The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2) (25 page)

“
Y’all in need of a tune, son?” the old man said as Baby Joe passed him on the way to the bar.

“
You play ‘Skylark,’ sir?”

“
Kid, iffen I cain’t play it, it ain’t bin fuckin’ writ.”

Baby Joe smiled and dropped five dollars in the kitty. He walked up to the bar. The top was yellow marble. He stuck his foot on the rail. A guy with slicked-back hair and a beeswaxed mustache was bartending.

“
Let me guess,” he said. “Boilermaker. Am I right?”

“
Right you are son, right you are.”

As Baby Joe waited for his drink, the old man began to sing. He had a sweet voice that seemed that it ought to come from a much younger man, as if a boy was trapped inside his old bones trying to sing his way out.

“
Skylark, have you anything to say to me?
”

The bartender put Baby Joe’s drink down without saying anything and walked away.

“
Can you tell me where my love may be?
”

Baby Joe took a sip from his bourbon and chased it with a mouthful of beer.

“
Is there a valley in the mist?
”

Baby Joe realized that he was crying.

“
Where she’s just waiting to be kissed.
”

He let the tears come. Fuck it. Who cares? Fuck that macho bullshit. Pain and love and worry and beauty and music and relief. Fuck it. He sat drinking and listening, letting the song draw it all out of him, letting the old man’s smooth, melodic voice wash it all away and leave him clean. He closed his eyes. When the music stopped, he opened his eyes. Two people were standing on either side of him. One was a small white man, and the other was a large black woman.

“
Pretty song,” the woman said.

Baby Joe nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “It is.”

They moved to a table at the back. Agent Black ordered a Crimson Voodoo Ale. Agent White ordered a mimosa.

“
I just love these things,” she said.

“
I thought you people didn’t drink on duty.”

“
Well, we ain’t strictly on duty at this particular minute,” Agent Black said. “So, Mr. Young.”

“
Call me Baby Joe. Hey, you know what? You look kind of familiar. Do I know you from somewhere?”

When Baby Joe said this, Agent White turned to look at Agent Black, as if she were studying him.

“
I doubt it, Jack, I doubt it. Okay, then, so Baby Joe it is. You were a cop, right?”
said Agent Black.

“
Yeah. Yeah. Way back.”

Agent White sipped her drink and set it down. “The name Don Imbroglio mean anything to you, Baby Joe?”

“
Okay, guys. What say we just cut to the chase?”

“
A guy called Atlas Page told us he sold you a piece the same night that Lord Lundi went AWOL.”

Baby Joe didn’t bother to deny it. He knew how the game was played. He just shrugged.

“
Look, Baby Joe,” Agent White said, “you know the score. You know how hard we can make it. The thing is, we don’t want to. We hear you’re good people. Truth is, we don’t give a fuck what happened to that slimebucket Lundi. But we do care about the people he was hanging with. We may have a serious national security issue on our hands. If you cooperate with us, in any way you can, we won’t take it any further. Ever hear of a guy named Elmo Yorke?”

Baby Joe slammed his bourbon and raised a hand to the barkeep. “You guys want another?”

“
Sure.”

“
Why not?”

Baby Joe held up three fingers. “I’ve heard the name,” he said.

“
Where?”

“
At Lundi’s house, where I’ve never been, of course, I ran into a guy I was involved with a few years back, round about the time of the episode with Don Imbroglio, who I’ve never heard of. This boy is a real piece of work. Anyway, the creep tells me that he’s working for an Elmo Yorke.”

“
Who is this guy?”

“
His name’s Parker. Monsoon Parker.”

Black and White looked at each other and smiled. Agent White asked, “When was the last time you saw him?”

“
Back at the house where I never was, the day Lundi went AWOL.”

***

The greenskeeper of the golf course at the Moscow Country Club thought his boss was a state-of-the-art ring piece. His boss thought the greenskeeper, whose name was Dmitri, was a bone-idle, untrustworthy incompetent whom he would gladly have gotten rid of if he could have found any other schmuck willing to work for such shit wages.

But Dmitri wasn’t such a bone-idle, untrustworthy, incompetent schmuck that he couldn’t recognize a windfall when he saw one. So after he had finished being chewed out about the dead fish, he did exactly as instructed and removed said dead fish from the pond. He then called his mate who had an asthmatic but still functional van, and they loaded the fish up, and flogged them for a few rubles down the local market. Not having been in a financial position to include much protein in his diet, Dmitri chose three of the largest specimens for himself. That evening, he had himself a veritable feast of paint-stripper-grade supermarket vodka, and the flesh of three entire fish, right down to the bone. That night he had the best night’s sleep he had had for a long time.

They do say that too much of a good thing is not good for you. In Dmitri’s case they were right, because two days later he was dead.

***

There is a bar in a suburb of Moscow called the Yuri Gagarin Social Club. If you are wearing chain mail, carrying a bazooka, and accompanied by a pack of ravening hyenas, it might be safe to drop by after work for a quick drink. Otherwise, it’s probably best not to go in there.

