The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2)

by Norwood, Shane

  “He’ll listen to me. He thinks I love him.”

  “And you don’t?”

  “Don’t be an idiot. Do you think anyone could love that nauseating slug? I played him. I was just after the same thing as you. And now you don’t have that either. But I know who does.”

  “So do I!”

  “Clever boy. But do you know where he is? Or where it is?”

  “No. Do you?”

  “At this particular moment? No. But I do know where they will be tomorrow, and when. Alphonso has already cut you out of the deal. So you need to be there, or you lose everything. And I can take you there. Of course, I would have to be alive to do that.”

  Hyatt stared at her hard, and then looked at Low Roll and Hard D.

  “Boys. Let’s step outside for a moment.”

  They left Fanny where she was. Low Roll helped Hard D to the door.

  “Okay. You two wait next door. Give the desk jockey some change to fetch a doctor who knows how to keep his trap shut, and get those leaks plugged. You gonna be all right for tomorrow?”

  “Sure. I’ve had worse.”

  “Lissen, kid,” Low Roll said, “you ain’t fallin’ for this shit, are ya? The lyin’ bitch is up to somethin’.”

  “Of course she is. But we’ll play ball until we find Parker. I’ll take care of her for now. I’m keeping her tied up, but Low Roll, you stay on your toes, just in case she tries anything.”

  “If you say so. But promise me one thing. When this deal is over, I get to chop the bitch into salami.”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, don’t go getting soft on me. Or her.”

  Hyatt grinned. “Quite the opposite, boys. Quite the opposite.”

  ***

  Monsoon came to with the undisputed champion of headaches and the crown prince of crust pain duking it out in the back of his skull. He tried to stand up, but felt dizzy and had to flop himself back down. He dragged himself to the sewer that passed for a bathroom and vomited. He struggled upright, clinging to the bowl for support. His head felt unbalanced. That was because it was. His whole face was distorted, his eye and cheek swollen, and he had a knot on the side of his head like a turkey’s ass. He made John Merrick look like John Barrymore. Strangely, there was no blood. He didn’t even bother to look for the R3. He staggered down the stairs and across the road into the bar.

  Obviously walk-in ambulance cases were a daily occurrence for the bartender, because he made no comment other than to ask Monsoon what he wanted to drink. Monsoon wanted everything to drink. He wanted to drink the whole fucking bar dry, and then move on to the next one and drink that dry too. He was desolate. Eviscerated. Gutted like a trout.

  Which particular deity had he inadvertently offended this time? Why was Beelzebub breaking his balls, and what was Osiris’s fucking problem? What was he supposed to do, sacrifice a goat, do a hajj, walk the Stations of the Cross, pluck his fucking eye out and give to Odin? Who did you have to speak to? Where did you write to complain? Who was in charge of the sucker-punched-by-one-eyed-midgets-while-agonizingly-close-to-fabulous-wealth department? And what was the story with all those bitches queuing up to slap him down? Was there a fucking list somewhere where they put their name down to be next in line?

  It was all getting too complicated and dangerous. What would happen when Nightingale found out he didn’t have the Fab 13? What would happen if he just didn’t show up at the tower? How long before Nightingale tracked him down? And Hyatt? Where was he, and how long before he showed up? And that goddamn Fanny. What was her angle? And Zalupa. That loose-cannon motherfucker was capable of anything.

  Suddenly this sauce had a little too much heat in it for his taste, and it looked like the only trading that was going to get done was lead. The smart move would be to split the scene. Cut and run, while he still had half a head left. Head to the airport and go the fuck home. He had enough of Hyatt’s money for a stake to get back in the game. Yeah. That was it. Go home. Fuck all those foreign cocksuckers.

  Monsoon allowed himself the luxury of wallowing in his misery and self-pity, lining ’em up and shooting ’em down, slamming down shot after shot of brandy and chasing it with piss-poor Parisian pantywaist beer. But as the spirits went down, Monsoon found his own starting to rise. The pain was abating and the nausea dissipating, and he was starting to be able to think a little more clearly. What the fuck, it was only one more gut-wrenching disappointment among many, just one more vicious mugging by the feckless fairies of fortune, nothing but another searing Vaseline-less ass reaming from the giant dong of destiny.

