“So Kaya hired you to kill Armitage, Monash, and Paula?”
“Not hired,” Gobi said.
“Why do you keep saying that?” I was trying to keep my voice down in the sleeping train compartment, but it wasn’t easy. “If they’re not paying you to kill all these people, then why are you doing it?”
She didn’t answer, not even when I finally got tired of waiting, reached for her arm, and pulled her toward me. Her head lolled sideways, and in the light of a passing railway trestle, I saw the whites of her eyes rolled back in her head. A seizure, at the worst possible moment. She never seemed to have them at any other time.
“Gobi?” Her skin felt cold, clammy, and when I tried to shake her, her limbs were loose, without any resistance in the muscles or the joints.
I touched her face and felt something sticky and wet.
At first I thought maybe it was sweat. Then I looked at my fingers and saw they were red. Blood was trickling from her nose and the corner of her lips, covering her chin and neck. She had already soaked the whole front of her T-shirt.
“Oh, shit,” I said, lifting her limp body. “Gobi… What the hell?”
Her mouth fell open and she made a clicking noise. There was still a lot of blood coming from her nose, and maybe her mouth too. Out of nowhere I thought about what the guy with the beard, Swierczynski, had said to us last night.
The bullet is already in your head.
I tried to think clearly about what was happening. The blood didn’t make sense. She hadn’t been shot back in St. Mark’s Square, and there was no way she was really walking around with an actual bullet in her head.
I picked up her wrist and felt her pulse. It was irregular, and when I watched her chest rise, her breathing seemed shallow and labored.
“Look, I don’t know what to do here,” I said. “Is there an injection or something I can give you?”
Her eyes flicked toward me silent and helpless. When she still didn’t say anything, I reached down and started digging through the canvas tote she’d dragged from the locker back at the Venice train station. Inside were our fake passports and documents, two bottles of water, a silk scarf, sunglasses, a Eurail map and train schedule, a thick bundle of euros, a tube of lipstick, and a few bullets rolling around. No medicine, no messages, no clues.
At the very bottom, my hand came across a key tucked into one of the seams. It was a big chunk of brass, and at first I thought it was the room key from Venice. Then I realized there was a different tag on it completely. It read, in totaclass="underline"
Hotel Schoeneweiss, Zermatt
I dropped the key back in her bag, poured some water on the scarf, and tried to wipe some of the blood from her face, zipping up her jacket to cover the stained shirt. I guess I knew where we were heading after all.
Next to me, Gobi had started to tremble.
25. “Everybody Daylight” — Brightblack Morning Light
I awoke without realizing that I’d fallen asleep. The train was slowing down, the rhythm of its wheels changing, sloughing off speed, drawing me from sleep so deep, it felt like waking up from anesthesia or hypnosis. I’d been hypnotized once at a party, and coming out of it had felt like this, blurry and unpleasant. I’m going to begin counting back from ten, and when I get to one you’ll be fully awake. ..
I sat up. My mouth was dry, and getting my eyes completely open was probably going to require a couple of toothpicks and a whole lot of caffeine.
We were pulling into the station. The video screen at the front of the car said we were in Zermatt. I glanced around, immediately on guard for anybody who might have been watching us, but the only other passengers on this side of the compartment were a pair of hippie backpackers, a guy and a girl slouched side by side under a heavy Hudson Bay blanket, their sleeping bodies shifting together, keeping time with the train’s still diminishing velocity.
Next to me, Gobi slumped pale and motionless against my shoulder. Sometime during the night she had finally stopped trembling and slipped into a kind of shallow doze. I had a foggy memory of changing trains, getting off the TGV in the middle of the night, helping her through some desolate border checkpoint at three a.m., past two midnight-shift porters leering at us from behind a closed magazine kiosk, muttering something in broken, learned-from-TV English about a boy bringing his whore home after a rough night. From there we’d boarded a Swiss regional, handing our passports and tickets to a listless-looking official, who’d stamped them and shoved them back.
Now we’d come to a complete stop, the first rays of sun spiking down from the Alps, filling the compartment with brittle orange light that I wasn’t remotely prepared for.
“Wake up.”
“Ugh?”
“We’re here.” I moved my arm, and Gobi stirred reluctantly toward consciousness, making a gravelly noise in her throat. Standing up, I lifted under her arm, pulling her down the aisle and guiding her down the steps to the main platform until she started to support her own weight. Outside the air was sharp and glacial and smelled faintly like pine trees-an almost painfully clean smell. I slipped the sunglasses over Gobi’s eyes to cover as much of her face as possible, and hauled her out into the daylight.
The terminal clock said it was just past seven a.m. Outside the station, the first early skiers and tourists were already on their way to the slopes. The main drag had no actual cars, just these little diesel vehicles and electric mini-taxis shuttling people past chalets and still closed alpine shops full of overpriced watches, postcards, and cuckoo clocks. A decorative red and green banner blowing in the wind over the street advertised some kind of festivaclass="underline"
ClauWau Fest!!-25-27 Nov
I handed one of the drivers a twenty-euro bill from Gobi’s bag and asked him to drive us to the Hotel Schoeneweiss.
“Wohin?” He gazed at me blankly, a grizzled middle-aged man in a golf cap with windburned hangdog jowls, watery gray eyes, and a gunslinger’s mustache hanging off his upper lip.
“Is there a problem?” I asked, trying to support Gobi’s head without making it look like that’s what I was doing.
“There is no such hotel in Zermatt, mein Herr.”
“There has to be.” I held up the key that I’d found in Gobi’s bag so he could read the label. “Look.”
The driver inspected the key for a long moment and gestured gloomily for us to climb in.
At the far end of the main street, past all the other inns and shops, the taxi pulled up in front of a small wooden storefront that seemed to be built directly into the side of the mountain itself. The shop window was full of dusty wine bottles. The hand-carved sign above the low arched door read VINOTHEKE-WEINE-SPIRITUOSEN.
“Looks like a liquor store,” I said. With its low, cavelike entrance and folksy decor, it looked like where Bilbo Baggins might drop by for a bottle of eiswein. “Are you sure this is it?”
The driver grunted and pointed above it, to an even smaller row of windows above the wine and spirits shop. A tiny hand-carved shingle no bigger than a license plate was creaking back and forth in the breeze: SCHOENEWEISS.
I looked at the darkened front door. “Where do we check in?”
“The Hotel Schoeneweiss never has any guests.”
“Sounds like a great place,” I muttered, and when I opened the back door to help Gobi out of the cab, she slouched over sideways and tumbled forward into my arms. I barely managed to catch her, and when I did, I saw how much worse she’d gotten.
Her half-lidded eyes were glazed and glassy, like she’d forgotten how to blink. Her cracked lips hung slightly parted, and at that point I honestly couldn’t tell if she was breathing or not. Her nose and mouth had started to bleed again, not much, but enough to drizzle down over her chin. I knelt down over her and glanced back up at the driver.