The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2)

by Norwood, Shane

  Something was very clearly about to go down, and it looked as if it might well involve Fanny, which meant that Antonio had a decision to make. He could do nothing and see what happened, but if some harm were to befall Fanny that prevented her from spilling the beans about the baubles, Mr. Nightingale was bound to be disappointed.

  The other alternative was to improvise, zip into the house, ambush the bathing beauty, and zip out again into the night before whatever it was that was about to happen had time to happen. He calculated he needed at least ten minutes. It was a gamble, and the kind of risk which he had studiously avoided all his career, but he weighed that against the possibility of letting Mr. Nightingale down, and also against the possibility that absolutely nothing was going to happen, in which case he had nothing to worry about and had a free shot.

  He had to admit to himself that it was rather exciting as he threw caution to the wind and sneaked into the house and up the stairs after a diversion into the kitchen to select a suitably sized vegetable. Fortunately for him, Zalupa was a man of cosmopolitan tastes. If you have ever tried to bludgeon anyone into insensibility with a cabbage, you’ll know. The first part of the project went exactly according to his hastily devised plan, but then his problems began as he realized he had seriously miscalculated Fanny’s weight. What she had was all in the right places, but she had plenty, and it all added up.

  He was reduced to dragging her. He was trying not to make any noise, but at each step down the stairs her head cracked against the wood with a gentle thunk, and Antonio was moved to consider how ridiculous truly beautiful women could look under certain circumstances. Only an Italian would think of something like that at such a moment.

  Anyway, Antonio manfully stuck to his task, and, panting and perspiring even on that cold night, managed to haul Fanny out the door, across the lawn, though the gate, and to his car. All the best kidnapping manuals tell you that the only proper place to stash a hostage is in the trunk, but Antonio quickly came to the conclusion there was absolutely no chance he would be able to lift Fanny that high, so he had to content himself with stuffing her into the backseat, one limb at a time, like a ventriloquist trying to stuff a particularly large and recalcitrant dummy back into its case.

  It was at that point he decided to give her a shot of Propofol and tie her up. The equation used to calculate the ratio between vegetable weight, blow strength, and time of unconsciousness is complicated, and subject to many variables, and he didn’t want to take the chance that she would wake up while he was driving. He suffered an Italian moment when he took a fistful of her thigh to administer the injection to her buttock, but he managed to exercise professional restraint, and climbed into the driver’s seat.

  It was only after he sat behind the wheel that he realized he had lost one of his shoes. An Italian would never abandon a shoe, especially one handmade and so expensive, but the true value of the shoe only became clear to him after it cost him his life when he went back to look for it, and three almost simultaneous shots blasted the breath from him as he walked toward the fallen shoe where it lay at the foot of the stairs.

  Fanny awoke later, to complete darkness and silence, cold, and with a stiff neck and pins and needles in her legs, in a state of disarray and an entirely inappropriate mode of dress for a murder scene, understandably confused about just exactly where she was, or just exactly what the fuck was happening in the ’hood.

  ***

  At the exact moment that Monsoon Parker was idly speculating about Baby Joe Young, whom he believed to be on another continent, his train was actually chugging past a Kruzhka restaurant on Arbat street, where Baby Joe Young was sitting having a liquid lunch with Asia and Crispin, idly speculating on what happened to that little shitbird creep Monsoon Parker. His wounds were healing without complications, and although, to his extreme embarrassment and much to the amusement of Crispin and Asia, he was required to walk with a cane, he generally felt a lot better than he was entitled to for a guy his age who had taken such a shellacking.

  “I don’t know. I got a feeling this show ain’t over, folks.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s just an instinct. I’m not usually wrong.”

  “Well, you are this time. We’re going home,” said Asia.

  Baby Joe looked at her. He smiled, but there was something in his smile that said he wasn’t convinced. “What happened to the writer?”

  “I don’t know. I called her, but all I get is a service. Why, do you think something happened to her?”

