The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2)

by Norwood, Shane

  In truth, he was glad to get out. He needed it. He was feeling caged in, both physically and emotionally, and he needed some space. They needed some space. He enjoyed the air and the sounds of night and darkness as he walked through the Quarter. It was early, but still the ubiquitous jazz attended his every footstep, and every doorway sang its own song. He found a quiet joint down a side street. There were only a handful of customers. A huge fan slowly creaked in the ceiling and an equally creaky old man sat at a piano, tinkling out a slow boogie-woogie.

  “Y’all in need of a tune, son?” the old man said as Baby Joe passed him on the way to the bar.

  “You play ‘Skylark,’ sir?”

  “Kid, iffen I cain’t play it, it ain’t bin fuckin’ writ.”

  Baby Joe smiled and dropped five dollars in the kitty. He walked up to the bar. The top was yellow marble. He stuck his foot on the rail. A guy with slicked-back hair and a beeswaxed mustache was bartending.

  “Let me guess,” he said. “Boilermaker. Am I right?”

  “Right you are son, right you are.”

  As Baby Joe waited for his drink, the old man began to sing. He had a sweet voice that seemed that it ought to come from a much younger man, as if a boy was trapped inside his old bones trying to sing his way out.

  “Skylark, have you anything to say to me?”

  The bartender put Baby Joe’s drink down without saying anything and walked away.

  “Can you tell me where my love may be?”

  Baby Joe took a sip from his bourbon and chased it with a mouthful of beer.

  “Is there a valley in the mist?”

  Baby Joe realized that he was crying.

  “Where she’s just waiting to be kissed.”

  He let the tears come. Fuck it. Who cares? Fuck that macho bullshit. Pain and love and worry and beauty and music and relief. Fuck it. He sat drinking and listening, letting the song draw it all out of him, letting the old man’s smooth, melodic voice wash it all away and leave him clean. He closed his eyes. When the music stopped, he opened his eyes. Two people were standing on either side of him. One was a small white man, and the other was a large black woman.

  “Pretty song,” the woman said.

  Baby Joe nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “It is.”

  They moved to a table at the back. Agent Black ordered a Crimson Voodoo Ale. Agent White ordered a mimosa.

  “I just love these things,” she said.

  “I thought you people didn’t drink on duty.”

  “Well, we ain’t strictly on duty at this particular minute,” Agent Black said. “So, Mr. Young.”

  “Call me Baby Joe. Hey, you know what? You look kind of familiar. Do I know you from somewhere?”

  When Baby Joe said this, Agent White turned to look at Agent Black, as if she were studying him.

  “I doubt it, Jack, I doubt it. Okay, then, so Baby Joe it is. You were a cop, right?” said Agent Black.

  “Yeah. Yeah. Way back.”

  Agent White sipped her drink and set it down. “The name Don Imbroglio mean anything to you, Baby Joe?”

  “Okay, guys. What say we just cut to the chase?”

  “A guy called Atlas Page told us he sold you a piece the same night that Lord Lundi went AWOL.”

  Baby Joe didn’t bother to deny it. He knew how the game was played. He just shrugged.

  “Look, Baby Joe,” Agent White said, “you know the score. You know how hard we can make it. The thing is, we don’t want to. We hear you’re good people. Truth is, we don’t give a fuck what happened to that slimebucket Lundi. But we do care about the people he was hanging with. We may have a serious national security issue on our hands. If you cooperate with us, in any way you can, we won’t take it any further. Ever hear of a guy named Elmo Yorke?”

  Baby Joe slammed his bourbon and raised a hand to the barkeep. “You guys want another?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why not?”

  Baby Joe held up three fingers. “I’ve heard the name,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “At Lundi’s house, where I’ve never been, of course, I ran into a guy I was involved with a few years back, round about the time of the episode with Don Imbroglio, who I’ve never heard of. This boy is a real piece of work. Anyway, the creep tells me that he’s working for an Elmo Yorke.”

  “Who is this guy?”

