The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2)

by Norwood, Shane

  A fourth man came out. He was different. Carved from a different stone. Yermak could tell, even though he didn’t know why. Yermak hesitated. The man looked at him.

  “You hungry, kid?” he said without smiling.

  That was the beginning of it. The Bratva. He learned fast and moved up through the ranks. They found his sister while he was doing his second stint in Butyrka. They greased him out long enough to see her. She saw the tattoos. She saw his eyes. She knew. She told him that there would be a place for him when he came out, that there was still a chance. There wasn’t. He got stabbed while he was inside. In the prison hospital he contracted TB. When he got out, she was gone. Married to a Yankee and gone to San Francisco. No message, no goodbye, no forwarding address. No dasvidanya. No nothing. And the last spark drifted into the cold night, and was extinguished.

  The men who took Khuy Zalupa from the streets thought they had found a dog to set upon their enemies, that they had a mindless slavering brute at their disposal, a grunting inarticulate peasant, a loose cannon that would soon ignite itself and be forgotten. They thought wrong.

  From behind his inimical and porcine little eyes, a formidable raw intelligence peered out, rooting and gouging for knowledge. He inhaled Moscow. Devoured it. He skinned it, paring it down to the bone, exposing its veins and arteries, its sinews. He cut through to its heart. And ate it. Slowly and painstakingly he taught himself to read, and the libraries became to him as a beacon to a sailor adrift, and a vast glorious tragic ridiculous pageant unfolded before him. And he understood! He understood where he was, and who he was, and what it meant to be who he was. The ruble dropped and he got the message and he got the picture. Not only that, he soon started sending his own messages and making his own pictures.

  The men were made uneasy. They had thought to throw him a bone—a bottle of vodka and a hussy and a bowl of borscht. They could feel him slipping beyond their control. Theretofore unimaginable pleasures were set before him, and he availed himself as freely as would any other young man in his situation. But it was not enough. He was seduced, but not beguiled, and by the time it occurred to them that they should kill him, it was far too late, and the cuckoo preened and cackled from its nest at the broken shells and splattered yolks below.

  Ten years later, he was the scarred Czar of Moscow. Shot, poisoned, bombed, beaten, starved, shafted, conspired against, investigated, jailed, set up, indicted but still standing, and supreme. And he had been scaled, every vestigial remnant of humanity and compassion excised from his being, scoured out by scalding blood and steel wire, painted in virulent layers of acid venom until what remained was a perfect image of true malevolence, and the harpies’ work was complete.

  They gave him the name Khuy Zalupa in prison. It was due to a biological abnormality. He liked it. And it was who he was. Yermak Timovitch was gone, vanished into an irretrievable and unlamented past, perhaps wandering as a ghost outside the ruins of a burned-out cabin down by the Don.

  And now Khuy Zalupa sat in the garden of his dacha, in the late afternoon, drinking vodka from the bottle and casting no shadow, as if even the sun was afraid of him. As he sat, deep in thought, his tiny deep-set piggy eyes glinted out of his discolored, pockmarked face like pieces of broken glass embedded in tarmac on a hot day. He appeared neckless, as if his bulbous globular head were attached directly to his massive shoulders, and the back of his bald head was corrugated with meaty folds of greasy gray skin. The deep creases between them had not seen the light of day for decades, and harbored who-knew-what pestilent microbiological menagerie. The few meager strands of hair plastered to his great sweaty dome were inadequate to conceal the huge red wart that protruded from between them like a newly hatched vulture chick peering out from its nest. Khuy was sensitive about this growth. To stare was to court death. To comment was to marry it.

  Khuy seemed to make up his mind about something. He roused himself from his reverie and lumbered to his feet and shuffled off across the grass with a peculiar swaying simian gait. The flowers at the edge of the lawn appeared to shrink back as he passed, and the birds stopped singing as if a sudden cold wind had arisen.

  Khuy walked into the house and the birds resumed their song, but fell silent again as he returned, carrying a cell phone. He flopped down heavily into his chair and prodded the phone with a thick stubby finger.

