It seems Mint had political ambitions and, in an attempt to draw attention to himself and grab some votes, he offered to put his collection on public display, but the attention he drew was not the kind that you want to draw, and the only thing that got grabbed was his collection.
He was found by his gardener one morning, hung up by his nuts in the toolshed, with his throat cut and half of his fingers and all his toes in a bucket underneath him, next to a blood-stained bolt cutter. Maybe Spear was as tough as his name suggested, because apparently he had held out until they got to his right hand before he told them where the goodies were at.
They never found out who did the deed, and the eggs were never seen again. According to the police records, the main suspect was a known villain, Huckleberry Hicks. But nothing was ever proven, and the case went cold. But Huckleberry Hicks’s phone record told an interesting story to anyone who knew what they were looking for. The day after Mint’s pedicure went badly wrong, Hicks made a call. To Benjamin Peabody. The list of Peabody’s phone buddies was even more interesting—in particular, one of his mates in Moscow. One Khuy Zalupa, to be exact. Et voilà!
***
There was profound stillness. A beauty beyond words. Beyond thought. And the man who beheld it did not think. He did not consider the beauty or the stillness. He existed as part of it, as much a part as the red sun that lay pendant upon the far mountains as a jewel about the alabaster throat of Isis; as the sapphire light in the still windless leaves of the eucalyptus; as the motionless egret, intent upon the pond, and its perfect mirror image, hunter of skyfish in the deepening azure; as the faint sickle moon, shy upon the eastern rim; as the ruddy vale where a million rubies coruscated from the shadow line of the trees to the point where the slow, turning world fell away into dark and unknowable space.
The man was upon a low eminence. He was naked, and stood upon one leg, the other leg angled against his knee. He leaned upon a hardwood spear. He was tall and slender and insubstantial, and a gray ragged beard stirred in the gentlest of breezes like some rare anemone waving in the tide. His face was ancient, a deep wrinkled parchment upon which were inscribed stories beyond counting, and his deep-set eyes, glowing red in the setting sun, were as lodestones, repositories of the wisdom of the ages, and they gazed out upon the world with fierce compassion.
The man began to sing, a slow ululating chant. He danced, syncopated and angular and hypnotic. The sun turned his jet-black face to lava. A kookaburra sang, and far off, a flock of lorikeets screeched as they took flight.
The man abruptly stopped dancing and singing. He stood motionless, listening. An alien sound approached. He looked to the north, where the day was bleeding into night, and the sky was the color of a Pacific storm. Lights approached, too low and too slow to be a satellite, and an engine buzzed like a fly in an adjacent room. The lights dipped lower still. The man grinned, a great gaping joyful gash. On a nearby mound, a kangaroo stood stock-still, rooted to the spot and concentrated on the descending plane, poised between curiosity and flight.
Wally spoke to it. “No worries, mate. It’s just that fucken dingbat Helmut. Reckon ’e might ’ev a few fucken tubes.”
The kangaroo looked at Wally, and then, reassured, hopped off to continue its grazing.
The Cessna had barely pulled to a halt before the door opened. Wombat Jimmy sprang out and landed like a panther. Behind him, Bruce toppled out and landed like a bag of shit. Helmut killed the engine. In the time it had taken them to land, darkness had already fallen. There was a small fire blazing at the foot of an outcrop a couple of hundred yards from where they had landed, and Jimmy was already halfway there before Helmut and Bruce had managed to manhandle the crate of beer out of the hatch. They took one end each and began to pick their way across the baked earth and sparse grass.
When they reached the fire, breathless, Wally and Jimmy were squatting on their haunches, grinning.
“Ah, g’day,” Wally said, “I was gettin’ worried.”
“About what, exactly?” Helmut said.
Somehow, despite the fact that they had been flying nonstop for almost two days, Helmut still managed to look dapper, his white uniform perfectly creased, his hair slicked in place, and his little mustache looking as if he had trimmed it ten minutes ago.
“I was worried in case this fat barstad’s ticker gave out before ’e got ’ere with the amber nectar, or you might ’ev got bit by a fucken taipan, and then I would’ve ’ed ta fetch the frosties meself.”
