Mr Blank (Fill in the Blank)

by Justin Robinson

  There were four of them, lounging on pillows that looked like they were in pain. They were women, and in their humble estimation, the most beautiful things in all the world. See, V.E.N.U.S. got its name from the first artwork produced by human hands, figurines of obese women with breasts like battleships. It was the contention of V.E.N.U.S. that this meant the truly desirable physique involved big breasts, big hips, and a pregnant belly. If you weren’t pregnant, the belly was to be simulated. It wasn’t an entirely crazy concept; it’s just that the people on top took it a little too far. They had that in common with every organization in the history of the world.

  V.E.N.U.S. was also an acronym. I can never actually bring myself to say what it stands for out loud, but anyone with a pulse could probably figure out what the V was.

  One of them looked me over with eyes half-closed by fat. “What a blessing that you should arrive when you aren’t called, Mr. Bailey.” A man emerged from the house, dressed in some kind of weird toga. Their men came in looking different, but before long, they were beaten into the same shape: rangy, hunched shoulders and downcast eyes, and for some reason, balding heads and full beards. The man was carrying a tray of goblets. I wondered if they were full of raw lard.

  “I thought I’d come back to see if anything needed doing.”

  The look she gave me would haunt me for the rest of my days. “Finally accepting what millions of years of evolution has been telling your eyes?”

  “No, I still think you’re all basically planetoids who are about a week from achieving their own gravitational pull.”

  In the brief silence that followed, I could hear a dog barking a couple blocks over.

  “We don’t need you today, or any other day.”

  “You’ll need me as soon as you need someone ambulatory. I know, I know, I’ll show myself out.”

  I turned and walked away, reflecting about how that could have gone better. By the time I made it to the gate, I had thought of eight things I could have done differently. Pretty soon I was going to have to alphabetize them just to keep track. I was ready to push the gate when it opened on its own.

  I thought it was sort of silly that she drove a Prius. Granted, next to the landmasses on the porch, she looked positively petite, but in the real world, she was a big girl. It was Red, of course.

  I smiled and waved.

  She pulled through the gate and stopped. Her window slowly dropped. She looked at me over her Audrey sunglasses.

  “Who are you?” She actually sounded a little impressed, throwing some extra mustard on are.

  “Have you opened the envelope yet?”

  Her brain found the track. “No, of course not. Daphne wanted it closed.”

  “Do you know who told her it would be there?”

  She shook her head. “Who are you?”

  “I just compared your bosses to moons. Comets. Large asteroids. So I’m not really welcome up there at the moment.”

  “I… see. And why did you do that?”

  “Turns out I’m not that bright. Who knew? Look, I want to know what’s in that envelope. Are you opening it with Daphne? Which one’s Daphne?”

  “The… uh… the blonde.”

  “There’s a blonde?”

  She nodded. Apparently there was a blonde.

  “Are you? Opening it with her?”

  “I think so. What’s in it that you need to know?”

  I glanced up the path. They were probably wondering where she was. “I’m parked up the street. Gray Toyota. When you’re done here, come meet me there, and don’t mention it to them, okay?”

  She looked me up and down. She didn’t seem to notice the hair. Damn. “Maybe.”

  “That’s the best I’m gonna get, isn’t it?”

  “Yep.”

  “Fair enough.”

  So I got to wait in my car for Red, who might or might not come. This was the destination of the envelope, but there was a distinct lack of apparent desire to kill me, no matter how many insults I threw their way. I was fairly comfortable putting V.E.N.U.S. in the safe pile. That meant my suspects were everyone minus one, which still sounded depressing.

  Red left the compound and looked around before spotting my car. The hill was pretty steep, and she was a little out of breath when she got to me. I got out of the car.

  “Jonah Bailey,” she said.

  “Sure, why not?”

  She frowned at me, but stuck her hand out. “Mina Duplessis.”

  Her hands felt like silk. “Nice to meet you. So, about the envelope?”

  “What do you know about it?”

  “Tell you what. You tell me what you know, I’ll tell you what I know.”

