The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2) (4 page)

In the end, it didn’t turn out too badly. Sitting on the golf cart it was difficult for people to tell that he was wearing his safari jacket with his legs forced through the sleeves as makeshift pants. And they even let him keep the toy koala.

***

Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky in the morning, sailor’s warning. So much for that shite. The previous evening had been a glory to behold, the cumulonimbus a fiery furnace to rival Hades, the sky ablaze as if God had forgotten to turn off the gas. And the morning was seriously grim. Low petulant clouds, snarling squalls, an intermittent but quickening wind picking up from the north, the sea choppy and unpredictable as hell. At least the fish would be happy. No one in their right mind would be going out in that shit. Least of all him. The only way to look at this sea was through the window of the bar.

Baby Joe winced as he stood up. Four years and the bastard still hurt. He grabbed his Driza-Bone full-length stockman’s oilskin coat and his Akubra slouch bush hat from the hook behind the door and went out. The wind kicked up as he turned onto the main road, and the rain came in heavy and he had to pull the brim of his hat over his eyes. He turned at the gate and whistled. Drover the blue heeler came bounding out of his kennel, with his ears back. He jumped up and Baby Joe patted him on the head.

“
Shit weather to be out in, Drove,” Baby Joe said.

Drover looked at him with an expression that was the dog equivalent of saying, “Well, what the fuck are we doing out in it, then?”

Baby Joe stopped at the mailbox. Inside was a package with a United States postmark.

“
Look at this, Drove. All the way from the good ol’ US of A. And sent express, no less. What do you reckon it is?”

Drover looked at him with an expression that was the dog equivalent of saying, “I’m a dog. How the fuck should I know?”

Baby Joe shoved the package into his pocket, and Drover skipped at his heels as he headed down the wharf. The wind billowed and Joe had to step back as the spray came over the breakwater. He looked at the boats jostling in the swell and listened to the pinging of the shrouds against the masts. He had always loved that sound. The windows of the pub were misted as they climbed the short flight of heavy stone stairs to the side door.

Inside it was warm and welcoming, and they had the fire going. Baby Joe took a seat in an alcove under the window where he could watch the rain lash the glass and see the high dark clouds scud by overhead. The barman brought his pint of Guinness over without asking, and a saucer, and Baby Joe poured a drop of the black stuff into it and placed it on the floor. Drover scarfed it up and curled up under the table at Baby Joe’s feet.

Baby Joe downed his pint, and the barman brought another, and Baby Joe said, “Cheers, Mick. Listen, will you tell Boogo that he might want to tighten his lines some? She’s a little loose and might smack the wall if it picks up.”

Mick turned and shouted over to the bar where Boogo stood with a roughhewn crew.

“
Hey, Boogo, ya fucken fat useless bludger. Baby Joe reckons ya need ter tighten yer fucken lines, ya nong.”

Boogo grinned and raised his glass. “Good on yer, mate.”

Baby Joe returned the gesture and went back to looking out of the window. He could see his reflection against the darkened sky, looking back in at him like some half-transparent apparition. The ghost of Baby Joe Young. Sometimes he felt like one. As if he was fading away, melting into the dreamtime.

He knew Asia felt it too. He was surprised how much he missed her. He had felt guilty because he was secretly glad that she was leaving, but now that she was on the far side of the world, he wished that she were back. She had only been gone for two weeks, but it felt like two years. He resented the time that was going by, to be subtracted from the total that was left to them, the bizarre and unfair mathematics of love, one kiss minus one caress minus one heartbreakingly beautiful moment of togetherness, plus the rest of your life equals…zero. It was happening exactly as he’d told her it would, but being right didn’t make it any easier.

Their love was like something finite, a dwindling resource that became more precious and rare with each drop that evaporated. Cupid had turned out to be an Indian giver after all, giving them love and then stealing it back, and now it felt like he was trying to hold a cloud in a fishing net. They were like two people on either side of a crevice that was widening, and neither one knew how to get to the other side, and neither one wanted to jump. And being afraid to jump and not wanting to are two different things.

