Au Revoir, Crazy European Chick (4 page)

9

"What ... what do I do?"

We were coming into Union Square now, traffic looking worse than bad, and all I could think was that my father would never have wanted any of this for his car, or for his son, but mainly for his car.

"Get in the left lane," Gobi said. "Take Fourteenth Street around the park, pick up Broadway the next block down."

"No, about my dad."

"What will you do if you don't answer?"

"He'll probably just keep calling."

"Then you need to pick it up and talk to him."

"I can't—" The phone slipped out of my hand and Gobi caught it midair, switched on the speaker, and held it up to my face so that I could keep both hands on the wheel, cutting off the cab behind me on my way left. "Hello?"

"Perry?"

"Dad?"

"I hear car horns. Where are you?"

"We, ah..." I threw a frantic look at Gobi. She shook her head, which could have meant anything, but which I interpreted as
Improvise, stupid.
"We had to leave the prom. Some stuff happened."

"Some
stuff?
What are you talking about?"

"We're sort of in the city."

"What city? You're in
New York?
" His voice sharpened, becoming more angular with every syllable. "May I remind you that you're driving the Jaguar, Perry."

"Dad, I know ... Look—Gobi asked me to take her to the city, and, uh—"

"I don't care if the ghost of Frank Sinatra extended you a personal invitation to Carnegie Hall," Dad said. "I want to know what you're doing, driving my car into New York without conferring with your mother and me?" The anger in his voice was a controlled burn. "Now I want you to listen to me very carefully. As quickly and as
safely
as possible, I want you to turn around and come home, right now, where we can discuss the consequences of your rash decision. Do you understand me? Perry?"

The light changed and I took a left onto Fourteenth Street. Before I could answer, Gobi took the phone away and brought it to her own ear. She was still on speaker.

"Hello? Mr. Stormaire? This is Gobija."

"Gobi, put Perry back on the phone, please. This is a private matter."

"Mr. Stormaire, you must understand something. Your son is a good boy. All his life, he has dedicated himself to making you proud of him." She gestured up ahead where Fourteenth fed back into Broadway, continuing downtown. "Tonight I asked him to show me the city one last time before I flew home."

"Gobi, no offense, but this doesn't involve you in the least." I could hear his temper slipping a notch and felt the tightening in my sphincter that always preceded the instinct to do whatever he said. "Now put my son back on the phone."

She actually seemed to think about it. "No."

"
No?
"

"Not until you apologize for the way you have treated him."

There was a second of silence, and my dad said, "Come again?"

"For nine months I see things in your home, Mr. Stormaire, and I watch how you treat your son. I see that you want the best for him, but you have crushed his spirit with your expectations, and you have discouraged him with your restrictions. Family is important, but it is not immune to the indifference of a cold-hearted parent."

"I see," my dad said. "And you're an expert on this, are you, Gobi? On my family?"

"I know that the man who does not put his family first places his own soul at peril. I have been watching and listening. And while that may not make me an expert, I would say that I know what I am speaking of." She shifted her weight around in the seat, and I saw her face, the way she was focused intently on the phone. "There is a proverb in my country, Mr. Stormaire:
The faithless husband poisons his family at the roots.
"

"The faithless..." My dad stopped. "Wait a second. What are you talking about?"

"I believe we understand each other. I hardly think we need to go into the specifics of your ongoing relationship with Madelyn Kelso, do we?"

It was quiet for a long time.

"Excuse me?" Dad said. "Did you say Madelyn Kelso?"

"You heard me."

"Now you listen here. I don't know what you're referring to, or what you think you know—"

"I am referring to the events of April sixteenth," Gobi said without so much as a pause for a breath. "And your business trip to San Diego on the twenty-eighth, as well as your weekend at the Hotel Monaco with Ms. Kelso in Chicago on May third. Would you like me to continue?"

"How do you know about that?"

"May I inform you that you are on speakerphone, Mr. Stormaire."

Dad didn't say anything for a long time. When he finally did, his voice sounded completely different, unfamiliar from any type of fatherly intonation I'd ever heard before. It sounded gut-punched, out of breath. "Perry?"