  She said, “Do you know who the Anas are?”

  “Ana” was a pejorative term for members of a sect called the Guardian Servitors of the Anorectic Praxis. They worshiped a goddess they called Anamadim, sort of a high-fashion nymph type. More importantly for Mina’s purposes, the Anas were V.E.N.U.S.’s opposite number. The Anamadim Cult had been around since the late ’60s, but really started to come into its own in the internet age. They believed that anorexia was a lifestyle choice rather than a clinical illness. They were constantly at war with V.E.N.U.S. over the female psyche and proper representation of woman. V.E.N.U.S. gave us Sophia. The Anas countered with Twiggy. V.E.N.U.S. gave us Anna. Anas struck back with Kate.

  “Yeah, vaguely. They’re the… uh… bad guys.” Low-levels loved the term “bad guys.” They used it before they got to understand that good and bad were mostly relative terms.

  “Right,” she said. “We’ve had a ceasefire since the most recent assassinations.”

  “Assassinations?”

  She got a look like she’d just spilled the beans, but to her credit, she bulled ahead. “Come on, Jonah. There’s more out there than you realize. Think back a couple years. A large actress would die, then a skinny model. It was like homicidal badminton.”

  I honestly hadn’t put that together. My work with both groups was pretty arm’s length. I was even lower with them than with most, simply because I couldn’t stomach the higher-ups for too long. I kept wanting to order a pizza for one side and tell the other side about how much weight Jared lost.

  “Right, so there was a ceasefire.”

  She nodded. “But in the envelope, there were documents. Expense reports, bills, that kind of thing. It points to an offensive. It could mean they’re ready to go after some of our people. Monica, Christina... probably not me, but maybe.”

  “You? What do you do?”

  She blushed a little. “I’m a… uh… model.”

  “A model? But you’re so…”

  “Fat?”

  “I was going to say short.”

  “I’m five-eight.”

  “Right. I meant in comparison. You know, to a basketball player.”

  She gave me a glare.

  I said, “So you’re a model, then?”

  “I’m a plus-sized model.”

  And that’s when I figured out where I knew her from. It was a commercial that had been running for a couple weeks. A young woman, babysitting her brother’s kids; she doesn’t know how to cook, but hey! No problem. There’s Casseroller! The casserole that’s easy and fun!

  I must have made the recognition eyes at her. She nodded, and in the breathy voice she used on TV, “It’s so easy!”

  “So you’re here to…”

  She finished for me, like she was quoting: “To promote a more positive image of femininity and to return the aesthetic to what the Goddess intends.”

  I had to admit, if more of the V.E.N.U.S. women looked like her, I could see myself becoming a fanatic. I thought about wearing a suicide vest stuffed with ice cream bars and charging into runway shows.

  “So how’s that working out for you?”

  “I get more gigs than I did before. What about you? I shared. Your turn.”

  It’s a good policy not to let a pretty face get you stupid, but in my defense, she had
pretty other things, too. We were five seconds from her giving me an “I’m up here.”

  Deep breath. “I planted the envelope.”

  “You. You!” She stumbled backward and turned to run.

  I couldn’t think of what to do, so I grabbed her. “Wait, Mina!” Turned out, that was a mistake. She hit me in the gut with an elbow, turned and punted my head like a football, then ran back down the hill for the gate.

  I lay there for a second, trying to catch my breath around the sheepshank her elbow had planted in my lungs. I wasn’t sure if the compound was going to empty onto the street to collect me. There was a decent chance I was about to be surrounded by soft-eyed and bearded men with Uzis. As fun as that sounded…

  I rolled over and stumbled to my car, hit the ignition, and sped back down the hill.

  -FIVE-

  Evolution put some shortcuts into the human brain that probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but can be manipulated if you know how. It’s about finding the cracks, usually in the interplay between belief and perception and how one bolsters or destroys the other. Some people call it magic, some call it a con game, and some call it New Age psychology.