  “His name’s Parker. Monsoon Parker.”

  Black and White looked at each other and smiled. Agent White asked, “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Back at the house where I never was, the day Lundi went AWOL.”

  ***

  The greenskeeper of the golf course at the Moscow Country Club thought his boss was a state-of-the-art ring piece. His boss thought the greenskeeper, whose name was Dmitri, was a bone-idle, untrustworthy incompetent whom he would gladly have gotten rid of if he could have found any other schmuck willing to work for such shit wages.

  But Dmitri wasn’t such a bone-idle, untrustworthy, incompetent schmuck that he couldn’t recognize a windfall when he saw one. So after he had finished being chewed out about the dead fish, he did exactly as instructed and removed said dead fish from the pond. He then called his mate who had an asthmatic but still functional van, and they loaded the fish up, and flogged them for a few rubles down the local market. Not having been in a financial position to include much protein in his diet, Dmitri chose three of the largest specimens for himself. That evening, he had himself a veritable feast of paint-stripper-grade supermarket vodka, and the flesh of three entire fish, right down to the bone. That night he had the best night’s sleep he had had for a long time.

  They do say that too much of a good thing is not good for you. In Dmitri’s case they were right, because two days later he was dead.

  ***

  There is a bar in a suburb of Moscow called the Yuri Gagarin Social Club. If you are wearing chain mail, carrying a bazooka, and accompanied by a pack of ravening hyenas, it might be safe to drop by after work for a quick drink. Otherwise, it’s probably best not to go in there.

  Oleg was sitting at a table by himself, surrounded by an aura of such venom that nobody dared approach him unless summoned. The space surrounding him seemed somehow darker than everywhere else in the room, as if he were some kind of miniature black hole, generating a gravity of evil that not even the light could escape. On the table in front of him was an empty, overturned vodka bottle, and another one that was half full. Bolshoi lay at his feet, looking at the other people in the bar the way Humbert Humbert looked at a school bus.

  Oleg was not a happy camper. Things had changed, almost overnight. He could tell. The way Khuy spoke to him. The way Khuy looked at him. It was as if he wasn’t there anymore. It was as if, all of a sudden, Khuy didn’t trust him anymore. And if Khuy didn’t trust him, why should he trust Khuy? When men started letting themselves be controlled by women, who knew what could happen.

  The only thing that Khuy could see was the woman. It was sickening the way he was with her. Talking to her, eating with her, being nice to her. Enjoying her company. It made Oleg sick to his stomach to think about it. And worse, it was making Khuy weak. And everyone knew what happened to weak people. They got eaten. Khuy was not paying attention to business. Khuy was getting careless. And word was getting out. Already there were whispers. Things were being said that nobody would have dared to say before. And if that had happened in only a few days, how bad would it get? What would happen? There would be war, that’s what would happen. And Khuy would expect Oleg to fight for him. Again. Well, maybe it was time Oleg started fighting for himself.

  Oleg snatched up the half-empty bottle of vodka, drained it, and hurled it against the wall, shattering it to fragments.

  Chapter 9

  “The good news,” the doctor was saying, “is that at this moment in time, Crispin has no recollection of what happened to him. He believes he was stung by some insect and had an allergic reaction. He appears perfectly normal.”


  “So what’s the bad news?” Asia said.

  “The bad news, I’m afraid, is that sooner or later he will remember. What has happened to him is not uncommon in cases such as this. When a mental trauma is so severe, in certain individuals, the stress levels are insupportable. The brain refuses to accept reality. It’s a defense mechanism, a form of self-induced amnesia. But the amnesia is only temporary. Sooner or later, the brain is forced to acknowledge the truth.”

  “And then what happens?”

  “Again, it depends upon the individual. In some cases, not much. A panic attack, anxiety, trouble sleeping, nightmares. In others…in others it can get very bad, I’m afraid. People can become incapacitated mentally. Suicidal in some cases.”

  “Shit. So how long will it take?”

