Get Blank (Fill in the Blank)

by Justin Robinson

  “I’m looking for Oana Constantinescu?” I said.

  “And who are you?” asked the girl from the balance beam. The two jiu-jitsu girls were leaning against the ropes. The tumblers had their veiny hands resting on very muscular hips.

  “I’m a friend of hers. Jonah Bailey?”

  I doubted they’d look into that name, but it was a work of art, if I do say so myself. I put a lot of thought into that one. See, I was looking at V.E.N.U.S. as a possible employer, so I wanted a name that sounded just a little feminine. Kind of a subconscious sort of deal. Also, the leadership of V.E.N.U.S. is extremely... zaftig. Actually make that zeppelaftig. They’re huge. And I say that as someone who finds the skin-and-bones look disturbing. So I figured if I was going into the belly of a whale, I might as well be named Jonah.

  More than just the name, though. I made sure Jonah Bailey had the feminist bona fides. Registered member of the Peace and Freedom Party, a blog that mostly mined and reposted stuff from Jezebel and similar sites, and even a dummy piece from the Vassar College newspaper about how Jonah organized a march against sexual harassment amongst the dining hall employees. Jonah Bailey looked like the perfect well-meaning stooge for V.E.N.U.S.

  Problem was, while I personally hold the opinion that women are pretty fantastic, I’m also an unrepentant asshole who has no filter on the jokes he makes in mixed company. Didn’t make me terribly popular with V.E.N.U.S. leadership. Still, the Jonah Bailey name would probably hold up if I claimed I had spent the last year working on an organic kale farm.

  “Never heard of you,” said Balance Beam.

  “You know all of Oana’s friends, then?”

  Balance Beam was not amused. “Why didn’t you call her?”

  “I did. No answer. I haven’t seen her in a while, and I was wondering if she had changed phones or something.”

  “I’m not giving some creep off the street her number.”

  I let the creep thing slide. “How about you call her and tell her Jonah Bailey is here to see her?”

  They all exchanged looks. Finally, Balance Beam, who appeared to be the leader, said, “All right. Emma W., could you do it?”

  One of the tumblers, a tiny Asian girl who might have been some kind of elf, nodded and zipped off to the office. Even running casually, she did the light-footed and stiff-armed run gymnasts use in competition. I turned a chuckle into a cough when I saw the others staring at me.

  “So... how are you ladies doing?”

  The gymnasts just stared me down. It was rather disconcerting. I had no idea how clued in they were, so it wasn’t like I could just start throwing around conspiracies and make any headway. I had no idea if Oana was still with V.E.N.U.S., especially considering how they tried to sell Mina out while Oana had put a lot on the line trying to keep her safe. I sighed. Somehow I had managed to make my dizzying array of loyalties even more complex.

  Emma W. emerged from the office. “She’s not answering her phone.”

  “Did you try her house?” Balance Beam asked.

  “I tried home and cell.”

  Now I was worried. “Guys, look. I swear to the goddess or Nadia Comaneci or whoever that I am Oana’s friend. I owe her a lot. I need to see her, so if one of you could tell me where she lives, I’d be grateful.”

  Balance Beam shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Then one of you can come with me!”

  “Get into a car with a strange man?”

  “If Oana taught you anything she knows about jiu-jitsu, I’m about as dangerous to you as a corgi with pillows for teeth.”

  Balance Beam smiled at a memory. Pretty sure it involved her breaking someone in half with her shins. “You have a car, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Three of us will go with you.”

  “Fine. Let’s just go now, please?”

  “Emma K. and Emma R. Let’s go.” The two jiu-jitsu girls hopped out of the ring with disconcerting grace.

  “Wait. All your names are Emma?”

  “My name is Emily,” said Balance Beam.

  “Right. Totally different.” I shook my head and Emily and the two Emmas followed me out the door. Emily got in shotgun, leaving chalky handprints on my door handle. The Emmas were in the back. I felt like the oddest combination of hostage and sex criminal.

  “Where am I going?”

  “Near Dodger Stadium,” Emily said.

