Wolves of the Calla dt-5 Read online

  "It would be a fairish way to start," Roland said, and Eddie found his thoughtful tone rather chilling. Then the gunslinger turned to him again. "Go on. If you can add anything, Jake, please do. And relax, both of you, for your fathers' sakes. For now I only want a sketch."

  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-"

  "The vacant 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?"

  "I think so. Right after the part about Tower not permitting any liens or encumbrances on his property, because of Sombra's 'stated interest,' wasn't it? "

  "Right," Jake said. "The sign I saw in the lot said…" He paused, thinking, then raised his hands and looked between them, as if reading a sign only he could see: "Mills construction AND SOMBRA REAL ESTATE ASSOCIATES ARE CONTINUING TO REMAKE THE FACE OF MANHATTAN. And then, COMING SOON, TURTLE BAY LUXURY CONDOMINIUMS."

  "So that's what they want it for," Eddie said. "Condos. But-"

  "What are condominiums?" Susannah asked, frowning. "It sounds like some newfangled kind of spice rack."

  "It's a kind of co-op apartment deal," Eddie said. "They probably had em in your when, but by a different name."

  "Yeah," Susannah said with some asperity. "We called em coops. Or sometimes we went way downtown and called em apartment buildings."

  "It doesn't matter because it was never about condos," Jake said. "Never about the building the sign said they were going to put there, for that matter. All that's only, you know… shoot, what's the word?"

  "Camouflage?" Roland suggested.

  Jake grinned. "Camuflage, yeah. It's about the rose, not the building! And they can't get at it until they own the ground it grows on. I'm sure of it."

  "You may be right about the building's not meaning anything," Susannah said, "but that Turtle Bay name has a certain resonance, wouldn't you say?" She looked at the gunslinger. "That part of Manhattan is called Turtle Bay, Roland."

  He nodded, unsurprised. The Turtle was one of the twelve Guardians, and almost certainly stood at the far end of the Beam upon which they now traveled.

  "The people from Mills Construction might not know about the rose," Jake said, "but I bet the ones from Sombra Corporation do." His hand stole into Oy's fur, which was thick enough at the billy-bumbler's neck to make his fingers disappear entirely. "I think that somewhere in New York City-in some business building, probably in Turtle Bay on the East Side- there's a door marked sombra corporation. And someplace behind that door there's another door. The kind that takes you here."

  For a minute they sat thinking about it-about worlds spinning on a single axle in dying harmony-and no one said anything.

  FOUR

  "Here's what I think is happening," Eddie said. "Suze, Jake, feel free to step in if you think I'm getting it wrong. This guy Cal Tower's some sort of custodian for the rose. He may not know it on a conscious level, but he must be. Him and maybe his whole family before him. It explains the name."

  "Only he's the last," Jake said.

  "You can't be sure of that, hon," Susannah said.

  "No wedding ring," Jake responded, and Susannah nodded, giving him that one, at least provisionally.

  "Maybe at one time there were lots of Torens owning lots of New York property," Eddie said, "but those days are gone. Now the only thing standing between the Sombra Corporation and the rose is one nearly broke fat guy who changed his name. He's a… what do you call someone who loves books?"

  "A bibliophile," Susannah said.

  "Yeah, one of those. And George Biondi may not be Einstein, but he said at least one smart thing while we were eavesdropping. He said Tower's place wasn't a real shop but just a hole you poured money into. What's going on with him is a pretty old story where we come from, Roland. When my Ma used to see some rich guy on TV-Donald Trump, for instance-"

  "Who?" Susannah asked.

  "You don't know him, he would've been just a kid back in '64. And it doesn't matter. 'Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations,' my mother would tell us. 'It's the American way, boys.'

  "So here's Tower, and he's sort of like Roland-the last of his line. He sells off a piece of property here and a piece there, making his taxes, making his house payments, keeping up with the credit cards and the doctor bills, paying for his stock. And yeah, I'm making this up… except somehow it doesn't feel that way."

  "No," Jake said. He spoke in a low, fascinated voice. "It doesn't."

  "Perhaps you shared his khef," Roland said. "More likely, you touched him. As my old friend Alain used to. Go on, Eddie."

  "And every year he tells himself the bookstore'll turn around. Catch on, maybe, the way things in New York sometimes do. Get out of the red and into the black and then he'll be okay. And finally there's only one thing left to sell: lot two-ninety-eight on Block Nineteen in Turtle Bay."

  "Two-nine-eight adds up to nineteen," Susannah said. "I wish I could decide if that means something or if it's just Blue Car Syndrome."

  "What's Blue Car Syndrome?" Jake asked.

  "When you buy a blue car, you see blue cars everywhere."

  "Not here, you don't," Jake said.

