The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2)
Page 1
THE CHAMELEON FALLACY
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, places, incidents, and dialogue are the product of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real, or if real, are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, either living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Shane Norwood
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author and the team of dedicated professionals that support them.
For more information, to inquire about rights to this or other works, or to purchase copies for special educational, business, or sales promotional uses please write to:
The Zharmae Publishing Press, L.L.C.
5638 Lake Murray Blvd, Suite 217
La Mesa, California 91942
www.zharmae.com
FIRST EDITION
Published in Print and Digital formats in the United States of America
The golden Z logo, and the TZPP logo are trademarks of
The Zharmae Publishing Press, L.L.C.
The Chameleon Fallacy
Shane Norwood
Seattle | Las Vegas | San Diego | Los Angeles | Spokane
Table of Contents
Part 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part 2
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Part 3
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Dedication
About the Author
Credits
Part 1. New Orleans
One of the names people use for New Orleans is The Big Easy. It’s a good name. It sounds like what it is. A fine spicy hot stew, a mint julep, a big lazy muddy river, a bittersweet city with a bite to it, a human filé gumbo, a Homo sapiens cocktail concocted from the descendants of people from the four winds. An ever-changing flow of humanity moving over a landscape as unpredictable as the sandbanks in the Mississippi, where things are never what they seem, but where it is easy to see them not as they are, but as you wish them to be. Until, that is, the hornet hiding in the perfumed magnolia stings you on the nose, and the southern belle turns out to be a gator in disguise.
When people of such diversity come together, something happens. You get friction, sure, and you get your fair share of Stormy Mondays and Black Fridays, not to mention Fat Tuesdays, but you also get something else. You get hybrid vigor, and crosspollination, and an exchange of ideas and blood and spirit that eventually develops its own special mojo. A unique culture and identity. And in this particular case, you get jazz, baby.
Another of the names people use for New Orleans is the Crescent City, because of the shape it makes on the littoral. New Orleans is on and of the river. The river defines it. Without the river it wouldn’t be New Orleans and it wouldn’t be the Big Easy. Of course, history is a matter of perspective, and often depends upon where you’re looking at it from. Which means that to a great many of the people who have lived there over the centuries, New Orleans wasn’t the Big Easy at all. It was the Big Badass, and the crescent was a bite mark.
In 1706, a group of people who called themselves the Chitimacha was sitting on the banks of the Mississippi, where they had been living for six thousand years minding their own business, when the French Navy rocked up and told them to haul ass. The customary unpleasantness ensued, with the usual consequences, and by 1786 the Chitimacha didn’t have any asses left to haul.
This was when Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville founded a city in the delta and, in a flagrant piece of kissassery, called it New Orleans, after the Duke of Orléans, who was running the show in France at the time. So up to that point it was a pretty straightforward case of colonial subjugation—exploitation, rape, pillage, etc., etc.—but then the story got a tad complicated. It went something like this…
The Seven Years’ War kicks off and the French get handed their asses by the Brits so they turn Louisiana over to the Spanish, but the Americans whup the Brits and start waving the Star-Spangled Banner around. Then Napoleon fires a few cannons at the Bastille and the French make him the big fromage so he buys back Louisiana from the Spanish, which he tries to keep under his little cockaded tricorne hat. The Americans get wind of it, so Napoleon sends an army to secure New Orleans, and the Americans start to worry in case the French decide to free all the slaves. The Americans start making noises about duking it out with the French, but then the Haitians start their own revolution. They kick French butt with the help of a little yellow fever—and Napoleon, who is about to embroil his nation in yet another bout of fisticuffs with the Brits, throws a hissy fit because he can’t get his grasping little Gallic hands on the sugar and decides to wash his hands of the whole damn show.
Get the picture? No, me neither, but anyway, this is when Thomas Jefferson makes a sucker out of Napoleon with the Louisiana Purchase. Old Boney was hell on wheels when it came to an international punch-up, but in the real estate business he was a serious schlemiel, and Jefferson chiseled him out of all or parts of what are now Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, North and South Dakota, New Mexico, Texas, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and Louisiana, including New Orleans, with a couple of bits of Canada thrown in for good measure, for the modern equivalent of half of what it cost to build the Mercedes-Benz Superdome. Way to go, Nappy!
So, since who owned the joint was pretty much sorted out, the next point of contention was what language they were going to speak. Officially, English had the nod, but most of the Creoles spoke French, and boatloads of disenfranchised Francophones from Haiti started sailing up the river, so it was de facto decided to just let it roll with the lingo and see how it panned out. When the Irish and the Germans started showing up in numbers, nobody knew what the fuck they were talking about anyway, so it didn’t make much of a difference.
