Au Revoir, Crazy European Chick (5 page)

12

"One thing that I must ask you, Perry, before you shoot me."

"Yeah? What's that?"

"Have you ever been to Europe?"

"What?"

"Have you ever traveled outside of your own country?"

I stared at her. "What's that got to do with anything?"

"Just answer the question."

"No, I ... I've been to Canada, but that's about it."

"You should consider traveling, spending some time seeing the world. It's best when you're young."

"Okay," I said. "I'm going to shoot you now."

"Wait," she said. "One more thing."

"What?"

"I have wired sixty-five pounds of Tovex in the basement of your house."

"
What?
"

"If you shoot me and I do not make a phone call at a certain time, my contact will blow the charges by remote detonator and burn down your house with your family in it."

"That's insane! What if it goes off by accident?"

"My name is another form of Gabija, the goddess of fire in Lithuanian mythology," she said. "In my country it was said that when Gabija became angry she would take a walk and set fires wherever she went."

"You're a complete lunatic. How do you know it's just not going to go off all by itself ?"

"I am trained in explosives, among other things."

"Oh, right, of course," I said, "
Le Femme Gobija.
"The comparison, which was supposed to make me feel better, actually had the opposite effect, sandbagging my lower GI tract with a bout of sudden, hammering queasiness.

"May I have my gun back, if you are not going to shoot me with it?"

I hesitated, just for a second, and in that moment her hand flashed out, snapping the weapon from me in one neat twisting motion. I looked at my empty palm and open fingers. "You could have done that anytime you wanted."

"I wanted you to understand the stakes."

"How long have the explosives been in our basement?" I asked.

"About eight months," Gobi said, and then, of my amazed and horrified reaction: "I had to be sure, in case anything happened." She rested one hand on my forearm in a gesture that was probably meant to be reassuring. "Is okay. I will remove it in the morning before I leave."

"If we even survive that long," I said. We were still sitting on Avenue A, an island of stillness in a cavalcade of nighttime traffic. "You know, I don't even see how you got through the exchange student screening process. Don't they do extensive background checks or something?"

"I seduced my admissions officer."

"Wonderful."

"She seemed to think so."

"
She?
"

Gobi reached over and squeezed my thigh. "Does that excite you?"

"No."

"You must learn to adapt, Perry. Improvise. Go with the flow."

"I almost went with the flow a second ago when you were shooting at that cop."

She slipped the gun back in her bag and glanced out the window, reorienting herself to our location. I got the sense that she was wired into the night itself, aware of every fluctuation of electricity and sound, the reflections in glass and steel. "We need to disappear for a while," she said. "Downtown is too hot for us now. Santamaria knows we are here."

"Who's Santamaria?"

"Santamaria sent those men in the black Humvee."

I shook my head. "I totally should have shot you when I had the chance."

"And the explosives?"

"I could have called my family and told them to get out of the house, then called the bomb squad."

"Ach," she said, and gave my leg another squeeze, this one not so gentle. "The explosives are wrapped in a charcoal filter to throw off the dogs. Also, you would have to call your father. And we already know how you feel about that."

Suddenly all the levity went out of her voice. From up the street I heard tires squealing. I twisted around and saw headlights streaking forward, etching across the darkness. Before I could even see the vehicle, I knew it would be the Humvee, bearing down on us from half a block away and closing in fast.

"They are here."

"What do we do?"

"Take the keys." Gobi flung out one arm, opened my door and shoved me out, swinging me forward toward a group of people standing at the intersection. We hit the ground at a dead sprint, keeping to the shadows. Just before we turned the corner, I looked back and saw the Hummer jerk to a halt alongside the now empty Jaguar, two figures jumping out to surround it on either side.

I was out of breath, trying not to gasp for air.

"Where are we going?" I managed.

"Somewhere friendly," she said. "Keep moving."

"Forget it." I stopped in my tracks. "I'm not going anywhere else with you."

"Then I will blow your house up," she said, without breaking stride. "Do you believe me?"

Yes,
I thought.

"No."

