Mr Blank (Fill in the Blank)

by Justin Robinson

  The other three tries had been different. It wasn’t like someone wanted me dead personally for something I had done. They were all of the “wrong place wrong time big mouth” variety.

  Taking them in chronological order:

  A Satanist tried to take a sacrificial dagger to my favorite spine right before a Black Mass. Because of my green eyes, the local antipriest had decided I was good luck. So, for a period of about a month and a half, I was shadowing him every other day as his personal lucky rabbit’s foot. Bear in mind that these were very traditional Satanists. They weren’t fans of the recent attempt to recast Lucifer as a misunderstood rebel; they looked at the devil as the embodiment of evil. Needless to say, it’s not a healthy work environment. Because they’re so old-school, the way to rise in the ranks is through the ritual sacrifice of a superior, proving that you have Satan’s blessing. The welcome side effect of this method of succession is that the Satanists had traditionally been led by meatheads. They can be very predictable and their ideas of evil are pretty pedestrian—or, at least, they were until Paul Tallutto took over. I’m still unclear on how he did it.

  In any case, succession was what my potential murderer was up to, but first he had to take out the antipriest’s security, which was me. I had turned to speak to the door, behind which the big boss was getting blown or changed (I didn’t ask), when I heard a floorboard creak. I turned, and the knife came down. Still have a hell of a scar on my shoulder from that one. The guy didn’t want me dead specifically. He just wanted to take out the guard at the door so he could get to the very real business of cutting his boss apart.

  The next time was about a year later. When people hear “Russian mob,” they immediately think “bored KGB agent.” While there are some ex-KGB in the Organizatsiya, by and large, it’s a Jewish mob. The Kosher Nostra has always been powerful out west, first with Mickey Cohen and Bugsy Siegel. Now the new heavy hitters are Russians coming into the States on Israeli passports. My very first job was with them. It was with a sense of Ricklesian irony that they hired a Gentile to do their money laundering, but that’s neither here nor there.

  By the time of my brush with death, I had moved from accounting to just working as an informant for one of the local capos, a guy named Vassily “the Whale” Zhukovsky. He had a dive bar out in San Pedro that he liked, supposedly because he could hear the creak of the cargo ships. I was sitting down at his table to deliver some information about some of the local Salvadoran gangs all living in houses owned by the same shell corporation, when a guy came in and just opened fire. He hosed the place down with a Tec9 until one of the Whale’s bodyguards tackled him. The only thing on me that got hurt was my chin, which I hit on the table when I tried to duck under it. That guy wasn’t after me either. That was wrong place, wrong time.

  The last time was my fault. Long story short: don’t call a Templar Knight “shitbird” unless you know how to use a broadsword.

  In all three of those cases, killing me wasn’t the goal. Even the third was more about respect. This time, though—this was different. The guy at Union Station was a full-blown Manchurian Candidate. He had the blank eyes and the robot strength. This was a guy who had been brainwashed and conditioned to become the perfect assassin. He probably escaped from the train station and woke up someplace awhile later with no idea why he had my footprint on his crotch. But the fact of the matter is, when someone sends a Candidate after you, they really want you dead. They’re not joking. They paid good money, or else used an asset they’d been cultivating over many years, all to take you out.

  Only a couple organizations know how to make the Candidates: there are a few tried and true ways, and those that use them often hire their Candidates out to the highest bidder. It’s a serious, delicate, lucrative business, and now I was on the wrong side of the accounting somehow. Brizendine found out that I worked for someone, probably recently, and contacted the CIA or the Assassins and hired himself a Candidate. A Candidate who used a goddamn rock on a chain. No two ways about it—that was odd.

  I checked the numbers on my Mason phone. Brizendine was in there, but a taunting call to him just seemed like a dick move. I scrolled through the contact list. Someone in there had to be okay with my continued existence.