On the subject of language: It is amazing how a trite little piece of eco-speak like “Triangular Trade” can disguise something as abhorrent as slavery, but that’s what the good old Europeans called it. It was a doozy of a plan, and easy too, if you had a couple of ships handy, and some guns, and a length of chain or two lying about. All you had to do was gather together a few beads, a couple of mirrors, a bolt of calico, and a few substandard muskets, and sail over to West Africa. You find some king or other who has been busy devastating the countryside and capturing everybody, and you trade all the gewgaws for a shipload of men and women. Then you chain them all together and set sail for the Americas, so that the ones who survive the trip under inconceivably horrendous conditions—“The Middle Passage” was the nice little turn of phrase used there—can be swapped for sugar and cotton, so that the chained-together people can be
forced to grow more sugar and cotton. Then all you have to do is sail back to Europe, sell the sugar and cotton for a usurious profit, use some of it to buy more doodads, and away you go again.
Being a seaport at the head of a mighty river that stretches right into the guts of the country, New Orleans was a great spot for sending the chained-together people up into the country, and the sugar and cotton back out of it. In fairness, there was a lot of less-reprehensible business going on as well, and many of the black residents of New Orleans were referred to as gens de couleur libres, or free people of color, which is a lot better than what they get called today in some quarters—but it’s undeniable that a lot of white folks got mighty rich from chaining black folks together, and, as a consequence, by 1840 New Orleans was the richest city in the land.
Things began to change some when the difference of opinion between the States began. New Orleans was occupied by a Northern army under the command of one Major General Benjamin F. Butler, also referred to as “Beast” or “Spoons.” You don’t come by handles like that by dancing with the old ladies at church socials. It seems some of Spoon’s Yankee boys got slapped around in the streets by some southern belles on account of their practice of making free and loose with the ladies’ household goods. Apparently Spoons came to the conclusion that the French language was responsible for this distinctly un-American behavior, so he abolished it. Of course, you can’t stop people from speaking their own language altogether, but he did manage to put something of a dent in it. It never fully recovered, and the issue of what language was going to be spoken in New Orleans had been by and large, if not amicably, resolved.
In 1872, just to show there were no hard feelings about all that chaining-people-together business, P. B. S. Pinchback, a man of African descent—well, African-ish, or one-eighth to be exact—was elected Governor of Louisiana. But it seems that even one-eighth was just too much for the white folks, and he even had some Injun blood in him too, which was never gonna fly. So Jim Crow and his pal Mr. Segregation came to town and stayed until the sixties, until the Civil Rights Movement kicked their asses the hell out, and Norman Rockwell got to paint little Ruby Bridges going to school with the white kids. It’s a pretty picture.
Later in the decade, New Orleans started to get outmuscled by the other big dogs in the gulf, and the saints went marching out. New Orleans started to drift backward, back toward its days as a sleepy backwater. The tourists kept it alive. Mardi Gras, Preservation Hall, the French Quarter, lies and legends, plastic voodoo, plastic beads, watered-down hurricanes, imported oysters, Dr. John, hammered varsity jocks puking on the corners and tipsy cheerleaders flashing their tits from the ornate balconies, Mr. and Mrs. Buttcleft Wyoming picking their way through streets filled with winos and mule shit, trying to get to the heart of the night, not realizing that it doesn’t have one. But, in its own way, that’s a pretty picture too.
The real deal wasn’t so pretty, and never is. There is no Mr. Bluebird on your shoulder, in New Orleans or anywhere else. There is no Big Easy, and there never was. It’s just that in New Orleans, at certain times of the day, in certain kinds of light, under certain kinds of sky, or in the hot nights when the heady heavy heavenly smell of blooms is in the air, and the moon looks down like the eye of Yahweh, and the ghost of Buddy Bolden can be heard blowing his golden horn from across the levee, it seems like there might be.
But it’s an illusion. And it’s also a good place to start, because that’s what this story is really about: illusion.
Chapter 1
De Villiers Brooke was stringing it out. Cranking up the tension. He knew he wasn’t going to miss, and this other schmuck knew it too. Not only was he going to sink it, but he was also going to send in a teaser and make the smug bastard suffer. The supercilious little prick in his pink sweater had been leading all the way around until this last hole. Well, let’s hear some puerile smart-mouth remark now, pal. It was a little over three feet, and dead straight. The green was as soft and smooth as a shaven pussy. Just one little gentle tap, dead center, and it was twenty grand. He could already feel the comforting bulge of the roll in his back pocket. A lot of people would get nervous in a situation like this, maybe choke and blow the putt. But De Villiers Brooke wasn’t one of them. He was the ice man, the king of chill, and the captain of cool. Nervous wasn’t in his repertoire, and the only choking that was going to get done was by the bitch who’d be sucking on his meat in about a half hour’s time.
