27. “99 Problems”
—Jay-Z
Which was very uncool.
I wandered restlessly around the gym, checking out all the black iron and chrome and not really seeing any of it, thinking of all the things that had gone wrong so far and waiting for the guy to come back out. When he didn’t, I went back to the other door leading back downstairs, but the handle wouldn’t budge. Apparently on top of everything else, I was now locked inside the biggest, most lethal workout room in the universe.
My empty stomach swung open its vaults with a growl that wasn’t so much hunger as an overall complaint about conditions in general. Sometime in the middle of the night I’d gnawed on some strangely shaped Bavarian chocolate cookie that came in a purple plastic egg, and chased it down with two cans of some sticky-sweet German energy drink, but when was the last time I’d eaten real food?
What about your parents and Annie? You think anyone’s giving them anything?
My thoughts circled back to the three of them, locked up wherever they were, and I felt a little ashamed for thinking of myself and my problems. I hoped they were at least giving them bathroom breaks. Annie in particular used to get weird whenever she had to hold it, like on long trips in the car.
Thinking about that, the three of them but Annie especially, I felt a piercing blade of anger at Armitage and what he’d done. What kind of scumbag does something like that to a little girl? For twenty-four hours, I’d equated George Armitage with a record deal and rock superstardom. Now all that was gone forever—it had never really existed in the first place—and I was glad he was dead.
Unless his being dead was going to cost my family their lives.
Don’t think about it, a voice inside my head suggested.
Except, that technique hadn’t been working any better lately then it ever had. Instead, I found myself gazing at the locked rack of machine guns, pistols, and rifles, row upon row of them gleaming like the black grin of war itself.
That was when the door opened and the guy came back out.
“Perhaps we should start with introductions.” He was wiping his hands off with a towel, flexing his fingers, making big, muscular-looking fists, the kind that seemed to come with double the normal number of knuckles and veins. “I know who you are, but you do not know me. My name is not Kaya. I do not know who this Kaya is.”
“No offense,” I said, “but I really don’t care much about the whole meet and greet right now. The only reason I’m even here with Gobi now is that she thought maybe we could find—”
“Your family,” the man said, “yes. You are referring to Phillip and Julie Stormaire and your twelve-year-old sister, Annie, last known residence, one-fifteen Cedar Terrace, East Norwalk, Connecticut, whereabouts currently unknown.”
“How did you know that?”
“She told me.”
“Gobi?”
“Zusane.”
I nodded. Zusane had been Gobi’s given name before she’d taken on the name of her dead sister, Gobija, and smuggled herself into New York to take revenge on a soulless human cancer named Santamaria. It all felt like so long ago that it could have happened to a completely different guy.
“I am Erich Schoeneweiss.” He reached into his pocket and took out the key that I’d found in Gobi’s bag, then began turning it over in his hand. “You should know that bringing Zusane here was the most dangerous thing you could have done.” He glanced up at me. “You probably also saved her life.”
“You can thank me later.”
“I am making inquiries now as to the whereabouts of your family. They may yield something useful, or they may not. We will know soon.”
“How soon?”
“An hour, perhaps two.”
“And then what?”
“That is your decision,” he said, and I noticed for the first time how colorless his eyes were, an almost silvery gray-white, like the ice that hardens on top of old snow, the kind that can cut your ankle if you step through it the wrong way. “All I ask is that if you do choose to notify the authorities, please use discretion regarding my own involvement.”
“Don’t mention your name,” I nodded. “I get it.” I looked at him. “Why did you say that bringing Gobi here is the most dangerous thing I could have done?”
Erich hesitated as if weighing his words carefully. Before he could formulate an answer, the door behind us swung open and Gobi stepped out.
Right away I couldn’t believe how much better she looked. She was wearing a plain white flannel nightgown and slippers, with her hair wrapped up in a towel. The color had returned to her cheeks, and her eyes looked clear and bright, totally alert and oriented to her surroundings.
After walking over to Erich, she leaned in, took his hand, and murmured something to him in German. He smiled and answered back, squeezing her fingers. Then she looked to me.
“Thank you, Perry.”
“Sure,” I said stiffly. “I mean, you know, whatever. I found the key in your bag, and I didn’t know what else to do, so…”
“You did the right thing.” Gobi looked across the gymnasium and stretched up on her toes. “I spent three years in this room,” she said, “getting ready for my trip to United States.”
“You trained here?” I turned to Erich. “With him?”
She glanced up at him, and Erich nodded with that same cool, expressionless look in his eyes. “In this country,” he said, “every male must serve in the armed forces. After my father got out, he started this… hotel. We operated it together until his death, and I took over by myself. It is not really a hotel.”
“Gee, really?” I eyed the rows of machine guns mounted on the walls. “I was just going to ask about the minibar.”
Erich smiled politely. “There is a saying in certain intelligence community circles. ‘Herr Schoeneweiss runs a hotel in Zermatt that never has any guests.’ However, we do offer accommodations to special clients on a private basis.”
“Special clients?”