  ***

  A lot of people don’t like clowns. In fact, many people are afraid of them. There is even a name for it: coulrophobia. In one survey, a staggering ninety-five percent of children between the ages of five and fourteen claimed to be scared of clowns. And who can blame them? Who is lurking under that motley, and what have they got to hide? There is something fundamentally wrong and sinister about a heavily made-up man with exaggerated facial features wearing ridiculous clothes and cavorting about, grimacing and leering like a deranged gargoyle, trying to elicit sympathy. Just look at Steven Tyler, for fuck’s sake. So clowns give a lot of people the creeps, and some clowns are just creeps, plain and simple. But some clowns people are right to be afraid of.

  Dietrich “Low Roll” Zimmermann and Denzel “Hard D” Schmaltz, for example. Low Roll and Hard D existed on opposite ends of the spectrum of possible human physiology. Low Roll was a walking xylophone, with ribs like a pariah dog and a face like a collapsed soufflé, and Hard D was packing enough spare pork to affect Nathan’s Famous share prices and was afraid to go swimming in the sea in case the Norwegians got him.

  Sartorially they were not the most elegant of citizens, either. In another era, Low Roll would have been sued by Charlie Chaplin, and short of Saks Fifth Avenue opening a Seriously Fat Bastard section in the menswear department, Hard D was more or less limited to what he could find that would fit him. Neither one of them was especially well endowed with wit, and nor were they, even though they hailed from Philadelphia, overly imbued with a spirit of brotherly love.

  In fact, if it were not for the nature of their profession, Low Roll and Hard D would have been risible. But they had a talent and a reputation that had frozen the laughter in more than one throat. They could both shoot the beak off a backward-flying hummingbird at a thousand yards, and the asshole out of a March-struck jackrabbit at upward of a mile. Partners rather than friends, they were attracted and bound together by some arcane law of gravity, which dictated that each was fundamentally useless without the other but together they were as dangerous as a rhino in a phone booth.

  There was one more anomaly that set them apart from the majority of humanity. Although Hard D weighed in somewhere on the lower cetacean scale, he hardly ate enough to keep a sparrow alive in winter, whereas Low Roll, who was compelled to cross the road every time he walked past an undertaker’s, just in case, could put away five Big Macs in a sitting, no sweat.

  It was just such a delicacy he had crammed into his cakehole when the phone rang.

  “Mfmfucking mmphonne,” he said.

  Hard D stared at him, and then delicately picked a piece of lettuce from between his teeth before answering.

  “Low Roll and Hard D. Permanent solutions services. How may I fucking help you?”

  “Iz me, fat fucker. Vere iz you?”

  Hard D looked across the counter at Low Roll and mouthed the words, The Russki. “Yo, Khuy. Didn’t recognize the number. We’re in Philly, we’re havin’—”

  “Nobody give fuck what you do, borscht brain. Get you fat ass New Orleans, and bring fucking skeleton. Have job. No be late or you be the late. Ponyal?”

  The phone went dead before Hard D could say anything.

  “Eat up, pal. We gotta head south. N’Orlins.”

  “That fat-neck fucker still ain’t paid us for the Vegas job.”

  “Well, maybe you’d like to bring that up with him in person. C’mon.”

  ***

  Crispin was loving it! He was back in his element, and life was a glass slipper filled with champagne. He felt twenty years younger, fifty pounds lighter, and his heart was a turtledove, plucking the st
ars from the sky and turning them to sugar candy as he floated across the ether on a giant toasted pink marshmallow. Of course, seven zombies in an hour and a half will do that to you. Asia wasn’t far behind. She had been on the wrong side of five mimosas before she decided to try a Savoy Corpse Reviver. In terms of the reviving effect it was having on her corpse, she felt they were overrated.

  And all this was on top of the wine and bubbly that they had guzzled at Asia’s mama’s eightieth birthday celebration at the Commander’s Palace, which was why they were in New Orleans in the first place. The dinner had been sublime, and Evangeline Birdshadow had been enchanted, and had cried when Crispin went up to the piano and sang happy birthday to her in his Ricky Lee Jones voice. Evangeline had initially been reluctant to come to the Big Easy, and had wanted to stay home with her friends on the bayou, but Crispin had convinced her, and promised her another party when she got home. In his opinion, fried road kill skunk, collard greens, and hominy grits were not an appropriate eightieth birthday dinner. By eleven o’clock, old Evangeline had been out of the game, so they had taken her back to the hotel. After she had been safely tucked away, they’d decided to make a night of it.

