"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. .h.i.t 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.

9. "Run (I"m a Natural Disaster)"

-Gnarls Barkley.

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, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g 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.

10. "Police and Thieves"

-The Clash "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 h.e.l.l 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, s.h.i.t, 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 ca.n.a.l.

"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 Ca.n.a.l 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.

Then she shoved the trunk over the edge and it fell.

There was a long silence followed by a splash below just as the hotel door swung open behind us. When I looked back at Gobi, she was already climbing over the railing into the night.

"What are you doing?"

She let go of the railing and disappeared.

11. "Jump"

-Van Halen My decision to go over the railing was pure hot-stove reflex, not involving much in the way of rational thought. It was more like a series of images, bold and simple-Kabuki risk a.s.sessment, not recommended to anyone who might ever need to justify their actions afterward to the authorities.

From the other side of the suite, I saw men pouring through the open door-they wore black long-sleeved T-shirts and black pants, and carried automatic weapons, machine pistols, heavy artillery. If these guys were cops, then Venice had a serious paramilitary budget. I could still see the copper wires dangling from the key-slot where they"d disabled the electronic lock.

The man in front looked straight at me, his face instantly familiar. Unlike the others, he was wearing a suit.

So you found it.

Your little tourist trap.

The next thing I knew, I was over the railing, the hotel bathrobe billowing out around my bare legs in the chill night air while my wet toes curled and skidded along the outer rim of the balcony.

The man in front shouted in Italian, swinging his gun up toward me.

I let go.

Spilling back through the open air, pinwheeling my arms in wild, frantic circles as if I might suddenly remember how to fly, I seemed to fall for a long, long time, long enough to think, I left my ba.s.s up there, and then, This is really going to hurt, while they kept yelling at me from up above.

And then pain, which is basically the same in any language. The water flattened me, punching the air out of my lungs-I swear for a second I actually bounced. Then my legs went numb, seemed almost to disappear, and I may have blacked out.

The water around me was freezing, squid-ink black, and I was thrashing around, wondering if anything was broken and guessing it probably wasn"t if I was swimming. But I couldn"t breathe. When I did, things started to make a little more sense.

The steamer trunk had bobbed to the surface in front of me, kind of swaying up and down in the water. The latch had burst open on impact. I felt a hand brush past my arm. I took it blindly, pulling hard.

"Perry!"

Gobi"s voice drifted from somewhere off in the distance. It didn"t occur to me to wonder how she could be so far away when I had her arm right here.

I pulled harder on the arm, clamping on to it with both hands, and that was when a man"s body floated out of the trunk and straight at me. He was older, bald, dressed in black, wearing a white priest"s collar, which had come loose when he"d hit the water and now stuck out on one side. His lips gawped, water from the ca.n.a.l washing in and out of his mouth, and then I saw his eyes pop open, and he looked right at me.

"s.h.i.t!" That"s what I was trying to say-it"s certainly what I was thinking, but it probably came out more like "Aiiiggghhghh!" I shoved back from him, flailing my arms in the water. "Oh s.h.i.t, s.h.i.t!" I tried to say, but this time all that emerged was a spew of bubbles. Glubb-blitt-bripp.

"Perry!"

Now Gobi sounded worried. Gunfire rattled from overhead-a series of flat, popping cracks like somebody snapping rolls of the world"s deadliest bubble wrap-hitting the water like hail, splashing it up around me. When I looked up I saw two men on the balcony. Gaudy bouquets of orange and yellow muzzle-flash splattered around them.

I flung my arms out and started flurrying them hard in the direction of Gobi"s voice, paddling like h.e.l.l for the stone bridge in front of me. At least it was dark under there. Grabbing a deep breath, I plunged low and kicked as hard as I could.

The sudden roar of a diesel engine filled the s.p.a.ce beneath the bridge, above and below the surface, overtaking everything. I bobbed up to see the low white hull of the vaporetto closing in over me, too fast to dodge. I slapped the bow, tried to push myself off, and felt something grab the soaked collar of the sopping hotel bathrobe that clung to my bare skin, hoisting me out of the water to land hard on the deck. An abrupt bundle of dry fabric fell over my head.

Gobi"s eyes flashed from the shadows like a pair of unaffordable earrings in a darkened jeweler"s window.

"Hold still."

"You..."

"Shut up."

" . . . shot . . ."

"Are you deaf?"

" . . . a priest?"

Gobi reached up and clapped her hand over my mouth. I realized she"d wrapped a trench coat over my soaking wet bathrobe.

"Keep your head low."

"You"re insane."

She didn"t argue. I wondered where she"d gotten the dry trench coat and decided not to ask-it probably meant there was some tourist on the boat sprawled out unconscious or worse. The vaporetto lurched forward, spewing diesel fumes, its engines roaring behind us as it nosed its way toward the next stop. When it hit the sh.o.r.e, I could already hear the two-note European sirens dopplering up the ca.n.a.l, blue lights flashing from a police boat headed in the opposite direction, the night waking up around us.

"This is our stop." She put her arm around me, pulling me upward, giving me the b.u.m"s rush down the floating platform.

"Forget it, I"m done."

"Idiot." n.o.body did exasperation like she did-you"d think she"d invented it. Tilting slightly to one side, she c.o.c.ked her right leg, simultaneously sweeping her right hand back, and when it reappeared I saw the knife, six inches long and flickering brightly in all that remained of the light. "No more Perry Stormaire bulls.h.i.t." She p.r.o.nounced it bool-sheet.