Perry's Killer Playlist

by Joe Schreiber

  The band was onstage in the middle of yet another soundcheck. When Norrie saw us coming, he stopped pounding the drums, dropped his sticks, and practically fell over his cymbals on the way to the footlights.

  “Huh-Holy shit—Perry?” Then, recognizing Gobi, he raised both his hands in a frantic warding-off gesture, took a step back, and almost tripped over Caleb’s amp. “Whuh-Whoa, no.” His eyes were wide open, and his stutter, which always had the cruel tendency to act up in moments of stress, went absolutely berserk. It almost sounded like he was rapping. “Guh-Guh-Get her out of here, muh-man. I’m nuh-nuh-not even fuh-fuh-fucking around with you—juh-juh-hust get her out of here now.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “She’s all right.”

  “Shuh-She’s a fuh-fuh-hucking buh-bullet muh-magnet! A-And I duh-don’t wuh-want her here!”

  “Hey, it’s Perry the Platypus!” Sasha dropped the microphone and came down to the floor, threw his arms around me in a big stinky road hug. He smelled like a mixture of hair product, Cool Ranch Doritos, and Coke Zero, and even though I’d just seen him two days earlier, I felt such a sudden huge wave of homesickness well up over me all at once that I wanted to cry. “What’s up, Baron von Broheim? That was waaaay crazy back in Venice, huh? What are you doing here?”

  “Just in the neighborhood,” I said, and mentally added, Jeopardizing my family’s lives . . . again.

  Sasha cackled and punched me in the arm. “‘In the neighborhood,’ he said… Will you listen to this fart-knocker?” A giant grin had spread over his face, making him look about twelve years old. “Hey, you better go talk to Linus. I think he really wants to, you know, work some shit out.”

  “We talked.”

  “Cool. I love Europe, man. I’m moving here.” He turned to Gobi, ecstatic enough now that his words were running together without the added inconvenience of punctuation. “And you’re here too, the original European chick, that’s so utterly cool since you’re kind of the reason all of it happened in the first place and you guys are too cute together, like Sid and Nancy except without the drugs—hey, Caleb, Norrie, did you see who’s here?”

  “I suh-saw,” Norrie muttered, and Caleb, who had just now gotten his Strat tuned the way he wanted it, gave us a distracted wave, as if all of this were happening in his garage on a slow Tuesday after school.

  “So”—Sasha clapped his hands again—“are you ready to rawk?”

  “Not exactly.”

  Norrie took a step forward. “Wuh-What’s guh-going on, Perry?”

  “I need to talk to you guys in private,” I said, and when I took off my coat, the Glock fell out of my pocket and we stood there staring at it like it was a dead bird on the floor.

  “No,” Norrie said. “Nuh-No. No way. No.”

  “Norrie.”

  “No. No!”

  “Dude.” I’d already picked up the gun and stuffed it back in my parka, but I kept seeing Norrie’s eyes flick back to the lump that it made in my pocket. “I need your help.”

  We were leaning against the side of the stage while Sasha and Caleb tried to figure out the set list. Gobi was sitting on the floor beside me with her head in her hands. She hadn’t moved or spoken since we’d gone off to this dark corner of the club.

  “Just let us—”

  “I duh-don’t even care about the shuh-show,” Norrie said. “I juh-hust don’t want to guh-get killed.”

  “Trust me, man, okay?”

  He looked at me wearily. We’d been friends since grade school, and we’d been through a lot together, and this wasn’t how I wanted to catch up with him again. We should’ve been at home in his basement listening to Wolfmother, playing Red Dead Redemption, and talking about Princeton and girls and whatever else popped into our heads. Even back in high school, I’d known it couldn’t last forever, but I hadn’t ever dreamed that it would end so crashingly soon.

  “And wuh-why c-can’t you just guh-go to the cops about this again?” Norrie asked, then answered his own question. “Oh yeah, thuh-that’s right, buh-because yuh-you’re traveling with a h-hired assassin!”

