Thank You, Goodnight by Andy Abramowitz Read Free Book Online

reached my room, Metcalf had tracked down the string bean percussionist, and I immediately dialed the son of a bitch without any thought of the early hour. There was no answer.
    By the next morning, I’d gradually realized that I didn’t really have anything to say to Warren anyway. I’d found what he sent me here for. Had we actually connected, I probably would’ve just cussed up a storm and threatened to kill him. Which is what I was sure to do when we finally did catch up.
    In the meantime, I had arrangements to make. I studied the geography of Switzerland on Google maps. There was someone in Unterseen I needed to have a word with.

CHAPTER 3
    W hen Warren finally returned my call, I didn’t even hear the phone ring. In the fluid jumble of the Zurich train station, I was tearing a bite out of a baguette stuffed with tomato and mozzarella. It was just as well. His voice mail was a half minute of unbroken laughter, full throttle, like he was finding the whole thing freshly hilarious. “How about that picture? Right?” he finally managed to say.
    How about it.
    There was an irony here. I was setting out to confront an artist about his art, to register my disapproval of someone else’s creative expression, and in that act, I was changing sides. Maybe my songs had never inflamed violent passions in anyone or been sufficiently outrageous as to provoke a government ban somewhere, and maybe that rendered me an artistic failure. Perhaps it was the mark of a robust vision to piss a few people off along the way, and perhaps that made Heinz-Peter Zoot a superior artist. He could explain that to me while I was choking the life out of him.
    I followed the river through the town and out past a row of gingerbread houses, soon arriving at a stone road that curved up a hill and through a light patch of trees. The road ended at a small, solitary triangle of a home set squarely in a clearing. The silence was smothering, as not a single voice echoed up from the town, not a single carhummed by. I couldn’t even hear the river’s peaceful babble. I was completely alone in Unterseen’s pastoral innocence. Just me and my blistering anger.
    There’d been ample time to let my rancor rise. Back in London, I was sure that every face that met mine was in on the joke, that every smirk was a masked sneer from someone who had seen the exhibit. The journey into a world of unmolested Swiss beauty did little to douse my bitterness. The train had weaved past cozy clusters of houses on green hills, around idyllic ice waters, all of which fueled the illusion that this country was a timeless fairy tale, a place of magnificent terrain toothed with fierce jagged mountains. It seemed a land accessible only by plane crash. And yet when I gazed out at a stream, I saw only the rush of mango salsa. A shrub on a mountain face was but a wedge of cilantro besmirching an incisor.
    Finally, I stood facing a house that may or may not have belonged to my nemesis. If this was, in fact, Zoot’s home, the seclusion could well work against me if things got out of hand. Fuck it. I once had Bret Michaels in a headlock. I could certainly handle some Swiss photographer. What was he going to do, yodel at me?
    Slinging my Morris & Roberts travel bag over my shoulder like the tough guy that I was, I walked toward the house.
    Five feet from the front step I stopped dead at the sound of a voice inside. It was a deep baritone calling out in German or maybe French or perhaps Dutch, some language I for sure didn’t speak. Before I could decide whether I recognized the voice as belonging to the lug nut I’d met a few years ago in the Amsterdam cantina, a large man pushed open the screen door. He saw me and froze.
    It was him all right. Burly, bald, cutoff jean shorts and the same decaying white tank top from the exhibit bio photo. He stood there searching my face, looming over me from the raised porch, looking puzzled. Seeing him up close forced the image of that goddamn photo