The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2) (15 page)

***

Stavros’s bones creaked like the mast of a galleon in a storm as he eased himself out of his chair and set sail for the bar. Determination got him there and he bellied up to the stained and scarred counter. He regarded the wood, and the legends and histories carved thereupon by the deeds and misdeeds of men.

“
Jesus, if this fucken bar could only speak it’d ’ev a tale or two ter fucken tell, eh, mate?”

“
Too fucken right,” said Bruce, who was no spring chicken himself those days.

“
More grog?” Stavros said.

“
How long ’ev you been askin’ stupid fucken questions, ya dill. Fucken fill ’er up.”

As Stavros was battling against the resistance of his impressively protuberant paunch in order to bend down and get Bruce a tinny from the fridge, a wiry, dark-skinned young man, with a mass of wild hair waving about on top of his head like an electrocuted guinea pig, came bounding up.

“’
Owarya, Stav,” the boy said.

Stavros smiled at him. “’Owarya yerself, son? Who are ya, Wal’s son or ’is fucken grandson?”

The kid grinned. “I’m ’is great-grandson, ya bladdy nong.”

“
Strewth. An ’ow old are ya?”

“
I’m bladdy ten.”

“
Fucken spiders. ’Ow fucken old does that make ’im, then?”

“
Nobody knows.”

“
Yeah, well. Good on ya, son. Whaddya need, kid?”

“
Eh, well,” the kid continued, “there’s some bloke wants to talk to you on the phone.”

“
Ah, yeah? Well, what does the bladdy drongo want?”

“
Dunno. ’E speaks fucken funny. Can’t understand the barstad. Think ’e said ’is name was Ben Iggins.”

“
I don’t know nobody called Ben Iggins. Tell ’im to fuck off.”

The kid grinned and scarpered off happily, to tell Ben Iggins to fuck off.

Bruce finished his tin, crumpled it, and threw it at the back of Stavros’s head as Stavros was in earnest conversation with two giggling aboriginal girls.

“
Hoy. The fucken service in this joint is really goin’ down the tubes, Stav.”

“
Get it yerself, ya fat barstad. I ’ent bendin’ over again. Besides, can’t ya see I’m busy?”

As Bruce lifted the hatch, the kid came back.

“
Did ya tell the bludger ter fuck off, son?”

“
Yeah. But ’e told me not to be so fucken cheeky, threatened to punch me lights out, and told me ter tell yer ’e’s Phil Parker’s dad.”

Stavros sprayed beer in a fine mist across the room. “It ain’t Ben Iggins, ya dingbat. It’s fucken Bjorn Eggen.”

Stavros gimped toward the office as fast as his Hellenic heels would carry him.

***

There was no need for Atlas Page to call Lord Lundi. Lord Lundi already knew that Baby Joe was coming. Lord Lundi wasn’t an octopus; Lord Lundi was a millipus…waiting, watching, listening, chittering, and preening in the shadows like a vicious and blood-yearning bat. If the night had a thousand eyes, Lord Lundi had a million. If God saw everything, one of his angels called Lundi and dropped the dime. The word was not only on the street, it was in the wind, riding the trolley car, in the back seat of the cab, hiding in the closet in the boudoir, playing three-card stud with the skeleton in the closet, and swapping dirty jokes with the man in the moon. And the moon was full.

***

People differ in their opinion as to what constitutes a perfect zombie. Some people think that amaretto is the secret. Others add a drop of Texas Fire. Some say the pineapple juice pulls its teeth, and that you should counteract it with a drop of Angostura bitters, and go easy on the maraschino. Most people, however, do not recommend cyanide.

Elyssia Marron was not most people. Elyssia Marron was so dark-skinned she made Michael Jackson look like Michael Jackson. The woman was Nubian-black. Midnight-in-the-graveyard black. So black her skin reflected no light. And she was beautiful. As beautiful as a panther on a starless night—and as dangerous.

