Au Revoir, Crazy European Chick (6 page)

14

The sound died with the lights, a candle blown out with a single puff. For a second I could hear Sasha's voice in the dark, squalling naked and childlike without the aid of a microphone, and then Norrie's drums rattled silent. The crowd reacted instantly with a startled last-episode-of-Sopranos "Huh?" of shock and confusion.

I felt a hand grab my sleeve and jerk me from the stage. I dropped my bass and swung my arms out to catch myself, experiencing air's notorious inadequacy when it comes to behaving as a solid, and then my chin slammed into the floor and my face went numb up all the way back to my jawbone.

"Get up," Gobi's voice hissed in my ear, with all the rage of a culturally repressed eastern Europe behind her words, but by that point she was already dragging me through the crowd. Scrambling to my feet, I went staggering through the front door and outside into the night.

"What are you doing?"

"Saving your life."

"Now?"

"We must go."

I looked back at the club. "But we were rocking!"

"Too many people paying attention," she said.

"That's kind of the p—"

"Shut up." She jabbed something into the small of my back and we walked quickly back up Avenue A toward the park. The sight of the Jaguar seemed to reassure her. "Get in."

I opened the driver's side door and heaved myself in, still dizzy and sweating. "You couldn't have at least waited till we finished the song? One of the most important guys in the music industry was sitting at the bar."

"Does not matter," Gobi said, consulting her BlackBerry.

"Maybe not to you, but it matters to me."

"That is not what I mean." She turned to face me. "I saw you with your father at that club. All he has to do is tell you to stop, and just like that you give up your dreams, like poof, like they were nothing."

"We were
good
up there."

Gobi smiled at me. She had the strangest way of doing that at odd moments.

"You were better than good, Perry. You were great."

"Thanks."

"It is just a pity that you cannot stand up for what you love."

"What, like killing people for money?"

Gobi stiffened. A flat, dispassionate mask clamped over her face, and her voice went flat.

"Drive uptown," she said. "Should take no more than fifteen minutes."

15

It was almost eleven when we drove up Fifth Avenue and Gobi pointed to the entrance of the Sherry-Netherland Hotel. The valet in a red jacket and pants with gold piping approached the Jaguar and stopped, inspecting the body damage, the smashed rear window, and the blood on the windshield. His face went from a placatory smile to the "Oh, no" emoticon of ☺.

"Is everything all right, sir?"

I nodded and kept my eyes on Gobi. She had my cell phone in her bag, but as soon as she got out, I was going to do whatever I could to get in touch with Annie and make sure she was safely out of the house. Then I was going to bolt.

"Come on." She gestured me out. "This time you are coming with me."

"I'd rather stay put, thanks."

She reached in and pulled me out. How a girl that weighed fifty pounds less than me could force me out of a vehicle and make it look elegant was a total mystery, but the valet appeared to find it amusing, almost ☺. He was still beaming at us as Gobi held my arm and swung me into the hotel lobby.

"What am I supposed to do?"

"Shut up. Be charming."

We walked toward the hotel bar, a place called Harry Cipriani's. It was a loud, lemon-colored room with lacquered wooden walls, full of low tables clustered together everywhere like toadstools. The air smelled like seafood and split-pea soup. Gobi went into stealth mode, assessing the patrons, until her gaze came to rest on an old man in a gray vintage tuxedo and a great cloud of wintry white hair, surrounded by several carafes of wine and a pile of dirty saucers. He had red, scaly ears that stuck almost straight out from his head, and he was pushing his long nose into a red wine glass, sniffing repeatedly and shaking his head, muttering under his breath, a comedic performance. Flanking him were two giggling young women that could have been his granddaughters but probably weren't.

Gobi stood and waited while he looked up at her.

"Hello?" His voice had a heavy Slavic accent that made it sound lower and more suspicious than he probably was. "What is it? Do we know each other?"

"We might," Gobi said. "You are Milos Lazarova?"

Now the suspicion sounded more genuine. "Who are you?"

"So quickly you forget?" Gobi smiled, and I could almost hear the twinkle in her voice. "Your granddaughter Daniela and I were at university together in Prague. We had Christmas dinner at your palazzo in Rome. Surely you haven't forgotten me so soon."

