The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2) (67 page)

Zalupa lifted Nightingale from the floor. A blade came up. Very thin, elegant and evil. It slid into Zalupa’s stomach up to the hilt. Zalupa reached down slowly, almost casually, as if he’d expected it. He took Nightingale’s wrist in his fist and twisted it. The wrist snapped. Zalupa took the hilt of the dagger and withdrew it from his belly. His face was impassive. Nightingale watched, fascinated, despite his pain. The drama played out in silence—a
danse macabre
, a kabuki. The movements were elaborate and deliberate, as if rehearsed.

Zalupa held the knife up to the light. It glittered. It was slender, and beautiful, the hilt of gold and jade. It was not a weapon, it was an ornament, a piece of mortal jewelry—but it would suffice. The blade was just long enough for the heart. Nightingale did not struggle. He knew it would do no good. The grip about his throat was absolute. Zalupa opened the front of Nightingale’s dressing gown with the dagger. There was something tender in the gesture, almost sexual.

Nightingale’s skin was white and sickly, something that had never seen the sun. His chest bore a tattoo, beautifully rendered—a nightingale. The eyes were lifelike. They looked at Zalupa—for pity? They did not find it. Zalupa drove the knife in where the wing met the breastbone.

Nightingale looked down at the blade, then back at Zalupa. The eyes still showed no fear, and then no pain either. No light. The nightingale sang no more. Zalupa released his throat. He fell backward over a wall. Zalupa watched. Nightingale lay on the flagstones under a gargoyle. A piece of yellow silk had been torn away by the gargoyle’s teeth. His limbs splayed out at odd angles—a broken flower. The gargoyle watched over him while he slept.

Footsteps came loud on the stairs, and the police were shouting. Fanny was examining Zalupa’s wound. There was surprisingly little blood.

“
Are you okay?” Fanny asked.

Zalupa grinned. “Is nothing. Cut myself shaving worse.”

“
This way,” Fanny said.

She found a gallery and maneuvered them into the darkness of an apse. They saw the light from the flashlights and heard the crackle of the radios. The police stopped in the nave to view the carnage. Fanny took Zalupa by the hand and led him down a narrow passage.

“
There must be another way down,” she whispered.

Zalupa didn’t say anything. His grip on her hand slackened. She looked into his unfocused eyes. He looked back at her, but he didn’t see her. His mind had taken him back in time. He heard the howling wind outside, and he saw the glow of the candles, and by such he saw the light in his sister’s eyes, the light of the one love that had shone upon him, gazed down at him tenderly. His renal artery had been perforated and he was bleeding into his chest cavity.

Zalupa fell to his knees, then onto his back. He lay like an obelisk, toppled by time. Even giants fall. Fanny dropped to her knees beside him, crying out his name over and over. She fell upon his chest and gathered him in a desperate embrace. He felt no pain. He heard nothing. The stones were cool beneath him. His breathing became shallow. He felt cold.

The monster lay dying on the stone cold floor of an ancient house of worship, and the great shadow of eternity crept across his prostrate form, and perhaps in that holy place it could be acknowledged that he who was born into darkness and deformity and denied all innocence, and from whom all chance or hope of a destiny different and unblemished had been wrested in his cradle, and who had been formed by the uncaring hand of who-knew-what cruel and vindictive craftsman and fashioned and shaped into a thing inimical and hateful by the brutality of men, could be found blameless, and forgiven.

As his last breath left him, and he turned his eyes toward the only woman he had loved, and who had loved him, but there was no light left to see her with, and in that eternal darkness the demon that lived in Khuy Zalupa’s soul finally found peace.

***

Even the French police were prepared to concede that if you found two naked women—one suffering from shock and who had recently been beaten with a riding crop, and the other suffering from minor contusions and abrasions and in a state of emotional distress—surrounded by several dead guys, including one known Corsican Mafioso and a guy later identified as a feared Russian gangster, who had all been eighty-sixed in a brutal, close-quarters armed conflict, the women were probably not the guilty parties. Asia and Fanny were therefore interviewed but not detained.

Baby Joe’s involvement was not so straightforward. He was hospitalized under secure conditions, with a twenty-four-hour police guard at the door. He was questioned several times by different people in a manner ranging from friendly and sympathetic to aggressive and downright hostile, but Baby Joe stuck to the facts, and the facts spoke for the fact that he had done nothing but defend himself and the women.

On the third day, a smartly dressed individual who spoke perfect English came in. He said, “They are not happy that you fucked up the bell.”

“
Say what, now?”

“
The bell,
monsieur
. Somebody shot the bell in Notre Dame. It will have to be replaced.”

“
Not guilty,” Baby Joe said.

“
Apparently not. I am Duvalier of the Sûreté. We received a communiqué from your government. As soon as you’re well, you are free to go.”

“
Okay. Thanks.”

“
Don’t thank me. I always liked that fucking bell. So.
Au revoir
. Oh, and one more thing. As soon as you are well, we would appreciate it if you would go back to your own fucking country.”

***

Monsoon was a bright-lights-big-city kind of guy. The only river he knew anything about was Joan, and he thought that meander was a guy who used to play for the Carolina Panthers. The dynamics of current and tide and drift were lost on him. So he could be forgiven for thinking, as he saw Woolloomooloo Wally gradually receding from view, that he was home free. As he lay there, his wrist and ankle throbbing, but the Fab 13 cradled in his arms like a million-dollar baby, a sudden exhaustion came over him. And a marvelous sense of relief. Relief tempered by pain, but blessed relief nevertheless. He had made it. Old Monsoon had finally made it. All that dreadful foreboding shit was just natural anxiety. Fucking stress. He was away down the home straight, a yard from the goal line with the ball firmly in hand, and nobody near him. Nobody to stop him from scoring. He closed his eyes for a second. Just a few moments’ rest and he would be ready to rock and roll again. Within seconds, he was in the embrace of a deep and dreamless sleep.