  I nodded and got back on the freeway, grateful I wouldn’t be transporting any minors over state lines. “What happened to your nose?” asked one of the Emmas.

  “Headbutted an orc.”

  On the stereo: “I Am the Resurrection” by the Stone Roses.

  Pretty tempting to call it Christian claptrap with a title like that. It sort of is, but the first clue is in the name of the band. See, the term “sub rosa” originally came from the Knights Templar, who would hold their meetings under a stone carving of a rose. When you realize that, it’s a short road to determining the purpose of the song as a not-so-subtle threat to those who thought the Knights Templar were dead and gone.

  I got off the freeway and drove east of downtown up into the short hills at the edge of Chavez Ravine. The houses had a pleasantly ramshackle look to them and apart from the cars on the street, the neighborhood had probably not changed much since the ’40s. Large berms rose on either side of the road and palm trees and cactus sprouted from the yellow dirt. Emily guided me through the winding streets to a modest one-story house poised at the end of a street.

  Right away, it was obvious there was something wrong. The front picture window was shattered, glass in the dirt and stuck amongst the needles of a barrel cactus beneath it. The house was on a small rise, with a decent amount of distance between it and the neighbors. Probably one of the selling points to someone like Oana.

  One of the Emmas gasped and all three were scrabbling at the doors as soon as I stopped. I was a little slower out of the car, trying to take the scene in. Unlikely Oana would still be there in light of that window. There was no police tape, either.

  Emily was one step into a gymnast’s run for the front door when I grabbed her shoulder and said, “Wait.” I’m not sure exactly what she did next, but as soon as conscious thought returned, I found I was on my knees wondering how one finger could cause me so much pain. “Don’t... don’t run in there,” I gasped. “We don’t know what... could you stop hurting me now, please?”

  “Sorry,” Emily said, but I don’t think she was. She let me go and I got to my feet, massaging my finger. “You shouldn’t grab people.”

  “I didn’t want you running in there into who knows what. Just do me a favor and hang back. If someone my age dies, it’s not quite as much of a tragedy.”

  The gymnasts exchanged a look and Emily nodded.

  “One thing,” I said. “When was the last time any of you talked to Oana?”

  “Practice yesterday,” one of the Emmas said. “She was helping me with my leglocks.”

  That was Monday, the same day Mina had been arrested. I looked back at the house. No tape. Nothing over the window. That meant no one had called the police. This wasn’t the best neighborhood in the world, but you’d think an altercation would have at least triggered a 911. I went to the door and listened. Nothing inside that I could hear. I tried the door. It opened.

  Into chaos. Oana’s house was trashed. Whatever had happened in here was brutal. Furniture was smashed, shelves toppled, her chess set had its marble board broken in half. In the opposite wall, I spotted a bullet hole. That made the lack of police even more suspect, unless the attackers had silencers on their guns. I liked that idea even less. I stepped inside, shoes crunching on glass from shattered picture frames. I tried to keep the emotion out of it, to just take in facts, but it was difficult. Oana had gotten her ass royally kicked saving Mina one time, and as far as it went, that meant I owed the little gymnast. And it looked like I was too late to repay her.

  In the wreckage on the floor, Oana’s me
dals from the Sydney games glinted up at me, as if to say, “She’d have taken us if she got away!” There was the gold, which she’d won as part of that unstoppable Romanian women’s team, her silver for the vault, and the big one, the bronze in the women’s all-around that said in 2000, she was the third best in her sport on the planet.

  My mind ran through a hundred conspiracies, trying to figure out who had a beef with Oana and V.E.N.U.S. There were the Guardian Servitors of the Anorectic Praxis, of course. The Knights Templar. New Camelot. The list went on and on, and I still didn’t know who might want Oana dead. Who knew what she had been up to in the year I’d been gone? And even before then, it wasn’t like we were confidants. Truth be told, I thought she was an annoyance right up until she proved to be the best ally I’d ever had.