"Then this is goodbye."

After a second, I ran to catch up.

Six blocks up Avenue A, I realized where she was taking me.

"Wait," I said, "we're going
here?
"

Gobi swung open the door of Monty's and pushed me in first, as if expecting an ambush. I stumbled inside and got my bearings—if that was even possible in a place like this.

Depending on who you asked, Monty's was either an irredeemable dump or the last of the great East Village rock clubs left over from the eighties. That last bit came directly from the owner, a Norwegian re-covered junkie named Sven that none of us had actually met and who possibly existed only as part of the club's lore. Supposedly Sven's brother-in-law had set up Inchworm's show and cashed the $2500 check Norrie and I had written last fall when we first set up the show, because that was the way it worked: you bought the place out for the night and hoped people showed up and paid at the door. We'd all read Legs McNeil's
Please Kill Me
from cover to cover and were thrilled to be taken advantage of in such a historic fashion.

Gobi pointed at the Xeroxed Inchworm flyer stapled inside the doorway. I recognized it immediately—it was the one that Norrie and I had printed and plastered around town last weekend.

"Your band is playing here tonight," she said. "It is a good cover for us until things cool off."

"Wait," I said. "You're using my gig as your hideout?"

"What is the matter, Perry? Do you feel
exploited.?
"

"I liked you better when you were this geeky quiet exchange student."

"Well, perhaps I liked you better when you just shut your mouth and stared at my chest," she said, "but we cannot always get what we want in this world."

"I never ... I didn't—"

"You are expected to be here tonight. Everybody knows that. And so you get up, play your songs, buy us some time." She shrugged. "It is not the best cover, but it will hold for now."

I started to argue again, but Gobi cut me off with the sweep of her hand, as if such things were beneath explanation, especially to one as slow-witted as myself. To my left, the bouncer, a shriveled, capuchin-faced gnome in the hoodie, gave me an indifferent blink. "Five dollars."

"I'm in the band," I muttered. "Perry Stormaire."

"Not on the list."

"That's because I'm
in the band.
"

"Not on the list."

I opened my wallet and found ten dollars, handing it over. It was my last ten dollars.

"ID?"

Holding up my hand, I showed him the UNDERAGE stamp from the 40/40 Club.

"No alcohol," the gnome said. "You can't—"

"Sit at the bar, yeah, I know."

He waved us forward, making a point of checking Gobi out as she sauntered by. A moment later I heard a staticky blurt of microphone noise, and up on stage, I saw Norrie, along with Caleb and our lead singer, Sasha, marching out, gazing at the crowd with a combination of carefully feigned rock-and-roll disregard and barely controlled panic. They hadn't seen me yet.

"Gobi," I said, a terrible possibility occurring to me. "Wait. You're not going to kill anybody here, are you?"

"Not unless is absolutely necessary." She paused and took a speculative look at the band. "In firefight, would any of them take a bullet for you, do you think?" Her eyes lingered on Norrie. "The one in back, perhaps playing the drums—he is good size, and would make a good shield, if it came to that."

"You're kidding, right? Are you kidding? That's my best friend." My mind was still reeling, trying to imagine a scenario more desperate than being gunned down at my band's first real New York gig, when I felt a hand grasp my shoulder.

As Gobi slipped into the crowd, I turned around and looked at the two adults standing in front of me.

"Mom?" I said. "
Dad?
"

13

Staring at them, I realized that forty-five minutes had passed since I'd spoken to my father on the phone.

"We thought we might find you here," he said, raising one hand like he might pat me on the back or haul off and sock me in the jaw. In the end he just let the hand flop back to his side. He was looking at me very closely, with an intensity I'd never seen before and didn't particularly like. It made my skin itch. "I suppose Gobi's here with you?"

"She's ... somewhere," I said.

Dad nodded and started scanning the crowd. I imagined his Terminator-vision analyzing the faces for some trace of the woman with the sole power to bring down his marriage.

"Perry," Mom said, "how could you do this to us? How could you betray our trust?"