  “There’s no way of knowing. It could be ten minutes; it could be ten years. The only certainty is that it will happen.”

  “So what should I do?” she said.

  “Just go along with it. Let him believe what he believes. He’ll be perfectly normal, although he may start to exhibit some eccentricities.”

  “Eccentricities?”

  “Yes. Unusual behavior. Acting out of character. Weird, so to speak.”

  “Damn. With Crispin how the hell would you tell the difference? Anything else?”

  “Just be ready for the inevitable.”

  ***

  Agent White looked at herself in the mirror of her hotel room. She sighed and shook her head. What the hell. That was then, this is now. Deal with it, or quit. She dressed quickly and went down to the lobby bar to wait for Agent Black. She kept thinking about something that Baby Joe Young had said: You look kind of familiar. Do I know you from somewhere?

  That was exactly what she had thought to herself when Black walked into the Director’s office. And when she mentioned it to him later, he had said exactly the same words to her that he had said to Baby Joe. She still couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d seen him somewhere before.

  One thing she did know, though, was that after the mission was over, she never wanted to see him again. The guy was a creep, with a capital C and a capital fucking R-E-E-P to go with it. Something about him made her skin crawl. But she was stuck with him for as long as it lasted, and if she tried to be civil, at least that would make one of them. And as long as it lasted would be too long. She could understand why she had been called in, and the importance of it, but she had been on another case, and she had been getting close. She just hoped the trail wouldn’t go cold while she was on this little jaunt.

  She respected and admired the director and she was determined not to let him down, just as she respected the rules of the game, which dictated that she would pretend not to know that her father’s influence had secured her the gig over more qualified people, and he would let her. But she had been onto something that would have proved to everyone, not least herself, that she wasn’t a charity case.

  The director’s instructions had been explicit. This is Agent Black, da-da-da. Full cooperation, blah-blah-blah. Interdepartmental harmony joint operation presidential scrutiny media attention, etcetera etcetera. Fair enough, she knew the routine. But something about this Agent Black character didn’t ring true. Not that she had extensive experience with people of the newly formed Department of Homeland Security type, but Agent Black looked and behaved more like a Social Welfare type. Well, whatever.

  When Agent Black breezed into the bar, doing that really annoying thing he did with his neck, she resisted the temptation to slap that supercilious and contemptuous grin right of his rat-faced redneck kisser, and smiled at him.

  ***

  “You work for me now.”

  That was seriously good news as far as Monsoon was concerned. Working for Zalupa meant that he wasn’t sitting in a backstreet garage with a tire full of petrol around his neck, or drifting gently with the current along the mud at the bottom of the Moskva River, in small pieces, with the fishes nibbling at the bits where the veins poked out.

  Monsoon was having a little trouble understanding why he wasn’t dead or dismembered, even though Zalupa’s breath had almost snuffed him all by itself. Mr. Zalupa had appeared somewhat dismayed to learn that the golf ball was missing. In fact, Monsoon had never seen anybody get so upset over something so trifling. It made one wonder how he would react if something really serious happened, like he lost his car keys, say. Khuy Zalupa at the height of his rage was the most terrifying spectacle Monsoon had ever witnessed. It was like watching two T-rexes fighting with chainsaws in the middle of a hurricane. Well, perhaps not quite that exciting, but not far off.

  Of course he had explained effusively and in detail what had happened to the ball, making sure that Mr. Zalupa understood fully that if he had for one minute known how valuable it was, or if he had been given more explicit information about which particular golf ball he was supposed to deliver, he would never, ever, even at the cost of his life, have let it out of his sight. But, before Monsoon could even get into full begging-and-pleading mode, as suddenly as it began, the storm abated. One second Zalupa was deranged tree-swinging off-his-trolley fruit-loop crazy, and the next minute he was as calm as a librarian with a cup of tea, stroking her cat.

  “You work for me now,” was all Zalupa said, before he walked out of the room.

