The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2) (69 page)

“
Baby Joe,” she said tenderly, “can we go home now?”

***

The windows of Fanny Lemming’s villa were shuttered over. Her roses were dead. The water in her pool was yellow and filled with leaves. Her Ferrari stood in the garage, covered in dust, with a flat tire and a dead battery. Her computer screen was dark, her notes untouched.

She went out only to eat dinner at a bistro on the corner. She wore dark clothes and dark glasses and tied her hair in a scarf. She sat in the same table in the corner and spoke to no one. She ate a sparse meal, drank a bottle of wine, and went home. She could not sleep in darkness. She dared not, because of the unsupportable terrifying nightmares that assailed her. And therefore she sat, night after night, keeping vigil over the lonely sea, drinking and weeping. Keeping at bay the dreaded demon-inhabited dreams. Only in daylight could she sleep in peace. Her waking hours were a torment of anguish and remorse, of longing and regret.

She knew she had pushed her luck too far, had dared the devil to a game of skill and had been found wanting. She was a shell, a hollow woman devoid of everything except brutal memories, bereft of will or desire, her imagination stifled, replaced by a bitter, profitless knowledge. She started drinking more and more, dulling her tormented brain, anesthetizing herself, sinking into a lightless void from which she knew there was no return. And she didn’t care.

Until one day there was a sign. It was small, a tiny seed of hope in a parched desert of disillusion, a candle on a windswept midnight prairie. But it was enough, and she knew from that moment on that, in time, she would be all right.

She came out of the bistro on a summer’s evening when the air was still warm and the sun yet hung over the ocean. A small girl was standing by the door, crying. She was a beautiful child, with long golden hair, and the setting sun gleamed on the tears that ran down her cheeks. For the first time in as long as she could remember, Fanny felt a stirring of emotion. She bent down to the child.

“
Are you lost?” she asked.

“
No,” the girl said, “Mama and Papa are inside.”

“
Then why are you crying?”

“
I broke my doll. Look.” The girl held out a doll. Its head had come off.

Fanny reached out and took the doll from the child. “Oh, don’t cry,” she said. “Don’t worry. I’ll fix it.”

Fanny took the detached doll’s head and twisted it back into its socket. She handed it back to the girl. “There you go,” she said, “good as new.”

The little girl beamed at her, wiping the tears from her cheeks. Fanny smiled down at her and turned to go.

“
Can broken dolls always be fixed?” the girl said.

Fanny stopped. She stared at the little girl, and at her eyes, wide and expectant, waiting for an answer. She looked at the red sun pendant upon the world’s edge, still warm and full of promise for tomorrow. Fanny pulled the scarf from her head, and shook her hair, and let it blow free in the breeze. She let the scarf go, and watched the wind skitter it across the road onto the sand, and away down the beach. She turned back to the little girl.

“
Yes,” she said. “Yes, they can.”

***

The guy whose job it was to clean the jet that had brought Monsoon from Moscow to Paris didn’t have much of a life, all things considered. He was an Algerian, from a goatshit village at the foot of the Atlas Mountains. His parents had come to France in the sixties, looking for a better life. What they got was a crumbling apartment on the outskirts of Paris, surrounded by destitutes, drug dealers, and religious fanatics, and a two-hour, three-bus ride every day into the city to work for twelve hours a day for the price of a loaf of bread and a piece of rat-gnawed
fromage
and, if they were lucky, a hunk of sheep that had died of old age over the weekend. It made goat shit and flies seem like a nostalgic memory.

Abdul, as he was called—along with half the population of his village—didn’t draw the short straw. He hadn’t drawn any straw at all. He was stunted, had no wife or even the remote possibility of ever having one, suffered from scoliosis and a skin condition, and had an unfortunate focal arrangement whereby one eye was an inch higher than the other.

The day that he cleaned the plane had been particularly exhausting and discouraging. A student protest had meant that he’d gotten to work four hours late on a bus full of broken windows. It meant that when he finished work he would have no way to get home and would have to wait for five hours for the buses to start running.

With a deep sigh, he commenced cleaning the carpet. There was nothing else to do. As he manipulated the vacuum cleaner, he reflected upon the kind of life enjoyed by the people who flew on the plane, and contrasted it with his own. He was almost fifty years old, but it didn’t stop him from weeping.

As he zooped the rich pile between the luxurious chair and the video screen, he became aware of the sense of being imbued by a strange kind of energy and an unwonted sense of optimism. He suddenly recalled a song from his childhood and began to sing it. He saw a crescent moon over the desert, and palm fronds glowing in the moonlight, and the starlit dark ripples in the oasis as the herders dipped their buckets.

He had a sudden urge to be outside under the naked sky. He turned off the cleaner and headed for the door. He banged his head on the bulkhead, which was strange because it was at least a foot over his height. Even stranger was the fact that he had to duck down to get out of the door. Outside, the distant lights of Paris were like an enormous heart, gently beating with love and desire and possibilities. It was twenty miles, but it seemed no more than a footstep away.

As Abdul paced lightly and swiftly along the road to the city, the darkness seemed to melt away before him and be replaced by an unearthly light. Abdul was unable to account for that, and so attributed it to his sudden onset of
joie de vivre
. And so he never realized that he was glowing. A weird, pulsating, atomic green.

