The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2)

by Norwood, Shane

  Moscow also has a few other interesting statistics. Members of the Bratva, the particularly violent and ruthless Russian equivalent of the Mafia, have three times more chance of getting knocked off by a rival than do their US counterparts; an average of fifty cars a day get swiped; it’s harder to find a cup of tea in Brighton than it is to find a corrupt official in Moscow; it is the holiday destination of choice for traffickers in guns, drugs, and human beings from all over the world; and they reckon fifty percent of its economy is connected to organized crime. Plus half the city’s youth call themselves “Gopniki” and sit around on benches all day getting shitfaced on 9% ABV alcoholic beverages called Jaguars, and twenty-five percent of the male population between ages fifteen and fifty croak from alcohol abuse.

  But then, so it goes with cities as with people. Children with troubled backgrounds grow into people with troubled futures. They should have stuck with Mosh Kvat.

  Chapter 8

  When in Rome, as they say. Monsoon had done his best to stay awake on the flight so as to enjoy his all-too-brief sojourn into the world of the rich and famous as much as possible, but had fallen asleep halfway through Slumdog Millionaire. He woke up with a headache and a mouth like the bottom of a buzzard’s nest, and he vowed never to drink anything from France ever again, never realizing that his condition had more to do with the fact that the stewardesses had knobbled his champagne cocktail so that they could get it on with George in the seat next to him.

  In any event, he recognized the urgent need for the hair of the dog that bit him, and so when he disembarked at Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow, he headed straight for the nearest bar and ordered a triple Stolichnaya in honor of his destination. As he was savoring the vodka and idly watching the large snowflakes slowly melting and sliding down the windowpanes, a couple in their mid-thirties, tanned and blond and healthy-looking, approached him. She was a good-looking girl, if you like them as wholesome as brown bread, and he looked like he kept his dick wrapped in cellophane when he wasn’t using it.

  “Mr. Woods,” the girl said, flushed with excitement, “I’d love to get my hands on one of your balls.”

  The corners of Monsoon’s lips twanged to the back of his head like a giant rubber band. “You’re on,” he said. “Where the nearest head?”

  “Erm. I think what my wife means is your golf balls, Mr. Woods,” said Tupperware Boy.

  “Oh, er, right. Shit.”

  “Oh, yes, Mr. Woods. It’s such a surprise seeing you here. So unexpected. And so thrilling. If you could sign one of your golf balls for me, why, I would just treasure it forever and ever.”

  “Yeah, er, sure,” Monsoon said, still wrestling with his mental image of a quick tryst in the john. He stepped off his stool, zipped open the pocket of the golf bag, and pulled out a canister of new balls. The girl looked crestfallen.

  “Oh,” she said, “I’m sorry, but don’t you have one that you’ve used?”

  She was starting to get on his tits. He shoved his hand back into the bag and scrabbled around until he came up with a loose ball. He toyed with it and made a show of deliberating carefully.

  “I dunno, babe. I mean, I hate to part with this baby. This is the one that I won the Open with, with a fifty-foot putt.” He watched hope and disappointment battle for supremacy in the girl’s vacuous blue eyes.

  “Oh, okay,” he said, “I’ll win a shitload more Opens before I’m done. You got a pen?”

  “I’ve got just the thing,” she said brightly, whipping out a red indelible pen from her purse.

  “What’s your name, baby?”

  “Delia. But people call me Deli.”

  “No shit,” Monsoon said, proceeding to write on the ball.

  “You look different on TV,” the Weetabix Kid said, the slightest trace of a frown on his face.

  “Yeah, smaller probably, asshole. See ya.”

  Monsoon flipped the ball to Deli, slammed his vodka down, grabbed his club bag, and headed for the exit.

  Deli looked puzzled as she regarded the ball.

  “What’s up,” said Muesli Man.

  “Well, it’s certainly good he can play golf.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s illiterate. Look.”

  Deli held out the ball. On it was written, “To Deli with love. Tigger Woods.”