  "Not here," Oy put in, and they all looked at him. Days, sometimes whole weeks would go by, and Oy would do nothing but give out the occasional echo of their talk. Then he would say something that might almost have been the product of original thought. But you didn't know. Not for sure. Not even Jake knew for sure.

&
nbsp; The way we don't know for sure about nineteen, Susannah thought, and gave the bumbler a pat on the head. Oy responded with a companionable wink.

  "He holds onto that lot until the bitter end," Eddie said. "I mean hey, he doesn't even own the crappy building his bookstore's in, he only leases it."

  Jake took over. "Tom and Jerry's Artistic Deli goes out of business, and Tower has it torn down. Because part of him wants to sell the lot. That part of him says he'd be crazy not to." Jake fell silent for a moment, thinking about how some thoughts came in the middle of the night. Crazy thoughts, crazy ideas, and voices that wouldn't shut up. "But there's another part of him, another voice-"

  "The voice of the Turtle," Susannah put in quietly.

  "Yes, the Turtle or the Beam," Jake agreed. "They're probably the same thing. And this voice tells him he has to hold onto it at all costs." He looked at Eddie. "Do you think he knows about the rose? Do you think he goes down there sometimes and looks at it?"

  "Does a rabbit shit in the woods?" Eddie responded. "Sure he goes. And sure he knows. On some level he must know. Because a corner lot in Manhattan… how much would a thing like that be worth, Susannah?"

  "In my time, probably a million bucks," she said. "By 1977, God knows. Three? Five?" She shrugged. "Enough to let sai Tower go on selling books at a loss for the rest of his life, provided he was reasonably careful about how he invested the principal."

  Eddie said, "Everything about this shows how reluctant he is to sell. I mean Suze already pointed out how little Sombra got for their hundred grand."

  "But they did get something," Roland said. "Something very important."

  "A foot in the door," Eddie said.

  "You say true. And now, as the term of their agreement winds down, they send your world's version of the Big Coffin Hunters. Hard-caliber boys. If greed or necessity doesn't compel Tower to sell them the land with the rose on it, they'll terrify him into it."

  "Yeah," Jake said. And who would stand on Tower's side? Maybe Aaron Deepneau. Maybe no one. "So what do we do?"

  "Buy it ourselves," Susannah said promptly. "Of course."

  FIVE

  There was a moment of thunderstruck silence, and then Eddie nodded thoughtfully. "Sure, why not? The Sombra Corporation doesn't have a topping privilege in their little agreement-they probably tried, but Tower wouldn't go for it. So sure, we'll buy it. How many deerskins do you think he'll want? Forty? Fifty? If he's a real hard bargainer, maybe we can throw in some relics from the Old People. You know, cups and plates and arrowheads. They'd be conversation pieces at cocktail parties."

  Susannah was looking at him reproachfully.

  "Okay, maybe not so funny," Eddie said. "But we have to face the facts, hon. We're nothing but a bunch of dirty-ass pilgrims currently camped out in some other reality-I mean, this isn't even Mid-World anymore."

  "Also," Jake said apologetically, "we weren't even really there, at least not the way you are when you go through one of the doors. They sensed us, but basically we were invisible."

  "Let's take one thing at a time," Susannah said. "As far as money goes, I have plenty. If we could get at it, that is."

  "How much?" Jake asked. "I know that's sort of impolite- my mother'd faint if she heard me ask someone that, but-"

  "We've come a little bit too far to worry about being polite," Susannah said. "Truth is, honey, I don't exacdy know. My dad invented a couple of new dental processes that had to do with capping teeth, and he made the most of it. Started a company called Holmes Dental Industries and handled the financial side mostly by himself until 1959."

  "The year Mort pushed you in front of the subway train," Eddie said.

  She nodded. "That happened in August. About six weeks later, my father had a heart attack-the first of many. Some of it was probably stress over what happened to me, but I won't own all of it. He was a hard driver, pure and simple."

  "You don't have to own any of it," Eddie said. "I mean, it's not as if you jumped in front of that subway car, Suze."

  "I know. But how you feel and how long you feel it doesn't always have a lot to do with objective truth. With Mama gone, it was my job to take care of him and I couldn't handle it-I could never completely get the idea that it was my fault out of my head."

  "Gone days," Roland said, and without much sympathy.

  "Thanks, sug," Susannah said dryly. "You have such a way of puttin things in perspective. In any case, my Dad turned over the financial side of the company to his accountant after that first heart attack-an old friend named Moses Carver. After my Dad passed, Pop Mose took care of things for me. I'd guess that when Roland yanked me out of New York and into this charming piece of nowhere, I might have been worth eight or ten million dollars. Would that be enough to buy Mr. Tower's lot, always assuming he'd sell it to us?"