The old man gazed at her deeply and then shook his head, looking both flummoxed and charmed. "Forgive me. For the life of me, I cannot recall your name."

"Tatiana Kazlauskieni." Gobi offered her hand, and Milos kissed it.

"Please, sit." He turned his gaze to me, and without a word the two bimbo bookends that had been sitting on either side of him abruptly stood up and vanished. "You must introduce me to your lucky friend."

Gobi smiled. "This is Perry. My fiancée."

"Doubly lucky, then," Milos said, beaming, and gestured to the suddenly vacant chairs. "You must both join me. I insist."

"We really can't—"

"Thank you, how kind." Gobi jammed something hard into my spine, an elbow or a dagger or the barrel of a gun, and I sat down heavily, still feeling the old man's eyes on me. They were as brown as chestnuts, searching and soulful, with the depth of those of someone who'd lost something close to him and had never quite allowed himself to get over it.

"The specialty of the house is the Bellini." Milos raised three fingers at a waiter without glancing away from us. "You must try it. Surely you know the origin of this bar."

"I do not," Gobi said. Her eyes sparkled. "You must enlighten me."

"Harry Cipriani is a near duplicate of Harry's Bar in Venice, famous watering hole of many American luminaries." Milos smiled, radiating a luxuriant, liquid happiness that seemed to saturate this entire corner of the bar. "In the early 1950s, I was down and out in Venice, living like a peasant." A slight nostalgic smile played at the corner of his lips. "I had just come to the end of an affair with a married woman, much to the ire of her husband, who happened to be a very influential Venetian businessman. Suffice it to say, it had not ended well for me." He chuckled, deep in the memory now, far beyond reach. "In any case, I walked into the Harry's Bar hoping for a glass of water and a crust of bread. I had perhaps five hundred lira in my pocket—the one pocket that did not have a hole in it. I half expected them to throw me out on the street." His eyes flicked upward for just a second, then returned to us. "When I walked in, there was an American holding court at the bar, a big bear of a man with a beard and a loud voice, surrounded by several reporters and sycophants. He looked familiar, but I couldn't place him. When he noticed me standing there in my shabby clothes, waiting to get the bartender's attention, he stopped in the middle of the story and asked who I was. I told him that I was no one, just a young man down on his luck. The loud American smiled—smiled with his eyes, you know, as if recognizing a kindred spirit. 'That kind of luck only comes from a woman,' he said, and he bought me my first Bellini."

I looked at him, remembering last year's English class, when we'd read
A Moveable Feast.
"Was it Ernest Hemingway?" I asked.

"In the flesh," Milos beamed. "He invited me to join him, and the two of us spent the rest of the afternoon drinking and talking about women. He seemed intensely interested in my experiences with the fairer sex, few though they were. A young man's distractions are far more potent than an old man's memories,' he told me. He said that in the end memory is a cheat and a lie and no substitute for what he called the real stuff, the stuff of life."

Milos straightened up, resurfacing from half a century ago. He appeared thirty years younger, the beneficiary of some rejuvenation formula.

"And now we drink our Bellinis."

Exactly on cue, the white-jacketed waiter delivered three champagne flutes full of sparkling pink purée, setting them down in front of us. What was inside was cold enough to fog the glass. Gobi raised hers to her lips, and Milos lifted his. I reached out and picked mine up, sure that I was going to knock it over, although somehow I managed not to. Apparently when Milos was ordering the drinks, the UNDERAGE stamp on my hand didn't mean squat.

"Speaking of the stuff of life..." He gestured, and when I looked around I saw that the waiters had cleared the tables away, creating an open space in the middle of the floor. Milos smiled at Gobi. "Will you two dance?"

That was when I realized that tango music had started playing from recessed speakers in the ceiling, and several couples were already beginning to slide easily through the newfound space. Before I could say anything, Gobi took my hand and pulled me up. I reached back and polished off my Bellini in one cold gulp.

"I can't dance, remember?" I whispered.

"It's just a tango. It is like sex, except with clothes on." Then, squeezing me closer: "Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot, you do not know how to do that either."

"Oh, ha-ha."

"Relax. Just follow my lead."

I glanced back at Milos watching us from his table. "You can't kill that guy. He's this sweet old European man. He didn't
do
anything."

