Lee Heal was sitting in Khuy Zalupa’s office. They were talking turkey.
“You prefer wing or leg?”
“Gimme some of that dark meat.”
Zalupa passed Lee his plate. “More vodka?”
“Fuckin’ A.”
“So. Now you see R3 work. You like?”
“Khuy, my man, that shit is going to revolutionize the entertainment industry. The possibilities are literally endless. Everybody, and I mean every swinging dick, is going to want one a them puppies. We are going be up there with Mr. Gates, boy. So what’s the next move?”
“Next move is you give me ridiculous large sum of money as agree. I give you R3. You be very rich. I be very happy. Iz not same thing.”
“Very philo-fucking-sophical. Okay, Socrates. I’ll bring our guy around tomorrow. If he says it checks out, we’ll have the dough ready to transfer, and we make the switch. Okay?”
Khuy Zalupa said “Da.” He looked at Lee Heal for a long moment. There was something conveyed in the look that Lee did not enjoy. Zalupa abruptly stood and lumbered away without another word. Lee stared at his receding bulk. The man was a bear. A dangerous, unpredictable bear. He knew what he was going to have to do.
Lee walked back into the other room. Momo and the woman were still glued to the TV.
“C’mon. We gotta go. Let’s split.”
Momo looked at Lee, then back at the screen, then back at Lee again. He stood up, reluctantly, and followed Lee out of the door. He had really been enjoying Danny DeVito’s performance as the Incredible Hulk.
***
Oblov the Sloth was busy occupying himself doing fuck-all. He was a master at the art of strenuously avoiding all forms of work while continuing to earn unmerited promotions on the back of other people’s efforts. The irony of it was that if he had chosen to apply himself instead of being a fat idle bastard, he could have been a pretty decent detective. He had the gray matter for it. But maybe that was the problem. Maybe he was too smart to see any percentage in putting his ass and his life on the line for six hundred rubles a month and a shit apartment in a crap neighborhood full of Chechen refugees and embassies from countries nobody had ever heard of.
The only time Militsiya Major Leonya Oblov ever motivated himself to get his fat crack out of his chair and into his clapped-out Lada Kalina was when he got a direct call from one of the big knobs in the Kremlin. Which was why it was so annoying when his phone rang just as he was busy deciding to have kholodets or vareniki for lunch. He sifted through the piles of unopened letters and empty cigarette packets on his deck to find the receiver.
“Oblov. What do you want?”
“I want you to stop being a useless fatass waste of government money, but unfortunately, that is impossible.”
“Ah, General Schmenkovich. How nice to hear your voice.”
“No it’s fucking not. Go to the airport. Some Americans are arriving. They are Black and White. You are to cooperate fully in any way you can. Do you understand?”
“Yes, General.”
“Good. Now what about the investigation of the people that died by the Country Club?”
“General, I have personally…”
“You have personally done jack shit, you fat twat. Well, there is another one to add to the list. The manager of the club carked it this morning.”
“Do you believe the deaths are connected, General?”
“No. I believe it is pure coincidence that seven people are dead within a one-mile radius, that they all died of radiation poisoning, and that two agents from the USA are about to land in Moscow investigating some missing polonium, you cretin. Go to the fucking airport.”
***
Baby Joe Young was a cold fish, scaled and eviscerated, his eyes blank and immobile as he stared out of the window of the plane at the endless black nothingness below, punctuated occasionally by tiny clusters of sad lights, accentuating the darkness and isolation below. And in his heart. He felt nothing. Hollow. Devoid of the will to even think. A succession of images floated across his brain. He recognized them as memories but they were meaningless, as if they belonged to someone else. They invoked no sadness, no joy, no regret, no melancholy sense of the passing of the days, no bittersweet pangs of longing and desire. Nothing. They were pages turned in a magazine, idly gazed at and forgotten. Baby Joe was motionless. He was travelling at five hundred miles an hour, but he was as still and silent and timeless as a broken clock.
