EIGHT
Jake watched Eddie go past pale to ashy gray. His eyes were bulging from their sockets. Not without difficulty, Jake pried the clamping hand off his shoulder. Eddie made as if to point with that hand, but didn’t seem to have the strength. It fell against the side of his leg with a little thump.
The man who had gotten out on the passenger side of the Town Car walked around to the sidewalk while the driver opened the rear curbside door. Even to Jake their moves looked practiced, almost like steps in a dance. The man who got out of the back seat was wearing an expensive suit, but that didn’t change the fact that he was basically a dumpy little guy with a potbelly and black hair going gray around the edges. Dandruffy black hair, from the look of his suit’s shoulders.
To Jake, the day suddenly felt darker than ever. He looked up to see if the sun had gone behind a cloud. It hadn’t, but it almost seemed to him that there was a black corona forming around its brilliant circle, like a ring of mascara around a startled eye.
Half a block farther downtown, the 1977 version of him was glancing in the window of a restaurant, and Jake could remember the name of it: Chew Chew Mama’s. Not far beyond it was Tower of Power Records, where he would think Towers are selling cheap today. If that version of him had looked back, he would have seen the gray Town Car . . . but he hadn’t. Kid Seventy-seven’s mind was fixed firmly on the future.
“It’s Balazar,” Eddie said.
“What?”
Eddie was pointing at the dumpy guy, who had paused to adjust his Sulka tie. The other two now stood flanking him. They looked simultaneously relaxed and watchful.
“Enrico Balazar. And looking much younger. God, he’s almost middle-aged!”
“It’s 1977,” Jake reminded him. Then, as the penny dropped: “That’s the guy you and Roland killed?” Eddie had told Jake the story of the shoot-out at Balazar’s club in 1987, leaving out the gorier parts. The part, for instance, where Kevin Blake had lobbed the head of Eddie’s brother into Balazar’s office in an effort to flush Eddie and Roland into the open. Henry Dean, the great sage and eminent junkie.
“Yeah,” Eddie said. “The guy Roland and I killed. And the one who was driving, that’s Jack Andolini. Old Double-Ugly, people used to call him, although never to his face. He went through one of those doors with me just before the shooting started.”
“Roland killed him, too. Didn’t he?”
Eddie nodded. It was simpler than trying to explain how Jack Andolini had happened to die blind and faceless beneath the tearing claws and ripping jaws of the lobstrosities on the beach.
“The other bodyguard’s George Biondi. Big Nose. I killed him myself. Will kill him. Ten years from now.” Eddie looked as if he might faint at any second.
“Eddie, are you okay?”
“I guess so. I guess I have to be.” They had drawn away from the bookshop’s doorway. Oy was still crouched at Jake’s ankle. Down Second Avenue, Jake’s other, earlier self had disappeared. I’m running by now, Jake thought. Maybe jumping over the UPS guy’s dolly. Sprinting all-out for the delicatessen, because I’m sure that’s the way back to Mid-World. The way back to him.
Balazar peered at his reflection in the window beside the TODAY’S SPECIALS display-board, gave the wings of hair above his ears one last little fluff with the tips of his fingers, then stepped through the open door. Andolini and Biondi followed.
“Hard guys,” Jake said.
“The hardest,” Eddie agreed.
“From Brooklyn.”
“Well, yeah.”
“Why are hard guys from Brooklyn visiting a used-book store in Manhattan?”
“I think that’s what we’re here to find out. Jake, did I hurt your shoulder?”
“I’m okay. But I don’t really want to go back in there.”
“Neither do I. So let’s go.”
They went back into The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind.
NINE
Oy was still at Jake’s heel and still whining. Jake wasn’t crazy about the sound, but he understood it. The smell of fear in the bookstore was palpable. Deepneau sat beside the chessboard, gazing unhappily at Calvin Tower and the newcomers, who didn’t look much like bibliophiles in search of the elusive signed first edition. The other two old guys at the counter were drinking the last of their coffee in big gulps, with the air of fellows who have just remembered important appointments elsewhere.
Cowards, Jake thought with a contempt he didn’t recognize as a relatively new thing in his life. Lowbellies. Being old forgives some of it, but not all of it.
“We just have a couple of things to discuss, Mr. Toren,” Balazar was saying. He spoke in a low, calm, reasonable voice, without even a trace of accent. “Please, if we could step back into your office—”
“We don’t have business,” Tower said. His eyes kept drifting to Andolini. Jake supposed he knew why. Jack Andolini looked the ax-wielding psycho in a horror movie. “Come July fifteenth, we might have business. Might. So we could talk after the Fourth. I guess. If you wanted to.” He smiled to show he was being reasonable. “But now? Gee, I just don’t see the point. It’s not even June yet. And for your information my name’s not—”
“He doesn’t see the point,” Balazar said. He looked at Andolini; looked at the one with the big nose; raised his hands to his shoulders, then dropped them. What’s wrong with this world of ours? the gesture said. “Jack? George? This man took a check from me—the amount before the decimal point was a one followed by five zeroes—and now he says he doesn’t see the point of talking to me.”
