The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2) (37 page)

If the intern had been up to speed on his history of epic African animal survival stories he would not have been so surprised when the corpse suddenly resurrected itself, slid off the slab, took him by the throat and slammed his face into the wall, rendering him toothless and senseless, removed his clothes, put them on, and pushed through the double doors and out into the unhealthy green corridor.

Khuy Zalupa also should have died that day, but his rage would not let him. His bestial fury compelled him to survive, and his lust for vengeance became a life force in itself.

Chapter 13

It started to get really dark, even though it was only early afternoon. The snow had stopped but the cold was intense, even colder than before. The people walked past with their shoulders hunched and their hands in their pockets. Everything was gray. The sky, the river, the buildings. The people. Asia did not know how far she had walked on her slow, brooding peregrination through the streets, but she suddenly realized she had no idea where she was, or how to get back to the hotel. Her thoughts were as somber and dark as the clouds that oppressed the city and threatened to suffocate her with their gloom. She was about to hail a taxi when she saw a light on the corner. A bright blue light—a splash of color in all that grimness. A splash of hope. She headed toward it. It was a bar. The blue light was a neon sign in the shape of a lizard. It had letters in Cyrillic and English. In English it read “The Chameleon Lounge.”

Asia pushed through the doors. Inside was a haven. A sanctuary. People packed the tables and crowded the bar. The music was loud, and condensation ran down the windows. In the corner by the fire, a group of young people was singing along to the jukebox.

Asia looked for a seat. At a table in the back, a woman sat alone. There was a spare chair. Asia walked over. The woman had a bottle of vodka on the table, and a single glass. She had her head bowed. She was staring at the floor. Or somewhere else.

“
May I join you?” Asia said. “I’m sorry, but there’s nowhere else to sit.”

The woman looked up. Asia was struck by how beautiful she was. But she had a black eye, and a split lip, and you could tell she had been crying.

“
American, huh? Sure, hon, sit down, sit down. Misery loves company.”

Asia sat. “Shit, what happened to you?”

“
You should see the other guy,” the woman said. “Hey, waiter, bring another glass, please.” She turned to Asia. “You don’t look so hot yourself, hon. Man trouble?”

Asia smiled a wan smile. “Yeah. You could say that.”

The waiter brought a second glass. The woman filled both glasses and handed one to Asia.

“
Well, ain’t we quite the fucking pair?” she said. “To men.”

She slammed back the vodka. Asia did likewise. The woman reached across the table and held out her hand.

“
Pleased to meet you,” she said. “I’m Fanny. Fanny Lemming.”

***

There was some kind of commotion outside the hospital. A guy was lying bleeding in the snow, and the cop cars had their lights flashing.

“
What’s going on?” Endless Lee said to the policeman who was with them.

“
I no know. Some dyead guy not as dyead as they think. Please to follow.”

The policeman led Endless and Momo down dim, forbidding corridors. It was damp, and the lights flickered. The halls smelled of disinfectant, and something else: despair. Somewhere a man coughed and a woman screamed. A haggard man in striped pajamas, smoking on a bench, stared at them with lifeless eyes as they passed.

“
In here,” the cop said.

Inside it was cold. The bare white tiles were cracked and greasy and there was dried blood in the grout. The intern had a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. He shuffled over to a row of steel cabinets and pulled out the drawer. The stiff was covered in a grimy sheet with holes in it. There was a typewritten tag on his toe. There was something wrong with the letter P on the machine.
Seb. E. Ty*e
, it said. The intern pulled back the sheet.

Momo gagged and turned his face away. Endless stared.

Sebastian Type’s face was bloated. There was a small blue hole right in the middle of his forehead. The back of his skull was fastened on with bandages and tape. His lips were twisted into a lascivious leer, and one of his eyes was open, as if he was winking. As if being dead was a joke.

“
Iz that you friend?”

“
Not anymore,” Endless said. “C’mon, Momo. Let’s get the fuck out of this slaughterhouse.”

They crossed the road and went into a bar. It was just a giant square room with benches set out in rows and a high corrugated roof. It smelled of fish and stale beer and vomit. In one corner a fight was in progress, but nobody was paying it much attention. A waitress came over. She had huge hands with reddened knuckles, and peroxide hair. Her dress was cut low and one of her areolae was exposed. She had a tiny dark mustache. She leaned on the table. Her breath reeked of vodka and tobacco.

“
Gentlemans. What the pleasure?”

They ordered vodka, and watched her walk away. Her calves were covered in downy black hairs and there was a deep red crease on the back of her thighs where she had been sitting on a hard chair. Momo felt himself becoming strangely aroused, as if after what he had just seen, he needed some life and warmth in all its rawness.

“
So,” Endless said. “That shitbird Hyatt.”

Momo forced himself to withdraw from his fantasy of a sordid encounter in the restroom. “Yeah. The prick must have wasted Sebastian, recorded himself, and then used the R3 to con us.”

“
Do you think he knows it was us that waxed Zalupa?”

“
How could he?

“
So what’s our next move?”

“
Seems pretty straightforward. We find Hyatt, then we find the R3.”

“
I don’t see how that’s fucking straightforward, Lee. We’re in Russia. The little prick could be anywhere. And he’s fucking deadly. Just ask Sebastian.”

