“Couldn’t it have been faulty wiring? Or maybe spontaneous combustion?”

The elderly shine-boy gave Callahan a cynical look. Oh, please, it said. He cocked a polish-smeared thumb at the smoldering ruin. “You see that yella tape? You think they put yella tape says PERLICE INVESTIGATION around a place that spontaneously combust-you-lated? No way, my friend. No way José. Cal Tower was in hock to the bad boys. Up to his eyebrows. Everybody on the block knew it.” The shine-boy waggled his own eyebrows, which were lush and white and tangled. “I hate to think about his loss. He had some very vallable books in the back, there. Ver-ry vallable.”

Callahan thanked the shine-boy for his insights, then turned and started back down Second Avenue. He kept touching himself furtively, trying to convince himself that this was really happening. He kept taking deep breaths of the city air with its tang of hydrocarbons, and relished every city sound, from the snore of the buses (there were ads for Charlie’s Angels on some of them) to the pounding of the jackhammers and the incessant honking of horns. As he approached Tower of Power Records, he paused for a moment, transfixed by the music pouring from the speakers over the doors. It was an oldie he hadn’t heard in years, one that had been popular way back in his Lowell days. Something about following the Pied Piper.

“Crispian St. Peters,” he murmured. “That was his name. Good God, say Man Jesus, I’m really here. I’m really in New York! ”

As if to confirm this, a harried-sounding woman said, “Maybe some people can stand around all day, but some of us are walking here. Think yez could move it along, or at least get over to the side?”

Callahan spoke an apology which he doubted was heard (or appreciated if it was), and moved along. That sense of being in a dream—an extraordinarily vivid dream—persisted until he neared Forty-sixth Street. Then he began to hear the rose, and everything in his life changed.

Seven

At first it was little more than a murmur, but as he drew closer, he thought he could hear many voices, angelic voices, singing. Raising their confident, joyful psalms to God. He had never heard anything so sweet, and he began to run. He came to the fence and laid his hands against it. He began to weep, couldn’t help it. He supposed people were looking at him, but he didn’t care. He suddenly understood a great deal about Roland and his friends, and for the first time felt a part of them. No wonder they were trying so hard to survive, and to go on! No wonder, when this was at stake! There was something on the other side of this fence with its tattered overlay of posters…something so utterly and completely wonderful …