Pretty Lethal

Gobi and I had talked about Harry’s Bar back in New York, as some fantasy rendezvous point in a future that neither one of us had ever expected would be real. Now that I was actually here, though, things seemed different, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how it would be if she really did show up. What if the night that we’d spent together had been a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon, a potent but irreproducible mixture of hormones and gunpowder, never to be repeated? What would we say to each other – would there even be anything to say?

‘Signori?’

I jumped and looked up from my drink, and realized the bartender was staring at me.

‘We are closing for the night.’

I looked at the clock over the bar. It was five to eleven. That seemed early, but I saw that the other patrons had left or were putting on their coats and scarves, paying their tabs, saying goodbye, heading out into the cold Venetian night.

‘Can I just hang out here a few more minutes?’ I asked.

He sighed. ‘Si.’

I sat while the waiters wiped down the tables, put away glasses, and started turning off the lights around me, click, click, click. By now the bar had emptied out entirely. The bartender reappeared in front of me wearing his own coat, his face very serious now.

‘Signori, I am sorry, but we must close.’

‘Okay.’ I got out my wallet, dug out the emergency Visa card, and paid the tab. ‘Thank you.’

‘Prego.’ The waiter let me out and locked the door behind me.

I stepped out. The rain was falling harder now, the wind gusting it straight into my face, and there was no one on the street in front of the canal. I thought about what I’d read about Venice sinking. Everywhere I looked, the lagoon was lapping up the steps and filling the doorways. Up ahead, I saw two men – the same ones in suits, smoking, that I’d talked to before – emerge out in front of me as if they’d been there waiting for me the whole time.

‘So you found it,’ one of them said.

‘What?’

‘Your little tourist trap.’

I turned and started walking in the other direction, and another man with a shaved head appeared in front of me, blocking my way, his gaze shifting up to the two behind my back. The bald one was young, wearing jeans and a shiny, puffy black coat that seemed like it was stitched together out of designer garbage bags. A second later I felt something hard and cold jab up against the back of my neck. Over my shoulder I could smell garlic and cigarettes mixed with overpowering cologne. One hand grabbed my shoulder, slamming me face-first into the alley wall hard enough that I heard my incisors scrape off the concrete before I hit the ground. Pain burst through the left side of my face and I tasted blood, salty and fresh, as fingers rifled my back pocket, yanking out my wallet.

‘Just take whatever you want,’ I said, my tongue flicking off my newly chipped tooth. ‘Just – ’

‘Where is she?’

‘What?’ I said. ‘Who?’

Then one of the men screamed.

All at once I heard feet scuffling above me and a series of quick, brutal thumps, like a glove stuffed with pennies smacking into flesh. Someone grunted, staggered, fell, and footsteps went slapping fast up the alley, through the puddles, and then there was no sound except for the rain.

‘I see you have still not learned to fight.’

I looked up.

Gobi was standing in the alley in front of me, hands on her hips, with two of the men sprawled at her feet. For a second I didn’t know if what I was seeing was real or just a delayed result of head trauma.

She was wearing a short leather jacket with lots of buckles, and some kind of stretchy black micro-skirt, torn black stockings, and big chunky shitkicker boots. Her hair was dyed and chopped above the shoulders.

‘How did you find me?’ I asked.

‘Perry.’ She shook her head. ‘You do not look so good.’

‘Yeah, well, I could’ve used you . . .’ – I stopped and coughed hard, looked at my hand, and saw a little spatter of scarlet across my knuckles – ’like, about twenty seconds earlier?’

‘So use me now.’ She extended one hand and I took it, lifting myself up. I was still getting my balance when she leaned forward, catching me in her arms, and I saw the little white scar across her neck, and all the rest of it came back from there.

‘Never Let Me Down Again’ – Depeche Mode

We crossed a dark bridge to the Centurion Palace Hotel. It was a sleek slice of L.A.-style architecture built inside what looked like a five-hundred-year-old palace on the opposite side of the canal, and to get inside we had to cross a wide courtyard of perfectly oval stones that crunched under our feet as we walked over them. She led me into a high-domed lobby with a chandelier made of curved glass tubes and long sofas arranged across the wide marble floor. From the concierge desk I saw a pair of high-cheekboned faces, incurious and androgynous, peering back at us from a liquid cloud of blue light.

