The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2) (5 page)

If not for his sister, Alyona, he would surely not have survived his infancy. Alyona was his only light, his only warmth, his only consolation, his only touch, his only confirmation of his own existence and worth, the only one who ever held him or cherished him. In later years he carried as icons the warm, sweet, smoky smell of her hair and the loving look that glowed in her eyes by the dim lamplight, sacred images in the reliquary of his mind that was otherwise devoid of souvenir or memento.

But even she was taken from him. The father begrudged him even that candlelight of hope, and sent her to Moscow, to labor for kopeks in the kitchens of some commissary. When he was eleven, Yermak was dispatched to the farthest outpost of the settlement, to guard the sheep through the winters, and apart from the spring herding lived in virtual isolation for years. It might have been the saving of him. It might have. If the vindictive harpies that had singled him out for his fate had released him from their spiteful whims, he might have been rescued from the bitter flood of bile that was sweeping him remorselessly to his destiny. Out there in the solitude, under shimmering oceans of stars and endless pristine skies, listening to the wind and the water in the rills, living off the land, he began to discover a new meaning to his life. He learned that the problem was not himself. It was the others. The ones who hated him, and spurned him. Out there, he was not different, for there was no one to be different from. He almost found peace. Almost.

One day, in his fourteenth year, as he was sitting outside his rude cabin smoking a pipe, watching the sheep dotted over the low brown hills across the stream, and watching the rabbit he had snared smoking over his fire, and watching the way the flitting insects disturbed the smooth surfaces of the melt pools that stretched away down to the river and ruffled the reflection of the solitary pink cloud that floated there, he heard something in the tree line. He stood and quickly fetched his ancient Berdan rifle from where it leaned against the doorframe. He watched. A gray muzzle peered from behind a tree and sniffed the wind. Yermak leveled the piece and steadied his breath. He pressed the trigger, indenting it to the firing point. The beast stepped out. Yermak released the trigger and lowered the weapon.

It wasn’t a wolf. It was a dog. A huge dog. An Ovcharka. And it was limping. Yermak put the gun back against the doorframe and stepped out. The dog turned to run, stopped, hesitated, turned back again, sniffed the wind, and lowered its head. It looked at Yermak. He walked slowly over to the fire, tore a piece from the rabbit, and tossed it to the dog. The dog limped forward, then stopped and hesitated again. Yermak crooned to it soothingly. The dog ran up, snatched the piece of flesh, and dashed back into the tree line. Yermak smiled and went back to his pipe. As he sat, the dog was watching him. He smiled again.

That night, when he curled up in his pile of skins on the rough board floor, the dog was lying next to him. The dog had been shot. With a shotgun. Yermak meticulously and carefully removed the pellets one by one. The dog began to follow him wherever he went, and after a week it had stopped limping. Yermak was still trying to think of a name for the dog when the hateful bitches swooped down to perch in the pines and gloat as the silent men waded up to the cabin in the first pearl light to look for the animal.

They were four in number. Apocalyptic raptors. Bearded, with high cheekbones and beaked noses and piercing fierce eyes. The dog whined when it saw them. It cowered and allowed itself to be tethered.

Yermak stepped out of the cabin. He held his rifle. “What are you doing?”

The men said nothing. Yermak raised the rifle. One of the men pulled a pistol from the pocket of his Astrakhan coat and shot Yermak through the shoulder. The rifle went off. One of the men fell. His ushanka rolled in the clay. The men moved in. Yermak was immensely strong, but he was only fourteen. And he had been shot. And they were three.

Things were done to him. They left him for dead, naked and bleeding and broken, lying in the dirt illuminated by the flames from the burning cabin. They took the sheep. And they took the dog. The rain saved him. An unlikely and unseasonal storm came, and it roused him and doused the flames, and he was able to crawl inside the smoking ruins and secrete himself inside of pile of smoldering skins. He lay there, whimpering inside a warm furry womb until the dawn came.

