The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2) (46 page)

Antonio had found the solution in his Italian heritage. The best thing to use in such cases was, undoubtedly, a large zucchini. It was heavy enough for an incapacitating and concussive blow, but flexible enough not to do any serious structural damage.

Which is why, when Fanny opened the door looking like a Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec cabaret poster made manifest, with her arms outstretched and her luscious lips puckered in a provocative pout, an eight-pound cucurbit came whistling out of the darkened hall, smacked her right in the courgettes, and turned her clock back to zero.

It had left Antonio with something of a predicament, however. He was at all times a meticulous and diligent professional, and had been observing the coming and goings of the household for several days from a number of different vantage points. He had made all the necessary arrangements to put the snatch on Fanny Lemming the following day, and had been making a last-minute recon, when a window of opportunity suddenly and unexpectedly presented itself.

People started to leave, cars pulled away, the police left, and the guardians apparently melted into the night. The sole resident of the manse was then the lovely lady in question, whom Antonio could see at her
toilette
silhouetted against the billowing lace curtains of an upstairs window, which was by that point the only lit room in the house.

Something was very clearly about to go down, and it looked as if it might well involve Fanny, which meant that Antonio had a decision to make. He could do nothing and see what happened, but if some harm were to befall Fanny that prevented her from spilling the beans about the baubles, Mr. Nightingale was bound to be disappointed.

The other alternative was to improvise, zip into the house, ambush the bathing beauty, and zip out again into the night before whatever it was that was about to happen had time to happen. He calculated he needed at least ten minutes. It was a gamble, and the kind of risk which he had studiously avoided all his career, but he weighed that against the possibility of letting Mr. Nightingale down, and also against the possibility that absolutely nothing was going to happen, in which case he had nothing to worry about and had a free shot.

He had to admit to himself that it was rather exciting as he threw caution to the wind and sneaked into the house and up the stairs after a diversion into the kitchen to select a suitably sized vegetable. Fortunately for him, Zalupa was a man of cosmopolitan tastes. If you have ever tried to bludgeon anyone into insensibility with a cabbage, you’ll know. The first part of the project went exactly according to his hastily devised plan, but then his problems began as he realized he had seriously miscalculated Fanny’s weight. What she had was all in the right places, but she had plenty, and it all added up.

He was reduced to dragging her. He was trying not to make any noise, but at each step down the stairs her head cracked against the wood with a gentle thunk, and Antonio was moved to consider how ridiculous truly beautiful women could look under certain circumstances. Only an Italian would think of something like that at such a moment.

Anyway, Antonio manfully stuck to his task, and, panting and perspiring even on that cold night, managed to haul Fanny out the door, across the lawn, though the gate, and to his car. All the best kidnapping manuals tell you that the only proper place to stash a hostage is in the trunk, but Antonio quickly came to the conclusion there was absolutely no chance he would be able to lift Fanny that high, so he had to content himself with stuffing her into the backseat, one limb at a time, like a ventriloquist trying to stuff a particularly large and recalcitrant dummy back into its case.

It was at that point he decided to give her a shot of Propofol and tie her up. The equation used to calculate the ratio between vegetable weight, blow strength, and time of unconsciousness is complicated, and subject to many variables, and he didn’t want to take the chance that she would wake up while he was driving. He suffered an Italian moment when he took a fistful of her thigh to administer the injection to her buttock, but he managed to exercise professional restraint, and climbed into the driver’s seat.

It was only after he sat behind the wheel that he realized he had lost one of his shoes. An Italian would never abandon a shoe, especially one handmade and so expensive, but the true value of the shoe only became clear to him after it cost him his life when he went back to look for it, and three almost simultaneous shots blasted the breath from him as he walked toward the fallen shoe where it lay at the foot of the stairs.

Fanny awoke later, to complete darkness and silence, cold, and with a stiff neck and pins and needles in her legs, in a state of disarray and an entirely inappropriate mode of dress for a murder scene, understandably confused about just exactly where she was, or just exactly what the fuck was happening in the ’hood.

***

At the exact moment that Monsoon Parker was idly speculating about Baby Joe Young, whom he believed to be on another continent, his train was actually chugging past a Kruzhka restaurant on Arbat street, where Baby Joe Young was sitting having a liquid lunch with Asia and Crispin, idly speculating on what happened to that little shitbird creep Monsoon Parker. His wounds were healing without complications, and although, to his extreme embarrassment and much to the amusement of Crispin and Asia, he was required to walk with a cane, he generally felt a lot better than he was entitled to for a guy his age who had taken such a shellacking.

“
I don’t know. I got a feeling this show ain’t over, folks.”

“
What do you mean?”

“
It’s just an instinct. I’m not usually wrong.”

“
Well, you are this time. We’re going home,” said Asia.

Baby Joe looked at her. He smiled, but there was something in his smile that said he wasn’t convinced. “What happened to the writer?”

“
I don’t know. I called her, but all I get is a service. Why, do you think something happened to her?”

“
I don’t know. All I know is that we’re at the ass end of the world, and we have all suffered, and I’m fucked up because of something that didn’t concern us and I never should have been involved with in the first place, all because of a series of coincidences which don’t seem like coincidences, and that somehow that little lowlife Monsoon Parker is mixed up in it, and there are a lot of loose ends. And there’s something that’s not right. I have a suspicion crawling around like a bug in the back of my skull. It’s nothing specific. It’s like a dog thing. A sense that something is going to happen that I need to do something about. A feeling that events have been set into motion that we don’t understand, but that have their own trajectory and will require a conclusion before it’s over.”