"Perry will be back in the morning, along with your precious automobile. Until then you will not call him or harass him in any way, or I assure you that my next phone call will be to
Mrs.
Stormaire. Do we understand each other?"

"Now just a moment." Dad's voice sounded hoarse. "I'd like to speak to my son for moment, please."

"He heard everything you just said."

"Gobi, please—"

"Later," Gobi said, and hung up, handing me back the phone.

We were back on Broadway, and I just drove.

10

Traffic loosened south of Union Square. Broadway fed down past restaurants and all-night groceries, flower shops and guys setting up tables on the sidewalks, selling knockoff purses and jewelry and bootleg DVDs. I kept my eyes straight ahead, not talking, until Gobi turned and glanced up at me.

"I am sorry you had to find out this way, Perry."

"He promised us that was over," I said.

My voice felt dead, even to me, like somebody talking in his sleep. Gobi didn't say anything, just kept her attention on the street ahead as we passed through the Lower East Side toward the Financial District, the concrete canyonlands where college funds and retirement money was gained and lost every day.

"That stuff you told him about Madelyn," I said, "that wasn't just a bluff, was it?"

She picked up her BlackBerry, tapped in keys. "Wiretapping your phones was a security precaution along with routine surveillance. As part of the assignment, I had to secure the site, including your father's private line."

"That's not an answer," I said.

But it was.

11

My sinuses felt like they were filling with hot molten lead, suffocating me from the inside. I was thinking about what my dad had told me back in his office. "'A man has obligations outside himself...'" I muttered. "That hypocritical piece of crap." My hands gripped the wheel hard enough to whiten my knuckles, but I didn't let go because I didn't want to see how badly they were shaking. "She's his personal assistant—can you believe that? The first time Mom caught him, he promised it would stop for good."

Gobi said nothing, lost in her BlackBerry. I let her go. I could feel the past swimming up behind me to swallow me up. It took me back to the night two years ago when I'd come home from the library and stepped on a piece of broken dish lying in the foyer. Mom had thrown three of them at Dad on his way out the door. There was a gash in it, just above the doorknob.

I'd found her sitting on the couch in the living room with a gin and tonic in her hand, staring at
Dancing with the Stars
with the sound off.

"She threw him out of the house," I told Gobi. "He went to stay at a hotel that night and when he came back he promised it would never happen again."

She shrugged. "Men are swine."

"Not all of us."

Gobi nodded at the next intersection. "Pull into the alleyway," she said. "We're here."

She glanced at the lit office window twelve floors off the street, then back at me. "Here," she murmured, leaning over to wrap the plastic handcuffs from her bag around my wrists.

"Wait, what's this?"

She looped the restraints through the Jaguar's steering wheel, cinching them to the skin.

"Ow, that's too tight!"

"Stay here."

"Like I could go anywhere?"

She reached into the bag and took out the gun I had seen earlier.

"Gobi,
wait—
"

She got out and sank into the shadows half a block off Pearl Street, a Lithuanian ninja. I jerked tentatively on the wrist restraints but that only made them tighter. She had left her bag sitting on the passenger seat, and I wondered what else she had in there—passports, more weapons, a bazooka?

I looked up to the rearview mirror, back up the alleyway to the street. I put both hands on the steering wheel and blasted the horn. It was ten fifteen. Somewhere over on Avenue A, Inchworm had started their sound check at Monty's. I hit the horn again. I imagined my dad wandering through the house with a scotch and soda in his hand, wondering how on earth a foreign exchange student had found out about his ongoing affair with his assistant. I blasted the horn again. Back in Boy Scouts we'd learned Morse code, and I tried to remember how to do SOS, but settled for a series of irregular, spastic-sounding honks, hoping it sounded desperate and not just like a malfunctioning car alarm or the drum part from "My Sharona," a song that Inchworm sometimes played at our live shows, but only ironically.

At the far end of the alley, a pair of headlights appeared.

