely halfway when Andolini’s hand clamped on his upper arm with the paralyzing force of a vise-grip. His breath as hot as a bull’s on the back of Eddie’s neck. He did all this in the time you would have thought, looking at him, it would have taken his brain to convince his hand to pull the doorhandle up.
Eddie turned around.
Be cool, Eddie, Roland whispered.
Cool, Eddie responded.
“I could kill you for that,” Andolini said. “No one tells me stick it up my ass, especially no shitass little junkie like you.”
“Kill shit!” Eddie screamed at him—but it was a calculated scream. A cool scream, if you could dig that. They stood there, dark figures in the golden horizontal light of late spring sundown in the wasteland of housing developments that is the Bronx’s Co-Op City, and people heard the scream, and people heard the word kill, and if their radios were on they turned them up and if their radios were off they turned them on and then turned them up because it was better that way, safer.
“Rico Balazar broke his word! I stood up for him and he didn’t stand up for me! So I tell you to stick it up your fuckin ass, I tell him to stick it up his fuckin ass, I tell anybody I want to stick it up his fuckin ass!”
Andolini looked at him. His eyes were so brown the color seemed to have leaked into his corneas, turning them the yellow of old parchment.
“I tell President Reagan to stick it up his ass if he breaks his word to me, and fuck his fuckin rectal palp or whatever it is!”
The words died away in echoes on brick and concrete. A single child, his skin very black against his white basketball shorts and high-topped sneakers, stood in the playground across the street, watching them, a basketball held loosely against his side in the crook of his elbow.
“You done?” Andolini asked when the last of the echoes were gone.
“Yes,” Eddie said in a completely normal tone of voice.
“Okay,” Andolini said. He spread his anthropoid fingers and smiled … and when he smiled, two things happened simultaneously: the first was that you saw a charm that was so surprising it had a way of leaving people defenseless; the second was that you saw how bright he really was. How dangerously bright. “Now can we start over?”
Eddie brushed his hands through his hair, crossed his arms briefly so he could scratch both arms at the same time, and said, “I think we better, because this is going nowhere.”
“Okay,” Andolini said. “No one has said nothing, and no one has ranked out nobody.” And without turning his head or breaking the rhythm of his speech he added, “Get back in the truck, dumb wit.”
Col Vincent, who had climbed cautiously out of the delivery truck through the door Andolini had left open retreated so fast he thumped his head. He slid across the seat and slouched in his former place, rubbing it and sulking.
“You gotta understand the deal changed when the Customs people put the arm on you,” Andolini said reasonably. “Balazar is a big man. He has interests to protect. People to protect. One of those people, it just so happens, is your brother Henry. You think that’s bullshit? If you do, you better think about the way Henry is now.”
“Henry’s fine,” Eddie said, but he knew better and he couldn’t keep the knowing out of his voice. He heard it and knew Jack Andolini heard it, too. These days Henry was always on the nod, it seemed like. There were holes in his shirts from cigarette burns. He had cut the shit out of his hand using the electric can-opener on a can of Calo for Potzie, their cat. Eddie didn’t know how you cut yourself with an electric can-opener, but Henry had managed it. Sometimes the kitchen table would be powdery with Henry’s leavings, or Eddie would find blackened curls of char in the bathroom sink.
Henry, he would say, Henry, you gotta take care of this, this is getting out of hand, you’re a bust walking around and waiting to happen.
Yeah, okay, little brother, Henry would respond, zero perspiration, I got it all under control, but sometimes, looking at Henry’s ashy face and burned out eyes, Eddie knew Henry was never going to have anything under control again.
What he wanted to say to Henry and couldn’t had nothing to do with Henry getting busted or getting them both busted. What he wanted to say was Henry, it’s like you’re looking for a room to die in. That’s how it looks to me, and I want you to fucking quit it. Because if you die, what did I live for?
“Henry isn’t fine,” Jack Andolini said. “He needs someone to watch out for him. He needs—what’s that song say? A bridge over troubled waters. That’s what Henry needs. A bridge over troubled waters. If Roche is being that bridge.”
