The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2) (19 page)

“
It’s very pretty,” she said.

Fanny was trying to keep the quavering out of her voice, but it was proving beyond her. She had never been this frightened in her life.

“
You are famous Fanny Lemming,
da
. You write book. Peabody tell me.”

Fanny felt a slight relief. “Yes. Yes, I am. Yes, I do.”

“
I am Russian. We love book. Russia have greatest writers in world.”

“
And have you read any of my books?”

“
Da
.” Zalupa stared at her. It was a demon staring at a fresh soul.

“
Did you like them?” she forced herself to say. She felt as if her fate rested in the answer.

“
Da
. I like.”

Again she felt the slightest relief.

“
Especially this one.” Zalupa reached behind him. He pulled out a copy of
Diamonds Aren’t for Everyone
and tossed it to her. She tried to catch it but her hands failed her and it landed in her lap. She picked it up.

“
Oh, my latest,” she said. “It’s my favorite, too. I like the plot.”

“
Iz not plot.”

Nobody likes critics unless they say something good. Fanny’s resentment took just a tiny sliver off the edge of her fear.

“
Of course it’s a plot. It’s a very good plot.”

“
Iz not plot!
” Zalupa bellowed.

Fanny jumped. She knocked her zombie over. It spilled on her leg but she did not move.

“
Iz not plot,” Zalupa continued in a normal tone. “Iz plan.”

“
What?”

“
Iz plan. Iz stealing plan. From me.”

Fanny stared in disbelief. She looked at Oleg. His eyes were baleful holes. She looked away.

“
All your book same. I know. I in same business. Everything happen in your book, happen in real world. Only one explanation. I know you.”

Fanny continued to stare. She felt as if she couldn’t blink. She wanted to avert her eyes but she couldn’t.
My God.
Was is possible to be terrified and repelled by somebody and to be impressed by them at the same time? Never in a million years did she expect anyone to figure it out. It was the essence of the game. It was the essence of who she was. It was as if someone had located the keystone of her ego and moved it, and everything that she stood for and everything that her life and her self-image was constructed upon had come crashing down in one moment. But how? The plots were sublime, exquisitely devious. Circular clues that led back to where they began. Double and triple entendres, blind alleys, labyrinths to confuse the Minotaur. Everything changed, everything disguised—locations, people, dates, centuries even—but a subtle scent deliberately left to follow, a scent so faint that the keenest bloodhound would lose heart and give up. And yet a scent nevertheless, a map, and an answer. On purpose. So that she could laugh. So that she could watch and enjoy the delicious irony while so-called experts groped around blindly in the dark. Policemen, detectives, forensics analysts, lab technicians, profilers, insurance adjusters, even clairvoyants and seers, all lost and bewildered, the misled leading the misled, and all the time the solution was on the shelves in every bookstore in every city in the land. Blind huntsmen chasing wild geese though halls of mirrors, and the perpetrator named on the bestseller lists in every newspaper in the English-speaking world.

And Khuy Zalupa had figured it out. The very last person on the planet that she would have wished to know, and he had figured it out. She had pushed her luck too far, and now the worst nightmare possible was sitting right in front of her.

“
You iz Caramel Cougar.”

It was hopeless to deny it, and she knew it.

“
Yes,” she whispered. “Yes, I am.” The admission was somehow a relief. She was able to avert her eyes.

“
And you figure out about Fab 13,
da
.”

“
Yes.”

“
And you plan steal that too.”

“
Yes.”

“
All my life I search for Fab 13. I Russian. I keep believe when no one else do. I look and keep look. Because I know. Iz in my blood. And I find. Is most beautiful thing I ever see. Is worth all others put together. And you want to steal it from me.”

“
Yes.”

“
Now I have other question. Look at me.”

She could not. She knew she had to raise her eyes and look at the man, but she could not.

Zalupa reached across and slapped her, hard. Her lip was cut. He grabbed her hair, and hissed viciously, “You see him?” He indicated Oleg with a nod of his head. “He hate you. He hate everyone. You see dog? Dog iz killer. See dead dog? This one kill them. If Oleg say one word—one word—dog kill you. Look at me.”

She raised her eyes. Zalupa stood up.

“
You like me?”

Fanny shook her head. There were tears in her eyes.

“
I am handsome,
da
?”

She shook her head again. The tears began to roll down her face.

“
You want me?”

She began to sob.

“
Let me show you something.”

She couldn’t help herself. She stared as Zalupa unzipped his trousers. She was a creature watching a cobra. Helpless. Mesmerized. Paralyzed as the spider approached.

Zalupa let his trousers fall around his ankles.

He was grotesque. Deformed. His thighs were veined and bulging and matted with thick black hair. But his penis—it was disgusting. Horrific. Not the penis of a man, but of a thing. A pig. It was long and sickly pink, but it was twisted. It spiraled, like a huge living corkscrew. Fanny thought she was going to vomit.

“
When I come it hurt me. Bad. Pain like you cannot imagine. But I do it. And guess what. It hurt you much worse.”

Fanny was suddenly furious. Furious that this loathsome worm had outsmarted her. Furious at her helplessness. Furious that this foul, hideous monster was going to hurt her and invade her. Furious in the knowledge that even if she survived, she would never be able to be with a man again without thinking of Zalupa’s bestial contorted member and being revolted. All her fear left her, and was replaced by a lynx’s rage. She leapt up and railed at Zalupa, screaming right into his face, spitting her venom at him.