  “I don’t know. All I know is that we’re at the ass end of the world, and we have all suffered, and I’m fucked up because of something that didn’t concern us and I never should have been involved with in the first place, all because of a series of coincidences which don’t seem like coincidences, and that somehow that little lowlife Monsoon Parker is mixed up in it, and there are a lot of loose ends. And there’s something that’s not right. I have a suspicion crawling around like a bug in the back of my skull. It’s nothing specific. It’s like a dog thing. A sense that something is going to happen that I need to do something about. A feeling that events have been set into motion that we don’t understand, but that have their own trajectory and will require a conclusion before it’s over.”

  “Well, like you said, it didn’t concern us. We were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. So now it’s the right time to get to the right place. Let’s go home.”

  “Well,” said Crispin. “Now that we’re on the subject of going home, I have an idea.”

  “Uh-oh,” Baby Joe said.

  “No, listen. Get this. Let’s go to Paris.”

  “What the fuck?”

  “Oh, yes. I’d love to.”

  “Look, Baby Joe. We’ve all had a shit time. You got shot. I got stung by some kind of swamp bee. Asia has had a very traumatic experience. But we’re okay now. There’s no reason we have to go straight home. We can go and have a wonderful vacation together. We’ll have so much fun. We can go to restaurants, and take a cruise on the Seine. Imagine. Notre Dame. The Eiffel Tower. Montmartre. Oh, come on, Baby Joe. What do you say?”

  “Yeah,” said Asia, taking his hand and smiling. “What do you say?”

  Baby Joe took up his beer and aimed a rueful smile in their direction. “I’ve got a feeling I’m going to regret this,” he said, “but what the fuck? Deal me in. Paris, here we come.”

  Crispin clapped his fat hands in glee as Asia laughed and Baby Joe chugged back his ale.

  ***

  Not for the first time, Fanny was in front of Khuy, although this time in an entirely different connotation. She was way ahead of him. For her, figuring out who was responsible for perforating Zalupa and scaling the R3 and the Fab 13 was about as difficult as Sherlock Holmes finding his pipe where it had slipped down the back of the sofa.

  In all the best crime shows, what do the robbers do? Vamoose. They split, make a getaway with the loot, and read all about it in the morning paper as they cackle evilly into their morning brew. And what do fugitives from justice do? Skedaddle. They hightail it, flee the scene of the crime—or in this particular case, flee the country.

  Mentally doing a Hercule Poirot and gathering all the suspects into the parlor to examine their motives and alibis, she concluded that while any, or all, or a combination of Endless Lee, Momo Bibbs, Hyatt, and Oleg could have had a hand in the deed, the guilty party would probably be the one that legged it. She doubted that Oleg had the cerebral wherewithal, and as for Lee and Bibbs, guys who have recently committed what they believed to be murder and absconded with King Solomon’s Mines-class riches don’t normally hang round in hotel bars in the early hours of the morning waiting to get into gunfights. Ergo…

  For security reasons, airline employees are strictly forbidden from giving out information concerning passenger lists and who was or was not on a particular flight. For job-retention purposes, airline employees steadfastly refuse to reveal the aforementioned information. Except in
cases where they are in the back of a rental car with Fanny Lemming’s lips around their dicks, in which case they will reveal not only the names of everybody who was on the flight, but also their onward destinations, their hotel reservations, what happened to Ambrose Bierce, who was behind the Kennedy assassinations, where Jimmy Hoffa is buried, and why fools fall in love.

  Which is how Fanny came to discover that Hyatt flew to Paris the day after Khuy got plugged, and that he had a reservations at the Ritz. She even got a free ticket after she threatened not to finish the job.

  ***

  As he boarded the plane, Monsoon stared into the cockpit and carefully examined the pilots to make sure they weren’t dead. That kind of dead-pilot-miraculous-escape routine could get old PDQ. Once he had established that the gods were not trying to pull the same fast one twice, Monsoon eased into his first class leather chair, which was smoother than a silkworm’s ass. Something felt slightly uncomfortable, but it was only the bulge of the eight thousand dollars he still had left, stashed in his back bin. That kind of discomfort he could live with.