He was on his fifth pint before he remembered the package. The paper was damp where the rain had seeped through the open flap of his pocket. Inside was something uneven. He tore the end off and tipped the contents out onto the table. It was a doll.

“
What the fuck?”

He picked it up and examined it. It was made of some kind of china or plaster, and was shaped like a woman. It had long red hair. It looked like Asia. He checked the envelope. There was nothing else inside. No letter, no note. Nothing. He examined the doll closely. There was nothing about it to give him any clue as to what it meant. No signs, no inscriptions, just smooth white porcelain or whatever it was. He looked at the postmark on the package. Shreveport. Had Asia sent it?

Was it a joke? If it was, he didn’t get it. Maybe this was part of it. He always used to get her jokes. He set the doll on the table.

Boogo walked past, on his way to attend to the ropes on his boat. He wasn’t sailing on an even keel. As he drew level with Baby Joe’s table he staggered and banged against it. The doll fell and broke in two on the floor.

Boogo bent down unsteadily to pick it up. “Aw, jeez, Joe. I’m sorry, mate. I dint me ter. Shit.”

Baby Joe looked at him and smiled. “Don’t sweat it, Boogo. I’m too fucking old to play with dolls, anyway.”

“
Jeez, what a useless prick I am. I’m sorry, mate,” Boogo said again as he headed for the door.

Baby Joe looked at the doll. It had split across the torso. The break was clean. Baby Joe fitted the two pieces together. Nothing that a drop of glue wouldn’t fix. He put the two half dolls back on the table. As he did so, he saw what looked like a piece of paper inside. He tugged it. It came out. It was a rolled-up photograph. It looked like people standing together, but he couldn’t see clearly. He reached into his pocket for his glasses, but they weren’t there.

He shouted, “Hey, Mick. Lend us your bins. I forgot mine at home. And bring me another gauge while you’re at it.”

Mick came over. “Glasses and a glass,” he said.

“
Fuck me, Mick. How can you see through these? Drover’s ass is cleaner than these.”

Under the table Drover wagged his tail when he heard his name, then went back to sleep. Baby Joe wiped the glasses on his shirt and looked at the picture. It was Asia and Crispin in a bar somewhere. She looked beautiful. Crispin had his arm round her and a massive grin on his fat face. He had some kind of cocktail in a tall glass in his free hand, and was obviously out of the game. Baby Joe turned the photo over. Someone had written on it in red ink, but it wasn’t Asia’s handwriting. It said:

Unfinished Business!

Baby Joe frowned. Once again, he didn’t get it. He examined the picture. And then he froze. Behind Asia was a tall, dark man with a thin, ghastly face. He wore a black Fedora. Long black hair fell about his face from under it. He was staring directly at the camera. He was smiling, but it wasn’t that kind of smile.

“
Fuck,” Baby Joe said aloud. “Lord Lundi.”

He was halfway to the door before Drover woke up and raced after him.

Chapter 2

Thus do the fates toy with us. On the 14th of January in 1973, while Elvis was performing the world’s first worldwide telecast from Hawaii, four babies were born.

While Elvis was singing “Love Me Tender” in a lightless and loveless goat-shit hovel on an icy tributary of the Don River, a howling blizzard drowned out the cries of a newborn boy whose mother would soon lay dead and cold in the snow outside. His father, a winter-hearted bastard who would hate the child for the sake of the dead mother, called him Yermak. But the men who would come to know him and fear him would call him by another name.

The first words Michael Montcalm Robinson heard were the lyrics to “Heartbreak Hotel,” which was playing on the radio when he was hauled out of his mama and into the bright world in a one-room chicken shack next to a white wooden church in Saint Bernard Parish, Louisiana. Michael did not cry, even after they gave him a mean slap. And there was something else. Something that had people reaching for their mojos.

