The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2) (53 page)

She slipped out of the room and went back out to the bar. She called Hyatt’s room again, but again there was no reply. She decided to have one more drink, and then go and check the room out. And if Hyatt came back and caught her in the act, so much the better.

***

Looking at the back of his own head was proving difficult even with the aid of a mirror, but tenderly palpating the lump behind his ear, where that dime-novel bitch had sapped him, at least proved to Monsoon that he had been right about the hotel rooms. If he hadn’t been smart enough to switch hotels, he would have lost the gizmo for sure. No more fucking Ritz for him.

He took a bottle of brandy and went out onto the balcony. He carefully dug the Fab 13 out of the palm or whatever it was. He wasn’t much of a connoisseur of fine art, but as a strap-on it was a dandy. Monsoon tried to imagine what kind of snatch could accommodate it. He sat on a creaking wicker chair, cleaned the dazzling dildo up with a towel, and held it to the light. He looked at how it shone and sparkled, changing color as the sun twinkled on its facets and jewels and glowed on its burnished bell-end.

It was like a crystal ball, he thought. And he could see his future in it. Monsoon Parker dragging down the Strip in his Ferrari, wiping his ass with speeding tickets. Monsoon Parker scoffing lobsters with the elite in Martha’s Vineyard.
Thank you very much, Ms. Kennedy. Excellent blowjob
. Monsoon Parker at Hialeah, up to his ass in beaver and blow, winking at the jockey and watching his gee gee come home at fifty-to-one. Monsoon Parker looking at the ocean as he backscuttled some bitch in the Bahamas on the balcony of his suite.

A shadow suddenly clouded the Fab 13 like some omen, or as if something dark moved within it. Monsoon was momentarily perturbed until he realized it was just a reflection. He looked up to see the Moroccan midget standing behind him, smiling. She was winking at him again. Monsoon smiled and winked back. She slugged him in the temple with a ball-peen hammer.

***

Fanny called Hyatt’s room again from the lobby. No reply. She went up to the concierge desk. A look at the pout on the concierge’s chubby chops told her that cleavage wasn’t going to get the job done in this case, so she slipped twenty euro onto the counter and waited in the lobby bar, sipping a Sauvignon Blanc, watching closely as the urgent message was announced. Nada.

She took the service stairs. A middle-aged Tunisian maid was working the floor, pushing a cart loaded with bed linen and towels. Fanny ran into the cart and fell to the floor. The maid rushed over, solicitous and concerned, not about Fanny but about her three-euros-an-hour illegal gig that she used to feed eight kids. Fanny smiled as she was helped to her feet, and she said not to worry and that it had been her fault for not watching where she was going, and the maid grabbed the cart and zoomed off gratefully down the corridor. 2016 and 2018 were just going to have to wait.

Fanny took the key that she had lifted from the maid and softly opened the door to Hyatt’s suite. The wall lights in their sconces were dimly lit, but the hall and the main room were in darkness. There was a room service cart just inside the door. Fanny studied it. The plates were empty, but it looked like someone had ordered food for twenty people. Before she advanced into the room, she lifted her skirt, reached down, and pulled out the Beretta 87 Cheetah automatic that she had stuck in her stocking top.

There was some kind of disgusting muzak playing, and there was a light coming from under the bathroom door. She carefully opened it. The shower curtain was closed, but there was a wallowing splashing sound coming from behind it. She heard a man’s voice, rhythmically reciting a nursery rhyme.

“
This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed at home…”

It didn’t sound like Hyatt. She checked the mag and cranked one into the chamber. She slipped out of her shoes, slinked over to the curtain, and took ahold of it. She swung the barrel in as she pulled it back. Her hand went to her mouth. She couldn’t help it. Low Roll was sodomizing Hard D, thrusting his sinewy whippet buttocks in and out in time to the rhyme.

“
This little piggy had bread and butter, this little piggy had…what the fuck?”

Hard D surged out of the bath like an enraged behemoth lurching out of the deep, bent upon the punishment of mankind for their sins. Low Roll was still attached to his back, clinging on like a tree frog schtupping its mate. It’s not easy to look ferocious, ridiculous, and embarrassed all at the same time, but Hard D somehow managed it. Fanny was so astounded she almost forgot to shoot. Almost. By the time she did, Hard D’s hands were nearly at her throat. She had eight copperheads in her clip. Two of them went into the region of Hard D’s ribs. The first one gave him something to think about. The second dropped him to the tiles where he flopped onto his back and lay still, like a white slab of flensed blubber.

Low Roll rolled off and knelt on the tiles. He glared at Fanny with such a look of pure, unadulterated hatred that she might have been intimidated, despite the gun, except for the preposterous fact that he still had an erection, and it was the slenderest dick she had ever seen. She pointed the gun at his eye.

“
Easy with the fucking antenna, there, ace,” she said.

***

Woolloomooloo Wally stood on the ghost fields of Normandy, looking out over the leaden green sea flecked with white foam, and at the birds that swooped and screeched above it. Behind him stood the town of Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer. Windblown high clouds swept across the brittle blue sky, sending galloping shadows racing across the dark sand, coloring the sunbathers and children at play in shades of dark and light. The painted wooden fishing boats were all hauled up on the beach, but yachts and dinghies dared the tide beyond the white breakers, sails bright against the sea, helmsmen in slickers or bared to the waist standing at wheel and tiller, braced against the swell. It was a fine sight—the wide, deep beach, and the broad sweep of the bay.