  He sank back into the cool, luxurious embrace of his chair as the jet blasted down the runway and up into the grim sky. The frozen drizzle lashing the window heightened his sense of comfort and security. And luck. The transition—from a frigid railway station in Buttcracksville to a 747 en route to Paris and unimaginable wealth—had been surprisingly easy and uncomplicated. Monsoon had always known that money talked, but he never knew that it spoke fucking Russian.

  As soon as the seat belt sign went off, he hit the call button. Monsoon didn’t know what paradise smelled like, unless you were talking about the flophouse in Reno by that name, but the stewardess who immediately appeared by his chair in a cloud of sensual musk must have been a pretty fair representation. And her tits were definitely heavenly. Having had a good gander at the menu while he was waiting for takeoff, Monsoon decided to sample some exotic booze. He ordered an absinthe. When it came, he sucked it down, smacked his lips, lay back, and let the green genie take possession of his soul.

  Everything was going to be different from now on. The pendulum could only swing so many times before it stopped, right? A simple question of momentum. You toss the coin enough times, and sooner or later it will land on its edge. It had to balance out, as described by the unalterable laws of probability. Sooner or later a guy had to win one. And after so many horses pulled up lame, so many busted flushes, so many cocked dice, and so many dropped catches with all the bases loaded, he figured he was about due for the big smackeroo.

  So far so good, anyway. He looked down through wispy clouds at the Volga winding away into the distance like a giant’s piss stream, and at the grim gray landscape receding like a bad memory. Above were blue skies, and ahead skies bluer still, skies so blue you wouldn’t fucking believe it. On the back of the seat in front of him was a flat screen. The control was in the arm of his chair. His clicked it on and Michael Jackson appeared singing “Thriller.” Perfect. Monsoon rang the bell and ordered crème de menthe. Fuck that minty shit, he decided. He switched to Drambuie. Bit sweet, but hey, life was getting sweeter all the time. Watching old Michael give it big licks with the hips, he had an idea. What if I change Michael into Barry White?

  Monsoon smiled to himself and reached for the R3. He pondered it for a second. It looked like nothing—a cheap child’s toy, something you got out of a gumball machine. And yet it was priceless. It seemed inconceivable that the little doodad had the power to change the world, and more importantly, to change Monsoon Parker’s world. He aimed the R3 at the screen and squeezed. Nothing happened.

  It was such a startling occurrence that it was a full two seconds before Monsoon panicked. He shook it violently, he pressed it and poked it and squeezed it. He babbled to it frantically, hot whispered words of pleading desperation; he spoke to it sternly, he slapped it, he shouted and cursed and screamed imprecations at it. But nothing happened. The R3 stayed steadfastly silent, an inanimate, lightless, lifeless piece of black plastic. Monsoon sank back in despair, into the downy depths of his chair.

  Fucking Hyatt was right. It had vanished. Gone. Disappeared up its own asshole, taking his incalculable wealth with it. Monsoon chugged down his Drambuie mindlessly, the piquant warmth lost on him as a familiar black miasma of despair swirled around in his brain and put the big chill on his soul. Again.

  He looked at Michael, cavorting, leering, mocking. “I’ll fix you, you fucking zombie cunt,” he snarled. He threw the R3 at the screen. He missed. It smacked against the bulkhead and pulverized itself into a fine black dust that swirled in front of Monsoon’s stricken eyes like a murder of tiny crows, before floating gently down onto the rich, deep carpet and disappearing into the warp and weft. Disappearing into nothingness.

  Monsoon felt tears of frustration building in his eyes. He stabbed the button viciously. When the stewardess didn’t appear immediately, he stood up, cursing, and his bag fell to the floor. The Fab 13 rolled out. The Fab 13! The fucking Fab 13. Monsoon danced a little jig in the aisle and bent down and grabbed the Fab 13 and embraced it, waltzing around the cabin with it. Tears of frustration turned into tears of relief. Okay, so he might not be a billionaire. Well, fuck it then. Millionaire would just have to do. He pointed the Fab 13 at the screen like a weapon.