“
Well, it might be that we won’t have to find him at all.”

“
How do you figure that?”

“
Well, maybe he’ll find us. He’s got to do business somewhere. It’s not like there’s a buyer on every corner.”

“
And Sebastian?”

“
Maybe it was just aggressive negotiation. Maybe Hyatt thinks with Sebastian gone, we can’t make it work without him.”

“
Well, either way, it makes him a ruthless little son of a bitch. And if you’re wrong, and he’s got his own plans, he must know that as soon as the R3 comes to light, in any form, we’re going to trace it back to him. I mean, what would you do? And we’re on his turf.”

“
Yeah, well, don’t worry. I recruited some local talent. Drink up. Let’s get to it.”

Momo downed his vodka and followed Endless out into the dismal street, glancing wistfully over his shoulder at the waitress as she leaned over a table, laughing with a bunch of men in white coats.

***

Monsoon was feeling on top of the world. The sun was even shining, and the snow crystals glistened in the perpendicular light. He was sitting on a rough bench outside the cabin, with Sasha curled up at his feet. The air was chill, but he was wrapped up in an old coat Yevgeny had given him, and he had a heavy woolen scarf wrapped around his head, and the half a bottle of vodka that he had inside him had his boiler stoked good and proper.

Yevgeny came out and handed him his own clothes, which he had washed and dried.

Monsoon beamed at him. “Man, I don’t know how to thank you for this. You saved my ass for sure.”

“
Ah, forget it. It how human beings supposed to treat each other. Here.” Yevgeny threw him a small leather bag.

“
What’s this?”

“
How should I know? It’s yours.”

“
Mine?”

“
Yes. You had it fastened to your belt when I found you. Don’t you remember?”

“
No. I’ve never fucking seen it before.” Monsoon opened it. His eyes flew wide open as if someone had sneaked up and goosed him. “Holy shit!”

“
What is it?”

Monsoon’s expression turned suddenly shifty. “Oh. Er, nothing. Nothing, man. Hey, er, listen, I’m really grateful for everything, but I gotta split, man. I got things to do. Is there a bus or something? I gotta get to Moscow.”

“
Oh. I can’t let you leave.”

“
Don’t worry. I’m fine. I’ll be seeing ya. Thanks.” Monsoon started walking away.

“
I said I can’t let you leave,” Yevgeny said in a tone that made Monsoon turn his head. Yevgeny had a large WWII vintage service revolver pointed at his belly button.

Monsoon froze, bewildered, his mind rifling through disconnected pieces of information looking for an explanation. He stared at the black, baleful eye aimed at his stomach. Time seemed to become as frozen as the fields outside. He heard the crunching of car tires in the snow. A door opened. He heard muffled footsteps in the house.

Hyatt walked out into the yard. Relief and suspicion jostled for elbowroom in Monsoon’s brain. “Hyatt, my man, what…?”

Hyatt pulled out a semiautomatic. “Throw me the fucking bag.”

Relief stopped jostling. Suspicion grinned. Monsoon tossed the bag. He threw it short and it fell on the hard ground. The R3 and the Fab 13 rolled out onto the snow.

***

It was the catharsis that they both needed. It started with a warm place, a common language, and a shared sympathy between two likeminded women who had both recently been given graphic and explicit reason to doubt the wisdom of the respective courses that they were pursuing, insofar as they were both somewhat fucked.

Asia and Fanny downed the bottle of vodka and ordered another. Out of sympathy grew empathy, and out of empathy grew the seeds of friendship and understanding, and in that foreign place two empathetic souls reached out to each other and began to unravel the warp and weft of their lives, and began to reveal to each other secrets that were theretofore known only to themselves and perhaps then only understood at a visceral level but not acknowledged, and here they were brought into the light and laid bare upon the table.

There were tears and consolations and laughter and moments of quietude and their small table was an island in all that sea of discord, and though they appeared as prey they were not, and the many pirates who tried to board their ship were repelled with attitude and choice epithets, and eventually they were left alone to wallow in their misery and bathe in the balmy waters of their memories, and when the joint finally closed, Fanny gave the waiter a hundred bucks and he went out into the street and stopped a cab and said the magic words, and at one o’clock in the morning they were sitting at a table in a dimly lit club with gently glowing orange and green lights, in the middle of fuck-knows-where, and the improbably sized gentleman who stood by the door in an ill-fitting dress suit had been suitably remunerated for the service of ensuring that all lowlifes and scumbags left them the fuck alone so they could continue their investigations into what the fuck had gone wrong, exactly.

“
So, how’d you come by the shiner?” Asia said.

“
Oh, honey, you won’t believe this. What a sap. I wish I could have seen it myself. I was all dressed up for the dance, so to speak. I was hot to trot; you know what I mean. I heard the footsteps in the hall, and obviously I was expecting Khuy and his exceptional assemblage, so I walked over to the door, closed my eyes, and let it all hang out. I stood there with my lips pursed and my hands on my hips, and some creep let me have it right in the kisser.

“
When I woke up, I was in the back of a car, tied up. Whoever did the trussing-up was a real amateur and I was out of there in less than ten. When I stood up, I felt a pain in my ass. I found a bruise and I realized that whoever did it had given me a shot of something. I could have been out for hours. Who knows? Anyway, that’s when things got real weird and scary, let me tell you.