“Do not lose your nerve on me, Perry.” She spoke without turning her head, without seeming to move her lips. “Just turn around slowly and wait.”
I did as she said, trying to figure out how long it would take me to run back out the door. The priests sat at their tables, gathered here in near silence like a murder of crows. Fat ones, skinny ones, old ones, young ones—they must have come here from the cathedral across the piazza. Was this where they hung out after mass? At first count I guessed there were eight or ten of them eating or murmuring to one another, sipping a glass of wine or reading the newspaper, candlelight glinting off their spectacles. Several of them had already taken notice of our arrival, and without staring, I tried to guess which of them wasn’t the real priest, which one wasn’t going to be walking out of here tonight. I felt the irrational urge to shout at them: Why aren’t you in church?
There was a flicker of movement in my peripheral vision.
Behind the bar, a woman reached down and brought out a long cardboard box, like the kind you’d use to deliver long-stemmed roses, and laid it on the counter with a muffled but somehow very loud thump.
Gobi picked up the box, weighed it in her hands, and nodded. I saw her hand reappear holding a plastic bag filled with rolls of carefully bundled euros, which she placed on the counter. The woman on the other side made it disappear so quickly that it was almost like it had never been there. The entire transaction took less than three seconds. My heart was pounding hard, and I was pretty sure that I could make it to the front door in three steps.
That was when the police walked in.
14. “The World Has Turned and Left Me Here”
—Weezer
It must have been sheer luck. As soon as the cops stepped through the doorway in their dark blue uniforms and berets, laughing and talking to each other, I knew they hadn’t come here looking for us. They weren’t the same ones from the hotel, and their relaxed, casual banter told me that they were on routine patrol and had just happened to walk into the wrong place at the wrong time.
Like I said, pure luck—all bad.
They stopped and stared at us, and I knew that there had to be some kind of official bulletin already circulating from what happened at the hotel, with our physical descriptions. One female, armed and dangerous, dressed in black; one male, scared and wet, dressed in terrycloth.
“Okay, listen.” I put up my hands. “I’m not part of this. I’ll go quietly, okay?”
Slightly behind me and off to my left, Gobi flipped open the box that the woman behind the bar had given her and took out a sawed-off shotgun, swinging it upward in one unhesitating move. At the sight of the gun, both cops—carabinieri, she’d called them, the Italian 5-0—dropped instantly into defensive stances on the other side of the doorway, going for their own sidearms, as Gobi pumped a round into the shotgun and pointed the barrel right up under my chin.
“What are you doing?” I muttered.
The cops started shouting at us, both of them at once. Their voices sounded booming and authoritative in the confined space of the trattoria. Gobi didn’t answer, just kept the barrel where it was, pointed up at my head, where twelve years of education were waiting to become paint on the ceiling. Her eyes were locked on the officers blocking the door. On either side, the priests were staring at us with unblinking, owlish eyes. Last rites, anyone?
“Allontanare,” Gobi said, in what sounded like perfect Italian. Her eyes were locked on the cops. “Ottenga indietro o muore.”
The carabinieri stared at her. Their faces changed and all the bravado and adrenaline drained away from their cheeks. Slowly, they lowered their guns and stepped away from the door.
“What did you tell them?”
“I said if they moved, I would kill you.”
“That’s it? They looked terrified.”
“They saw that I meant it.”
Gobi nudged me through the door. Then, turning around, she braced her back against one of the stone pillars that stood outside the entrance, doubled up her legs, and used her feet to shove the cigarette machine over so it landed on its side in front of the doorway with a crash. She spun me around and we started hustling back across the piazza, my bare feet stumbling numbly over cobblestones.
“Where are you staying?” she asked.
“What?”
“What is your hotel?”
“My hotel? You want to go to—”
“We cannot very well go back to where I was staying, can we?”
“I can’t—” I shook my head as if to connect a few of the disconnected thought-Legos rattling around inside. “I don’t remember.”
“We need to disappear for a little while. Somewhere quiet.”
“How about Connecticut?”
Almost on cue, loud voices came spilling through the open piazza, sounding drunk and unruly. A group of twenty-something Americans were stumbling toward us, coming back from some bar, yelling and laughing.
“Hey, dude!” one of them shouted, pumping his fist in the air. “Viva la Resistance!”
“We need to get off the streets right now,” Gobi said. “Otherwise there is only death for us here.”
“So none of those priests back there was your target?”
“That was simply a weapons buy,” she said with a shrug, “nothing more. I have one more target here in Venice, but first we must cool off.” The shotgun touched my lower spine. “Where is your hotel?”
I closed my eyes and tried to think of the place that Norrie had mentioned over the phone. The name popped into my head. Thank you, high school study skills. “Guerrato,” I said, “something like that. Pensione Guerrato? By the Rialto Bridge?”
On the far side of the piazza, behind the church, Gobi stopped in front of a Telecom Italia phone, grabbed the receiver, and pushed me down into the shadows while she called what I assumed was the operator. I heard her murmuring in Italian. When she pulled me back up, we were already moving again, over the biggest stone bridge yet, overlooking the dark canal and closed windows, expensive galleries and shops of luxuries, none of which were as appealing as the prospect of just getting out of here alive.
