“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 smack-head 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 air-carriages 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 TONIGHT 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.