Au Revoir, Crazy European Chick (12 page)

34

We landed in the helicopter with a thud.

I didn't hear it, but I realized right away that I wasn't falling anymore. I was rolling on my side across a series of carpeted bumps, my leg shrieking at me with every point of contact. I would have screamed, but I wasn't breathing. Not yet.

When I finally managed to inhale, the air smelled like cold leather upholstery and diesel exhaust. Curved walls and four beige seats rose up on either side of me, illuminated by soft recessed lighting. There were seatbelts and cup holders. Looking back one last time, I caught a bleary glimpse of the skyscraper's broken window already swinging away from us, turning as the helicopter's hatch drew shut, and then everything became muffled and lower, a pulsing
whop-whop-whop
that resonated through my chest cavity.

I drew my leg up, pressing both hands against the damp fabric of my pants, and crawled up into one of the bucket seats next to Gobi, who was hunched forward with her head turned away, looking out the opposite window. I poked experimentally at my knee. At least the bleeding had stopped. What was left was a shallow gouge outside my kneecap, and although it still hurt worse than anything I'd ever gone through, including five years ago when my appendix had burst in the middle of the night, I realized that I could probably stand it. I straightened the leg, bracing myself for a dose of world-ending pain. The end of the world didn't come.

I leaned over and saw the shadowy form of the pilot illuminated by the lights of the cockpit and redirected my attention to Gobi.

"Who's flying this thing?"

The lump next to me didn't move.

"Gobi."

When she still didn't sit up or answer, I reached over and took hold of her arm, giving it a not-so-gentle squeeze. She let out a soft groan and peered at me, two frazzled green eyes behind a wild thatch of blood-stiffened hair. The breath in her lungs sounded like what you'd hear by blowing through a clogged garden hose. Her gaze looked foggy and dull.

Then abruptly she smiled, as if recognizing that I was next to her.

"Perry."

"How are you doing?"

"Not bad." She nodded. "I am just very tired."

"Yeah," I said, "you call that kind of tired getting shot in the chest."

"Nothing serious."

"Bullshit." I listened to the space between words. The wheezing noise was getting worse. "Gobi—"

"I will be fine, Perry. I gave myself another EpiPen injection in the elevator. I have survived worse."

"Gobi, listen. You can't just keep giving yourself adrenaline shots. You need serious medical attention."

"And I will get it. As soon as we arrive at our destination."

"Where are we going?" I looked out at the city of Manhattan spread out below us. "I'm pretty sure this thing won't go all the way back to Lithuania."

"The pilot is a friend. I arranged it beforehand as an insurance policy. He'll get us out of here."

"Where to?"

She scowled. "Do you always ask so many questions?"

"My guidance counselor says it's the sign of an intellectually curious mind."

"Perry?"

"What?"

"Do you..."—another wheezing gurgle—"hate me?"

"Hate you?" I blinked at her. "Just because you dragged me all over New York City on prom night and made me an accomplice to murder five times over, then shot me?" I said. "Why would I hate you?"

"We could try to start over."

"I think it's a little late for that."

"I am sorry about your father."

"He'll be okay. The bullet just grazed him." I glanced down at my knee again and tried not to think about how hard she was laboring to breathe. "I guess we both could've been a lot worse off."

Gobi didn't say anything for a long time. Manhattan's lights shimmied off into the distance as we crossed over Long Island Sound, skimming north. Warm air had begun to circulate through the ventilation system, and I felt my muscles beginning to sink into the upholstered seats. Fatigue from the adrenaline comedown began seeping through every fiber of my body, overtaking me by inches and then by feet.

"Seriously, Perry," Gobi's voice said, from what sounded very far away. "Whatever happens, I hope you get everything that you want out of life. You deserve it."

"Well," I said, turning away, "thanks."

"I mean it, Perry. What happened tonight was not easy, but it had to be done. I could not have done it without you." She reached up and brushed one hand over my face, her palm cold and damp. "My sister would have thanked you too."

