The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2)

by Norwood, Shane

  Fanny turned. She stared pointedly at Benjamin’s dick. “Khuy Zalupa,” she said.

  “Okay, okay. I’ll do it.”

  “Good boy,” she said. She slinked back over to the bed and lowered herself down onto Benjamin. He slipped into bliss, succumbing to a sublime helplessness and, hoping fervently that he wasn’t going to die in the next ten seconds, closed his eyes in anticipation of the joyous, joyful release. Something tapped him on the forehead. He opened his eyes. It was a cell phone.

  “Now,” Fanny said.

  “Are you fucking crazy? Are you out of your fucking m…”

  The sensation of Fanny sliding off him congealed the words in his throat. He snatched the phone, and hit the button. Fanny began to bob up and down, almost imperceptibly, like a yacht at anchor in a sleepy lagoon. The four rings seemed like four centuries.

  “Da, pizda. What you want?”

  “The egg.”

  “What about egg? Where is?”

  “I have it. Don’t worry. But I have someone here that wants to meet you. Maybe she could deliver it?”

  “You sound weird. What is wrong wid voice? Sound like cat strangle.”

  “Oh, er, nothing, nothing. Just a touch of asthma.”

  “So who is devotchka?”

  “She’s a, er, a friend. Famous, actually. She’s a writer. Fanny Lemming.”

  “Ah. I know name. Read book once. See picture. Have bolshoi bazongas, da?”

  Benjamin looked up to where Fanny’s majestic mounds burgeoned in front of his eyes. “Er, why yes, they are rather, er, bolshoi, yes.”

  “Davai. Why not? Tell her bring egg to New Orleans. Lundi place. On Friday. I wait.”

  The phone went dead. Fanny took it from his hand. She smiled down at him. Benny beamed back.

  “There’s a good boy,” she said, allowing her full weight to descend on him, “and now you get what you deserve.”

  Benjamin closed his eyes and waited, transported and consumed, the whole world reduced to six inches of scintillating sensation.

  Fanny leapt to her feet like a gymnast, roughly yanking herself off. Benjamin watched, speechless and mortified as he stared from his dingus to Fanny and back again, watching aghast as she grabbed her clothes, lithely slid into her dress, and headed for the door.

  Geneva being Geneva, the Swiss cops don’t get to see all that much action, so they were actually quite pleased when the concierge of the Beau Rivage called them to say that there was some kind of nut job going apeshit in his room and keeping everybody awake.

  ***

  Elyssia Marron stared down dispassionately at the prostrate, naked figure of Baby Joe. A flicker of tristesse flew across her soul. He was a passionate and skillful lover. And he was a beautiful man. Not in any conventional sense, but beautiful in the way that a pit bull is beautiful. It was a shame that he had to die. Under different circumstances…?

  She banished such thoughts from her mind. Lundi had ordered it; therefore it must be done. She took the straight razor from her pocketbook and held it up to the light. She saw her own face reflected in the bright sheen of evil intent that gleamed from the naked bulb in the ceiling. What must be done must be done. Get it over with. Not deep, Lundi had said. Just deep enough to cut the tendons. To incapacitate. He must be alive. He must bear witness. She approached the bed and straddled Baby Joe. As she did so, she felt him stir. She looked down. Why not? What difference did it make? She reached down and touched herself and put her wet finger to Baby Joe’s nose, and when he became fully proud she squatted over him and guided him into her and began to slowly gyrate her hips, and when her nostrils flared and her pupils dilated and the great wave crested inside her and began to break on the shore, she took the blade of the straight razor and pressed it against the jugular of Baby Joe Young.

  Baby Joe Young reached up, grabbed her wrist, and broke it. She tried to scream but he punched her in the solar plexus and the wind whooshed out of her lungs so that she had none left to express the pain that she felt.

  Baby Joe flipped her over. He entered her from behind, holding her broken wrist behind her back. He felt evil. He knew it was wrong. He knew that what he was doing was contrary to everything he believed to be true about himself. He didn’t give a nun’s cunt about what he believed to be true about himself. The bitch had been going to kill him. And if she killed him, she killed Asia. He was going to fuck her to save the woman that he loved. Under the circumstances, he might be forgiven for the logic. She screamed as he spent himself, but that might have had something to do with her broken wrist.

