Au Revoir, Crazy European Chick (10 page)

26

Footsteps thudded down the stairs again, that same unhurried pace of a workman going about his routine with no particular worry about the hour. This time Slavin was carrying a toolbox with him. Laying it in front of Gobi, he squatted down, then popped the latches and brought out a pair of stainless-steel pliers. I heard keys jingling, and he reached around behind Gobi's chair. I held my breath again and heard a lock click open. Slavin leaned forward to bring Gobi's right hand out in front of her.

"Now you will tell me who you are, and who sent you."

Gobi said something long and elaborate in Lithuanian.

Slavin sighed. "I do not speak that language."

"I said that you should go to hell. I said that your mother will meet you there and you can lick her ass for all eternity."

Slavin manufactured another laugh, but this one sounded more stilted, as if he was trying to hold his anger in check, not quite successfully. When he finally responded, his diction was strained and formal.

"You are very bold," he said, gripping her hand. "We will see how bold you are when I rip your nails out."

"Go ahead," she said. "I feel nothing. I am already dead."

Now Slavin's grin became real again. Real and hungry. "We shall see," he said.

He picked up the pliers. At that same moment, Gobi jerked her knee upward, slamming it into his face. I heard the crack of bone against bone, and Slavin rocked backwards. Gobi's hand dipped into her boot and whipped out the razor. I saw its mirrored surface flash once through the air in front of the man's startled face, and when he staggered backwards clutching his throat, blood was spurting out between his fingers. Slavin tripped over the toolbox and fell into the chains dangling from the pipe, clattering on the floor in a complicated crash of metal and cement and the leather coat. A halo of red pooled behind his head, spreading toward the grate in the floor.

Gobi jumped over him, crossed the distance between us in what looked like three weightless strides, stuck the key in my handcuffs, and twisted it, freeing me.

Without a word, she started up the stairs.

I went after her.

27

The door at the top of the stairs was open just a crack.

Through it, over Gobi's shoulder, I could see three people sitting around what looked like a large industrial kitchen walled in by stainless-steel pantries and storage bins. It smelled like old gravy and canned tomato sauce. The only light came from the flat-screen TV on the wall tuned to some low-budget Asian kung fu movie, something from the seventies, full of bad English dubbing and oversaturated color.

In its glow I recognized Teardrop Tattoo and his partner, the resin-haired action figure who looked like he could have been a body double for any number of Hollywood B-actors, sitting at a plain wooden table and smoking cigarettes in grumpy, exhausted silence.

The clock on the wall said two fifteen a.m.

Neither man was talking. Teardrop Tattoo was flipping disinterestedly through a car magazine while his partner watched the movie. The third person in the room was a bony woman in a short skirt and torn stockings, her greasy no-color hair piled on top of her head, where it had already started spilling out in different directions. She walked past the TV, the smoky blue light illuminating the sharp planes of her face, and I saw that her eyes had the dazed, insomniac glassiness of a long-term drug user or someone who'd been abused so long that she'd ceased to feel anything at all. When she turned to get something out of a cabinet, I noticed a long, poorly executed tattoo of a snake winding its way up her arm to the shoulder, where it became an entirely different animal, something with a wolf's head. I thought about what Gobi had told me about her sister and suddenly felt very tired and hopeless. The woman was hobbling around the table with her back to us, pouring drinks for the men.

I leaned forward, the top step creaking under my foot.

Without looking back, Gobi flattened her palm against my chest and stopped me, but it was already too late. Across the room I saw the woman turn around and glance up right at us, suddenly alert.

She looked at us and screamed something that sounded like "
Chai!
"

The men at the table scrambled to their feet, whirling around, grabbing weapons.

Gobi moved.

I'm not really sure how it happened. One second she was directly in front of me. The next second she was a puff of smoke twenty feet away, grabbing the wrist of Teardrop Tattoo, swinging his arm behind him, and slamming his face down onto the table. Glasses fell. The bottle hit the floor and burst. The woman kept screaming. On the other side of the table the second man already had his gun up and pointed. Gobi whirled Teardrop in front of her like a shield, her hand going into his barn coat and whipping out a short-barreled, one-handed machine gun pointing at the man on the other side of the table.

There was a gigantic crash and the room went white with muzzle-flash.