15. “Happiness Is a Warm Gun”
—The Beatles
“Hold it.”
It was just a whisper. We were in a square along one of the canals, sometime after one a.m. Greenish-black water lapped up in every doorway and stairwell. I stopped, Gobi’s hand on my shoulder, and saw that she was staring across the tiny square, past a row of pushcarts that had been covered for the night, down a narrow street off to our right.
“What?”
She didn’t answer. A second later she moved, cutting across the square, leaving me standing there alone in the moonlight.
I need to get out of here, I thought.
Up till that very second, I’d somehow assumed that Gobi would lead us back to my hotel and I’d start making noise, hoping that Linus and the rest of the band would come to my rescue, maybe burst in with an arsenal of guitars and microphones and distract her with a few verses of “All the Young Dudes” while I phoned the authorities. Now, though, I realized that this would just put them in harm’s way. This tour was over. In our current situation, showing up with Gobi was the equivalent of rolling a live grenade down the aisle of a DC-10. You couldn’t escape her; you could only hope to survive her.
I needed to run, to get far away. Maybe I could get a job on a fishing boat and sail down to Capri, start a bar on the beach and wear rope-soled sandals, and send a message summoning the rest of the band down to join me when the coast was clear.
I turned and started sprinting in the opposite direction, trying to calculate the least visible trajectory. From behind me I heard an object rattle off the stone, clattering.
Something big and smelly slammed into me from behind, hard enough to knock me off my feet. It was like being hit by a roll of remnant carpeting. I tumbled forward and caught myself, scraping my palms, and looked around to see a thickly bearded guy in a heavy
woolen overcoat sprawled on his side next to me, clutching his head and groaning. The gash on his face was trickling blood, and he was trying to get up, cursing in what sounded like German or Arabic or Russian, one of those great guttural languages full of surliness and phlegm.
Gobi seemed to recognize him at once. “Swierczynski.” Her boot came down hard on the guy’s chest, pinning him to the concrete. “Do not move.” When I sat up, I saw that she had the shotgun pointed at his head, but he and I were lying close enough that she could have just as easily had it pointed at me. “Open your coat.”
The guy, Swierczynski, muttered something in his own language.
“Open now.” Gobi reached down and ripped the coat open, exposing a camera with an expensive-looking telephoto lens hanging from a strap around his neck. She scowled at the camera like she’d expected nothing less.
“Are you working for Kaya now?” she asked.
The guy glared at her, then gave a grudging nod.
“Tell Kaya that I do not need a nursemaid.” She yanked the camera loose from his grasp, then searched his other pockets, pulling out a switchblade, a cell phone, and a thick roll of euros and pocketing all of that as well. “Tell him I do the job as arranged.”
Swierczynski nodded again.
“Tell him the next tail he puts on me, I send back to him in pieces. Can you remember all this, or you need me to carve it on your chest?”
“Stupid cow.” The man spat blood in her direction. The accent was eastern European, maybe Polish. “I am not idiot.”
“Sometimes people forget things after they hit their head.”
He sneered. “You didn’t hit me that hard.”
“Not yet.” Gobi turned and glanced back at me. “Hit him.”
“Me?”
“Is time you learned to fight.”
“No.”
She turned and aimed the shotgun at him again. “Do it, or I finish him off now.”
“Okay, seriously—”
“Make a fist.”
“I know how to throw a punch.” I looked at the man with the beard, standing there waiting for me to hit him.
“Stand with feet apart at shoulder width,” Gobi said, taking the position as she described it. “Bend your knees. Elbows back, fists here. In kendo, this is horse stance.”
“Look, I really don’t—”
Swierczynski went for the shotgun. It wasn’t the most agile move in the world, not particularly speedy or graceful, but he did have the element of surprise on his side, and for a second it almost seemed like he was going to get away with it. Then Gobi’s right foot lashed out so fast that I almost felt sorry for the guy. I heard the cartilage pop in his knee as she swept his leg from the side and dropped him into a pile on the street.
Gobi picked up the shotgun and leveled it at his head. “This will be loud.” Her stance was different now, as if she were already preparing for the recoil. “Get ready.”
Swierczynski lifted his head. “If you kill me,” he said, in his low, heavily accented English, “you will die. Kaya will make sure of it.”
Gobi didn’t move.
“He told me everything.” His lips twisted into an ugly grin, and he pointed to his temple. “He told me the bullet is already in your head.”
Gobi exhaled. Then, without a sound, she lowered the gun, pointing it back at me.
“Walk,” she told me, and we left him lying at the side of the street.
16. “Know Your Enemy”
—Green Day
Key questions for discussion at this point:
Who’s Kaya?
Why was the guy following us, trying to take Gobi’s picture?
How come Gobi was killing guys dressed as priests?
“The bullet is already in your head”? WTF?
Who or what did Kaya have that gave him control over Gobi?
Was I ever going to get to wear anything more than a stolen overcoat over a wet hotel bathrobe?
Was this seriously as good as my time in Venice was going to get? Because if so—dude, major disappointment.