It had all looked very different on June 6th, in 1944. Then it had been known as Sword Beach, and the place in front of where Wally stood had been Queen Red sector, and the sand where people strolled and threw balls for their dogs had been a vicious charnel house, a nightmare carnage of belching smoke and burning rubber and flesh, howling shells, shrieking engines, screams and explosions and shouts, and above all the gunfire, the death rattle of thousands upon thousands of guns and cannons, lusting dark swarms of steel and lead shredding young men, turning them to bloody offal, snatching them into the air and hurling them torn and lifeless, limbless, back to earth. Transfixing them. Penetrating them. Violating them. Brutally snatching away their breath and their years on the barges and in the blood red surf and on the sand daubed burgundy by the lifeblood of so many slain and dismembered, gashed and rended, crying out in pain and fear, calling for their mothers as their young lives slipped away in futility and insanity into the soil and sand and sea of France.

And no glory that, nor honor. Only survival, desperate ranks of men, sea-soaked and sand-covered and burdened under weapons and webbing, helmets and packs, crawling, running, falling, digging, shooting, cursing and raging, vomiting, blinded by smoke and deafened by cannonades and explosions, fearful or exhilarated; praying to be delivered by God, or by providence, or by the blind arbitration of impartial fate which alone decides who shall be stricken and who shall come unharmed through the fury; men defiant and undaunted, or weeping for shame in soiled underwear; fighting for the sanctuary that lay only in the deed done and in the silence of the guns that sought them out; striving to avoid the jaws of the great ravening industrial beast that turned young men into soup and wrung tears that would never dry from the eyes of mothers an ocean away.

That was what Bjorn Eggen Christiansson saw that day, and although he walked away from it without a scratch it was written like graffiti on his soul as by some dark gang lord defining his territory, and it could never be erased, or even spoken of except to others who had seen like events and knew the awful truth of the lies that are told to young men to compel them to slaughter. Woolloomooloo Wally was one such man, and Bjorn Eggen had spoken to him of that day, which was why Wally was standing there to see the place where his friend was forever deprived of his innocence.

Wally looked down at that place and tried to imagine Bjorn Eggen battling his way through that deranged killing floor while so many around him died and were chewed up and spat out upon the hot sand or swallowed whole into the stygian darkness of eternity, until he reached the spot where Wally now stood, but he could not, and yet still he wondered if the shade of Bjorn Eggen watched over him as he himself tried to watch over the ghost of Bjorn Eggen and guide him through that sea of anguish and turmoil to safety.

Wally turned and walked away from the tides and remembrances and crossed the road and went into a small bistro, and every head turned to look at him but only the tourists stared, and the fishermen continued about their business as if Wally was indeed strange to behold and yet no stranger to them, because he too was a man among men. He walked up to the bar, and by the time he clambered into the back of the cab that would take him to the station where he would board his train, he was feeling no pain, but only a strange kind of pride that he could neither explain nor define.

He took a seat at a café on the platform by the tracks and drank a succession of soapy beers until his train pulled in, and on the front of it above the driver was written “Paris.”

***

“
Do I look scared to you, bitch?”

“
You don’t look like you’re scared of much of anything. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be. Very soon I’m going to shoot you, and you’re going to die. Like him.”

Low Roll looked from Fanny to the tiles of the bathroom floor, where Hard D lay, huge and gray and bloody, and kind of surprised, like a manatee chewed up by a speedboat propeller. He looked back at Fanny. She looked into his eyes. It was true. He didn’t look scared at all. What did that mean? He had just watched her shoot down Hard D, so he knew she would and could shoot. Didn’t he care?

“
There’s a philosophical way to look at this.”

“
Jesus. Fuckin’ dames. Always gotta be flappin’ the fuckin’ lips. If ya gonna shoot me, fuckin’ shoot.”

“
How many people do you think you’ve killed?”

“
Not enough. I shoulda kilt you.”

“
Or not even people. Things. How many deaths have you been responsible for? How many cows, how many pigs, how many chickens? How many spiders and flies?”

“
You are one fucked-up broad, lady.”

Fanny was wondering why she was talking instead of shooting. Why didn’t she shoot? She knew what she had to do. Every second she delayed meant another second where something could go wrong. Did she really feel so in control?

“
What I mean is, if I catch a barracuda, for example, and eat it, I am taking one life, but I am saving many. I’m saving all the fishes that that barracuda would have eaten, for the rest of its life. So, when I shoot you, I’ll be saving all the lives that you would have taken.”

Who was she talking to? The creep in front of her, or to herself? Was she trying to convince herself? Why didn’t she just shoot? She knew: because the fat guy had been a reflex. She was defending herself. He was going to hurt her and she reacted. It had been instinct. But this, now, was different. This one was unarmed and helpless. It was premeditated. Cold-blooded murder. It was different. Harder.

“
You are one seriously crazy bitch. Shoot, why doncha. I ain’t got time for this shit.”

Fanny pointed the gun. She steadied it in both hands and aimed it at Low Roll’s skinny chest. He looked so frail. She imagined the bullet crashing though those skeletal ribs. She started to squeeze the trigger. Low Roll stared at her, unflinching.

Hard D coughed, and wheezed, a harsh sound like wind through a broken window. A great gout of blood spurted out of his gasping mouth and spattered on Fanny’s face. She jumped with fright and horror. She pointed the gun down at Hard D. Low Roll moved like a whippet. His bony hand closed around hers. She couldn’t believe how strong his grip was. He twisted the gun viciously. She couldn’t get her finger out of the trigger guard. It snapped. She screamed.

Hard D lumbered to his feet, a great, vengeful, wounded beast. He bellowed at her. His face was contorted, hideous with rage. A huge meaty hand smacked her on the side of the head. She screamed again as her eardrum ruptured. She kicked out as hard as she could, and tried to squirm away, but Low Roll still had her hand trapped. He leaned close. His breath reeked.