  The Mama Mambo Hot Sauce Lounge was Crispin’s kind of joint. The décor was Art Nouveau Voodoo, the color scheme was bad accident at the Max Factor factory, the show was Folies Bergère on steroids, and the music was like the Count Basie band playing in a submarine. And best of all were the people: fabulously dressed, exotic, beautiful, colorful people, getting down and dirty. Shimmying and boogying like there was no tomorrow, and letting it all hang out, and from what he could see, some of them had plenty to hang out.

  The Mama Mambo Hot Sauce Lounge didn’t see too much of the tourist trade, being too far from the main drag, but among the locals it was recognized as the best cabaret and gin mill in town, not to mention the finest house of ill repute in Louisiana. The grub was hot, the women hotter, and the band was the real deal, authentic bluesmen whose enthusiasm for the gig was not entirely unrelated to the fact that at the Mama Mambo they didn’t have to listen to some plastic-beaded plonker from Buttmunch, Wisconsin, asking for “When The Saints Go Marchin’ In” every five fucking minutes.

  Also important for the locals was the safety factor. New Orleans, the real New Orleans, away from the Bourbon Street pantomime and third-rate Louis Armstrong impersonators, can be a rough town. You don’t get the moniker Murder Capital of the USA by being Carmel-by-the-Sea, and a thousand-to-one chance of getting eighty-sixed every time you walk out of the door is just not good enough odds for some people.

  Which was why the locals dug The Mama Mambo, on account of the dude who owned it. Nobody who wasn’t either suicidal or away with the fairies would bring down any heat in Lord Lundi’s establishment. That was an odds-on chance of getting eighty-sixed, and there were many who believed that wasn’t the end of it. In certain quarters, Lord Lundi was held to be a full-on vodun loa, with connections on the other side, which meant that being somewhat deceased was no guarantee that you were off the hook.

  The English, Spanish, and French don’t agree on much, but they do concur about one thing: Monday. Moon Day. The Spanish call the moon la luna, and Monday, lunes. The French call it la lune, and Monday, lundi. The moon has long had an association with madness and otherwise-unaccountable behavior, hence “lunacy.” There is even one theory that states that the tidal effect of the moon affects the water and blood content in people’s brains and makes them go batshit doolally every time the moon is full.

  According to some, Lord Lundi was batshit doolally whether the moon was full or not. According to others, he was a deathless voodoo priest who could summon up some seriously badass demons to put a spectral ass-whupping on anyone who gave him any lip. According to yet others—and this was the considered opinion of the New Orleans law enforcement community—he was a vicious hoodlum son of a bitch whose activities included, but were not limited to, murder, extortion, grand larceny, racketeering, prostitution, drug trafficking, double parking, and not chipping in the full whack at the church social. In fact, his reputation among certain high-ranking officers of the law was such that, if he hadn’t been paying them so much, they would have arrested him.

  One, among many, of Lord Lundi’s unusual traits was that nobody seemed to be able to accurately describe him: whether he was tall or short, handsome or unsightly, nor could they even state with any certainty what color he was. It was as if he existed as a state of mind rather than an actual person, as though something about being in his hypnotic presence kept you from getting a good gander at him. He was a walking illusion, a shapeshifter, a shimmering mirage that defied close observation. All that people could agree on was that he was one sinister motherfucker.

  According to his mother, he was Michael Montcalm Robinson, and because he was born while “Heartbreak Hotel” was playing on the radio, the first word he heard was, in fact, “heartbreak.” His mother would later have cause to reflect upon the irony and significance of this fact. Michael was born albino, a condition that meant that he had to remain indoors a lot of the time, and led to him being ostracized by both the black and white communities. Whether this influenced his later career decision to become an evil black magic drug lord assassin is a moot point, but it certainly did not dispose him to invite his buddies round for ice cream. Mrs. Robinson had no way of knowing this was a mere biological accident, a random coincidence of genetic alignment, and attributed her son’s condition to sin and disobedience of the commandments. Even though she was blameless in every respect, she assumed culpability, and the responsibility for the guilt thereby accrued, and every day she prayed in the white wooden church for forgiveness for herself and her son. And while God was prepared to welcome Mrs. Robinson into his bosom when she passed to her reward, as far as he was concerned Michael Montcalm Robinson was beyond redemption, and the nasty motherfucker deserved everything that was coming to him, and his reservation to the other place was already confirmed and a deposit paid.