17. “There Are Some Remedies Worse Than the Disease”
—This Will Destroy You
Gobi didn’t answer any of these questions, of course, just jabbed me from behind to keep me walking. It was kind of this fun language we worked out: I asked a question, she poked me in the spine with the shotgun. Ever since my abortive attempt at escape across the square, the shotgun was pointed at me exclusively again. It made me feel special.
“Is Kaya the one that hired you to kill the guys who aren’t priests?”
“Kaya did not hire me.”
“So why are you doing it?”
“I am not a hired killer.”
The shotgun pushed me harder. The sign for the Pensione Guerrato hung on the left-hand side of an alleyway leading from an empty marketplace in the Rialto Mercado. Gobi took one look at the surveillance camera hanging above the door and stepped back.
“You push it.” Hanging back from the doorway, she lowered the shotgun and shoved me toward the brass-plated intercom button. “Keep your head tilted down.”
I lowered my head, pressed the button, and waited what felt like a long time until a man’s voice answered through the speaker. “Buona sera.”
“Uh, hello. Do you speak English?”
“Yes.”
“My name is, ah…” My mind went blank. “ . . . James Morrison. I need a room for the night.”
The door buzzed and I opened it. It led into a narrow vestibule of varnished wooden walls and a steep, creaky staircase rising upward into what felt like perilous heights. Gobi’s footsteps stayed right behind me the whole time, and I could feel the shotgun ever so slightly against my back, an ugly reminder that we weren’t done here.
We got to the top step. The landing was decorated with antique chairs and statues, lace-draped tables and floor lamps. Bookshelves lined the far wall next to old maps of the city and opera posters. Behind the front desk, a distinguished, GQ-looking guy in his fifties sat next to an iMac flat-screen with a cup of tea.
I stepped forward, trying to clutch the trench coat around my neck so it wasn’t totally obvious that all I had underneath was a bathrobe. “I’m James.” I cleared my throat. “This is my friend Gobi.”
“Yes, of course.” The man smiled and Gobi smiled back, clutched my arm, laying her head on my shoulder. In the mirror across the lobby I saw us standing there together and felt a dull sense of amazement. Especially with the camera around Gobi’s neck, we looked like two weary travelers at the end of a long day who just wanted to tumble into bed together.
“I am Benito,” the man said. “It is a pleasure to meet you.” He handed us a big brass key on a tassel. “You are staying in room fourteen, right up the stairs.”
“Do you have something more private?” Gobi brought out the wad of euros that she’d taken from Swiercynski, peeled off several large bills, and laid them on the counter. “A suite in another part of the hotel, perhaps?”
Benito’s eyes moved over the money. “Of course, signora.” He didn’t miss a beat, hanging up the first key and giving us another. “I am certain that I can accommodate you.”
“We enjoy our privacy.” She peeled off another hundred and slid it across the counter. “If it is possible, we would appreciate your complete discretion.”
“Absolutely.”
“Thank you,” Gobi said, and took the key, nudging me forward toward the stairs.
“You’re seriously tying me to the bedposts?” I asked.
“Only arms.” She tightened the thick braided cords that she’d cut from the curtains, checking the knots around my wrists while I lay there with my arms above my head, shivering. With the wet bathrobe off, I’d been reduced to the blankets she’d tossed over me, with nothing underneath. “I do not want to lose you, Perry.”
“How romantic.”
She shook her head. “Only you would think so.”
“I can’t sleep like this.”
<
br /> “Try.”
“What happens in the morning when the rest of the guys start tearing this place apart, looking for me?”
“I should be gone by then.”
“Wait, what?”
She switched off the light. A moment later I heard the shower go on. When it stopped, the bathroom door creaked open. I smelled steam and soap, some kind of shampoo and conditioner, and a tiny cell phone screen appeared, the one she’d taken from Swiercynski, floating in the darkness on the far side of the room. I heard her voice murmuring in Lithuanian, soft consonants and s-sounds, just above a whisper. It reminded me of when she was living at our house in Connecticut, the way that I’d sometimes heard her talking through the wall. Back then we’d thought she was calling her family in Lithuania. Who was she calling now?
Despite what I’d told her about not being able to sleep with my arms above my head, I must have dozed off, because at some point, I felt her slip in bed next to me, heard the bedsprings creak underneath me. Although our bodies didn’t touch, I was aware of the warmth of her skin in the cool sheets and the faint, even sound of her breathing. Her bare arm brushed against mine. I could smell leather and the faint ocean smell mixed with whatever she’d used to wash her hair.
“Gobi?”
“What?”
“I seriously can’t feel my arms.”
“I can.” She rolled over and put her hand on my chest. “Your heart is pounding.”
“Pain elevates the heart rate.”
“Is that really what you want to talk about now?” she said. “Pain?”
“Don’t.” I tried to move away, but the cords around my wrists weren’t going anywhere. “I told you…”
Her hand slid over my stomach and farther down. “You are telling me something very different now.”
“That’s—”
“What?”
“ . . .”
“ . . .”
She let out a chuckle, patted me on the chest and rolled over onto her back. “Go to sleep,” she said. “Tomorrow is a busy day.”
Perry's Killer Playlist Page 5
