“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.