The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2) (43 page)

So, back to the carrot. Use it, or eat it? She didn’t fancy the idea of both. Fuck it. She lay back on the bed and pulled off her capacious bloomers. She reached into the abundant hair and began to get the job warmed up. She reached for the carrot. It was a real beauty. A foot long if it was an inch, fat, round, smooth, and sturdy. But cold. She lifted her mighty buttocks and wedged the carrot underneath. She continued playing with herself while she squirmed around, getting the carrot nice and warm. She reached down and retrieved it. She had it halfway inserted when something came crashing through the window and landed on the bed beside her. She shrieked and jerked upright. The carrot snapped off right in the middle.

Maria cursed and leapt to her feet. She rushed over to the window. No one was there. She fished out the broken half of the carrot and pitched it out of the broken pane, and spat after it. She walked dejectedly back to the bed to see what had broken the glass. Lying next to her pillow was a huge ruby-colored crystal dildo, with a bright golden head, throbbing with light and energy.

Maria fell to her knees and crossed herself. “Oh, thank you, God. Thank you,” she said with tears of gratitude in her eyes.

***

In the Guinness Book of Records there is a case of a guy who fell twenty-two thousand feet out of a plane, with no parachute, landed in a tree and a snowdrift, and walked away with a broken hip. Well, he didn’t exactly walk away, but you get the point. People can miraculously survive, for improbable reasons. The reason that Monsoon survived was that Mighty Jupiter was taking a shit at the time that Monsoon got lippy, so he wasn’t in a position to deal with the situation personally. He therefore decided on a little godly intervention so that he could fuck Monsoon up in the proper and deserved fashion at a later date.

Fortunately for Monsoon, he lost consciousness seconds after he fell out of the plane. Approximately one mile to the west of his exit point was an escarpment with a one-in-nine slope at the top, leveling out to a one-in-two at the bottom. There was a ninety-knot easterly wind. At a position of more or less five o’clock from Monsoon’s angle of declination was a flock of seventeen thousand snow geese, give or take a gosling or two, en route to the Sudan for their annual breeding season.

If you want to work out the equation for yourself please feel free to do so, but if not, you will just have to trust these two points: a hundred-and-fifty-pound human being plummeting at max gravity impacting twenty-nine full-grown geese in a ninety-knot easterly equated to the human being being deposited on the soft, snowy lip of a south-facing escarpment, relatively unsplattered, and factoring in the weight, resilience and bonce-cushioning effect of the briefcase which he was still instinctively clinging to with a deathlike rigor mortis grip, sliding down at an at-first-increasing but then friction-reduced velocity, until he traversed five hundred meters of level ground, zipped across a fortunately little-travelled road, lambasted through a wheat barn, and landed bruised, bloodied, and discombobulated, but otherwise unharmed, in the antechamber of a voluptuous middle-aged Russian widow’s farmhouse.

That was the first point. The second point was that Mighty Jupiter doesn’t fuck about when it comes to intervention in mortal affairs.

Monsoon awoke in a goose down bed, with a hot water bottle on his head and a work-hardened but gentle hand softly running up and down the length of his erect penis. Due to his understandable suspicion of the motives of supernatural beings, he refrained from opening his eyes for as long as he could. When he finally did, he saw a plump, pleasant face, which might have been pretty if the work and the weather hadn’t kicked the shit out of it, smiling tenderly down at him.

“
Hi,” the lady said in Russian. “I’m Maria.”

Chapter 15

“
It feels different now,” Asia said.

“
I know,” said Baby Joe.

“
I still can’t really believe it.”

“
I know.”

“
Knowing that you’ve killed someone. That you’ve taken a life.”

“
You didn’t kill him, Asia. He killed himself. You saved me.”

“
No. I was just there. I was scared. You would have won.”

“
No, I wouldn’t.”

“
Of course you would. You’re Baby Joe. You always win.”

“
Nobody always wins.”

“
You do.”

“
Sometimes you don’t want to win. Sometimes you don’t care if you win or not.”

“
That doesn’t sound like you.”

“
And how do I sound? When you take a life, there’s no going back. It’s like virginity. There is no way that you can go on with your life and pretend that it didn’t happen. It’s the ultimate threshold. The trick is not getting to like it. You killed out of necessity. The lioness protecting her cubs. You didn’t premeditate. It was a situation, and you reacted. You reacted well. How would you feel now if you hadn’t? I would be dead, and maybe you too. You did the right thing. It was very brave.”

“
You always say the right things. But I still feel changed. I still feel ashamed.”

“
Did you enjoy it?”

“
No. It was awful.”

“
Sure?”

“
Sure.”

“
Then you’re okay.”

“
Are you two lovebirds still cheeping?”

“
Hi, Crispin. How’s it hanging?”

“
Listen. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, I’m bored shitless, and the doctor says you can go. So why don’t you get some pants on and let’s go and eat?”

“
Okay. Stay frosty. I’m coming. Got anywhere in mind?”

“
Oh, yes. There’s a fucking head waiter I need to speak to.”

As Baby Joe shuffled off down the corridor to struggle into the new clothes that Asia had bought him, Crispin plonked himself down on the bed and picked up the bottle of champagne from the bucket. It wasn’t as cold as it could have been and had lost some of its fizz, but Crispin drank it anyway. Asia didn’t notice him get up again and leave.

