“Is there a hospital around here?”
The driver took one glance at Gobi, decided that he’d done his part for the cause, and hit the gas and sped off, leaving us there at the end of the street. The enormity of my bad decision-making-my misplaced trust in others and myself-settled over me like one of those smallpox-infected blankets that the U.S. Cavalry supposedly handed out to the Plains Indians. Why hadn’t I just taken my chances with the Italian police?
Some bleak inner-Perry gave voice to my darkest suspicions: Because they would have arrested you, and she would have died, and your family would never have been found.
The cold reality of it shot through me, a steel instrument tapping a raw nerve. Every second that I hesitated, every moment that I let slip away, meant that my dad and mom and Annie were getting that much closer to-
To death. You know it. That’s exactly the word.
I was trying to decide if I should just start looking around for some kind of emergency clinic somewhere when a cold hand gripped the back of my neck, thumb and forefingers pinching the tendons there, and a sharp bolt of pain shot down both arms just before they went completely numb.
The German voice in my ear was calm, almost a whisper.
“Let me see her.”
26. “Hurt” — Nine Inch Nails
“Let me guess,” I said. “Kaya?”
The man standing behind me didn’t answer. I put him mid-to-late-thirties, handsome in a sloppy kind of way. He was wearing brown wool pants with a faded flannel shirt, sleeves rolled up to his forearms, with a two-day stubble and thick black hair that tumbled across his forehead. He had quick, searching eyes and the kind of sharp upper lip and chin that could have made him a late-night movie star from the fifties, except right now he didn’t seem to give much of a shit what he looked like at all.
“Help me get her inside,” he said, in that same low German voice. And then, touching Gobi’s chin gently, turning her head: “It is all right now, Zusane. I’m here.”
We carried her inside the empty wine store, a cramped rectangle of darkness that looked as if nobody had bought champagne or anything else here in years. As we walked past the front counter with its hooded cash register, I noticed that each shelf held exactly one row of bottles, enough to give the outward appearance of a well-stocked market. Not only were most of the bottles empty, but they were covered in about an inch of dust.
In the back, the shop gave way to a set of double doors that opened onto a narrow stairwell. I was holding Gobi’s legs and the guy took her arms, backing his way carefully up the steps while I did my best to keep her feet from dragging.
“How long has she been like this?” he asked.
“Since last night.” I looked up at him. “Who-”
“Through here.” At the top of the stairs we stepped through a doorway into a blinding expanse of light. In contrast to the gloomy booze shop below, the second floor was a spotless pine-floored room with a back wall that was one gigantic mirror.
It took me a second to realize that it was a gym.
We carried Gobi past weights and barbells, an arrangement of parallel bars, beams, tumbling mats, even a pommel horse, with a floor-to-ceiling climbing wall occupying the wall behind it. Boxing gear-heavy bags, throwing dummies, speed bags-dangled from the ceiling. The far end was dedicated to all kinds of increasingly dangerous-looking martial arts stuff, sparring gloves and masks and projectile weapons, swords, knives, and an enormous padlocked gun rack gleaming with enough well-oiled automatic firepower to blow this corner of Switzerland off the map. The cumulative effect was like taking an evolutionary speed-tour of the ultimate adolescent revenge fantasy, from “first I’ll get strong” to “then they’ll be sorry.” Taken in all at once, it was more than a little disturbing.
“Where do you keep the nuke?” I asked.
Ignoring me, the man opened a door on the opposite side of the gym. Inside, I glimpsed the residential decor, marble floors, a long leather sofa, steel and glass end tables, recessed light fixtures. I thought I heard a Hawaiian steel guitar playing somewhere softly inside.
“Stay here.”
“Now hold on-”
He took Gobi inside and shut the door in my face.
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.”