In Paris, in a three-story townhouse above a café in Le Quartier Latin, in the 5th arrondissement, Jean-Jacques Nightingale listened to Elvis singing “Blue Suede Shoes” on a small transistor that he held to his ear as he paced anxiously up and down in the corridor outside the room where his son, Alphonso, was being brought into the world. News of a drug deal gone wrong called the father away before Alphonso was born, and the father’s eyes were closed by gunfire before they were ever lovingly laid upon his son.

On a quiet street in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a couple of miles from Kirtland Air Force Base, Lieutenant Colonel Mortimer Day of the USAF sat in his Mustang with the radio on, listening to Elvis singing “Hound Dog.” A black lady in a starched white dress came and stood on the verandah. She was his sister. She held his newborn daughter, wrapped in swaddling, close to her breast. Lieutenant Colonel Mortimer Day climbed out of the car, walked across the trimmed lawn, and took tiny, miraculous Lucretia Day in his arms. As he did so, the tears rolled down his ebony cheeks.

Born worlds and miles apart, separated by culture, language, background, and gender, sharing little but a human genome, different in just about every way that it is possible for human beings to be different, Yermak, Michael, Alphonso, and Lucretia were set then upon an immutable trajectory, their courses cast and defined, unalterable by coincidence or intent, invulnerable to accident or act of will, so that on the day that Paul McCartney would celebrate his sixty-fourth birthday, an ill-starred convergence would begin that would bring all but one of them to destruction.

***

A couple of centuries ago, Khuy Zalupa would have been thundering across the vast Steppe on a wall-eyed steed, laughing at the stars, his saber flashing in the sunlight, with blood on his furs and a terrified and screaming—but secretly quite flattered—woman draped across the front of his saddle, and the fires of destruction burning in his wake.

These days, he was tooling down Nevski Prospekt in a Jaguar S-Type Convertible, laughing at the neon, his Cartier flashing in the lights, with soup stains on his Polish knocked-off Armani suit, and a giggling, pouting—but secretly quite terrified—woman draped across the back seat, with the stub of the two-hundred-dollar cigar he had just tossed out of the window burning in his wake.

Khuy Zalupa was a Don Cossack, an unsightly and fearsome individual, with the face and disposition of a warthog with a particularly painful testicular infection. Physically, he was a monstrous apparition summoned from a poisonous blue-cheese-and-tainted-oyster nightmare. Psychologically, he was as a man traversing the dark chasm of lunacy on a burning tightrope, on ice skates of real ice, and his soul resonated with a constant mournful howling, like the lonely wolf song of his ancestral Steppe, echoing the vast frozen distances that separated him from the companionship of his kind. He harbored a pain that could never be extinguished and a hunger that could never be fed, and his flawed diamond of a mind was a glittering repository of barely contained incandescent rage that yearned to shatter into brittle shards and slash the face of the mocking world to ribbons. For revenge.

In his defense, his formative years on the banks of the River Don had not exactly been an uninterrupted series of nostalgic sepia-colored picture postcards of pastoral innocence and bucolic idyll, and his particular Don did not flow quietly. And never would.

Growing up in brutal poverty and privation in a harsh land, he enjoyed neither parental affection nor any kind of solace in the company of his fellows, who feared and rejected him with the instinctive loathing of the herd for the different, the deformed, the Frankenstein’s thing despised. The girls were disgusted by his repugnance. As he grew in strength, the only thing he was spared was mockery, for none dared.

He was born six days’ ride from Rostov, on a night notable for its bleakness even in a succession of such nights, and despite the weather the orthodox priest who christened him Yermak Timovitch would not keep vigil and rode out into the bitter cold and driving snow, crossing himself on the threshold and never looking back. His mother, Yelena, bled to death in the snow three days later, her cries unheard and unheeded above the screeching gale, and his father, Constantin, a hard and cruel man in any case, never forgave him for it, and spoke barely a word to the boy other than in recrimination for the next thirteen years.