The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2) (56 page)

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 any 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?”

“
The what?”

“
Ze transformair, ze machine, ze fucking sparklair, ’oo ’as it?”

“
The creep does,” said Fanny. “Monsoon Parker. He stole it from Hyatt after Hyatt swiped it from Khuy. I was just trying to get it back for Khuy.”

Some surreal game of spoof was taking place, with everyone trying to figure out what everybody else was up to.

Khuy was looking from one face to the other, trying to read their expressions, strenuously wrestling with his desire to start throwing people off the tower, beginning with Fanny, while simultaneously strenuously wrestling with his desire to believe Fanny, all the while castigating himself for being a sucker, and keeping any leftover brain capacity for figuring out how to get his hands on the goods first, and trying to guess who really had them. He was also trying to figure out how many of the people up there pretending to be tourists were actually Nightingale’s people, in case he had to start getting physical.

Hyatt was stalling and sweating, hoping that Low Roll and Hard D would get into position and take care of Zalupa before his uncle’s simmering bitch’s brew of rage bubbled over and he started severing family ties. And family throats. But if Alphonso saw Zalupa go down, he would realize that Hyatt had the drop on him, and would be compelled to reconsider the consequences of unsound business practices, and play the deal straight. Then the shine would be easy to take care of, and he could turn Fanny over to Alphonso as a sweetener.

Alphonso’s brain was performing mental chiropractic, clicking facts into alignment like vertebral discs. Fanny’s presence, of course, explained why Antonio Lo Vuolo had dropped off the radar, and her relationship to Hyatt was made clear by the video of her using the R3 that Hyatt had sent him. Hyatt’s
pantalon
-pissing reaction when he saw the Russian made it obvious that there was some dastardly double-crossing afoot. What wasn’t clear was how come all these people suddenly crashed the party, or how they’d even found out about it—but they had to be dealt with before the Zouave showed up. But the timing had to be right. The time to act would be when he got the call from his people that Monsoon was in sight, then he could give the signal. As for Fanny, she looked so magnificent up there, framed against the blue Parisian sky with her hair blowing in the wind, that he was seriously toying with the idea of forgiving her. After he had tortured her to find out where his diamonds were, of course.

Fanny was looking remarkably serene, but the permutations were bouncing around in her brain like popcorn. She knew she could slink her way out of it, but it was like defusing a bomb. If you didn’t cut the wires in the right sequence,
adiós
ass. She knew that Nightingale was on home turf, obviously had backup, and had the upper hand at the moment, but she couldn’t start schmoozing him too heavily in case Khuy did a Vesuvius. And where were the two boys from the bathtub, and what did Hyatt have up his snotty little sleeve? As she was wondering whom to pucker up to, the situation took the turn from Strangeville to Weird City, missed the light, and ended up in Insaneola.

First, Hyatt fell over. Sound travels a mile in approximately five seconds. That meant that by the time the faint, distant pop of the rifle reached his ears, he didn’t hear it, because he had already been dead for nine and a half seconds. Alphonso reached inside his coat, and three people started to close in quickly. Basilisk appeared from behind a group of schoolchildren and rushed forward. Khuy moved with a speed that took everyone by surprise. He slapped Alphonso in the mush and grabbed Fifi Foufette. He cocked his arm like a quarterback, with the dog clenched like a ball in his hairy fist. Alphonso looked stricken.

“
Give gun, or dog go over,” Khuy said. “And tell gorilla move back.”

“
Do as ’e says,” Alphonso snapped. The three people, two men and a woman, stopped and began to ease backward. Basilisk stood his ground, glaring at Khuy.

“
Basilisk,” Nightingale hissed.

Basilisk backed off. Alphonso slid the gun out and handed it over, butt-first.

“
Fanny. Go elevator. If you telling me truth, wait downstairs. If you no there, I know truth, and you know what happen.”

Fanny moved over to the elevator. Khuy and Alphonso stared at each other in silence. Alphonso had blood running from his nose. The dog squirmed and whimpered. Khuy pinched it. It yelped. Alphonso took a step forward, but Khuy stopped him with a look. The staring match resumed. It was a surreal scene. One group frozen in a tense tableau, isolated among the sightseers milling about oblivious to the fuse that burned among them, as if existing in some alternate dimension.

Khuy waited until the elevator doors closed behind Fanny, and then began to edge toward the stairs. A woman screamed. People craned their necks and began to approach. A spreading pool of blood had gathered around Hyatt’s head. Khuy used the people as a screen. He shot the lock off the door at the top of the stairs and kicked it open. People began screaming and scattering when they heard the shots. Alphonso came running up. Basilisk was right behind.

“
Don’ worry,
ma chérie
,” Alphonso called out to the struggling dog. “Papa will save you.”

“
I no think so,
pizda
,” Khuy said, pitching the dog over the railing. Alphonso screamed and ran to the rail. The woman and the two men followed. Basilisk turned his head and looked back at Khuy, just in time to see himself shot in the gut. Alphonso watched in horror as Fifi Foufette plummeted through the air like an albino bat and zinged into the crowd below.

He raced to the top of the stairs with murder in his tearstained eyes. He stepped over the fallen Basilisk and started shooting blindly down the stairwell. But Khuy Zalupa was long gone. When Khuy Zalupa got to the bottom of the stairs, so was Fanny.