The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2) (31 page)

“
Ya gonna drink all that yerself, ya bladdy drongo, or ya gonna go halfers with yer fucken mates?”

Bjorn Eggen froze with the bottle halfway to his lips. He turned his head toward Wally, infinitely slowly, as if afraid to discover that the voice he heard was a figment of his imagination, or that the black figure that inhabited his peripheral vision was some dark troll, arrived from its stygian lair to mock him in his age and his grief.

His still-piercing blue eyes opened wide when he beheld Wally, and then brimmed with tears. “Wally? Wally? That you? Haf you really come?”

“
Nah, it’s Rudolph the red-nosed fucken reindeer. Course it’s me, ya nong.”

Bjorn Eggen stood and creaked toward Wally. Wally met him halfway. The two men embraced. Two old dogs at the end of their days, standing by a frozen lake at the ceiling of the world, with mist rising around them and the bare trees stark against the snow and the sun slipping to darkness and memory. Bjorn Eggen made no attempt to stem the flow of his tears, and any such attempt would have been in any case futile, because the joy he felt at the presence of his friend in that moment chased all care from his heart and forebode all restraint. He clung fiercely to the old man who had travelled half a world to be with him, and cried like a baby.

“
Oh, Wally. Sank you, my friend. Sank you. You haf no the idea vat this is meaning to me.”

“
Shut up, ya silly old fart, and hand over the bottle before I start fucken blubberin’ meself.”

Bjorn Eggen released Wally and handed him the bottle, and smiled as the neck disappeared between the black limpet lips, and Wally sucked back the brew and turned half away so that his face should be hidden from his friend and his own tears not revealed.

***

They argued vociferously, but finally Momo Bibbs gave in to the wishes of Fanny Lemming, and they agreed upon Penelope Cruz. Momo had to concede that she looked seriously poky with her Mohican as she replaced Robert De Niro in
Taxi Driver
, but he didn’t think Verne Troyer was so hot in the Harvey Keitel part.

Lee Heal was sitting in Khuy Zalupa’s office. They were talking turkey.

“
You prefer wing or leg?”

“
Gimme some of that dark meat.”

Zalupa passed Lee his plate. “More vodka?”

“
Fuckin’ A.”

“
So. Now you see R3 work. You like?”

“
Khuy, my man, that shit is going to revolutionize the entertainment industry. The possibilities are literally endless. Everybody, and I mean every swinging dick, is going to want one a them puppies. We are going be up there with Mr. Gates, boy. So what’s the next move?”

“
Next move is you give me ridiculous large sum of money as agree. I give you R3. You be very rich. I be very happy. Iz not same thing.”

“
Very philo-fucking-sophical. Okay, Socrates. I’ll bring our guy around tomorrow. If he says it checks out, we’ll have the dough ready to transfer, and we make the switch. Okay?”

Khuy Zalupa said “
Da.
” He looked at Lee Heal for a long moment. There was something conveyed in the look that Lee did not enjoy. Zalupa abruptly stood and lumbered away without another word. Lee stared at his receding bulk. The man was a bear. A dangerous, unpredictable bear. He knew what he was going to have to do.

Lee walked back into the other room. Momo and the woman were still glued to the TV.

“
C’mon. We gotta go. Let’s split.”

Momo looked at Lee, then back at the screen, then back at Lee again. He stood up, reluctantly, and followed Lee out of the door. He had really been enjoying Danny DeVito’s performance as the Incredible Hulk.

***

Oblov the Sloth was busy occupying himself doing fuck-all. He was a master at the art of strenuously avoiding all forms of work while continuing to earn unmerited promotions on the back of other people’s efforts. The irony of it was that if he had chosen to apply himself instead of being a fat idle bastard, he could have been a pretty decent detective. He had the gray matter for it. But maybe that was the problem. Maybe he was too smart to see any percentage in putting his ass and his life on the line for six hundred rubles a month and a shit apartment in a crap neighborhood full of Chechen refugees and embassies from countries nobody had ever heard of.

The only time Militsiya Major Leonya Oblov ever motivated himself to get his fat crack out of his chair and into his clapped-out Lada Kalina was when he got a direct call from one of the big knobs in the Kremlin. Which was why it was so annoying when his phone rang just as he was busy deciding to have kholodets or vareniki for lunch. He sifted through the piles of unopened letters and empty cigarette packets on his deck to find the receiver.

“
Oblov. What do you want?”

“
I want you to stop being a useless fatass waste of government money, but unfortunately, that is impossible.”

“
Ah, General Schmenkovich. How nice to hear your voice.”

“
No it’s fucking not. Go to the airport. Some Americans are arriving. They are Black and White. You are to cooperate fully in any way you can. Do you understand?”

“
Yes, General.”

“
Good. Now what about the investigation of the people that died by the Country Club?”

“
General, I have personally…”

“
You have personally done jack shit, you fat twat. Well, there is another one to add to the list. The manager of the club carked it this morning.”

“
Do you believe the deaths are connected, General?”

“
No. I believe it is pure coincidence that seven people are dead within a one-mile radius, that they all died of radiation poisoning, and that two agents from the USA are about to land in Moscow investigating some missing polonium, you cretin. Go to the fucking airport.”

