18. “Panic Switch”
—Silversun Pickups
“Perry?”
I opened my eyes and tried to sit up, then remembered that I couldn’t. My shoulders were on fire, and my neck ached like I had iron rods running down from the base of my skull. Off to the right, there was a rattling sound as the heavy curtains swung open and daylight exploded in my face. It was blinding enough that I could barely make out the female silhouette poised in front of it.
“Okay,” I managed, “we’ve established that it’s morning. Can you please untie me now?”
My eyes adjusted, and I got my first real look at the woman standing over me.
It was Paula.
She was standing by the window, wearing the coat that she’d no doubt arrived in, and her briefcase was still in one hand and her suitcase in the other. For a moment, we just stared at each other. I realized that the blankets were pulled down to my waist, just far enough to reveal that I wasn’t wearing anything underneath them, and I was now acutely aware of my position on the bed.
“I—I finished early in L.A.” She blinked exactly once. The words were dropping out of her mouth like stale candy falling out of a vending machine, just lying there between us. “I got on a plane. I wanted to surprise you.”
“Officially surprised.”
“Yeah.” Another word that just lay there. “Me too.”
“Thank God you’re here,” I said. “Gobi—”
“Gobi?” Her eyebrows went up even higher, if that were possible. “Gobi is here?”
“Who do you think did this?” I tugged on the cords, as if I needed to draw more attention to the fact that I was still tied to the bedposts. “Can you cut me loose?”
Paula looked at Gobi’s clothes strewn around the room, a blouse on the nightstand, something lacy and red dangling from the doorknob. Some dazed part of me realized that Gobi must have gotten up early and gone shopping, then come back here to change while I lay sound asleep. Couldn’t she have at least picked up after herself?
When Paula’s eyes returned to me again, they were harder to read. The surprise was gone, and there was something else there instead, a kind of keen, businesslike efficiency, as if she were suddenly seeing this from a completely different set of contact lenses. “Of course.”
“Paula, wait—”
“I’ll be right back. I’m just going to go see if they have anything sharp at the front desk.”
The door closed. I lay there staring at the ceiling for what felt like a very long time, trying to identify various stains. One of them looked like a fish. One looked like a bird. One looked like my future imploding.
I looked at the digital clock on the nightstand and saw that it was somehow already two in the afternoon. If Linus and the band had started searching the hotel for me, they hadn’t gotten around to breaking down random doors yet.
Finally Paula came back with a pair of very lethal-looking scissors. She reached over the bed toward my arms. Now she wasn’t making eye contact with me at all.
“Hold still.”
“Look,” I said, “Paula—”
“I’m actually here for a reason.” Snip-snip. “Armitage is flying in this afternoon.” Snip. “He wants to meet you personally before tonight’s show.” She finished with the first cord and moved on to the second one. “So I guess I don’t have to ask how the tour’s going so far.”
“Stop it,” I said. “Just listen, okay?”
Snip-snip. “I’m not upset, Perry, all right? I’m a grownup. I get it.”
“But I haven’t told you anything.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Hold on—”
“I read what you wrote about her, remember? In your college essay?”
“Okay,” I said, “but that isn’t—”
Snip. “I should never have sent you to Venice.”
“I’m not—”
Snip. “I ought to have my head examined.”
“Paula, she’s killing people again.”
The scissors froze midsnip, and Paula straightened up and looked at me. “What?”
“Gobi. She’s working for somebody named Kaya. He’s got something on her, I don’t know what, but he’s forcing her to do some new assignment. The targets—one of them was dressed as a priest. She made me help her get rid of the body last night and dump it into the canal from her hotel balcony.”
“You helped her get rid of a body?”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Last night she bought a shotgun at a restaurant and kept it pointed at my back all the way here. We have to call the police right now, before she gets back.”
Paula cut the last cord and my left hand was free at last. I stretched my arm back, working the pins and needles from my shoulder until the circulation came flooding back. She still hadn’t said anything. Looking at her eyes, I could see her mind working fast, evaluating the situation and analyzing her options.
“You said you helped her?” she asked.
“No! I mean, yeah, but—”
“Did anybody see you?”
I thought about our standoff with the carabinieri at the Trattoria Sacro e Profano. “Well, yeah, but—”
“The police?”
“Yes.”
“And they saw your face.” Paula sighed. “So you’re already an accomplice.”
“What?” I stood up. “No! I told you, she had a gun to my—”
“Perry,” Paula said, “listen to me. I believe you, obviously. But you have to look at it their way. Right now you’re just an American kid on a rock-and-roll tour, and the last time they saw you, it was this Bonnie and Clyde shootout with a gun-toting psychopath. An international incident like this can go south fast. Even if there was no video surveillance footage of you, they probably already have your Identi-Kit facial composite to Interpol right alongside Gobi’s.” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “Before we do anything, you need a lawyer—or the next place you’re going to end up is in an Italian jail.”