  ***

  Monsoon had been told that he would be picked up on arrival. And he was. But then again, he had to be, because as soon as he stepped out of the airport into such a bitter cold as he had never experienced in his life before, a man dressed as a policeman approached him and truncheoned him over the back of the head.

  ***

  Many people might believe that having a father who was a professor of English literature and a fervent admirer of Mark Twain would be an advantage in life. Huckleberry Sawyer Hicks did not agree. He had his first fight in high school before he had even gotten off the bus. And, although some kids benefit from being the scuttlebutt of the class, and it helps to develop their character, Huckleberry was not one of those, either.

  Kids in Huckleberry’s situation usually react in one of three ways. They develop a mean wit and satirically annihilate anyone who bandies words with them; or they develop a mean streak and pulverize the living shit out of anyone who gives them any lip; or they become shy, retiring, socially inadequate misfits who spend their evenings sitting alone in their bedrooms reading wank mags and gun catalogs, and their days tying firecrackers to cats’ tails and stuffing toads into bottles, and making nasty hurtful remarks to little girls with freckles.

  For Huckleberry Sawyer Hicks, please refer to option three.

  Huckleberry Hicks became a problem child, a troublesome student, a delinquent, and a right royal pain in the ass for parents, PTA, police, and parole boards alike, and his journey from after-school detention to correctional facility was more or less a done deal.

  It was the Marines that saved him from the slammer. After one particularly distressing incident involving a student teacher, an alarm clock, and a test tube full of hydrogen sulfide, his counselor suggested that young Huckleberry might be better off lying in a paddy field with his legs blown off by a Vietcong land mine. The following morning a jeep rolled up outside the family residence, and a sergeant with a face like an exploded deer tick climbed out with a sheaf of papers and a Continental Trailways ticket to Fort Benning.

  But, as John Donne says, no man is an island, and throughout Huckleberry’s not-so-happy schooldays and troubled teens, there was always one guy who took an interest in him, and who befriended him and tried to help him. The guy was something of a misfit himself, but what set him apart was his IQ. He was so much brighter than everybody else that nobody could communicate with him, his thought processes so convoluted and arcane it was if he was speaking an alien language. You kept expecting him to say something like “I come in peace,” or “Take me to your leader.”

  His name was Lee Heal.

  ***

  “If I see that pretending poopypants again, I’m going to give him a piece of my mind, I can tell you that for nothing.”

  “Calm down, Ritchie, and don’t upset yourself. We’re here to have fun, remember?” Deli said.

  “Ritchie” was Fiber Man’s real name. What else would it be? Ritchie was incensed. He had just found out, from the TV in the clubhouse, that while the so-called Tiger Woods was making such a show of signing the ball for Deli, the real Tiger Woods was busy winning the Arnold Palmer Invitational.

  “I knew there was something fishy about him. I can tell, you know.”

  “Ritchie. Don’t make such a fuss. Take your shot. People are waiting.”

  They were on the third hole of the course at the Moscow Country Club, just outside Krasnogorsk. It was an unseasonably fine day, and the course was full.

  “You know what? Give me that stupid ball,” Ritchie said.

  Deli looked around, embarrassed. She gave the people waiting behind them a sheepish wave. The men just s
tared at her. She fumbled in her bag for the ball and handed it to Ritchie.

  “Here. Now hurry up. Those men behind look annoyed.”

  Ritchie quickly bent down and pegged in his tee. He dropped the ball on top of it. It rolled off. He picked it up and dropped it again. It rolled off again. He picked it up a third time and placed it carefully. He turned around and waved to the men waiting. One spat. Another was drinking from a vodka bottle. Two were smoking. And staring.

  Ritchie wiggled his ass, addressed the ball, and swung his driver. He sliced it. The ball whizzed off at right angles to his club, smacked a tree, and plopped into a water feature. Deli didn’t bother to take her shot. She pulled Ritchie off the tee, and waved the men behind them through. Deli and Ritchie stood in embarrassed silence as the men teed up. As they attempted to take their tee shots, they were all pissing themselves laughing.

