Song of Susannah (26 page)

“Cry pardon,” Eddie said, “but I took a knock on the head while I was arriving in this charming little town, and I think it’s screwed up my hearing. I thought you said that sai . . . that Mr. Tower had decided against selling us the lot.”

Deepneau smiled, rather wearily. “You know perfectly well what I said.”

“But he’s
supposed
to sell it to us! He had a letter from Stefan Toren, his three-times-great grandfather, saying just that!”

“Cal says different,” Aaron responded mildly. “Have another strawberry, Mr. Dean.”

“No thank you!”

“Have another strawberry, Eddie,” Roland said, and handed him one.

Eddie took it. Considered squashing it against Long, Tall, and Ugly’s beak, just for the hell of it, then dipped it first in a saucer of cream, then in the
sugarbowl. He began to eat. And damn, it was hard to stay bitter with that much sweetness flooding your mouth. A fact of which Roland (Deepneau too, for that matter) was surely aware.

“According to Cal,” Deepneau said, “there was nothing in the envelope he had from Stefan Toren except for this man’s name.” He tilted his mostly hairless head toward Roland. “Toren’s will—what was in the olden days sometimes called a ‘dead-letter’—was long gone.”

“I knew what was in the envelope,” Eddie said. “He asked me, and
I knew!
”

“So he told me.” Deepneau regarded him expressionlessly. “He said it was a trick any street-corner magician could do.”

“Did he also tell you that he
promised
to sell us the lot if I could tell him the name? That he fucking
promised?
”

“He claims to have been under considerable stress when he made that promise. As I am sure he was.”

“Does the son of a bitch think we mean to weasel on him?” Eddie asked. His temples were thudding with rage. Had he ever been so angry? Once, he supposed. When Roland had refused to let him go back to New York so he could score some horse. “Is that it? Because we won’t. We’ll come up with every cent he wants, and more. I swear it on the face of my father! And on the heart of my dinh!”

“Listen to me carefully, young man, because this is important.”

Eddie glanced at Roland. Roland nodded slightly,
then crushed out his cigarette on one bootheel. Eddie looked back at Deepneau, silent but glowering.

“He
says
that is exactly the problem. He says you’ll pay him some ridiculously low token amount—a dollar is the usual sum in such cases—and then stiff him for the rest. He claims you tried to hypnotize him into believing you were a supernatural being, or someone with
access
to supernatural beings . . . not to mention access to millions from the Holmes Dental Corporation . . . but he was not fooled.”

Eddie gaped at him.

“These are things Calvin
says
,” Deepneau continued in that same calm voice, “but they are not necessarily the things Calvin
believes.
”

“What in hell do you mean?”

“Calvin has issues with letting go of things,” Deepneau said. “He is quite good at finding rare and antiquarian books, you know—a regular literary Sherlock Holmes—and he is compulsive about acquiring them. I’ve seen him
hound
the owner of a book he wants—I’m afraid there’s no other word that really fits—until the book’s owner gives in and sells. Sometimes just to make Cal stop calling on the telephone, I’m sure.

“Given his talents, his location, and the considerable sum of money to which he gained complete access on his twenty-sixth birthday, Cal should have been one of the most successful antiquarian book-dealers in New York, or in the whole country. His problem isn’t with buying but selling. Once he has an item he’s really worked to acquire, he hates to let it go again. I remember when a book
collector from San Francisco, a fellow almost as compulsive as Cal himself, finally wore down Cal enough to sell him a signed first of
Moby-Dick.
Cal made over seventy thousand dollars on that one deal alone, but he also didn’t sleep for a week.

“He feels much the same way about the lot on the corner of Second and Forty-sixth. It’s the only real property, other than his books, which he still has. And he’s convinced himself that you want to steal it from him.”

There was a short period of silence. Then Roland said: “Does he know better, in his secret heart?”

“Mr. Deschain, I don’t understand what—”

“Aye, ya do,” Roland said. “Does he?”

“Yes,” Deepneau said at last. “I believe he does.”

“Does he understand in his secret heart that we are men of our word who will pay him for his property, unless we’re dead?”

“Yes, probably. But—”

“Does he understand that, if he transfers ownership of the lot to us, and if we make this transfer perfectly clear to Andolini’s dinh—his boss, a man named Balazar—”

“I know the name,” Deepneau said dryly. “It’s in the papers from time to time.”