Since nobody could argue with this logic, they all cracked a tinny apiece and sucked it back. Nobody spoke. They sat in silence, drinking, each man in isolation, cloistered in solitary contemplation as the flickering flames reflected in their eyes and the shadows danced upon their faces.
Nobody had seen Wally for the best part of a year. He had gone walkabout. It had been time. A profound, beautiful sadness was upon him. And a peace. He was going back the way he came, taking the gifts that he had been given, the sights and the sounds, the light and the knowledge, the ways of things, the designs of the earth and the things that live upon it, the secrets of land and sky, and giving them back. He was journeying inside of himself, taking the trappings and superficialities of the so-called civilization that he had accumulated and setting them aside, taking the clothes of Woolloomooloo Wally and neatly folding them and leaving them by the side of the road, traveling back in time, forty thousand years. To the truth. The truth, naked and unburdened. The dreamtime was coming, but only Birring Barga could go there. Wally must stay behind, and exist only in the memories of his friends.
They all knew this, as he knew it, and therefore he knew that something serious must have happened for them to come and find him. But nobody wanted to be the one to say it.
“Scheisse, Wal. It was like trying to find a navel in a haystack,” Helmut said.
“Needle, ya fucken dill,” Wally said. “’Ow did ya fucken find me, anyway?”
“Piece a piss,” Jimmy said. “Knew ya’d go south, foller the Flinders to Corroboree Creek, up over the sisters, then figured ya’d stop over to Yarra or maybe Karumba and jump on a coupla sheilas, then head down the Currajong out across the Carpentaria, out to the blue rock, and then down over the Bunyip gibbers to the Bunyas and maybe park it at the Wallamans for a moon or two, and then down to the bight and across the beach to the headland, over the reed flats to Croc’s Crotch Creek, and then back north up to the great white sand, over the red ridge, and then back ’ere either by the gully or across the Bullock Pass. I calculated ’ow fast an ancient old cunt like you could peg it, and reckoned ya’d be round about ’ere. Only ’ad ter fly a coupla fucken days before we seen yer tracks.”
Wally grinned. “Ah, yeah. Good fucken thinkin’. So whaddya doin’ ’ere?”
“Ah, you know. Figured ya’d be about ready fer a tube, mate,” Bruce said.
“Ya figured right, ya fucken bludger,” Wally said, skulling his beer. Helmut tossed him another can. He cracked it. He looked at Jimmy and spoke in Ngadjonji. “Is it bad?”
Jimmy looked at him. “Yeah, I reckon.”
Wally looked at Helmut and said, “So, whaddya really doin’ ’ere?”
Helmut studied the faces around the fire. He looked back at Wally. “Stavros got a call from Bjorn Eggen. He was looking for you. He’s dying.”
***
Monsoon never realized what the Fantastic Four did on their day off until he saw The Thing march out onto the ninth tee wearing tartan plus fours and a Balmoral bonnet. And with the face he had on him, his caddie should have been wearing a fencing mask out of courtesy. There were two other guys with them. They were wearing some kind of jockey outfits. Monsoon gave them the sly once-over. He figured one was money and one was muscle. The muscle guy didn’t actually have much muscle, but Monsoon could tell he was dangerous. He knew the type. And anybody who could manage to look scary in those duds had to be some kind of badass.
All Monsoon had known about golf until recently, he had gotten
from casual and disinterested glances at the screen in some sports bar when there was no other action, so he naturally assumed that golf was a game played by wholesome, pudgy dudes wearing clowny-ass pants and sweaters their maiden aunts had knitted for them. He hadn’t expected the clubhouse to look like the studio canteen during a Star Wars shoot, and the two jokers he had just seen in the locker room had really taken the cake. The one guy looked like he should have been extinct for sixty million years, and the other one like an Egyptologist had just unwrapped the fucker. Monsoon didn’t see how it was physically possible for that suet-assed bastard to swing a club, and the Famine Kid would be lucky if no one mistook him for the flag.
Monsoon was keeping his distance, and staying out of earshot as he had been instructed to, when Elmo Yorke walked up to him.
“Say boy, din’t I tell y’all that y’all was onto a winner. Now zip it ’n’ lissen tight. Y’all booked on a flight goin’ to Moscow.”
