TEN
He swallowed another cup of Tower’s coffee, this time without the Half and Half. Then he took the plastic-wrapped volume in hand once more.
“What makes it special?” he asked. “I mean, it’s special to me because I met someone recently whose name is the same as the name of the guy who wrote this. But—”
An idea struck Eddie, and he turned to the back flap, hoping for a picture of the author. What he found instead was a curt two-line author bio: “BENJAMIN SLIGHTMAN JR. is a rancher in Montana. This is his second novel.” Below this was a drawing of an eagle, and a slogan: BUY WAR BONDS!
“But why’s it special to you? What makes it worth seventy-five hundred bucks?”
Tower’s face kindled. Fifteen minutes before he had been in mortal terror for his life, but you’d never know it looking at him now, Eddie thought. Now he was in the grip of his obsession. Roland had his Dark Tower; this man had his rare books.
He held it so Eddie could see the cover. “The Dogan, right?”
“Right.”
Tower flipped the book open and pointed to the inner flap, also under plastic, where the story was summarized. “And here?”
“‘The Dogan,’ ” Eddie read. “‘A thrilling tale of the old west and one Indian brave’s heroic effort to survive.’ So?”
“Now look at this!” Tower said triumphantly, and turned to the title page. Here Eddie read:
The Hogan Benjamin Slightman Jr.
“I don’t get it,” Eddie said. “What’s the big deal?”
Tower rolled his eyes. “Look again.”
“Why don’t you just tell me what—”
“No, look again. I insist. The joy is in the discovery, Mr. Dean. Any collector will tell you the same. Stamps, coins, or books, the joy is in the discovery.”
He flipped back to the cover again, and this time Eddie saw it. “The title on the front’s misprinted, isn’t it? Dogan instead of Hogan.”
Tower nodded happily. “A hogan is an Indian home of the type illustrated on the front. A dogan is . . . well, nothing. The misprinted cover makes the book somewhat valuable, but now . . . look at this . . . ”
He turned to the copyright page and handed the book to Eddie. The copyright date was 1943, which of course explained the eagle and the slogan on the author-bio flap. The title of the book was given as The Hogan, so that seemed all right. Eddie was about to ask when he got it for himself.
“They left the ‘Jr.’ off the author’s name, didn’t they?”
“Yes! Yes!” Tower was almost hugging himself. “As if the book had actually been written by the author’s father! In fact, once when I was at a bibliographic convention in Philadelphia, I explained this book’s particular situation to an attorney who gave a lecture on copyright law, and this guy said that Slightman Jr.’s father might actually be able to assert right of ownership over this book because of a simple typographical error! Amazing, don’t you think?”
“Totally,” Eddie said, thinking Slightman the Elder. Thinking Slightman the Younger. Thinking about how Jake had become fast friends with the latter and wondering why this gave him such a bad feeling now, sitting here and drinking coffee in little old Calla New York.
At least he took the Ruger, Eddie thought.
“Are you telling me that’s all it takes to make a book valuable?” he asked Tower. “One misprint on the cover, a couple more inside, and all at once the thing’s worth seventy-five hundred bucks?”
“Not at all,” Tower said, looking shocked. “But Mr. Slightman wrote three really excellent Western novels, all taking the Indians’ point of view. The Hogan is the middle one. He became a big bug in Montana after the war—some job having to do with water and mineral rights—and then, here is the irony, a group of Indians killed him. Scalped him, actually. They were drinking outside a general store—”
A general store named Took’s, Eddie thought. I’d bet my watch and warrant on it.
“—and apparently Mr. Slightman said something they took objection to, and . . . well, there goes your ballgame.”
“Do all your really valuable books have similar stories?” Eddie asked. “I mean, some sort of coincidence makes them valuable, and not just the stories themselves?”
Tower laughed. “Young man, most people who collect rare books won’t even open their purchases. Opening and closing a book damages the spine. Hence damaging the resale price.”
“Doesn’t that strike you as slightly sick behavior?”
“Not at all,” Tower said, but a telltale red blush was climbing his cheeks. Part of him apparently took Eddie’s point. “If a customer spends eight thousand dollars for a signed first edition of Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, it makes perfect sense to put that book away in a safe place where it can be admired but not touched. If the fellow actually wants to read the story, let him buy a Vintage paperback.”
“You believe that,” Eddie said, fascinated. “You actually believe that.”
