Perry's Killer Playlist

by Joe Schreiber

  But when they saw what Gobi was doing with the gun, they kept on their side of the platform. One of them shouted something, and it doesn’t matter that I slept through two years of high school French—I got the gist. Let him go. Put it down. Hands up. All of that. Gobi ignored them completely, focusing all her attention on me.

  “As tave myliu,” Gobi said. With her free hand, she reached out and brushed the wet hair out of my eyes. “Your hair is getting shaggy, mielasis.” Then she pointed the pistol back at my head, underneath my chin.

  “It doesn’t have to go this way.”

  “Yes, it does.”

  “Just tell me what you’ve done with my family. Tell me where they are.”

  “One more must die.”

  “Gobi, no, you’re sick. There’s a tumor in your brain. You’re not thinking clearly. Like on the train.”

  “Au revoir.”

  “Gobi.” I held up my hands. “You don’t need to do this anymore. As tave myliu.”

  Something changed in her eyes, not much, maybe just a subtle shift in the lights reflected in her pupils. I kissed her then, not even thinking about the gun, while she kept it jammed up my chin. Her mouth felt as cold as the metal barrel against my skin, her lips coming open and kissing me, the surprising warmth of her tongue, salty-sweet as it slipped inside and slid against mine. The gun was still there, pushing up hard against my jaw.

  “How did you learn to say ‘I love you’ in Lithuanian?” she asked.

  “Erich.”

  “You are still jealous of him.”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  She put her lips to my ear. “Sixty-six rue de Turenne,” she murmured. “Is parking garage. They’re in the back.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And Perry.”

  “Yes?”

  “I am sorry.”

  “Wh—”

  She moved the gun from my head and put it against her own, placing the barrel to her temple. Too late, I saw how it was going to end.

  “Gobi, no!”

  She pulled the trigger.

  Nothing happened.

  I stared at her. She looked back at me.

  “The safety.” I said. “It’s still on. You forgot—”

  Then from somewhere behind me, a dark shape flew forward and crashed into her, knocking her to the floor of the platform.

  Sitting up, I saw Gobi on her back, turning sideways, grappling with the dark-garbed figure on top of her. I saw the shining glint of buckles and a badge. One of the gendarmes had broken ranks, jumped out into the rain, and tackled her.

  Gobi squirmed sideways, reared back, and released a kick to the face that spun the gendarme a hundred and eighty degrees around, hard enough to knock the riot helmet from the officer’s head, revealing a spray of blond hair.

  Paula.

  In less than a second, Paula had already caught her balance, recovering from the kick, and reached into the uniform she was wearing to pull out an automatic. She held it in the textbook two-handed grip, pointing it at Gobi.

  “Paula,” I said.

  She glanced back at the gendarmes. “Tonight I bought your lives—rented them for a few moments, anyway.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When the reports came across the police band, I got out here as soon as I could.” Her eyes flicked back to the group of gendarmes on the far side of the platform, and Paula reached into her tunic and pulled out a laminated ID badge on a lanyard. “Interpol special hostage negotiation squad.”

  “Very realistic,” I said.

  “It comes in handy from time to time. The police have orders to stand down until I say otherwise.”

  I tried to smile. It didn’t hurt too much. “I didn’t know you still cared.”

  “You’re sweet.” Paula drew in a breath of night air. “But deluded as always.” She took a step toward Gobi. “Zusane. You know, the last thing my father said before he died today was ‘Make her suffer.’ I promised him that I would.” Paula regarded her with pity bordering on revulsion. “But… look at you. Christ. You’re half dead already. You can’t even stand up. You’re rotten with cancer. At this point, anything I do to you would be a mercy.”

  Gobi didn’t say anything. Still keeping the pistol trained on her, Paula looked out to the southeast, at the long stretch of open, flat field leading off to the Tour Montparnasse. “You know what that is? The Champ de Mars.” She glanced back at Gobi. “Named after the god of war.”

  “Then they should bury us both there,” Gobi said.

  Paula shook her head again. “Just you.”

  I held up my hand. “Paula—”

  Paula squeezed the trigger.

  The first shot slammed into Gobi’s chest, the second her belly, driving her backwards against the guardrail with the force of the gunshot. She didn’t make a sound, her expression not betraying a hint of what it must have felt like at that moment. It was as if she was just putting the pain somewhere completely away from her, a private place where all the hurt went. I saw her fingers grope for the railing as she tried to hoist herself up to keep fighting, and that was when Paula fired again, hitting Gobi in the left knee. Gobi’s leg went out from under her and this time she stayed down, palms upraised, fingers outstretched.

  Her hands were empty.

  Paula kicked the Glock aside and stood over her with her own pistol aimed point-blank at Gobi’s face. My hearing was gone in my left ear from the gunshots. Paula’s mouth was moving, shouting loudly enough that I could almost make it out, something about her father, something about the end of it all.

  “Leave her alone,” I said, but I couldn’t hear myself, and then I realized that Paula probably couldn’t hear me either.

  I stood up.