"
Me
betray your trust?" I looked back over at Dad. "Mom—"

"
Good evening, New York!
" Sasha bellowed from the stage, loud enough to startle everybody, spilling a few drinks and momentarily souring the communal mood. "
I heard New York City wants to rock!
"

There was a momentary lull as the crowd looked up, judged Sasha not to be an immediate threat, and went back to their drinks and conversations.

"
I said,
" Sasha insisted, "
that I heard New York City wants to rock!
"

It wasn't exactly clear why we'd taken Sasha on as Inchworm's lead singer. On the plus side, he did have that element of raw animal savagery vital to a frontman. On the other hand, he seemed to think this was 1985, when his parents had been his age.

With the downtown crowd continuing to ignore him, Sasha decided to give formal notice that the show was about to begin. He communicated this by executing a flying roundhouse kick, letting out a Comanche warrior's shriek, and picking up a Stratocaster, an instrument I'd seen him play only when he was drinking tequila and the guitar itself was invisible. Meanwhile, behind him, Norrie attacked the bass. Caleb, normally our lead guitarist, had settled himself behind the drums.

That was when I realized that in my absence, Norrie had reassigned instruments. The only reason I recognized the results—a cover of Motley Crue's "Kickstart My Heart"—was that we'd planned on opening with it.

The crowd responded by continuing to ignore them, slightly more aggressively.

Remembering the plastic explosives in the basement of my house, I turned back to my mother, who appeared to be on the verge of tears. "Mom, where's Annie?"

"What?"

"
Where's Annie?
"

"She's at home."

"In the house?"

"Yes, Perry, that's usually where people are when they're at home."

"You need to call her and tell her to get out of there, right now!"

"I can't hear you over this racket!"

"I said—"

Dad appeared between us, blocking Mom out entirely. He leaned in close so that I could hear him. "Perry. We need to talk."

"Dad—"

"Those things that Gobi was talking about, I don't know where she heard them or what she thinks she knows, but those were legitimate business trips."

"Dad," I said, "you're obviously lying, but right now I couldn't care less."

Holy shit—had I just said that? I was still trying to figure out whether the actual words had left my lips when my dad grabbed me by my tuxedo shirt and shook me, slightly harder than I'd expected. I knew that he went to the gym, but he was also fifty-two years old and his favorite foods were bourbon and bacon.

"Now you listen to me," he said. "I'm your father and right now you are
way
off the reservation on this one—you understand?"

Over his shoulder I saw Gobi come out of the crowd. She froze and looked at us, and I saw she was holding what looked like a taser, pointing it at my dad's neck. I shook my head sharply.

"No?" Dad asked, misinterpreting my head shake. "Well, let me make it crystal clear. As long as you live under my roof, you will obey certain rules. You're not a child anymore. Your music, this little game you play, is over. It's time to focus on more pressing matters."

I glanced back at Gobi again. A man in a leather jacket had appeared behind her. He was probably in his twenties, and his face looked like a sculpture made by a disturbed metal-shop student with a fond ness for veins. His haircut was shellacked with gel product, giving it the resinous, bulletproof appearance of a Ken doll's. At that exact same moment, a second man, the same age, with eyes cut out of the same semicolorless agate, materialized to my immediate right. He wore a barn coat and his shoulders gave him the tight, heavy look of a man who'd done prison time, maybe a lot of it. A teardrop tattoo was suspended under his left eye. There was a density about both of them that made me think of guns concealed under layers of Teflon and Kevlar.

I thought instantly about the black Humvee.

"Are you even listening to me?" Dad asked. "I'm
talking
to you."

"Dad, we have to get out of here."

I looked for Gobi, but she had vanished. But not Teardrop Tattoo. He was striding straight toward me with an expression of dawning purpose, as if every nagging uncertainty in his life, every unresolved question and crisis of faith, had been answered in the form of the idea of kicking my ass. He shoved my dad aside without even looking at him, and my dad, for his part, went over without a bit of resistance.