Does my heart still beat? Do I care? Does it matter? Where I am going? What difference does it make? Now? You knew this was coming. You predicted it. But you still weren’t ready. And now? And now nothing. Just wait. What will happen will happen. The wind will blow, the tide will turn, the sun will rise to its zenith, the stars will glitter, you will inhale and exhale, you will sleep and wake, the shadows will grow long and recede, the leaves will fall, the flowers will grow, there will be others, there will be blood and tears and music. It will be what it will be. It was always going to be what it was going to be. You knew that. Yet you weren’t ready. You were not ready.
***
Khuy Zalupa awoke to the sun coming through the high window of his villa. The motes swirled in the beams, and shadows were angular against the wall. Outside the window the bare, stark branches pointed away, as if trying to draw his attention to something that waited outside. What waited? Who knew? Nothing can protect you from that which comes.
He looked down at Fanny as she slept. Even in sleep she was radiant. He had not been ready for this. This happiness. It was hard to understand. He felt strangely light and without momentum. As if he drifted. The thing that had driven him was gone. The hatred. It had been the keystone upon which his existence had been constructed, and it was gone. The howling rage, the bitter jealously, the blood hunger for revenge, the need to inflict pain so that his own might be assuaged, the need to inspire terror, the need to be feared and hated. Gone.
He was sinking into some terrible contentment, seeing things as if for the first time, hearing things, noticing things. He was wise enough to know what it meant. It meant that as a sadistic, sociopathic scourge, anathema to the good and the kind, he was more or less fucked. There was only one way to go from here, and only one way this ended if he didn’t. The alpha male could never just quit, never just step down. He had to be brought down, harried into a corner and torn to pieces, his remains fought over by the pretenders. That was the way of things. Without the will, he would not survive, and the will was gone.
So he would just leave. One day. Soon. As soon as this shit with the Americans was finished. Then they would just vanish. Gone. From Moscow, from Russia, from sight and memory. To where? Who cared! She could decide. Somewhere where she could be happy. Where they could be happy. Where maybe they could even…!
But wait. He couldn’t get ahead of himself. There was still business to be taken care of. The Americans were dangerous men. They would not be happy when the R3 ceased to function. And in any event, they intended to try something, that was for sure. Just as they must be certain that he was going to try something. Which he was. And what of his own people? They were animals. Sharks. They had shark senses. They would begin to wonder. They would begin to sniff the air for the scent of carrion. Soon they would understand. They would realize. And when they knew for sure, the pack would begin to circle. The hunt would begin. He needed time. He needed a demonstration of brute power to keep the wolves at bay until he was ready to make his move.
***
Low Roll and Hard D both detested flying, but for entirely different reasons. Hard D hated flying because, even though he made special arrangements, paid for two seats, and had the dividers removed, his ginormous, bulging butt would still be crammed so tight that his circulation would be cut off and he would have no sensation in his ass for hours after the flight. Plus he could never watch the movie, because his stomach obscured the screen. Low Roll hated it because of the food, and even though he always ate his portion, plus the two portions assigned
to Hard D’s two seats, it was never enough, and he was perpetually hungry.
“I hate fuckin’ flyin’,” he observed.
“No more’n me, pally. It stinks. I don’t know why we gotta go all the way ta Commieland any ways. What? We ain’t got enough people to shoot in America?”
“Well, Rolly, strictly speakin’, they ain’t commies no more. I hear they even got McDonald’s over there now.”
“I don’t care if they go to church on Sundays, love their moms, and eat apple fuckin’ pie, they’re still Russians. The sooner we stretch whichever stiff we’s supposed to stretch, and get back to civili-fucking-zation, the better.”
“Hallelujah to that, brother, hallelujah to that. Hey, grab that stewardess, wouldya?”
Hard D cranked his head around and said, “Hey, sweetcheeks, howzabout a coupla more cocktails over here.”
