It seemed to Roland that great multitudes of folken were streaming into the building, but this was the perception of a man who had spent the latter years of his quest in mostly deserted places.
If he’d come at quarter to nine, while people were still arriving, instead of at quarter to eleven, he would have been stunned by the flood of bodies. Now most of those who worked here were settled in their offices and cubicles, generating paper and bytes of information.
The lobby windows were of clear glass and at least two stories high, perhaps three. Consequently the lobby was full of light, and as he stepped inside, the grief that had possessed him ever since kneeling by Eddie in the street of Pleasantville slipped away. In here the singing voices were louder, not a chorus but a great choir. And, he saw, he wasn’t the only one who heard them. On the street, people had been hurrying with their heads down and looks of distracted concentration on their faces, as if they were deliberately not seeing the delicate and perishable beauty of the day which had been given them; in here they were helpless not to feel at least some of that to which the gunslinger was so exquisitely attuned, and which he drank like water in the desert.
As if in a dream, he drifted across the rose-marble tile, hearing the echoing clack of his bootheels, hearing the faint and shifting conversation of the Orizas in their pouch. He thought, People who loork here wish they lived here. They may not know it, exactly, but they do. People who work here find excuses to work late.
And they will live long and productive lives.
In the eenter of the high, echoing room, the expensive marble floor gave way to a square of humble dark earth. It was surrounded by ropes of wine-dark velvet, but Roland knew that even die ropes didn’t need to be there. No one would transgress that litde garden, not even a suicidal can-toi desperate to make a name for himself. It was holy ground. There were diree dwarf palm trees, and plants he hadn’t seen since leaving Gilead:
Spathiphyllum, he believed they had been called there, although they might not have the same name in this world.
There were other plants as well, but only one mattered.
In the middle of the square, by itself, was the rose.
It hadn’t been transplanted; Roland saw that at once. No. It was where it had been in 1977, when the place where he was now standing had been a vacant lot, filled witfi trash and broken bricks, dominated by a sign which announced die coming of Turtle Bay Luxury Condominiums, to be built by Mills Construction and Sombra Real Estate Associates. This building, all one hundred stories of it, had been built instead, and around the rose. Whatever business might be done here was secondary to that purpose.
Hammarskjold Plaza was a shrine.
SIX
There was a tap on his shoulder and Roland whirled about so suddenly that he drew glances of alarm. He was alarmed himself.
Not for years-perhaps since his early teenage years-had anyone been quiet enough to come within shoulder-tapping distance of him without being overheard. And on this marble floor, he surely should have-
The young (and extremely beautiful) woman who had approached him was clearly surprised by the suddenness of his reaction, but the hands he shot out to seize her shoulders only closed on thin air and then themselves, making a soft clapping sound that echoed back from the ceiling above, a ceiling at least as high as that in the Cradle of Lud. The woman’s green eyes were wide and wary, and he would have sworn there was no harm in them, but still, first to be surprised, then to miss like that-
He glanced down at the woman’s feet and got at least part of the answer. She was wearing a kind of shoe he’d never seen before, something with deep foam soles and what might have been canvas uppers. Shoes that would move as softly as moccasins on a hard surface. As for the woman herself-
A queer double certainty came to him as he looked at her: first, that he had “seen the boat she came in,” as familial resemblance was sometimes expressed in Calla Bryn Sturgis; second, that a society of gunslingers was a-breeding in this world, this special Keystone World, and he had just been accosted by one of them.
And what better place for such an encounter than within sight of the rose?
“I see your father in your face, but can’t quite name him,”
Roland said in a low voice. “Tell me who he was, do it please you.”
The woman smiled, and Roland almost had the name he was looking for. Then it slipped away, as such things often did: memory could be bashful. “You never met him… although I can understand why you might think you had. I’ll tell you later, if you like, but right now I’m to take you upstairs, Mr. Deschain.
There’s a person who wants…” For a moment she looked self-conscious, as if she thought someone had instructed her to use a certain word so she’d be laughed at. Then dimples formed at the corners of her mouth and her green eyes slanted enchantingly up at the corners; it was as if she were thinking If it’s a joke on me, let them have it. “… a person who wants to play with you,” she finished.
“All right,” he said.