Oleg was sitting at a table by himself, surrounded by an aura of such venom that nobody dared approach him unless summoned. The space surrounding him seemed somehow darker than everywhere else in the room, as if he were some kind of miniature black hole, generating a gravity of evil that not even the light could escape. On the table in front of him was an empty, overturned vodka bottle, and another one that was half full. Bolshoi lay at his feet, looking at the other people in the bar the way Humbert Humbert looked at a school bus.

Oleg was not a happy camper. Things had changed, almost overnight. He could tell. The way Khuy spoke to him. The way Khuy looked at him. It was as if he wasn’t there anymore. It was as if, all of a sudden, Khuy didn’t trust him anymore. And if Khuy didn’t trust him, why should he trust Khuy? When men started letting themselves be controlled by women, who knew what could happen.

The only thing that Khuy could see was the woman. It was sickening the way he was with her. Talking to her, eating with her, being
nice
to her. Enjoying her company. It made Oleg sick to his stomach to think about it. And worse, it was making Khuy weak. And everyone knew what happened to weak people. They got eaten. Khuy was not paying attention to business. Khuy was getting careless. And word was getting out. Already there were whispers. Things were being said that nobody would have dared to say before. And if that had happened in only a few days, how bad would it get? What would happen? There would be war, that’s what would happen. And Khuy would expect Oleg to fight for him. Again. Well, maybe it was time Oleg started fighting for himself.

Oleg snatched up the half-empty bottle of vodka, drained it, and hurled it against the wall, shattering it to fragments.

Chapter 9

“
The good news,” the doctor was saying, “is that at this moment in time, Crispin has no recollection of what happened to him. He believes he was stung by some insect and had an allergic reaction. He appears perfectly normal.”

“
So what’s the bad news?” Asia said.

“
The bad news, I’m afraid, is that sooner or later he will remember. What has happened to him is not uncommon in cases such as this. When a mental trauma is so severe, in certain individuals, the stress levels are insupportable. The brain refuses to accept reality. It’s a defense mechanism, a form of self-induced amnesia. But the amnesia is only temporary. Sooner or later, the brain is forced to acknowledge the truth.”

“
And then what happens?”

“
Again, it depends upon the individual. In some cases, not much. A panic attack, anxiety, trouble sleeping, nightmares. In others…in others it can get very bad, I’m afraid. People can become incapacitated mentally. Suicidal in some cases.”

“
Shit. So how long will it take?”

“
There’s no way of knowing. It could be ten minutes; it could be ten years. The only certainty is that it will happen.”

“
So what should I do?”
she said.

“
Just go along with it. Let him believe what he believes. He’ll be perfectly normal, although he may start to exhibit some eccentricities.”

“
Eccentricities?”

“
Yes. Unusual behavior. Acting out of character. Weird, so to speak.”

“
Damn. With Crispin how the hell would you tell the difference? Anything else?”

“
Just be ready for the inevitable.”

***

Agent White looked at herself in the mirror of her hotel room. She sighed and shook her head. What the hell. That was then, this is now. Deal with it, or quit. She dressed quickly and went down to the lobby bar to wait for Agent Black. She kept thinking about something that Baby Joe Young had said:
You look kind of familiar. Do I know you from somewhere
?

That was exactly what she had thought to herself when Black walked into the Director’s office. And when she mentioned it to him later, he had said exactly the same words to her that he had said to Baby Joe. She still couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d seen him somewhere before.

One thing she did know, though, was that after the mission was over, she never wanted to see him again. The guy was a creep, with a capital C and a capital fucking R-E-E-P to go with it. Something about him made her skin crawl. But she was stuck with him for as long as it lasted, and if she tried to be civil, at least that would make one of them. And as long as it lasted would be too long. She could understand why she had been called in, and the importance of it, but she had been on another case, and she had been getting close. She just hoped the trail wouldn’t go cold while she was on this little jaunt.

She respected and admired the director and she was determined not to let him down, just as she respected the rules of the game, which dictated that she would pretend not to know that her father’s influence had secured her the gig over more qualified people, and he would let her. But she had been onto something that would have proved to everyone, not least herself, that she wasn’t a charity case.

The director’s instructions had been explicit. This is Agent Black, da-da-da. Full cooperation, blah-blah-blah. Interdepartmental harmony joint operation presidential scrutiny media attention, etcetera etcetera. Fair enough, she knew the routine. But something about this Agent Black character didn’t ring true. Not that she had extensive experience with people of the newly formed Department of Homeland Security type, but Agent Black looked and behaved more like a Social Welfare type. Well, whatever.

When Agent Black breezed into the bar, doing that really annoying thing he did with his neck, she resisted the temptation to slap that supercilious and contemptuous grin right of his rat-faced redneck kisser, and smiled at him.

***

“
You work for me now.”

That was seriously good news as far as Monsoon was concerned. Working for Zalupa meant that he wasn’t sitting in a backstreet garage with a tire full of petrol around his neck, or drifting gently with the current along the mud at the bottom of the Moskva River, in small pieces, with the fishes nibbling at the bits where the veins poked out.