Joe Schreiber: Perry's killer playlist

“Who else has this number?”

“No one.”

I hit TALK. “Hello?”

“Hey, kid.”

That voice, like broken gravel being shoveled in my ear. “Agent Nolan,” I said, feeling Gobi react beside me as I glanced over my shoulder at the empty roadway behind us.

“Listen, about last night, no hard feelings, huh?” Nolan coughed, not bothering to cover his mouth. “I didn’t want you to think I was mad about that or anything.”

“That’s a load off,” I said.

“You have to admit, it was kind of stupid, though, right?” This time the cough sounded more like a humorless chuckle, and it was easy to imagine him sitting in a safe house somewhere back in Switzerland, stirring Nescafe and checking his e-mail. “You don’t have many friends in Europe now.”

“I’ve got one.”

“I wanted to let you know that we checked on your family. Nothing yet.”

“Thanks, and good luck tracing this phone. I’m ditching it.”

“I would expect nothing less.”

“Goodbye, Nolan.”

“See you, Perry.”

As soon as he hung up, Gobi looked at me. “What did he say?”

“He said I don’t have many friends in Europe.”

“Is he right?”

I looked at the sign up ahead. PARIS-262 KM.

“We’ll see.”

By early afternoon we’d reached the outskirts of Paris and abandoned the Peugeot in a commuter lot at Joinville le-Pont. I bought us two twenty-four-hour rail passes while Gobi wiped the car down, getting our prints off the wheel and the door handles. When the RER pulled up to the platform, we got onboard and took two seats in the very back.

Gobi leaned her head on my shoulder and dozed. People got on and off the train without noticing us. Outside it was raining again, big fat metal-colored droplets streaking the glass as we rocked past industrial parkways, warehouses, and factories outside the city. Power lines swooped and dipped like sine waves outside the window. A half-hour later, we changed from the commuter rail to the Metro, and I saw oil-slick puddles and landfills along the tracks, abandoned furniture, tangles of graffiti along the trestles, getting thicker and more elaborate, American words and hip-hop slang mixed in with French phrases and local iconography. If this wasn’t Paris, we were definitely headed into New Jersey.

“Look.” She pointed out the window. “Eiffel Tower.”

I stared at it rising above the brown and white rooftops. Until that moment it hadn’t really registered where we were. For a while the buildings of Paris could have been the same anonymous tenements of any other city, apartments and drugstores with rain sluicing off the canopies, but as the train rose up on an elevated track, I saw the cathedrals and the river, and then we were in the middle of all of it.

“It’s like nine hundred feet high,” I said, remembering what I’d heard from my French teacher sophomore year. “I think there’s a restaurant up there.”

She sounded lost and alone. “I have always wanted to go. First the 40/4 °Club, now the Eiffel Tower.” The joke came off weak, even to me. “You’re not exactly a cheap date, you know that?”

“I want to die there.”

I looked at her, startled. “What?”

“You heard me.”

“Not today.”

She didn’t say anything. I didn’t either, for a while. Gobi tucked her chin and closed her eyes. As she leaned back against my shoulder, her coat slipped open and I caught a glimpse of the Glock, hanging out for the whole world to see.

“Jeez, Gobi-” I reached over to push the gun back out of view and pull her coat shut, but when my hand brushed the harness, she snapped violently awake, shoved me back, and grabbed the gun, then held it out, pointing it right at me.

“Gobi.” I tried to make my voice calm. “What are you doing? Put that down.”

She didn’t move. Her face was absolutely blank, an alabaster mask with real eyes twitching around inside it. A thin trickle of blood had started running from her left nostril. I couldn’t tell how many of the other passengers had noticed what was going on, but the woman across from us in a business suit-a middle-aged Parisian executive who looked like she was on her way out to a power lunch-was staring straight at Gobi and the Glock.

“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.

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.