If Roche is a bridge to hell, Eddie thought. Out loud he said, “That’s where Henry is? At Balazar’s place?”
“Yes.”
“I give him his goods, he gives me Henry?”
“And your goods,” Andolini said, “don’t forget that.”
“The deal goes back to normal, in other words.”
“Right.”
“Now tell me you think that’s really gonna happen. Come on, Jack. Tell me. I wanna see if you can do it with a straight face. And if you can do it with a straight face, I wanna see how much your nose grows.”
“I don’t understand you, Eddie.”
“Sure you do. Balazar thinks I’ve got his goods? If he thinks that, he must be stupid, and I know he’s not stupid.”
“I don’t know what he thinks,” Andolini said serenely. “It’s not my job to know what he thinks. He knows you had his goods when you left the Islands, he knows Customs grabbed you and then let you go, he knows you’re here and not on your way to Riker’s, he knows his goods have to be somewhere.”
“And he knows Customs is still all over me like a wetsuit on a skin-diver, because you know it, and you sent him some kind of coded message on the truck’s radio. Something like ‘Double cheese, hold the anchovies,’ right, Jack?”
Jack Andolini said nothing and looked serene.
“Only you were just telling him something he already knew. Like connecting the dots in a picture you can already see what it is.”
Andolini stood in the golden sunset light that was slowly turning furnace orange and continued to look serene and continued to say nothing at all.
“He thinks they turned me. He thinks they’re running me. He thinks I might be stupid enough to run. I don’t exactly blame him. I mean, why not? A smackhead will do anything. You want to check, see if I’m wearing a wire?”
“I know you’re not,” Andolini said. “I got something in the van. It’s like a fuzz-buster, only it picks up short-range radio transmissions. And for what it’s worth, I don’t think you’re running for the Feds.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. So do we get in the van and go into the city or what?”
“Do I have a choice?”
No, Roland said inside his head.
“No,” Andolini said.
Eddie went back to the van. The kid with the basketball was still standing across the street, his shadow now so long it was a gantry.
“Get out of here, kid,” Eddie said. “You were never here, you never saw nothing or no one. Fuck off.”
The kid ran.
Col was grinning at him.
“Push over, champ,” Eddie said.
“I think you oughtta sit in the middle, Eddie.”
“Push over,” Eddie said again. Col looked at him, then looked at Andolini, who did not look at him but only pulled the driver’s door closed and looked serenely straight ahead like Buddha on his day off, leaving them to work the seating arrangements out for themselves. Col glanced back at Eddie’s face and decided to push over.
They headed into New York—and although the gunslinger (who could only stare wonderingly at spires even greater and more graceful, bridges that spanned a wide river like steel cobwebs, and rotored aircarriages that hovered like strange man-made insects) did not know it, the place they were headed for was the Tower.
/> 9
Like Andolini, Enrico Balazar did not think Eddie Dean was running for the Feds; like Andolini, Balazar knew it.
The bar was empty. The sign on the door read CLOSED TONITE ONLY. Balazar sat in his office, waiting for Andolini and Col Vincent to arrive with the Dean kid. His two personal body-guards, Claudio Andolini, Jack’s brother, and ‘Cimi Dretto, were with him. They sat on the sofa to the left of Balazar’s large desk, watching, fascinated, as the edifice Balazar was building grew. The door was open. Beyond the door was a short hallway. To the right it led to the back of the bar and the little kitchen beyond, where a few simple pasta dishes were prepared. To the left was the accountant’s office and the storage room. In the accountant’s office three more of Balazar’s “gentlemen”—this was how they were known—were playing Trivial Pursuit with Henry Dean.
“Okay,” George Biondi was saying, “here’s an easy one, Henry. Henry? You there, Henry? Earth to Henry, Earth people need you. Come in, Henry. I say again: come in, H—”
“I’m here, I’m here,” Henry said. His voice was the slurry, muddy voice of a man who is still asleep telling his wife he’s awake so she’ll leave him alone for another five minutes.