  “Look,” I said. “I’ll have the cops here tonight. I just want as much cover as possible if something goes wrong.”

  “You w-want to have an armed st-standoff in the middle of our show,” he said, sounding abruptly very sick of being my best friend. “Again.”

  “What about that song?”

  He stared at me, his face screwed up with confusion. “Whuh-What?”

  “You said that you wrote a new song.”

  “Are you suh-serious?”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “Nuh-now?”

  I looked around the empty club, thinking of everything that was happening out beyond those walls, thinking of me and Gobi and my family, the odds against us stacked higher than they’d ever been. “Might be our last chance.”

  “No. No way.” Shaking his head. “I cuh-can’t—”

  “Yeah, you can.”

  Norrie took in a breath, shook his head, and with a long-suffering, oh-Lord-I-can’t-believe-I’m-doing-this sigh of exasperation, turned and went back to the stage, where Caleb and Sasha had been studiously pretending they weren’t eavesdropping on our conversation. He murmured something to them as he got behind his drum kit, picked up his sticks, and fired off a three-click beat as Caleb ripped into the first notes.

  The song—what he had of it—was ragged, unpolished, sloppy, all over the place… and unquestionably the best thing that Norrie had ever written. Midway through the second makeshift verse, unable to hold back any longer, I climbed up and grabbed the replacement bass that was sitting there, plugged it in, and started improvising a bass line on the spot, making my way up to the microphone to do backup vocals with Sasha.

  When we finished, Gobi and Linus were standing there staring at the foot of the stage with matching expressions of amazement. I wiped the sweat out of my eyes and looked past Caleb, toward where Norrie had just finished pounding out the last beat of the song. He was gazing up me.

  “Well?” he managed. “What do you think?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I call it ‘Bullet Magnet.’”

  I nodded. “Good title.”

  “I thought so.”

  “Me too.”

  The applause from the back of the room startled us all.

  42. “Baby Goes to 11”

  —Superdrag

  “Stormaire?” Paula’s voice rang out loud and clear through the excellent acoustics of the empty concert hall. She pulled out a lighter and held it up. “Rock on, baby.”

  I put down the bass and saw her at the back of the club. She was wearing a black wool coat and knee-high leather boots, standing by the bar, with Monash to her right in a gray business suit. Between them, the cadaverous Parisian bouncer that had let us in a few minutes earlier stood with his skinny tattooed arms crossed, cupping his elbows and trying really hard to look defiant and French, which could not have been easy given the pistol that Monash was pointing at his head.

  “Listen,” Paula said. “I know you were planning something special for tonight, but Dad and I are kind of pressed for time here. Mind stepping out back with us for a moment? I really think you’ll want to see this.” She started to turn around, then glanced back almost as an afterthought: “Oh, and bring the freak.”

  Gobi looked at me, and we followed Paula out of the club.

  A white FedEx truck was parked in an alleyway next to a row of scooters. Rain had soaked the piles of trash back here, and the whole place smelled like raw sewage. Without a word, Paula walked around to the back of the truck and opened the doors, standing out of the way so that I could see inside.

  And then, in real time, I saw them.

  Three hunched figures sitting there on the floor against the inside wall of the truck, squinting up into the light. And all of a sudden I felt everything else lurch up inside of me and melt away to nothing.
r />   “Mom,” I said. “Dad. Annie.”

  My mother was the first one to react. She moved forward and threw her arms around me. “Perry, thank God.” Just hearing that tone in her voice, I realized that she was even more worried about me than she was for herself or Annie. Dad was on his knees, holding on to Annie, kind of helping her move forward out of the van.

  “Are you guys okay?”

  Dad nodded. “We’re fine.” His voice was quiet, different, broken somehow, without a trace of the confidence that I naturally associated with him. His stubble had grown into the beginnings of a beard, making him look completely different, younger and much older at the same time. “We’re tired.”

  “Annie?” I gave her a big hug. “You all right, munchkin?”

