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?”
“Just in the neighborhood,” I said, and mentally added, Jeopardizing my family’s lives. .. again.
Sasha cackled and punched me in the arm. “‘In the neighborhood,’ he said… Will you listen to this fart-knocker?” A giant grin had spread over his face, making him look about twelve years old. “Hey, you better go talk to Linus. I think he really wants to, you know, work some shit out.”
“We talked.”
“Cool. I love Europe, man. I’m moving here.” He turned to Gobi, ecstatic enough now that his words were running together without the added inconvenience of punctuation. “And you’re here too, the original European chick, that’s so utterly cool since you’re kind of the reason all of it happened in the first place and you guys are too cute together, like Sid and Nancy except without the drugs-hey, Caleb, Norrie, did you see who’s here?”
“I suh-saw,” Norrie muttered, and Caleb, who had just now gotten his Strat tuned the way he wanted it, gave us a distracted wave, as if all of this were happening in his garage on a slow Tuesday after school.
“So”-Sasha clapped his hands again-“are you ready to rawk?”
“Not exactly.”
Norrie took a step forward. “Wuh-What’s guh-going on, Perry?”
“I need to talk to you guys in private,” I said, and when I took off my coat, the Glock fell out of my pocket and we stood there staring at it like it was a dead bird on the floor.
“No,” Norrie said. “Nuh-No. No way. No.”
“Norrie.”
“No. No!”
“Dude.” I’d already picked up the gun and stuffed it back in my parka, but I kept seeing Norrie’s eyes flick back to the lump that it made in my pocket. “I need your help.”
We were leaning against the side of the stage while Sasha and Caleb tried to figure out the set list. Gobi was sitting on the floor beside me with her head in her hands. She hadn’t moved or spoken since we’d gone off to this dark corner of the club.
“Just let us-”
“I duh-don’t even care about the shuh-show,” Norrie said. “I juh-hust don’t want to guh-get killed.”
“Trust me, man, okay?”
He looked at me wearily. We’d been friends since grade school, and we’d been through a lot together, and this wasn’t how I wanted to catch up with him again. We should’ve been at home in his basement listening to Wolfmother, playing Red Dead Redemption, and talking about Princeton and girls and whatever else popped into our heads. Even back in high school, I’d known it couldn’t last forever, but I hadn’t ever dreamed that it would end so crashingly soon.
“And wuh-why c-can’t you just guh-go to the cops about this again?” Norrie asked, then answered his own question. “Oh yeah, thuh-that’s right, buh-because yuh-you’re traveling with a h-hired assassin!”
“Look,” I said. “I’ll have the cops here tonight. I just want as much cover as possible if something goes wrong.”
“You w-want to have an armed st-standoff in the middle of our show,” he said, sounding abruptly very sick of being my best friend. “Again.”
“What about that song?”
He stared at me, his face screwed up with confusion. “Whuh-What?”
“You said that you wrote a new song.”
“Are you suh-serious?”
“Let’s hear it.”
“Nuh-now?”
I looked around the empty club, thinking of everything that was happening out beyond those walls, thinking of me and Gobi and my family, the odds against us stacked higher than they’d ever been. “Might be our last chance.”
“No. No way.” Shaking his head. “I cuh-can’t-”
“Yeah, you can.”
Norrie took in a breath, shook his head, and with a long-suffering, oh-Lord-I-can’t-believe-I’m-doing-this sigh of exasperation, turned and went back to the stage, where Caleb and Sasha had been studiously pretending they weren’t eavesdropping on our conversation. He murmured something to them as he got behind his drum kit, picked up his sticks, and fired off a three-click beat as Caleb ripped into the first notes.
The song-what he had of it-was ragged, unpolished, sloppy, all over the place… and unquestionably the best thing that Norrie had ever written. Midway through the second makeshift verse, unable to hold back any longer, I climbed up and grabbed the replacement bass that was sitting there, plugged it in, and started improvising a bass line on the spot, making my way up to the microphone to do backup vocals with Sasha.
When we finished, Gobi and Linus were standing there staring at the foot of the stage with matching expressions of amazement. I wiped the sweat out of my eyes and looked past Caleb, toward where Norrie had just finished pounding out the last beat of the song. He was gazing up me.
“Well?” he managed. “What do you think?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“I call it ‘Bullet Magnet.’”
I nodded. “Good title.”
“I thought so.”
“Me too.”
The applause from the back of the room startled us all.