"The first Gobija."

"Yes."

I rolled my forehead against the cold glass windows, hoping for a degree of sanity. I told myself that what I was thinking was crazy. I tried saying the words to myself, just so I could hear how ridiculous it was, but it didn't work. I wouldn't be satisfied until I spoke them out loud.

"Gobi."

A whistling inhalation. "What?"

"I can't believe I'm about to say this, but ... you know, I could still be your hostage."

She cocked one eyebrow, the expression of comic incredulity at stark odds with her pale, perspiring face. "What are you talking about?"

"For a little while longer, you could use me to get out of here. You know, hold on to me." I nodded at the sawed-off shotgun she'd brought with her; the machine pistol must have stayed back at the office, before the jump. "You've still got a gun. The cops won't stop you if they think you're going to kill me. Then once you get, you know ... on an airplane or wherever, you could let me go."

"That's a very generous offer," she said. "But I'll be fine."

"No, you won't."

"Trust me."

"Quit saying that."

She smiled and sat back for the rest of the ride. Despite everything, I felt my eyelids getting heavy, helpless against exhaustion. Time drifted, blurring, an abstraction of darkness and white noise.

I jerked awake.

The helicopter was descending.

"Where are we?"

Gobi sat forward, her voice hardly a croak. "See for yourself."

Looking down, I saw my house.

35

From above, my house was a blazing electric sea of blue and red emergency lights. I saw state police cruisers snaked halfway up the street. It was four thirty in the morning and the neighbors were outside in their bathrobes and jackets, standing in the yard. There were news vans on the lawn.

"What are we doing here?" I asked.

Gobi ignored me and shouted something to the pilot in Lithuanian. The helicopter went into a low hover, shaking the poplars and shrubbery, blasting newly formed leaves from the trees and whipping them through the neighborhood. A spotlight speared down from the helicopter's undercarriage and hit the roof. I saw shingles flipping and flying loose.

Now I could recognize faces: Mr. Drobenack, who always complained about the property line, Mr. and Mrs. Englebrook, who always let their dogs poop on our yard, all using their hands to shield their eyes from the light.

"Hang on."

Gobi threw open the hatchway. Noise roared in on a fresh gush of cold night air, pushing me back into my seat. Bracing herself against the bulkhead, Gobi reached up into a cargo swing bin and brought down a canvas bundle, opening the flaps and tossing it out. I leaned sideways and saw a rope ladder unfurling downward until it was dangling just above my roof.

"Hold it a second!" I shouted. "What are you doing?"

"I have to get the bomb out of your basement."

"What?"

"
I said I have to get the bomb out of your basement!
"

"Wait," I said, "maybe—"

She gripped the ladder and swung out, already gone.

I stood in the hatchway watching her repel down, a small dark shape swaying and weaving in the prop-wash until she dropped down onto the top of our house. A moment passed while she checked her balance, gauged the slope of the roof, then scurried across it toward the nearest bedroom window, flung it open, and crawled inside. It was her room, the one we'd given her to stay in. Of course she would have left it unlocked.

The helicopter had already started to lift. I reached forward and tapped the pilot on the shoulder.

"Where are we going?"

He either didn't understand or chose to ignore the question, and it didn't really matter because a minute later we were descending again, this time over a ball field at the other end of my subdivision. Even as we came to ground, the pilot didn't say anything. But when we touched down, he pointed at the door and made an odd, flicking-away motion with his hands that I realized I knew from earlier.

"Morozov?" I shouted, over the engine's roar. "Pasha?"

He jerked around and looked at me, the ratlike, emaciated face and hungry eyes gazing from deep inside their sockets.

"You knew everything the whole time?"

"What do you think?"

"You were going to chop my fingers off!"

Morozov paused to give the matter some thought. "No," he said finally, "not really."

"If you knew I was lying to you the whole time, why didn't you say anything?"

