The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2) (16 page)

The man was upon a low eminence. He was naked, and stood upon one leg, the other leg angled against his knee. He leaned upon a hardwood spear. He was tall and slender and insubstantial, and a gray ragged beard stirred in the gentlest of breezes like some rare anemone waving in the tide. His face was ancient, a deep wrinkled parchment upon which were inscribed stories beyond counting, and his deep-set eyes, glowing red in the setting sun, were as lodestones, repositories of the wisdom of the ages, and they gazed out upon the world with fierce compassion.

The man began to sing, a slow ululating chant. He danced, syncopated and angular and hypnotic. The sun turned his jet-black face to lava. A kookaburra sang, and far off, a flock of lorikeets screeched as they took flight.

The man abruptly stopped dancing and singing. He stood motionless, listening. An alien sound approached. He looked to the north, where the day was bleeding into night, and the sky was the color of a Pacific storm. Lights approached, too low and too slow to be a satellite, and an engine buzzed like a fly in an adjacent room. The lights dipped lower still. The man grinned, a great gaping joyful gash. On a nearby mound, a kangaroo stood stock-still, rooted to the spot and concentrated on the descending plane, poised between curiosity and flight.

Wally spoke to it. “No worries, mate. It’s just that fucken dingbat Helmut. Reckon ’e might ’ev a few fucken tubes.”

The kangaroo looked at Wally, and then, reassured, hopped off to continue its grazing.

The Cessna had barely pulled to a halt before the door opened. Wombat Jimmy sprang out and landed like a panther. Behind him, Bruce toppled out and landed like a bag of shit. Helmut killed the engine. In the time it had taken them to land, darkness had already fallen. There was a small fire blazing at the foot of an outcrop a couple of hundred yards from where they had landed, and Jimmy was already halfway there before Helmut and Bruce had managed to manhandle the crate of beer out of the hatch. They took one end each and began to pick their way across the baked earth and sparse grass.

When they reached the fire, breathless, Wally and Jimmy were squatting on their haunches, grinning.

“
Ah, g’day,” Wally said, “I was gettin’ worried.”

“
About what, exactly?” Helmut said.

Somehow, despite the fact that they had been flying nonstop for almost two days, Helmut still managed to look dapper, his white uniform perfectly creased, his hair slicked in place, and his little mustache looking as if he had trimmed it ten minutes ago.

“
I was worried in case this fat barstad’s ticker gave out before ’e got ’ere with the amber nectar, or you might ’ev got bit by a fucken taipan, and then I would’ve ’ed ta fetch the frosties meself.”

Since nobody could argue with this logic, they all cracked a tinny apiece and sucked it back. Nobody spoke. They sat in silence, drinking, each man in isolation, cloistered in solitary contemplation as the flickering flames reflected in their eyes and the shadows danced upon their faces.

Nobody had seen Wally for the best part of a year. He had gone walkabout. It had been time. A profound, beautiful sadness was upon him. And a peace. He was going back the way he came, taking the gifts that he had been given, the sights and the sounds, the light and the knowledge, the ways of things, the designs of the earth and the things that live upon it, the secrets of land and sky, and giving them back. He was journeying inside of himself, taking the trappings and superficialities of the so-called civilization that he had accumulated and setting them aside, taking the clothes of Woolloomooloo Wally and neatly folding them and leaving them by the side of the road, traveling back in time, forty thousand years. To the truth. The truth, naked and unburdened. The dreamtime was coming, but only Birring Barga could go there. Wally must stay behind, and exist only in the memories of his friends.

They all knew this, as he knew it, and therefore he knew that something serious must have happened for them to come and find him. But nobody wanted to be the one to say it.

“
Scheisse
, Wal. It was like trying to find a navel in a haystack,” Helmut said.

“
Needle, ya fucken dill,” Wally said. “’Ow did ya fucken find me, anyway?”

“
Piece a piss,” Jimmy said. “Knew ya’d go south, foller the Flinders to Corroboree Creek, up over the sisters, then figured ya’d stop over to Yarra or maybe Karumba and jump on a coupla sheilas, then head down the Currajong out across the Carpentaria, out to the blue rock, and then down over the Bunyip gibbers to the Bunyas and maybe park it at the Wallamans for a moon or two, and then down to the bight and across the beach to the headland, over the reed flats to Croc’s Crotch Creek, and then back north up to the great white sand, over the red ridge, and then back ’ere either by the gully or across the Bullock Pass. I calculated ’ow fast an ancient old cunt like you could peg it, and reckoned ya’d be round about ’ere. Only ’ad ter fly a coupla fucken days before we seen yer tracks.”

Wally grinned. “Ah, yeah. Good fucken thinkin’. So whaddya doin’ ’ere?”

“
Ah, you know. Figured ya’d be about ready fer a tube, mate,” Bruce said.

“
Ya figured right, ya fucken bludger,” Wally said, skulling his beer. Helmut tossed him another can. He cracked it. He looked at Jimmy and spoke in Ngadjonji. “Is it bad?”

Jimmy looked at him. “Yeah, I reckon.”

Wally looked at Helmut and said, “So, whaddya really doin’ ’ere?”

Helmut studied the faces around the fire. He looked back at Wally. “Stavros got a call from Bjorn Eggen. He was looking for you. He’s dying.”

***

Monsoon never realized what the Fantastic Four did on their day off until he saw The Thing march out onto the ninth tee wearing tartan plus fours and a Balmoral bonnet. And with the face he had on him, his caddie should have been wearing a fencing mask out of courtesy. There were two other guys with them. They were wearing some kind of jockey outfits. Monsoon gave them the sly once-over. He figured one was money and one was muscle. The muscle guy didn’t actually have much muscle, but Monsoon could tell he was dangerous. He knew the type. And anybody who could manage to look scary in those duds had to be some kind of badass.