“
Well, like you said, it didn’t concern us. We were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. So now it’s the right time to get to the right place. Let’s go home.”

“
Well,” said Crispin. “Now that we’re on the subject of going home, I have an idea.”

“
Uh-oh,” Baby Joe said.

“
No, listen. Get this. Let’s go to Paris.”

“
What the fuck?”

“
Oh, yes. I’d love to.”

“
Look, Baby Joe. We’ve all had a shit time. You got shot. I got stung by some kind of swamp bee. Asia has had a very traumatic experience. But we’re okay now. There’s no reason we have to go straight home. We can go and have a wonderful vacation together. We’ll have so much fun. We can go to restaurants, and take a cruise on the Seine. Imagine. Notre Dame. The Eiffel Tower. Montmartre. Oh, come on, Baby Joe. What do you say?”

“
Yeah,” said Asia, taking his hand and smiling. “What do you say?”

Baby Joe took up his beer and aimed a rueful smile in their direction. “I’ve got a feeling I’m going to regret this,” he said, “but what the fuck? Deal me in. Paris, here we come.”

Crispin clapped his fat hands in glee as Asia laughed and Baby Joe chugged back his ale.

***

Not for the first time, Fanny was in front of Khuy, although this time in an entirely different connotation. She was way ahead of him. For her, figuring out who was responsible for perforating Zalupa and scaling the R3 and the Fab 13 was about as difficult as Sherlock Holmes finding his pipe where it had slipped down the back of the sofa.

In all the best crime shows, what do the robbers do? Vamoose. They split, make a getaway with the loot, and read all about it in the morning paper as they cackle evilly into their morning brew. And what do fugitives from justice do? Skedaddle. They hightail it, flee the scene of the crime—or in this particular case, flee the country.

Mentally doing a Hercule Poirot and gathering all the suspects into the parlor to examine their motives and alibis, she concluded that while any, or all, or a combination of Endless Lee, Momo Bibbs, Hyatt, and Oleg could have had a hand in the deed, the guilty party would probably be the one that legged it. She doubted that Oleg had the cerebral wherewithal, and as for Lee and Bibbs, guys who have recently committed what they believed to be murder and absconded with King Solomon’s Mines-class riches don’t normally hang round in hotel bars in the early hours of the morning waiting to get into gunfights. Ergo…

For security reasons, airline employees are strictly forbidden from giving out information concerning passenger lists and who was or was not on a particular flight.
For job-retention purposes, airline employees steadfastly refuse to reveal the aforementioned information.
Except in cases where they are in the back of a rental car with Fanny Lemming’s lips around their dicks, in which case they will reveal not only the names of everybody who was on the flight, but also their onward destinations, their hotel reservations, what happened to Ambrose Bierce, who was behind the Kennedy assassinations, where Jimmy Hoffa is buried, and why fools fall in love.

Which is how Fanny came to discover that Hyatt flew to Paris the day after Khuy got plugged, and that he had a reservations at the Ritz. She even got a free ticket after she threatened not to finish the job.

***

As he boarded the plane, Monsoon stared into the cockpit and carefully examined the pilots to make sure they weren’t dead. That kind of dead-pilot-miraculous-escape routine could get old PDQ. Once he had established that the gods were not trying to pull the same fast one twice, Monsoon eased into his first class leather chair, which was smoother than a silkworm’s ass. Something felt slightly uncomfortable, but it was only the bulge of the eight thousand dollars he still had left, stashed in his back bin. That kind of discomfort he could live with.

He sank back into the cool, luxurious embrace of his chair as the jet blasted down the runway and up into the grim sky. The frozen drizzle lashing the window heightened his sense of comfort and security. And luck. The transition—from a frigid railway station in Buttcracksville to a 747 en route to Paris and unimaginable wealth—had been surprisingly easy and uncomplicated. Monsoon had always known that money talked, but he never knew that it spoke fucking Russian.

As soon as the seat belt sign went off, he hit the call button. Monsoon didn’t know what paradise smelled like, unless you were talking about the flophouse in Reno by that name, but the stewardess who immediately appeared by his chair in a cloud of sensual musk must have been a pretty fair representation. And her tits were definitely heavenly. Having had a good gander at the menu while he was waiting for takeoff, Monsoon decided to sample some exotic booze. He ordered an absinthe. When it came, he sucked it down, smacked his lips, lay back, and let the green genie take possession of his soul.

Everything was going to be different from now on. The pendulum could only swing so many times before it stopped, right? A simple question of momentum. You toss the coin enough times, and sooner or later it will land on its edge. It had to balance out, as described by the unalterable laws of probability. Sooner or later a guy had to win one. And after so many horses pulled up lame, so many busted flushes, so many cocked dice, and so many dropped catches with all the bases loaded, he figured he was about due for the big smackeroo.

So far so good, anyway. He looked down through wispy clouds at the Volga winding away into the distance like a giant’s piss stream, and at the grim gray landscape receding like a bad memory. Above were blue skies, and ahead skies bluer still, skies so blue you wouldn’t fucking believe it. On the back of the seat in front of him was a flat screen. The control was in the arm of his chair. His clicked it on and Michael Jackson appeared singing “Thriller.” Perfect. Monsoon rang the bell and ordered crème de menthe.
Fuck that minty shit
, he decided. He switched to Drambuie. Bit sweet, but hey, life was getting sweeter all the time. Watching old Michael give it big licks with the hips, he had an idea.
What if I change Michael into Barry White?