  Neil. That would be Neil Greene. He and I were on good terms. I remembered when he joined and, of course, when he passed me on the ladder. I called him.

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “It’s Colin,” I said.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Can we meet?”

  “It’s the middle of the day,” he said.

  “I know that. We’re in the same time zone.”

  “No, I mean I’m at work.”

  “The man lies in the temple, his guts over his shoulder.” A ritual plea.

  Neil’s voice changed: “I could probably take a long lunch.”

  There’s a Jewish legend about the Tzadikim. The story goes that in each generation, there are thirty-nine truly selfless people, and it is because of these people that the world keeps turning. The idea is that the rest of the world is so venal and selfish that anything less and the whole thing turns into Thunderdome. Cities function in much the same way. There are seventeen desks that control each city (and twenty-three in Wilmington, Delaware, for some reason). These desks are attached to gray jobs, the kind of work no one really thinks about. These aren’t city planners. These aren’t cops or councilmen. These are the bureaucrats between the other organizations, the ones responsible for passing paper along the chain. These people can pass along what they like, shred what they don’t, and alter whatever they please. These seventeen desks are the carotids and jugulars of the body politic.

  Neil sat behind one of these desks and controlled it for the Masons.

  At the moment, however, he was sitting on the hood of his car, eating the sandwich I had bought him from the Armenian deli on Doran. I was staying the hell out of Burbank until this thing got solved, so we were in a parking lot in Glendale. Trees blocked the sun, and it would have almost been a pleasant day if not for the reason that I brought him out there.

  “A… what?” he said finally.

  “A Manchurian Candidate.”

  “Like the movie with Denzel?” he said.

  “Yeah, sure.” That line of thought probably led nowhere profitable. First off, I’d probably have had to explain that Frank Sinatra was also an actor. “Do you know if the… if we have access to anything like that?”

  “I haven’t heard anything.”

  “Has Stan mentioned anything about new members? Ones with CIA connections, maybe?”

  Neil thought about that one. “I don’t think so. What makes you think these Manchurian Candidates are real?”

  Explaining to him that I’d seen parts of their creation wouldn’t help. “Rumors, mostly,” I said.

  He took another bite of the sandwich. Around a white bolus, he asked, “Who do you think sent him?”

  “Stan.”

  I thought for a second I was going to get to see prosciutto come out of his nose.

  “Stan Brizendine? Why would he want you dead?”

  Well, Neil, I could have said, you know all those stories about them? About the aliens and devil-worshipers and New World Order Trilateralists? Well, that’s all me. I have just as much loyalty to them as I do to you, and incidentally, they’re no worse than you are, and in many cases, they have a good bit more conscience then your standard one of “us.”

  Instead, I just shrugged.

  He said, “Did you spill anything?”

  “I don’t know anything to spill!”

  “Maybe you do. Maybe you know more than you know you know. You know?”

  I did know. “No.”

  “Can you be sure? I’ve seen what you do. You put things in place. You make things easier for us. You find things. It’s possible you found the wrong thing, right?”

  Oh, I could have said. You mean like the headquarters of the Rose Cross, where they let m
e in without conversation, where I even have some food with my name on it in the breakroom fridge?

  Instead, I just shrugged.

  “What do you want from me?” Neil asked.

  “I need you to find out if Stan tried to have me killed. Scratch that. I need you to find out if any one of us tried to have me killed. You’re, what…”

  “Seventeenth degree.”

  “That’s high enough for that, isn’t it?”

  “Should be. No offense, but if they wanted you dead, it probably wouldn’t be a big secret to anyone above fifth.” He chewed his sandwich. “Colin,” he said. “If you thought we were trying to kill you, why call me?”

  There was a long answer to that. I gave him the short version. “Calculated risk. The… uh… we’re so secretive, that it’s not like I’m going to find out about it without help. And if this thing is because of a leak, which I think it might be, I need to find the source of that leak, which I’m also not going to do without inside help.”

