The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2) (52 page)

Monsoon turned back to the bar. The barman was still rat-faced, greasy, and unshaven. He looked around. Everything was still normal. He hefted the bottle to his mouth and swallowed. So what if the old fart was on the level. What do you do—save the world or own it? Have wealth and privilege beyond the dreams of sultans, or turn over the doodad and let everybody continue on their own ramshackle road to ruin and destruction at their own pace? Difficult decision. Like fuck it was!

“
Sorry, Daddy-O,” Monsoon said. “No can do, I’m afraid.”

Something jabbed him in the ribs. He looked down and saw a silenced Luger. Not for the first time, he was given cause to wonder what it was about Lugers that made them look so much more evil than other guns.

“
Then I’m afraid you leave me no choice. If you do not take me to it, I shall shoot you dead, right now, on this spot, and hang the consequences.”

Monsoon looked into the old dude’s flinty eyes. He looked like he was pretty good at hanging the consequences. Monsoon’s brain was frantically flicking through his mental rolodex of bullshit-your-way-out-of-potentially-life-threatening-situations routines. He tried to play for time. “If you know where it is, why don’t you just go and get it?”

The barrel slammed into Monsoon’s belly. “Don’t be naïve as well as stupid, you retard. You
are
it. The infection must be eradicated. Let’s go. Oh, fuck.”

Monsoon saw Ooglas’s round academic eyes widen in shock, and then Ooglas split, scuttling for the back entrance with his head tucked in his collar. Before Monsoon could turn around to see what had spooked Ooglas, he felt a hard hand on his shoulder, and felt rather than saw himself enclosed by two looming figures. He expected to turn around and see the two jokers from the gallery, so he didn’t know whether to be surprised or alarmed to see Alphonso Nightingale and Basilisk. He decided his best plan was to stick to the ice man routine.

“
Glad you could join me. How’d you know I was here?”

“
Don’t be a…’ow you Americans say…sheet-for-brains all your life. Zis is Paris. Ah know everysing zat ’appens ’ere. ’Oo, what, when, where, and why. No one can ’ide from me in zis city.”

“
You set me up, you cocksucker.”

“’
Ave a care, mah friend. People ’ave died for less zan calling me a cocksuckair. Ah ’ave set up nobody.”

“
Oh, no? Then it must have been Bob Hope and Bing fucking Crosby after me. I must have made a mistake.”

“’
Oo was after you?”

“
Come on. You mean to tell me that you didn’t send them? The blob and the anorexia case.”

“
Ah know nossing of zis.”

“
Oh, no? Then how come you never showed up in front of the po-faced bitch with the thumb up her ass?”

“
Ah would like to say you are not as stupid as you look, but it would not be true. Do you seriously expect anybody to conduct such a transaction undair ze eyes of ze best camera system zis side of Monte Carlo? And even if ah was such an imbecile as to walk round wiz fahv millions in cash, ’av you any idea ’ow big ze fucking case would ’av to be? Ze gendarmes tend to ask questions when zey see someone walk into ze Louvre wiz a fucking suitcase,
non
? Not to mention ze little mattair of a demonstration.”

“
So why did you agree to the meet, and why were you sitting outside the Louvre in your convertible with two gorillas and your little gay dog?”

“
It was a test.”

“
Of my integrity?”

“
No. Your fucking stupidity. Congratulations. You ’av passed, wiz flying colairs.”

“
So now what?”

“
So now, we do sings my way. Be at ze top of ze Eiffel Towair tomorrow afternoon at five. Ah will be zere. Alone. I will ’av a computair. You will ’av ze device. I will ’av a Jean Reno movie downloaded. You will change ’im into anybody ah specify. When ah am satisfied, I will transfair your money, using ze same computair.”

“
I don’t have a bank account.”

“
Well zen. You ’av until five tomorrow to get one. Welcome to ze twenty-first century, Monsieur Chimpanzee.” Nightingale got up to leave.