“Jail?” I felt my stomach lurch downward with a sudden nauseating heaviness. All at once I couldn’t breathe. It was like my lungs had just sort of gotten stage fright and forgotten how to do their job. Every movie I’d ever seen with a guy-ends-up-in-a-foreign-jail-cell plot went through my brain all at once, and I was already wondering how many packs of cigarettes I’d be worth on the open market.
When I finally managed to draw breath, my voice sounded wheezy and faint, like an asthmatic gasping down a clogged garden hose. “I can’t go to jail,” I said. “My dad—”
“I know.”
“What do we do?”
“For now, we need to get you out of here.”
“And then what?”
Paula frowned. “It’s possible that Armitage can help us.”
I looked at her, allowing myself to feel the faintest spark of hope. “How?”
“Well, for one thing, he’s a billionaire. People like him don’t go anywhere without a fleet of attorneys. And for some reason, Stormaire, he’s taken a liking to you.” She smiled a little. “There’s no way he’ll get Inchworm into the studio for their first album if their bass player and songwriter is rotting in a cell somewhere in Venice, right?”
“So what next?”
“We go somewhere and lie low.” She looked at her watch. “We’ve got a little over six hours till we meet him tonight. And then all you have to do is play a gig so amazing that Armitage will do whatever it takes to keep you out of jail.”
“I gotta tell the guys I’m here.”
Paula shook her head. “No offense to Linus, but at this point the last thing we need is his particular brand of high-pitched rhetoric. We’ll deal with him soon enough.”
I saw her point. “Okay, but—”
“First things first.” Her gaze moved back to me, one eyebrow raised. “Where are your clothes, anyway?”
“I haven’t seen them since last night.”
“You’ve been naked since yesterday?�
�
“Except for a hotel bathrobe and a stolen overcoat,” I said, “yeah.”
“I’ll send the desk clerk out with my AmEx.” Paula shook her head, but she was still smiling. “I have to say, Stormaire, in spite of everything else, when I first saw you tied to the bedposts like that, it got me kind of tingly.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that,” I said. “Because the way you looked at me, I thought you might try cutting off something different.”
“Are you kidding? After waiting this long? I’d probably miss it more than you would.”
“I doubt that.”
She smiled, then folded up that smile and put it away, all business, all at once. It was uncanny how she could do that, but I couldn’t imagine not having her on my side.
“Can I ask one more question?”
Paula glanced up. “What?”
“How did you figure out what room I was in?”
“You checked in under the name Jim Morrison, Perry. You might as well have hung out a freaking sign.”
“I guess.”
“Now come on,” she said, and gave me a lascivious glance. “Let’s get you some clothes before I lose what’s left of my willpower.”
19. “Busy Child”
—The Crystal Method
In a city like Venice, most of the nicer hotels claim to have been palaces at one time or another. But there were palaces and there were palaces, and the Gritti, where Paula said we had a room, was a silk-draped, marble-floored, gold-rimmed old-world marvel that didn’t exactly go along with what I imagined when I thought about lying low. The kid staring back at me in the lobby mirrors didn’t look like he belonged here, but then, at that moment, he didn’t look like he necessarily belonged anywhere.
“You can afford this?” I murmured, gazing across the mostly empty lobby.
“Armitage keeps a suite here.”
“Is he here now?”
“He’ll meet us later for dinner. Just relax, all right? Go stand by the elevators and wait for me.”
Paula went to check in while I hovered behind a pillar, trying to look inconspicuous. I was wearing skinny European jeans and a Venice T-shirt with a baseball cap and sunglasses. I had a garment bag over my shoulder, the one that Benito, the desk clerk at the Pensione Guerrato, had brought back for me before we’d slipped out.
When Paula came back with the key, we took the elevator up to Armitage’s suite, and I gazed out on the Grand Canal and the city beyond, trying not to think about how less than twenty-four hours ago, I’d been trying to get rid of a corpse from a similar height.
“You like the view?”
“It’s great.”
“Perry…”
I looked around. Paula was sitting on the bed, gazing at me in a way that I’d never seen before.
“We’ve still got a few hours to kill,” she said. “Any ideas?”
“We could send down for some champagne.”
“That sounds like a good start, but where do we go from there?”
I sat down next to her on the bed and we started kissing. Paula slipped her hand inside my T-shirt, and we sprawled backwards over the covers, and all I could think was This is it. You’re in Europe now, you’re alone in a hotel room, you can do whatever you want. I thought about how most guys, including my friends, had lost their virginity in the back seat of a car or on their girlfriend’s couch, hoping like hell that her dad didn’t come down and catch them. Compared to that, this was a dream.
Paula sat up and looked at me. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“You seem distracted.”
“No, I’m totally fine, really.”
“I knew it.” Her eyes didn’t budge from mine. “It’s her, isn’t it?”
“What?” I shook my head. “Who, Gobi? Are you kidding?”
“I’m not stupid, Perry.”
“Wait,” I said, and grabbed her by the arm, “just listen to me, okay?”
She just sat there staring at me.
“I’m telling you,” I said. “There’s no one else I’d rather be here with right now. No one.”