  According to Erich Schoeneweiss, in order to successfully break a board or brick in tae kwon do, the hand has to be traveling about thirty feet per second when it makes contact. Mustering this kind of speed requires the puncher to be aiming beyond the object, punching through it in the direction of something on the other side.

  I aimed for the back of Paula’s head.

  I punched a hole in the night.

  When Paula went down, it was all at once. The gun slipped from her hands and her face swung forward, deflected off the guardrail, snapped back, and came around showing me a dentist’s nightmare of blood and broken teeth. Yet somehow it was still a grin.

  “Like father, like son,” she said. It came out a little mushy, but I could make out the words just the same through my one good ear. “Your dad liked to tussle too, Perry—did you know that?”

  I tried to tell her to shut up and realized I needed to catch my breath. I’d put everything I had into the punch and it hadn’t been enough. While she was talking, Paula was already scrambling around looking for the gun, either hers or Gobi’s, but it was dark and the platform was black and one of her eyes was already swelling shut.

  “I always thought it was funny. You were so nervous about taking me to bed”—she wiped the blood from her mouth with her sleeve—“when the whole time I was getting everything I needed from your old man. Ask him about it, Perry. Ask him how I was. Too bad you’ll never find out for yourself.”

  I went over to where Gobi was lying and put my arms around her. I could smell a sheared copper smell coming from her wounds, a deep, wet, desperate smell like scorched fabric and cauterized skin.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “You don’t have to do any more.”

  “Perry.” She put her mouth right next to my good ear. “Lift me up.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She nodded. She was heavy, much heavier than I remembered from before, and the phrase dead weight sprang to mind, although maybe I was just weaker than I remembered—that was almost certainly the case. Somehow I got my hands underneath her arms and lifted her upright. I could feel the rough, ragged scrape of her breathing, her broken ribs rubbing together in her chest as I held her there.

  A few feet in front of us, Paula rose u
p. Through the blood and the swelling, the fire in her eyes was a reflection of something fierce, some gaudy spectacle of vengeance that only she could see. She had both guns, Gobi’s in her right hand, hers in her left.

  “Sorry,” Paula said. “This is it for us.”

  I felt Gobi’s shoulders stiffen with anticipation. I braced my legs to support her. Leaning all her weight back against me, she swung her right leg straight up in the air, then brought it down on Paula’s neck.

  The ax kick connected exactly where it had to, dead center across the base of the skull, and when Paula’s face hit the floor, it was with more weight than she’d ever carried when she was alive.

  I looked down at her lying there in the rain, eyes open, blank, staring.

  I caught Gobi and lay her down slowly beside me, running my hands through her hair. It was dark and it was raining, and that was how we stayed, the two of us huddled together next to the metal railing until the gendarmes came out and led us away.

  46. “Brand New Friend”

  —Lloyd Cole and the Commotions

  “Hey, kid.”

  I was sitting in the otherwise empty waiting room in the American Hospital in Paris with the television on. I didn’t have to take my eyes off the French version of Biggest Loser to see who had just walked in. Agent Nolan stood there in the doorway for a long beat, holding his briefcase, waiting to be acknowledged.

  “You gonna say hi to me?”

  “Sorry.” I turned my other ear toward him, the one that I could still hear out of. “Speak into this one.”

  “Where’s the family?”

  “In a hotel,” I said. It was basically true. I decided Nolan didn’t need to be informed that my parents were staying in separate hotels on opposite sides of the Seine. There were some things that even the CIA didn’t need to know.

  “What about the band?”

  “They went back to New York yesterday with our manager.”

  “And you? Flying home soon?”

  “Tomorrow,” I said, “probably,” and started to reach for the remote.

  Nolan looked back up the hall toward the OR. “How long’s she been in surgery?”

  “Thirteen hours. They’re finishing now.”

  “They get all of it?”

  “What do you care?”

  “Crazy, huh?”

  “What’s that?”

  “She’s wearing a bulletproof vest up there, saving her life, and the whole time it was the tumor that was killing her.”

  He started to say something, and I turned my bad ear back toward him. When he saw me do that, he walked straight in front of me, blocking the TV set.

  “Listen, Perry. Maybe we got off on the wrong foot. Maybe you got a rough lesson in gunboat diplomacy—who knows?” He shrugged. “That part I asked you before about her… I was just being polite. I already talked to the neurosurgeons. They said she’s in a coma.”

  “Induced,” I said.

  “What?”

  “It’s an induced coma. It’s what they do to protect higher brain function during and immediately after major neurosurgery.”

  “Somebody’s been reading his Wikipedia.”

  I switched off the TV and looked at him. “Why are you here?”

  “As a matter of fact…” He sighed and sat down next to me, plucking at the seams of his suit pants. “I want to help.”

  “Unless you can give me back the hearing in my left ear or…”—I almost said “save my parents’ marriage”—“undo what happened here, you’re pretty useless to me.”

