The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2) (58 page)

“
You forgot to say ‘or else.’ If you really want to intimidate someone, you have to say ‘or else.’”

Monsoon looked from one man to the other. It wasn’t a reassuring sight. Zalupa looked like he could go a few rounds with Hellboy, but Monsoon knew what Baby Joe could do. You could almost hear the squealing tension, like nails on a blackboard, or a freight train with the brakes jammed on. The dragon and the demon hissed and shrieked from their soul cages, frantic to be at each other. Monsoon wasn’t sure what the line was, or who he thought would win if it came to it, but he was sure that he had to get the fuck away from those psychos pronto and get to the meet, and that if he managed to start something he might get the chance to run for it. He tried to pour a little oil on the fire.

“
If you want me, you’re gonna have to fucking take me, pizza face,” he said.

Zalupa turned a glance on Monsoon that was so full of undiluted malice that he actually felt his bladder loosen. But he didn’t move. Instead he smiled. It was even more piss-in-your-pants-inducing than the glare.

“
Nice try, sambo,” he said, getting up slowly without taking his eyes off Baby Joe. “Nice meet you. Next time we meet, and trust me, will be next time, won’t be nice.
Ponyal
.”

Zalupa backed away from the table slowly, just as the waiter rushed up with a bottle of vodka. Zalupa grabbed it, guzzled half of it without taking his eyes off Baby Joe, poured the rest slowly and meaningfully out onto the grass, dropped the bottle, and turned and walked out.

“
Shit,” Monsoon said, suddenly able to breathe again. “I never figured on him to back down.”

“
He didn’t,” Baby Joe said. “So, now that we’ve got the pleasantries over with, start fucking talking, before I change my mind and hand you over to laughing boy.”

Despite Khuy’s intimation to Monsoon that he had located him by sophisticated sleuthery, it had actually been blind providence aided and abetted by shortsighted coincidence. It’s not easy for a hippopotamus to do undercover work, and Khuy knew that in the Ritz he would be about as incognito as a pterodactyl in a duck pond, so he told the terrified taxi driver to drop him at a nearby hotel from where he would be able to stake out the joint.

As they were driving past the Bois de Boulogne, he’d seen Monsoon Parker scuttling through the gate. He jumped out and followed. He closed the distance to fifty yards, and then lurched along behind on the shady side of the path. The park was full of revelers and strollers, young lovers cooing and billing, elderly couples and children playing, people riding bicycles. The light fells in bright shafts through the trees and dappled the emerald green lawn with elaborate shadows. It was a scene of tranquil beauty, and Khuy Zalupa stalked through its heart as a thing alien and inimical, a dark nightmare beast prowling through a sunlit midsummer’s daydream.

Khuy knew that guys like Monsoon Parker didn’t go for walks in the park, so when he saw the sign for Longchamp racecourse, he’d figured out where Monsoon was headed. He cut through the woods and stationed himself in a dark glade beside the road to the main entrance. He had timed it to perfection. There were crowds of people heading into the course, but the people in front all had their backs to him, and there was a gap between Parker and the following group, and he was walking in isolation. The people were all excited, laughing and joking, and nobody was paying much attention.

As Parker passed the tree behind which he was skulking, Khuy reached out and grabbed his arm and dragged him into the deep shadows. As he grabbed Monsoon’s arm, Khuy was mildly surprised by the size and tone of his biceps and triceps. He had expected Parker to be feeble. For that reason he put a little more weight into his punch than he had intended. The pork knuckle fist cracked Monsoon under the chin, and his head snapped back, and he was out before he flopped down onto the soft, luxuriant grass.

He went down so hard that Khuy experienced a moment of panic that he might have killed him, and thus complicated the search for Fanny, but a quick feel of his carotid artery reassured him. Khuy sat next to Monsoon to wait. He noticed how well dressed the little bastard was. He was wearing a Lacoste shirt and Pierre Cardin pants, and Khuy could tell they were real. And look at the fucking watch! Patek Philippe no less. The
pizda
must have scored some cash from somewhere. Good. Call it compensation.

Khuy undid the strap of Monsoon’s watch. It didn’t even come close to fitting around his ape wrist. He stuffed it in his top pocket. He rolled Monsoon over and pulled a fat wallet out of his back pocket. He opened it, ripped out a wad of euros, and shoved them into his own pocket. He tossed the wallet into the grass. It flopped open with a driver’s license face up. Out of curiosity, Khuy reached out and picked it up, and looked at it.

“
Oh, fuck,” he said.

He clambered to his feet. He looked at the people milling through the turnstile. Oh, well, what the hell? He was hot and thirsty and he might as well get a free drink out of it. He ducked out of the shadows and headed toward the track, leaving Tiger Woods sleeping peacefully under the tree behind him.

***

“
Look down. Look down. The drop or the blade, my beauty. Fall or bleed.” Lundi sounded like a B-movie sci-fi robot. His words came in a sibilant, triumphant, reptilian hiss through his electrolarynx, and slithered through his lipless mouth. His good eye peered, glittering and nasty, filled with gleeful malice. The snake king. The prince of poison poised for the kill. The balloonist lay bleeding on the floor. He never knew what hit him, or why.

Lundi pointed the knife at her throat as he leered at her nakedness. Her clothes lay in a pile on the floor of the basket. It was long and thin, a shining surgical promissory of pain. It was a Japanese yanagi-ba. A sushi knife.

Crispin was comatose. Rigid with terror and also naked, he stood, wedged into the corner as far away from Lundi as possible, his arms hugging himself in a tight embrace, and his eyes locked into the distance, his mind gone, escaped, far away from the fiend and the horrible things that were happening. He saw himself at a white piano, wearing a white suit and a white top hat, and there was a white rose in a white vase on top of the piano, and the audience was cheering and clapping and he was smiling the biggest smile in the world but there was no music and no sound except the whistling wind.