  Michael was forced to leave home at thirteen, after he killed four people by mistake during a poker game when his gun went off by accident. How, when, and why Michael transformed himself into the fearsome Lord Lundi was part of the shadow-whispered mystique of the man, but somewhere along the way he developed a system of wearing heavy black makeup by day to protect his skin, and being as pale as a blind eel at night. This greatly eased his discomfort, and didn’t do his reputation as a night crawler any harm either. He also used contact lenses. That too helped protect and disguise his delicate pink eyes, and also to disguise the fact that one of them was completely sightless.

  This was because, several years back, he had kidnapped the daughter of a Boston police officer who was retired on a disability pension, filled her full of smack, and put her to work in the back room of one of his less salubrious joints down by the river. The girl’s father had hired this bad news motherfucker he knew to come looking for her, and he had traced her to Lundi.

  Lundi had his rep to consider and wasn’t playing kiss and tell, so the bad news motherfucker locked him naked into a sun bed turned up to full, until he spilled the beans. But that wasn’t the worst part. Even after he told the bad news motherfucker where the girl was, the bad news motherfucker left him in the machine. If the cleaner hadn’t happened by, he would have fried to death. As it was, he suffered irreparable skin damage that prevented him from going outside at all in daylight without serious protection, and he lost the sight in his left eye.

  The bad news motherfucker’s name was Baby Joe Young.

  Chapter 3

  The seeds of rebellion were sown by an orange…

  The illusion of safety is worse than no safety at all. It’s an unloaded gun, a safety net woven from strands of steam and smoke. Some people don’t survive the fall. Others do, but when they get back to their feet, they’re changed in ways they never imagined. Arantxa Marinelarena learned this the hard way.

  Arantxa grew up cushioned and clouded by a sen
se of security that was not only false, but was a dangerous liability. She was disarmed before the fight even started, insulated by a belief system and worldview that precluded all but one itinerary and conclusion to her life, devoid of both the tools needed to construct a barricade against life’s vagaries, and the instincts to get behind it when she needed to.

  As a child, Arantxa wasn’t so much cloistered as imprisoned by her mother, Leire, a disappointed woman so incorruptibly bound by an iron and inflexible adherence to the Catholic faith that she made the Venerable María de Jesús de Ágreda seem a wanton and degenerate Hogarthian Libertine by comparison. She dwelt in virtual seclusion behind the high walls of a villa, saw no one except likeminded people, went out only under the strictest supervision, was surrounded by and educated with children very much like herself, and spent her childhood years steeped in an atmosphere of censorship and quiet fanaticism, in what to all intents and purposes might have been another century, her course from cradle to convent charted, plotted, and under full sail.

  If it is true that opposites attract, then Arantxa’s mama and papa must have attracted the shit out each other, because the Marinelarena père, Oier, was a not only a bold sea captain and a man given to profane language and hard drinking, but was known as a roué and harleteer of note by every sea slut from Biscay Bay to Key Biscayne.

  Although, by the nature of his profession and the dictates of his nature, Oier’s visits to the ancestral villa—located in the green rolling hills approximately equidistant between the city of San Sebastián-Donostia and the sea—were infrequent, Leire still took great pains to keep contact between Arantxa and her father down to a respectful and distant minimum, for fear that he would corrupt her innocence and jeopardize her budding state of grace with his buccaneering ways and swashbuckling demeanor, and that Arantxa should fall victim to the same sea dog charm that had beguiled her own self and put her soul in jeopardy and filled her days with an insufferable confusion of desire and guilt and regret. Given this kind of attitude, it’s not surprising that old Oier spent so much time at sea.