The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2) (11 page)

With a barely perceptible movement of her head and a gracious smile, she summoned the waiter who refilled their glasses with Bollinger Vieille Vignes Françaises ’69. She raised her glass and gazed directly into the young man’s mesmerized eyes, which caused him to splatter an oyster onto the front of his new cream-colored Old Navy chinos. The woman watched him desperately trying to clean his trousers with a serviette, flushed and embarrassed. A man-child, athletic, handsome in a boyish Kennedy kind of way, his locker room confidence and repertoire of rewarmed movie star poses fallen to pieces in an instant, destroyed by the accidental dropping of a shellfish. A wave of sadness welled up out of nowhere and washed over her.

What am I doing? What am I doing
here
? What do you want?
I want to be touched. Physically? Yes. Yes. I need that. To be held, to be opened up. I need that. Tonight? Always. So? It’s not enough.
So what is it? I want more. Love? No. Companionship? No. What then? I want to be touched. You said that. No, touched. Inside. Moved. I want to feel something. Something I’ve never felt before. So what is it? I don’t know. So how do you know it exists? Because I want it, therefore it exists. Are you sure? No.

The woman stood up.

“
I’m sorry,” the boy said, attempting to rise, “it was an accident. I didn’t mean to…”

“
I know you didn’t. It’s okay. It wasn’t that.”

“
Then wha’d I do? Wha’d I say?”

The woman shook her head sadly, and walked away.

***

Consider, then, the woman as she sat in the garden at the Sainte Marie in New Orleans, in the early hours of the morning, sipping a highball. A storm was coming. The night was overcast and heavy and the smell of rain was in the air. The insects were loud, and there was the sense that there would be lightning soon. She was deep in thought, and very still. Although she rarely spoke it anymore, on that occasion, she thought in the old language. Somehow, it felt right. She was a mystery to herself: a multifaceted diamond that bent the light according to the point of view of the beholder. She thought about the elusive desire that tormented her. She thought about the nature of desire. She thought of her lovers.

She had a great many. Considerate, virile, tender, subtle, raw, sophisticated, crude—but somehow, never enough. No matter how long it lasted, or how many times she rippled with orgasm, she would find herself overcome by a feeling of emptiness, a haranguing sense of something unfulfilled, that left her restless and confused. And sad.

The woman thought of where she was, and where she came from. She thought of what she had done, and of what she was about to do. She no longer did things because she had to. She did them because she wanted to.

She was a writer, and a thief, and an addict.

Her novels made her a lot of money. But she didn’t really need it. She had all the wealth she needed. She stole it—specifically jewelry. She was daring and audacious and infamous and arrogant. After every heist, she left her calling card: a cat-shaped candy bar, handmade for her by an ancient wizened crone in Geneva. That was why the press and the cops called her the Caramel Cougar. And she was about to embark on the most dangerous blag of her career.

But she didn’t care about the money. It was the danger she needed. She was addicted to danger. Not the wild-horse racing-car jumping-out-of-airplanes kind of danger. Sophisticated danger. High wire acts of tension and suspense, the risk of being caught. But like any addiction, it grows, feeding off itself, creating the need for ever-bolder acts of bravado, with the consequences of failure ever more severe. To get the same rush, she needed to push the envelope and push her luck. And she was pushing her luck, and she knew it.

She was heading to the point of critical mass, where guile and skill would confront the frontiers of impossibility and challenge the laws of probability, and in the end it would all come down to the toss of a coin. But that was the point. If she stepped back now, it would be over for her, like the gunfighter who loses his nerve and backs down. She knew whom she was going up against. She had heard the stories, and knew they weren’t just stories. The man was cruelty personified, a soulless, conscienceless beast who thrived on the pain of others and whose black desperate heart, if he even had one, was nourished by cries of pain and anguish. She even admitted herself a little anxiety. It was good. It heightened the senses and let off a little static, so that when the moment came, she could enter into the tantric realm of absolute serenity that was necessary.

So the woman sat very still, under the advancing storm, and thought. In the old language. Her name was Fanny Lemming.

Chapter 4

Crispin had been in seventh heaven. He was swaying on a hammock slung under a magnificent magnolia, wearing a beautiful peacock feather-pattern silk dressing gown that the charming Lord Lundi had given him as a gift and sipping ice-cold Chablis from a silver goblet. The scent of the flowers in Lord Lundi’s garden was divine, and he was cool in the shade of the trees. He could look up from his book and see the curtains billowing out of the shutters of his corner room of the chateau in the gentle afternoon breeze. Lord Lundi had given him the best room in the house, and he could see out over the Quarter to where the boats sailed up and down the wide lazy river. He was reading
Diamonds Aren’t For Everyone
by Fanny Lemming, and it was a cracking good read about a lady who stole jewels.

When a waiter in a crisp white uniform brought him two dozen oysters, a platter of king crab legs, and a mint julep, he moved into eighth heaven. When the string quartet set up on the lawn next to him and began playing slow ballads, and the young man with the divine falsetto began to serenade him while he ate lunch, he shipped out for ninth heaven. When a lithe, muscular Negro with the body of Adonis appeared carrying a folding massage table, and mimed the act of Crispin disrobing and climbing onto it, he set sail for tenth heaven. When the Negro laid his hands upon him and began to knead his corpulent, yielding white flesh with just precisely the right amount of pressure, Crispin flitted across twelfth heaven and proceeded directly to thirteen. When the massage concluded with the Negro giving him the best, slowest, most excruciatingly thrilling blow job he’d had in thirty years, he ran out of heavens to go to and exploded into bliss before slipping into the bosom of Elysium with the deepest, most contented sigh imaginable. Goodnight, sweet prince!