“
Wait, wait,” Monsoon said. “What if those two show up again?”

“
As ah said before, ah do not know ’oo zey are. ’Owevair, do not worry. Ah will ’av someone taking care of you, and if anybody bothairs you, ’e will take care of zem also.
À demain
.”

***

So, let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that you’re an unprincipled, bottom-feeding, double-dealing, scum-sucking, shyster, African-American-Scandinavian-Vietnamese Tiger Woods-looking motherfucker, recently arrived in a foreign city where you don’t speak the lingo, carrying what is quite possibly the most valuable object on the planet, which is thirteen inches long and more or less transparent, in all likelihood being sought by several people who want to retrieve it and kill you in the process, on your way to do a deal with a Corsican Mafioso who will in all probability try to kill you in preference to paying you…What’s your plan?

At what point does instinct become preferable to thought? When does animal cunning supersede intellect? When does the fox lead the hound into its own trap and fuck it up the ass? How do you simultaneously checkmate Bobby Fischer, fill an inside straight against Steve McQueen, outdraw Wild Bill Hickok, dirt-box Marilyn Monroe, and end up on the next first class one-way flight to Tahiti with enough dough in your bin to make sure that you never have to go without oysters for the rest of your life, and a billfold so fat that you need a hydraulic press just to fold the fucker?

These were the questions that Monsoon Parker was asking himself as he sat in the back of his cab on the way to Place Pigalle. As the taxi pulled off the main drag and into the narrow, greasy, gray cobbled streets, Monsoon suddenly started to feel more at home. It might have been on the other side of the big pond, but sleaze was sleaze whatever flavor it came in, and Monsoon instinctively felt he was back in his natural habitat. When he saw a minus-one-star hotel called La Goulue with a picture of some fat bitch kicking her legs in the air and waving her crotch in everyone’s face, he told the cabbie to stop.

La Goulue was perfect. Even the cockroaches were minor-league. Monsoon booked two rooms on opposite sides of the uneven corridor from the hotelier, who was some kind of one-eyed Moroccan midget. When she gave him the keys, he didn’t know whether she was winking at him or just blinking. He went into one room, scattered his few meager possessions around, and rumpled the bed. Then he went into the other room. It had a tiny balcony overlooking a narrow street. Below and across the street a bar was in full swing, even though it was only early afternoon. Next door, someone was giving someone the high hard one, and the thin walls were pounding, and the cheap bed was creaking, and Monsoon could almost see the woman looking at her watch over the john’s back.

On the balcony, in a big red clay pot, was a wilted palm or something, which looked like it was wishing it were the fuck back in Mozambique, or wherever it came from. Monsoon dug around the base, lifted it out, planted the Fab 13, and put the plant back. The plant looked pleasantly surprised. Monsoon prized the keys off both key rings and swapped them, and then went down and handed them to the Arabian Cyclops. That time she definitely winked, there was no doubt about it.

He went across the road into the bar. Perfect. He was invisible. It was the United Nations in there. There were people from all over the world. Men and women from all the former colonies of the empire were huddled in corners or scrunched up at the bar. It was incognito city. If Mike Tyson had been break dancing with Magic Johnson, nobody would have noticed. Monsoon eased up to the bar between a tattooed gal in a red dress with a face like a Gillette, and what looked like a Polynesian rugby player in a nun’s outfit. He ordered a beer and back, and turned his back to the bar and surveyed the room with satisfaction. So far so good. Just another refugee scumming around in the dregs of the big P. There was absolutely no chance in the world that anyone would find him or recognize him or pay him any attention whatsoever. Monsoon looked over to a corner where three women sat huddled around a bottle. None of them was exactly Audrey Tatou, but hey, what the hell? Monsoon smiled. They smiled back.