Hard D watched the stewardess’s buff buttocks flounce down the aisle. He would have liked to grab his dick, but he couldn’t reach it.
***
Lee Heal didn’t come by his vast wealth by accident. Or, perhaps indirectly, he did. Lee had worked upward of sixteen hours a day every day for twenty years to get where he was. But then again, it wasn’t that he had a whole lot else to do.
Lee used to have this girlfriend, see. She was into heavy-duty hardcore body modification. Piercing and branding. She told him that if he stuck a number nine industrial washer around the base of his glans, it would give him the ability to drive any woman wild. So the inevitable happened, and when he couldn’t get it off gangrene set in and they had to amputate his helmet. He had to leave town shortly thereafter, when “I love you Endless Lee” began to appear as graffiti on the walls of his neighborhood.
Understandably, Endless became something of a recluse after that episode. He locked himself away from the real world and immersed himself in the cyber world. It became his métier, his passion, and his natural environment. Every new wave of development in computing and information technology and old Endless was right there surfing on the crest, ahead of the pack. When genetic engineering began to emerge, Endless plunged into it with the fervor of a dervish, driven by the tantalizing belief that it would one day be possible to rebuild his bell-end.
He moved to Woonsocket, Rhode Island, and started his own company: Woonsocket American Nuclear Gene Technology. His innovations started attracting attention, and his reputation as a rising star drew some top talent from the universities, and pretty soon he had gone from small potatoes to titan of tubers.
Momo Bibbs, out of Berkeley, was an example of the kind of megawatt sconce power that was drawn to the intellectual gravitational field generated by W.A.N.G Tech. Momo could have walked into any of the top legal outfits in the country, but he chose to hook up with Endless and handle his patents. It was a smart move. By the time he was thirty-six, his stock options were worth a quarter of a billion, and he could watch the rich and famous fluttering up and down in their yachts from the bay windows of his villa on Bailey’s Beach. Not bad for a skinny kid whose parents were second-generation immigrant Afar people from Djibouti.
Endless was extremely well endowed in the brains department, if, unfortunately, no longer in other ways, but compared to Sebastian Type he was a simpleton. Sebastian Type had an IQ that was off the clock. His article in Science, published when he was just seventeen years old, on the theoretical existence of subatomic constructs in dark matter which conform to expectations proposed by Fibonacci’s progression, drew a standing ovation from everybody in the scientific community that that could understand it. All three of them.
Like Momo, Sebastian could have waltzed into a top gig at any research lab in the land, but he chose the Head of Research chair at W.A.N.G., with his own agenda, continually updated state-of-the-art lab tech, and as much blow as he could handle. Before his fortieth birthday, he was accumulating spondulicks so fast that even he had trouble calculating how much he was worth.
And there the three of them were, sitting in mouse-pussy-smooth kid leather seats on a Learjet 85, thirty thousand feet above the Volga River, staring out at the clouds through marijuana clouds of their own making, on their way to Moscow to conclude a deal that, if all went according to plan, would make the billions that they were collectively worth seem like chump change.
Brains beats brawn, as they say. And, most of the time, it’s true. Except, as every entrepreneur knows, occasionally some brains need to be kicked out, which is when brawn is required. So, to the high-octane, intellectual cornucopia of skull power cubed to the power of ten wielded by Endless, Momo, and Sebastian, was added some weaponry wielded by a cerebrally limited but skilled, vicious, ruthless, and easily manipulated ex-military gunslinger—not to mention the none-too-responsible but still proud father of old school buddy Cups Hicks—the celebrated and decorated Huckleberry Sawyer Hicks, esquire, kick-ass assassin…just in case equations and cosines didn’t cut the mustard, and some knuckle sandwiches had to be dealt out, or some troubleshooting was called for that required real shooting.