Gobi dropped Teardrop's body, kicked the table forward, and flipped it on top of the woman's leg, pinning her to the floor. Ignoring her, Gobi bent forward and picked up the sawed-off shotgun where it had landed, and pointed it at the other man. If there were sounds, I didn't hear them: The report from the gunfire shut my ears down. For the next several minutes I existed in a kind of Beethoven's landscape of perfect noiseless space.

Gobi's lips moved. The other man's lips moved. Her lips moved again. The other man shook his head, said something. Gobi glanced down at the floor, grabbed a cell phone, and jammed it in the other man's hand, pointing the machine gun at his head.

The man lifted the phone and dialed.

He talked.

He handed the phone back to Gobi. Nodding, she wrote something down on the back of her hand—numbers and a word, an address.

Then she pointed the gun at his head and pulled the trigger.

With the machine pistol in her right hand and the sawed-off in her left, she gestured me out of the doorway. She was saying something, but it still felt like my ears were stuffed with cotton. It would be another few seconds before her first words reached my eardrums successfully.

I followed her across the room, stepping over the bodies.

"Watch out for the blood," she said.

28

"Santamaria is the last," Gobi said.

I was still thinking of her as Gobi, not Zusane, as we limped back out onto the empty sidewalk into the cold night air. New York was still here, but it had changed in our absence. It was long after midnight, and vast walls of fog off the river shimmered along the sidewalks like the ghosts of tenements that had long ago been leveled to make way for the parking garages and office buildings. It was a spectral Manhattan, a double-exposed landscape where the past folded back over on itself in overlapping decades.

"Where are we?"

Her breath made a little whistling sound. "Tenth Avenue."

"I don't even remember getting here." Though it was true, this wasn't even what I meant to say. My true sentiment—that this didn't even remotely resemble the New York that I remembered—made so little sense in the context of the moment that it was snuffed out on the way through my speech center.

"We need to get across town."

Gobi stumbled, falling to her knees and collapsing onto her side. My first thought was that she'd had another petit mal seizure, and then I saw the blood on her chest.

That was when I realized she'd been shot.

I bent down over her, turning her over on the sidewalk as gently as I could, looking at the red-saturated swath of dress under her right breast. The fabric rippled against her skin and I saw the hole where the bullet had punched through the flesh. "We have to get you to a hospital."

She shook her head. "I'm fine."

"No, you're not. You need a doctor."

"Santamaria..."

"Forget Santamaria. If your lung collapses you're going to die."

"The bullet is not in my lung."

"How do you know that? Are you a doctor?"

Gobi raised the machine pistol that she'd taken from the men, swung it up, and pointed it at my face. Now her voice was absolutely ironclad. "No."

"Okay, that's just stupid. If you shoot me you'll never make it anywhere."

Gobi arched her neck and twisted her head back, looking behind us, keeping the gun leveled at my head the whole time. "Just ... help me up. Need ... a car."

I put my arm around her waist and lifted her up to her feet. She was lighter than I'd expected, even with all her weight resting on me. Up ahead I saw a group of people walking toward us, talking loudly and laughing on their way back from a bar. I draped my tuxedo jacket over her shoulders and drew it across her bloody dress, holding her close as the group passed us. I could feel her breathing against me, irregular and labored. Intense heat poured off her.

"Perry..."

"What?"

"Reach inside my stocking." She staggered a little toward an alleyway in front of us, stretched out one hand, and leaned against the wall, then slid the rest of the way to the ground. "Reach in and get it out."

Kneeling down, I slipped my hand up her dress and down the stocking, running my finger along her thigh until I felt a hard round object tucked inside the nylon. Sliding it out, I saw it was a yellow tube: it looked like a highlighter.

"What is it?"

"EpiPen. Adrenaline. You need to inject me with it."

I took the cap off. "Anywhere?"

"In my thigh. Up here."

I uncapped the syringe and stabbed the needle into the flesh of her leg. Gobi winced, stiffened, and then started to relax. The change was unbelievably quick. Her breathing began to normalize, but I still heard the wheezing sound trailing at the end of every breath.

"Better?"

"I will be."

"You still need a doctor."

"And you need a better haircut." Gobi gripped the alley wall and rose unsteadily to her feet. Color had flushed back through her cheeks, and the metallic brightness in her swollen eyes wasn't entirely rational, but it was alive, watchful.