***

Ever see the original version of
Nosferatu
? Imagine being a Parisian cab driver and having that motherfucker sitting behind you all the way from Orly Airport into the city center. That’s how the guy who was driving Khuy Zalupa’s taxi felt on the way to the Ritz. He had been a cabbie for thirty years, but it was the first time he had ever driven off without waiting for a tip.

Khuy’s trauma had left him with a ghoul-like pallor, which had done nothing to improve his appearance, nor was it improved by the more or less permanent scowl that inhabited his features. They say football is a game of inches—survival is a game of millimeters. Apart from having the constitution of a honey badger, Khuy had been fortunate to the point of miraculousness. Aorta, liver, spleen, and spinal cord, all missed by an angel hair, the bullets churning through flesh and muscle, clipping and chipping a bone or two here and there, popping the odd blood vessel, but missing the vitals by microns: the difference between life and the big sleep, the distance between Tinker Bell’s twat lips.

Khuy wasn’t as good at giving blowjobs to airline employees as Fanny. But when it came to giving blowtorch jobs, he was second to none. Which was how he came to discover that Hyatt had taken a flight to Paris and had a suite booked at the Ritz, and how he came to discover that Fanny had also taken a flight to Paris and had a suite booked at the Ritz. Which is how the green monster of suspicion rose once again from the bubbling slime pool of his mind, slobbering and drooling, and drove all pain and suffering from him, and compelled his punctured and punished flesh on the road to revenge. Which, coincidentally, happened to be the road to Paris.

***

Sometimes you just had to laugh. There was nothing else to do. This irony wasn’t delicious; it was fucking delectable. Alphonso Nightingale! Perfect. Fanny headed straight for the Ritz and checked into her suite. Using her cell she called reception and asked for Hyatt’s room. No reply. She put on her best Princess Grace outfit and went to sit outside in the bar to see if the egg came before the chicken.

It turned out the dickhead came before either one, and the world wasn’t small, it was microscopic. First that weird Tiger Woods-looking guy that she had seen hanging round Khuy’s place showed up, and then Alphonso. A first-degree intrigue was developing. Did that mean Khuy and Alphonso were connected? Shit, wouldn’t they have some stories to swap in the men’s room? Or was it something to do with Hyatt, or was the spade a free agent, or what? The deal had more possible connections than LAX.

But you know how to solve a puzzle? One piece at a time. So as soon as Nightingale flew the coop and Monsoon came out to play again, she turned on the pheromones. It wasn’t as easy as she thought it was going to be to get Monsoon into her web…it was easier. She was just a little concerned in case he slipped on his own drool going up the stairs.

Once inside his room, all it took was a flicker of the tongue and a hint of heaving bosom to get him to reveal his conversation with Alphonso Nightingale in every detail. Monsoon was sharp enough not to spill the beans entirely, but she garnered enough information to be able to come up with a pretty clear picture of what was going on. She correctly figured Monsoon for a non-reader, who therefore would not have read any of her books, and would therefore be susceptible to the old dropped-earring ploy. Just to make sure, although she was sure that it wasn’t necessary, she allowed Monsoon a surreptitious glance at the sweet place just north of Thighsville, which revealed to him that she was wearing no underwear, and he skipped to his own slaughter like a spring lamb. When she said, “Oh, no, my diamond earring. I think it rolled under the bed.” Monsoon was on his knees faster than a penitent on judgment day. His gullibility was so childlike and endearing that she didn’t sap him as hard as she perhaps should have, but it was okay because Monsoon had a glass back of the head.

She didn’t waste her time looking in the obvious places, giving Monsoon credit for at least not being a total klutz. So she opened the AC, took the back off the TV, checked the lining of the curtains, checked inside the tubes of the toilet rolls, emptied his shaving foam, and pulled the plant out of its pot. She was almost disappointed when the combination of his wall safe turned out to be 666. She pulled off his trousers and checked his asshole, just to be on the safe side, but by that time she was convinced that he didn’t have the Fab 13 or the R3, or, at least, he didn’t have them with him. She was just going to have to eyeball his meet with Nightingale.