  She nodded and hugged me back so tightly that I could feel her heart racing. “I hate you, big brother.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I deserve it.”

  “You owe me so big for this.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “When this is over…”

  “Just as long as it is over.” There were tears in her eyes. “That would be enough.”

  “I want to thank you for holding up your end of the deal, Stormaire,” Paula cut in behind me, and when I turned, I saw that she had replaced the Glock that she’d lost to Gobi with something even uglier, some kind of customized Soviet-looking machine pistol pointed at Gobi’s face.

  Monash had Gobi backed up against the alley wall under a quaint piece of Parisian graffiti depicting schoolchildren playing “Ring Around the Rosie” around a mushroom cloud. Rain from the rooftops was trickling down, making Gobi’s pale face shine in all kinds of radiant, unhealthy ways. “You brought her in to us, just like you said you would.”

  Gobi’s eyes flashed over Paula’s shoulder and latched hard on to mine, magnet to steel, and I shook my head violently.

  “No,” I said. “Wait a second, that’s not—”

  “You made the right choice,” Paula said. “After all, who wouldn’t choose their own family over some girl he hardly knows?”

  “That wasn’t how I planned it,” I said, but Gobi wasn’t looking at me anymore.

  “We’re not going to lose her this time,” Monash said. It was the first time I’d heard him speak, not counting all the shouting inside the steamer trunk back in Venice. Now that he had a gun in his hand, his voice was refined, British American, the product of private school and board rooms, exactly the way you’d expect the father of someone like Paula to sound.

  Tucking the weapon into a shoulder holster, letting Paula keep her gun pointed at Gobi, he started strapping a pair of plastic restraints around Gobi’s wrists. “And there’s going to be quite a lengthy reeducation process, isn’t that right, Zusanne?” And then, to Paula: “We’ve got an empire to rebuild, darling.”

  Gobi lowered her head and said something under her breath.

  “What’s that, love?”

  “My name is Gobija.”

  The restraints zipped tighter. At first I thought she was going to do the same thing she’d done in Zermatt, going quietly until she had a chance to assess the situation.

  I was wrong.

  43. “Icky Thump”

  —The White Stripes

  The noise Gobi’s head made as it smashed into Monash’s nose was kind of a wet, muffled crack, like what you’d get if you pulverized a grapefruit inside a burlap bag. Monash didn’t get a chance to cry out. By then, she was already on him, looping her arms up and wrapping the restraints around his neck, crossing her wrists and jerking them tight. Something popped in Monash’s spine—something deep and fragile and important-sounding—and he let out a sharp glottal croak and started twitching frantically in his five-thousand-dollar suit.

  Gobi whirled, still in motion, keeping Monash’s body upright in front of her, ramming him forward like a human shield into Paula, who had backed up, trying to get a shot. Even I saw that wasn’t going to happen. The alley was narrow, with even less space now that the FedEx truck was parked here, and no room to maneuver if Paula wasn’t planning on shooting Gobi through her father, who was arguably still alive and kicking. My parents and Annie had already jumped back up inside the truck.

  “Hold it!” a voice shouted down the alley, and when I glanced back, I saw Nolan running toward us from up the alley from rue Oberkampf with two uniformed gendarmes coming up behind him.

  I’ve watched the surveillance footage of what happened in the next nineteen seconds, from several different angles—the CIA made me go over it with them, and a bootleg version is also available on YouTube, and I still haven’t wrapped my mind around it.

  Things start to get blurry around the one-minute mark. Then around 1:22, you can see Gobi pivot with Monash still held up in front of her like a spastic puppet. At 1:29, there’s a gunshot—it’s Paula’s, and it’s headed nowhere in particular, ricocheting off the alley wall where the cops will later find it embedded in a trash can thirty meters away—and the driver’s-side door of the FedEx truck flings open, knocking Paula over sideways. I’m out of the frame at this point, temporarily blocked out by Nolan and the gendarmes, who are still charging forward until they realize somebody’s shooting.