Baby Joe looked at his watch. He knew that Monsoon Parker was not a man dedicated to the truth, but he also knew that fear doesn’t lie. He was therefore confident that he had four hours to kill. If what Parker had told him was accurate he was in the right place, so he slid into a booth at The Bitches Brew, ordered a beer and back, and waited.

The Bitches Brew was quiet. It was way too early for the type of clientele it attracted. He was alone except for a couple of slender women with too much makeup, kissing each other in a far corner and drinking some shit that looked radioactive. He looked at himself in the mirror behind the bar. It had a depiction of Maurice Chevalier engraved upon it. Thank heaven for little girls. Fuckin’ A.

He thought about his own little girl, and the desperate love for her that raged inside him. He thought about that. Why had the fading gray clouds of evening suddenly turned again into the rose pink of sunrise? Was it love? Or retaliation? Was this fierce rekindling of the flame because of Asia, or because of the danger? Their love had been forged in the fires of threat and spite. Was that the only place it could burn bright? Did it need menace to flourish? Did it feed from adventure and suffocate upon tranquility and routine? How the fuck could anyone know that? All he knew was that he loved her with a ferocious desperation and that he was going to carve up any motherfucker that dared to lay his hands upon her.

Baby Joe hated second-guessing himself. Third-guessing himself seriously pissed him off. But that was what he was required to do when Elyssia Marron sat down beside him. Her beauty was perfect. Her smile was an invitation to Xanadu. The Sphinx would have gotten a hard-on. Right in the middle of his soul-searching examination of his love for Asia, the wings of desire wafted their heady breeze into his nose, and the dragon that lived in the heart of Baby Joe Young woke from its eternal slumber, told his soul to fuck right off, and threatened to kick the living shit out of his conscience if it didn’t leave him the fuck alone.

Baby Joe looked at the woman. He suddenly felt detached, as if he himself were a voyeur to his own misdeeds, an observer of his own folly. He smiled sardonically, half in pity and half in contempt, as he watched the confused and battered old man—sutured together from lies and dreams, sitting under a moth-infested light in a red-light levee dive in Louisiana, walking the fine line between hope and helplessness with his eyes closed—allow himself to be taken by the hand and led up the lopsided wooden staircase.

As he lay next to her, tasting the sickly sweet zombie that she had insisted he drink, he justified his actions to himself by rationalizing that he might be dead in a couple of hours. Or Asia might be. And that it didn’t really mean anything. Did it? And what the hell else was he supposed to do? And what fucking difference did it make? He was running out of lies to tell himself, when someone sneaked up and attached lead weights to his eyelids, and he fell asleep.

***

Working backward from the photograph, Fanny was able to collect the shards of the mirror that was broken all those years ago, and assemble them in such a way as to give her a distorted reflection of what had happened. The story implicit in the missing splinters and jagged edges she was able to extrapolate for herself. The way she had it figured, it went down something like this…

Edward the Seventh gives the Fab 13 back to Czar Nicholas, and tells him he wants his dough back, but before the czar has a chance to have a word with Carl Fabergé, old Eddy turns up his well-indulged royal toes, and croaks. Given that in Old Mother Russia the mother of all shitstorms is about to break loose, and that World War One is already on the boiler and brewing nicely, Nicholas understandably doesn’t have the Fab 13 at the top of his things-to-be-taken-care-of list, and forgets about it, and it becomes just another priceless artifact in the Romanov rock box. By this time Grigori Rasputin is in tight with the Romanovs. According to some he is in about as tight as you can get, with the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna and all the daughters. Little Maria, his daughter, is also best buddies with the Romanov gals. Maria Rasputin marries this lowlife slimeball named Boris Soloviev. Meanwhile the Bolsheviks have deposed the czar, and banged him up in Ekaterinburg, and Rasputin has been smoked by this Prince Felix dude and his buddy. Soloviev takes charge of some of the Romanov jewels for safekeeping, which he promptly keeps safe for himself, and legs it to Bucharest. One of the jewels he safekeeps is the Fab 13. Maria never cared too much for Soloviev in the first place, but when she realizes what a douchebagski he is, she lifts the Fab 13, and she safekeeps it for herself. Soloviev ends up working as an auto mechanic in Paris and croaks of TB, so maybe the cynics are wrong, and there is some justice in this world after all.

