“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?”
Then the typing sounds continued and I heard a voice coming from across the room, from the computer monitors hooked up to Paula’s iPad.
It was my father’s voice.
29. “Family Man” — Hall and Oates
“I don’t know where she went,” Dad was saying through the speakers. “I don’t know when she’s coming back.”
I peered over Erich’s shoulder at the monitor. On the screen, Mom, Dad, and Annie were still sitting on the floor of the same dirty white room they’d been photographed in earlier, none of them looking at the camera. Annie was asleep, and Mom was holding her head and shoulders in her arms, cradling her like a baby. If you didn’t know any better, you might have guessed they were three stranded travelers in the United terminal at O’Hare, waiting for the weather to clear. Dad had rolled his shirt sleeves up. The newspaper that he had been holding earlier lay in a rumpled gray pile next to him, along with some empty plates and wrappers and Evian bottles. That made me feel a little better. At least someone was giving them food and water.
Mom glanced at Dad. “Are you going to try to talk to her?” she asked, in a low voice, as if she didn’t want to disturb Annie, but the microphone picked it up clearly.
“I don’t know what you expect me to say,” Dad said.
“You certainly didn’t seem to have any problems with that earlier.”