  At 1:33, Paula regains her balance, turns around, and fires a second shot, this one more deliberate, but too late. There’s a flicker of something moving into the truck, the door slamming shut.

  If you pause the footage at 1:38, you can see my face pop back up in the foreground, looking straight up. The expression on my face says it all.

  The truck is gone.

  So is my family.

  So is Gobi.

  44. “Walking Far from Home”

  —Iron & Wine

  Which brings us here, Gobi.

  Not quite, but close enough.

  With everything that’s been written and broadcast and blogged about us in those final few hours in Paris, official and otherwise, you would think that the full story had been mapped out. And to the extent that the facts tell the story, that’s true. There were definitely aspects of the investigation that Nolan’s people withheld from the public, especially when the lead was still flying and the blood was still wet, but none of that really affected the outcome in any concrete way.

  In the end it boiled down to this:

  A woman, only twenty-four years old, died on top of the Eiffel Tower that night.

  As far as the record is concerned, those are the facts.

  Here is the rest.

  The wet metal railing is flaking nine hundred feet up, rusty, worn smooth in places from the millions of eager hands that have gripped it over the years, gazing down over the lights of Paris. It’s so cold up here that I already can’t feel my fingertips, even with my hands stuffed down in the pockets of my parka. I stopped feeling my earlobes and the tip of my nose somewhere on the elevator ride to the top.

  Despite the darkness and the temperature, plenty of tourists are still milling around up here posing for pictures, pointing out landmarks far below in a half-dozen different languages. Being here makes them feel glamorous somehow, part of something bigger than themselves. They act like celebrities at a photo shoot. They pose and preen. They air-kiss and vamp. They’ve got bottled water and hot chocolate and sandwiches from the bistro and plastic bags from the souvenir shop one floor below the main observation deck. There have been no additional security checks at ticket windows tonight, and why would there be? The afternoon’s assault off the rue Oberkampf was an isolated incident, the identity of its sole fatality not yet released to the public, but certainly not a cause for panic in the City of Lights. No one has mentioned anything to the authorities about keeping an eye on the Eiffel Tower in particular, because if such a person were to do that, neither one of us could have come up here.

  I never would have seen you again.

  And I see you now.

  You’re standing twenty yards away, waiting for me on the opposite side of the platform with your arms crossed and your back to the railing. We’
re a thousand feet above the most beautiful city in the world, and you’re only looking at me.

  The wind and rain blow hard in my face, making my eyes water a little, and when I come closer and wipe them clear, I can see you’re bleeding. Not much, not yet. It’s running down your face from your right nostril. From here, I can’t tell whether you recognize me or not.

  “Gobi.”

  You smile sadly. You say something in Lithuanian. It sounds like a prayer.

  “Where did you leave the FedEx van?”

  You blink and gaze back at me.

  “Where’s my family?”

  Your eyes flick down and up to me again, almost tentatively, but without true recognition. It’s as if you’ve spotted someone in an airport, an old acquaintance whose face is familiar but whose name you can’t recall.

  “I know you like them,” I say. “I know you’d never do anything to hurt them. Just tell me where they are.”

  You smile again, then wince and touch your head, as if it suddenly hurts very badly.

  “My mom and dad and my little sister, Annie,” I say. “You know them. You can picture their faces.”

  You just shake your head.

  Then, a few seconds later, you pull out the gun.

  45. “Stand Up”

  —The Prodigy

  I don’t know when the police showed up. All it took was one particularly observant Tokyo schoolgirl somewhere off to our left to spot the pistol in Gobi’s hand and make a phone call, and within five minutes the observation platform had been cleared.

  Then it was just us and the cops. For a long moment Gobi and I stood there watching Avenue Anatole France fill with police lights, turning it into a river of flickering blue along the truer, darker curve of the Seine itself. The next time the elevator door opened, it dispatched a wedge of gendarmes in what looked like full riot gear.