Gobi glared at me. For a second I couldn’t tell if she was going to take a swing at me or shove me out of the car. Then her chin trembled and her whole expression quivered and she started to laugh.
I stared at her. “Now what?”
“I forgot how funny you are when you get mad.” She wrinkled up her forehead, lowering her voice, transforming it into an annoyingly accurate imitation of mine. “I am trying to help you, don’t you get that? I am only one that you can actually trust.”
“Okay, first of all, I don’t sound like that—”
“I will just turn my worrier off.”
“You’re not funny.”
“Don’t go there.”
“You’re insane.”
“You’re insane.”
I glared at her smirking back at me, then changed my own voice into a stiffly accented version of English.
“Is not for you to worry about,” I said.
She tilted her head slightly to one side. “Is that supposed to be me?”
“I am Gobi,” I intoned. “I am Goddess of Fire. I kill everything.”
She shoved me. “Shut up, stupid ass. That is not how I talk.”
“No more Perry Stormaire bool-shit.”
“Your essay is all wrong,” she said. “All the talking that I do in your writing is wrong.”
I looked at her. “You read my essay?”
Gobi nodded. “Of course I read. On the Internet.”
“What did you think, aside from your dialogue?”
“It was—all right.” She looked up, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “Some good parts.”
“Yeah, like what?”
“Like… when we kissed in that coffee house in Brooklyn. And when we danced together at the hotel on Central Park. Those parts I like.”
“You mean before you pulled that knife on me?”
“You liked it.”
“Oh, I liked it?”
“Yes, I think—yes.”
I reached out to her again, put my hand up along her temple, and this time she let me keep it there. I could feel the blood pumping in her veins, and tried not to think about what else was going on in there, growing inside her skull, but when her eyes flicked to me, I knew she’d already picked up my thoughts.
“How bad is it?” I asked.
She hesitated, and when she spoke again her voice was low and soft, not much more than a whisper. “At first, you know, it was not so terrible. Even when I was training with Erich for the first time, three years ago? There was headaches at night, yes, and sometimes…”—she opened her mouth, mimed throwing up—“in morning, you know? Then later came the shaking, the…”
“The seizures.”
“Yes.” She moved her head up and down, almost too slowly to be a nod. “When I first came to live with you and your family. Neurologists, the first ones, they had said yes, is temporal lobe epilepsy, gave me medicine? But I think even then they knew. Because of before.”
“Your other cancer.”
She nodded, unconsciously touching the thin white scar on her throat, then reaching up to her head. “But is worse, this.”
“When did you know for sure?”
“About the tumor?” She paused. “After that night in New York. That man back there, Nolan. Approached me at the airport in Amsterdam. Told me what they wanted. They did blood work and MRI, and told me I could have surgery, if I…”
“If you did what they wanted.”
She nodded.
“And you believed them.”
She looked at me. “What choice?”
The question hung between us, a riddle without an answer, maddening in its simplicity. We sat there in the darkness for what felt like eons, and I looked out at the road in front of us. It was absolutely silent. When I turned to face her again, I realized that she’d never stopped looking at me.
“How did you get out of that helicopter, anyway?”
“I jumped.”
“You jumped.”
“Yes.”
“Out of a helicopter.”
An edge of impatience now: “I am the one with the brain damage, Perry. Are you an idiot?”
“What, like with a parachute?”
Sigh. “After liftoff I went for the gun. Was not so difficult in enclosed space.” She shrugged. “Pilot took a bullet in the head. Paula and her father and me… all grabbed parachutes. They got away before I could kill them.”
“Or they could kill you.”
She smiled wryly. “They still thought that I will work for them as an assassin, if they get me to a surgeon and take care of this.” She touched her head. “But I will stay with Kaya’s offer.”
“You can’t trust Kaya either.”
“Perry, you must promise me.”
“What?”
“Because of what is in my head, I sometimes… lose myself. Become confused. I know this is true. Erich told me that when you and I were in Switzerland—”
“Forget about it.”
“If that ever happens, and I—I put you in harm’s way, you must promise you will end it cleanly.”
“What,” I said. “You mean, break up with you?”
“Shut up.” She punched me. “I am serious.”
“Ouch! Shit!”
“Your family was very kind to me when I was in America, Perry. They gave me a home, a safe place to stay so that I could finish what I had to do.” She looked at me slowly and I realized that she had already made up her mind. “Do you want them back?”
“My family? You know I do.”
“We cannot go to police.” She opened her coat and I saw the gun that she’d taken from Paula on the helicopter, a nine-millimeter Glock semi-automatic. “Not now.”
“No,” I said.
“What would you be willing to do?”
“Whatever it takes.”
“Do you remember how it was for us in New York that night?”
I nodded.
“And you are ready to go to war again?”
“If we have to.”
Gobi took out the sheet of paper, unfolded it, and told me what she had in mind. When she finished talking, the silence came back, filling the car again, and this time the quiet felt right and easy between us and I knew it was there to stay. I took in a breath and let it out, and eased my foot back on the gas, following the road through the forest of the night.
39. “I Am the Highway”
—Audioslave
“You are ready?”