  The following afternoon, the head greenskeeper got called to the manager’s office. The conversation went something like this:

  “Hey, numbnuts. I thought I told you to take care of the fucking pond.”

  “I did.”

  “Did what?”

  “I cleaned it. I cleaned it just like you said.”

  “What with, fucking paraffin?”

  “No, just with the net and the brush.”

  “Then how come all the fucking fish are dead?”

  ***

  Crispin was heavily sedated in a private room in the Tulane Medical Center. According to the doctor, he had suffered a severe mental breakdown and was liable to be in a dissociative state for a while. Crispin was well insured, and while the doctor could not say exactly if his policy covered psychological trauma brought on by a near-fucked-to-death-by-goat experience, he thought there was a pretty good chance that it did.

  Asia was in better condition. Just. Baby Joe had rented a small basement apartment in Carrollton for a month so that they could wait for Crispin to recover and Asia to gather herself. Asia’s mother had been found wandering the streets in the Quarter, awash with bourbon and ready to boogie. She was unaware that she had been kidnapped, and remembered only that a young black man with very nice manners had taken her for a ride in his car.

  Asia was having bad nightmares, but during the day she was more or less okay. Physically there was not much damage. Psychologically, only time would tell. Privately, the doctor had told Baby Joe that the fact Asia did not remember as much about her ordeal as she should could be a bad sign, and could indicate posttraumatic stress disorder.

  Sometimes she was lucid and happy. At other times she became withdrawn, and seemed confused. Sometimes Baby Joe found her crying. He knew enough not to press her. He still believed in the palliative effect of time, so he set himself up to just be around, there, ready in case she needed him. He only went out without her in daylight, and he restricted his drinking for fear that it should unleash the implacable rage that burned inside him, which made him wish that Lord Lundi was still alive so he could kill him again.

  Asia herself was not quite so withdrawn as she pretended to be, and she felt guilty for it because she knew how worried Baby Joe was and how much he needed some sign from her, but she also knew that she could not give it. She owed her life to him, and she was grateful for it, but she also knew that he was the reason that she had been subjected to torture in the first place, and although she knew it was not his fault and that it was a consequence of something that had happened long before they met, she still could not forget it. She thought she still loved him, and hoped she did, but she knew that she could not be with him in the way that he wanted her to be with him just then, or even in the way that she wanted to be with him.

  She remembered more than she was prepared to admit, but pretended that she didn’t because she was not ready to talk about it and knew that she had to deal with it in her own way. She was not yet ready to confront the memory of that terrifying, helpless paralysis, and needed to avoid any association or conversation that would force her to relive it. Only in her sleep was she helpless to keep the memories at bay, and that was when the dreams came.

  ***

  The headache that Monsoon woke up with made the one that he’d gotten off the plane with seem like an amateur. As he came to, somewhere jangling around in his befuddled brain was the thought that Russian smelling salts were even more pungent and disgusting than American ones. That was before he realized that it was Bolshoi’s breath in his face that had woken him up. Monsoon could not actually see Bolshoi himself, because Bolshoi had his mouth agape and was panting and drooling down the front of Monsoon’s shirt, where Monsoon found himself once again trussed to the obligatory single wooden chair in the middle of the customary empty room with the de rigueur single bare bulb hanging by a dusty chain from the dirty ceiling. Monsoon had the impression of staring into a filthy toilet bowl. With teeth. It was only when Bolshoi closed his cavernous chops that Monsoon came to the understanding that he was confronted by a beast that made the hound of the Baskervilles look like Deputy Dawg.

  Monsoon had had enough experience of being tied to chairs in dank rooms to realize that he had either not been there very long or the guy who did the tying was not much of a pro, because he could still feel and freely move his hands, which meant his circulation was okay. He looked around the room for other signs for optimism, but they were thin on the ground. The best he could come up with was that he wasn’t dead, which meant whoever had done this to him didn’t want him to be dead, ergo they wanted him alive.

