“Well good,” Eddie said. “You thank him for me, and you tell him that I’m back, his goods are safe, and I can take care of Henry just like Henry always took care of me. You tell him I’ll have a six-pack on ice and when Henry walks in the place we’re going to split it and then we’ll get in our car and come on into town and do the deal like it was supposed to be done. Like we talked about it.”

“Balazar wants to see you, Eddie,” Jack said. His voice was implacable, immovable. His head did not turn. “Get in the truck.”

“Stick it where the sun doesn’t shine, motherfucker,” Eddie said, and started for the doors to his building.

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 was 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 door-handle 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?”