The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2)

by Norwood, Shane

  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.”

  “Well, guess what, Mr. Parker? You just got yourself a new set of partners.”

  “Oh. Just like Vietnam, huh?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Well, shit. Suppose I don’t got no fucking choice. Uh, lissen, Baby Joe, I gotta take a leak. I’ll be right back.”

  “Oh, okay. I’ll just wait here then, shall I? Fucking dream on, pal. From now on, if you have to go, I’m holding it for you.”

  They stood and walked out. The sunlight was dazzling after the cool gloom of the tent. The path to the head took them past the parade circle, where the horses for the next race were showing off their paces. Baby Joe had Monsoon boxed in against the rail, in case he tried to make a dash for the anonymity of the crowd.

  Monsoon suddenly ducked under the rail into the path of a prancing horse. Racehorses are not known for their equilibrium of temperament, and when Monsoon waved his hands in its face and screamed, the horse—which, by a delicious coincidence, happened to be called Escape Plan—went Looney Tunes. Escape Plan reared up, dumping the jockey on the seat of his silks, and then leapt the rail and galloped into the panicked crowd. As flying Frenchmen went ass-over-tit trying to dive out of the way, Baby Joe was caught up in the melee and pushed over.

  As he was falling, he just managed to catch a glimpse Monsoon flipping him the bird as he ducked under the opposite rail and crawled between the legs of the pressing mob.

  ***

  The laws of possibility will accommodate any circumstance. The laws of probability only dictate how often the laws of possibility get to run the show. It’s only a question of time, and the only defining parameter is if time runs out, which, according to certain astrophysicists, it either won’t or can’t or both. They also talk about parallel universes, where everything that can happen is happening all the time, to someone, or billions of someones, who look exactly like you, and in fact think they are you. Or maybe you think that you are them. So, one day, sooner or later, a Tyrannosaurus rex will be elected president of the United States and accompany itself on a dobro while it sings “The Yellow Rose of Texas” every Saturday afternoon on the White House lawn.

  Plus, on the subject of probability and possibility, your average Parisian is pretty much like your average New Yorker insofar as he or she believes that they have seen it all, so nobody should have been really surprised when a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound naked gay piano player came hurtling through the ether like a screaming pink meteor and landed on top of a hot air balloon at a thousand feet, give or take, or when he became entangled in the netting at the top; nor when his weight, counterbalanced by the enormity of one of the passengers, sent the balloon into equilibrium spaz mode, and the whole contraption went into a strangely sedate and balletic death spiral, like a giant whirligig seed spinning down, before gently settling onto the rippled surface of the River Seine and slowly deflating as it drifted downstream toward Clichy-sous-Bois, pursued by a pack of enraged Citroens with their blue lights flashing.

  ***

  Some things you just can’t pay for. The passengers on the Îles du Salut, mostly Americans, were expecting a pleasant cruise, a wonderful dinner, a magnificent view of Notre Dame, some twat with an accordion warbling on in a nasal tone about not regretting anything, and a glass of bubbly or three.

  They weren’t expecting to see a hot air balloon ditch into the drink right in front of their boat, so that the skipper was compelled to do an emergency portside swerve to the bank, nor to see a fat guy, naked as the day he was born and wailing just as righteously, get twanged off the top of it and into the river. Nor two other guys, one who looked like he’d just walked out of the gate of Bergen-Belsen, and the other who looked like he did stand-in work for the Goodyear Blimp, leap out of the basket just before it got deep-sixed, and start splashing frantically for the shore.

  The guys in the photo lab departments at Walmart were going to be working overtime when the folks got back home, because the cameras were going off as if ET had just pulled over to fix a flat tire on his bike. The people were loving it, clapping and cheering and wolf whistling, and down at the stern a Mexican Wave got started.

  Only one passenger seemed detached. It wasn’t that he wasn’t enjoying the spectacle as much as everybody else, it was just that Wally was busy being bonce-boggled and bewildered, and his conceivable-occurrence receptor had just blown a gasket.

  It turned out his plane had been delayed for twenty-four hours, and Qantas put him up in a hotel, and he’d had the whole livelong day on his hands. So he decided to take a sail down the Seine, see the sights, and suck back a few.

  He was standing in the bow when the balloon came down, so he was in the forefront of the action, and the fat guy was only about fifty yards in front of him as he did a double backflip, exposed his centrifugally distended asshole to half the inhabitants of the Left Bank, and swan-dived into the current. It happened pretty fast, but Wally still had his eyes. And he was sure. It was an event horizon of black hole inconceiva-fucking-bility, but that fat pink bastard flying through the Parisian sky was Crispin Capricorn.

  As he jumped over the rail, Wally was still harboring the suspicion that the plunge into the chill water would dispel the illusion of what he believed he had just witnessed, but as he clambered up the cobbles onto the grassy bank, and saw Crispin wallowing and gasping like an inept hippo, the only illusion that was dispelled was the illusion that, at his age, there was nothing he could possibly see that could surprise him.

  Asia had screamed herself into silence by the time she reached the edge of the basket. She watched in fascinated horror as she saw Crispin and Lord Lundi tumble end-over-end, still clasped together, locked like lovers in a suicide pact. Seconds turned to hours; time congealed and flowed like honey in November. And then
they suddenly parted, burst asunder as if they were flung apart by polarity, or torque, or had thrust each other away as if each believed the other to be the weight that dragged him down, or as if each had suddenly determined that they did not care to die in such company. She heard the distant, thin wail from Crispin, but from Lundi there came not a sound. And then she saw a sight more astounding than anything she had ever witnessed.

  Another balloon loomed into view, and Crispin smacked onto the top of the canopy, momentarily collapsing it. As it was in a temporary state of flaccidity, Crispin’s legs slid under the netting. His nuts came to rest against a knot in the web. The balloon began to recover from the impact. It re-inflated itself.

  Asia started to laugh. She couldn’t help it. She was heartbroken and hysterical and fractured in mind and soul, but God help her she could not help herself. Crispin was trapped, his bollocks entangled in the net, being carried away and down like Ahab affixed to Moby Dick. A fat, pink, screeching, struggling Ahab, enmeshed to a red and green candy-striped inflatable whale by his gonads. Asia howled. She couldn’t help it. It was the funniest thing she had ever seen.

  ***

  Michael Montcalm Robinson looked into his mother’s eyes. They were deep tender pools of hot chocolate that you could plunge into, and they would envelop you in their viscous, sweet warmth and keep you safe forever. His father walked into the room and patted him on the head. He could see the veins standing out on his father’s muscles, and he heard the deep reassuring rumble of his voice. He felt the calloused palms on his cheek and knew that nothing could hurt him.

  Michael went outside to play ball and the kid tossed the ball toward him and it came so slowly as if he had all the time in the world, and he swung his bat in a lazy arc, and he heard the satisfying thwack as the hickory smacked the leather and the ball sailed out of sight and the crowd went wild and the girl in the red dress with the pigtails and the lollipop stood up and jumped up and down and shouted his name, and he saw her big brown eyes gazing at him, and even though he was only twelve he knew what it meant, and later her panties smelled of urine and detergent as he pulled them off and he did not know what to do but she did, and she took his rigidness in her hand and guided him inside and kissed him and her breath smelled of bubblegum and cigarettes, and he knew then that his life had changed forever.