He knelt down and removed an imaginary piece of leaf from the pristine grass. He felt the schmuck fidgeting, impatient, annoyed with his playacting. He smiled. He closed his eyes and mentally performed the shot. Sports psychology one-oh-one. Positive reinforcement. He felt the corrugated rubberized grip, cupped in his hands with exactly the right pressure, and visualized the perfect metronomic swing of the putter: a slow, economic movement with precisely the right amount of momentum. In his mind he heard the ever-so-gentle puck as the putter’s sweet spot kissed the ball, and he saw the ball slowly roll straight and true toward the hole. He saw it pause tantalizingly on the lip of the cup, and heard the schmuck draw a breath. He saw El Schmucko’s knuckles whiten and his nails dig into the palms of his hands. Then he saw the ball teeter over the edge and plop into the cup with that unmistakable rattle. He opened his eyes. The moment was perfect. The tension was absolute. The schmuck was holding his breath. Even the birds had stopped singing. De Villiers Brooke drew back his putter just the right amount and sent it on its perfectly weighted, slow, steady trajectory toward the ball.
His cell phone rang. It was programmed to play the opening guitar phrase of “Are You Gonna Go My Way” by Lenny Kravitz.
De Villiers Brooke jumped. The shanked shot wobbled toward the hole, bobbled, rolled tantalizingly round the rim, and then, according to the immutable laws of gravity and momentum, spun out of the cup, rolled across the green, and bumped to a halt against the toe of the schmuck’s three-hundred-dollar Puma Ferrari golf shoe.
The captain of cool went apeshit.
He wrenched the phone from his pocket and glared at the screen, his eyes bulging. “YOU FAT RUSSIAN SCUMBAG. YOU JUST COST ME TWENTY GRAND. I WAS PLAYING GOLF. PEOPLE DON’T CALL PEOPLE WHO ARE PLAYING FUCKING GOLF.”
He glared at the schmuck, who was tittering with his gloved hand across his mouth.
“I DON’T GIVE A FLYING FART HOW YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO KNOW I WAS PLAYING GOLF. JUST BECAUSE YOU DON’T HAVE ANY GOLF COURSES IN THAT FROZEN COMMIE SHITHOLE YOU COME FROM DOESN’T MEAN WE DON’T.”
The schmuck abandoned all pretense of hiding his mirth and giggled openly as De Villiers Brooke listened again.
“I’LL TELL YOU WHAT. THE DEAL IS OFF. GET IT? ‘OFF’ AS IN ‘FUCK OFF.’”
The schmuck could hear somebody shouting at the other end of the connection.
“YOU WHAT? YOU THINK YOU CAN THREATEN ME? I’LL FEED YOUR STINKING BALLS TO MY FUCKING PIGS.”
De Villiers Brooke snapped the phone shut and flung it into the bottom of his golf bag.
As soon as the words, “Well, I guess that’s why you’re supposed to turn your cell phone off on the golf course,” had left his mouth, the schmuck realized he had committed a grave error of judgment. He started to back away across the green as De Villiers Brooke advanced upon him, brandishing a three wood, with a look on his face that said he wasn’t about to demonstrate how to improve his swing. The schmuck backed up against his own golf bag, tripped over it, and went down. He closed his eyes in terror as De Villiers Brooke raised the club high over his head in both hands.
Because the schmuck had his eyes shut tight, he did not see the back of De Villiers Brooke’s skull explode, nor the look of extreme surprise on his face as a 175 gr. 7.62 NATO projectile pierced his forehead traveling at 790 meters per second and delivered him to the big clubhouse in the sky.
Nor did the schmuck see, even after he opened his eyes—because they were just over three quarters of a mile away, on a tree-lined ridge overlooking the
course—two men, one corpulent to a prodigious degree, and the other borderline emaciated, chatting amiably as they packed away their Dragunov sniper rifle and paraphernalia.
Neither, obviously, could he hear when the fat one said to the thin one, “How’s that for a fucking hole in one?”
***
Monsoon Parker cut a solitary and forlorn figure as he stared disconsolately into his glass of beer. He was never a big man, but he seemed even smaller than usual, diminished, as if the soul-sapping heartbreaking disappointments that life kept feeding him were sucking him dry and actually physically shrinking him. Everyone got dealt a shit hand every now and then, but in Monsoon’s case the Queen of Fortune was dealing seconds from a stacked deck, with an ace up her sleeve and the jack of hearts up her snatch just for good measure.
Monsoon studied his glass. Was it half empty or half full? What kind of candy-ass pseudo-psychology bullshit was that? Half of it was fucking gone! Of course it was half fucking empty. What kind of brainless optimistic moron sits smiling at the dregs of life and says, “Ooh, look. There’s still some left. Oh, goody.” Any prick who thought like that shouldn’t be allowed to drink beer in the first place.
Even though Monsoon knew with absolute certainty that his pockets were empty, the feeble ember of hope that smoldered in his brain refused to be extinguished completely. On the off-chance that a wormhole had opened into a dimension where things weren’t so tight, and a couple of bucks had spontaneously materialized in his bin, he ran his fingers through his coat and trousers, delicately, as if he were trying to pick his own pocket. The wormholes had taken the afternoon off. Monsoon drained his glass and looked at the bartender.