Joe Schreiber - Perry's killer playlist

“Those mechanized figures are called the moors,” I said, remembering something from one of the guidebooks I’d read on the train here. “Supposedly back in the seventeenth century one of them knocked an unsuspecting worker off the top and he fell to his death. The first official assassination by a robot.”

That got a smile out of Paula. “You’re a good tour guide, Stormaire. Maybe if this whole rock-and-roll thing doesn’t pan out…”

“You think Armitage will actually be able to help me sort this out?”

“We’ll see.”

I took a deep breath. She glanced across the piazza and I caught the faraway look in her eyes that I hadn’t seen before.

“Hey,” I said. “Are you all right?”

“I have a picture of me sitting on my dad’s shoulders right over there.” Paula pointed back to the cathedral, next to the folded-up platforms they kept in the square in times of acqua alta, high water, when the canals flooded into the streets. “I was probably five or six at the time.”

“I didn’t know you’d been here before.”

“Dad was here with the Stones back in the early nineties. He brought me with him. It was a good time.”

Her melancholy tone caught me off-guard. “You guys still see each other all the time, right?”

“Things are different now.” She tugged my hand. “Come on. We’re going to be late.”

We stopped outside a bistro with outdoor tables set up along the cobblestones. As we approached, I saw Linus pacing back and forth in front of the entrance, smoking a cigarette hard enough that it seemed to disappear in two long drags. He saw me and tossed the butt aside.

“Perry, thank God, where have you been?” His attention immediately snapped to Paula. “What did you do with him?”

Paula sighed. “Good to see you too, Linus. Where’s the rest of the band?”

“They’re inside already, doing the sound check. Which is where he should be, right now.”

I hustled inside and found Norrie, Sasha, and Caleb setting up equipment onstage. Caleb was eating an enormous slice of pizza while Sasha flirted with a strikingly beautiful waitress in a language that seemed to rely on nothing more sophisticated than hand gestures and smiles. None of them seemed particularly concerned about my disappearance. “What’s up, jerkweed,” Sasha said. “What happened? We thought you drowned in a canal or something.”

Norrie squinted at me suspiciously, and when he got close enough, he lowered his voice and whispered, “Wuh-Well?”

“Well, what?”

“You nuh-know what, Stormaire. Duh-Did you fuh-find her or what?”

“Dude…”

“Yuh-You totally did, didn’t you?” He shook his head. “Thuh-That’s why you duh-ditched us.”

“. . it’s a crazy, long story, and-”

“Nuh-Never mind. Doesn’t muh-matter. Guh-Guess what?” When he looked at me again, he was smiling, and just like that, his stutter was gone. “I wrote a new song.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. And it’s good. All it needs is a bass line.”

“No problem, man.” In spite of everything, I felt that sudden lift that came along with our songwriting partnership, that sense that somehow we’d lucked into knowing each other, way back before either one of us could’ve guessed what that meant. “Bass line, I can do.”

“Wuh-Wait a second.” Norrie’s eyes narrowed. “Wuh-Where’s your bass?”

“I kind of… lost it.”

“What?”

“Look,” I said, “if I told you half the shit that I’ve been through in the last twenty-four hours…”

“That’s all right,” a voice said. “I’m sure we can figure something out.”

I turned around and saw George Armitage standing there.

In person, Armitage was exactly as refined and charming as I’d imagined from talking to him over the phone. He was in his midfifties, tall and fit, his skin almost Mediterranean, with just a few artfully arranged wrinkles around his pale blue eyes. Everything about him felt polished and real at the same time, and there was a certain smell, like suede and Lear jet fumes, clinging ever so faintly to his clothes. So this is what a billion dollars smells like, I thought.

The bodyguards on either side of him stood silent, their eyes hidden behind mirrored sunglasses. I almost immediately started thinking of them as Ram and Rod.

After a brief introduction to the rest of the band, and to Linus, who for once seemed able to keep from making some kind of acerbic comment, Armitage led Paula and me across the square to the small cafe, where a table was waiting for us. Ram and Rod followed at a respectful but conspicuous distance.

“I won’t keep you long,” Armitage said. “I know you’ve got a sound check to get to.”

“It’s all right.”

“How do you like the city?” He spread his hands magisterially across the cafe, the cathedral, and the piazza full of pigeons behind us in the gathering dusk, as if he’d conjured all of this out of the ether, just for us. “My absolute favorite place on earth. She’s like a beautiful woman whose favor I’ve never quite managed to capture.”

“It’s really great,” I said.

“I think we should celebrate.” He signaled the waiter. “Villa Antinori, ’ninety-five.”

The waiter disappeared, and Armitage turned the full wattage of his attention on me. “Perry, I realize all of this must feel like it’s happening very quickly to you, but by now you know how much I love your music, and I think it’s time we discuss Inchworm’s first album.”

“Okay.”

“I’d like to get you in the studio as soon as this tour is over, if possible. In fact, we were talking about going directly to L.A. You blokes could certainly recuperate there, and when the time is right, we could start recording right away. How does that sound?”

“Like a dream come true.”

“Wonderful.” Armitage smiled and glanced at Paula. “Make a note to book some time at Sunset Sound, love, won’t you?”

“Taking care of it now,” Paula said. She took her iPad out of her purse and started typing something onto the screen.

The wine arrived, and Armitage poured a glass for each of us.

“That settles it, then,” he said, raising a toast. “Here’s to Inchworm and the great future that awaits them.”

I reached for my glass, and that was when I saw Gobi coming through the crowd, walking straight toward us with the shotgun.

When I think back on that moment, I’m always amazed by how long it took me to react. Everyone else seemed to move before I did-Paula, the waiters, even the other patrons of the cafe.

Gobi took out the bodyguards from twenty feet away. I heard two quick, deafening noises- BLAM, BLAM -and saw them both pitch backwards in opposite directions, hitting the cobblestones on either side of the table. What I saw then couldn’t possibly be right-it had to be some kind of run-time glitch in the mainframe of the universe-because when I looked again, Gobi was less than a foot away, pumping another round into the chamber and pointing the shotgun right at Armitage’s chest, point blank.

Armitage opened his mouth to say something, but he never got the chance before Gobi pulled the trigger. There was a third deafening KAPOW, and the shotgun blast blew him backwards out of his chair hard enough to knock the whole table over with his knees, spilling wine and glass everywhere. Pigeons took flight and people screamed in that far-off way that voices sound after your eardrums have been assaulted by blunt-force audio trauma. My ears were used to it from years of speakers and amps, and it was still a backwards-sounding scream-the crowd almost seemed to suck it back inward-withering into a gasp, when they saw what had happened.