She was gazing out of the window at the sinister, scary rows of bleak, soulless apartment buildings that marched into infinity down the wide avenue. Who lived there? What were their lives like? How did they get up every morning into that cold, hopeless dawn and carry on? Or maybe it was a paradise in disguise. Each unto his own. What if you didn’t know anything else?

Crispin interrupted her reverie. “Hey, Asia. Guess what?”

“
What?”

“
I just went to the bathroom.”

“
Thanks for keeping me informed.”

“
Well, if you’re going to be facetious…”

“
No, Crispin. I’m sorry. I’m distracted.”

“
You can fucking say that again.”

“
No. No. Really. What?”

Crispin leaned close. He looked up and down the ward with his eyebrows raised, like a music hall villain. “Well. You remember I saw that poor man in the restaurant bathroom. The one with no lips?”

“
Yeah.”

“
Well, I just saw him again.”

***

People have different pain thresholds. Nobody really knows if it’s a question of tolerance, or if people feel pain differently. How do you know if you stick a pin in yourself, and then shove it into the guy or gal next to you, if it feels the same to them as it does to you?

Anyway, it wasn’t a concept that meant a great deal to Khuy Zalupa. He was born into pain. He was born into a Russian shitstorm to a dead mother and an uncaring father, and things just went downhill from there. So a couple of bullet holes here and there, a laceration or two, the odd sucking chest wound, maybe a destroyed lymph node, a compound fracture just to round things off, what the big fucking deal. Get up and walk it off.

And that was exactly what Khuy did. But we were talking about physical pain. Emotional pain is an entirely different story. The pain of a lost love can fuck up the toughest, meanest, baddest dude that ever there was. Just ask the big gorilla how his romantic interlude with the blonde turned out. Khuy wasn’t a man given to deep self-analysis or reflection upon the vagaries of existence, but he didn’t need to be a student of philosophy to entertain the suspicion that he might have fucked up somewhat.

Khuy wasn’t accustomed to missing people—especially when he had the old Kalashnikov in his mitt. But he missed Fanny. Bad. It was a mean, relentless, toothache-nagging hurt that would not leave him alone, and would not let him sleep or eat or think. And it was compounded by the fact that he might have acted in haste when he accused her of setting him up and robbing him. What if she didn’t? What if it was more complicated, and some other slimeball was manipulating the situation? There was only one thing to do. Guys like Khuy Zalupa didn’t sit around and brood. As the saying goes, when the going gets tough, the tough go out and kill somebody.

Khuy went to a bar in a part of town where he was sure that nobody would know him. Or want to. The place was full of tourists and poseurs and artistic types, and in that perfumed garden he was as inconspicuous as a triceratops turd in a wedding cake, but it was good place for him to think without having to keep one eye on the door.

He ordered a bottle of vodka. The waiter quickly decided that a reserved sign on the table would be superfluous. Khuy reached into his inside pocket and pulled out a small leather pouch and undid the drawstring with his teeth. He tipped the slugs out on the table and poked them with his finger. He idly wondered if it was some kind of record. He took the ballistics report from his inside pocket and studied it for the twentieth time, rolling each bullet in turn from the pile as he ticked them off.

One 7.62 Nagant, fired from an M1895. Almost an antique. That one was fairly easy. The only person he knew who used such a gun—or, rather, used to use such a gun—was Oleg.

One .32 Harrison and Richardson Magnum, almost certainly fired from a Ruger out of Connecticut. Very expensive cartridge, and the weapon of a connoisseur or an egotist or both. There was a note that said that the model was popular with women in the States.

One 460 Rowland, blasted from a Smith and Wesson 25/625, by some Dirty Harry wannabe or some guy with penile size issues. Normally it would drop a moose wearing chain mail, and would have dropped Khuy for the long count if it hadn’t drilled Bolshoi’s pelvis first.

One 9mm Makarov from Stetchin Kobalt, and a 9*-x21 Gyurza from a SR-1 Vector. Armor-piecing. Very nasty.

And then the big daddy: a 7.62 Nato zipped from the barrel of an M40A3. An American rifle.

Khuy pondered the bullets. There was enough lead there to replumb his shithouse, and enough firepower to have unceremoniously shuffled even him off the mortal coil, if even one of the slugs had been properly placed. And those weren’t the kind of guns amateurs used. So what the fuck went wrong? Or, from his perspective, what the fuck went right? For the thousandth time he sifted through the fragmented memories of the night he got shot, trying to piece together a facsimile of what may or may not have happened. If he had it figured more or less right, it went something like this:

Justifiably feared Russian crime czar sets up meeting with trusted and loyal deputy and bodyguard on a pigeon shit-covered bridge over the frozen Moskva River in the early hours of a typically inhospitable Moscow winter morning. Trusted and loyal deputy doesn’t show up. Not only does trusted and loyal deputy not show up, but when justifiably feared Russian crime czar arrives home expecting a little poontang and Beluga, trusted and loyal deputy is waiting to set big nasty fucking dog on him, having previously punched seriously foxy glamorous girlfriend in her kisser, giving her a fat lip and a black eye.

So far, it was a fairly straightforward case of backstabbing, duplicity, betrayal, and life-and-death struggle with a savage beast and a skilled, hardened, vicious Tartar warrior. Khuy had to admit that Oleg was a seriously shit-hot fighter and Bolshoi was some kind of pooch. If it had been Bruce Lee and a polar bear they might even have stood half a chance, but as it was it was Dorothy and Toto against the Beast from Twenty Thousand Fathoms.