  Someone untied Monsoon, showed him to a room in the house, told him where the kitchen and the bar were, and told him to make himself at home. There was even a TV with a twenty-four-hour porn channel. So as he was sitting on the sofa with a glass of vodka and a sandwich made of something that tasted like bear meat, watching three girls taking turns sticking it to each other with a polo mallet, he was once again left to reflect upon what the fuck was going on.

  And, once again, the only conclusion he could come to was that Zalupa needed him for something. Maybe when old Elmo finally showed up, he would be able to shed some light on things. In the meantime…!

  ***

  This time, the old piano player was playing “Begin the Beguine.” They were at the same table, drinking the same drinks. When they had told Baby Joe not to leave town at the end of their last encounter, he knew it wasn’t a figure of speech.

  Agent Black was speaking. “We found out that this Monsoon character went to Moscow.”

  “No shit?”

  “Yeah, and that ain’t all. Elmo Yorke was booked on the same flight the following day; only he didn’t make the check-in on account of having some excess baggage wedged in his skull, from a mile away. Outstanding shot. Ex-military for sure.”

  “So why would they take separate flights?”

  “You tell me. How well d’ya know this Monsoon fella?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means, how do we know you ain’t on the team?”

  “What fucking team?”

  “The Boston fucking Celtics. C’mon, Baby Joe. Cut us some slack here?”

  “Listen. I told you all I know, and I’m not involved. I haven’t seen the creep for years. It’s just a fucking coincidence.”

  “Yeah, well, we’re goin’ to Moscow.”

  “Bon voyage.”

  “You don’t seem to be getting it. We’re going to Moscow. You’re comin’ with us.”

  “Like hell I am.”

  “Like hell you ain’t,” said Agent White. “Look, Baby Joe, we hate to do this to you, honest, I mean it. But some serious shit is going down, and we’re only now finding out how serious it is. You can help. This Monsoon jerkoff, he knows you. That might be an angle. We don’t know. It might all be a fart in the wind, but we’re pulling out all the stops on this one.”

  “I appreciate what you’re saying, but I’m a different guy now. I have a life. I live in Australia, for fuck’s sake. And I have some serious personal issues I need to take care of. Besides, I’m way too old for this kinda shit.”

  “Baby Joe. We wouldn’t be puttin’ the squeeze on you if it weren’t important. You gotta cooperate, man. So
oner or later they’re gonna find a dead voodoo motherfucker floating in a swamp somewhere. And then there’s still the deal with the Vegas wop we can dig up if you make us. Not to mention a bit of unpleasantness back in Boston a few years back. Plus, certain parties are not entirely convinced that you ain’t in on what’s goin’ down here. So c’mon, man. It’ll be better if you cooperate. A coupla weeks, and you’ll be back on the plane. Courtesy of Uncle Sam. We guarantee it.”

  Baby Joe stared into his drink. He listened to the closing refrains of the song. “Well, looks like I don’t have much of a fucking choice. Asia is not gonna like this, that I can tell you for fucking free.”

  Baby Joe raised his glass to the two operatives. “Let the beguine begin. God bless America,” he said, slamming back the bourbon.

  ***

  It was the first time Asia had been out by herself since the incident. She had been telling herself that she felt much better than she had been leading people to believe. That she would be okay to be out by herself. Maybe she even believed it.

  She had only gone three blocks before she understood that she had lied to herself. The people and the lights and the noise put the zap on her brain. But when you’re in the middle of quicksand, what do you do? Keep going, or try to go back. Back to where? Asia kept going. She walked down a side street. At the end was a small bar. She went in. She was the only customer. The day was fading like an old photograph. A sepia light, the color of nostalgia, came through the high window above the door and illuminated from behind the old man who played the piano. A jazz Rembrandt.

  Asia took a seat at the bar. The stools were a little too high, and she had to hitch herself up. The barman was wiping glasses and nodding his head in time to the old man’s playing. When he saw her, he stopped wiping and came over. He was still nodding. He was a guy with slicked-back hair and a beeswaxed mustache.