The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2) (64 page)

The man in front turned around and came back to frisk Baby Joe. The blade flashed vaguely yellow in the flickering firelight. The blood on the flagstones appeared black. The man dropped the gun and grabbed his wrist. The blood seeped from between his fingers. The other was reaching for his own gun. Baby Joe stepped in and head-butted him. The man went limp. Baby Joe grabbed him by the shoulders, spun him around, and rammed his head into the stone wall. He went even limper—as limp as you can get.

The other was looking at the gun on the floor. He wanted to reach for it, but he didn’t want to let go of his wrist. The blood was gushing.

“
You’re bleeding to death,” Baby Joe said. “You understand?”

The man nodded.

“
If you go now, you can reach help. Tell me where and how many, and I’ll let you go.”

“
Third floor. By the bell. Five.”

Baby Joe nodded. He picked up the gun. It was slippery with blood. He wiped it on the man’s coat. The man turned to leave. Baby Joe belted him behind the ear with the gun. He dropped in silence. Baby Joe bent down and opened his other wrist. Painless.

Monsoon was gagging—the smell of blood and old bones, corrupted shrouds, the dust of centuries.

“
Come on.”

Baby Joe saw the gleam of the bell. He heard music: Maurice Chevalier, thin and tinny. Mono. He pushed Monsoon out into the light. Nobody shot him. Baby Joe followed…into a surrealist nightmare. Salvador Dali on acid. Degas on mescaline.

There was Alphonso Nightingale, in a deck chair, dressed improbably in a yellow silk dressing gown, with some kind of turban on his head. He smoked a cheroot from a long ivory holder. Beside him was an ice bucket with champagne—Bollinger, of course. And a final touch of dementia, or genius: and old-fashioned phonograph and a pile of wax records. Five men. Bad men. Gypsies. Bulgars. Scarred fighters. The whole scene was lit by candles on long stands. White candles, to ferry prayers to heaven. For the saving of souls.

In the center of the stones, tied to two chairs, sat Asia and Fanny, naked and shivering. Goosebumps raised their flesh. Fanny had been beaten. There were nasty raised welts on her thighs and breasts. A riding crop. Behind each chair stood a man with a knife.

“
Monsieur
Young. Ah appreciate a man ’oo knows ’ow to be on tahm. We must ’urry. Ah bribed ze verger, but we only ’av one ’our. You ’ave it?”

Baby Joe stepped forward. He avoided looking at Asia, but in his peripheral vision he could see her straighten in her chair. She knew. At least she knew. Baby Joe handed the Fab 13 to Alphonso Nightingale. He reached out and took it, puzzlement and fascination playing across his face in equal measure.

“
Mah, mah. Zis iz
incroyable
.
But what ze fuck is it? Where is ze R3?”

“
That is the R3.”

“
Shoot
le nègre
.”

“
No. No, wait.
It…it fucking did something. It switched, it changed, it…it…what’s the fucking word…it evolved.”

“
Shoot ’im.”

A man stepped up and put a gun to Monsoon’s head. Baby Joe did nothing. Monsoon closed his eyes. His bladder went. The urine ran down his pants leg. The man smiled and cocked the hammer.

“
He’s right,” a voice said.

Duncan Ooglas walked across the stone floor. He left bloody footprints.

“’
Oo are you?”

“
I made it. The R3. It’s my invention. It must be destroyed. You can’t control it. It grows stronger all the time.”

“
Ah am beginning to lose patience. Shoot zis one as well.”

Duncan Ooglas turned into Alphonso Nightingale. Then into Maurice Chevalier. Then he turned into Quasimodo. Everybody stared, dumbfounded. Even Asia and Fanny forgot about their distress. Only Baby Joe concentrated, counting, measuring, calculating. Time enough for parlor tricks later.

Quasimodo shuffled up to Alphonso Nightingale. Nightingale shrank back in horror and disgust. Quasimodo’s clothes were rank, his breath foul, his deformed face covered in pustules and boils.

“
You see,” he said, his voice a horrid hissing gurgle, a witch’s cauldron bubbling on the fire full of toads, “you cannot control it. You cannot stop it. It will destroy you. It will destroy everybody. Give it to me.
Give it to me
.”

As if mesmerized, under the control of a force before his will, Nightingale reached out and handed the Fab 13 to Duncan Ooglas. Before anyone could react, Ooglas reached into his coat and pulled out a tube. There were wires attached to it, wires that disappeared inside his shirt. He slipped the Fab 13 inside it and pressed a button. There was a brilliant flash of multicolored light, a vortex rainbow swirling around his body. For a second he appeared transparent. He cried out, a sad plaintive call, like a sea bird at dusk, and collapsed to the floor.

Nobody moved. Ooglas slowly and painfully picked himself up. He opened the tube and took out the Fab 13. He limped up to Nightingale and handed it to him.

“
Here,” he said, “you can have it now. It’s just a bauble now. A pretty toy.”

Nightingale forced himself to speak. “And ze R3?”

Ooglas smiled sadly. “I am the R3 now. It’s in me. It is me. But I told you. It must be destroyed.”

Ooglas pulled out his Luger and put it to his head.

“
Non. Arrêtez
. Stop, wait. What are you doing, you fool?”

“
It’s the Chameleon Fallacy,” Ooglas said.

He pulled the trigger.

The silence was amplified as the gunshot faded away. The men waited for Nightingale to speak. Nightingale sat limp as if stunned. He kept looking from Ooglas’s body to the Fab 13 and back again. He held the Fab 13 up to the light and peered into it as if it could reveal something to him.