“
Listen, Valentino, if you’re going to fuck me, the least you can do is do me from behind so I don’t have to smell your breath or see that piece of roadkill that you call a face.”

Oleg suddenly jumped up and grabbed her. The bruising strength in his hands made her cry out. He pulled her hands over her head and forced her facedown over the arm of the chair and held her. Zalupa laughed. It was like a lung cancer victim singing.

“
Ha-heugh-heuhgh. Hey. Why not? Anything for lady,
da
?” He lumbered up, lifted her dress, and tore her underwear from her.

***

Sitting in the hitherto-unimaginable comfort of his dove’s-foreskin-soft leather reclining chair in the first class cabin of his jumbo flight to St. Petersburg, Monsoon was left to reflect once again upon a vertigo-inducing series of swoops and swirls in his topsy-turvy existence. He was also left to reflect upon the fact that his current VIP status was not quite as pleasurable as it might have been because, despite the fact that he had gone to great efforts to enhance his resemblance to Tiger Woods by kitting himself out in some seriously upmarket golf duds in the hope of maybe joining the Mile High Club with some golf-obsessed stewardess, fucking George Clooney was in seat A1, and Monsoon was getting about as much attention as poison ivy at a flower show.

Monsoon looked out of the window at the moonless, starless night. His own reflection gazed back at him.

“
Can you believe this shit?” he asked his reflection.

The cabin lights dimmed and his reflection vanished without comment. Monsoon tipped his seat all the way back and lay with his glass of brandy balanced on his stomach, his eyes closed.

Unlike the delectable butterflied scallops, which the stewardess had managed to serve him without breaking her neck trying to keep an eye on seat A1 and without dropping mulled red wine sauce on his nuts, the events of the previous couple of days took some swallowing. Here, seemingly, was another inexplicable acceleration in fortunes, from sick to slick in no time at all, and with that same inescapable feeling that fate was setting him up. Was that godly giggling he could hear above the gentle hum of the engines? Were the cynical, sadistic bastards, rolling about on their pornographic mosaics, pissing into their flowing robes at the thought of setting the sucker up for the big bamboo again? Words like “improbable” and “unlikely” just didn’t cut it. Try “no fucking way,” “never in a coon’s age of blue fucking moons,” “snowball-fight-in-Hades-downright-impossible.” It just couldn’t be a coincidence, could it? They didn’t make coincidences that big. If it was, it was a triple-X, supersize, extra-fries-and-don’t-go-easy-on-the-fucking-mayo coincidence. And what about that newspaper blowing under the shithouse door? The weird wind of destiny, or the well-aimed fart of fate?

Monsoon didn’t often find himself at a loss for words, but he had been open-mouth speechless when he walked through the patio doors of that creepy motherfucker’s mansion where they were staying and seen that fat pansy Crispin lounging on his lard ass in a recliner, with the ever-lovely Asia sitting beside him.

What part of the great, convoluted, preordained plan was that shit? The last time he had seen that pair—or expected to ever see again—they were eating his dust in the back of the boonies, while he made off with the shekels. That was three years and change back, and in all that time he had never thought about them except to hope the fat turd suffered an irreparable rectal prolapse and she got abducted by a sadistic sect of diseased fetishists.

And there they were, as large as life—or in that fat bastard’s case, larger. His deep-and-underlying-suspicion-of-all-human-beings-and-activities-related-thereto alarm went off, in spades, and he ducked back behind the portal. He tried to skedaddle across the portico but, just then, Elmo and Lord Creepo had come sauntering through the door. Monsoon had no choice but to follow when Elmo said, “C’mon out here, boy. Let’s all sip ourselves a julep er two.”

The questions in Monsoon’s addled brain pushed each other out of the way so fast that he didn’t have time to address one before another took its place. Finally the big daddy question muscled the others out of the way: What the fuck were those two doing there, and what had Elmo Yorke got to do with it?

Monsoon was just limbering his lips up for some fast talking when Elmo said, “Ho. Double L. Y’all’s got company, I see.”

“
Yeah. But it’s kind of a private arrangement. It don’t really concern our deal.”

“
Shit, boy. You ain’t about to try to tell me that you intend to keep that there prime piece a chicken all to yer goddamn self, are ya now, son?”

Lord Lundi gave a sly, serpentine smile. “Why, don’t you worry yourself, Elmo. Look around.”

Elmo looked around and saw two dusky, enchanting seductresses slinking toward them.

“
Well, now, boy. That’s what I call Southern hospi-fucking-tality. Yessiree.”

“
Me, too,” Monsoon said, stepping forward with his lips only millimeters from his ears.

Lundi grabbed him. “The facilities are for the guests, nigger. Servants’ quarters are that way.”

Monsoon looked to Elmo, but Elmo was already headed for the curved antebellum staircase, one gently bouncing butt cheek clasped in each hand.

Monsoon skulked off to his room to plot some lingering form of execution for Lord Lundi’s carp, swiping a bottle of Southern Comfort from the armoire on his way. He was halfway through it when Elmo sent for him to tell him it was time to head out to the course.