Paula kept her eyes on me, her expression unchanged. Somewhere down in the piazza, a church bell rang. She took a breath.
“Prove it.”
“Perry, you ready yet? It’s time.”
“One second.” It was almost six o’clock now, and I was still in the bathroom, trying to fix my tie. “I’ll be right there.”
“Perry, we have to go.”
“All right.” Taking a big breath, I turned the knob and stepped out of the bathroom. “I’m ready, let’s go.”
Paula didn’t say anything right away. She got an odd look on her face, a kind of half frown, half pucker that I’d never seen before, and bit the corner of her lip. The European-style suit that Benito at the front desk had brought back fit me well enough—in fact, it almost fit too well, the narrow, tapered pants and suit jacket clinging perfectly to my frame in straight, smooth lines. The shirt was made out of some flimsy, silky material that felt like it might dissolve if it got wet, and the lines of the tie were crisp and sharp. My narrow black leather shoes gleamed like mirrors. Somewhere in the universe, every guy that I’d ever hung out with and watched RoboCop was asking if I’d like a glass of chardonnay to go with my Celine Dion Greatest Hits CD.
“You look… great,” she said. “I’ve just never seen you like this before. I sort of want to devour you.”
“Still?”
“Again.”
“Now?”
“Always.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, thanks. You’re looking pretty edible yourself.”
“I packed in a hurry.” Apparently “in a hurry” meant an extremely low-cut black cocktail dress with a stylized zipper running diagonally down the front, a white cropped fur coat, and stilettos that probably could have doubled as projectile weapons. I had definitely spent too much time with Gobi, I thought—now I was viewing fashion accessories with the eye of a Secret Service agent. Her hair was pinned up in back, accentuating her throat and ears, where she wore no jewelry whatsoever. Something about that tan, uninterrupted skin made me want to kiss it, which I’m sure was the whole point.
“Don’t forget your hat and sunglasses.” She offered her arm. “Shall we go?”
We took the elevator down, both of us watching the numbers. She reached over and put her hand on my chest.
“How do you feel?”
“Good.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m positive.”
She turned to me and smiled. If you had told me at that moment that I had just spent several hours up in a luxury hotel room with a beautiful woman and I’d somehow still emerged from the whole thing a virgin, I think I would have skipped over disbelief completely and gone straight to exasperation. But that was how it had happened. Even as we’d wrestled half naked across the sheets, Paula had managed to keep her cool.
It’s all right, Perry, she’d said. I don’t want you rushing into anything you’re not ready for, especially if you’re just trying to prove a point.
I almost asked her what point she thought I was trying to prove, then realized I already knew.
I guess in the end, we both did.
20. “Darklands”
—The Jesus and Mary Chain
We walked across the Piazza San Marco, making our way among the pushcarts selling masks and T-shirts to tourists in the gathering dusk. My new shoes felt tight on my feet. Pigeons fluttered and dive-bombed our heads, close enough that I almost had to duck to avoid being hit, and as we walked past the cathedral, I pointed up to the clock tower, where two bronze men swung their clappers to mark the hour.
“Those mechanized figures are called the moors,” I said, remembering something from one of the guidebooks I’d read on the train here. “Supposedly back in the seventeenth century one of them knocked an unsuspecting worker off the top and he fell to his death. The first official assassination by a robo
t.”
That got a smile out of Paula. “You’re a good tour guide, Stormaire. Maybe if this whole rock-and-roll thing doesn’t pan out…”
“You think Armitage will actually be able to help me sort this out?”
“We’ll see.”
I took a deep breath. She glanced across the piazza and I caught the faraway look in her eyes that I hadn’t seen before.
“Hey,” I said. “Are you all right?”
“I have a picture of me sitting on my dad’s shoulders right over there.” Paula pointed back to the cathedral, next to the folded-up platforms they kept in the square in times of acqua alta, high water, when the canals flooded into the streets. “I was probably five or six at the time.”
“I didn’t know you’d been here before.”
“Dad was here with the Stones back in the early nineties. He brought me with him. It was a good time.”
Her melancholy tone caught me off-guard. “You guys still see each other all the time, right?”
“Things are different now.” She tugged my hand. “Come on. We’re going to be late.”
We stopped outside a bistro with outdoor tables set up along the cobblestones. As we approached, I saw Linus pacing back and forth in front of the entrance, smoking a cigarette hard enough that it seemed to disappear in two long drags. He saw me and tossed the butt aside.
“Perry, thank God, where have you been?” His attention immediately snapped to Paula. “What did you do with him?”
Paula sighed. “Good to see you too, Linus. Where’s the rest of the band?”
“They’re inside already, doing the sound check. Which is where he should be, right now.”
I hustled inside and found Norrie, Sasha, and Caleb setting up equipment onstage. Caleb was eating an enormous slice of pizza while Sasha flirted with a strikingly beautiful waitress in a language that seemed to rely on nothing more sophisticated than hand gestures and smiles. None of them seemed particularly concerned about my disappearance. “What’s up, jerkweed,” Sasha said. “What happened? We thought you drowned in a canal or something.”
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