  Belief means different things to different people. When I use it, I’m not talking about expectations based on experience. I’m talking about expectations based on ephemera. Take my haircut, for example. People trust it because it reminds them of Ronald Reagan, and everyone knows that Reagan was a tireless champion of human rights, the guy who brought down the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union and saved a bunch of hostages from Iran. This belief really isn’t based on anything solid. In fact, Reagan was responsible for the creation of twenty-three FEMA-controlled concentration camps within the U.S. and kept Saddam Hussein, the Ayatollah Khomeini, and Osama bin Laden on the CIA payroll. Seriously, look it up. That’s the whole point: the reality of the situation and the belief about the situation have nothing to do with one another. People believe Reagan was a good guy, and so the haircut, his most identifiable physical trait, gets associated with good guys. Belief allows you to ignore facts in favor of what sounds right. It can also allow you to see something that’s not really there, but that’s slightly more complex. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Well, not always, but belief can manufacture the perception of the same. Plant a cause, and people will remember the effect.

  Which is why I looked like a Phil Collins video.

  Mina had kicked me right along my jawline. Her foot didn’t land flush, thank my lack of belief in God. If it had, I probably would have been knocked cold instead of just being dazed. The bruise was red, and would probably turn good and purple before dinner. On that subject, chewing would be fun.

  The Masons were trying to fan the flames between V.E.N.U.S. and the Anas. As I drove, I tried to think of a good reason for that.

  On the stereo: “Amanda.”

  I couldn’t think of one, beyond some paranoid fantasy about a gender war.

  That left the Candidate. If there was a contract out on me—or, more accurately, out on Colin Reznick— it was probably sent to several different groups. Going to the Assassins themselves would be like marching into the lion’s den covered with lamb chops and barbecue sauce. There was a next best thing, though.

  Besides, a nice sea breeze sounded good right about now.

  I pulled over near the onramp to the Old Pasadena Freeway, popped my trunk and fished around until I found a small locked box. Opened it. Jewelry. Not nice jewelry, either. Man jewelry was basically glazed testicles worn on the fingers or around the neck. In my box, there were class rings from every school worth mentioning and a few that didn’t exist. There were gold chains. There was even a fake clip-on diamond tooth. I picked a gold rope and unbuttoned my top two buttons. I checked the look in the mirror.

  Hello, Nicky Zorotovich.

  I wished I’d picked up a nickname, but this ID wasn’t even Russian. Wasn’t Jewish, either. That’s the trick with a good ID. Don’t want to be too good to be true, especially if all you’re after are scraps.

  Still, a nickname would have been cool. Nicky “the Butcher” Zorotovich. Nicky “the Red Menace” Zorotovich. Nicky “Nicky” Zotorovich was the best I’d done so far.

  I never liked visiting Vassily “the Whale” Zhukovsky. Unlike most of the people I worked with, Vassily was actually dangerous in an immediate sense. I worried that if I moved too slowly, he’d just eat me.

  I’d be in San Pedro in the late afternoon, which would mean there was one place I could find Vassily: the one place I never liked to go. Meeting Vassily for lunch, great. Dinner, even better, assuming you liked cognac and caviar. Meeting Vassily for a nightcap, sure, even if it did lead to awkward side-by-side lap dances by strippers with bullet scars. There were two times never to meet the man. Before and after dinner. Both watching him work up an appetite and digest were repulsive.

  Possible scenarios to keep my mind off Vassily: the Masons wanted me dead for divided loyalties and did the two-in-one. The Anas found out I was going to start a war and headed me off with a male assassin that couldn’t be traced to them. V.E.N.U.S. found out and did the same, only their motive was to catch me in the process so they could wave a bloody shirt in front of the Anas. This wasn’t helping. Wasn’t an investigation supposed to eliminate suspects?

  The Barbary Coast was a section of San Francisco in the latter part of the 19th century. Supposedly, it was the most debauched place on earth. You could get hookers of every flavor, gamble away your life savings, and watch no-holds-barred unarmed combat. It was like a hillbilly Caligula’s wet dream.