***

Bettina Bunsen wasn’t always wizened, wasn’t always old, and wasn’t always a crone. In fact, at one time, she was plump, young, and very pretty. But eighty years took care of that. She wasn’t always alone and sad, either. She’d had a husband and a baby. The RAF took care of that when they bombed the shit out of Dresden. She survived and managed to make it to Switzerland as a refugee. Because God had decided that she should live, she did not wish to offend him by taking her own life, and therefore she supported the unsupportable and bore the unbearable. Eventually she married a confectioner from Geneva, and learned that she had a natural gift for making sweets that she never suspected, and enjoyed a year of…not happiness, but at least the closest approximation to it that she could imagine.

When her husband’s cuckoo clock gave out on the night of their first anniversary, she decided that God was seriously taking the piss, but by that time she was so old that knocking herself off seemed like jumping the gun, and anyway, daily existence was such a painful experience that it felt like atonement for the guilt of having survived.

She took over the running of the shop, which had a small but loyal clientele, and waited for God to come and get her so that she could give him a piece of her mind. Maybe God was trying to evade the issue, because the years went rolling by, and Bettina dried up and shrank and withered, but she didn’t croak.

One day a young woman walked into the shop who was so beautiful that it made Bettina think of the lindens, and the children laughing in the fountain before the war, and she felt as if she wanted to cry but the tears had long dried up along with the rest of her. So she asked the young woman what she wanted and the young woman said that she wanted a particular candy, made out of caramel in the shape of a cat, and that she wanted them only for her own self, and that she would pay Bettina to keep it a secret.

Bettina didn’t give a coon’s crotch about the money, but she liked the young woman for having made her think about the lindens, and the children laughing in the fountain before the war, and even though she was very old she still believed that women should be allowed to have their secrets and so she agreed. She made the candy for the young woman, and she even put in the very rare zedoary spice that she grew in her own greenhouse, and the young woman thanked her and went away, and Bettina did not think about it again until a few years later when some men came into her shop and showed her one of the candies. They said they were policemen, and they talked about forensics and ingredients, especially the unusual zedoary, and water quality, and chemical composition, and soil characteristics, and geographical specifics, and told her that they had established beyond a reasonable doubt that the candy was produced locally and did she know anything about it. Bettina thought about the young woman and the lindens, and the children laughing in the fountain before the war, so she told the policemen to
geschissen
, and they did.

But then another man came, who was the ugliest man Bettina had ever seen, and had a thing sticking out of his head that looked like a baby vulture peering out of a nest. She was afraid—not of dying, because she had no fear of that, but because she knew that this was a man who would hurt her. He smiled at her, but that made him look even scarier than before. He asked her about the candy, and she told him to
geschissen,
and he punched her in the face. The man knew what he was doing and he hit her just hard enough so that she did not pass out and she did not die. The man asked her again about the candy, and she told him about the woman, and the man asked her when this had happened, and she told him that also. Then he asked her where she kept her records, and she told him on her computer, and he asked her for the password and she told him to
geschissen
and he broke her arm.

Bettina was hoping that she would die, but she did not. The man told her that he would keep breaking her bones until she told him what he wanted to know, and she knew that it was true, so she told him. When the man had verified what she told him was the truth, and had looked at the records, he came back and put a pillow over her face and suffocated her.

When Bettina got to heaven, St. Peter told her that God had been called away on business and had left the keys with him, but to please make herself at home.

***

“
Goddamn, girl. I could live here. This is paradise. It’s like being royalty.”

They were on the lawn by the side of Lord Lundi’s ornate pool. Crispin twirled the ice in his julep as he watched the golden carp lazily wafting their gossamer fins in the clear water.

“
And that Lord Lundi. What a gentleman. I mean, I know he looks a bit creepy, but how lucky were we to have met him. Talk about Southern hospitality. Shee-it.”

Asia smiled. “Now you sound like a Southerner.”

“
I’m just practicing, dearie. I may decide to stay here.”

Asia wasn’t as altogether comfortable as Crispin. By the time they’d gotten through partying in the cat house in back of the Mama Mambo neither one of them was perambulatory. Things had gotten seriously wild and weird. The English-sounding dude, Sir Cornbread or whatever his name was, had gotten a corncob up his ass when he finally got it through his skull that he wasn’t going to make any time with Asia, and had sloped off with a couple of Lord Lundi’s showroom models.

A few of the working girls had joined the party, and even through the sepia- and rose-tinted light of an improbable number of cocktails, and despite the blanketing bayou heat, Asia had felt the chill of remembrance of all those Vegas nights, and it had instilled in her a strange discomfort.

When Lundi had offered his hospitality, Asia hadn’t had much choice but to accept. Crispin was spark out on the floor wrapped in a faux tigerskin rug, wearing some kind of aviator’s helmet on his head and nursing a half-full bottle of Bollinger, and nothing short of a team of oxen was going to budge him. Even in her condition, Asia had managed to concern herself with her mother, but Lundi had reassured her that he personally would see to it that her mother got a message to say they were okay.