  I went deeper into the house, seeing the same story throughout. It got a hell of a lot worse in the kitchen. On the white wall, over a calendar of puppies, was a spray of blood followed by a messy streak. It went from the doorway into the kitchen on a downward stroke, like someone had been shot, hit the wall, and had fallen.

  A strangled sob came from behind me. All three girls were in the little breakfast nook leading into the kitchen, tearing up as they stared in horror at the blood.

  “This isn’t a lot of blood. Nobody’s dead from this.” I tried to sound authoritative. It wasn’t too hard; I had a little experience, not in the investigation of murder, but certainly in the covering up and in the faking thereof. I was pretty good at those.

  I walked into the kitchen, the linoleum creaking with my steps. A wooden door with a broken window looked out into Oana’s backyard, a nice open area that ended when the ground dropped away. It was a pretty view of a hilly area of Echo Park. I thought maybe I should have a closer look.

  My foot creaked again. I looked down. Stepped. Stepped again. Frowned. I knelt and moved the knit rug away from the side of cabinets. There was a trapdoor beneath it, blood smeared on the handle. I allowed myself a smile. Oana had a way out. Of course she did. She was smart.

  The girls were comforting each other. One of the Emmas was going to pieces. I opened the trapdoor and poked my head in, shining the light from my phone inside. There was a cramped tunnel burrowing away into the earth, way too small for me or any other grown human being. For a tiny person like Oana, it was the perfect escape hatch: a place where the vast majority of pursuers could not follow. To confirm it, a few drops of blood shone on one of the wooden supports. In the business, places to hide small things like documents and Romanian bronze medalists are known as slicks, and that’s what this was.

  I closed the trapdoor and replaced the rug, heading for the back door. I went outside, where Oana had a comfortable porch set up in front of a cactus garden and her view. I went to the edge of the little cliff and looked down. About fifteen feet below, there was a shack with a dirt road tracing the side of the slope and ending at a side road. I knew just looking that Oana’s slick led into that shack and that was where she had kept her car. It looked about big enough for a Mini Cooper, which would have been a luxury sedan to her.

  I turned around. The girls were on the back porch, looking at me with the same fear as someone waiting for a doctor to dispense the bad news. “I think Oana made it out of here,” I said. “I need to check something.”

  The slope was steep, and what started as careful steps turned into an out-of-control dusty slide. The little garage was made of sagging water-damaged wood, and there was so much paint chipped off I couldn’t even tell what color it had been back when the earth was young. The door was open and in the cool shadows beyond, the shed was empty.

  Tire tracks, still intact on the dirt just outside, said what I had thought: Oana had a car in there at one time. The slick emerged from the wall, some dried blood on the wooden door leading into it. Oana was alive. Now the question was: where was she? I thought back to the house, trying to find that one clue that would lead me right to her hiding spot. There was always one of those on TV. The picture on the mantel would have something distinctive in the background, or those cacti in her backyard could only be bought in one nursery.

  I chewed it over as I made my way down the dirt road onto the street. This street wasn’t even connected to Oana’s; to get to that, there was a concrete staircase up a berm, which spat me out right next to the Dead End sign on Oana’s street. I went back to the house to fetch Emily and the Emmas.

  Where would Oana go? Where would she feel safe? Maybe where she learned gymnastics? Where she was recruited? But those places could be found by the same people she was hiding from. I missed Mina. She had a way of cutting through the bullshit while my mind was spinning on an overload of speculation. Oana was in the wind and she was much too smart to leave clues lying around as to where.

  I went back into the house; the girls were still on the porch. One of the Emmas was crying and the other one was heroically trying not to join in. Emily just looked angry.

  “She was alive when she left here,” I said.

  “How about now?” Emily asked.

  “No idea. But if she got away, my guess is she’s holed up somewhere and is gonna stay that way.”

  “Who did this?” asked the crying Emma.

  “Wish I knew.” She almost dissolved into a fresh bout of tears when I added, “But I’m going to find her. You have my word on that.”

  “Who are you?” Emily asked, and now I had three upset teenaged girls looking to me for some hope. I really wished I could grunt, “I’m Batman,” but that didn’t seem like it would be helpful.