"Gobija wanted to test you. She likes her men to prove themselves, to know if she can trust them." He shrugged. "You passed the test."

"What if I'd failed?"

"Never mind." He gestured at the door. "Get out."

"You did all this for her?"

"You are not the only one who loves her."

"Whoa," I said. "Who said anything about loving her?"

He glared at me as if I'd insulted his entire family ancestry. A closer look revealed that his eyes were red, his cheeks streaked and shining with long silvery-looking creases that followed the natural etchings of his face. After a second I realized that he was crying.

"Get out," he repeated, and this time I did. I had already jumped down and made my way across the baseball diamond, back toward my street, the helicopter roaring back overhead, when I realized that his accent wasn't Russian at all. I should have recognized it right away; I'd heard enough of it that night.

It was Lithuanian.

36

From what people said, the news footage they ran for weeks afterward showed everything very clearly, although I never watched it. I didn't have to. I was there.

I couldn't really afford to run back through my neighborhood, but I did anyway, forcing my leg to move faster past the houses that I'd known all my life, homes that I'd biked past and delivered newspapers to, familiar mailboxes and sidewalks, trees and landmarks, until I got to my street. It all looked different now, even my own house, as if I were seeing it from a totally different set of eyes. It seemed like I'd been away a lot longer than ten hours.

"Perry?"

My mom broke out of a crowd of people and ran toward me, throwing her arms around me and hugging me. "Oh, thank God. Are you all right? What happened to your leg?"

"It's a long story," I said. "Is Annie okay?"

"Annie's fine. She's at the Espenshades'. I think she's finally asleep."

I turned to look at our house. "Where's Gobi? Has she come out yet?"

A peculiar gleam flashed through Mom's face, as if she had just now understood something she felt she should have noticed a long time ago. "No," she said. "Perry, how did you get back from the city?"

"On the helicopter."

"She brought you with her? Who
is
she, Perry?"

"She's just a girl."

"Annie said you told her—"

"Forget what I told Annie. I was wrong. I didn't know anything about her at all."

Mom stood next to me, not talking, not moving. After a long time she drew in one of those breaths that I could tell meant that she wanted to say something but wasn't sure how to phrase it.

"I got a message from your father. He's at Beth Israel. They were going to take him to surgery but apparently he's refusing until they transfer him to New York Presbyterian. Stubborn to the last, that man."

"Uh-huh."

"And now..." Exasperation trickled into her voice, making the whole conversation more familiar. "The police won't even let us in our own
house.
The bomb squad came and they couldn't find anything, so they left, but now I want to know—"

"Wait a second," I said. "The bomb squad didn't find anything in the basement?"

"Not in the basement, not in the whole house," Mom said. "They brought dogs and everything. Then they just picked up and left again, but they still won't let us go back inside—"

"So there was no bomb?"

"Apparently not."

I turned and looked back at the house, amazed.

Trust me.

"Damn," I said.

"What is it?"

"Nothing, it's just that she was bluffing after a—"

At that second there was a blast and bright flame shuddered up from the house where I'd grown up, blowing the windows out in a tinkling spray. A second later the roof blew off and the walls exploded, showering debris outward as the house caved in, collapsing in a heap.

37

Blown Away.

"That's the headline?" Mom asked, picking up the
New York Post
sitting next to Dad's hospital bed. "That's what it says?"

I watched as my dad reached out over the bedrail, past the newspaper, and picked up a cup of coffee. He sniffed it, recoiled, and put it back without taking a drink. Apparently he'd been complaining to his nurses about the coffee since he'd arrived here. My impression was that they couldn't wait to get rid of him and send him back to Starbucks so they wouldn't have to listen to him whine anymore.

"Well," Dad said with kind of a shrug, "it's true."

"At least Perry wasn't blown away!" Mom said.

"Perry wasn't in the house, Mom," Annie said. She didn't look up from her phone, her thumbs clicking busily away. "Check this out: this TV station in Japan wants to interview Perry."

