Inside it was warm and welcoming, and they had the fire going. Baby Joe took a seat in an alcove under the window where he could watch the rain lash the glass and see the high dark clouds scud by overhead. The barman brought his pint of Guinness over without asking, and a saucer, and Baby Joe poured a drop of the black stuff into it and placed it on the floor. Drover scarfed it up and curled up under the table at Baby Joe’s feet.
Baby Joe downed his pint, and the barman brought another, and Baby Joe said, “Cheers, Mick. Listen, will you tell Boogo that he might want to tighten his lines some? She’s a little loose and might smack the wall if it picks up.”
Mick turned and shouted over to the bar where Boogo stood with a roughhewn crew.
“Hey, Boogo, ya fucken fat useless bludger. Baby Joe reckons ya need ter tighten yer fucken lines, ya nong.”
Boogo grinned and raised his glass. “Good on yer, mate.”
Baby Joe returned the gesture and went back to looking out of the window. He could see his reflection against the darkened sky, looking back in at him like some half-transparent apparition. The ghost of Baby Joe Young. Sometimes he felt like one. As if he was fading away, melting into the dreamtime.
He knew Asia felt it too. He was surprised how much he missed her. He had felt guilty because he was secretly glad that she was leaving, but now that she was on the far side of the world, he wished that she were back. She had only been gone for two weeks, but it felt like two years. He resented the time that was going by, to be subtracted from the total that was left to them, the bizarre and unfair mathematics of love, one kiss minus one caress minus one heartbreakingly beautiful moment of togetherness, plus the rest of your life equals…zero. It was happening exactly as he’d told her it would, but being right didn’t make it any easier.
Their love was like something finite, a dwindling resource that became more precious and rare with each drop that evaporated. Cupid had turned out to be an Indian giver after all, giving them love and then stealing it back, and now it felt like he was trying to hold a cloud in a fishing net. They were like two people on either side of a crevice that was widening, and neither one knew how to get to the other side, and neither one wanted to jump. And being afraid to jump and not wanting to are two different things.
He was on his fifth pint before he remembered the package. The paper was damp where the rain had seeped through the open flap of his pocket. Inside was something uneven. He tore the end off and tipped the contents out onto the table. It was a doll.
“What the fuck?”
He picked it up and examined it. It was made of some kind of china or plaster, and was shaped like a woman. It had long red hair. It looked like Asia. He checked the envelope. There was nothing else inside. No letter, no note. Nothing. He examined the doll closely. There was nothing about it to give him any clue as to what it meant. No signs, no inscriptions, just smooth white porcelain or whatever it was. He looked at the postmark on the package. Shreveport. Had Asia sent it?
Was it a joke? If it was, he didn’t get it. Maybe this was part of it. He always used to get her jokes. He set the doll on the table.
Boogo walked past, on his way to attend to the ropes on his boat. He wasn’t sailing on an even keel. As he drew level with Baby Joe’s table he staggered and banged against it. The doll fell and broke in two on the floor.
Boogo bent down unsteadily to pick it up. “Aw, jeez, Joe. I’m sorry, mate. I dint me ter. Shit.”
Baby Joe looked at him and smiled. “Don’t sweat it, Boogo. I’m too fucking old to play with dolls, anyway.”
“Jeez, what a useless prick I am. I’m sorry, mate,” Boogo said again as he headed for the door.
Baby Joe looked at the doll. It had split across the torso. The break was clean. Baby Joe fitted the two pieces together. Nothing that a drop of glue wouldn’t fix. He put the two half dolls back on the table. As he did so, he saw what looked like a piece of paper inside. He tugged it. It came out. It was a rolled-up photograph. It looked like people standing together, but he couldn’t see clearly. He reached into his pocket for his glasses, but they weren’t there.
He shouted, “Hey, Mick. Lend us your bins. I forgot mine at home. And bring me another gauge while you’re at it.”
Mick came over. “Glasses and a glass,” he said.
“Fuck me, Mick. How can you see through these? Drover’s ass is cleaner than these.”
