The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2) (47 page)

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 punches 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.

Around 1870 or so, La Belle Époque wafted into town, and for a while it really was “La Vie en Rose.” If, that is, you happened to have the odd franc lying around, and were not one of the uncounted thousands of peasants wallowing in the slime making it all happen for the perfumed dandies hanging out at the Ritz. The pneumatic tire was invented by Édouard Michelin, the Lumière brothers showed the first movies, and Louis Pasteur developed antibiotics and a rabies vaccine, which came in pretty handy if you lived in the same town as Paul Gauguin.

Labor was cheap, so the
nouveau riche
didn’t have to worry about wiping their own asses; the champagnes and absinthes were going down by the gallon in the cabarets; Auguste Escoffier was filling people’s faces with haute cuisine; literature, music, and the arts flourished; and things were really swinging down by the Seine and cooking on the Champs-Élysées.

In 1889, Paris hosted a World’s Fair. They called it an Exposition Universelle, which was fair enough. It was their fair, so they could call it whatever they wanted. But not every Parisian was entirely thrilled when Monsieur Gustave Eiffel proposed the erection of a humongous metallic schlong smack-dab in the center of their civic pride. Nobody does committees quite like the French, and a bunch of
artistes
and intellectuals and self-appointed guardians of the French aesthetic, including Guy de Maupassant, formed a committee of three hundred to object to the structure, arguing that it was “ugly, useless, and inappropriate.” Monsieur Eiffel formed a committee of one to tell them to fuck right off, and he built it anyway.

The original deal was that the tower was supposed to be scrapped after twenty years, but it was raking in so much dosh from sightseers that it was allowed to stand. So far, 250 million people have forked out wads of francs and euros to climb it, not to mention the astronomical number of postcards and replicas that have been knocked out. In fact, the Japanese got so fed up with the amount of yen that was being splashed out on shoddy souvenirs of
La tour Eiffel
that they built one of their own in Tokyo. And it’s bigger than the one in Paris, so there! The point here, though, is that in its day it was an engineering marvel, the tallest building in the world until surpassed by the Chrysler Building, and has since become the instantly recognizable and enduring symbol of Paris, and has been a giant success in every respect. So who’s ugly, useless, and inappropriate now, boys?

1889 was a big year as far as Parisian identity went, because that was also the year that the Moulin Rouge opened, and voilà, the gals stared waving their knickers in everyone’s faces and giving the front row a good eyeful of perfumed Parisian gusset. Actually, the can-can, which means “scandal,” had been around for a while, but it really started to get wild, especially with Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec gimping around painting every crotch in sight. Of course, he was a good height for it.

In 1914 a bit of global unpleasantness put a stop to all that frivolity and people prospering and enjoying themselves nonsense, but when that particular turkey shoot was done and dusted, Paris flourished once again, and the crème de la crème of the literary world arrived to spend all day getting completely shitfaced in the boulevard cafes and talking a load of pretentious shite with the other legless literati, before staggering off to their garrets to write some of the greatest novels in existence so that Gertrude Stein could tell everybody it was all her idea in the first place, before going home herself to scribble down more unintelligible, childish gibberish and call it art.

In 1940, when the jolly, jackbooted Germans panzered into town again, it put the mockers on the pen party for a while, but before they could fuck up everything that the French had built, they got booted right in their kaisers and hightailed it back to the Fatherland, with Ernest Hemingway hot on their heels, making sure that the Teutonic bastards hadn’t scarfed all the champers out of the Ritz on their way out.

In 1968 the students and unions got a bit uppity and started heaving a few cobblestones in the direction of Charles de Gaulle, which was really no way to be treating the man who was in large part responsible for their still having any cobblestones to throw in the first place; but at least Mick Jagger wrote “Street Fighting Man,” so all’s well that ends well.

So as you can see, it hasn’t always been a bed of roses in “The City of Light” but, throughout a long and turbulent history, the one thing that has remained constant is that it is still a really good place for catching frogs.

And there she still stands, in all her glory and fading beauty, a grand old lady who hides the heart of a harlot behind the dowager’s sad and enigmatic smile that she wears as she mourns the gentility and elegance of her glory days, and remembers her lovers and suitors, those who wooed her with a poem and a lover’s whisper, and those who fucked her senseless, and as she remembers the stately march of her days through the ages, before there were thousands of mad bastards daily careering round the Arc, tooting their little French horns. Perhaps she even harbors a slight nostalgia for the turmoil and upheaval that every once-upon-a-time shook her foundations and rattled the glass in her windows, when the martial music flared and she thrilled to the sound of the guns.

Well, old girl, be careful what you wish for, as they say.

Chapter 16

People in jail make promises to themselves. Principally, they make promises to themselves about what they are going to do when they get out of stir. Like go straight, go to the park and feed the ducks, go to a fancy restaurant, get into a bath full of Heinz tomato ketchup with three hookers and a ukulele, find out where all the jurors live and eviscerate their cats and burn their houses down, that kind of thing.

Alphonso Nightingale promised himself that he would find Fanny Lemming—or Fatima Habibi, as she was calling herself then—and, after recovering his diamonds of course, have a land mine surgically implanted into her womb before having her buried underneath the penalty spot at the stadium of the Paris Saint-Germain football club.

But first, he had a little business to take care of. Apparently some ungrateful swine had attempted to take advantage of his incarceration and take over his organization. During the course of the customary repercussions and beggings for mercy and pleadings for forgiveness, etcetera etcetera, one poor unfortunate promised that he could make Alphonso, if not richer than God, at least up there with Gabriel and the boys, or girls, or whatever it was they were supposed to be. Naturally old Alphonso was a little skeptical, as people have a tendency to say anything when their dick has been sown into the mouth of a dead mackerel and they are suspended over a compound full of starving pelicans. But angels get their golden harps from somewhere, and what did it cost to listen, so Alphonso gave the nod, which seriously pissed off the pelicans.