Joe Schreiber: Perry's killer playlist

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 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.

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.

“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 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.