Baby Joe got ready. Now was the moment, when everyone was distracted. He had his own gun. Ooglas’s was within reach. Drop the one next to Asia, and then…

Khuy Zalupa walked into the room. He held a shotgun. Nightingale suddenly came awake. He shouted in French. Zalupa leveled the scattergun at his face. The man behind Fanny put the blade to her throat, and Zalupa hesitated. Two men came out of the shadows behind him. One put a gun to his head and pressed hard, the barrel digging into his cheek. The other grabbed the shotgun. The man behind Asia took her by the throat. He pointed his knife at her eye.

“
Well. Zis is turning out to be quite an entertaining evening. Now we will ’ave a leetle more fun,
n’est-ce pas
?”

Baby Joe would have killed Alphonso Nightingale just for the supercilious expression on his smug face.

“
Ze rules of zis game are very simple. It is a game for lovairs. What better place than Paris,
non
? ’Ere we ’ave two women. One of zem will live; ze ozair will die. Zere, we ’ave two men. One of zem will live; ze ozair will die. You two will fight, and ze lover of ze one ’oo wins will live. Ze ozair will die. Simple,
non
?”

It was sick psycho bullshit. Nightingale wasn’t planning on letting anyone walk away. Baby Joe knew it. Zalupa knew it too. But did he care? It might all come down to that. All Baby Joe could do was play the game out. Play it by ear and improvise. Sooner or later there would be a moment. There had to be. It was all there was. Zalupa was already moving forward.

The gargoyles of Notre Dame Cathedral are eight hundred years old, give or take a decade or two, so it’s doubtful that the artisans who crafted them had utility as a shooting platform as a major design consideration. Hard D didn’t know shit about gargoyles, but he knew a grade-A firing position when he saw one. The one he was perched on was a kind of bat-faced bastard with a humpty back, and he was sitting astride its neck, cowboy style. The stock of the rifle was braced against one of its bat ears, the stone was smooth and cool, and his chest was protected. It had taken a bit a grunting and groaning to haul his ass up, but now he was there, he was comfortable and relaxed. Low Roll was sitting behind him, on the creature’s back, with his feet resting on its elbows. The problem was those fucking candles. You couldn’t see shit, and if you looked at one directly, you lost your night vision for a few seconds. But Low Roll had a better view, and with the glasses he could call the shots if necessary. Once they decided whom the fuck to shoot, that was.

“
You got any fucking idea at all what’s goin’ on down there?”

“
Nope. I thought I’d seen me some whacked-out extravagant shit before, but this scene takes the fucking biscuit.”

“
So who do we clip?”

“
I dunno. Let’s just hang fire, enjoy the show, and see how it pans out. Then we plug whoever is still on his feet. Only just make sure the Frenchie don’t stop one. We don’t need that shit again.”

“
I hear ya.”

***

To the watching gargoyles it perhaps seemed that Khuy Zalupa was one of their number, made quick and manifest by some ancient spell or curse, an elemental, hideous beyond even their own fearsome countenances, grimacing and leering, bellowing like the minotaur its death throes. He was naked to the waist and barefoot. His shirt had been torn off and he had lost his shoes in the fight—heavy, hairy, squat, and bestial, with monstrous shoulders, immensely powerful, exerting a freak show fascination upon the watchers, a riveting repulsiveness.

Baby Joe was likewise shirtless, his musculature still defined but the loose skin betraying his age, a parchment on which the testament to a life of blood and violence was written in a litany of scars.

They stood facing each other in the circle of guttering candlelight. Breathing heavily, weighing each other up. Thinking. It was a lull, the heavy, expectant quietude between the lightning flash and the peal of thunder. Baby Joe was fighting smart, containing and controlling his rage, using it as fuel. He was a better fighter than Zalupa, faster and fitter, despite the difference in age, but Zalupa was much stronger. He was staying out of reach, ducking under the wild swings, swaying out of range, and sending in short chopping blows, drawing blood and raising welts, waiting for Zalupa to slow down. Waiting for the moment.

But Zalupa wasn’t slowing down. He was getting stronger, his savage fury feeding off itself, a bull bloodied and goaded by the picador’s lance. Baby Joe the matador. The veronica: whirl away and stab with his fists.

He had to stay on his feet. He had barely been touched, but in the few glancing blows that Zalupa had managed to land, he had felt the strength. He knew that if he went to ground, Zalupa’s weight and power would be too much for him. He could not win the fight at close quarters. And yet he knew he had to bring it down and in close. He had to take the chance. It was the only way.

The staircase at Notre Dame is a narrow spiral. It has 387 steps. It is designed to be defended, to restrict the right-hand movement of the attackers. Baby Joe edged toward it, and backed up onto the first step. Nightingale’s men started to follow, but Nightingale stopped them. He was intrigued. Amused. There was nowhere to go but back down again.

There was no room for lateral movement, and Baby Joe was being forced backward up the stairs. The staircase was taking its toll on Zalupa. He was panting and snorting, but still he came on. Baby Joe backed up until they were out of sight of the people below.

“
Listen,” Baby Joe said. “Stop. Listen to me.” His voice sounded loud, ringing off the cold damp stones. He backed off, looking for a reaction in Zalupa’s eyes. There was nothing but a remorseless hatred. Nothing.

“
Listen. He’s going to kill her anyway, and you. Our only chance is to work together.”

Zalupa plowed in, a wild boar, a mindless animal.
Fuck this.
He let Zalupa grab his ankle.

It worked. Zalupa lifted his head trying to pull Baby Joe over, and Baby Joe slammed his boot under Zalupa’s chin. As the head came up he drove his fingers into the eyes. Baby Joe pulled his ankle free and drove his elbow into Zalupa’s throat.