  Go home? With what? Sure he had some spare change left, but how long would that last? Or he could stick it out and go for the big one. Try and get the Fab 13 back. How hard could it be to find a one-eyed midget? And anyway, what did he have to lose? You might even say he had been lucky. An inch lower with the hammer and he might have been history. Maybe that was it right there. That was a lucky break. The luckiest. Maybe it was a sign that his luck had changed. Now all he needed was a demon plan.

  The guy next to him stood up and left. He left a newspaper on the bar. As the guy left, the draft through the door ruffled the pages of the paper. It opened to the racing page. Maybe it was another sign. This whole fiasco had got started with a newspaper blowing under the shithouse door. Fuck it, why not? He grabbed the paper and walked out to flag a cab to Longchamp.

  ***

  “So what’s the deal with the shine?” Low Roll said.

  “Fanny knows where and when the meet will take place.”

  “Oh, so she’s Fanny now? When did she get promoted from interfering, back-shooting bitch?”

  Hyatt let it slide. “Obviously,” he continued, “she is not prepared to reveal the details.”

  “She will if you let me cut her cunt lips off.”

  Hyatt let it slide again, although it didn’t slide as far as the first time. “So we all go with her. We go early. I go to the meet. You two scout the terrain. Get set up where you can cover all exits and entrances. When the spook shows, you blow him away. If my uncle shows up, grease him too. Don’t fucking miss this time.”

  “I told you, asswipe, I didn’t fuckin’ miss. The dog…”

  “Hang fire,” said Low Roll. “Supposin’ the big D wastes the shine, and then the shine ain’t got the goods about his person. We’ll be fucked.”

  “He will have,” Hyatt said.

  “How come you’re so sure?”

  “I know the type. He just wants to make the score and split. He doesn’t have the patience or the smarts for a waiting game. He’ll want to show the merchandise right off. Guaranteed the meet will be in a public place. Guys like him figure they’ll be safe in public places. Nightingale will know that, and he’ll try to strong-arm the R3 off him. That’s why we have to be sharp. If Nightingale makes his move before us, then we have to deal with him too, and it will get complicated. You guys have got to be sure. Hard D, you sure you’re up for this?”

  “Just watch me. But don’t forget the deal—we get the bimbo. Okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Okay.”

  “You don’t sound too convinced.”

  “I am.”

  “You ever see William Tell when you were a kid?”

  “No. Why?”

  “You should have. Then you’d know where the second bolt goes.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Just stick to the fuckin’ deal. Money ain’t everything to guys like us.”

  ***

  Balloons are part of our culture, and probably have been since the first caveman figured out how to inflate a bladder. They represent fun. Parties, birthdays, used car sales. They’re an allegory for freedom. Freedom from gravity, freedom from restraint, floating across the blue skyscapes of our minds since we were children. That’s why we love them. Most of us.

  Baby Joe Young wasn’t most of us, and Asia knew it, so she didn’t make a big deal of it when he told her to go have fun with Crispin and he would mee
t them later under the tower. People who love and understand each other don’t ask the people they love to do things they know they don’t want to do, because they know that the people who love them will do what they don’t want to do just because the people who love them want them to do it. Something like that, anyway.

  Baby Joe put Asia and Crispin into a cab, waved them goodbye, and headed to the Place Pigalle. It was something in his nature, some impulse that drove him to seek out the contrast, to see the muddied underbelly of the swan in whose plumes he had nested the night before. He liked the sadness, the washed-out colors of the daylight whore, bled white and pale by the night and the pain. He liked the hardness, away from the pomp and pretense. Pigalle was down-and-dirty, rough streets and rough people and hopeless, hapless, down-and-out sons of bitches fighting for scraps and lying in wait and paying the piper day-in and day-out with pieces of their souls like pennies laid down as a down payment to Charon.