  “It’s like I said: I’m a friend.” A friend who is finding more and more that “retired” is a word that, to paraphrase a certain Spaniard, does not mean what I thought it meant.

  I picked up Oana’s medals. I didn’t want them just lying there, probably because I’m a total sucker. I handed them to Emily and asked her to look after it. The girl nodded, folding the ribbons carefully and cradling the clinking discs with the respect due religious relics. I drove the three girls back to their gym and dropped them off.

  “You promise?” Emily said from the curb.

  “I promise,” I said, feeling stupid for promising the impossible.

  She nodded and the gymnasts disappeared back into the building.

  Mina arrested and Oana attacked. Both were or had been members of V.E.N.U.S., a feminist conspiracy dedicated to the advancement of a positive image for women, so it was entirely possible someone was targeting the oldest secret society there was by framing a rising star and taking out their dirty tricks specialist. I might not like management, but that didn’t mean I wanted to see them all dead. Add in the fact that the first two people targeted were important to me, and it was time to get a little more hands- on.

  I drove back across town to V.E.N.U.S. headquarters, a big Craftsman mansion on Mount Washington, to warn them about what might be coming their way. Memories being what they are, it was tough not to smile a little, since that’s where Mina first realized I was something more than just a creep hitting on her. Of course, it caused her to beat me up, but what are you going to do?

  I pulled up at the gate and the grin vanished. Out front was a Realtor’s sign. V.E.N.U.S. headquarters was abandoned.

  [4]

  NOT CONTENT TO JUST ACCEPT MY DEFEAT, I actually looked around a little, wandering around property I had once broken into. Gone. Even the garden, which had once been a series of terraces mimicking different environments, had been torn up and replaced with local plants. The concrete porch where the leaders had once lounged was bare. The house was cool, dark, and echoey. I kept thinking if I walked around the whole place, the command structure of V.E.N.U.S. would emerge from hiding, although having a hiding spot large enough for all of them seemed a bit of a stretch.

  Served me right. I had been retired for a full year. Not exactly shocking that a secret society might pull up stakes and move after the place had been turned into a shooting gallery, even if it was hard to picture one of those terrestr
ial cetaceans V.E.N.U.S. called leaders actually moving. I got back in my car and stared at the gate, trying to will a conspiracy into existence.

  I had been trying to ignore what the evidence was saying, mostly because it was too scary to really entertain, but I’d foolishly thought of V.E.N.U.S. as a bunch of whales, opening up the free association floodgate. There was another connection between the name “Nicky Zorotovich,” Neil Greene, Mina, Oana, and this place: Russian Mob boss Vassily “the Whale” Zhukovsky. Other than once trying to hire me to kill Mina, he also knew Neil and Oana from their time in a short-lived cabal whose purpose seemed primarily to betray one another. Vassily didn’t like me much after I tricked him into getting ruthlessly probed by the Little Green Men, and he hated Mina just as much after she led him to this place and a date with a firing squad.

  Even though he must have eaten sixty bullets from V.E.N.U.S. guards, he didn’t go down. The guy was plain impossible to kill. There were legends throughout the Information Underground about his resilience. The bear-punching incident. The atomic wrestling match. The bomb-eating contest. I was there for the raygun shootout. Half of them had to be made up, but from the sheer size of the guy, you believed the stories. No one had yet figured out the way to kill Vassily, and personally I suspected it would have something to do with Mecha-Vassily.

  Mina’s frame-up and Neil’s murder seemed a little too subtle to be one of Vassily’s plans, but maybe he’d turned over a new leaf. The fact is, I didn’t know enough about Mina’s case to make a determination. That was a situation I had to rectify and I hoped I knew how.

  I dialed a number. “Hey, it’s me. I need a favor. A couple police reports.” Joel’s voice was quiet and a little surprised, but she was as helpful as ever. We arranged to meet at a bar not far from where I was. It was getting on toward the evening, so the regulars would give me a little protective coloration.