“That Balazar will then leave your friend alone? If, that is, he can be made to understand that the lot is no longer your friend’s to sell, and that any effort to take revenge on sai Tower will cost Balazar himself dearly?”

Deepneau crossed his arms over his narrow
chest and waited. He was looking at Roland with a kind of uneasy fascination.

“In short, if your friend Calvin Tower sells us that lot, his troubles will be over. Do you think he knows
that
in his secret heart?”

“Yes,” Deepneau said. “It’s just that he’s got this . . . this kink about letting stuff go.”

“Draw up a paper,” Roland said. “Object, the vacant square of waste ground on the corner of those two streets. Tower the seller. Us the buyer.”

“The Tet Corporation as buyer,” Eddie put in.

Deepneau was shaking his head. “I could draw it up, but you won’t convince him to sell. Unless you’ve got a week or so, that is, and you’re not averse to using hot irons on his feet. Or maybe his balls.”

Eddie muttered something under his breath. Deepneau asked him what he’d said. Eddie told him nothing. What he’d said was
Sounds good.

“We will convince him,” Roland said.

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that, my friend.”

“We will convince him,” Roland repeated. He spoke in his driest tone.

Outside, an anonymous little car (a Hertz rental if Eddie had ever seen one) rolled into the clearing and came to a stop.

Bite your tongue, bite your tongue
, Eddie told himself, but as Calvin Tower got briskly out of the car (giving the new vehicle in his dooryard only the most cursory glance), Eddie felt his temples begin to heat up. He rolled his hands into fists, and when his nails bit into the skin of his palms, he grinned in bitter appreciation of the pain.

Tower opened the trunk of his rental Chevy and pulled out a large bag.
His latest haul
, Eddie thought. Tower looked briefly south, at the smoke in the sky, then shrugged and started for the cabin.

That’s right
, Eddie thought,
that’s right, you whore, just something on fire, what’s it to you?
Despite the throb of pain it caused in his wounded arm, Eddie squeezed his fists tighter, dug his nails in deeper.

You can’t kill him, Eddie
, Susannah said.
You know that, don’t you?

Did he know it? And even if he did, could he listen to Suze’s voice? To any voice of reason, for that matter? Eddie didn’t know. What he knew was that the real Susannah was gone, she had a monkey named Mia on her back and had disappeared into the maw of the future. Tower, on the other hand, was here. Which made sense, in a way. Eddie had read someplace that nuclear war’s most likely survivors would be the cockroaches.

Never mind, sugar, you just bite down on your tongue and let Roland handle this. You can’t kill him!

No, Eddie supposed not.

Not, at least, until sai Tower had signed on the dotted line. After that, however . . . after that . . .

“Aaron!” Tower called as he mounted the porch steps.

Roland caught Deepneau’s eyes and put a finger across his lips.

“Aaron, hey
Aaron!”
Tower sounded strong and happy to be alive—not a man on the run but a man on a wonderful busman’s holiday. “Aaron, I went over to that widow’s house in East Fryeburg, and holy Joe, she’s got every novel Herman Wouk ever wrote! Not the book club editions, either, which is what I expected, but—”

The
scroink!
of the screen door’s rusty spring being stretched was followed by the clump of shoes across the porch.

“—the Doubleday firsts!
Marjorie Morningstar! The Caine Mutiny!
I think somebody across the lake better hope their fire insurance is paid up, because—”

He stepped in. Saw Aaron. Saw Roland sitting across from Deepneau, looking at him steadily from those frightening blue eyes with the deep crow’s feet at the corners. And, last of all, he saw Eddie. But Eddie didn’t see him. At the last moment Eddie Dean had lowered his clasped hands between his knees and then lowered his head so his gaze was fixed upon them and the board floor below them. He was quite literally biting his tongue. There were two drops of blood on the side of his right thumb. He fixed his eyes on these. He fixed every iota of his attention on them. Because if he looked at the owner of that jolly voice, Eddie would surely kill him.

