The wet metal railing is flaking nine hundred feet up, rusty, worn smooth in places from the millions of eager hands that have gripped it over the years, gazing down over the lights of Paris. It"s so cold up here that I already can"t feel my fingertips, even with my hands stuffed down in the pockets of my parka. I stopped feeling my earlobes and the tip of my nose somewhere on the elevator ride to the top.
Despite the darkness and the temperature, plenty of tourists are still milling around up here posing for pictures, pointing out landmarks far below in a half-dozen different languages. Being here makes them feel glamorous somehow, part of something bigger than themselves. They act like celebrities at a photo shoot. They pose and preen. They air-kiss and vamp. They"ve got bottled water and hot chocolate and sandwiches from the bistro and plastic bags from the souvenir shop one floor below the main observation deck. There have been no additional security checks at ticket windows tonight, and why would there be? The afternoon"s a.s.sault off the rue Oberkampf was an isolated incident, the ident.i.ty of its sole fatality not yet released to the public, but certainly not a cause for panic in the City of Lights. No one has mentioned anything to the authorities about keeping an eye on the Eiffel Tower in particular, because if such a person were to do that, neither one of us could have come up here.
I never would have seen you again.
And I see you now.
You"re standing twenty yards away, waiting for me on the opposite side of the platform with your arms crossed and your back to the railing. We"re a thousand feet above the most beautiful city in the world, and you"re only looking at me.
The wind and rain blow hard in my face, making my eyes water a little, and when I come closer and wipe them clear, I can see you"re bleeding. Not much, not yet. It"s running down your face from your right nostril. From here, I can"t tell whether you recognize me or not.
"Gobi."
You smile sadly. You say something in Lithuanian. It sounds like a prayer.
"Where did you leave the FedEx van?"
You blink and gaze back at me.
"Where"s my family?"
Your eyes flick down and up to me again, almost tentatively, but without true recognition. It"s as if you"ve spotted someone in an airport, an old acquaintance whose face is familiar but whose name you can"t recall.
"I know you like them," I say. "I know you"d never do anything to hurt them. Just tell me where they are."
You smile again, then wince and touch your head, as if it suddenly hurts very badly.
"My mom and dad and my little sister, Annie," I say. "You know them. You can picture their faces."
You just shake your head.
Then, a few seconds later, you pull out the gun.
45. "Stand Up"
-The Prodigy I don"t know when the police showed up. All it took was one particularly observant Tokyo schoolgirl somewhere off to our left to spot the pistol in Gobi"s hand and make a phone call, and within five minutes the observation platform had been cleared.
Then it was just us and the cops. For a long moment Gobi and I stood there watching Avenue Anatole France fill with police lights, turning it into a river of flickering blue along the truer, darker curve of the Seine itself. The next time the elevator door opened, it dispatched a wedge of gendarmes in what looked like full riot gear.
But when they saw what Gobi was doing with the gun, they kept on their side of the platform. One of them shouted something, and it doesn"t matter that I slept through two years of high school French-I got the gist. Let him go. Put it down. Hands up. All of that. Gobi ignored them completely, focusing all her attention on me.
"As tave myliu," Gobi said. With her free hand, she reached out and brushed the wet hair out of my eyes. "Your hair is getting s.h.a.ggy, mielasis." Then she pointed the pistol back at my head, underneath my chin.
"It doesn"t have to go this way."
"Yes, it does."
"Just tell me what you"ve done with my family. Tell me where they are."
"One more must die."
"Gobi, no, you"re sick. There"s a tumor in your brain. You"re not thinking clearly. Like on the train."
"Au revoir."
"Gobi." I held up my hands. "You don"t need to do this anymore. As tave myliu."
Something changed in her eyes, not much, maybe just a subtle shift in the lights reflected in her pupils. I kissed her then, not even thinking about the gun, while she kept it jammed up my chin. Her mouth felt as cold as the metal barrel against my skin, her lips coming open and kissing me, the surprising warmth of her tongue, salty-sweet as it slipped inside and slid against mine. The gun was still there, pushing up hard against my jaw.
"How did you learn to say "I love you" in Lithuanian?" she asked.
"Erich."
"You are still jealous of him."
I shook my head. "No."
She put her lips to my ear. "Sixty-six rue de Turenne," she murmured. "Is parking garage. They"re in the back."
"Thank you."
"And Perry."
"Yes?"
"I am sorry."
"Wh-"
She moved the gun from my head and put it against her own, placing the barrel to her temple. Too late, I saw how it was going to end.
"Gobi, no!"
She pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened.
I stared at her. She looked back at me.
"The safety." I said. "It"s still on. You forgot-"
Then from somewhere behind me, a dark shape flew forward and crashed into her, knocking her to the floor of the platform.
Sitting up, I saw Gobi on her back, turning sideways, grappling with the dark-garbed figure on top of her. I saw the shining glint of buckles and a badge. One of the gendarmes had broken ranks, jumped out into the rain, and tackled her.
Gobi squirmed sideways, reared back, and released a kick to the face that spun the gendarme a hundred and eighty degrees around, hard enough to knock the riot helmet from the officer"s head, revealing a spray of blond hair.
Paula.
In less than a second, Paula had already caught her balance, recovering from the kick, and reached into the uniform she was wearing to pull out an automatic. She held it in the textbook two-handed grip, pointing it at Gobi.
"Paula," I said.
She glanced back at the gendarmes. "Tonight I bought your lives-rented them for a few moments, anyway."