  And whatever the dark and nefarious purpose behind the fact that he was not croaked, and whatever it was that they needed him for, or planned to do with him, was better than being dead. At least for the time being. Another mild cause for comfort was that, although the dog was looking at him the way a schoolboy with a pin looks at a balloon, at least it hadn’t ripped his head off yet, which meant either somebody had told it not to or it just wasn’t hungry.

  Monsoon couldn’t say that he was even really surprised at the turn of events. Given the tortured, melodramatic, oscillating, gonad-swinging, tragicomic switches of fortune of his life in recent years, it was almost inevitable that the hand of fate, having handed him a T-bone and a brewski, would then punch him in the nuts. If this was going to be the pattern, the trick was going to be to scarf down as much of the gravy as he could when it was flowing, and try not get flushed down the hole when the plug got pulled.

  He turned his attention to how he felt. Uncomfortable? It had been worse. Hungry? Not really. Thirsty? As hell. Scared? In all honesty he couldn’t say that he was. As shit as his situation was, for some undefined reason, it didn’t seem as quite as shit as other shit situations that he had been in. It was only when Khuy Zalupa walked into the room that he seriously shit himself.

  ***

  Lucretia Day started out beautiful, and stayed that way all through childhood and into her early twenties. In mind, body, and spirit, beautiful all the way. Smart too, and fit. Graceful and athletic. Until it happened. After that, things changed.

  Being the looker that she was, she was on every jock’s radar all the way through college, but she came from a household with solid family values, and she kept her head screwed on, her legs closed, and her eyes open, and graduated with distinction. She could have taken her pick of professions, but she wanted to follow in her daddy’s footsteps, and so she joined the military.

  In ’92, she went to Somalia as part of Operation Restore Hope, working psyops as a 25U, attached to the 3rd battalion, 75th Rangers. She was still there when the Battle of Mogadishu kicked off. Although she was not actually present at the epicenter of the battle, she was still subjected to fierce street fighting on the periphery, where evil steel genies shrieked in the smoke, seeking her out to take her life. They did not find her and she came through unscathed. And there was the irony: on her way to the airstrip on her way out of the country, she was hit in the throat by a stone. A stone! Having survived everything that modern state-of-the-art weaponry could throw at her, she w
as struck down by a projectile fired from a weapon from biblical times. A slingshot.

  It was nasty wound, but she got immediate care, and after a few weeks, it looked healed, and she seemed okay. It was only a year later that she started to develop thyroid problems. They had to put her on levothyroxine. It was enough to put her out of uniform and on the street. She went home and secluded herself. She gained weight and her hair started to thin out. Depression set in hard, and it looked like it had moved in to stay.

  Lieutenant Colonel Mortimer Day was an honorable man who did not subscribe to nepotism, but he was desperate. He could not stand idly by and watch what was happening to his little girl, and he knew he had to do something. He knew his daughter. He knew that what Lucretia needed was motivation, a challenge, that she could beat the depression rap if she just had a goal she could set herself toward. So he called in a few favors.

  Despite the circumstances, he was not entirely comfortable, and could not quite reconcile himself to what he had done, but he knew he had made the right decision, because the day after Lucretia got the call from Langley, she was already a different woman.

  ***

  In life-and-death situations, people feel many conflicting emotions. Ennui is not usually one of them. In the middle of the firefight, Huckleberry Hicks was feeling like a jet fighter pilot on a roller coaster. While everybody around him was screaming and shitting into their Calvin Kleins, Huckleberry was bored shitless. Bang bang, shoot shoot, ho hum.

  He had been hired on as a mercenary in some Eastern European shithole where everybody was trying to secede from everybody else, and you couldn’t even pronounce the name of the fucking people you were supposed to waste, never mind the people who were trying to waste you. And it wasn’t much of a war, either. The grub was shit; the beer, when you could get it, was piss; and the women all had armpits like angora sweaters and stank of garlic. Even the fighting was third-rate. After the shit he’d waded through with the Corps, this little soiree was like crowd trouble at a hockey game.