Eddie supposed he’d known that, but hearing Roland say it made him feel better. “All right. It was a Memorandum of Agreement. That was right at the top, in big letters. At the bottom it said Agreed to, and there were two signatures. One was Calvin Tower. The other was Richard someone. Do you remember, Jake?”

“Sayre,” Jake said. “Richard Patrick Sayre.” He paused briefly, lips moving, then nodded. “Nineteen letters.”

“And what did it say, this agreement?” Roland asked.

“Not all that much, if you want to know the truth,” Eddie said. “Or that’s what it seemed like to me, anyway. Basically it said that Tower owned a vacant lot on the corner of Forty-sixth Street and Second Avenue—”

“ Thevacant lot,” Jake said. “The one with the rose in it.”

“Yeah, that one. Anyway, Tower signed this agreement on July 15th, 1976. Sombra Corporation gave him a hundred grand. What he gave them, so far as I could tell, was a promise not to sell the lot to anyone but Sombra for the next year, to take care of it—pay the taxes and such—and then to give Sombra first right of purchase, assuming he hasn’t sold it to them by then, anyway. Which he hadn’t when we were there, but the agreement still had a month and a half to run.”

“Mr. Tower said the hundred thousand was all spent,” Jake put in.

“Was there anything in the agreement about this Sombra Corporation having a topping privilege?” Susannah asked.

Eddie and Jake thought it over, exchanged a glance, then shook their heads.

“Sure?” Susannah asked.

“Not quite, but pretty sure,” Eddie said. “You think it matters?”

“I don’t know,” Susannah said. “The kind of agreement you’re talking about…well, without a topping privilege, it just doesn’t seem to make sense. What does it boil down to, when you stop to think about it? ‘I, Calvin Tower, agree to think about selling you my vacant lot. You pay me a hundred thousand dollars and I’ll think about it for a whole year. When I’m not drinking coffee and playing chess with my friends, that is. And when the year’s up, maybe I’ll sell it to you and maybe I’ll keep it and maybe I’ll just auction it off to the highest bidder. And if you don’t like it, sweetcheeks, you just go spit.’ ”

“You’re forgetting something,” Roland said mildly.

“What?” Susannah asked.

“This Sombra is no ordinary law-abiding combination. Ask yourself if an ordinary law-abiding combination would hire someone like Balazar to carry their messages.”

“You have a point,” Eddie said. “Tower was mucho scared.”

“Anyway,” Jake said, “it makes at least a few things clearer. The sign I saw in the vacant lot, for instance. This Sombra Company also got the right to ‘advertise forthcoming projects’ there for their hundred thousand. Did you see that part, Eddie?”