So…so far, so good. This much Fanny surmised from the historical records and a little deduction and intuition, but then the real sleuthing work began.

Maria bailed out of the circus in Florida and became, amazingly, a riveter in a shipyard during WW2. She married a geezer named Grigori Bernadsky, became a US citizen, and ended up living in Los Angeles on social security, where she cashed in her chips in ’77. Now, chicks walking round with priceless, unique, jewel-encrusted historical artifacts that may well have, for all anyone knows, been embedded in the snatches of half the Russian royal family, don’t generally end up croaking on welfare in LA, so it’s a reasonable assumption that the Fab 13 went astray somewhere.

Fanny turned her attention to Bernadsky.

Compared to the first husband, Bernadsky was a distinct improvement, but he was still no kind of peach. Maria soon discovered he was a shiftless bum with definite disinclination to getting off his fat ass and helping her out, so she gave him the big E. Bernadsky moved to Pittsburgh. There he vanished from the record. People at the bottom of the Ohio River wearing anchor chains as necklaces often do. Fanny had no conclusive evidence that this was what happened to Bernadsky, but she concluded that something similar had transpired when she discovered that the landlord of the festering tenement that had been Bernadsky’s last known address, one Myron Smoothe, had sold the slum and acquired a fast food chain called Slick Dick’s Chick N Chips. It had been worth around three million dollars. Owners of crumbling, rat-infested, derelict apartments don’t normally have three big ones lying around, so old Myron had enjoyed something of a windfall somewhere along the way. His next windfall wasn’t so pleasant—apparently the wind blew him off the top of the Cathedral of Learning.

What he was doing up there at four o’clock on a Sunday morning wearing a cocktail dress was anybody’s guess, but even before he had been scraped up and the sidewalk properly hosed down, Slick Dick’s Chick N Chips had somehow reverted to its former owner, Emil “Spear” Mint. It turned out that in addition to fast food and throwing people off the tops of university towers, Spear Mint had other interests, one of which was a chain of jewelers. He also boasted an extensive collection of objets d’art and other trinkets and knickknacks that included—you got it—Fabergé eggs.

It seems Mint had political ambitions and, in an attempt to draw attention to himself and grab some votes, he offered to put his collection on public display, but the attention he drew was not the kind that you want to draw, and the only thing that got grabbed was his collection.

He was found by his gardener one morning, hung up by his nuts in the toolshed, with his throat cut and half of his fingers and all his toes in a bucket underneath him, next to a blood-stained bolt cutter. Maybe Spear was as tough as his name suggested, because apparently he had held out until they got to his right hand before he told them where the goodies were at.

They never found out who did the deed, and the eggs were never seen again. According to the police records, the main suspect was a known villain, Huckleberry Hicks. But nothing was ever proven, and the case went cold. But Huckleberry Hicks’s phone record told an interesting story to anyone who knew what they were looking for. The day after Mint’s pedicure went badly wrong, Hicks made a call. To Benjamin Peabody. The list of Peabody’s phone buddies was even more interesting—in particular, one of his mates in Moscow. One Khuy Zalupa, to be exact.
Et voilà!

***

There was profound stillness. A beauty beyond words. Beyond thought. And the man who beheld it did not think. He did not consider the beauty or the stillness. He existed as part of it, as much a part as the red sun that lay pendant upon the far mountains as a jewel about the alabaster throat of Isis; as the sapphire light in the still windless leaves of the eucalyptus; as the motionless egret, intent upon the pond, and its perfect mirror image, hunter of skyfish in the deepening azure; as the faint sickle moon, shy upon the eastern rim; as the ruddy vale where a million rubies coruscated from the shadow line of the trees to the point where the slow, turning world fell away into dark and unknowable space.