“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.
“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 and 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.
But when they saw what Gobi was doing with the gun, they kept on their side of the platform. One of them shouted something, and it doesn’t matter that I slept through two years of high school French-I got the gist. Let him go. Put it down. Hands up. All of that. Gobi ignored them completely, focusing all her attention on me.
“As tave myliu,” Gobi said. With her free hand, she reached out and brushed the wet hair out of my eyes. “Your hair is getting shaggy, mielasis.” Then she pointed the pistol back at my head, underneath my chin.
“It doesn’t have to go this way.”
“Yes, it does.”
“Just tell me what you’ve done with my family. Tell me where they are.”
“One more must die.”
“Gobi, no, you’re sick. There’s a tumor in your brain. You’re not thinking clearly. Like on the train.”
“Au revoir.”
“Gobi.” I held up my hands. “You don’t need to do this anymore. As tave myliu.”
Something changed in her eyes, not much, maybe just a subtle shift in the lights reflected in her pupils. I kissed her then, not even thinking about the gun, while she kept it jammed up my chin. Her mouth felt as cold as the metal barrel against my skin, her lips coming open and kissing me, the surprising warmth of her tongue, salty-sweet as it slipped inside and slid against mine. The gun was still there, pushing up hard against my jaw.
“How did you learn to say ‘I love you’ in Lithuanian?” she asked.
“Erich.”
“You are still jealous of him.”
I shook my head. “No.”
She put her lips to my ear. “Sixty-six rue de Turenne,” she murmured. “Is parking garage. They’re in the back.”
“Thank you.”
“And Perry.”
“Yes?”
“I am sorry.”
“Wh-”
She moved the gun from my head and put it against her own, placing the barrel to her temple. Too late, I saw how it was going to end.
“Gobi, no!”
She pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened.
I stared at her. She looked back at me.
“The safety.” I said. “It’s still on. You forgot-”
Then from somewhere behind me, a dark shape flew forward and crashed into her, knocking her to the floor of the platform.
Sitting up, I saw Gobi on her back, turning sideways, grappling with the dark-garbed figure on top of her. I saw the shining glint of buckles and a badge. One of the gendarmes had broken ranks, jumped out into the rain, and tackled her.
Gobi squirmed sideways, reared back, and released a kick to the face that spun the gendarme a hundred and eighty degrees a
round, hard enough to knock the riot helmet from the officer’s head, revealing a spray of blond hair.
Paula.
In less than a second, Paula had already caught her balance, recovering from the kick, and reached into the uniform she was wearing to pull out an automatic. She held it in the textbook two-handed grip, pointing it at Gobi.
“Paula,” I said.
She glanced back at the gendarmes. “Tonight I bought your lives-rented them for a few moments, anyway.”
“What do you mean?”
“When the reports came across the police band, I got out here as soon as I could.” Her eyes flicked back to the group of gendarmes on the far side of the platform, and Paula reached into her tunic and pulled out a laminated ID badge on a lanyard. “Interpol special hostage negotiation squad.”
“Very realistic,” I said.
“It comes in handy from time to time. The police have orders to stand down until I say otherwise.”
I tried to smile. It didn’t hurt too much. “I didn’t know you still cared.”
“You’re sweet.” Paula drew in a breath of night air. “But deluded as always.” She took a step toward Gobi. “Zusane. You know, the last thing my father said before he died today was ‘Make her suffer.’ I promised him that I would.” Paula regarded her with pity bordering on revulsion. “But… look at you. Christ. You’re half dead already. You can’t even stand up. You’re rotten with cancer. At this point, anything I do to you would be a mercy.”
Gobi didn’t say anything. Still keeping the pistol trained on her, Paula looked out to the southeast, at the long stretch of open, flat field leading off to the Tour Montparnasse. “You know what that is? The Champ de Mars.” She glanced back at Gobi. “Named after the god of war.”
“Then they should bury us both there,” Gobi said.
Paula shook her head again. “Just you.”
I held up my hand. “Paula-”
Perry's killer playlist ps-2 Page 14