***

Outside of Ray Charles, a couple of guys in Tibet wearing orange robes and banging gongs all day, and maybe a kiddy or two trying to keep the flies of the cow’s asses in the Sudan, most people know what the Mona Lisa looks like. Every year around six million people pay to stand in front of it for an average of fifteen seconds. It is the most storied, discussed, analyzed, copied, and parodied picture in history. If you close your eyes now, you can probably formulate a pretty good mental image of it. The gal looks pretty good for being five hundred years old. She got swiped once. For a while, Pablo Picasso was one of the suspects. The gendarmes even pulled him in for questioning. But it turned out it was an inside job. She only showed up again after a couple of years. After a couple of whack jobs threw things at her, they finally put her behind bulletproof glass, in a climate-controlled environment, where nobody could ever tamper with, remove, or otherwise molest her ever again.

Which is why there was some confusion, dismay, and not a little panic when the people queuing up to enjoy seeing the most widely known and reproduced image in history gazing back at them enigmatically from some imagined, distant, elysian past, saw instead the mug shot of a bloke who was a dead ringer for Tiger Woods, grinning out at them maniacally from twenty minutes ago.

***

Lucretia Day got a commendation. She should have gotten a promotion, but she didn’t. She thought about that while she was convalescing. It wasn’t the promotion that bothered her. It was the other thing—the silence. The people who should have called didn’t. And the way people were with her. It wasn’t anything specific, just a subtle realignment of allegiances, a distancing. As if the word was out.

She realized what it was. No one said anything, but they were blaming her. The establishment had screwed up by not picking up on Huckleberry Hicks, but they were letting her take the rap for it. Nothing official, but it was implicit in the way she was being treated. The brass had decided to let her take the fall for their fuckup. And it wasn’t on. No way. Okay, so she could have rumbled sooner, but he had everyone fooled, and ultimately it was her who had resolved the issue. And her who got fucking shot. Lucretia was pissed.

That’s why, when she came up for active duty again, and they told her to pick up where she left off on the case she had been working on when the deal with the polonium came up, she told them to pick up her badge and shove it up their hypocritical, conspiratorial asses. Maybe that’s what they really wanted all along, because they let her slide quietly out the door.

She went home to New Mexico and mooched around, thinking things through and figuring where to go from there. She saw an ad in a magazine. An international company, with branches in five different countries, was looking for security people, specifically people from an intelligence background. She sent her résumé. They called a day later and gave her an appointment for an interview in New York. She knew they were legit, and interested, because they paid for her flight and accommodation.

She got to the Big Apple a day early. Fanny Lemming was doing a book signing for
Womb Raker
in the village. Lucretia went. She waited until the crowd thinned out, making sure she was the last person in the line. Fanny looked older, and weary, but still beautiful.

“
Hi,” she said.

Lucretia sat down. “Hi.”

Fanny studied her. “Do I know you?” she said. “You look familiar.”

“
Albuquerque,” Lucretia said. “Billy’s Long Bar. We had a drink together.”

“
Oh, that’s it, yes. Now I remember. Did you miss your bus again?”

Lucretia smiled and shook her head. She opened her purse and pulled out a copy of
The Spy Who Gloved Me
. It was a first edition, wrapped in cellophane. She placed in on the table in front of Fanny.

Fanny looked at it, then at her. She pulled a moue. “Lucky, right?”

“
Yeah, that’s right. Lucky Day. And it’s for you, hon,” Lucretia said, standing up.

“
What do you mean?”

Lucretia smiled at her. “There’s your fingerprints back. Case closed.”

Fanny stared as Lucretia walked across the shop floor and out into the street.

Lucretia took a cab to the interview. It was at some kind of a gallery. She was shown into an atrium. It was beautiful. It had high stained glass windows, and there was a fishpond and a mosaic floor, and heavy ornate vases filled with white gardenias, and the water in the pond softly gurgled as she sat in the plush satin chair and drank the coffee she had been given.

“
Is there anything I need to fill out?” she had asked.

“
Oh, that won’t be necessary,” the secretary had said. “You are going to be offered the position. You come highly recommended, and your résumé is very impressive. The interview is more of a formality, really, just to see if the terms and conditions are to your liking.” She had assumed a conspiratorial tone. “Just between you and me, we need you. We’ve been losing a lot of stuff just lately. Anyway, we won’t keep you long.”

The secretary smiled and walked out, leaving Lucretia with her coffee and her thoughts. After five minutes, a door opened and a man walked into the foyer. He was handsome and tanned and extremely well dressed, with unruly hair and a kind of piratical air about him. He came over with his hand extended, and a beaming smile on his face.

“
Hello there,” he said, “thank you for coming. It’s a pleasure to meet you. My name is Peabody. Benjamin Peabody.”

***

Momo Bibbs’s experiences in Russia caused him to reevaluate his life, and he decided he valued it more than however much he was making with Endless Lee. He reexamined his contract with W.A.N.G Tech, and concluded that getting shot was not included under the terms of his employment. So he split.

In retrospect it had been a foolhardy and unnecessary escapade, and he realized that a sense of intellectual superiority had led him to the misguided conclusion that he could control events, when in fact entropy is the defining factor in any potentially volatile situation and, when dealing with intangibles, such as bat-fuck-crazy, homicidal Russian psycho-jobs for example, nobody can control shit. He also knew that he had been lucky. He was left with a permanent limp and severe recurring headaches, but he had come out of the misadventure in a good deal better shape than his erstwhile friend Sebastian Type. In order to have severe recurring headaches, it is necessary to be in possession of a head.