  “Yeah, but why me? I mean, I could be the leak, right?” He waggled his eyebrows like a pervy uncle.

  I pointed at the caterpillars above his eyes. “Because of that. You can’t lie.”

  He looked a little disappointed. It’s a truism in this business that the desk guys all want to be field guys and the field guys are looking forward to becoming desk guys.

  “Okay. I’ll ask around, see what I can see. What are you going to do?”

  “Try not to go crazy.”

  -FOUR-

  The longer version of the answer to Neil’s question had to do with paranoia. Paranoia can be a useful and constructive state of mind. It can also turn you into a quivering lump that can’t even muster up the courage to walk to the bathroom. The key is walking that tightrope. Don’t get so secure that you wind up taking stupid risks and don’t get locked into self-defeating loops of paralyzing logic. Either extreme, and you end up face-down in your own fluids.

  So I had to do something, just not something stupid. There was the temptation to hole up at home. Maybe check into a motel. For a brief moment, I thought of fleeing town. Every one of these options was wrong. It gave the initiative to the guy who wanted me dead, and he already had too much initiative to begin with.

  I had a couple moves available. Might as well take them. I changed my shirt right in that Glendale parking lot. I had a fresh one, still in the plastic from the store. Then I put on my movie star disguise: big shades and sportcoat. I didn’t look like a different guy, but at first glance, all you’d see would be the hair and the shades. That would have to do.

  There were good odds that the envelope I’d planted was actually for someone, rather than just being a dummy prop. I had felt the thing and there was something in it. A sheaf of papers, probably a paperclip judging by the way it scraped along the inside. Of course, I wouldn’t put it past Stan to give me an envelope stuffed with blank papers. It wasn’t that he had style; it was that he lacked the imagination to fill the paper up.

  But like I said, there were good odds that the envelope was destined for a particular recipient. The information underground runs on efficiency. If Stan was setting me up to die, he might as well get another errand done at the same time.

  Back into Union Station. The first thing I noticed was the utter lack of cops. It was hard not to be a little offended. After all, I’d nearly been killed, and not in a nice way. Not that I would have expected them to ignore it if I’d been shot at with a gun. But my attacker packed a homemade flail. Even for me, that was weird.

  But there was no fuss at all.

  I walked through the entrance hall a little gingerly. Even as I tried to force myself to act casual, I felt like everyone was looking right at me, and tried to ignore the sensation. I walked past the chairs that looked molded into the ground, past the gift kiosk, then turned around and bought a magazine without looking at it. Past the ticket booths, and I was at the top of the escalator. The lockers were down below. For a moment, I thought I heard the carpenter-bee sound of the chain. A glance behind me showed that the bad paranoia was creeping into the little bones in my ear.

  The Candidate would be long gone. In fact, he would probably, at that very moment, be lying down in his hyperbaric chamber right next to Walt Disney’s head and getting a good night’s sleep for a long day of fluoridating.

  That thought moved my feet. Good thing, too. One more glare of someone squeezing past me on the escalator, and the paranoia would have come back like Jason Voorhees. I looked down: the damage from the rock was visible. Locker seventeen was nearly caved in and the floor in front of it was cracked in a neat pattern. No police tape, either. The locker damage had been ignored, but there was a wet-floor janitor cone next to the floor’s wound.

  Covered up. Almost everyone in the underground had the juice to cover up a lone nut attack, especially if both sides got away and no celebrities were involved.

  Score one for the amateur detective: I’d successfully added “Everyone” to my list of suspects.

  I walked first to the broken floor. A janitor was mopping nearby. The broken section was covered in a thin gray dust, but I didn’t see the Virgin Mary in the break. The rock had really done a number on the floor, probably more than a sledgehammer could have.

  I asked the janitor, “What happened here?”

  He shrugged. “Someone dropped something, I guess.”

  “Obviously, you’re not a golfer.”