"What do you mean?"
"When the reports came across the police band, I got out here as soon as I could." Her eyes flicked back to the group of gendarmes on the far side of the platform, and Paula reached into her tunic and pulled out a laminated ID badge on a lanyard. "Interpol special hostage negotiation squad."
"Very realistic," I said.
"It comes in handy from time to time. The police have orders to stand down until I say otherwise."
I tried to smile. It didn"t hurt too much. "I didn"t know you still cared."
"You"re sweet." Paula drew in a breath of night air. "But deluded as always." She took a step toward Gobi. "Zusane. You know, the last thing my father said before he died today was "Make her suffer." I promised him that I would." Paula regarded her with pity bordering on revulsion. "But... look at you. Christ. You"re half dead already. You can"t even stand up. You"re rotten with cancer. At this point, anything I do to you would be a mercy."
Gobi didn"t say anything. Still keeping the pistol trained on her, Paula looked out to the southeast, at the long stretch of open, flat field leading off to the Tour Montparna.s.se. "You know what that is? The Champ de Mars." She glanced back at Gobi. "Named after the G.o.d of war."
"Then they should bury us both there," Gobi said.
Paula shook her head again. "Just you."
I held up my hand. "Paula-"
Paula squeezed the trigger.
The first shot slammed into Gobi"s chest, the second her belly, driving her backwards against the guardrail with the force of the gunshot. She didn"t make a sound, her expression not betraying a hint of what it must have felt like at that moment. It was as if she was just putting the pain somewhere completely away from her, a private place where all the hurt went. I saw her fingers grope for the railing as she tried to hoist herself up to keep fighting, and that was when Paula fired again, hitting Gobi in the left knee. Gobi"s leg went out from under her and this time she stayed down, palms upraised, fingers outstretched.
Her hands were empty.
Paula kicked the Glock aside and stood over her with her own pistol aimed point-blank at Gobi"s face. My hearing was gone in my left ear from the gunshots. Paula"s mouth was moving, shouting loudly enough that I could almost make it out, something about her father, something about the end of it all.
"Leave her alone," I said, but I couldn"t hear myself, and then I realized that Paula probably couldn"t hear me either.
I stood up.
According to Erich Schoeneweiss, in order to successfully break a board or brick in tae kwon do, the hand has to be traveling about thirty feet per second when it makes contact. Mustering this kind of speed requires the puncher to be aiming beyond the object, punching through it in the direction of something on the other side.
I aimed for the back of Paula"s head.
I punched a hole in the night.
When Paula went down, it was all at once. The gun slipped from her hands and her face swung forward, deflected off the guardrail, snapped back, and came around showing me a dentist"s nightmare of blood and broken teeth. Yet somehow it was still a grin.
"Like father, like son," she said. It came out a little mushy, but I could make out the words just the same through my one good ear. "Your dad liked to tussle too, Perry-did you know that?"
I tried to tell her to shut up and realized I needed to catch my breath. I"d put everything I had into the punch and it hadn"t been enough. While she was talking, Paula was already scrambling around looking for the gun, either hers or Gobi"s, but it was dark and the platform was black and one of her eyes was already swelling shut.
"I always thought it was funny. You were so nervous about taking me to bed"-she wiped the blood from her mouth with her sleeve-"when the whole time I was getting everything I needed from your old man. Ask him about it, Perry. Ask him how I was. Too bad you"ll never find out for yourself."
I went over to where Gobi was lying and put my arms around her. I could smell a sheared copper smell coming from her wounds, a deep, wet, desperate smell like scorched fabric and cauterized skin.
"It"s okay," I said. "You don"t have to do any more."
"Perry." She put her mouth right next to my good ear. "Lift me up."
"Are you sure?"
She nodded. She was heavy, much heavier than I remembered from before, and the phrase dead weight sprang to mind, although maybe I was just weaker than I remembered-that was almost certainly the case. Somehow I got my hands underneath her arms and lifted her upright. I could feel the rough, ragged sc.r.a.pe of her breathing, her broken ribs rubbing together in her chest as I held her there.
A few feet in front of us, Paula rose up. Through the blood and the swelling, the fire in her eyes was a reflection of something fierce, some gaudy spectacle of vengeance that only she could see. She had both guns, Gobi"s in her right hand, hers in her left.
"Sorry," Paula said. "This is it for us."
I felt Gobi"s shoulders stiffen with antic.i.p.ation. I braced my legs to support her. Leaning all her weight back against me, she swung her right leg straight up in the air, then brought it down on Paula"s neck.
The ax kick connected exactly where it had to, dead center across the base of the skull, and when Paula"s face hit the floor, it was with more weight than she"d ever carried when she was alive.
I looked down at her lying there in the rain, eyes open, blank, staring.
I caught Gobi and lay her down slowly beside me, running my hands through her hair. It was dark and it was raining, and that was how we stayed, the two of us huddled together next to the metal railing until the gendarmes came out and led us away.
46. "Brand New Friend"
-Lloyd Cole and the Commotions "Hey, kid."
I was sitting in the otherwise empty waiting room in the American Hospital in Paris with the television on. I didn"t have to take my eyes off the French version of Biggest Loser to see who had just walked in. Agent Nolan stood there in the doorway for a long beat, holding his briefcase, waiting to be acknowledged.
"You gonna say hi to me?"
"Sorry." I turned my other ear toward him, the one that I could still hear out of. "Speak into this one."