He had suffered injuries that would have killed a lesser man, let alone a boy, but some animal vigor clung to him and sustained him, and the ghost would not leave him even though he was in such pain that he wished it would and could not understand why it would not. At first light, he crawled to the stream and drank and crawled back again and lay back in the furs, and he did this for several days until he was at last able to walk. Then he gathered what was left and began the slow, painful trek across the valleys and plains to where the railway track lay. It took him four days to reach it, scavenging what he could, and he waited another two days before a train rumbled past up the long gradient and he was able to haul himself aboard.

Later, as he lay sore and shivering in the straw scattered onto the floor of the box car, as the freight train slowly rattled and clanked on its long journey to Rostov, and as he tried to peer at the brittle stars through his swollen eyes, it occurred to him how essentially simple life is. Everything has a balance. Light and dark, hot and cold, love and hate, good and evil. But you can neither have, nor be, both.

In some things you had no choice. It was night; therefore there was no light, save the distant stars. There was no sun; therefore it was cold. He could not love, because no one would love him in return. Goodness leads to pain, and evil triumphs. So, there it was. He was loveless, cold, and hateful. And he would be evil. He had only one choice, and that choice had already been made for him. By the hateful twisted god bastards who had spat upon his mother’s uterus and shaped him thus. By the father who had rejected him, by the children who denied him friendship, by the girls who spurned him, by the men who had beaten and brutalized him. Hatred and vengeance were his choices. Hate everybody and everything.

And suddenly, there in that glacial lonely night, the pain left him. The aching of his battered body ceased. His hate rose up in him and around him like a blanket and a shield. He smiled in the darkness, knowing that nothing and nobody would ever hurt him again. And, unafraid, he closed his ravaged eyes and slept. It was only much later that he realized the rain that day never really saved him at all.

Yermak found his way to Moscow, and began to look for his sister. Even though the great city was as alien to him as if he had been some ancient barbarian, wandered into Rome, he immediately felt at home. He felt its power and its coldness and cruelty and its wonderful anonymity. In Moscow he was not the only freak in the circus. On the evening of the second day he wandered up to a restaurant and peered in through the steamy windows. Inside were well-dressed people, and waiters carrying huge glowing dishes, and men drinking at a long bar. A man came out and told him to get lost. Yermak ignored him and continued to gaze at the fascinating scene within. The man grabbed Yermak by the arm. Yermak turned upon him like a wolverine. Two more men came out. Yermak felt a vicious joy and abandonment as he went for them, without skill but with such brute force and ferocity that he drove all three of them into bloody retreat.

A fourth man came out. He was different. Carved from a different stone. Yermak could tell, even though he didn’t know why. Yermak hesitated. The man looked at him.

“
You hungry, kid?” he said without smiling.

That was the beginning of it. The Bratva. He learned fast and moved up through the ranks. They found his sister while he was doing his second stint in Butyrka. They greased him out long enough to see her. She saw the tattoos. She saw his eyes. She knew. She told him that there would be a place for him when he came out, that there was still a chance. There wasn’t. He got stabbed while he was inside. In the prison hospital he contracted TB. When he got out, she was gone. Married to a Yankee and gone to San Francisco. No message, no goodbye, no forwarding address. No
dasvidanya
. No nothing. And the last spark drifted into the cold night, and was extinguished.

The men who took Khuy Zalupa from the streets thought they had found a dog to set upon their enemies, that they had a mindless slavering brute at their disposal, a grunting inarticulate peasant, a loose cannon that would soon ignite itself and be forgotten. They thought wrong.

From behind his inimical and porcine little eyes, a formidable raw intelligence peered out, rooting and gouging for knowledge. He inhaled Moscow. Devoured it. He skinned it, paring it down to the bone, exposing its veins and arteries, its sinews. He cut through to its heart. And ate it. Slowly and painstakingly he taught himself to read, and the libraries became to him as a beacon to a sailor adrift, and a vast glorious tragic ridiculous pageant unfolded before him. And he understood! He understood where he was, and who he was, and what it meant to be who he was. The ruble dropped and he got the message and he got the picture. Not only that, he soon started sending his own messages and making his own pictures.