  I walked away to have a look at the locker. The denting looked a little strange to me. I traced it with my fingers. They came away covered in the same gray dust. I sniffed it. I had no idea what I expected to learn from that, other than the fact that it smelled like rock. I walked away to lean against the wall.

  It wasn’t my first stakeout. In my years of work, I had sat in cars and watched cameras. I had crouched in bushes outside of apartments. I had waited in bathrooms. A couple of times, I had hidden in crawlspaces. None of that makes me sound very good, but in my defense, I’m not a very good person.

  I picked a wall with a good view of the locker, just below the escalator. Whoever went to the locker would have his back to me. Now, to look unobtrusive. I brought the magazine up and…

  20 Ways To Know He Loves You.

  Son of a bitch. It was a Cosmo.

  Screw it. As it turned out, the twenty ways weren’t variations on “He remembers your name.” That was the problem with those magazines. You got women who don’t understand men writing for women who really don’t understand men. There’s at least two layers of bullshit to wade through in those situations. Women don’t want to know the truth: we’re not that complicated, we’re not that interesting, and we react to the most simple of stimuli. In short, we’re not women.

  The sad part was, I ended up getting interested enough in the article that I nearly missed the mark.

  If it weren’t for the red hair, I wouldn’t have looked up at all. Like I said, simple creatures.

  A little too short to call it long, but it definitely wasn’t short. What it was was shiny. What it was was hypnotic. What it was was completely distracting me from what I should have been doing.

  I tossed the magazine away, tried to take in the rest of her, and there was a hell of a lot to take in. Not chunky exactly, though an asshole might call her that; she had too much grace to be accurately described that way. She definitely had a waist, but it probably measured more like the hips on an average LA woman: the Monroe hourglass. She didn’t seem at all ashamed of that, either, like that magazine I had just tossed would like her to be. Her blouse and skirt hugged that figure, showing every bountiful curve. It had just become a very good day to be me.

  She was at locker seventeen, fishing out the envelope I planted.

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  She turned around. She really looked familiar, but that could have just been wishful thinking. Still, I could have sworn on a polygraph I’d seen those big blue eyes somewhere, but the way my heart was pounding, it would read like a li
e.

  “Yes?” she said. Polite. Calm.

  I tried to concentrate. There was part of me that thought she might be a ghost of a starlet from the ’50s. I thought better of trying to pinch her. The downside of all of this was that I completely forgot what I planned to say.

  Okay, first, figure out if she’s connected, and if so, with who.

  “Do I know you?” I hated myself as soon as that came out of my mouth, and it must have shown on my face.

  She said, “No. Just one of those asses.”

  “Wait, what?”

  “Listen, it’s fun getting hit on, but this is the metro and I’m a little busy.”

  This was rapidly getting out of hand. “Oh no. I’m not hitting on you.”

  “Sure seems like it.”

  It clicked right then and there. I knew who she was, and where she was going. It didn’t explain the envelope, but I wasn’t going to get anywhere standing around, especially with the way she was looking at me.

  “My mistake, I just could have sworn you and I were both on the Finnish biathlon team.” I turned and double-timed it up and out.

  It was a quick car ride from there to Mount Washington, the collective name for a bunch of hills in East LA. The house was hidden amongst these hills. It was almost a commune, with multiple levels and tiny stinking gardens. It was the local headquarters of V.E.N.U.S., and unless my instincts were completely off, it was Red’s destination.

  I drove past the house and made a U-turn so my car was above the house and facing downhill, then walked to the gate. The intercom was old, but it worked, and I buzzed.

  A male voice said, “Hello?”

  “It’s Jonah Bailey. Let me in.”

  The gate buzzed again and creaked open. There was a short path up to the house. Because this was Southern California and I was on hippie land, the path was hot and dusty, and the vegetation looked sick and natural. They were on the porch that day. If I had to guess, I would have said that there was a shade over two tons resting on there. Good thing it was concrete.