It was just after dawn. We were somewhere in France, gassing up the Peugeot at a BP station, steam rising off the cups of espresso that Gobi had brought out a few minutes earlier along with a loaf of bread. On the opposite side of the road, two cows were gazing at us with unblinking bovine indifference. If American cows looked bored, French cows had elevated it to an art form.
I started the engine, pulling away from the service station while Gobi tore a chunk of bread off, smeared it with cheese, and handed it to me. I wasn’t hungry, but after driving through the night, I was starting to get the shakes. All around us, the countryside spilled out in wet brown fields that looked like the Cezanne paintings I’d seen in one of my mother’s coffee table books. None of it looked like it had changed much in the last hundred years except for the occasional satellite dish.
My phone started to buzz. The one that Gobi had planted on me. I looked over at her.
“Who else has this number?”
“No one.”
I hit TALK. “Hello?”
“Hey, kid.”
That voice, like broken gravel being shoveled in my ear. “Agent Nolan,” I said, feeling Gobi react beside me as I glanced over my shoulder at the empty roadway behind us.
“Listen, about last night, no hard feelings, huh?” Nolan coughed, not bothering to cover his mouth. “I didn’t want you to think I was mad about that or anything.”
“That’s a load off,” I said.
“You have to admit, it was kind of stupid, though, right?
” This time the cough sounded more like a humorless chuckle, and it was easy to imagine him sitting in a safe house somewhere back in Switzerland, stirring Nescafé and checking his e-mail. “You don’t have many friends in Europe now.”
“I’ve got one.”
“I wanted to let you know that we checked on your family. Nothing yet.”
“Thanks, and good luck tracing this phone. I’m ditching it.”
“I would expect nothing less.”
“Goodbye, Nolan.”
“See you, Perry.”
As soon as he hung up, Gobi looked at me. “What did he say?”
“He said I don’t have many friends in Europe.”
“Is he right?”
I looked at the sign up ahead. PARIS—262 KM.
“We’ll see.”
40. “The Metro”
—Berlin
By early afternoon we’d reached the outskirts of Paris and abandoned the Peugeot in a commuter lot at Joinville le-Pont. I bought us two twenty-four-hour rail passes while Gobi wiped the car down, getting our prints off the wheel and the door handles. When the RER pulled up to the platform, we got onboard and took two seats in the very back.
Gobi leaned her head on my shoulder and dozed. People got on and off the train without noticing us. Outside it was raining again, big fat metal-colored droplets streaking the glass as we rocked past industrial parkways, warehouses, and factories outside the city. Power lines swooped and dipped like sine waves outside the window. A half-hour later, we changed from the commuter rail to the Metro, and I saw oil-slick puddles and landfills along the tracks, abandoned furniture, tangles of graffiti along the trestles, getting thicker and more elaborate, American words and hip-hop slang mixed in with French phrases and local iconography. If this wasn’t Paris, we were definitely headed into New Jersey.
“Look.” She pointed out the window. “Eiffel Tower.”
I stared at it rising above the brown and white rooftops. Until that moment it hadn’t really registered where we were. For a while the buildings of Paris could have been the same anonymous tenements of any other city, apartments and drugstores with rain sluicing off the canopies, but as the train rose up on an elevated track, I saw the cathedrals and the river, and then we were in the middle of all of it.
“It’s like nine hundred feet high,” I said, remembering what I’d heard from my French teacher sophomore year. “I think there’s a restaurant up there.”
She sounded lost and alone. “I have always wanted to go. First the 40/40 Club, now the Eiffel Tower.” The joke came off weak, even to me. “You’re not exactly a cheap date, you know that?”
“I want to die there.”
I looked at her, startled. “What?”
“You heard me.”
“Not today.”
She didn’t say anything. I didn’t either, for a while. Gobi tucked her chin and closed her eyes. As she leaned back against my shoulder, her coat slipped open and I caught a glimpse of the Glock, hanging out for the whole world to see.
“Jeez, Gobi—” I reached over to push the gun back out of view and pull her coat shut, but when my hand brushed the harness, she snapped violently awake, shoved me back, and grabbed the gun, then held it out, pointing it right at me.
“Gobi.” I tried to make my voice calm. “What are you doing? Put that down.”
She didn’t move. Her face was absolutely blank, an alabaster mask with real eyes twitching around inside it. A thin trickle of blood had started running from her left nostril. I couldn’t tell how many of the other passengers had noticed what was going on, but the woman across from us in a business suit—a middle-aged Parisian executive who looked like she was on her way out to a power lunch—was staring straight at Gobi and the Glock.
“Hey,” I said, “it’s okay. It’s Perry.” I held up my hands. “You’re just confused. Just put the gun down, okay?”
All around us, people were starting to panic, jumping out of their seats, one or two of them screaming, getting out cell phones, fighting to get out of the railway car. I tried not to let any of that faze me, struggling to keep my expression calm. The hole at the end of the gun’s barrel looked as big as the Holland Tunnel.