"Santamaria is the only one left." She held up her hand where she'd written the address in ballpoint. "When the job is finished I will go away and be gone forever. The only problem is that this is an office building and I will need clearance to get through security."

I looked at the address:
855 3rd Avenue.

"There's got to be some mistake." I stared at the writing on her hand. "This is my dad's office."

She looked supremely unsurprised. "Yes?"

"You knew," I said.

Gobi stopped and looked back up at me, her eyes still pumped and twitching with adrenaline. "After everything I went through to put this together, you could not have thought it was just an accident that I chose your family. It was not just random chance."

"But if you already knew, why did you have to call and get the address?"

She drew in a breath and let it leak out from between swollen lips.

"I needed to be sure. At this time of night. Home..." She held up her hand. "Or office."

I couldn't speak. I stood there on the corner of Tenth Avenue and Thirtieth Street at three in the morning, mute, mindless, my rented leather shoes nailed to the sidewalk. In the end I was just a stupid rented prince in a stupid prom tuxedo and everything that had happened up until this moment had been a fairy-tale trail of bread crumbs leading through the woods of the night. That I had followed that trail blindly, reacting, responding, somehow thinking that I'd understood what was going on, only made me a bigger idiot than I thought I was before.

"You must realize," Gobi said. "Tonight was all for my sister. For her, I would have done anything." She raised the machine pistol back in my direction. "Anything."

I swallowed. I think I nodded. "What if you're wrong?"

"I am not wrong."

"It's a law office."

"A paragon of innocence."

"Who is it? Who are you going to kill?"

"The one who laundered the money for it. The one who allowed Gobija to be brought here and sold to these animals, exploited and killed for their sport."

"Santamaria."

"Yes."

"Who is it?"

"Give me your card, Perry."

"What?"

"Your key card to get into the office. It is in your wallet behind your driver's license, right in front of the snapshot of you and your sister at Disney World."

"If you knew it was there, why didn't you just take it before now?"

"You would have noticed. You are a smart boy."

A lie, and we both knew it.

She turned and directed her attention up Tenth Avenue, where cabs were running in packs from the last light, headed uptown.

I opened my wallet and took out the magnetic card, handing it to her.

"And now," she said, raising her hand for a cab, "your wish has been granted. You may go home and forget I ever existed." A taxi swung up to the curb. "Whatever happens next is not on your conscience."

"Wait," I said. "Gobi..."

She leaned forward, kissing me briefly on the mouth. "Au
revoir,
Perry."

"Wait," I said.

But she didn't.

She climbed into the taxi.

She didn't look back.

29

I didn't have a cell phone. I didn't have a car. I didn't have any cash. I had an ATM card and a calling card and a Visa card that I was allowed to use only in emergencies. Hunched over in the last working public phone in midtown, I punched in the digits. I didn't have to wait long, one ring at the most.

"Hello?"

"Mom?"

"
Perry.
" Relief and exasperation gushed out in equal proportion. "Where are you?"

"I'm still in New York. Mom, listen—"

"Your father and I have been absolutely beside ourselves."

"Where is Dad?"

"He's still in the city looking for you. Are you all right?"

"Mom, listen to me, okay? First, you need to get Annie and get out of the house. It's not safe there."

"Annie already told me about that," she said. "Perry, I don't know what kind of joke you're trying to pull, but this isn't funny. There are limits to publicity."

"What?"

"Your band. I know you're trying to get noticed, but this isn't the way to go about it."

"Mom, it's not about the
band
"

"Oh no? So you were just playing this show tonight for fun?"

"Mom, please, just listen. Take the cell phone and get out of the house now."

"Do you have any idea what time it is, Perry?"

"Yes," I said. "I do. I'm cold and tired and alone and I'm in the middle of New York City in the middle of the night so yes, I do know what time it is. And I need you to get Annie and get out of the house right now, please, okay?"

"Where are you?"

"I told you, I'm—"

"Yes, but where exactly?"

"The corner of Eighth Avenue and Thirty-Third Street," I said, "why?"

Quiet, for a long time.

"I'm calling your father," she said. "Stay where you are."