The men were made uneasy. They had thought to throw him a bone—a bottle of vodka and a hussy and a bowl of borscht. They could feel him slipping beyond their control. Theretofore unimaginable pleasures were set before him, and he availed himself as freely as would any other young man in his situation. But it was not enough. He was seduced, but not beguiled, and by the time it occurred to them that they should kill him, it was far too late, and the cuckoo preened and cackled from its nest at the broken shells and splattered yolks below.

Ten years later, he was the scarred Czar of Moscow. Shot, poisoned, bombed, beaten, starved, shafted, conspired against, investigated, jailed, set up, indicted but still standing, and supreme. And he had been scaled, every vestigial remnant of humanity and compassion excised from his being, scoured out by scalding blood and steel wire, painted in virulent layers of acid venom until what remained was a perfect image of true malevolence, and the harpies’ work was complete.

They gave him the name Khuy Zalupa in prison. It was due to a biological abnormality. He liked it. And it was who he was. Yermak Timovitch was gone, vanished into an irretrievable and unlamented past, perhaps wandering as a ghost outside the ruins of a burned-out cabin down by the Don.

And now Khuy Zalupa sat in the garden of his dacha, in the late afternoon, drinking vodka from the bottle and casting no shadow, as if even the sun was afraid of him. As he sat, deep in thought, his tiny deep-set piggy eyes glinted out of his discolored, pockmarked face like pieces of broken glass embedded in tarmac on a hot day. He appeared neckless, as if his bulbous globular head were attached directly to his massive shoulders, and the back of his bald head was corrugated with meaty folds of greasy gray skin. The deep creases between them had not seen the light of day for decades, and harbored who-knew-what pestilent microbiological menagerie. The few meager strands of hair plastered to his great sweaty dome were inadequate to conceal the huge red wart that protruded from between them like a newly hatched vulture chick peering out from its nest. Khuy was sensitive about this growth. To stare was to court death. To comment was to marry it.

Khuy seemed to make up his mind about something. He roused himself from his reverie and lumbered to his feet and shuffled off across the grass with a peculiar swaying simian gait. The flowers at the edge of the lawn appeared to shrink back as he passed, and the birds stopped singing as if a sudden cold wind had arisen.

Khuy walked into the house and the birds resumed their song, but fell silent again as he returned, carrying a cell phone. He flopped down heavily into his chair and prodded the phone with a thick stubby finger.

***

A lot of people don’t like clowns. In fact, many people are afraid of them. There is even a name for it: coulrophobia. In one survey, a staggering ninety-five percent of children between the ages of five and fourteen claimed to be scared of clowns. And who can blame them? Who is lurking under that motley, and what have they got to hide? There is something fundamentally wrong and sinister about a heavily made-up man with exaggerated facial features wearing ridiculous clothes and cavorting about, grimacing and leering like a deranged gargoyle, trying to elicit sympathy. Just look at Steven Tyler, for fuck’s sake. So clowns give a lot of people the creeps, and some clowns are just creeps, plain and simple. But some clowns people are right to be afraid of.

Dietrich “Low Roll” Zimmermann and Denzel “Hard D” Schmaltz, for example. Low Roll and Hard D existed on opposite ends of the spectrum of possible human physiology. Low Roll was a walking xylophone, with ribs like a pariah dog and a face like a collapsed soufflé, and Hard D was packing enough spare pork to affect Nathan’s Famous share prices and was afraid to go swimming in the sea in case the Norwegians got him.

Sartorially they were not the most elegant of citizens, either. In another era, Low Roll would have been sued by Charlie Chaplin, and short of Saks Fifth Avenue opening a Seriously Fat Bastard section in the menswear department, Hard D was more or less limited to what he could find that would fit him. Neither one of them was especially well endowed with wit, and nor were they, even though they hailed from Philadelphia, overly imbued with a spirit of brotherly love.