"Thank you, God." I hit the horn in shorter, sharper blasts and started shouting out the open window. "Help! Help me! Up here!"

The headlights turned in and started toward me. Red and blue swirled from the roof as the cruiser pulled up directly behind me, doors opening.

The female officer who approached the car didn't look as if she were in a hurry.

"Is there a problem, sir?"

I jerked my head down at the plastic wrist restraints. "I'm tied to the wheel here."

"Yes, sir. I can see that."

"The woman who did it is up in that office building. She has a gun. She went up there to kill somebody. She's an assassin. Also, she's Lithuanian." Why this last part was important, I didn't know; maybe it added what the SAT might call verisimilitude.

"An assassin?" Now I had the cop's attention, but she seemed just as interested that I was seventeen years old, wearing a rented tuxedo, and driving a Jaguar that clearly didn't belong to me. Her flashlight went to the stamp on my right hand:
UNDERAGE
. She drew in a deep breath. "Is this some kind of joke?"

"There's blood on the windshield," I said. "Does that look like I'm joking?"

She raised her flashlight to the windshield and played it across the blood. That was when a bullet hole appeared in the glass. It was a brand new bullet hole, I realized; it had just happened.

The
pop
sound arrived afterward, like an afterthought. The cop went into a duck-and-cover position next to the Jaguar, grabbing her radio from her belt and saying cop things into it, shouting codes and signals. I heard the next bullet go whining off the cement next to her and she sprang back up, bounding off in the direction of her cruiser. Shots were spanging and spackling off the ground now like hail, and a second later Gobi came running back up to the car and jumped into the passenger seat with the gun in her hand. Blood flecked one side of her face and she was breathing hard, looking over her shoulder at the police car.

"You did it again, didn't you?" I asked. "You shot somebody else!"

"What were you doing?" she said, turning the ignition key. "Drive."

I hit the gas and sent us roaring blindly back down the alley, scraping past a dumpster and stacks of boxes, my hands still tied to the wheel. Before I could say anything, Gobi raised the butt of the pistol and whacked me across the back of the head.

"Ow! Shit! Crap!"

"All I ask you to do is wait! One simple thing! Only wait!"

"I didn't—"

She raised the gun again. I shut up, cringing back. She lowered the gun. "You put innocent lives in danger when you take stupid risks! What were you thinking?"

"Were you really going to shoot that cop?"

She looked back. The police lights were flashing up the alleyway after us, playing off puddles and brick walls. "I might still have to." She shook her head, gazing at me with a mixture of exasperation and annoyance. "I understand now why you never have a girlfriend, Perry."

"What? I've had a girlfriend! What's that got to do with anything?"

"You do not know how to listen to a woman." She pointed. "Out this way, take a right."

Tires screeching, I took the corner too fast, the back of the Jaguar fishtailing and caroming off the back of a newspaper stand. I hoped that she didn't lean out the window and start shooting back at the cop, but the very act of hoping seemed to bring that exact scenario to life, because seconds later Gobi was leaning out the window and shooting back at the cop.

"I've had lots of girlfriends," I shouted. It had just occurred to me that if Gobi was tapping the phone at our house then she might have been eavesdropping on my cell phone conversations too, and overheard the countless conversations in which Norrie had referred to my virginity, both explicitly—"Hello, Mr. Virgin"—and in not-so-secret code—"Aye aye, Cap'n Cherry." Once, junior year, apropos of nothing, he'd interrupted the middle of our conversation comparing Wendy's and Fuddruckers with an entire song apparently composed on the spot, to the tune of "Like a Virgin":

Gobi dispelled any doubt on this issue when she turned to me and said:

"But you still are a virgin."

"What? No! No, I'm not."

She stuck the gun back out the window and fired again. "I heard you talking about it on the phone."

"That's a total invasion of privacy! Besides, that was a joke. It's just a stupid nickname."

"Your nickname is Virgin?"

"Yeah, it's ironic, like when you call a big guy Tiny."

"So you have had many girls?"