Under the table Drover wagged his tail when he heard his name, then went back to sleep. Baby Joe wiped the glasses on his shirt and looked at the picture. It was Asia and Crispin in a bar somewhere. She looked beautiful. Crispin had his arm round her and a massive grin on his fat face. He had some kind of cocktail in a tall glass in his free hand, and was obviously out of the game. Baby Joe turned the photo over. Someone had written on it in red ink, but it wasn’t Asia’s handwriting. It said:
Unfinished Business!
Baby Joe frowned. Once again, he didn’t get it. He examined the picture. And then he froze. Behind Asia was a tall, dark man with a thin, ghastly face. He wore a black Fedora. Long black hair fell about his face from under it. He was staring directly at the camera. He was smiling, but it wasn’t that kind of smile.
“Fuck,” Baby Joe said aloud. “Lord Lundi.”
He was halfway to the door before Drover woke up and raced after him.
Chapter 2
Thus do the fates toy with us. On the 14th of January in 1973, while Elvis was performing the world’s first worldwide telecast from Hawaii, four babies were born.
While Elvis was singing “Love Me Tender” in a lightless and loveless goat-shit hovel on an icy tributary of the Don River, a howling blizzard drowned out the cries of a newborn boy whose mother would soon lay dead and cold in the snow outside. His father, a winter-hearted bastard who would hate the child for the sake of the dead mother, called him Yermak. But the men who would come to know him and fear him would call him by another name.
The first words Michael Montcalm Robinson heard were the lyrics to “Heartbreak Hotel,” which was playing on the radio when he was hauled out of his mama and into the bright world in a one-room chicken shack next to a white wooden church in Saint Bernard Parish, Louisiana. Michael did not cry, even after they gave him a mean slap. And there was something else. Something that had people reaching for their mojos.
In Paris, in a three-story townhouse above a café in Le Quartier Latin, in the 5th arrondissement, Jean-Jacques Nightingale listened to Elvis singing “Blue Suede Shoes” on a small transistor that he held to his ear as he paced anxiously up and down in the corridor outside the room where his son, Alphonso, was being brought into the world. News of a drug deal gone wrong called the father away before Alphonso was born, and the father’s eyes were closed by gunfire before they were ever lovingly laid upon his son.
On a quiet street in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a couple of miles from Kirtland Air Force Base, Lieutenant Colonel Mortimer Day of the USAF sat in his Mustang with the radio on, listening to Elvis singing “Hound Dog.” A black lady in a starched white dress came and stood on the verandah. She was his sister. She held his newborn daughter, wrapped in swaddling, close to her breast. Lieutenant Colonel Mortimer Day climbed out of the car, walked across the trimmed lawn, and took tiny, miraculous Lucretia Day in his arms. As he did so, the tears rolled down his ebony cheeks.
Born worlds and miles apart, separated by culture, language, background, and gender, sharing little but a human genome, different in just about every way that it is possible for human beings to be different, Yermak, Michael, Alphonso, and Lucretia were set then upon an immutable trajectory, their courses cast and defined, unalterable by coincidence or intent, invulnerable to accident or act of will, so that on the day that Paul McCartney would celebrate his sixty-fourth birthday, an ill-starred convergence would begin that would bring all but one of them to destruction.
***
A couple of centuries ago, Khuy Zalupa would have been thundering across the vast Steppe on a wall-ey
ed steed, laughing at the stars, his saber flashing in the sunlight, with blood on his furs and a terrified and screaming—but secretly quite flattered—woman draped across the front of his saddle, and the fires of destruction burning in his wake.
These days, he was tooling down Nevski Prospekt in a Jaguar S-Type Convertible, laughing at the neon, his Cartier flashing in the lights, with soup stains on his Polish knocked-off Armani suit, and a giggling, pouting—but secretly quite terrified—woman draped across the back seat, with the stub of the two-hundred-dollar cigar he had just tossed out of the window burning in his wake.