“Okay. The category is Arts and Entertainment. The question is … Henry? Don’t you fuckin nod off on me, asshole!”
“I’m not!” Henry cried back querulously.
“Okay. The question is, ‘What enormously popular novel by William Peter Blatty, set in the posh Washington D.C. suburb of Georgetown, concerned the demonic possession of a young girl?’ “
“Johnny Cash,” Henry replied.
“Jesus Christ!” Tricks Postino yelled. “That’s what you say to every thin! Johnny Cash, that’s what you say to fuckin everythin!”
“Johnny Cash is everything,” Henry replied gravely, and there was a moment of silence palpable in its considering surprise… then a gravelly burst of laughter not just from the men in the room with Henry but the two other “gentlemen” sitting in the storage room.
“You want me to shut the door, Mr. Balazar?” ‘Cimi asked quietly.
“No, that’s fine,” Balazar said. He was second-generation Sicilian, but there was no trace of accent in his speech, nor was it the speech of a man whose only education had been in the streets. Unlike many of his contemporaries in the business, he had finished high school. Had in fact done more: for two years he had gone to business school—NYU. His voice, like his business methods, was quiet and cultured and American, and this made his physical aspect as deceiving as Jack Andolini’s. People hearing his clear, unaccented American voice for the first time almost always looked dazed, as if hearing a particularly good piece of ventriloquism. He looked like a farmer or innkeeper or small-time mafioso who had been successful more by virtue of being at the right place at the right time than because of any brains. He looked like what the wiseguys of a previous generation had called a “Mustache Pete.” He was a fat man who dressed like a peasant. This evening he wore a plain white cotton shirt open at the throat (there were spreading sweat-stains beneath the arms) and plain gray twill pants. On his fat sockless feet were brown loafers, so old they were more like slippers than shoes. Blue and purple varicose veins squirmed on his ankles.
‘Cimi and Claudio watched him, fascinated.
In the old days they had called him Roche—The Rock. Some of the old-timers still did. Always in the right-hand top drawer of his desk, where other businessmen might keep pads, pens, paper-clips, things of that sort, Enrico Balazar kept three decks of cards. He did not play games with them, however.
He built with them.
He would take two cards and lean them against each other, making an A without the horizontal stroke. Next to it he would make another A-shape. Over the top of the two he would lay a single card, making a roof. He would make A after A, overlaying each, until his desk supported a house of cards. You bent over and looked in, you saw something that looked like a hive of triangles. ‘Cimi had seen these houses fall over hundreds of times (Claudio had also seen it happen from time to time, but not so frequently, because he was thirty years younger than ‘Cimi, who expected to soon retire with his bitch of a wife to a farm they owned in northern New Jersey, where he would devote all his time to his garden… and to outliving the bitch he had married; not his motherin-law, he had long since given up any wistful notion he might once have had of eating fettucini at the wake of La Monstra, La Monstra was eternal, but for outliving the bitch there was at least some hope; his father had had a saying which, when translated, meant something like “God pisses down the back of your neck every day but only drowns you once,” and while ‘Cimi wasn’t completely sure he thought it meant God was a pretty good guy after all, and so he could hope to outlive the one if not the other), but had only seen Balazar put out of temper by such a fall on a single occasion. Mostly it was something errant that did it—someone closing a door hard in another room, or a drunk stumbling against a wall; there had been times when ‘Cimi saw an edifice Mr. Balazar (whom he still called Da Boss, like a character in a Chester Gould comic strip) had spent hours building fall down because the bass on the juke was too loud. Other times these airy constructs fell down for no perceptible reason at all. Once—this was a story he had told at least five thousand times, and one of which every person he knew (with the exception of himself) had tired—Da Boss had looked up at him from the ruins and said: “You see this ‘Cimi? For every mother who ever cursed God for her child dead in the road, for every father who ever cursed the man who sent him | away from the factory with no job, for every child who was ever born to pain and asked why, this is the answer. Our lives are like these things I build. Sometimes they fall down for a I reason, sometimes they fall down for no reason at all.”