  Vassily came over from Russia with this very idea. He’d spent his life trying to recreate the Barbary Coast just south of the harbor. He had been partially successful, proving that the American Dream wasn’t dead, just a little sticky. When I got there, he would be getting ready for the night: watching his dealers set up, scaring his whores, and fixing the fights.

  From the outside, the new Barbary Coast didn’t look like much. Just some warehouses that scary Russians liked to loiter in front of, smoking. They returned my nods.

  I picked the least scary-looking one of them, which was like selecting the least horrifying stage mom. “I’m looking for Vassily.”

  “What the fuck happened to you? Get in a fight?” His accent was pretty thick. Stereotypical Southern Russian.

  I touched Mina’s autograph. “You should see the other guy.” Seriously. The other guy was a hot girl. “Where’s Vassily?”

  “He’s with dogs.”

  “What, no rats?”

  “Traps been bare for days, except for couple raccoons and a possum. Last time we try them, no good.”

  I went past him. This section of the warehouse was the casino. The only sounds were a pit boss’s rusty murmur, the purr of the cards, clinks of glass from the bar. I walked past this low-rent Vegas to a padded door. The muscle stood aside. I opened it.

  Sounds: barking. Smells: blood, shit. God, I hated this part of the place.

  I knew some murderers. Vassily had killed people. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Stan Brizendine had done the big deed at one time. Hasim was an Assassin, so it was pretty much a job requirement. The saving grace was something John Gotti supposedly said to a scared lawyer. He leaned across the table and offered what he thought was a comforting smile and said, “Don’t worry, we only kill each other.”

  That’s mostly true. Not me, of course. I’d probably throw up if I pointed a gun at someone, and that would reflect badly on me and my employers. Who wanted to pay the Puking Hitman? I wanted a nickname, but not that bad.

  Like I said, Gotti’s theory was mostly true—just not in Vassily’s case. Coming in here, seeing the chainlink cages stuffed with dogs—it bugged the shit out of me. These were dogs. Animals. There was no element of choice there. They were going to kill each other and they never got a vote in the matter. All they had done to die was get born a dog, then meet Vassily. The point is, I couldn’t stop thinking about what amounte
d to a bunch of mentally challenged wolves, and it bugged me more that Vassily was hurting them than that he was hurting people. It seemed like I should think about my priorities, or even sic the ASPCA or PETA on him. PETA vs. the Russian mob. Yeah, I’d pay to see that.

  I saw Vassily through several layers of fence. He was looking at one of the dogs, a snarling and snapping black-and-tan that might have been a Rottweiler. He was speaking to a short, balding man with what looked like carpal tunnel braces on both forearms.

  There’s an element to a good nickname. If it makes you laugh whenever you hear it, it’s a good nickname. If different people at different times bestow the same nickname on the same guy, it’s a good one. If you hear about someone by that nickname, then see the guy, and you can immediately deduce that that’s the guy, it’s a good nickname.

  Vassily the Whale might as well have been born at sea. Calling him big didn’t cut it. He was about six-ten, but walked in a rolling hunch that made him look rounder. I had no idea how much the man weighed, but he looked like the Kingpin. His bald head was almost impossibly shiny, and he wore that kind of suit that only gangsters wear, the sort that shined like it was wet, like he had just surfaced from the depths. His meaty hands gave the impression of flippers.

  The guy was a fucking whale on two legs.

  He was also the scariest man this side of Brighton Beach. Vassily was the kind of guy that couldn’t help but have legends made up about him. Legends about his strength, like the time he got drunk and fell in the bear cage at the zoo and ended up beating the shit out of the bear. The thing about Vassily was that you sort of believed the stories, no matter how weird they got.

  “I don’t see it,” Vassily said.

  “Trust me,” said the trainer. “He’s vicious.”

  I cleared my throat.

  Suddenly, I had Vassily’s undivided attention. I realized that I hadn’t thought this through.

  “Nicky Z! Someone give you trouble outside?” I realized he was commenting on my jaw.