Teardrop Tattoo locked eyes with me, and I saw my own death reflected there. It was not heroic or meaningful or even particularly interesting, just bloody, painful, awkward, and agonizing. I looked back at the stage where the ragged, awful noise that wasn't music had already started dissolving into a bowlegged twang of strings and random cymbal taps, like a stoned octopus slithering through a Guitar Center.

Teardrop Tattoo charged me.

With no place else to go, I jumped up onto the stage.

***

As soon as I got up there and Norrie realized what was happening— "
Holy shit! It's Perry!
"—the band instantly re-reorganized. I grabbed the bass and Sasha tossed his guitar to Caleb, who abandoned the drums for Norrie, who clicked his sticks together, firing off a four-count for our original song "It's My Funeral." At first I didn't think I'd even be able to play—I had way too much going on in my mind—but to my profound surprise, my fingers didn't seem to care. Apparently if you wanted to rock, it didn't matter if you had explosives in the basement, or a father with a chronic problem with keeping his dick in his pants, or a crazed ex-Blackwater employee with some religious conviction for ripping your head off.

Hell, it might have
helped.

In the beginning the crowd regarded us with the distracted curiosity you might pay to a three-legged dog hobbling down the other side of the street. Twenty seconds later, though, most of them had stopped what they were doing and just watched us. By then people were actually nodding along with the music. We finished the song and the cheering started.

"Dude!" Norrie shouted, gesturing me over to the drums. Sweat was pouring from him in rivers and streams, soaking his gray Fugazi T-shirt black around the neck and pits and painting a long black dagger down his spine. The grin on his face made him look about six years old. "You made it! That was awesome!"

Backing away, ignoring him completely, I scanned the crowd for Teardrop Tattoo and saw him standing at the foot of the stage, brain-raping me with his eyes. As long as we kept playing, he couldn't touch me. "Hey, Norrie, look—"

"Whoa, man." Norrie grabbed my arm. "Did you see who's out in the crowd?"

"Who, my dad?"

"Jimmy Iovine. That's J-Jimmy freakin'
Iovine,
dude."

"Really?"

"Yeah, man, check it out. It's t-totally him." An elbow as sharp as a Dungeons and Dragons broadsword dug into my ribs. "I
t-told
you Interscope was s-stalking our Facebook page. Y-Y-You thought it was b-bullshit, but there he is." Norrie's I'm-six-at-Disney-World smile was now a huge, goofy chimpanzee grin that stretched out both sides of his face like a cut-rate facelift. "This is it. This is
so
our t-t-time, right now."

"Okay."
Breathe, asshole,
I told myself. Teardrop Tattoo was now gripping the stage in front of me as if he was considering jumping up on it.

And then, just when the moment couldn't possibly get any weirder, I saw another familiar face in the crowd, a tall, cool brunette at the far end of the room.

Valerie Statham had come to my rock-and-roll show.

I looked at Norrie. "My dad's boss is here."

"What?"

"The one who's supposed to write my letter of recommendation to Columbia. I forgot that I invited her to the show." I could suddenly feel the unmistakable sensation of my two different worlds colliding in my brain. "What do we do?"

"Wh-What the hell do you think we do?" Norrie grinned. "W-W-We rock harder than we ever have in our lives."

"What song?"

"I think it has to be 'Tovah.'"

I was simultaneously hoping he'd say that and praying that he wouldn't. "Tovah" was the song we'd been working on for the past two months. It was about a girl that Norrie had met and fallen in love with at Jewish camp when he was fourteen years old, who had died of an overdose of Valium and tequila the following year, and when it was finished, it might turn out to be the best thing we'd ever written together, but it wasn't finished.

In the end, that didn't really matter.

We ripped into it hard and the people responded instantly, just lit up like the JumboTron in Times Square. It was as if up till now we'd been serving ginger ale and we'd suddenly switched to Jack Daniel's. The guy at the bar who might have been Jimmy Iovine put his phone down and started listening. Valerie Statham turned and stared. Even Teardrop Tattoo looked impressed. We finished the second verse and went into the chorus—

And the world went black.