  He was unmolested as he walked the square and the narrow streets beyond, and those who watched him as he passed, predators all, knew that one walked among them who would require blood for blood. And yet he knew he was watched. He felt it as he walked down a winding cobbled street, and he stepped into a doorway and quickly back out and back up the street, and as he did so someone at the entrance to the alley stopped and turned quickly back the other way.

  Baby Joe turned the corner and crossed a small square where a tramp lay sleeping on a bench and a pale light came through the trees and made shadows on the grassless earth and the used condoms and cigarette packets that lay there. He pushed through the swing doors of a small bar. It was very small, and only three tables were arranged on the unswept wooden floor. There were two stools at the bar. He took one. An African came to serve him, a scarred tribesman from Cameroon or Côte d’Ivoire, come from the heart of darkness to the city of light only to find a darkness greater still than that from which he’d come. The inescapable darkness of the truth.

  Baby Joe ordered a whiskey and a beer and he sat, listening to the murmured conversation from the table behind him, not understanding the words but knowing what was being said because it was what was being said at this hour the world over by drunken men who had been at their cups the whole night long. Baby Joe drank from his dirty glass and stared into the patina of half-light and smoke that existed in the space between his eyes and the fly-specked wall.

  Some men are born to peace and some men are born to war, and although they may believe they have volition they do not, nor is it anything to do with the places or the times they are born to. Those who are born to war and destined for violence will find it, even though stillness and tranquility be upon the land. Or it will find them.

  And those who are born to violence are also born with a sense of it, and know when it approaches, just as the animals know to turn their backs to the coming storm or to flee or huddle together for protection. But when the lion senses the presence of another, and when he hears the distant roars in the moonlight that echo over the savanna and still the beasts at their grazing, which he knows to be a challenge for his pride and his place, be he ever so old and weary, he goes forth to meet it. For he was born to it, and it is written in his blood and in the blood of those that came before him, and he has no choice, nor would he choose otherwise if he did.

  Baby Joe Young knew what was coming. He didn’t know why, or how. He did not have a whole picture but only fragments, pieces from a mosaic, but he knew what they meant. He could feel it creeping across the land like the shadow of a spider, and when the spider stalks, something will die, be it the prey or be it the spider, for that is the way of it.

  And he knew it had something to do with Monsoon Parker. How was that cloth woven? What eternal game, what jest? That man, not stranger, not friend, without the weight even to be an enemy, had appeared again like a harbinger in some Greek tragedy. What significance did he have? Was he the joker in the hand that life had dealt Baby Joe? Should he shoot him or fucking thank him? Without Monsoon Parker he would never have met Asia. He would never have fought the Don. He would not have been through that cycle of love and war and pain, and his life would be the poorer for it.

  And now this. He was in Paris. And shot. Again. The gossamer bonds of love that bound him to Asia had been stretched and tested, maybe even broken, and only the pain of the tear had brought them back together. And the circumstances. A sword forged and shattered can only be put back together again in the heat of the furnace. Whatever was between him and Asia had been within a hummingbird’s heartbeat of being history, but now it was back, burning more fiercely than ever, and that mongrel motherfucker Monsoon Parker had something to do with it.

  All this shit—Lundi, the Black and White minstrels, the Russian, Fanny the writer—was leading somewhere. Something was going down. Here. And soon. He knew. He could feel it. The boil was about to burst, and somewhere right in the middle of it was Monsoon Parker. And, without understanding why, so was he. And that meant Asia and Crispin. So what to do?

  He was on vacation, for fuck’s sake. Eat a few crêpes, see a couple of shows, drink a bottle of wine or two, buy a shit sentimental painting, and go the fuck home before the lid came off and the cookies get spilled all over the Tuileries? Or find the center of it. Preempt it. Follow the Valkyries to the killing ground, and kill it before it got the chance to hurt anyone.