After I got off the phone with my mom, I stood on the corner in front of a Korean deli, watching the traffic roll by. Maybe ten minutes passed. I thought about Gobi and her sister and the way it had all come unraveled.

I thought about my dad.

When you're young, you think your father can do anything. Unless he was this severely abusive person and beat you or got drunk and smashed things, you probably worshiped him. At least most of the guys I knew were like that. They might not have used those exact words, but they all have some cherished memory of something they did with their father, even if it was just a shiny, far-off moment.

I remembered being eight years old and making a Pinewood Derby car for Boy Scouts. Dad had brought out a gleaming red Craftsman toolbox that I had never seen before and helped me carve the car out of a block of wood, and we sat at the kitchen table painting it silver and blue with red flames up the side. I drank Pepsi and he sipped a beer. When we finished, the car didn't weigh enough, so we put lead weights in the bottom and sprayed lubricant on the wheels until it rolled freely from one side of the table to the other. I won third place, and he said, "I'm proud of you."

I remembered going fishing with him up in Maine, taking a little motorboat out across the foggy lake until it was too dark to see our bobbers.

I remembered him teaching me how to tie a necktie on the morning of my cousin's wedding.

I remembered seeing him in the stands at my first junior high swimming tournament, standing next to my mom and cheering.

I remembered waking up very early in the morning and hearing him downstairs making coffee before slipping out to work.

I remembered the first time I ever heard him swear.

The light changed again.

The night air was cold and damp. Without a cell phone, I realized that I didn't know what time it was, although I'd probably been standing here for at least ten minutes.

I crossed Eighth Avenue and headed east.

It took me thirty minutes to get across town on foot to the tower on 855 Third Avenue, and another twenty minutes standing up against the glass, waving and gesturing and knocking on the glass until Rufus glanced up from his newspaper and realized who I was. He tucked the paper away and stood up slowly, making his way across the huge marble lobby as if he couldn't quite believe what he was seeing.

"Brother," he said, as he unlocked the door and opened it for me, "you do work odd hours."

I stepped inside and looked around. The only sound was the fountain, clattering out endless watery applause for an audience of two. I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the glass, my bloody tuxedo shirt and bruised face.

"What happened to you?"

"I got mugged," I said. "Did anybody else come through here?"

"What, tonight?" He regarded me doubtfully. "Just the cleaning crew. Couple other security guards, Davy and Rheinhart—they're down in the control room, doing their rounds."

"Nobody else? You're sure?"

"Been at this desk all night." Rufus cocked his head to the side. "You want me to call the cops?"

"No thanks. Is there anybody up on forty-seven?"

"Some of the partners are working late, I guess. Where are you going?"

I went to the turnstile and hopped over it. "Up."

"Hey, man, you ain't supposed to do that. You got to swipe in first. That's policy."

"I lost my wallet, remember?" I headed for the elevators. "Keep your eyes open."

"What am I looking for?" Rufus said distantly. "You sure you don't want me to call you an ambulance or something?"

He was still watching me as the elevator doors slid shut.

I stepped out of the elevator and into the quiet of the climate-controlled hallway. The lights on the forty-seventh floor were turned down to their dimmest setting. In the shadows I saw the letters on the wall spelling out
Harriett, Statham, and Fripp.
Someday, my dad used to say, it would read
Harriett, Statham, Fripp, and Stormaire.
He meant both of us, senior and junior.

I walked through the reception area and gazed out the floor-to-ceiling window at the lights of Midtown far below. The glass was cold, beaded with condensation, my breath ghosting against it and then evaporating again.

The only sound was the faint whir of sleeping electronics, a scanner clicking, a fax machine's far-off hum.

The reception desk had been immaculately tidied up in preparation for Monday morning. Framed personal photos from home, a potted plant, flat-screen monitor cycling through endless screen-savers. Beyond it was the wide opaque glass door leading back into the offices themselves.

I took the handle and tugged.

It was locked.

I shouldn't have been surprised. I took a breath and wondered what I'd come here for anyway. What had I been expecting to find all the way up here, halfway between God and Broadway? The answer to all my questions?

The elevator chimed behind me.

The doors opened. Footsteps padded across the carpet and stopped.

"Perry?"

I looked around at the figure standing on the other side of the reception area, staring back at me.

"Hello, Dad."