“Not everything that I teach here is strictly legal. In fact, some of it is very illegal. There is a soundproof firing and demolition range in the basement. Intelligence, survival, evasion and interrogation tactics, wiretapping and surveillance. The only thing I do not give instruction on is—”
“Driving?”
Erich raised one eyebrow, surprised for the first time. “How did you know?”
“Lucky guess.” I was thinking of Broadway, down by Union Square, the smoking-rubber smell of the Jaguar’s tires as I’d made the turn onto Fourteenth Street with Gobi next to me, calculating distances. “I’ve done a bit of that myself.”
Erich finally let me back into his living quarters, where I caught a shower and changed into an anonymous pair of slightly too-big jeans and black long-sleeved T-shirt that nonetheless felt great compared to the uber-stylish Euro-suit I’d been wearing since Venice. When I came out, he was in the kitchen, dicing garlic while Gobi made a fruit salad. I stood there while she speed-chopped pineapple, mango, and cantaloupe. It was like watching some high-octane mashup of black ops and the Food Network.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Spinach frittata.”
“Not that.” I pointed. “That.”
Erich glanced over his shoulder into the adjacent room, at the computer monitor on the desk. I recognized Paula’s iPad wired into the CPU as an endless row of IP addresses scrolled upward across the screen.
“I am scanning the incoming and outgoing messages through the iPad, specifically the e-mail of the photo she received. Depending on the level of encryption that your girlfriend was using—”
“Ex-girlfriend.”
“Of course.”
I took a breath. “Any luck?”
“Some, yes.” He walked over to the desk and clicked the mouse, slowing the data flow to check individual lines of code. “Unfortunately, it looks as though Armitage’s people are rerouting messages through several other servers. According to this, your family may be in Re
ykjavik, Port-Au-Prince, or Las Vegas, or any of several European cities.”
“You can’t pinpoint it any better than that?”
“It will take more time. And perhaps faster equipment than I have here.” He produced a cell phone and glanced down at Gobi as he stepped out of the room. “Excuse me.”
I waited until the door clicked shut behind him, and looked across the table at Gobi. She had finished with the salad and was looking around for something else to chop up. “So, when you were training with him, did you, you know… stay here?”
She smiled a little and put down the knife. “You mean, did we sleep together?”
“Forget it,” I said. “Not my business.”
“When I first came here, my life had been torn apart by what happened to my sister.” The smile slipped away. “I was consumed by rage and grief. Erich taught me many things.”
“Okay.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You should not ask questions, Perry, if you do not want answers.”
“Whatever.”
“You are jealous.”
“Please.” I felt the tips of my ears glowing hot, a feeling that I hated, especially because I knew it was obvious to anyone looking at me that I was blushing. “You and me—”
“Are you still virgin, yes?”
“Okay,” I said, “so not a relevant topic of conversation at this point.”
“That woman Paula. All the time that you were together, you and she did not ever—”
“She wasn’t the one,” I blurted out. I don’t know where that came from. I certainly didn’t intend on telling Gobi any more than I already had about my own life, and up till that moment, I’d never really thought about why Paula and I hadn’t had sex. I’d just assumed it was my hang-up, virginal inertia, fear of the unknown, whatever it was, and dealt with it in private, on my own. Yet here we were in the middle of Switzerland, dissecting the whole thing under bright lights like the squirming toad that it was.
“You are looking for the quiet type?” she asked.
“Actually,” I said, “at this point I’d settle for the not-actively-trying-to-kill-me type.”
“I read all those e-mails you sent, Perry. Every last one.” Now she was sitting directly in front of me, so close that I could hear her breathing. “You know how hard it was for me not to answer? To not tell you where I was?”
“Yeah, well, you did the right thing,” I said. “I mean, we can’t even share the same continent without somebody turning up dead.”
She made a mock frown. “Is deal-breaker then?”
“What?”
“Me and you.”
“Is bigtime deal-breaker, yeah.”
“Well, whoever she is”—Gobi smiled again and picked up the dishes, putting them in the sink—“I hope you find her before you get yourself killed.”
28. “King of Pain”
—The Police
After a late breakfast I lay down on Erich’s couch, propped my head on the armrest, and let my eyelids sink shut. I’d only intended to rest for a minute, but last night’s trip must have completely sandbagged me, because when I finally opened my eyes, long shadows had filled the studio, and it felt like evening.
“What time is it?” I sat up, disoriented, trying to make sense of the room around me. “How long have I been asleep?”
Erich looked down at me. “Most of the day.”
“You didn’t wake me up?”
“You looked like you could use the rest.” He was wearing a white judogi with a thick belt and heavy weave that I only recognized because I’d taken a year of judo back when I was nine.
“What’s going on? What did I miss?”
“Erich?” Gobi’s voice came from the doorway. She was looking at Erich’s white martial arts uniform, an expression of pure, childlike pleasure on her face. “Can we?”
“You must promise,” Erich said. “Not full strength.”
Gobi nodded. “I will show mercy on you.”
“I meant for your sake.”
“I know what you meant,” she said, and followed him into the gym.