  Baby Joe pulled out, grabbed Elyssia by the hair, and dragged her to the floor. He put the razor against her eye.

  “One chance. The fucking truth. Where, and when?”

  “The back of beyond. At midnight.”

  The razor drew a drop of blood from her eyelid. “I admire your sang-froid, but you lose this eye with your next breath if you don’t tell me what I want to know.”

  “No. No, please. I’m telling you the truth. It’s a place. A clearing in the swamp. Hard ground. That’s where they do it. I swear. I’ll take you there myself.”

  Baby Joe moved the blade away from her eye and stood up. He pointed to the phone. “Call someone, and tell them to take me.”

  Baby Joe dressed, listening carefully for any inflection in her voice as Elyssia gave instructions to whomever she was speaking to. She hung up.

  “Downstairs. Ten minutes. A blue Olds.”

  Baby Joe walked up to her. She tried to back away, but he grabbed her arm. “When I leave, you’ll call.”

  “I won’t. I promise.”

  “You promise?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay then.” Baby Joe started to walk toward the door.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “The drink. It always works.”

  “I’m Irish. We don’t drink that shit. Try Guinness next time. Does your wrist hurt?”

  “Yes.”

  “Come here.”

  As Elyssia Marron walked toward him, Baby Joe took a light but firm grip on the shank of the razor. As he stepped forward, his conscience yelled at him not to do it. He didn’t listen.

  ***

  “Bjorn Eggen, ya bladdy mongrel. ’Owarya?”

  “Hello, Wally. How are you?”

  “Ah, ripper, mate. Fair fucken dinkum for a wrinkled old bastard, I say. So what’s up, you old fart? What’s all this shit I ’ear about you peggin’ out?”

  “I haf call to say goodbye, my friend.”

  “Goodbye. Where ya fucken goin’?”

  “Mary Rose haf die. Yesterday. I vil go vit her.”

  “Now hold yer fucken ’orses there, mate. What the fuck are ya goin’ on about?”

  “Oh, Wally. I am very old now. I haf had long life. Maybe I am tired now, ja? It is time for me to go.”

  “Hold up, ya nong. Don’t be goin’ and doin’ anythin’ fucken daft. I’m as ancient as Ayers fucken Rock, but I’m still ’evin the craic. There’s loads left to fucken live for, mate.”

  “For you, maybe, Wally. I am not you. Mary Rose haf gone. I am alone and old, and every day is hard, ja. It is time. I haf live long, and gud, but I do not wish to live anymore.”

  “’Ere, now, you just fucken lissen ter me, mate. I reckon…”

  “You haf been gud friend, Wally. Goodbye.”

  The phone went dead.

  “Shit me fucken britches. The silly old bastard. I gotta do somethin’. I gotta stop the old fucker.”

  “Strewth, Wal,” Stavros said when Wally walked back into the bar. “Ya look a bit shook up.”

  “Crack us a bladdy tube, Stav, will ya? And sent one a the billy lids to fetch Wombat Jimmy. I gotta go.”

  “Go where, Wal?”

  “Fucken Norway.”

  ***

  She was going to be playing Russian roulette, with a real Russian, but Fanny believed that fear was her ally. Only not her fear: everyone else’s. Khuy Zalupa was so absolutely confide
nt of his ability to inspire terror, the thought that anyone might attempt to enter his lair—the dark trembling miasma of cold sweat dread that he surrounded himself with—and steal one of his prized possessions was beyond conception. Under different circumstances, she might have been right.

  Zalupa took the standard precautions as a matter of course, but the sophisticated state-of-the-art high-tech detection devices that were usually employed were absent. No motion sensors, no infrared cameras, no lasers. No touch-sensitive weight-reactive pads, no bulletproof glass, no two-way mirrors, no cockroach-fart-sensitive microphones, no GPS-embedded devices. Only high walls, locked doors, a safe that a five-year-old girl wearing boxing gloves could crack—and the knowledge of a sure, slow, and exquisitely painful demise if you got caught—protected the Fab 13.