As Endless gazed out of the window at the beguiling configuration of stars, believing that if he only had enough time he could decipher the encrypted stellar message once and for all, and not even thinking for one nanosecond to appreciate them for their integral beauty, he was confident of the fact that, as forbidding as the reputation of his putative business partner was, while there might be the occasional thorn among the roses, the prospective negotiation and conclusion of the business at hand would be a tiptoe through the tulips.
It was the other team he was worried about. The so-called “good guys.” Endless did not have many friends, but his money had plenty, and some of the high-and-mighty guardians of the common good were prepared to shit on the common and the good from a great height if they could see some green attached to it. Which was how he got tipped off that the bloodhounds were already on the trail. He even got the names of the hounds. Well, he knew where the best place to be was: right next to the fucking dog. Which is why he had his own mutt already in place, with his ear to the ground and his nose to the wind, ready to piss on all the wrong trees, howl at the wrong moon, and bite any bastard that tried to get ahold of the bone.
***
Monsoon was certain that he had come to a crossroads in his life. That was because when they pushed him off the back of the truck, he landed in the middle of an intersection. Still, he had a few reasons to count himself lucky. For one, the chauffeur had been polite enough to slow down to about twenty before they heaved him over the tailgate, so he was only winded, with a few minor scrapes and contusions. For another, the crossroads was so remote, and the hour so late, there was no other traffic, so he didn’t need to worry about getting splattered by a passing truck before he could make the side of the road. Plus he still had some cash, his ID, and his passport.
He had Hyatt to thank for the latter. Or maybe Ace. To Zalupa, Monsoon was just a byproduct, an inconvenience to be disposed of once he had served his purpose. But Hyatt was seemingly possessed of a certain tenderness of heart and sense of gratitude that was not evident in his uncle, and he had interceded. So Monsoon’s sentence was commuted from bullet in the back of the head and pitched naked off the Borodinsky Bridge into the icy Moskva, to pitched fully clothed off the back of a moving Skoda twin cab, on a deserted backwoods back road, about a hundred miles outside of Moscow, at three o’clock in the morning.
Monsoon picked himself up and limped to the side of the road. There was not a light in sight, but at least there was a full moon glowing intermittently through the dark scudding clouds. Standing there in the moonlight, pondering each road in turn as it faded from pale gold to black, disappeared into darkness, and then was irradiated again in golden lunar mystery, he felt like Dorothy.
“There’s never a fucking wizard when you need one,” he said aloud, hoping the sound of his own voice would serve to banish the chill that was beginning to creep into his bones and into his heart. He looked at the pale silver snow banked up on ei
ther side of the road, and watched his frosted, moon-tinged breath linger and vanish.
“Well, at least there aren’t any fucking wolves.”
That was when he heard the first howl.
***
Fanny had tears rolling down her cheeks, and her stomach muscles were aching. After the fashion of many intelligent people, she had asked herself why, as she got older, she didn’t laugh as much as she used to. Helpless, out of control, rolling-about mirth. It just didn’t happen to her like it used to. But it was happening now, in spades.
Khuy was out doing whatever it was that evil Russian renegades do in the early hours of the morning in Moscow’s writhing, steamy viscera. Fanny couldn’t sleep, so she’d turned on the TV. Russian reality shows and ice hockey weren’t her thing, so she grabbed the R3 from where Khuy had it stashed—in his underwear drawer, of all places. Usually, that was the first place a burglar would look, but in Khuy’s case, the goods were pretty safe.
It didn’t take much to figure out how it worked, and she fiddled about, amusing herself for a while until she had an idea. As someone with an appreciation for the written word and the performing arts, she was pretty much au fait with what was going on in the movie industry. So she decided to take the Best Actor and Actress Oscar winners from the last ten years, and swap them, and see what happened.
What happened was she pissed in her knickers.
***
Sebastian and Hyatt were not especially worried about anybody listening in on their conversation. There is an old man in Australia, an Aboriginal, and the poor bastard is the last surviving member of his linguistic group, meaning the only person who can understand what he is talking about, is him.
The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2) Page 21