"Many, yeah, a lot." I was giving myself whiplash trying to figure out what street we were on. It looked just like Pearl Street, except I thought we were a little farther north, in Tribeca—could that be right? Then the street opened up and I saw the September 11 Memorial Site straight ahead of me, Ground Zero, which seemed completely appropriate given that the police car behind me was about to pull me over, if Gobi didn't kill the cop first.

But the strobe lights behind us were gone.

"We lost them," I said. "Did we lose them? I think we lost them."

Gobi scowled into her side-view mirror. "We picked up a tail."

"What? I don't see anybody."

"Not the police this time. Black Humvee, six cars back."

"You can see that far?" I craned my neck but could only make out generic strings of headlights up and down the street. "Who is it?"

She didn't answer, consulting her BlackBerry. The look of worry on her face was new, more serious than before. It meant something, but she wasn't going to tell me. The light in front of me was turning red.

"Run it."

"I don't think—"

"Now."

I slammed the accelerator. At the exact same second, the Humvee that I hadn't seen before came charging out of the line of traffic behind us and into the right lane, accelerating fast until it was almost alongside the Jaguar. I was in the middle of the intersection now, shoved sideways on the cushion of displaced air that the Hummer had created upon its arrival, cabs blasting their horns, screeching their brakes to avoid hitting us. The Hummer growled through behind me, took a hungry bite out of a taxi's right bumper, and just kept coming, a living force of demonic automotive vengeance. The back window of the Jaguar exploded with a shotgun blast and I felt my blood jump in my veins. I think I screamed.

"They're shooting at us!
They're
shooting at
us!
"

"Turn left," Gobi said. "Down this alley. And hold your arms still." She flicked open a straight razor and cut off the restraints, bringing sudden, blessed relief. "Keep going."

I cranked the wheel hard, trying at the same time to look over my shoulder. "Who's in the Humvee?"

She didn't answer. I was going forty miles an hour down an empty alley, with the headlights off praying that there was nothing in front of me. At the far end I saw lights of some big street and knew already that I wasn't going to be able to stop and wait for a break in traffic. I was just going to have to hope there was nothing coming from either direction when I got there.

The Jaguar torpedoed out of the alleyway and I turned right because it was easier than turning left. We were on Avenue A somehow—my sense of Manhattan geography was hopelessly scrambled and I didn't know if we were heading uptown or downtown—and the Humvee was nowhere in sight. I felt the endorphins simmering in a stew of adrenaline, the whole soupy mess coming to a boil in my temples. My chest started aching and I realized that I hadn't breathed in the last twenty seconds.

"Are they gone?"

"For now."

I swung to the curb and hit the brakes hard enough that Gobi jerked forward in her seat. Her bag fell open and the gun slipped out.

It was one of those life moments, the kind that all future events pivot upon. Not even thinking, I grabbed it in both hands and pointed it at her. She seemed both surprised and impressed by the speed with which I'd managed to turn the tables.

"Not bad, Perry. You are learning."

"Shut up," I said. The gun was shaking in my hands, but I didn't care. "Get out of my car."

She didn't move. "Don't you mean your father's car?"

"Whatever. I don't know why you picked me for this, but I'm done, you understand? I'm
through.
I'm eighteen years old. In a month I'm going to graduate, I'm waitlisted at Columbia ... and this—whatever it is—isn't part of the plan."

"So you are going to shoot me?"

"If I have to, yeah."

"All right."

"What?"

"Go ahead and do it. You have the gun. It is loaded." She waited. "But first you better take off the safety. It is the switch on the side. But you will not. Because you do not have the balls."

"You don't think so?"

"I know so."

"Well, you're wrong."

Keeping the gun pointed at her, I flipped the safety off. All at once I could hear the noise of the city, the traffic pulsing on the expressway, the subways roaring under the sidewalks, millions of people out talking and driving around, living their lives. I smelled coffee and cigarettes and perfume and wet trees, tasted it in the air. It was all incredibly alive, like my heart and lungs working on overload, resonating in my chest and pounding through my skull.

For an instant our eyes met and I saw that Gobi was smiling slightly, enjoying this.

And she said, "Wait."