In front of me, Gobi was talking to herself, saying something low in Lithuanian, murmuring it under her breath, a flurry of consonants and vowels, her pupils flicking around so fast that her eyes themselves seemed to be trembling in their sockets. The exhaustion and unreality of the moment made it feel like I had a clear bubble enveloping my head, as if everything were happening at one level of detachment. I fought to think clearly, but at the moment clarity was in extremely short supply.
You must promise me . . .
“Zusane,” I said. “Zusane Elzbieta Zaksauskas.”
She narrowed her eyes at the sound of that other name, the blind hysteria starting to waver, giving way to a suspicious uncertainty, but the gun stayed where it was. At the far end of the car, people were staring at us, holding their breath.
“You are last target,” she said.
“No,” I said. “You know I’m not.”
She flicked off the safety. “I must finish.”
“It’s Perry. It’s me.”
She murmured another phrase in her own language, finger tightening on the trigger. Now her eyes were almost closed, as if she didn’t want to see what was going to happen next, but her lips kept moving. It almost sounded like she was praying.
The voice in my head spoke with absolute certainty: She’s going to shoot me. I’m going to die right here on the Metro in a country where I don’t even speak the language. And at that same moment, I remembered the words that Erich had told me back in Zermatt.
“Zusane,” I said. “As tave myliu.”
Her eyes widened for a moment, and then finally the gun started to go down. We were slowing, moving into the station, and every other passenger on the car was shoved up against the door, waiting for it to open.
I kept my full attention on Gobi. After what felt like forever, she seemed to collapse back into herself again, a storm of emotions spilling over her face, and when she blinked at me, she looked like she was crying.
“Perry?”
“It’s okay.”
“Why did you say that?” She looked at the gun in her hand, then back up at me with a dawning realization and a sense of horror.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t even know what it means.”
“It is… nothing.” She looked at me and now her eyes were clear.
The train had stopped. I let my gaze stray out the window at the flood of frightened passengers putting as much distance between us and them as humanly possible. I didn’t hear any police sirens, not yet, but they were inevitable.
“Come on,” I said. “We have to get out of here, now.”
I put my arm around her shoulder, took the Glock and shoved it under my own coat, then wiped the blood from under her nose. She was still bleeding as I hustled her out onto the platform and up the stairs to the street in the rain.
41. “Teenagers”
—My Chemical Romance
We didn’t talk all the way up the rue Oberkampf. The rain kept pouring down harder than ever, splattering in puddles and making miniature waterfalls down canopies of cafés, keeping most of the pedestrians off the street. Scooters and big blue city buses roared past, splashing dirty water up from the gutter. I bought an umbrella from a street vendor and held it low over our faces, checking the reflections in shop windows to figure out if we were being followed.
Halfway down the next block, we passed a Chinese place, approaching the dark wooden exterior of the Café Charbon and a narrow purple awning next to it reading:
NOUVEAU CASINO
CONCERTS
CLUBBING
I opened the door and a tall, skinny-to-the-point-of-skeletal man standing there in a striped hoodie looked up from his iPod. “Ou allez-vous?”
“I need to go in.”
“No. Not open till t
onight.”
“I’m with the band.” I pointed at the flier stapled in the doorway. “Inchworm?”
“You are…” He kept looking at me, swiveling his head from one side to the other, as if there were some angle at which my arrival here would fit his expectations. “With that band?”
“That’s right.” I mimed a few chords. “Bass player.”
The bouncer glanced at Gobi leaning against me with my coat over her shoulders. She must have looked punk rock enough for him, because he made a flicking gesture down the hallway and we stepped inside, down into the club.
That was when a hand swung out and took hold of my shoulder, stopping me in my tracks.
“Didn’t I tell you?” Linus practically shouted. Beneath the huge cloud of his white hair, veins were standing out in his head. “Didn’t I tell you that miserable wench was going to ruin everything?”
We were still in the entryway, not five feet off the sidewalk, Gobi and I on one side while Linus stood in front of us in the middle of a full-tilt rant.
“Linus,” I said, “you were talking about tour percentages. Paula was literally trying to kill me.”
“Six percent of the door—I’d say she was trying to kill all of us!”
“I mean, with an actual gun.”
“Whatever.” He waved his hand. “Just like I told the boys, Inchworm is finishing this tour. I always knew Armitage was a thug. So what? It’s a ruthless business. You think David Geffen is a saint? That changes nothing.” He shook his head. “These local promoters are paying us, and we’re going to play. With the Slippery When Wet Tour back in ’eighty-six, when Jon Bon Jovi got a chest cold, did we go home with our tails between our legs? Hell no, and we’re not going home now.”
I looked over his shoulder. “Right now I think we’d just like to go inside.”
Linus, still muttering, led us into the club. Even mostly deserted, without the lights and strobes going, Nouveau Casino was a visually disorienting experience, a wide-open room with harlequin-colored walls and ceilings made out of irregular geometric shapes. Off to one side was a DJ booth and a red suede bar with an old-fashioned glass chandelier that looked like it could have been pilfered by the Nazis from the palace of Versailles and abandoned here during the liberation by mistake.
Perry's Killer Playlist Page 13