“
It seems a shame. But then, nothin’ I ain’t already had. Look at me.”

Asia looked at the floor of the basket.

“
Fucking look at me
.”

Asia jumped. She looked at Lundi despite herself. And then she could not look away. She was mesmerized by the cobra. She stared at his hideous, destroyed face, his sightless eye, the pale, mottled skin, the yellow rat teeth and pink frothy gums in the lipless gash of a mouth.

“
See how handsome I am. Your boyfriend do this to me. You hear me speak. Him steal away my voice. Twice he do things to me. Now it my turn, my pretty
putain
. I follow you. Halfway round the world I follow you. An’ you lead me straight to him. Oh, don’ worry. I have sometin’ special planned for him. Pain and sufferin’ like you wouldn’t believe. Like you wouldn’t even know how to understand. But first he have to know ’bout you. See this knife. This knife cut so fine. So thin. So decide—the knife, or the jump?”

Lundi crept toward her, swishing the knife backward and forward through the air in front of her face.

Crispin metamorphosed into a terrible butterfly. His face actually physically darkened, as if a black cloud had passed overhead. His teeth ground together as if they would break, and a great glistening bubble appeared at his lips. He began to tremble as if beset by some palsy. Evil, terrifying memories flooded his brain. Swamps and goats and drums and sweating, writhing bodies and deathly paralysis, and terror and pain. His eyes rolled up into his head and his body went into a spasm. A low keening noise came from the back of his throat rising to a high-pitched, spine-chilling shriek. He charged forward, eyes sightless blanks, his arms outstretched as if in some bizarre game of blind man’s bluff.

Lundi spun around and slashed with the blade, but it was too late. Crispin brushed his arm aside and grasped him in a crushing waist hold, and lifted him from the deck of the gondola. Lundi writhed with all his force, but Crispin was possessed of a demonic strength, and Lundi was helpless in his grip. He grabbed Crispin by the neck, kicking and biting. His nails sank into Crispin’s pudgy flesh. Crispin bore him toward the edge, and the abyss, as a child bears a doll. As Crispin heaved him over the side, Lundi lifted his legs and clasped his thighs around Crispin’s waist, and locked them like an ardent lover.

Asia’s scream rang out clear and high into the blue Parisian sky as Crispin and Lord Lundi tilted in each other’s embrace over the rim of the basket and plummeted toward the trees and lawns of the Bois de Boulogne, three thousand feet below.

***

“
Guinness Book of fucking Records, here I come,” Hard D said. “That Canadian guy Rob Furlong dropped that motherfucker in Afghanistan at 2,600 yards last year, but nobody, and I mean no-fuckin’-body, has ever seen anything like this.”

“
You gonna talk all day, or ya gonna shoot?”

“
Well, gimme some fuckin’ numbers, dipshit.”

Low Roll consulted his battery of instruments. “Okay. Cosine minus twenty-three, wind speed 5.3 knots, combined air speed eight knots, declination 14 degrees, degree of compensation eight right, estimated drop from parallel 52.9 milliradian, travel time seven seconds, ballistic deterioration sixty-three percent, distance to target 3,010 yards, increasing one yard per second, and your fat ass is causing a seventeen-degree tilt to starboard in the fucking basket, so you’ll need a bit of Kentucky windage. Got that, Hawkeye?”

Hard D was in a state of ecstasy. His cheeks were flushed and his eyes were shining. “This is going to be the greatest shot ever made,” he breathed. “The greatest shot in history.”

His fat finger was a butterfly kiss on the trigger. He inhaled deeply and let the air drift slowly from his lungs. The crosshairs were microscope-steady, hovering just above and to the right of the ear. Hard D listened to his heart. He waited for the interval between diastolic and systolic. He increased the pressure on the trigger by a fairy’s wingbeat.

Something heavy slammed onto the top of the balloon. Hard D twitched. The report was clear and crisp in the high thin air. Hard D called out, “
No, no, NO!
” He wanted to call back the bullet. He peered desperately through the scope—and watched in shock and disbelief as Hyatt’s brains splattered all over a blond-haired schoolkid who was standing by the rail, looking through the giant binoculars.

***

Monsoon Parker was a great many things, but suffragette wasn’t one of them. So it was ironic that it was the women’s suffrage movement that came to his rescue. Or at least an occurrence related to it. A man as immersed in the world of all things gambling as Monsoon was could not have failed to see the black-and-white footage of when Emily Davison dashed in front of King George’s horse at the Derby in 1913, nobbling an odds-on shoe-in, and getting herself wasted in the process.

The incident was in the back of his mind as Monsoon was spoon-feeding Baby Joe, dishing out the bullshit one mouthful at a time and watching how it was going down. He was carefully measuring each bite, calculating how much he could get away with. He was skating around the edges of the truth, using the bare bones of the known facts as a framework on which to fabricate a web of fabrications. He had to keep it plausible, and string it out long enough to give himself time to figure out how to make a break for it.

What was it with that fucking oaf? How come the big lug kept showing up every time he got within sniffing distance of scoring, to put the mockers on the deal? Was it those supernatural shitbags again? What was the name of that interfering Greek bitch who kept running around dealing out retribution and generally fucking with people? He bet it was her.
Well, fuck her, and fuck Baby Joe too. Not this time.

“
So, that’s what all this shit is about?” asked Baby Joe. “A fucking dildo?”

“
More or less.” Monsoon said.

“
So where is it now?”

“
Good question.”