“Unbelievable,” Biondi said. Andolini said nothing. He simply looked at Calvin Tower, muddy brown eyes peering out from beneath the unlovely bulge of his skull like mean little animals peering out of a cave. With a face like that, Jake supposed, you didn’t have to talk much to get your point across. The point being intimidation.
“I want to talk to you,” Balazar said. He spoke in a patient, reasonable tone of voice, but his eyes were fixed on Tower’s face with a terrible intensity. “Why? Because my employers in this matter want me to talk to you. That’s good enough for me. And do you know what? I think you can afford five minutes of chit-chat for your hundred grand. Don’t you?”
“The hundred thousand is gone,” Tower said bleakly. “As I’m sure you and whoever hired you must know.”
“That’s of no concern to me,” Balazar said. “Why would it be? It was your money. What concerns me is whether or not you’re going to take us out back. If not, we’ll have to have our conversation right here, in front of the whole world.”
The whole world now consisted of Aaron Deepneau, one billy-bumbler, and a couple of expatriate New Yorkers none of the men in the bookstore could see. Deepneau’s counter-buddies had run like the lowbellies they were.
Tower made one last try. “I don’t have anyone to mind the store. Lunch-hour is coming up, and we often have quite a few browsers during—”
“This place doesn’t do fifty dollars a day,” Andolini said, “and we all know it, Mr. Toren. If you’re really worried you’re going to miss a big sale, let him run the cash register for a few minutes.”
For one horrible second, Jake thought the one Eddie had called “Old Double-Ugly” meant none other than John “Jake” Chambers. Then he realized Andolini was pointing past him, at Deepneau.
Tower gave in. Or Toren. “Aaron?” he asked. “Do you mind?”
“Not if you don’t,” Deepneau said. He looked troubled. “Sure you want to talk with these guys?”
Biondi gave him a look. Jake thought Deepneau stood up under it remarkably well. In a weird way, he felt proud of the old guy.
“Yeah,” Tower said. “Yeah, it’s fine.”
“Don’t worry, he won’t lose his butthole virginity on our account,” Biondi said, and laughed.
“Watch your mouth, you’re in a place of scholarship,” Balazar said, but Jake thought he smiled a little. “Come on, Toren. Just a little chat.”
“That’s not my name! I had it legally changed on—”
“Whatever,” Balazar said soothingly. He actually patted Tower’s arm. Jake was still trying to get used to the idea that all this . . . all this melodrama . . . had happened after he’d left the store with his two new books (new to him, anyway) and resumed his journey. That it had all happened behind his back.
“A squarehead’s always a squarehead, right, boss?” Biondi asked jovially. “Just a Dutchman. Don’t matter what he calls himself.”
Balazar said, “If I want you to talk, George, I’ll tell you what I want you to say. Have you got that?”
“Okay,” Biondi said. Then, perhaps after deciding that didn’t sound quite enthusiastic enough: “Yeah! Sure.”
“Good.” Balazar, now holding the arm he had patted, guided Tower toward the back of the shop. Books were piled helter-skelter here; the air was heavy with the scent of a million musty pages. There was a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. Tower produced a ring of keys, and they jingled slightly as he picked through them.
“His hands are shaking,” Jake murmured.
Eddie nodded. “Mine would be, too.”
Tower found the key he wanted, turned it in the lock, opened the door. He took another look at the three men who had come to visit him—hard guys from Brooklyn—then led them into the back room. The door closed behind them, and Jake heard the sound of a bolt being shot across. He doubted Tower himself had done that.
Jake looked up into the convex anti-shoplifting mirror mounted in the corner of the shop, saw Deepneau pick up the telephone beside the cash register, consider it, then put it down again.
“What do we do now?” Jake asked Eddie.
“I’m gonna try something,” Eddie said. “I saw it in a movie once.” He stood in front of the closed door, then tipped Jake a wink. “Here I go. If I don’t do anything but bump my head, feel free to call me an asshole.”
Before Jake could ask him what he was talking about, Eddie walked into the door. Jake saw his eyes close and his mouth tighten in a grimace. It was the expression of a man who expects to take a hard knock.
Only there was no hard knock. Eddie simply passed through the door. For one moment his moccasin-clad foot was sticking out, and then it went through, too. There was a low rasping sound, like a hand being passed over rough wood.
Jake bent down and picked Oy up. “Close your eyes,” he said.
“Eyes,” the bumbler agreed, but continued to look at Jake with that expression of calm adoration. Jake closed his own eyes, squinting them shut. When he opened them again, Oy was mimicking him. Without wasting any time, Jake walked into the door with the EMPLOYEES ONLY sign on it. There was a moment of darkness and the smell of wood. Deep in his head, he heard a couple of those disturbing chimes again. Then he was through.