***

Baby Joe Young was a cold fish, scaled and eviscerated, his eyes blank and immobile as he stared out of the window of the plane at the endless black nothingness below, punctuated occasionally by tiny clusters of sad lights, accentuating the darkness and isolation below. And in his heart. He felt nothing. Hollow. Devoid of the will to even think. A succession of images floated across his brain. He recognized them as memories but they were meaningless, as if they belonged to someone else. They invoked no sadness, no joy, no regret, no melancholy sense of the passing of the days, no bittersweet pangs of longing and desire. Nothing. They were pages turned in a magazine, idly gazed at and forgotten. Baby Joe was motionless. He was travelling at five hundred miles an hour, but he was as still and silent and timeless as a broken clock.

Does my heart still beat? Do I care? Does it matter? Where I am going? What difference does it make? Now? You knew this was coming. You predicted it. But you still weren’t ready. And now? And now nothing. Just wait. What will happen will happen. The wind will blow, the tide will turn, the sun will rise to its zenith, the stars will glitter, you will inhale and exhale, you will sleep and wake, the shadows will grow long and recede, the leaves will fall, the flowers will grow, there will be others, there will be blood and tears and music. It will be what it will be. It was always going to be what it was going to be. You knew that. Yet you weren’t ready. You were not ready.

***

Khuy Zalupa awoke to the sun coming through the high window of his villa. The motes swirled in the beams, and shadows were angular against the wall. Outside the window the bare, stark branches pointed away, as if trying to draw his attention to something that waited outside. What waited? Who knew? Nothing can protect you from that which comes.

He looked down at Fanny as she slept. Even in sleep she was radiant. He had not been ready for this. This happiness. It was hard to understand. He felt strangely light and without momentum. As if he drifted. The thing that had driven him was gone. The hatred. It had been the keystone upon which his existence had been constructed, and it was gone. The howling rage, the bitter jealously, the blood hunger for revenge, the need to inflict pain so that his own might be assuaged, the need to inspire terror, the need to be feared and hated. Gone.

He was sinking into some terrible contentment, seeing things as if for the first time, hearing things, noticing things. He was wise enough to know what it meant. It meant that as a sadistic, sociopathic scourge, anathema to the good and the kind, he was more or less fucked. There was only one way to go from here, and only one way this ended if he didn’t. The alpha male could never just quit, never just step down. He had to be brought down, harried into a corner and torn to pieces, his remains fought over by the pretenders. That was the way of things. Without the will, he would not survive, and the will was gone.

So he would just leave. One day. Soon. As soon as this shit with the Americans was finished. Then they would just vanish. Gone. From Moscow, from Russia, from sight and memory. To where? Who cared! She could decide. Somewhere where she could be happy. Where they could be happy. Where maybe they could even…!

But wait. He couldn’t get ahead of himself. There was still business to be taken care of. The Americans were dangerous men. They would not be happy when the R3 ceased to function. And in any event, they intended to try something, that was for sure. Just as they must be certain that he was going to try something. Which he was. And what of his own people? They were animals. Sharks. They had shark senses. They would begin to wonder. They would begin to sniff the air for the scent of carrion. Soon they would understand. They would realize. And when they knew for sure, the pack would begin to circle. The hunt would begin. He needed time. He needed a demonstration of brute power to keep the wolves at bay until he was ready to make his move.

***

Low Roll and Hard D both detested flying, but for entirely different reasons. Hard D hated flying because, even though he made special arrangements, paid for two seats, and had the dividers removed, his ginormous, bulging butt would still be crammed so tight that his circulation would be cut off and he would have no sensation in his ass for hours after the flight. Plus he could never watch the movie, because his stomach obscured the screen. Low Roll hated it because of the food, and even though he always ate his portion, plus the two portions assigned to Hard D’s two seats, it was never enough, and he was perpetually hungry.

“
I hate fuckin’ flyin’,” he observed.

“
No more’n me, pally. It stinks. I don’t know why we gotta go all the way ta Commieland any ways. What? We ain’t got enough people to shoot in America?”

“
Well, Rolly, strictly speakin’, they ain’t commies no more. I hear they even got McDonald’s over there now.”

“
I don’t care if they go to church on Sundays, love their moms, and eat apple fuckin’ pie, they’re still Russians. The sooner we stretch whichever stiff we’s supposed to stretch, and get back to civili-fucking-zation, the better.”

“
Hallelujah to that, brother, hallelujah to that. Hey, grab that stewardess, wouldya?”

Hard D cranked his head around and said, “Hey, sweetcheeks, howzabout a coupla more cocktails over here.”

Hard D watched the stewardess’s buff buttocks flounce down the aisle. He would have liked to grab his dick, but he couldn’t reach it.

***

Lee Heal didn’t come by his vast wealth by accident. Or, perhaps indirectly, he did. Lee had worked upward of sixteen hours a day every day for twenty years to get where he was. But then again, it wasn’t that he had a whole lot else to do.

Lee used to have this girlfriend, see. She was into heavy-duty hardcore body modification. Piercing and branding. She told him that if he stuck a number nine industrial washer around the base of his glans, it would give him the ability to drive any woman wild. So the inevitable happened, and when he couldn’t get it off gangrene set in and they had to amputate his helmet. He had to leave town shortly thereafter, when “I love you Endless Lee” began to appear as graffiti on the walls of his neighborhood.