The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2) (49 page)

“
No, not like that, you dippy bitch. It happened to me again.”

“
What?”

“
Well, I suddenly came over all desperate again. Some kind of bug. I nearly didn’t make it. That’s the trouble with these fucking foreigners. They never wash their hands. Anyway, of course there was nothing to wipe with, so I asked the guy in the next stall.”

“
And?”

“
I think it was Wally.”

“
What?”

“
It sounded exactly like Wally. By the time I got out, he was gone.”

“
Crispin, you’re the one who’s gone. What would Woolloomooloo Wally be doing in a public toilet in a train station in Paris?”

“
Yeah. You’re probably right. It did sound just like him, though.”

Just then Baby Joe came up. “Come on,” he said. “Time to go.”

As Crispin struggled to get a grip on his collection of bags, Asia noticed the dark stain on the back of his trousers. She decided to wait until they were back at the hotel to tell him that he didn’t make it after all.

***

Although, before he got to Paris, Monsoon had thought that Coquille St. Jacques was a venereal disease, he had been to New Jersey, so unintelligible rude people wearing weird duds and waving their arms about was not completely new to him, and so he wasn’t as disorientated by the strangeness of it all as he might have been.

Monsoon Parker was many things, most of them not very pleasant, but a sucker wasn’t one of them. And if anybody knew about hotel rooms, it was him. Things happened to people in hotel rooms. How many celebrities did you hear about that got knocked off in hotel rooms? Suicides, homicides, sexual misadventures, overdoses, chicken sandwiches, you name it.

And even though some people considered the Ritz in Paris to be
the
hotel, as far as Monsoon was concerned it was just a bunch of fancy rooms piled one on top of the other where a guy could get into serious shit if he wasn’t careful. And the motherfuckers didn’t even speak English.

Which was why he checked in, but didn’t go to his room. He left a message to say that he could be found downstairs, out on the street in the café next door, from seven onward, and then cabbed it across the river and got himself a room in a flophouse on the other side where the hookers came a bit cheaper, even if they didn’t shave their legs.

At seven-oh-five a guy who looked like an Italian movie director approached his table and sat down. A guy who looked like an Italian cement mixer sat down right along with him. The guy was wearing a white linen suit, a blue silk shirt, oversized dark glasses, and a yellow silk scarf fastened yachting-style at his throat. His hair was black, greased, and parted down the middle to geometric perfection. He sported a pencil mustache that looked like it had to be trimmed every day. He had a dog with him that seemed to be part-sheep, part-chicken, and which was trimmed like the bushes in the gardens of one of those country houses that you see in magazines while you’re waiting for a root canal. As ridiculous goes, on a scale of one to ten, think fifteen.

“
I am Alphonso Nightingale. Zis is Fifi Foufette. No, not ’im. Ze poodle. ’E is Basilisk. Zat is not ’is real name, of course, but zat is beside ze point. Ze point is, you are not ’Yatt.”

“
Well spotted,” Monsoon said. “We’re quite different. The difference being that I have the R3 and that spotty-faced little fucker doesn’t.”

“
You realize ah could ’ave you killed on ze spot.”

“
What are you gonna do, make me use a public bathroom?”

“
Je ne comprends pas
.”

“
Never mind.
Listen. If you knock me off, you don’t get the goods. So, what’s the score with Hyatt?”

“
Ah. Ah appreciate a man ’oo knows ’ow to…’ow you say…talk the straight line. ’Yatt is nossing to
moi
. I barely know ’im. Mah only interest is ze R3.”

“
Well then,” said Monsoon, looking like Dizzy Gillespie drinking a milkshake, “I’m your fucking man.”

“
You ’ave eet?”

“
Yeah, pal. I got
eet
.”

“
Where is eet?”

“
I shoved it up my ass.”

“
Comment
?”

“
Joke, pal. I have it safe.”

“
In ze room?”

“
Do you believe in Father Christmas as well?”

“
Quoi
?”

“
Look. I have the fucking thing. I don’t know what deal you made with Hyatt, and I don’t fucking care. I know what this high-tech remote is worth, but I don’t care about that either. I’m not greedy. All I want is five million euros in cash. In a fucking case. A fucking American case. Not any of this French designer pansy shit. Do we got a deal, or do we don’t?”

“
Five million…’ow you say…big ones. You drive ze ’ard bargain,
mais pourqoi pas
? Okay.”

Okay!
It was the most beautiful sound Monsoon had ever heard. It was poetry and music. It was Luciano Pavarotti reciting William Butler Yeats. In the face of the delirious visions of salacious excess and drunken debauchery that immediately assailed his frontal lobe, he was seriously struggling to maintain his
sang-froid
, but he knew he had to play it cool. This was
it
! I-fucking-T. The gravy. The big one. The one that took Monsoon Parker from Shit Street to penthouse suite. So he gave it his all. It was the best performance of his life.

Monsoon stood up. Basilisk tensed. Alphonso shook his head. Monsoon sneered. He did that thing Eddie Murphy does with his eyebrow.

“
So, er, listen. What do you call that shitpile where you French dudes keep all the paintings and shit. The Loo?”