“Well . . . yes. Books can be objects of great value. That value is created in different ways. Sometimes just the author’s signature is enough to do it. Sometimes—as in this case—it’s a misprint. Sometimes it’s a first print-run—a first edition—that’s extremely small. And does any of this have to do with why you came here, Mr. Dean? Is it what you wanted to . . . to palaver about?”
“No, I suppose not.” But what exactly had he wanted to palaver about? He’d known—it had all been perfectly clear to him as he’d herded Andolini and Biondi out of the back room, then stood in the doorway watching them stagger to the Town Car, supporting each other. Even in cynical, mind-your-own-business New York, they had drawn plenty of looks. Both of them had been bleeding, and both had had the same stunned What the hell HAPPENED to me? look in their eyes. Yes, then it had been clear. The book—and the name of the author—had muddied up his thinking again. He took it from Tower and set it facedown on the counter so he wouldn’t have to look at it. Then he went to work regathering his thoughts.
“The first and most important thing, Mr. Tower, is that you have to get out of New York until July fifteenth. Because they’ll be back. Probably not those guys specifically, but some of the other guys Balazar uses. And they’ll be more eager than ever to teach you and me a lesson. Balazar’s a despot.” This was a word Eddie had learned from Susannah—she had used it to describe the Tick-Tock Man. “His way of doing business is to always escalate. You slap him, he slaps back twice as hard. Punch him in the nose, he breaks your jaw. You toss a grenade, he tosses a bomb.”
Tower groaned. It was a theatrical sound (although probably not meant that way), and under other circumstances, Eddie might have laughed. Not under these. Besides, everything he’d wanted to say to Tower was coming back to him. He could do this dicker, by God. He would do this dicker.
“Me they probably won’t be able to get at. I’ve got business elsewhere. Over the hills and far away, may ya say so. Your job is to make sure they won’t be able to get at you, either.”
“But surely . . . after what you just did . . . and even if they didn’t believe you about the women and children . . . ” Tower’s eyes, wide behind his crooked spectacles, begged Eddie to say that he had really not been serious about creating enough corpses to fill Grand Army Plaza. Eddie couldn’t help him there.
“Cal, listen. Guys like Balazar don’t believe or disbelieve. What they do is test the limits. Did I scare Big Nose? No, just knocked him out. Did I scare Jack? Yes. And it’ll stick, because Jack’s got a little bit of imagination. Will Balazar be impressed that I scared Ugly Jack? Yes . . . but just enough to be cautious.”
Eddie leaned over the counter, looking at Tower earnestly.
“I don’t want to kill kids, okay? Let’s get that straight. In . . . well, in another place, let’s leave it at that, in another place me and my friends are going to put our lives on the line to save kids. But they’re human kids. People like Jack and Tricks Postino and Balazar himself, they’re animals. Wolves on two legs. And do wolves raise human beings? No, they raise more wolves. Do male wolves mate with human women? No, they mate with female wolves. So if I had to go in there—and I would if I had to—I’d tell myself I was cleaning out a pack of wolves, right down to the smallest cub. No more than that. And no less.”
“My God he means it,” Tower said. He spoke low, and all in a breath, and to the thin air.
“I absolutely do, but it’s neither here nor there,” Eddie said. “The point is, they’ll come after you. Not to kill you, but to turn you around in their direction again. If you stay here, Cal, I think you can look forward to a serious maiming at the very least. Is there a place you can go until the fifteenth of next month? Do you have enough money? I don’t have any, but I guess I could get some.”
In his mind, Eddie was already in Brooklyn. Balazar guardian-angeled a poker game in the back room of Bernie’s Barber Shop, everybody knew that. The game might not be going on during a weekday, but there’d be somebody back there with cash. Enough to—
“Aaron has some money,” Tower was saying reluctantly. “He’s offered a good many times. I’ve always told him no. He’s also always telling me I need to go on a vacation. I think by this he means I should get away from the fellows you just turned out. He is curious about what they want, but he doesn’t ask. A hothead, but a gentleman hothead.” Tower smiled briefly. “Perhaps Aaron and I could go on a vacation together, young sir. After all, we might not get another chance.”
Eddie was pretty sure the chemo and radiation treatments were going to keep Aaron Deepneau up and on his feet for at least another four years, but this was probably not the time to say so. He looked toward the door of The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind and saw the other door. Beyond it was the mouth of the cave. Sitting there like a comic-strip yogi, just a cross-legged silhouette, was the gunslinger. Eddie wondered how long he’d been gone over there, how long Roland had been listening to the muffled but still maddening sound of the todash chimes.
“Would Atlantic City be far enough, do you think?” Tower asked timidly.
