The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page A

Baby Joe said aloud. “Lord Lundi.”
    He was halfway to the door before Drover woke up and raced after him.

Chapter 2

    Thus do the fates toy with us. On the 14th of January in 1973, while Elvis was performing the world’s first worldwide telecast from Hawaii, four babies were born.
     
    While Elvis was singing “Love Me Tender” in a lightless and loveless goat-shit hovel on an icy tributary of the Don River, a howling blizzard drowned out the cries of a newborn boy whose mother would soon lay dead and cold in the snow outside. His father, a winter-hearted bastard who would hate the child for the sake of the dead mother, called him Yermak. But the men who would come to know him and fear him would call him by another name.
     
    The first words Michael Montcalm Robinson heard were the lyrics to “Heartbreak Hotel,” which was playing on the radio when he was hauled out of his mama and into the bright world in a one-room chicken shack next to a white wooden church in Saint Bernard Parish, Louisiana. Michael did not cry, even after they gave him a mean slap. And there was something else. Something that had people reaching for their mojos.
     
    In Paris, in a three-story townhouse above a café in Le Quartier Latin, in the 5th arrondissement, Jean-Jacques Nightingale listened to Elvis singing “Blue Suede Shoes” on a small transistor that he held to his ear as he paced anxiously up and down in the corridor outside the room where his son, Alphonso, was being brought into the world. News of a drug deal gone wrong called the father away before Alphonso was born, and the father’s eyes were closed by gunfire before they were ever lovingly laid upon his son.
     
    On a quiet street in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a couple of miles from Kirtland Air Force Base, Lieutenant Colonel Mortimer Day of the USAF sat in his Mustang with the radio on, listening to Elvis singing “Hound Dog.” A black lady in a starched white dress came and stood on the verandah. She was his sister. She held his newborn daughter, wrapped in swaddling, close to her breast. Lieutenant Colonel Mortimer Day climbed out of the car, walked across the trimmed lawn, and took tiny, miraculous Lucretia Day in his arms. As he did so, the tears rolled down his ebony cheeks.
     
    Born worlds and miles apart, separated by culture, language, background, and gender, sharing little but a human genome, different in just about every way that it is possible for human beings to be different, Yermak, Michael, Alphonso, and Lucretia were set then upon an immutable trajectory, their courses cast and defined, unalterable by coincidence or intent, invulnerable to accident or act of will, so that on the day that Paul McCartney would celebrate his sixty-fourth birthday, an ill-starred convergence would begin that would bring all but one of them to destruction.
     
    ***
     
    A couple of centuries ago, Khuy Zalupa would have been thundering across the vast Steppe on a wall-eyed steed, laughing at the stars, his saber flashing in the sunlight, with blood on his furs and a terrified and screaming—but secretly quite flattered—woman draped across the front of his saddle, and the fires of destruction burning in his wake.
    These days, he was tooling down Nevski Prospekt in a Jaguar S-Type Convertible, laughing at the neon, his Cartier flashing in the lights, with soup stains on his Polish knocked-off Armani suit, and a giggling, pouting—but secretly quite terrified—woman draped across the back seat, with the stub of the two-hundred-dollar cigar he had just tossed out of the window burning in his wake.
    Khuy Zalupa was a Don Cossack, an unsightly and fearsome individual, with the face and disposition of a warthog with a particularly painful testicular infection. Physically, he was a monstrous apparition summoned from a poisonous blue-cheese-and-tainted-oyster nightmare. Psychologically, he was as a man traversing the dark chasm of lunacy on a burning tightrope, on ice skates of real