She touched his shoulder lightly, to hold him where he was yet a moment longer. “I’m asked to make sure that you read the sign in the Garden of the Beam,” she said. “Will you do it?”
Roland’s response was dry, but still a bit apologetic. “I will if I may,” he said, “but I’ve ever had trouble with your written language, although it seems to come out of my mouth well enough when I’m on this side.”
“I think you’ll be able to read this,” she said. “Give it a try.”
And she touched his shoulder again, gently turning him back to the square of earth in the lobby floor-not earth that had been brought in wheelbarrows by some crew of gifted gardeners, he knew, but the actual earth of this place, ground which might have been tilled but had not been otherwise changed.
At first he had no more success with the small brass sign in the garden than he’d had with most signs in the shop windows, or the words on the covers of the “magda-seens.” He was about to say so, to ask the woman with the faindy familiar face to read it to him, when the letters changed, becoming the Great Letters of Gilead. He was then able to read what was writ diere, and easily.
When he had finished, it changed back again.
“A pretty trick,” he said. “Did it respond to my thoughts?”
She smiled-her lips were coated with some pink candylike stuff-and nodded. ’Yes. If you were Jewish, you might have seen it in Hebrew. If you were Russian, it would have been in Cyrillic.”
“Say true?”
“True.”
The lobby had regained its normal rhythm… except, Roland understood, die rhythm of this place would never be like that in other business buildings. Those living in Thunderclap would suffer all their lives from little ailments like boils and eczema and headaches and ear-styke; at the end of it, they would die (probably at an early age) of some big and painful trum, likely the cancers that ate fast and burned die nerves like brushfires as they made their meals. Here was just the opposite: health and harmony, goodwill and generosity. These folken did not hear the rose singing, exactly, but they didn’t need to.
They were the lucky ones, and on some level every one of them knew i t… which was luckiest of all. He watched them come in and cross to the lift-boxes that were called ele-vaydors, moving briskly, swinging their pokes and packages, their gear and their gunna, and not one course was a perfecdy straight line from the doors. A few came to what she’d called the Garden of the Beam, but even those who didn’t bent their steps briefly in that direction, as if attracted by a powerful magnet. And if anyone tried to harm the rose? There was a security guard sitting at a little desk by the elevators, Roland saw, but he was fat and old.
And it didn’t matter. If anyone made a threatening move, everyone in this lobby would hear a scream of alarm in his or her head, as piercing and imperative as that kind of whistle only dogs can hear. And they would converge upon the would-be assassin of the rose. They would do so swiftly, and with absolutely no regard for their own safety. The rose had been able to protect itself when it had been growing in the trash and the weeds of the vacant lot (or at least draw those who would protect it), and that hadn’t changed.
“Mr. Deschain? Are you ready to go upstairs now?”
“Aye,” he said. “Lead me as you would.”
SEVEN
The familiarity of the woman’s face clicked into place for him just as they reached the ele-vaydor. Perhaps it was seeing her in profile that did it, something about the shape of the cheekbone.
He remembered Eddie telling him about his conversation with Calvin Tower after Jack Andolini and George Biondi had left the Manhattan Restaurant of die Mind. Tower had been speaking of his oldest friend’s family. They like to boast that they have the most unique legal letterhead in New York, perhaps in the United States.
It simply reads “DEEPNEAU.”
“Are you sai Aaron Deepneau’s daughter?” he asked her.
“Surely not, you’re too young. His granddaughter?”
Her smile faded. “Aaron never had children, Mr. Deschain.
I’m the granddaughter of his older brother, but my own parents and grandfather died young. Airy was the one who mosdy raised me.”
“Did you call him so? Airy?” Roland was charmed.
“As a child I did, and it just kind of stuck.” She held out a hand, her smile returning. “Nancy Deepneau. And I am so pleased to meet you. A litde frightened, but pleased.”
Roland shook her hand, but the gesture was perfunctory, hardly more than a touch. Then, with considerably more feeling
(for this was the ritual he had grown up with, the one he understood), he placed his fist against his forehead and made a leg. “Long days and pleasant nights, Nancy Deepneau.”
Her smile widened into a cheerful grin. “And may you have twice the number, Roland of Gilead! May you have twice the number.”