And it was in that condition that Wally found him. Wally had walked to the nearest bridge and studied the water and the curvature of the river. He re-crossed the bridge and walked downstream. He only had to swim out twenty feet to catch hold of the bow of the boat and tow it to shore.

He smiled down at Monsoon as he gently lifted the Fab 13 from his grip. There was a chill in the night air, so Wally took off his coat. He laid it over the sleeping figure of Monsoon and softly patted him on the cheek.

“
See ya later, ya useless bladdy dingbat,” he said, pushing the boat out into midstream again.

***

Crispin could not remember feeling better. His injuries from the beating the gypsies had given him were only superficial. He had survived his fall with remarkably little injury…but his demons didn’t. They died. The things that had happened to Crispin—the absurd
Perils of Pauline
lurching from one life- and sanity-threatening situation to another, every day apparently another terrifying tippy-toe trip down Trauma Street—had passed into the realm of the ridiculous, and Crispin felt like a cartoon character, and that the worst that could happen was some whimsical music and butterflies flying around his eyes. As he’d come screaming down through the Parisian sky, tumbling end-over-end to a certain and brutal death, a sudden peace had enveloped him.
In extremis
, surreal serenity. A thought had risen in his brain in a weird un-Crispin-like voice, as if stated by another, and yet his own voice nevertheless:
Is this all it is?
it said.
So what’s the big deal? What’s there to be afraid of?

And suddenly he was no longer afraid. Out of the game, out of his tree, off his trolley, hobnobbing with the hobgoblins, Waltzing Matilda with his tucker-bag full of crud, yes. On the night train with a first class, one-way ticket to Hysteriasville, certainly. Tap-dancing upside-down on the dunes inside the sandman’s skull, yup.

But afraid? Not anymore, and never again. The soul scars and psychological lesions had been sloughed away, washed clean in the Seine. He felt safe. Blessed. Touched by the hand of some mystical guardian who would let no harm befall him. He was certain of that.

He looked at the beautiful flowers that Asia had brought. He looked at the bottle of whiskey that Wally had brought, even though the wrinkled old bastard drank half of it before he handed it over. He looked at the light in his window and at the blue sky beyond, and the single white cloud that seemed to be watching over him. He watched the sunlight glow in the bubbles of his champagne. He drank deep. He closed his eyes and slept. They say that God protects fools and drunks…maybe he protects piano players too.

***

If Baby Joe Young had a dollar for every time he had cried, he would be skint, bumming it on skid row without a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of. But when he wrapped his arms around Woolloomooloo Wally on the Champs-Élysées in the midst of a bustling Parisian sunset, he earned a dollar and then some. He couldn’t help it. Wally and Joe hit the cafés and the cafés hit them back. By the time they got to the Arc de Triomphe they were fucked-up and fearless. When the night came down and the inevitable solemnity descended upon them and the time came for Wally to tell of how Bjorn Eggen Christiansson had gone to stand at the right hand of Odin, Baby Joe wept openly and he didn’t give a flying fuck who knew it, and God help the man who made comment.

A taxi crossed two lanes of traffic and pulled up to the curb, and the driver got out to exchange insults with the world in general, and Asia climbed out. The taxi started rocking backward and forward, and Crispin heaved himself out of the back and sailed imperiously into the bar. His waving blonde bouffant saluted Wally’s wiry badger’s-arse bristle thatch. Two hairy survivors acknowledging each other.

“
Strewth. I never thought I’d be so ’appy to see a jumbuck-lookin’ fat poofter in me fucken life.”

Crispin had his entrance prepared, but he collapsed into tears before he had the chance to be acerbically witty, and he draped his flabby arms around Wally, and clung to him as if to prevent himself from falling.

“
Wally. Oh, Wally. Thank you, thank you, thank you,” he gushed.

“
Shut yer gob and get the measures in, ya fat cunt,” Wally said, winking at Asia.

When Wally managed to prize himself out of Crispin’s grip, Asia flung herself upon him, and began slathering him with kisses. He leered at Baby Joe over her shoulder.

“’
Ere, Baby Joe. I reckon this ’ere sheila’s wasted on the likes a you, mate. Why don’t ya be a good fucken sport and turn ’er over to a bloke what knows what ’e’s doin’?”

“
Your ticker would give out after ten minutes, you silly old fart.”

And so the night progressed.

No decent Parisian bar is without a piano, and La Chatte de Piaf was no exception. The piano player was actually relieved when Crispin muscled in just as he was about to be compelled to play “La Vie en fucking Rose” for the fourteen-millionth time. Crispin eased his way into the gig with something gentle, and by the time he had finished singing “Chanson D’Amour” in a very creditable impression of the Manhattan Transfer, all four of them, and a few of the tourists, were sobbing into their sambucas. From there, Crispin cranked it up. The patrons hit the pavement to boogie, the original piano player went next door to look for another job, and the owner went and sat behind the till with a frog-eating grin on his greasy Gallic chops. Asia danced with anyone who could handle the pace.

After a while, Baby Joe and Wally strolled back out onto the street and sat at a table a few yards away. The light and jollity from the bar washed over them as they sat, drinking without speaking. There was no need. The words were in the deed and in the understanding, of which there was none, for who could understand or explain such things, and yet they had happened, and that was all.