“Wherescow?”
“Moscow, dipshit. Fuckin’ Russia. Y’all have heerd a Russia, right?”
“Yeah, but what the fuck…?”
“This is a special favor, kid, and they’ll be shitloads a extra change attached to the deal.”
“Well, how long do I have to stay? What do I have to do?”
“Now don’ worry ’bout nothin’, son. It’s all arranged. First class all the way. Now lissen up. Go to the clubhouse and open locker A26 with this here key. Inside you’ll find a set a clubs. Now them mothers is real valuable, son, ’n’ I mean like real valuable. Y’all got to cling onto them suckers as iffen you was a clingin’ to your mama’s tit. A driver will take ya back to the hotel, and bring ya to the airport in the mornin’. Now this is important: Don’t check the fuckin’ clubs. Don’t let ’em outta ya sight. Carry ’em onto the plane with ya. Ya first class, so don’t sweat it. They’ll let ya. Iffen any shitbird gives ya lip, act like a first class passenger and cuss ’em out. When ya get there, someone will meet ya. Got it?”
“Yeah, yeah, sure, man. I’m on it.”
“Good boy. But don’t fuck it up.”
“Don’t worry, Elmo, my man. My fucking-up days are long gone.”
The men watched Monsoon traipsing away over the grass. Money talked.
“Shit, Elmo. I have to hand it to you. That cocksucker looks so much like Tiger Woods, nobody at customs will even think about checking him out. They’ll probably ask for his fucking autograph.”
“In Russia, if people know he work for me, nobody check him out anyway, asshole,” The Thing said. “Iz juss precaution. So, vhere iz software?”
“In the golf bag.”
“So when will be safe?”
“As soon as the software is installed in the hardware, the polonium is shielded. In the meantime, the device has a failsafe shell, but it won’t last more than a few days. You sure your boy knows what he’s doing?”
“My cousin Hyatt more smart than Stephen Hawkeye. What about money?”
“When the software gets to where the software is going, and the software gets installed into the hardware, and I get the fucking R3, and see it working, then you get the money. Iz juss precaution. And by the way, it’s Stephen Hawking.”
The Thing stiffened. There was a sudden, severe change in the weather and a black cloud obscured his face. His caddy stepped forward, and Muscle stuck his hand under the lapel of his harlequin-checked windbreaker. They eyeballed each other, both outwardly still but inwardly bristling, like two German Shepherds with a ham bone between them. But then the cloud passed and The Thing laughed.
“Okay,” he said. “No problem. This time next week, we all be eat caviar, drink vodka. Everyone get what he want. Da? All people happy. Da?”
Money smiled. The tension eased, but not completely. The air was still combustible. A spark could still blow the whole deal.
Elmo stepped in. “Khuy,” he said. “I need to talk to you. We don’t need the boys anymore, no?”
Khuy Zalupa put on his best charming smile. A triceratops would have shit itself.
“No. No. Spasiba bolshoi and dasvidanya, boys. See you next week.”
Money nodded. Muscle backed away a couple of paces, keeping his eye on the caddie. They turned and headed across the green for the path. The caddie watched them go.
“It’s about the gelt, Khuy.”
“What about money?”
“Well. That schmuck general stiffed me. He upped the price to three mill, the fucking prestupnik. I had no choice.”
“Okay. Okay. No problem. Fair is fair. Where fuck iz Brooke?”
“I don’t know. He never showed up, the putz. Sometimes I think that boy must have a hole in his head.”
Monsoon was laughing out loud as he walked down the pristine pathway toward the clubhouse. Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-fuckin’-A. Chauffeured limos, first-class plane tickets, the whiff of French perfume and permed snatch as the stewardess leaned over to pour you another glass of champagne, pushing her tit against your chops. And if that commie beaver was anywhere near as spectacular as he’d heard it was, well…fucking roll on, Russia.
As he got level with the second hole, the clubhouse was down and to his right. Up to his left was a sharp hill with trees on top. A movement caught his eye, and he looked up in time to see those two bizarre circus-act motherfuckers from the clubhouse trudging over the crest. Probably going up there to shag each other. Any way you figured that scenario it came out seriously fucked up. Monsoon started laughing out loud again, and he did a little impromptu Ali shuffle, rattling the clubs in the bag.