  “I never said I wanted to help you personally,” Nolan said. “Although in this particular situation, I might be in the position to do so.” He opened his briefcase and took out a thick stack of official-looking documents, some of them in English, others in French. “Nobody knows how your little Lithuanian princess is going to come out of surgery, or if she’s going to come out at all. Even the docs say it’s too soon to tell. But one thing’s for sure: At the end of the day, somebody’s gonna get stuck with a hell of a hospital bill. We’re talking millions in rehab, all that shit. She’ll be in debt for the rest of her life.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “You can take care of that.”

  “The agency could. Probably.” He was looking at me out of the corner of his eye. “In exchange for certain considerations.”

  “Forget it,” I said.

  “Easy, kid. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. At this point we don’t even know if she’s going to make it. And if she does?” Another shrug. “She might not be able to shoot straight. But we’re willing to take that risk.”

  “That’s big of you.”

  “Hey, like I said, we do what we can. In any case, in the spirit of starting over, I want to just let you know, Uncle Sam’s got this one. Whatever it takes to get her back on her feet.” He grinned. “Alive and kicking, am I right?”

  “Agent Nolan.”

  “Yeah, kid?”

  “And I mean this from the bottom of my heart—”

  “Yeah?”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  He snapped his briefcase shut and stood up.

  “That’s not friendly, Perry.” His voice was cordial but just barely, as if every word was costing him a little bit of dignity. “I extended the hand of friendship and you just pissed on it.”

  “Maybe I was just practicing some gunboat diplomacy.”

  “Hey, no harm, no foul.” Now his grin was tighter, narrower, seeming to flatten out the broad planes of his face. “No matter who pays, we’re on her. You know that, right? If Zusane Zaksauskas does walk out of here, there’s not a place on this planet that she can hide from us. She’s ours for life.”

  “Lucky her.”

  He snorted and started for the door. What stopped him was the surgeon in scrubs and a mask and hairnet standing in the entryway. He glanced at Nolan, and then at me.

  “Perry?” the doctor said.

  I stood up, felt my heart vault upward into my throat. “Yes?”

  “I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news.”

  I stared at him, and Nolan stared at him, and I could feel the air molecules in the room fall absolutely motionless around us.

  “We did everything we could,” the surgeon said, “but she never recovered consciousness after the operation. I am very sorry.”

  Nolan sighed and shook his head, then looked back at me. “Sorry about that, kid. Like I said before, though, it’s probably for the best.”

  After he left, the surgeon took off his mask and looked at me.

  “I thought you told me you weren’t a doctor,” I said.

  “What is your American saying?” Erich tapped his finger against his head. “‘I play one on TV’?”

  “So Gobi…”

  “The body seems to have mysteriously disappeared. Or soon will.”

  “I take it you’ll be making the proper arrangements?”

  “Ja,” Erich said. “Is already taken care of.”

  47. “We Own the Sky”

  —M83

  The day after Gobija Zaksauskas was officially declared dead for the second time in her life, her remains whisked away from the hospital morgue by persons unknown, my mom and Annie and I flew back to the States. My dad stayed in Paris to catch a later flight. How much later remained to be seen. He didn’t tell us, and nobody asked.

  Walking through customs at JFK, Mom stopped and looked at the Christmas tree in the international terminal.

  “We missed Thanksgiving,” she said, in a funny voice, like she was just now realizing how far away we’d been. I knew how she felt. America sounded loud and frantic in my one good ear, people running, shouting, flights being announced in a barrage of noise and information. All around us, time had passed, and we’d been plunged right back into the flow again, trying to get our balance.

  Then, like that, it was December.

  Annie and I spent a lot of time at home over the next few weeks, going to movies, playing board games, wrapping Ch
ristmas presents, and downloading holiday music. Even the most normal, boring American things felt reassuring somehow, like they were anchoring us into place.

  Nobody said much about my dad. I tried to say something once or twice to Annie about it, but she didn’t seem to want to talk, so I let it go. My mom said she didn’t care about getting a tree this year, so Annie and I went out and brought one home ourselves on top of the Volvo while she was at work. Norrie, Caleb, and Sasha came over and helped us decorate it, stringing popcorn and cranberries because Annie had always wanted to do that. We practiced some of the new material and even did a couple of Christmas songs with Annie singing the background vocals on “Santa Claus Is Back in Town.” Mom said it sounded nice, but it was in that distracted kind of voice that could have been referring to anything, or nothing at all. She was being too quiet, spending too much time alone, but there didn’t seem to be any way to mention it.

  Two weeks after our arrival back in New York, Chow came home from Berkeley on Christmas break. He stopped by the house one night for pizza and eggnog. Naturally, he’d read about everything that happened with me and Gobi in Europe and couldn’t wait to talk about it—ever since we’d come home, it was all over the news and the Internet and everywhere else.

  It was good to see him again, and we stayed up late into the night, talking by the fire. He told me that while they were home, he and his old high school flame were back together “on a temporary basis,” which as far as I could tell meant they’d started sleeping together until they had to go back to their respective colleges in January.

  “What about you, dawg?” he said, looking over at the Christmas tree. “Another Christmas at home with your red lights and your blue balls?”

  After everything that had happened, it was a pretty freaking insensitive thing to say, but I found myself laughing, and that felt good.

  For a long time, I was afraid I’d forgotten how.