"Shut up."

"He got hammered with Hemingway, for crying out loud."

"Hush." Her body moved against me, shifting and pressing; her eyes locked on mine. The alcohol had begun to swim up my bloodstream, warming me from the inside, and her thigh grazed my leg as the music swelled. At this proximity I noticed a detail that I'd never seen before, a thin streak of white scar tissue directly across her throat.

"Hold me tighter." She reached back and pinched my butt, hard. "You see?"

"Ow!"

"Come on. I won't break."

I yanked tight. "How's that?"

"Yes. That's it." She smiled a little and bit her lip. "You
are
improving." We swung around sideways and I caught another glimpse of Milos at his table. He had his cell phone out now and was still watching us with hooded, expressionless eyes. Then he was gone again as we revolved the other direction, and Gobi was all that I could see.

"Not bad for your first time," she said. "All you need is the right teacher."

"That's you?"

"It could be." She cocked one eyebrow. "Unless there is something you wish to teach
me
—in which case you had better make it fast." Another tiny smile: "Being your first time, I suppose it will be." She was rubbing up against me again, the friction close and rhythmic until I felt something building down there. "Is your safety off?"

"I don't have the gun, remember?"

"Are you sure?" She reached down, gripped me. "Oh. I
see.
"

"You better stop doing ... that..." I got out, not sure where I was going from there, and that was when she let me go, abruptly stepping back. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Milos rising up from his chair. He was moving with surprising quickness for a man of his age, his hand jammed into his jacket pocket as he crossed the floor to Gobi.

"What is your real name?"

"Gobija Zaksauskas."

All remaining color drained from his face. At the same second he went absolutely rigid, the name reverberating through him visibly like a shock wave. "That's not possible. She's—"

Gobi took hold of his shoulders, spinning him around to the music. To anyone watching, she had simply changed partners. "Hemingway was an ugly American," she murmured, "but he was right about one thing." Her automatic appeared in her right hand, wedged into the old man's stomach just above his cummerbund, where only I could see it. "This kind of luck always comes from a woman."

"Please," the old man managed. "We can discuss this."

Gobi shook her head, turning him again. "There is nothing to discuss."

"I can explain. Just ... tell me who sent you. What happened was regrettable."

"
Regrettable?
"

"Arrangements can be made. I don't know who is paying you—I can make you a better offer, I assure you."

"Can you offer me a pound of flesh?"

The old man's eyelids fluttered, not understanding. "What?"

"Take this." Gobi's left hand flipped out a butterfly knife. "Cut a pound of flesh from your body. You do that, and I'll let you live."

The old man looked at the knife. He reached up slowly, his hand trembling, rheumy eyes searching for someone, somewhere, to take him away from all of this. "Please," he said. "
Signorina,
whoever you are, I beg you, be reasonable."

"We're far beyond that point now."

"But—"

She shoved the knife deep into the center of the old man's abdomen, jerking it upward. He opened his mouth, blood spurting out over his lips, and Gobi clapped her hand over it, pressing him backwards as she yanked the blade out and wrapped a tablecloth around his waist, blocking his body from view as she let him sink to the floor. The whole thing took probably three seconds.

"Too many Bellinis," she murmured, and wiped the knife off on the tablecloth before turning back to me. "Go get the car."

16

"Almost midnight," she said, climbing into the passenger seat. "We are ahead of schedule. Head uptown. East Eighty-Fifth Street." She turned to look at me. "What are you doing?"

I wasn't exactly sure. I knew that I'd staggered back out to the curb with my valet ticket and gotten the car and I was behind the wheel again, but now I seemed to be frozen in place. The image of the old man dying was burned so deeply into my corneas that it eclipsed all of Fifth Avenue and Central Park, and I couldn't seem to move.

The commotion in the bar was already spilling back out into the hotel lobby, growing louder by the second.

"Perry, now! Go!"

"Blood came out of his mouth," I said.

"What?"

"When you stabbed him. It was like he was puking blood. Like a fountain."

"That is because I severed his abdominal aorta," she said, as emotionless as an anatomy instructor. "Now can we please get out of here?" She retrieved her BlackBerry from her bag and started tapping keys.

I grabbed it.