Eddie Dean almost shuddered at the thought. He had a brief vision of two plump sheep—getting on in years, yes, but still quite tasty—wandering into not just a pack of wolves but a whole city of them.
“Not there,” Eddie said. “Anyplace but there.”
“What about Maine or New Hampshire? Perhaps we could rent a cottage on a lake somewhere until the fifteenth of July.”
Eddie nodded. He was a city boy. It was hard for him to imagine the bad guys way up in northern New England, wearing those checkered caps and down vests as they chomped their pepper sandwiches and drank their Ruffino. “That’d be better,” he said. “And while you’re there, you might see if you could find a lawyer.”
Tower burst out laughing. Eddie looked at him, head cocked, smiling a little himself. It was always good to make folks laugh, but it was better when you knew what the fuck they were laughing at.
“I’m sorry,” Tower said after a moment or two. “It’s just that Aaron was a lawyer. His sister and two brothers, all younger, are still lawyers. They like to boast that they have the most unique legal letterhead in New York, perhaps in the entire United States. It reads simply ‘DEEPNEAU.’ ”
“That speeds things up,” Eddie said. “I want you to have Mr. Deepneau draw up a contract while you’re vacationing in New England—”
“Hiding in New England,” Tower said. He suddenly looked morose. “Holed up in New England.”
“Call it whatcha wanna,” Eddie said, “but get that paper drawn up. You’re going to sell that lot to me and my friends. To the Tet Corporation. You’re just gonna get a buck to start with, but I can almost guarantee you that in the end you’ll get fair market value.”
He had more to say, lots, but stopped there. When he’d held his hand out for the book, The Dogan or The Hogan or whatever it was, an expression of miserly reluctance had come over Tower’s face. What made the look unpleasant was the undercurrent of stupidity in it . . . and not very far under, either. Oh God, he’s gonna fight me on this. After everything that’s happened, he’s still gonna fight me on it. And why? Because he really is a packrat.
“You can trust me, Cal,” he said, knowing trust was not exactly the issue. “I set my watch and warrant on it. Hear me, now. Hear me, I beg.”
“I don’t know you from Adam. You walk in off the street—”
“—and save your life, don’t forget that part.”
Tower’s face grew set and stubborn. “They weren’t going to kill me. You said that yourself.”
“They were gonna burn your favorite books. Your most valuable ones.”
“Not my most valuable. Also, that might have been a bluff.”
Eddie took a deep breath and let it out, hoping his suddenly strong desire to lean across the counter and sink his fingers into Tower’s fat throat would depart or at least subside. He reminded himself that if Tower hadn’t been stubborn, he probably would have sold the lot to Sombra long before now. The rose would have been plowed under. And the Dark Tower? Eddie had an idea that when the rose died, the Dark Tower would simply fall like the one in Babel when God had gotten tired of it and wiggled His finger. No waiting around another hundred or thousand years for the machinery running the Beams to quit. Just ashes, ashes, we all fall down. And then? Hail the Crimson King, lord of todash darkness.
“Cal, if you sell me and my friends your vacant lot, you’re off the hook. Not only that, but you’ll eventually have enough money to run your little shop for the rest of your life.” He had a sudden thought. “Hey, do you know a company called Holmes Dental?”
Tower smiled. “Who doesn’t? I use their floss. And their toothpaste. I tried the mouthwash, but it’s too strong. Why do you ask?”
“Because Odetta Holmes is my wife. I may look like Froggy the Gremlin, but in truth I’m Prince Fuckin Charming.”
Tower was quiet for a long time. Eddie curbed his impatience and let the man think. At last Tower said, “You think I’m being foolish. That I’m being Silas Marner, or worse, Ebenezer Scrooge.”
Eddie didn’t know who Silas Marner was, but he took Tower’s point from the context of the discussion. “Let’s put it this way,” he said. “After what you’ve just been through, you’re too smart not to know where your best interests lie.”
“I feel obligated to tell you that this isn’t just mindless miserliness on my part; there’s an element of caution, as well. I know that piece of New York is valuable, any piece of Manhattan is, but it’s not just that. I have a safe out back. There’s something in it. Something perhaps even more valuable than my copy of Ulysses.”
“Then why isn’t it in your safe-deposit box?”
“Because it’s supposed to be here,” Tower said. “It’s always been here. Perhaps waiting for you, or someone like you. Once, Mr. Dean, my family owned almost all of Turtle Bay, and . . . well, wait. Will you wait?”
“Yes,” Eddie said.
What choice?