Khuy Zalupa was a Don Cossack, an unsightly and fearsome individual, with the face and disposition of a warthog with a particularly painful testicular infection. Physically, he was a monstrous apparition summoned from a poisonous blue-cheese-and-tainted-oyster nightmare. Psychologically, he was as a man traversing the dark chasm of lunacy on a burning tightrope, on ice skates of real ice, and his soul resonated with a constant mournful howling, like the lonely wolf song of his ancestral Steppe, echoing the vast frozen distances that separated him from the companionship of his kind. He harbored a pain that could never be extinguished and a hunger that could never be fed, and his flawed diamond of a mind was a glittering repository of barely contained incandescent rage that yearned to shatter into brittle shards and slash the face of the mocking world to ribbons. For revenge.
In his defense, his formative years on the banks of the River Don had not exactly been an uninterrupted series of nostalgic sepia-colored picture postcards of pastoral innocence and bucolic idyll, and his particular Don did not flow quietly. And never would.
Growing up in brutal poverty and privation in a harsh land, he enjoyed neither parental affection nor any kind of solace in the company of his fellows, who feared and rejected him with the instinctive loathing of the herd for the different, the deformed, the Frankenstein’s thing despised. The girls were disgusted by his repugnance. As he grew in strength, the only thing he was spared was mockery, for none dared.
He was born six days’ ride from Rostov, on a night notable for its bleakness even in a succession of such nights, and despite the weather the orthodox priest who christened him Yermak Timovitch would not keep vigil and rode out into the bitter cold and driving snow, crossing himself on the threshold and never looking back. His mother, Yelena, bled to death in the snow three days later, her cries unheard and unheeded above the screeching gale, and his father, Constantin, a hard and cruel man in any case, never forgave him for it, and spoke barely a word to the boy other than in recrimination for the next thirteen years.
If not for his sister, Alyona, he would surely not have survived his infancy. Alyona was his only light, his only warmth, his only consolation, his only touch, his only confirmation of his own existence and worth, the only one who ever held him or cherished him. In later years he carried as icons the warm, sweet, smoky smell of her hair and the loving look that glowed in her eyes by the dim lamplight, sacred images in the reliquary of his mind that was otherwise devoid of souvenir or memento.
But even she was taken from him. The father begrudged him even that candlelight of hope, and sent her to Moscow, to labor for kopeks in the kitchens of some commissary. When he was eleven, Yermak was dispatched to the farthest outpost of the settlement, to guard the sheep through the winters, and apart from the spring herding lived in virtual isolation for years. It might have been the saving of him. It might have. If the vindictive harpies that had singled him out for his fate had released him from their spiteful whims, he might have been rescued from the bitter flood of bile that was sweeping him remorselessly to his destiny. Out there in the solitude, under shimmering oceans of stars and endless pristine skies, listening to the wind and the water in the rills, living off the land, he began to discover a new meaning to his life. He learned that the problem was not himself. It was the others. The ones who hated him, and spurned him. Out there, he was not different, for there was no one to be different from. He almost found peace. Almost.
One day, in his fourteenth year, as he was sitting outside his rude cabin smoking a pipe, watching the sheep dotted over the low brown hills across the stream, and watching the rabbit he had snared smoking over his fire, and watching the way the flitting insects disturbed the smooth surfaces of the melt pools that stretched away down to the river and ruffled the reflection of the solitary pink cloud that floated there, he heard something in the tree line. He stood and quickly fetched his ancient Berdan rifle from where it leaned against the doorframe. He watched. A gray muzzle peered from behind a tree and sniffed the wind. Yermak leveled the piece and steadied his breath. He pressed the trigger, indenting it to the firing point. The beast stepped out. Yermak released the trigger and lowered the weapon.
It wasn’t a wolf. It was a dog. A huge dog. An Ovcharka. And it was limping. Yermak put the gun back against the doorframe and stepped out. The dog turned to run, stopped, hesitated, turned back again, sniffed the wind, and lowered its head. It looked at Yermak. He walked slowly over to the fire, tore a piece from the rabbit, and tossed it to the dog. The dog limped forward, then stopped and hesitated again. Yermak crooned to it soothingly. The dog ran up, snatched the piece of flesh, and dashed back into the tree line. Yermak smiled and went back to his pipe. As he sat, the dog was watching him. He smiled again.