  “What have you got to say for yourself now, you moonwalking motherfucker?”

  The Fab 13 suddenly flashed neon green. The screen went black, then scarlet, then black again. And then there was Barry White, getting jiggy with it, shaking his walrus-of-love ass and singing “Thriller” like there was no tomorrow.

  Part 3. Paris

  This intro is longer than usual, so if anyone wants to cut to the chase, here’s the Hemingway version:

  It was an old city with a big tower that stood by a river and it had gone two hundred and nineteen years without a revolution.

  Otherwise…

  Many people believe that the city of Paris was named after the Greek mythological figure of the same name. Actually, the godly-beauty-contest-judging, wife-stealing, war-starting, poisoned-arrow-back-shooting little prick didn’t have anything to do with it. This is probably just as well, because one possible Ancient Greek translation of Paris is “backpack.” Kinda takes the edge off the romance, no? You can’t really see Ol’ Blue Eyes twisting his silky tonsils around a song called “I Love Backpack,” although no doubt it would have been a real beaut if he had.

  Paris gets its name from the Parisii. About three hundred years before certain significant events were taking place in the Middle East involving washings of hands and nailings to big crosses and the like, this tribe of snail-eating Gallic bastards camped out one night on the banks of the River Seine. They discovered it was a really good spot for frog catching, so they dug in, and have been there ever since. The Parisii were a Celtic people, which meant they were genetically and culturally related to the Scots and Irish, which in turn meant that the odd pitched battle or two was never going to be very far away.

  Shortly thereafter, with what was, for the people of the period, an almost monotonous predictability, the Romans showed up demanding that everybody behave in a civilized manner. The Parisii, being Celts, told them to fuck off. Cue pitched battle, etcetera etcetera.

  The Romans ran the show for four hundred years or so, calling the joint Lutetia, which is a slight improvement over Backpack, but only just. The Romans did what they were good at and knocked up a few forums and some baths and an aqueduct here and there, and laid down a couple of decent roads. But then the Germans started what would become something of a habit for them over the centuries, and they invaded France. And they proceeded to do what they did best, which was to fuck up everything that the Romans built.

  From then on, history began to unfold in its customary fashion, with one dude from one tribe proclaiming himself this and another geezer from another mob declaring himself that, and guys with handles like Clovis the Frank and Ragnar Lodbrok and Charles the Fat throwing punche
s and usurping left, right, and center. This went on until 987 CE when one Hugh Capet, Count of Paris, was elected King of France by his cronies, which established Paris as the Big Crêpe, and France as a bone fide nation-state.

  By 1348, the population was around two hundred thousand souls, and elbowroom was starting to be at a premium, but the big real estate agent in the sky sent the Black Death to thin things out some. Then, with the pecking order more or less established, and not having anything better to fight about, the French sorted themselves into Catholics and Protestants, so that they could get stuck into each other with proper religious fervor. Thereafter there were a few kingly scuffles, until the people got pissed off and the famous French Revolution kicked off and the people started to guillotine everyone in sight with a whiff of nobility about him or her, and Marie Antoinette discovered too late that it is best to keep one’s bakery opinions to oneself.

  All this guillotining and storming of Bastilles and similar set the stage for a short-arsed, bumptious little corporal from Corsica to take over the show and trigger decades of intercontinental strife, and build big arches everywhere to prove to everybody that his dick wasn’t as small as everybody said it was, but it also set the stage for Thomas Jefferson to stitch him up like a kipper in Louisiana and bring our little tale full circle.

  In between and around all this barbarity, Paris still managed to acquire a reputation as a place of enlightenment and free thinking, and also as a place where the people knew how to rustle up a decent plate of grub. Plus a gang of dissolute ne’er-do-wells from the left bank, with a fondness for absinthe and a tendency toward syphilis, began to paint their own particular reality, and Impressionism was born. Think what they could have done if Timothy Leary had been around back then.