  Oh, and Oleg and Bolshoi. Bolshoi was no kind of ballerina you would want to dance with. Bolshoi was a two-hundred-and-twenty-pound Caucasian sheepdog, with a shaven head and a swastika tattooed on his skull. He could rip the liver out of a Siberian timberwolf and wound-fuck it to death before breakfast. He feared no one and nothing except for Oleg. He loved no one and nothing except for Oleg. He was a perpetually cocked weapon, a coiled spring that only Oleg could release. It was the moment Bolshoi lived for, when Oleg said, “Bolshoi, davai,” and he could hurl himself into a joyous blood frenzy of dismemberment.

  Oleg himself was no oil painting. He was never much to look at to begin with, but after a rival gang took a carpet knife to his face in a Ukraine jailhouse turf dispute, he ended up with a face that looked like a mandrill’s ass. He loved working for Khuy Zalupa. He was unique in that he did not hate or fear him, and Khuy knew and valued this. Plus, working for Zalupa gave Oleg access to a lifestyle that he would not otherwise have enjoyed. Nice clothes, good food, the company of beautiful women. And all he had to do for it was kill anybody that Khuy told him to, in whatever fashion Khuy told him to do it. Piece of cake! Oleg was a dyed-in-the-wool stone killer, a skilled and fearless fighter, and a crocodile-level survivor.

  Anyone who had spent as much time in the gulags as Oleg had to be. Even Zalupa himself, while not exactly afraid of Oleg, knew enough about the man’s capacity for incendiary acts of violence to mind his manners when around him. It wasn’t that he was especially big or muscular. He was constructed like a Mongol composite bow, all tendon and sinew and bone, immensely powerful but light and maneuverable.

  So that was all that Fanny had to worry about: a homicidal institutionalized psycho and a dog that made Cerberus look like Lassie. Muscle and fang against guile and style. No contest! As a writer, Fanny detested clichés, but unfortunately the expression “to case the joint” is virtually unimprovable, so Fanny had to concede that step one was to case the joint. Casing the joint meant first getting close to Zalupa, and gaining his trust and his friendship. It meant getting an invitation to the troll’s cave. That meant going into the heart of darkness and bearding the dragon in his lair. But even dragons are suckers for a thirty-six, twenty-four, thirty-six genuine European-made racing chassis topped by a face to complicate the Judgment of Paris and a cunt that could suck a volleyball through the barrel of a Sherman tank. Plus, she had her invitation to the ball: Benjamin’s egg.

  Khuy Zalupa was in the back room of The Mama Mambo, surrounded by his hangers-on. They were drinking Stolichnaya and smoking Lord Lundi’s homegrown Voodoo Cloud, and watching Bolshoi disembowel a succession of pit bulls and Rottweilers. The only one that had given him any trouble at all was a South African Boerboel, which had managed to draw blood before Bolshoi ripped its head off. Khuy was twenty grand to the good, one over the eight, and in high spirits. He spoke in what was, for him, a jocular tone as he roughly pushed the girl off his lap and to the floor.

  “Lundi. You iz lying white nigger. This girl no can be virgin. One. No blood. Two. Pussy like drive Skoda through Red Square. Fetch new one.”

  Lord Lundi smiled and bowed a gracious bow, and went to do as he was bidden. Even evil, deathless sons of bitches know when they are out of their depth. As he stepped out of the back room and into the steamy jungle heat of the dance floor he bumped into a lady. He felt his chest rebound from the remarkably resilient breasts. The lady’s drink crashed to the floor.

  Lundi went into a pantomime routine that Marcel Marceau would have been proud of. He raised his hands to his face, and then into the air above his head as he mimed being mortified by the accident and overwhelmed by Fanny’s beauty at the same time. It was a pretty good show. If he hadn’t selected “evil bloodsucking creep” as a profession he might have given it a decent shot in showbiz.

  “Mon dieu!” he sleazed. “Are you ’urt? Are you injured? Do you ’ave ze stains on ze dress? Ah must replace your drink, immediately.”

  Fanny gave him a smile that nearly melted the gold plate off his shades. “Why, thank you, kind sir. You are most gracious. I am perfectly fine. I’ll have a zombie.”

  Lord Lundi gestured in the general direction of the back of the room, and, seemingly from nowhere, a waiter appeared with a bright orange zombie on a silver tray.

  “Voilà, mademoiselle,” Lundi said, going into his Mack Sennett routine again.

  Fanny gazed at him for a second, the faintest shadow of a doubt flitting across her mind like a bat across the moon.

