“Hey,” I said, “it’s okay. It’s Perry.” I held up my hands. “You’re just confused. Just put the gun down, okay?”
All around us, people were starting to panic, jumping out of their seats, one or two of them screaming, getting out cell phones, fighting to get out of the railway car. I tried not to let any of that faze me, struggling to keep my expression calm. The hole at the end of the gun’s barrel looked as big as the Holland Tunnel.
In front of me, Gobi was talking to herself, saying something low in Lithuanian, murmuring it under her breath, a flurry of consonants and vowels, her pupils flicking around so fast that her eyes themselves seemed to be trembling in their sockets. The exhaustion and unreality of the moment made it feel like I had a clear bubble enveloping my head, as if everything were happening at one level of detachment. I fought to think clearly, but at the moment clarity was in extremely short supply.
You must promise me. ..
“Zusane,” I said. “Zusane Elzbieta Zaksauskas.”
She narrowed her eyes at the sound of that other name, the blind hysteria starting to waver, giving way to a suspicious uncertainty, but the gun stayed where it was. At the far end of the car, people were staring at us, holding their breath.
“You are last target,” she said.
“No,” I said. “You know I’m not.”
She flicked off the safety. “I must finish.”
“It’s Perry. It’s me.”
She murmured another phrase in her own language, finger tightening on the trigger. Now her eyes were almost closed, as if she didn’t want to see what was going to happen next, but her lips kept moving. It almost sounded like she was praying.
The voice in my head spoke with absolute certainty: She’s going to shoot me. I’m going to die right here on the Metro in a country where I don’t even speak the language. And at that same moment, I remembered the words that Erich had told me back in Zermatt.
“Zusane,” I said. “As tave myliu.”
Her eyes widened for a moment, and then finally the gun started to go down. We were slowing, moving into the station, and every other passenger on the car was shoved up against the door, waiting for it to open.
I kept my full attention on Gobi. After what felt like forever, she seemed to collapse back into herself again, a storm of emotions spilling over her face, and when she blinked at me, she looked like she was crying.
“Perry?”
“It’s okay.”
“Why did you say that?” She looked at the gun in her hand, then back up at me with a dawning realization and a sense of horror.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t even know what it means.”
“It is… nothing.” She looked at me and now her eyes were clear.
The train had stopped. I let my gaze stray out the window at the flood of frightened passengers putting as much distance between us and them as humanly possible. I didn’t hear any police sirens, not yet, but they were inevitable.
“Come on,” I said. “We have to get out of here, now.”
I put my arm around her shoulder, took the Glock and shoved it under my own coat, then wiped the blood from under her nose. She was still bleeding as I hustled her out onto the platform and up the stairs to the street in the rain.
41. “Teenagers” — My Chemical Romance
We didn’t talk all the way up the rue Oberkampf. The rain kept pouring down harder than ever, splattering in puddles and making miniature waterfalls down canopies of cafes, keeping most of the pedestrians off the street. Scooters and big blue city buses roared past, splashing dirty water up from the gutter. I bought an umbrella from a street vendor and held it low over our faces, checking the reflections in shop windows to figure out if we were being followed.
Halfway down the next block, we passed a Chinese place, approaching the dark wooden exterior of the Cafe Charbon and a narrow purple awning next to it reading:
NOUVEAU CASINO
CONCERTS
CLUBBING
I opened the door and a tall, skinny-to-the-point-of-skeletal man standing there in a striped hoodie looked up from his iPod. “Ou allez-vous?”
“I need to go in.”
“No. Not open till tonight.”
“I’m with the band.” I pointed at the flier stapled in the doorway. “Inchworm?”
“You are…” He kept looking at me, swiveling his head from one side to the other, as if there were some angle at which my arrival here would fit his expectations. “With that band?”
“That’s right.” I mimed a few chords. “Bass player.”
The bouncer glanced at Gobi leaning against me with my coat over her shoulders. She must have looked punk rock enough for him, because he made a flicking gesture down the hallway and we stepped inside, down into the club.
That was when a hand swung out and took hold of my shoulder, stopping me in my tracks.
“Didn’t I tell you?” Linus practically shouted. Beneath the huge cloud of his white hair, veins were standing out in his head. “Didn’t I tell you that miserable wench was going to ruin everything?”
We were still in the entryway, not five feet off the sidewalk, Gobi and I on one side while Linus stood in front of us in the middle of a full-tilt rant.
“Linus,” I said, “you were talking about tour percentages. Paula was literally trying to kill me.”
“Six percent of the door-I’d say she was trying to kill all of us!”
“I mean, with an actual gun.”
“Whatever.” He waved his hand. “Just like I told the boys, Inchworm is finishing this tour. I always knew Armitage was a thug. So what? It’s a ruthless business. You think David Geffen is a saint? That changes nothing.” He shook his head. “These local promoters are paying us, and we’re going to play. With the Slippery When Wet Tour back in ’eighty-six, when Jon Bon Jovi got a chest cold, did we go home with our tails between our legs? Hell no, and we’re not going home now.”
I looked over his shoulder. “Right now I think we’d just like to go inside.”
Linus, still muttering, led us into the club. Even mostly deserted, without the lights and strobes going, Nouveau Casino was a visually disorienting experience, a wide-open room with harlequin-colored walls and ceilings made out of irregular geometric shapes. Off to one side was a DJ booth and a red suede bar with an old-fashioned glass chandelier that looked like it could have been pilfered by the Nazis from the palace of Versailles and abandoned here during the liberation by mistake.
The band was onstage in the middle of yet another soundcheck. When Norrie saw us coming, he stopped pounding the drums, dropped his sticks, and practically fell over his cymbals on the way to the footlights.
“Huh-Holy shit-Perry?” Then, recognizing Gobi, he raised both his hands in a frantic warding-off gesture, took a step back, and almost tripped over Caleb’s amp. “Whuh-Whoa, no.” His eyes were wide open, and his stutter, which always had the cruel tendency to act up in moments of stress, went absolutely berserk. It almost sounded like he was rapping. “Guh-Guh-Get her out of here, muh-man. I’m nuh-nuh-not even fuh-fuh-fucking around with you-juh-juh-hust get her out of here now.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “She’s all right.”
“Shuh-She’s a fuh-fuh-hucking buh-bullet muh-magnet! A-And I duh-don’t wuh-want her here!”
“Hey, it’s Perry the Platypus!” Sasha dropped the microphone and came down to the floor, threw his arms around me in a big stinky road hug. He smelled like a mixture of hair product, Cool Ranch Doritos, and Coke Zero, and even though I’d just seen him two days earlier, I felt such a sudden huge wave of homesickness well up over me all at once that I wanted to cry. “What’s up, Baron von Broheim? That was waaaay crazy back in Venice, huh? What are you doing here?”