Carlocimi Dretto thought this the most profound statement of the human condition he had ever heard.
That one time Balazar had been put out of temper by the collapse of one of his structures had been twelve, maybe fourteen years ago. There was a guy who came in to see him about booze. A guy with no class, no manners. A guy who smelled like he took a bath once a year whether he needed it or not. A mick, in other words. And of course it was booze. With micks it was always booze, never dope. And this mick, he thought what was on Da Boss’s desk was a joke. “Make a wish!” he yelled after Da Boss had explained to him, in the way one gentleman explains to another, why it was impossible for them to do business. And then the mick, one of those guys with curly red hair and a complexion so white he looked like he had TB or something, one of those guys whose names started with O and then had that little curly mark between the O and the real name, had blown on Da Boss’s desk, like a nino blowing out the candles on a birthday cake, and cards flew everywhere around Balazar’s head, and Balazar had opened the left top drawer in his desk, the drawer where other businessmen might keep their personal stationery or their private memos or something like that, and he had brought out a .45, and he had shot the Mick in the head, and Balazar’s expression never changed, and after ‘Cimi and a guy named Truman Alexander who had died of a heart attack four years ago had buried the Mick under a chickenhouse somewhere outside of Sedonville, Connecticut, Balazar had said to ‘Cimi, “It’s up to men to build things, paisan. It’s up to God to blow them down. You agree?”
“Yes, Mr. Balazar,” ‘Cimi had said. He did agree.
Balazar had nodded, pleased. “You did like I said? You put him someplace where chickens or ducks or something like that could shit on him?”
“Yes.”
“That’s very good,” Balazar said calmly, and took a fresh deck of cards from the right top drawer of his desk.
One level was not enough for Balazar, Roche. Upon the roof of the first level he would build a second, only not quite so wide; on top of the second a third; on top of the third a fourth. He would go on, but after the fourth level he would have to stand to do so. You no longer had to bend much to look in, and when you did what you saw wasn’t rows of triangl
e shapes but a fragile, bewildering, and impossibly lovely hall of diamond-shapes. You looked in too long, you felt dizzy. Once ‘Cimi had gone in the Mirror Maze at Coney and he had felt like that. He had never gone in again.
‘Cimi said (he believed no one believed him; the truth was no one cared one way or the other) he had once seen Balazar build something which was no longer a house of cards but a tower of cards, one which stood nine levels high before it collapsed. That no one gave a shit about this was something ‘Cimi didn’t know because everyone he told affected amazement because he was close to Da Boss. But they would have been amazed if he had had the words to describe it—how delicate it had been, how it reached almost three quarters of the way from the top of the desk to the ceiling, a lacy construct of jacks and deuces and kings and tens and Big Akers, a red and black configuration of paper diamonds standing in defiance of a world spinning through a universe of incoherent motions and forces; a tower that seemed to ‘Cimi’s amazed eyes to be a ringing denial of all the unfair paradoxes of life.
If he had known how, he would have said: I looked at what he built, and to me it explained the stars.
10
Balazar knew how everything would have to be.
The Feds had smelled Eddie—maybe he had been stupid to send Eddie in the first place, maybe his instincts were failing him, but Eddie had seemed somehow so right, so perfect. His uncle, the first man he had worked for in the business, said there were exceptions to every rule but one: Never trust a junkie. Balazar had said nothing—it was not the place of a boy of fifteen to speak, even if only to agree—but privately had thought the only rule to which there was no exception was that there were some rules for which that was not true.
But if Tio Verone were alive today, Balazar thought, he would laugh at you and say look, Rico, you always were too smart for your own good, you knew the rules, you kept your mouth shut when it was respectful to keep it shut, but you always had that snot look in your eyes. You always knew too much about how smart you were, and so you finally fell into the pit of your own pride, just like I always knew you would.