Saw our car. Saw it but never went over for a look. Never called out and asked his friend who was here, or if everything was okay. If
Aaron
was okay. Because he had some guy named Herman Wouk on his mind, not book club editions but the
real thing. No worries, mate. Because you’ve got no more short-term imagination than Jack Andolini. You and Jack, just a couple ragged cockroaches, scuttling across the floor of the universe. Eyes on the prize, right? Eyes on the fucking prize.

“
You
,” Tower said. The happiness and excitement were gone from his voice. “The guy from—”

“The guy from nowhere,” Eddie said without looking up. “The one who peeled Jack Andolini off you when you were about two minutes from shitting in your pants. And this is how you repay. You’re quite the guy, aren’t you?” As soon as he finished speaking, Eddie clamped down on his tongue again. His clasped hands were trembling. He expected Roland to intervene—surely he would, Eddie couldn’t be expected to deal with this selfish monster on his own, he wasn’t capable of it—but Roland said nothing.

Tower laughed. The sound was as nervous and brittle as his voice when he’d realized who was sitting in the kitchen of his rented cabin. “Oh, sir . . . Mr. Dean . . . I really think you’ve exaggerated the seriousness of that situation—”

“What I remember,” Eddie said, still without looking up, “is the smell of the gasoline. I fired my dinh’s gun, do you recall that? I suppose we were lucky there were no fumes, and that I fired it in the right direction. They poured gasoline all over the corner where you keep your desk. They were going to burn your favorite books . . . or should I say your best friends, your family? Because that’s what they are to you, aren’t they? And Deepneau, who the fuck is he? Just some old guy full of cancer who
ran north with you when you needed a running buddy. You’d leave him dying in a ditch if someone offered you a first edition of Shakespeare or some special Ernest Hemingway.”

“I resent that!” Tower cried. “I happen to know that my bookshop has been burned flat, and through an oversight it’s uninsured! I’m ruined, and it’s all your fault! I want you out of here!”

“You defaulted on the insurance when you needed cash to buy that Hopalong Cassidy collection from the Clarence Mulford estate last year,” Aaron Deepneau said mildly. “You told me that insurance lapse was only temporary, but—”

“It was!” Tower said. He sounded both injured and surprised, as if he had never expected betrayal from this quarter. Probably he hadn’t. “It
was
only temporary, goddammit!”

“—but to blame this young man,” Deepneau went on in that same composed but regretful voice, “seems most unfair.”

“I want you out of here!” Tower snarled at Eddie. “You and your friend, as well! I have no wish to do business with you! If you ever thought I did, it was a . . . a
misapprehension!
” He seized upon this last word as though upon a prize, and nearly shouted it out.

Eddie clasped his hands more tightly yet. He had never been more aware of the gun he was wearing; it had gained a kind of balefully lively weight. He reeked with sweat; he could smell it. And now drops of blood began to ooze out from between his palms and fall to the floor. He could feel his teeth beginning to sink into his tongue. Well, it was certainly
a way to forget the pain in one’s leg. Eddie decided to give the tongue in question another brief conditional parole.

“What I remember most clearly about my visit to you—”

“You have some books that belong to me,” Tower said. “I want them back. I
insist
on—”

“Shut up, Cal,” Deepneau said.

“What?”
Tower did not sound wounded now; he sounded shocked. Almost breathless.

“Stop squirming. You’ve earned this scolding, and you know it. If you’re lucky, a scolding is all it will be. So shut up and for once in your life take it like a man.”

“Hear him very well,” Roland said in a tone of dry approval.

“What I remember most clearly,” Eddie pushed on, “is how horrified you were by what I told Jack—about how I and my friends would fill Grand Army Plaza with corpses if he didn’t lay off. Some of them women and children. You didn’t like that, but do you know what, Cal? Jack Andolini’s here, right now, in East Stoneham.”

“You
lie!
” Tower said. He drew in breath as he said it, turning the words into an inhaled scream.

“God,” Eddie replied, “if only I did. I saw two innocent women die, Cal. In the general store, this was. Andolini set an ambush, and if you were a praying man—I suppose you’re not, unless there’s some first edition you feel in danger of losing, but if you were—you might want to get down on your knees and pray to the god of selfish, obsessed, greedy, uncaring dishonest bookstore owners that
it was a woman named
Mia
who told Balazar’s dinh where we were probably going to end up,
her
, not you. Because if they followed
you
, Calvin, those two women’s blood is on
your hands!
”