“
Ze Louvre,
monsieur
?”

“
Yeah, that’s it. What do you call that picture they have there, of the gal that looks like someone’s going down on her, out-of-camera-like?”

“
Eh?”

“
Moaning Lisa. Something like that.”

“
Ze
Mona Lisa
.”

“
Yeah, that’s it.”

“
Wat about eet?”

“
Eet
is a public place, dickhead. With plenty of people and plenty of cameras, you
sabe
? Meet me there tomorrow at ten. Bring the fucking dough. If Hyatt shows up, tell him he’s out. You can explain that to him any way you want to. If I see anybody but you, and I mean any-fucking-body, including the catwalk kid here, I split. You got that?”

“
Ah will be zere.”

“
Well. All righty then. See ya. Gotta go. See the sights. See what I’m sayin’?” Monsoon got up and started walking. He was trying to slide on down like James Brown. He looked more like he was making tracks like Groucho Marx, but fortunately Alphonso didn’t notice. He was too busy conferring with Basilisk to make sure he had understood right.

Monsoon scooted into the hotel and hid behind a column. He waited until he saw Alphonso climb into the back of a limo with the permed squirrel, and then legged it back into the café. He ordered a triple brandy, downed it in one, and ordered another. As he sat, contemplating what had just happened, but too excited to really think straight, he became aware of someone staring at him.

It was a woman. And what a fucking woman! Look at those lamps. Look at those lips. Jesus. The woman had her hair tied up in a green silk band and she wore Bulgari shades. The waiter brought her something clear in a small glass. Monsoon’s brandy arrived. He found that his hand was shaking as he tried to lift the glass. He looked over at the woman. She had taken her sunglasses off. Jesus. What fucking peepers. She raised her glass. She smiled. At him. Sweet Mary’s ass. How lucky could a guy get in one day?

***

Asia was ecstatic, and even though Baby Joe was trying hard to appear blasé, she knew that he was secretly impressed, and when they had gone to sink an aperitif or two in Bar Hemingway before dinner she could tell he was getting a kick out of drinking in the bar that Ernest liberated from the Krauts.

Of course, for Crispin there had been nowhere else to stay but the Ritz. It was absolutely
de rigueur
, even if it was only for a couple of nights. Any more and he would have had to cash in his life insurance policy, but what the hell. How many times did you get to be in Paris? And you should have seen the bed. As much as he loved Asia and liked Baby Joe, he couldn’t help wishing for a bit of company of a more intimate nature, but who knew. Maybe later on. Who knew what could happen to an American in Paris?

Crispin had been in some heavyweight grub shacks in his day, but he had to say that L’Espadon was at the pinnacle. The bisque was dreamy, the
foie gras en jus
was the taste fairy tripping lightly over his taste buds in little silver slippers, and he thought his coq au vin was to die for. And if Baby Joe hadn’t been so quick with the Heimlich maneuver, he would have—the leg bone would have wasted him for sure. But apart from that minor incident, Crispin was enjoying the mostly splendidly entertaining day he could ever have wished for. The waiters were just about kissing his ass every time they approached the table. Just about. Oh, well. You can’t have everything. And the wine—heavens above. No more of that California shite for Crispin Capricorn from now on, thank you very much. And the décor. The mirrors, the chandeliers. Simply fabulous. So romantic. It was so easy to imagine oneself back in the day, sitting across from some pompadoured princeling, playing footsie under the table, kitted out like a
comte
and rubbing elbows (and with a bit of luck other bits) with the elite, effete, and affected, and swanning around with the royalty’s bejeweled bonces, traipsing up and down the corridors berating the minions.

When his
poire belle Hélène
arrived, accompanied by a towering mound of croquembouche, which he had ordered just because he wanted to say it, Crispin was unable to suppress a little gasp of wonder.

“
Crispin,” Asia said, “you’ll never manage that. You’ll explode.”

“
Just you watch this, young lady,” Crispin said, digging in.

Asia smiled at Baby Joe. “I’d better help him.”

Baby Joe smiled back. He sat back in his chair and watched them scarfing the desserts with absolute uninhibited pleasure like giant kids at a birthday party. He loosened his tie and picked up his glass of Courvoisier.

His affection for Crispin was still something of a mystery to him. He watched him wrapping his chops around the chocolate, his fat cheeks bulging and his bouffant keeling over to one side like a collapsed soufflé. He was like a baby, Baby Joe thought. A fat, jovial, acerbic, witty, cynical, musical baby, needful and demanding, whom you sometimes wanted to cuddle and other times you wanted to slap silly. He would never have imagined that he would come to call such a man friend, and yet he did.

He turned his gaze to Asia. She was radiant, glowing with happiness and not a little cognac, wearing a green silk dress that looked as if it had been sprayed on, with a gardenia in her hair. No fairer woman had ever walked the streets of Paris. No princess at Versailles or harlot at Montmartre was ever sexier. Even old Renoir himself would have struggled to get Asia down on canvas, the way she looked that night. She glanced up, over a mouthful of pear, and saw him looking. She smiled. She had a spot of cream on her nose. He smiled and looked away. There was only so much beauty a man could stand at one go.