  “How did you do that?” she said.

  “Do what, my pearl?”

  “The drink. The zombie. You didn’t speak, but the waiter knew what to bring.”

  Lundi playacted the twirling of a mustache, even though he didn’t have one. “Ze ways of the South are bound in mystery, my angel. There are sings of which we must not speak. You must allow us to ’ave our little secrets, n’est-ce pas?”

  Fanny smiled again and inclined her head graciously, which took a couple more carats off the value of Lundi’s shades.

  “Please excuse me for one moment,” Lundi said. “Ah must attend to ze needs of ma guests. Ah will be right back.”

  Fanny sipped her drink as she watched him disappear into the brightness of the room. The deal with the drink had been a good trick. So what was the angle? Was it just some cheap hocus pocus parlor trick that Lord Lundi liked to lay on the tourists, or had they been watching her, and if so, why? Maybe it was just the surroundings that were making her feel paranoid. What could they possibly know about her plans, and how? She sipped the drink again, carefully. It seemed okay. In her line of work, you learned how to recognize a Mickey Finn. If she was being watched she couldn’t very well spill another drink. She decided to take a chance. She was getting close, and she didn’t want to risk blowing it. She took a deep suck through the straw. If it was a Mickey, it was the most delicious one she had ever tasted, but definitely a little shy on the chloral hydrate. Well, that was okay. She had plenty in her purse for everyone.

  Lundi came back with a pretty white girl in tow. The girl was obviously petrified. This was no time to be letting her maternal instincts get the better of her. Fanny ignored the girl’s appealing stare, and said to Lord Lundi, “I’m looking for Khuy Zalupa.”

  If there was any change of expression on Lundi’s cold fish face, it was lost in the shadows and in the lights reflected in the sunglasses. “Why?”

  “That’s between him and me. He’s expecting me. Tell him Fanny Lemming is here, and I have something for him.”

  Lundi leaned close. The shades came close to her eyes. She could see her own dim reflection. She held her ground. “Now would be a good time, boy.”

  Lundi grabbed the girl by the wrist and roughly dragged her though the door.

  Fanny calculated that she would not have to wait more than two minutes. She did not have to wait more than one minute. The door opened and Lundi beckoned her.

  It took all of her skills as an actress to disguise the shock that she felt at what she saw. She felt a tremor of trepidation run down her spine, and a sudden unwonted lack of confidence in herself. Was this one roll of the dice too many? She steeled her mind and cast off her doubts
.

  “Hey, boys,” she said, smiling brightly. “Mind if I join the party? Things are a little dull out there.”

  “Be guest. Have seat. Don’t mind dead dogs. How iz drink?”

  “Wonderful. I’d like another, please.”

  She watched Zalupa give Lundi a dismissive nod, and Lundi beckoned a waiter. She felt again that slight flicker of uncertainty. She came to the Big Easy a lot. It was impossible to do that and not know about Lord Lundi’s reputation. But he was obviously scared shitless of Zalupa. She began to wonder if she shouldn’t reconsider, then she angrily drove the idea out of her mind. The hell with it. She looked at Zalupa. What was there to be so worried about? Okay, so he was the most hideous man she had ever laid her eyes upon, he had some kind of tattooed Mongol warlord with a face like an underdone hamburger sitting next to him, he was surrounded by dead dogs, and the most feared man in Louisiana was afraid of him—but apart from that, what was the big deal?

  She smiled and raised her glass. “Cheers.”

  Zalupa raised his own brimming glass of vodka and downed it, seemingly without effect, as if it were a glass of milk. Nobody else moved. Fanny suddenly realized how quiet it had become. She also noticed that she could not hear the music from outside. The room was soundproofed. Zalupa barked something in Russian, and suddenly everyone got up to leave, except for Oleg. And Bolshoi. Lundi went as well, taking the girl with him. It was her turn to ignore Fanny’s appealing stare. The music blared briefly as the people left, and then abruptly stopped as the door closed with a soft hiss.

  Fanny wasn’t nervous now. She was scared. She was trying very hard not to show it, but Zalupa was a connoisseur. He could smell it, as well as Bolshoi.

  “You bring egg?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  Fanny made to open her purse. Oleg moved in and grabbed it. She started to stand but he shoved her roughly and she fell back.