All Monsoon had known about golf until recently, he had gotten from casual and disinterested glances at the screen in some sports bar when there was no other action, so he naturally assumed that golf was a game played by wholesome, pudgy dudes wearing clowny-ass pants and sweaters their maiden aunts had knitted for them. He hadn’t expected the clubhouse to look like the studio canteen during a Star Wars shoot, and the two jokers he had just seen in the locker room had really taken the cake. The one guy looked like he should have been extinct for sixty million years, and the other one like an Egyptologist had just unwrapped the fucker. Monsoon didn’t see how it was physically possible for that suet-assed bastard to swing a club, and the Famine Kid would be lucky if no one mistook him for the flag.

Monsoon was keeping his distance, and staying out of earshot as he had been instructed to, when Elmo Yorke walked up to him.

“
Say boy, din’t I tell y’all that y’all was onto a winner. Now zip it ’n’ lissen tight. Y’all booked on a flight goin’ to Moscow.”

“
Wherescow?”

“
Moscow, dipshit. Fuckin’ Russia. Y’all have heerd a Russia, right?”

“
Yeah, but what the fuck…?”

“
This is a special favor, kid, and they’ll be shitloads a extra change attached to the deal.”

“
Well, how long do I have to stay? What do I have to do?”

“
Now don’ worry ’bout nothin’, son. It’s all arranged. First class all the way. Now lissen up. Go to the clubhouse and open locker A26 with this here key. Inside you’ll find a set a clubs. Now them mothers is real valuable, son, ’n’ I mean like
real
valuable. Y’all got to cling onto them suckers as iffen you was a clingin’ to your mama’s tit. A driver will take ya back to the hotel, and bring ya to the airport in the mornin’. Now this is important: Don’t check the fuckin’ clubs. Don’t let ’em outta ya sight. Carry ’em onto the plane with ya. Ya first class, so don’t sweat it. They’ll let ya. Iffen any shitbird gives ya lip, act like a first class passenger and cuss ’em out. When ya get there, someone will meet ya. Got it?”

“
Yeah, yeah, sure, man. I’m on it.”

“
Good boy. But don’t fuck it up.”

“
Don’t worry, Elmo, my man. My fucking-up days are long gone.”

The men watched Monsoon traipsing away over the grass. Money talked.

“
Shit, Elmo. I have to hand it to you. That cocksucker looks so much like Tiger Woods, nobody at customs will even think about checking him out. They’ll probably ask for his fucking autograph.”

“
In Russia, if people know he work for me, nobody check him out anyway, asshole,” The Thing said. “Iz juss precaution. So, vhere iz software?”

“
In the golf bag.”

“
So when will be safe?”

“
As soon as the software is installed in the hardware, the polonium is shielded. In the meantime, the device has a failsafe shell, but it won’t last more than a few days. You sure your boy knows what he’s doing?”

“
My cousin Hyatt more smart than Stephen Hawkeye. What about money?”

“
When the software gets to where the software is going, and the software gets installed into the hardware, and I get the fucking R3, and see it working, then you get the money.
Iz juss precaution.
And by the way, it’s Stephen Hawking.”

The Thing stiffened. There was a sudden, severe change in the weather and a black cloud obscured his face. His caddy stepped forward, and Muscle stuck his hand under the lapel of his harlequin-checked windbreaker. They eyeballed each other, both outwardly still but inwardly bristling, like two German Shepherds with a ham bone between them. But then the cloud passed and The Thing laughed.

“
Okay,” he said. “No problem. This time next week, we all be eat caviar, drink vodka. Everyone get what he want.
Da
? All people happy.
Da
?”

Money smiled. The tension eased, but not completely. The air was still combustible. A spark could still blow the whole deal.

Elmo stepped in. “Khuy,” he said. “I need to talk to you. We don’t need the boys anymore, no?”

Khuy Zalupa put on his best charming smile. A triceratops would have shit itself.

“
No. No.
Spasiba bolshoi
and
dasvidanya
, boys. See you next week.”

Money nodded. Muscle backed away a couple of paces, keeping his eye on the caddie. They turned and headed across the green for the path. The caddie watched them go.

“
It’s about the gelt, Khuy.”

“
What about money?”

“
Well. That schmuck general stiffed me. He upped the price to three mill, the fucking
prestupnik
. I had no choice.”

“
Okay. Okay. No problem. Fair is fair. Where fuck
iz
Brooke?”

“
I don’t know. He never showed up, the putz. Sometimes I think that boy must have a hole in his head.”

Monsoon was laughing out loud as he walked down the pristine pathway toward the clubhouse. Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-fuckin’-A. Chauffeured limos, first-class plane tickets, the whiff of French perfume and permed snatch as the stewardess leaned over to pour you another glass of champagne, pushing her tit against your chops. And if that commie beaver was anywhere near as spectacular as he’d heard it was, well…fucking roll on, Russia.

As he got level with the second hole, the clubhouse was down and to his right. Up to his left was a sharp hill with trees on top. A movement caught his eye, and he looked up in time to see those two bizarre circus-act motherfuckers from the clubhouse trudging over the crest. Probably going up there to shag each other. Any way you figured that scenario it came out seriously fucked up. Monsoon started laughing out loud again, and he did a little impromptu Ali shuffle, rattling the clubs in the bag.