Roland nodded. “I have a job for him. One he and Eddie will do together. Pere, that’s a fine privy down below Rosalita’s cottage. Tall. Strong.”

Callahan raised his eyebrows. “Aye, say thankya. ’Twas Tian and his neighbor, Hugh Anselm, who built it.”

“Could you put a lock on the outside of it in the next few days?”

“I could but—”

“If things go well no lock will be necessary, but one can never be sure.”

“No,” Callahan said. “I suppose one can’t. But I can do as you ask.”

“What’s your plan, sugar?” Susannah asked. She spoke in a quiet, oddly gentle voice.

“There’s precious little plan in it. Most times that’s all to the good. The most important thing I can tell you is not to believe anything I say once we get up from here, dust off our bottoms, and rejoin the folken . Especially nothing I say when I stand up at the meeting with the feather in my hand. Most of it will be lies.” He gave them a smile. Above it, his faded blue eyes were as hard as rocks. “My Da’ and Cuthbert’s Da’ used to have a rule between em: first the smiles, then the lies. Last comes gunfire.”

“We’re almost there, aren’t we?” Susannah asked. “Almost to the shooting.”

Roland nodded. “And the shooting will happen so fast and be over so quick that you’ll wonder what all the planning and palaver was for, when in the end it always comes down to the same five minutes’ worth of blood, pain, and stupidity.” He paused, then said: “I always feel sick afterward. Like I did when Bert and I went to see the hanged man.”

“I have a question,” Jake said.

“Ask it,” Roland told him.

“Will we win?”

Roland was quiet for such a long time that Susannah began to be afraid. Then he said: “We know more than they think we know. Far more. They’ve grown complacent. If Andy and Slightman are the only rats in the woodpile, and if there aren’t too many in the Wolfpack—if we don’t run out of plates and cartridges—then yes, Jake, son of Elmer. We’ll win.”

“How many is too many?”

Roland considered, his faded blue eyes looking east. “More than you’d believe,” he said at last. “And, I hope, many more than they would.”

Five

Late that afternoon, Donald Callahan stood in front of the unfound door, trying to concentrate on Second Avenue in the year 1977. What he fixed upon was Chew Chew Mama’s, and how sometimes he and George and Lupe Delgado would go there for lunch.