That’s why he never heard the shot that put a hole through the front of Elmo Yorke’s expensive designer golf cap and dropped a large gobbet of his frontal lobe into the cup on the ninth hole.
Chapter 6
In a warped kind of way, Benjamin Peabody was an ethical man with a certain morality. It wasn’t what one did, so much as to whom one did it. So while punters were fair game, partners and collaborators were always treated with scrupulous and transparent fair play, and Benjamin was extremely anxious that his good reputation be maintained in that regard. However, in this particular case, it wasn’t his reputation he was concerned about. It was his testicles.
From the outset, getting involved with Zalupa had looked like a path fraught with risk, and perhaps even danger, but right now it was looking like riding blindfolded though a minefield on a monocycle, with a stick of dynamite jammed up his ass and a pyromaniac chasing him with a Zippo.
And it wasn’t that he was concerned about Zalupa believing him about what had happened. He knew that Zalupa would not distinguish between dishonesty and incompetence. To Zalupa it would be simple. Benjamin had lost the egg, and so he was going to lose his own eggs.
He looked out over the lake. The sky was overcast and moody and the water dull and leaden. He looked at his reflection. He sighed. It sighed back at him in agreement. They both looked like shit. Well, nobody could be expected to look their best after a sleepless night of desperation and despair mingled with a considerable proportion of abject terror, washed down with a bottle and a half of Tanqueray. As he raised his glass to his lips and poured the gin down his gullet, the fragrance of Rive Gauche wafted over him. He looked up. The woman was even more radiant than before, but his reserve tank of joie de vivre had sprung a leak and he could not summon the will to even return her dazzling smile.
At least, not until she said, “Hey, Benny. Want your egg back?”
When it came to balancing acts, Fanny made the amazing Blondin look like an amateur. She had Benjamin Peabody so finely balanced between frustration and ecstasy that he didn’t know whether he wanted a shit or a haircut. Using silk stockings as ligatures, she had him bound hand and foot to his bed in the Sissi Suite at the Beau Rivage, and he was drooling like Pavlov’s dog. She was tantalizingly tickling the end of his penis with one erect nipple, letting her hair gently flagellate his agitated nuts.
“Now, Benny,” she purred, “you’ve been a very naughty
boy. You lied to mama.”
“I didn’t I did I mean I did but I didn’t I mean when I said it it was true and now it isn’t what I mean is oh Christ I can’t stand it.”
“Did you see it?”
Benjamin moaned and tried to squirm closer. Fanny moved away.
“No-no-no,” she said, her voice rising a semitone with each repetition. “Did you see it?”
“Yes, yes, oh God, yes. I saw it. I saw it.”
“And…?”
“It’s magnificent, incomparable, glorious, spellbinding, oh, come on, come I want to come, don’t. Stop, don’t stop.”
Fanny placed her lips against Benjamin’s bell-end, and with excruciating slowness spread them and engulfed him like an amoeba devouring its prey. Benjamin went rigid. Fanny stopped. She stood up. Benjamin whimpered. Fanny squatted over him. She opened herself with her fingers. A divine scent wafted over him, and it wasn’t any damned Rive Gauche.
“You want this, Benjamin,” she cooed.
“Oh, yes yes yes, a thousand times fucking yes, come on, you bitch, this is fucking torture.”
“Okay, Benjamin. It’s all yours. But first I want something from you.”
“Name it, name it it’s yours, what is—what do you want?”
“An introduction.”
“Who to?”
“Khuy Zalupa.”
Benjamin felt his euphoria punctured. Fanny put her cool hand on his shaft to keep him focused.
“No, no, not him. You’re insane. He’s evil. He lives for pain. You’re mad. I won’t do it.”
Fanny stood up. “Okay. See ya. I’ll take care of it myself.”
Benjamin watched Fanny’s delectable fanny undulating toward the bathroom, over the top of his throbbing knob.
“No, wait, wait. Come back. I’ll introduce you to someone else. Anyone. Rod Stewart, Prince Charles, the Pope, I’ll get you into Studio 54, anything, please.”
The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2) Page 11
