“Stormaire?” Paula’s voice rang out loud and clear through the excellent acoustics of the empty concert hall. She pulled out a lighter and held it up. “Rock on, baby.”
I put down the bass and saw her at the back of the club. She was wearing a black wool coat and knee-high leather boots, standing by the bar, with Monash to her right in a gray business suit. Between them, the cadaverous Parisian bouncer that had let us in a few minutes earlier stood with his skinny tattooed arms crossed, cupping his elbows and trying really hard to look defiant and French, which could not have been easy given the pistol that Monash was pointing at his head.
“Listen,” Paula said. “I know you were planning something special for tonight, but Dad and I are kind of pressed for time here. Mind stepping out back with us for a moment? I really think you’ll want to see this.” She started to turn around, then glanced back almost as an afterthought: “Oh, and bring the freak.”
Gobi looked at me, and we followed Paula out of the club.
A white FedEx truck was parked in an alleyway next to a row of scooters. Rain had soaked the piles of trash back here, and the whole place smelled like raw sewage. Without a word, Paula walked around to the back of the truck and opened the doors, standing out of the way so that I could see inside.
And then, in real time, I saw them.
Three hunched figures sitting there on the floor against the inside wall of the truck, squinting up into the light. And all of a sudden I felt everything else lurch up inside of me and melt away to nothing.
“Mom,” I said. “Dad. Annie.”
My mother was the first one to react. She moved forward and threw her arms around me. “Perry, thank God.” Just hearing that tone in her voice, I realized that she was even more worried about me than she was for herself or Annie. Dad was on his knees, holding on to Annie, kind of helping her move forward out of the van.
“Are you guys okay?”
Dad nodded. “We’re fine.” His voice was quiet, different, broken somehow, without a trace of the confidence that I naturally associated with him. His stubble had grown into the beginnings of a beard, making him look completely different, younger and much older at the same time. “We’re tired.”
“Annie?” I gave her a big hug. “You all right, munchkin?”
She nodded and hugged me back so tightly that I could feel her heart racing. “I hate you, big brother.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I deserve it.”
“You owe me so big for this.”
“You’re right,” I said. “When this is over…”
“Just as long as it is over.” There were tears in her eyes. “That would be enough.”
“I want to thank you for holding up your end of the deal, Stormaire,” Paula cut in behind me, and when I turned, I saw that she had replaced the Glock that she’d lost to Gobi with something even uglier, some kind of customized Soviet-looking machine pistol pointed at Gobi’s face.
Monash had Gobi backed up against the alley wall under a quaint piece of Parisian graffiti depicting schoolchildren playing “Ring Around the Rosie” around a mushroom cloud. Rain from the rooftops was trickling down, making Gobi’s pale face shine in all kinds of radiant, unhealthy ways. “You brought her in to us, just like you said you would.”
Gobi’s eyes flashed over Paula’s shoulder and latched hard on to mine, magnet to steel, and I shook my head violently.
“No,” I said. “Wait a second, that’s not-”
“You made the right choice,” Paula said. “After all, who wouldn’t choose their own family over some girl he hardly knows?”
“That wasn’t how I planned it,” I said, but Gobi wasn’t looking at me anymore.
“We’re not going to lose her this time,” Monash said. It was the first time I’d heard him speak, not counting all the shouting inside the steamer trunk back in Venice. Now that he had a gun in his hand, his voice was refined, British American, the product of private school and board rooms, exactly the way you’d expect the father of someone like Paula to sound.
Tucking the weapon into a shoulder holster, letting Paula keep her gun pointed at Gobi, he started strapping a pair of plastic restraints around Gobi’s wrists. “And there’s going to be quite a lengthy reeducation process, isn’t that right, Zusanne?” And then, to Paula: “We’ve got an empire to rebuild, darling.”
Gobi lowered her head and said something under her breath.
“What’s that, love?”
“My name is Gobija.”
The restraints zipped tighter. At first I thought she was going to do the same thing she’d done in Zermatt, going quietly until she had a chance to assess the situation.
I was wrong.