‘Lift is this way,’ she said. ‘Follow me.’

I stepped into the brushed chrome elevator, feeling it rise smoothly upward, transporting us to some upper floor. There, Gobi kept me walking forward down the silent corridor. She swiped her keycard and we entered her suite, a series of rooms, one flowing into the next, opening out toward a balcony overlooking the canal. I saw a bottle of champagne on ice in front of the flat-screen TV, the counter scattered with her BlackBerry, jewelry, a jumbled pile of euros and foreign coins, her passport and lipstick.

‘Take off your clothes.’

‘What?’

‘You are freezing with the cold.’

‘Look, I should probably tell you something.’ I managed to get the windbreaker off, turning one of the sleeves inside out as I pulled my arm free, then reached down to unbutton my pants. ‘Do you mind looking the other way?’

She cocked one eyebrow, then turned to face the wall as I peeled off my jeans, then my socks, and finally my T-shirt. ‘I’m involved with somebody. She’s back in the States.’

Gobi didn’t say anything, just pointed in the opposite direction. ‘Shower is through there.’

The bathroom was a green marble grotto. My reflection stared back at me from a full-length mirror, a skinny, pale American kid with a face that looked like two pounds of Genoa sausage. I kicked off my boxers and stepped into the shower. By now my teeth were chattering and it took me a moment to figure out the faucets, but once I did, the shower head rewarded me with an oscillating spray of hot needles that made my whole body realize that it wasn’t dead after all. Maybe things weren’t as bad as I thought. I breathed in steam, scrubbed myself twice, and stood there until the hot water started to go cold. After what felt like a long time, I stepped out and found a fluffy hotel bathrobe waiting on the back of the door. I was actually starting to feel human again.

‘This is a really nice place,’ I said, stepping out of the steam. ‘How can you afford a place like this?’ No answer. ‘Gobi?’

A flicker of motion in one of the mirrors. ‘Over here.’

‘I – oh.’

When she stepped out from behind the closet door, I saw that she’d slipped off the leather jacket. The top underneath it was lacy and black, with shiny thin straps that stretched across her clavicles.

‘What are you looking at?’

‘Just – your clavicles. You have really nice ones.’

‘How are you with zippers?’

‘Excuse me?’

She turned her back to me, tilted her head forward, and lifted up her hair from the back of her neck. ‘It’s stuck.’

‘I told you I had a girlfriend, right?’

‘I am only asking you to do my zipper.’

‘Right.’ The zipper slipped down easily. ‘Don’t you want to know what I’m doing in Venice?’

‘No.’

‘I’m touring with Inchworm, and – ’

She turned around and kissed me, mouth open, tongue flicking up and in as her hands slipped into the bathrobe. I could taste the dry fruity flavor of the champagne she’d just been drinking, and something almost bitter, like dark espresso beans or black licorice. From outside I could hear music and faint laughter down the canal. I drew back, catching my breath.

‘Her name’s Paula,’ I said. ‘She’s really cool. You’d like her.’

A smoky chuckle and she muttered something in Lithuanian.

‘What?’

‘I called you a stupid ass.’

‘Why?’

‘Is what you call a man who has a girl in his bed and still makes small talk.’

‘We’re not in b– ’

She pressed her palms against my chest and pushed me backwards onto the mattress, knocking the pillows aside, rolling over the blankets and up against the headboard, where I was pinned as she straddled me.

‘Okay, look, this isn’t cool.’ The harder I tried to sit up, the harder she pushed back. ‘I don’t remember you being so – ’ I tried to think of another word for aggressive, but all of a sudden my word-finding ability seemed to have taken a serious hit to the word-place, whatever it was called. Randomly I noticed a Louis Vuitton steamer trunk in the corner of the room that looked like it cost about a million dollars, and then Gobi shifted her hips slightly on top of me and I forgot all about the steamer trunk and the million dollars it must have cost.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

‘I’m fine . . . ?’ My voice went up at the end, sounding like one of the Chipmunks. I put my hands behind me and tried to pull myself free, but her knees had pinned the bathrobe to the mattress. ‘I’m just kinda naked under this thing?’