That night, when he curled up in his pile of skins on the rough board floor, the dog was lying next to him. The dog had been shot. With a shotgun. Yermak meticulously and carefully removed the pellets one by one. The dog began to follow him wherever he went, and after a week it had stopped limping. Yermak was still trying to think of a name for the dog when the hateful bitches swooped down to perch in the pines and gloat as the silent men waded up to the cabin in the first pearl light to look for the animal.
They were four in number. Apocalyptic raptors. Bearded, with high cheekbones and beaked noses and piercing fierce eyes. The dog whined when it saw them. It cowered and allowed itself to be tethered.
Yermak stepped out of the cabin. He held his rifle. “What are you doing?”
The men said nothing. Yermak raised the rifle. One of the men pulled a pistol from the pocket of his Astrakhan coat and shot Yermak through the shoulder. The rifle went off. One of the men fell. His ushanka rolled in the clay. The men moved in. Yermak was immensely strong, but he was only fourteen. And he had been shot. And they were three.
Things were done to him. They left him for dead, naked and bleeding and broken, lying in the dirt illuminated by the flames from the burning cabin. They took the sheep. And they took the dog. The rain saved him. An unlikely and unseasonal storm came, and it roused him and doused the flames, and he was able to crawl inside the smoking ruins and secrete himself inside of pile of smoldering skins. He lay there, whimpering inside a warm furry womb until the dawn came.
He had suffered injuries that would have killed a lesser man, let alone a boy, but some animal vigor clung to him and sustained him, and the ghost would not leave him even though he was in such pain that he wished it would and could not understand why it would not. At first light, he crawled to the stream and drank and crawled back again and lay back in the furs, and he did this for several days until he was at last able to walk. Then he gathered what was left and began the slow, painful trek across the valleys and plains to where the railway track lay. It took him four days to reach it, scavenging what he could, and he waited another two days before a train rumbled past up the long gradient and he was able to haul himself aboard.
Later, as he lay sore and shivering in the straw scattered onto the floor of the box car, as the freight train slowly rattled and clanked on its long journey to Rostov, and as he tried to peer at the brittle stars through his swollen eyes, it occurred to him how essentially simple life is. Everything has a balance. Light and dark, hot and cold, love and hate, good and evil. But you can neither have, nor be, both.
In some things you had no choice. It was night; therefore there was no light, save the dista
nt stars. There was no sun; therefore it was cold. He could not love, because no one would love him in return. Goodness leads to pain, and evil triumphs. So, there it was. He was loveless, cold, and hateful. And he would be evil. He had only one choice, and that choice had already been made for him. By the hateful twisted god bastards who had spat upon his mother’s uterus and shaped him thus. By the father who had rejected him, by the children who denied him friendship, by the girls who spurned him, by the men who had beaten and brutalized him. Hatred and vengeance were his choices. Hate everybody and everything.
And suddenly, there in that glacial lonely night, the pain left him. The aching of his battered body ceased. His hate rose up in him and around him like a blanket and a shield. He smiled in the darkness, knowing that nothing and nobody would ever hurt him again. And, unafraid, he closed his ravaged eyes and slept. It was only much later that he realized the rain that day never really saved him at all.
Yermak found his way to Moscow, and began to look for his sister. Even though the great city was as alien to him as if he had been some ancient barbarian, wandered into Rome, he immediately felt at home. He felt its power and its coldness and cruelty and its wonderful anonymity. In Moscow he was not the only freak in the circus. On the evening of the second day he wandered up to a restaurant and peered in through the steamy windows. Inside were well-dressed people, and waiters carrying huge glowing dishes, and men drinking at a long bar. A man came out and told him to get lost. Yermak ignored him and continued to gaze at the fascinating scene within. The man grabbed Yermak by the arm. Yermak turned upon him like a wolverine. Two more men came out. Yermak felt a vicious joy and abandonment as he went for them, without skill but with such brute force and ferocity that he drove all three of them into bloody retreat.
The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2) Page 3