"No interviews," Dad said. "Not until they finish the investigation."

"Dad, come on! It's in Tokyo! They're interested in us!"

"You heard your father," Mom said. "No interviews."

"Mom, that's so mean! Nobody's ever going to care this much about me again!"

"That's not true, honey," Mom said, not looking up from the newspaper. "We'll always care about you."

She rolled her eyes. "Gee, thanks."

I sat in the corner of the room without talking, letting myself disappear behind a cloud of flowers and balloons, get-well cards, and loud, overlapping voices. The only thing that didn't seem to belong here was the hospital room itself. It would have been more appropriately suited to someone who was actually fighting for his life, or at least trying to get well. My eyes kept going back to the
Post
headline running in huge capital letters above the aerial photo of our house, or what had been our house, blasted to pieces and burned to the ground.

Blown away.

I dreamed about you sometimes.

In my dreams we were walking down Tenth Avenue together in the dark. You hadn't been shot after all, and we were both all right. I asked you if you were done, and you said yes, it was finished.

In my dreams the streetlights all went off as we walked past them, but I could still see perfectly clearly to the corner. There was heat and light pouring out of you like a lantern, shining down the sidewalk in front of us, filling the intersection with amazing white light. When I reached for your hand you let me keep it there and smiled.

You kissed me one more time. In my dreams I always knew that meant that I was about to wake up. The light spilling out of your face and eyes and skin blazed up higher, and you said you had to go.

You said it had to be this way.

You said you were a goddess of fire.

Life went on.

It always did, and that summer was no exception. Within six weeks of having the property cleared and sold, Mom and Dad had met with architects and agreed on a piece of land for the new house. Everybody was relieved. It would be in the same school district for Annie, and the insurance settlement had been very generous. Mom said she'd wanted a new kitchen anyway.

Gradually the reporters started leaving us alone, and that was a big relief too. We spent the beginning of that summer holed up in a five-star Connecticut resort with a pool, sauna, and day spa, eating in restaurants and picking out all new clothing, furniture, pots and pans ... everything you need to buy when someone blows up your house.

Dad insisted on getting the best of everything. He said that Mom deserved it (but never said exactly why). After what happened with Valerie "Santamaria" Statham, I had expected his stress level to go through the roof, but true to his habit of surprising everybody, he tendered his resignation and just walked away "to pursue other opportunities." He said it was like a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. The preliminary investigation had revealed that nobody else at the firm, including my dad, had any idea what Valerie had been involved in, but by then Harriet, Statham, and Fripp had become the Enron of the legal world, a late-night talk show joke, and their client list had emptied out faster than the first-class cabins on the
Titanic.
Throughout it all, Dad remained weirdly philosophical about the whole thing. "Never feel sorry for an attorney with a book deal," he said, and when Mom asked him if he really had a book deal, he just winked and said that he was "in talks with publishers."

It was a little odd having him around more often, but a good kind of strange, like having a three-month vacation in your own hometown. We played tennis, talked more, argued less, and spent ten days on the beach up in Maine. My mother laughed more. She and Dad started holding hands. Annie got asked out on her first date—nothing formal, just a group of friends going out to a movie together, although the boy who asked her came up to the door himself to pick her up while his mother waited out in the car. I still remember his face when he looked through the hotel suite door, his eyes wide with amazement when he said, "Geez, you guys actually
live
here?"

I got together with Norrie and the other guys in Inchworm and we jammed a couple times, but Interscope Records never called, and by July, Sasha had quit to go start his own band.

I watched the scar starting to form on my knee. No matter how tan I got, it stayed white.

Gradually, the dreams stopped.

By late July, when I still hadn't heard from Columbia, I assumed that I'd gone from the waitlist to the trash can. Didn't bother me as much as I'd expected. I was in at Uconn and Trinity. I'd started to wonder if that was what I really wanted after all.

And then, a few days later, the phone rang.