‘Perry.’

‘What?’

‘I need your help.’

I looked into her eyes. ‘You need me?’

‘I am not joking.’

‘Sure,’ I said, ‘whatever I can do.’

And then the Louis Vuitton trunk started to move.

‘Run (I’m a Natural Disaster)’ – Gnarls Barkley

I sat up fast, looking around so quickly that I felt my neck pop.

‘Wait – ’ I stared back at the steamer trunk, where something was definitely thumping around inside. ‘Is there somebody in that thing?’

Gobi sighed and climbed off me, sliding from the bed in one graceful move. With the resigned air of a woman going about some onerous but necessary task, she opened the drawer of the nightstand next to the bed and pulled out a pistol, screwing the silencer onto the barrel as she walked over to the trunk.

‘Wait, what is that? What are you doing?’

Gobi pointed the gun at the steamer trunk and pulled the trigger. The silenced gunshots weren’t particularly loud – three metallic champagne corks – and whatever was inside gave a shuddering howl and collapsed to the bottom with a thump. In the frozen moment of realization, I saw smoke drifting out of the bullet holes in the trunk, uncurling like ghostly pigtails in the tastefully recessed lighting.

I floundered off the bed and across the room to my wet pile of clothes, the bathrobe flopping open as I tried to get backwards to the door. Behind me, Gobi’s voice was quiet and stern.

‘Perry.’

‘What?’

‘I told you that I need your help.’

‘Yeah, well, dead bodies are kind of a deal-breaker for me in that department.’

That was when the pounding started outside the door.

‘Police and Thieves’ – The Clash

‘Who is that?’ I was standing in the corner by the door, trying to put my jeans back on, but they were too wet and I couldn’t even get one foot through the leg hole. I finally just gave up and tied the bathrobe tight around my waist, all too aware that I was naked underneath it. ‘What the hell is going on?’

‘This way.’ Gobi was dragging the trunk away from the wall with one hand, holding the pistol in the other. ‘Come on.’

‘There’s a person in there!’

‘Was, yes. Is dead person now.’

‘No. No – I’m not – ’

Wham-wham-wham! Heavy, authoritative fists hammered louder on the door of the suite, seeming to make the air shake around us. I stumbled forward, my spine suddenly electrified inside me, shooting down from the base of my brain all the way to wherever humans’ vestigial tail had dropped off two million years ago. Right now I was ready to dive back into the primordial ooze and take my chances with the single-celled organisms – maybe they had the right idea, staying where they were.

Voices came from outside, angry, urgent – soldiers or cops, it sounded like, shouting in Italian.

‘Oh, shit, who’s that?’

‘Carabinieri, probably.’

‘Carbon who?’

‘I will explain to you later if we are still alive,’ she said. ‘Right now, you need to . . . How do you say it? Hold up your end?’

BANG! BANG! BANG! More angry voices, giving orders, making demands in voices that sounded more and more like Mussolini’s Blackshirts on a bender.

‘What am I supposed to do?’

She hoisted the steamer trunk by one of its straps, dragging it toward the balcony. ‘Lift. Now.’

‘What? Why?’

She gestured over the balcony, down to the canal.

‘Oh, no. No way. No.’

‘We must get rid of the body before . . .’ She nodded at the door where the knocking and the shouting had fallen abruptly, ominously silent.

‘Forget it!’

She pointed the pistol at me. ‘It was good to see you again, Perry.’

‘Wait, hold on. I’m not getting involved in this.’

‘Already you are involved.’

Click. Safety off. Argument over. I gripped the leather strap and hoisted up my end of the trunk. As I lifted, I felt something inside do a slumping barrel roll over to my end, which got suddenly heavier, and we heaved it up onto the balcony, balancing it on the wrought-iron railing. For just a second I looked down, four stories, where the Grand Canal shimmered below in the darkness, jewels of light reflected from the hotels and buildings on the other side. Venice never looks lovelier than when you’re using it to dispose of a body.

Then Gobi shoved the trunk over the edge and it fell.

There was a long silence followed by a splash below just as the hotel door swung open behind us. When I looked back at Gobi, she was already climbing over the railing into the night.

‘What are you doing?’

She let go of the railing and disappeared.

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