  "He probably would sell it for deerskins, if Eddie's right about the Beam," Roland said. "I believe a deep part of Mr. Tower's mind and spirit-the ka that made him hold onto the lot for so long in the first place-has been waiting for us."

  "Waiting for the cavalry," Eddie said with a trace of a grin. "Like Fort Ord in the last ten minutes of a John Wayne movie."

  Roland looked at him, unsmiling. "He's been waiting for the White."

  Susannah held her brown hands up to her brown face and looked at them. "Then I guess he isn't waiting for me," she said.

  "Yes," Roland said, "he is." And wondered, briefly, what color that other one was. Mia.

  "We need a door," Jake said.

  "We need at least two," Eddie said. "One to deal with Tower, sure. But before we can do that, we need one to go back to Susannah's when. And I mean as close to when Roland took her as we can possibly get. It'd be a bummer to go back to 1977, get in touch with this guy Carver, and discover he had Odetta Holmes declared legally dead in 1971. That the whole estate had been turned over to relatives in Green Bay or San Berdoo."

  "Or to go back to 1968 and discover Mr. Carver was gone," Jake said. 'Tunneled everything into his own accounts and retired to the Costa del Sol."

  Susannah was looking at him with a shocked oh-my-lands expression that would have been funny under other circumstances. "Pop Mose'd never do such a thing! Why, he's my godfather!"

  Jake looked embarrassed. "Sorry. I read lots of mystery novels-Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, Ed McBain-and stuff like that happens in them all the time."

  "Besides," Eddie said, "big money can do weird things to people."

  She gave him a cold and considering glance that looked strange, almost alien, on her face. Roland, who knew something Eddie and Jake didn't, thought it a frog-squeezing look. "How would you know?" she asked. And then, almost at once, "Oh, sugar, I'm sorry. That was uncalled-for."

  "It's okay," Eddie said. He smiled. The smile looked stiff and unsure of itself. "Heat of the moment." He reached out, took her hand, squeezed it. She squeezed back. The smile on Eddie's face grew a little, started to look as if it belonged there.

  "It's just that I know Moses Carver. He's as honest as the day is long."

  Eddie raised his hand-not signaling belief so much as an unwillingness to go any further down that path.

  "Let me see if I understand your idea," Roland said. "First, it depends upon our ability to go back to your world of New York at not just one point of when, but two."

  There was a pause while they parsed that, and then Eddie nodded. "Right. 1964, to start with. Susannah's been gone a couple of months, but nobody's given up hope or anything like that. She strolls in, everybody claps. Return of the prodigal daughter. We get the dough, which might take a little time-"

  "The hard part's apt to be getting Pop Mose to let go of it," Susannah said. "When it comes to money in the bank, that man got a tight grip. And I'm pretty sure that in his heart, he still sees me as eight years old."

  "But legally it's yours, right?" Eddie asked. Roland could see that he was still proceeding with some caution. Hadn't quite got over that crack-How would you know?-just yet. And the look that h
ad gone with it. "I mean, he can't stop you from taking it, can he?"

  "No, honey," she said. "My dad and Pop Mose made me a trust fund, but it went moot in 1959, when I turned twenty-five." She turned her eyes-dark eyes of amazing beauty and expression-upon him. "There. You don't need to devil me about my age anymore, do you? If you can subtract, you can figure it out for yourself."

  "It doesn't matter," Eddie said. "Time is a face on the water."

  Roland felt gooseflesh run up his arms. Somewhere- perhaps in a glaring, blood-colored field of roses still far from here-a rustie had just walked over his grave.

  SIX

  "Has to be cash," Jake said in a dry, businesslike tone.

  "Huh?" Eddie looked away from Susannah with an effort.

  "Cash," Jake repeated. "No one'd honor a check, even a cashier's check, that was thirteen years old. Especially not one for millions of dollars."

  "How do you know stuff like that, sug?" Susannah asked.

  Jake shrugged. Like it or not (usually he didn't), he was Elmer Chambers's son. Elmer Chambers wasn't one of the world's good guys-Roland would never call him part of the White-but he had been a master of what network execs called "the kill." A Big Coffin Hunter in TVLand, Jake thought. Maybe that was a little unfair, but saying that Elmer Chambers knew how to play the angles was definitely not unfair. And yeah, he was Jake, son of Elmer. He hadn't forgotten the face of his father, although he had times when he wished that wasn't so.

  "Cash, by all means cash," Eddie said, breaking the silence. "A deal like this has to be cash. If there's a check, we cash it in 1964, not 1977. Stick it in a gym-bag-did they have gym-bags in 1964, Suze? Never mind. Doesn't matter. We stick it in a bag and take it to 1977. Doesn't have to be the same day Jake bought Charlie the Choo-Choo and Riddle-De-Dum, but it ought to be close."

  "And it can't be after July fifteenth of '77," Jake put in.