14. “The World Has Turned and Left Me Here” — Weezer
It must have been sheer luck. As soon as the cops stepped through the doorway in their dark blue uniforms and berets, laughing and talking to each other, I knew they hadn’t come here looking for us. They weren’t the same ones from the hotel, and their relaxed, casual banter told me that they were on routine patrol and had just happened to walk into the wrong place at the wrong time.
Like I said, pure luck-all bad.
They stopped and stared at us, and I knew that there had to be some kind of official bulletin already circulating from what happened at the hotel, with our physical descriptions. One female, armed and dangerous, dressed in black; one male, scared and wet, dressed in terrycloth.
“Okay, listen.” I put up my hands. “I’m not part of this. I’ll go quietly, okay?”
Slightly behind me and off to my left, Gobi flipped open the box that the woman behind the bar had given her and took out a sawed-off shotgun, swinging it upward in one unhesitating move. At the sight of the gun, both cops-carabinieri, she’d called them, the Italian 5-0-dropped instantly into defensive stances on the other side of the doorway, going for their own sidearms, as Gobi pumped a round into the shotgun and pointed the barrel right up under my chin.
“What are you doing?” I muttered.
The cops started shouting at us, both of them at once. Their voices sounded booming and authoritative in the confined space of the trattoria. Gobi didn’t answer, just kept the barrel where it was, pointed up at my head, where twelve years of education were waiting to become paint on the ceiling. Her eyes were locked on the officers blocking the door. On either side, the priests were staring at us with unblinking, owlish eyes. Last rites, anyone?
The carabinieri stared at her. Their faces changed and all the bravado and adrenaline drained away from their cheeks. Slowly, they lowered their guns and stepped away from the door.
“What did you tell them?”
“I said if they moved, I would kill you.”
“That’s it? They looked terrified.”
“They saw that I meant it.”
Gobi nudged me through the door. Then, turning around, she braced her back against one of the stone pillars that stood outside the entrance, doubled up her legs, and used her feet to shove the cigarette machine over so it landed on its side in front of the doorway with a crash. She spun me around and we started hustling back across the piazza, my bare feet stumbling numbly over cobblestones.
“Where are you staying?” she asked.
“What?”
“What is your hotel?”
“
“We cannot very well go back to where I was staying, can we?”
“I can’t-” I shook my head as if to connect a few of the disconnected thought-Legos rattling around inside. “I don’t remember.”
“We need to disappear for a little while. Somewhere quiet.”
“How about Connecticut?”
Almost on cue, loud voices came spilling through the open piazza, sounding drunk and unruly. A group of twenty-something Americans were stumbling toward us, coming back from some bar, yelling and laughing.
“Hey, dude!” one of them shouted, pumping his fist in the air. “Viva la Resistance!”
“We need to get off the streets right now,” Gobi said. “Otherwise there is only death for us here.”
“So none of those priests back there was your target?”
“That was simply a weapons buy,” she said with a shrug, “nothing more. I have one more target here in Venice, but first we must cool off.” The shotgun touched my lower spine. “Where is your hotel?”
I closed my eyes and tried to think of the place that Norrie had mentioned over the phone. The name popped into my head. Thank you, high school study skills. “Guerrato,” I said, “something like that. Pensione Guerrato? By the Rialto Bridge?”
On the far side of the piazza, behind the church, Gobi stopped in front of a Telecom Italia phone, grabbed the receiver, and pushed me down into the shadows while she called what I assumed was the operator. I heard her murmuring in Italian. When she pulled me back up, we were already moving again, over the biggest stone bridge yet, overlooking the dark canal and closed windows, expensive galleries and shops of luxuries, none of which were as appealing as the prospect of just getting out of here alive.
15. “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” — The Beatles
“Hold it.”
It was just a whisper. We were in a square along one of the canals, sometime after one a.m. Greenish-black water lapped up in every doorway and stairwell. I stopped, Gobi’s hand on my shoulder, and saw that she was staring across the tiny square, past a row of pushcarts that had been covered for the night, down a narrow street off to our right.
“What?”
She didn’t answer. A second later she moved, cutting across the square, leaving me standing there alone in the moonlight.
Up till that very second, I’d somehow assumed that Gobi would lead us back to my hotel and I’d start making noise, hoping that Linus and the rest of the band would come to my rescue, maybe burst in with an arsenal of guitars and microphones and distract her with a few verses of “All the Young Dudes” while I phoned the authorities. Now, though, I realized that this would just put them in harm’s way. This tour was over. In our current situation, showing up with Gobi was the equivalent of rolling a live grenade down the aisle of a DC-10. You couldn’t escape her; you could only hope to survive her.
I needed to run, to get far away. Maybe I could get a job on a fishing boat and sail down to Capri, start a bar on the beach and wear rope-soled sandals, and send a message summoning the rest of the band down to join me when the coast was clear.
I turned and started sprinting in the opposite direction, trying to calculate the least visible trajectory. From behind me I heard an object rattle off the stone, clattering.
Something big and smelly slammed into me from behind, hard enough to knock me off my feet. It was like being hit by a roll of remnant carpeting. I tumbled forward and caught myself, scraping my palms, and looked around to see a thickly bearded guy in a heavy woolen overcoat sprawled on his side next to me, clutching his head and groaning. The gash on his face was trickling blood, and he was trying to get up, cursing in what sounded like German or Arabic or Russian, one of those great guttural languages full of surliness and phlegm.
Gobi seemed to recognize him at once. “Swierczynski.” Her boot came down hard on the guy’s chest, pinning him to the concrete. “Do not move.” When I sat up, I saw that she had the shotgun pointed at his head, but he and I were lying close enough that she could have just as easily had it pointed at me. “Open your coat.”
The guy, Swierczynski, muttered something in his own language.
“Open now.” Gobi reached down and ripped the coat open, exposing a camera with an expensive-looking telephoto lens hanging from a strap around his neck. She scowled at the camera like she’d expected nothing less.
“Are you working for Kaya now?” she asked.
The guy glared at her, then gave a grudging nod.
“Tell Kaya that I do not need a nursemaid.” She yanked the camera loose from his grasp, then searched his other pockets, pulling out a switchblade, a cell phone, and a thick roll of euros and pocketing all of that as well.