  Why? Because it was there. Because that’s who I am. Because the beast love that existed between Asia and him fed off the danger and the blood and the roll-of-the-dice uncertainty and maybe needed those to survive. So what you’re saying is you’re going to find out what’s going on and stick yourself in the middle of something that doesn’t concern you, and maybe put your loved one in harm’s way because you love her? Something like that. That’s ridiculous. Yup. Fucking stupid. And anyway, you said you weren’t going to…I know what I fucking said. So you’re saying that that’s what Asia wants too. I think, deep down, maybe she does. You’re making that up, to make yourself feel right about doing something brainless. All this “love forged in war” shit is just an excuse. You’re just an old dog that wants to get into a new fucking fight. Could be. So what are you going to do? Find Monsoon Parker.

  These days, Phillip Marlow would have gone out of business. Now anyone can find anyone else, more or less. Anyone with a cell phone, a credit card, a sports watch, anyone who has an address, pays bills, pays taxes, votes, belongs to a club or a library, can be found by any ten-year-old kid with a PC.

  That’s why nobody could find Monsoon Parker. Monsoon didn’t exist in cyberspace. The streets that he inhabited and the corridors that he walked and the alleys that he stalked were off the radar. The shit hotels and flophouses he stayed in, the greasy spoons he ate in, the skid row whores he frequented, didn’t take plastic. They all dealt in the cool, crisp green. The only tangible evidence was his rap sheet, and that could only tell you where he had been, not where he was. In the States, he was the Invisible Man. In Paris, he was the man with no name, on the dark side of the moon, at the bottom of the thirty-nine steps, disguised as Will O’ the fucking Wisp.

  But Baby Joe had at least an inkling of where to start looking. It had to do with human nature. Or, in Monsoon’s case, subhuman nature. People like to feel comfortable, even lowlife scumbags. So, in any town in the world that has a significant population of lowlife scumbags, where is their comfort zone in daylight hours? The racetrack.

  Baby Joe stood up to leave. A slender dark figure took the stool next to him. It moved its hands. As Baby Joe turned his head there was a sound like a suppressed sneeze, and a cloud of fine white powder flew into his face.

  ***

  “She fucking played you, man. She fucking played all of us. You, me, Alphonso, all of us. She just wants the R3 and the Fab 13. She doesn’t care about you. She’ll do or say anything, or fuck anybody, to get what she wants. I say we waste the bitch.”

  Hyatt was desperately studying Khuy Zalupa’s eyes, to see if his words were having an
y effect. To see if they were going to make the difference between him descending from the tower using the elevator or taking the more direct route.

  It had, thus far, been an afternoon of not a few surprises, and it was hard to say who was the more surprised. Maybe “surprise” was not the best description of the expression that passed across Hyatt’s face when he saw Khuy Zalupa lumber out onto the top floor observatory of the Eiffel Tower. Perhaps complete-lower-bowel-prolapse-abject-mortification-heartbeat-skipping-mortal-terror would have been better.

  But whatever you wanted to call it, Hyatt’s sphincter muscle meltdown was equaled by Alphonso Nightingale’s confused stupefaction at seeing Fanny Lemming, a.k.a. Fatima Habibi, breeze out onto the roof with Hyatt. Especially when she smiled winningly and said, “Hi, baby,” as if she had just popped out for tea and scones with her mates.

  Such a strange and uncanny dynamic held the group together, such a fine balance of gravitational attraction and repulsion, that it was difficult to escape the conclusion that there was more at work than coincidence, and that some malicious, mischievous, immortal motherfucker was pulling the strings to make the marionettes dance. Any combination or permutation of Fanny, Hyatt, Zalupa, and Nightingale other than the current one, or any sequence of arrivals and meetings other than the one that actually took place, and either Hyatt or Fanny or both might have found the trip down a good deal shorter than the one up.

  As Nightingale listened to Hyatt’s desperate ass-against-the-wall bluster, only half-paying attention to the implications while simultaneously calculating how to deal with the latest complication, he gradually became aware of the non-appearance of Monsoon Parker.

  “Messieurs, before anybody is…’ow you say…wested, we ’ave to conclude business. Now, en fin, ’oo ’as ze transformair?”