Twenty minutes later, after Gobi had grabbed Erich and flipped him over her shoulder onto a pile of gym mats, I watched him walk over to where I was standing—okay, cowering—in the corner by the gun rack. He was sweating and breathing hard, rubbing his elbow and grinning ruefully.
“I’d hate to see full strength,” I said.
He didn’t answer right away. On the other side of the gym, Gobi stood barefoot, emptying a bottle of water over her head, shaking the droplets off her hair. She was wearing a matching judogi to Erich’s, and it fit her curves perfectly, as if it had been custom-made and waiting here for her to come back.
In the sparring ring, she and Erich had moved together like two people who knew each other’s bodies on an intimate level, striking and spinning and taking hold of each other with a level of familiarity, even pleasure, that told me everything I could’ve already guessed about their former relationship. Watching them had made me feel like a voyeur, as if I were spying on something private.
After they’d finished, I looked around at the other bags and sparring gear, then back at Erich, and said the words I thought I’d never speak.
“Teach me to fight.”
Erich looked at me out of the corner of his eye, bemused. “I do not think so.”
“I do think so.” I stood up. “Come on, right now, let’s go.”
“Perry, I spent three years training Zusane.”
“Her name’s Gobi,” I said.
“Regardless. The conditioning alone takes a lifetime of discipline.”
“Oh yeah?” Already the logical side of my brain realized that of course he was right. What I wanted was the equivalent of that scene in The Matrix where Neo needs to be able to fly a helicopter and just plugs the information instantaneously into his brain. “We’ll just see about that.”
“Why do you suddenly want to learn how to fight?”
“Self-defense.”
“Against… ?”
“You know, whoever.”
Erich looked at me thoughtfully. The clear, nearly colorless disks of his eyes seemed to take my full measure, and as much as it irritated me, I felt like what he was seeing was probably an accurate indication of who I was at that moment—desperate, way out of my league, the emotional equivalent of a naked mole rat.
“You do not need to worry about her.”
“Oh, really?” I asked, wondering if he had any idea of what she’d put me through so far.
Erich just shook his head. “She will always have your back. Simply say to her, As tave myliu.”
“What’s that mean?”
He smiled again, faintly. “Just some conversational Lithuanian.”
“Perry?” Gobi had ambled over, her hair and uniform soaked and, I couldn’t help but notice, semi-transparent, clinging to her skin with the water she’d dumped over it. She offered me her hand. “Do you want to play?”
We started with judo. It was also where we ended. Gobi said she’d show me a basic two-armed shoulder throw, as simple as it got. Then she stuck her elbow under my arm and before I knew it I was upside down on the floor, my spine feeling like it was shattered like a discarded jigsaw puzzle.
“Perry?” Her face and Erich’s appeared above me, looking down, neither of them looking especially concerned. “You are okay?”
I tried to say no. But talking involved breathing, and I still hadn’t figured out how to do that. After a moment I heard Gobi say something about hitting the shower, and I discovered that, left alone, I could probably crawl back to my feet.
“She is not well,” Erich said as the two of us walked back into the living quarters.
“Her?” I managed, trying to ignore the cracked-open feeling across my sternum, as if someone had done open-heart surgery on me without putting me to sleep first. “What about me?”
“She told me that she failed to complete her mission in Venice.”
“Armitage? Believe me, she didn’t fail.”
“The first target,” Erich said. “The man disguised as a priest. It was the first time that ever happened.”
“Yeah, I guess.” I thought of the bald guy in the steamer trunk opening his eyes in the canal, and looked back at Gobi in the gym. “But she seems okay now.”
“The corticosteroids that I gave her stopped the bleeding and restored her strength temporarily, but…” Erich shook his head. “I am not a doctor. My medical skills are limited to emergency field trauma techniques that I learned in the Swiss army, and also what I have picked up over the years here. But since I saw her last, her condition has worsened considerably.”
“You mean the epilepsy?”
He stared at me. “Is that what she told you? That she had epilepsy?”
“Yeah. Temporal lobe epilepsy. Like Van Gogh. Why?”
Erich didn’t say anything.
“You’re saying she doesn’t?”
“Epilepsy does not normally cause internal bleeding. Or such intense and prolonged states of dementia.”
“When was she having dementia?”
“When you first brought her here,” he said, “she was very disoriented. She told me that you were her final target. She swore she’d been hired to kill you.”
“What?”
Erich shook his head. “If you ask her now, she claims not to remember. But at the time…”
“So if it’s not epilepsy,” I said, “what’s making her act like this?”
“Did she ever tell you how she got that scar on her throat?”
“No,” I said, following after him. “Why?”
Erich walked through the living room to where the computers were still hooked up to Paula’s iPad and began typing, not looking at me.
“Wait a second, what happened?”
“What happened to who?” Gobi asked behind me. I looked around and saw that she was still dressed in her judogi, sipping a tall glass of water. Her gaze flashed from me to Erich, and back to me again. When neither of us answered her, she set the glass down and took another step toward us, repeating the same question with quiet intensity. “What are you talking about?”
Perry's Killer Playlist Page 9