a Black Centipede web serial
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
FIVE: ANONYMOUSHKA
Fall, 1933
The only real constant in this world is the fact that nothing ever goes as anticipated. This has been true since the Garden of Eden. It should be distilled into a mathematical equation. I have no doubt that it could be done by someone with the right kind of mind.
But it is a truth that none of us ever seem to internalize, myself included. We persist in the illusion that we can know just what the immediate future holds, and that we are in control, barring any unforeseen circumstances. Will we never learn that all circumstances are unforeseen?
And in any given situation, you may expect to see the last person you'd ever expect to see. Because he or she will be there, count on it.
When I arrived at Zenith Central Station, I found Stymie Beard with no trouble at all. Him, I was expecting to see, and he was right where he said he would be. Had I not known who I was looking for, I probably would have failed to recognize the child star. He was dressed in ordinary clothing, rather than the ragged urchin "uniform" he sported in the films. Also, he was minus his trademark derby.
I, too, enjoyed a degree of anonymity. I attracted a great deal less attention than one might expect of a man walking around in broad daylight wearing a black mask with a silver centipede emblazoned on it. I had developed a few techniques for going unnoticed, no matter where I was or what I looked like. They involved things that could be lumped under the heading of ESP, and occasionally veered off into the mildly occult.
Stymie seemed pleased to see me, and I was pleased-- and relieved-- to find him here in one piece. I approached him with a sort of jocular formality and gravely shook his hand. He played along for about two seconds, then gave in and grabbed me around the waist, burying his face in my jacket. I'm not too accustomed to displays of affection-- the crowd I run with is not very demonstrative-- and I patted him awkwardly on the head.
I am always awed by the trust of a child. It's one of the few things I regard as genuinely sacred.
Once he pulled himself together a bit, I squatted down to look him in the eye.
"Stymie, it's good to see you, and I want to hear what you have to tell me. But, as an adult, my first duty is to scold you without mercy for doing something as foolhardy and dangerous as this."
He looked down at the floor. "Okay," he said in a low voice. "Go ahead. I have it coming."
"I just did. That was it, what I said to you just now. That was your scolding."
He looked at me with mild skepticism on his face. "Really? Just that? I figured you was going to chew me up and spit me out."
I shook my head. "That's what your parents are for. And I do not envy you when they get their hands on you. I've had my say, and there's no point in belaboring it. You understood what I said to you. You know what you did, and why it was bad."
He nodded. "I know. But what I heard..."
"It has to do with DeMilby."
"Yes sir, it sure does.What I heard him talking about scared me. I knew it was for real, and... I just didn't know what to do. I was pretty sure nobody would believe me if I told them. Except for you, that is. I decided I couldn't take any chances. I followed him from the studio to the train station in Hollywood. When he got on the train, I did, too. There's all kinds of ways for a kid like me to do that without anybody knowing. I hid in the baggage car and it took me hours and hours to calm down and stop shaking over what I heard. I just had to kind of lay there behind some trunks until the worst of it went away."
"So, he got off the train here? Do you know where he went?"
Stymie shook his head. "I know he was going to a hotel, but I don't know which one. I'm afraid you might be in some danger, sir. A lot of it."
"Okay," I said, standing up straight and taking him by the hand. "You can tell me all about it. Have you had anything to eat since you got on the train?"
"No, sir."
"Well, that will have to be remedied first. Come on, let's find a nice diner. And we need to phone your parents, too."
*
As always, there was a line of taxis at the curb in front of the building. As we walked past them, something caught my eye. A woman was leaning on the roof of one of the cabs, with her head stuck through the open window on the passenger side.
She was tall, dressed in a very simple dark red skirt, blouse, and jacket. She had on a wide-brimmed red hat with a thick veil that covered her face. She looked very familiar, and when I heard her speak, it sent a chill through me.
"The actor," she was saying. "Did you see the actor come out here? Did he get in one of these other taxicabs? Where would such a person go in this city?"
Here, then, was the proverbial last person I would have expected to see. The woman was one of the more peculiar individuals I had encountered since donning the mask: Anonymoushka, the Woman Without a Face. She was called this for a very simple, straightforward reason-- she had no face. Why or how this was, I had never learned. She had no eyes, no nose, and only a small, thin slit, barely an inch wide, for a mouth. This was not a conventional deformity, nor was it the result of an accident. The skin that covered the front of her skull was smooth and unblemished. There were no scars, no signs that anything else had ever been there.
She must have been blind, but she evidently had some means of navigation that was equal, and possibly superior, to eyesight. It may have been telepathy of some sort, or perhaps a strange, organic "radar." Of course, it could just as easily have been something supernatural.
She had once been a prominent member of the Russian Secret Police, under Tsar Nicholas II. After the Revolution and the fall of the House of Romanov, she was the only surviving member of that organization who remained loyal to the Tsar-- or to his memory, at any rate. Beginning in 1918, she had worked her way through a list of names, a roll call of individuals she blamed for the murders of Nicholas and his family and the betrayal and destruction of the monarchy. She eliminated them one by one, with extreme prejudice. Her activities had not attracted much attention in the general bloodbath that followed the Bolshevik takeover.
Before she left Mother Russia, she had checked off every name on her list but one. The general consensus was that this individual had died in 1916-- that's what it says in all the history books.
I believed-- though I could not be certain-- that this individual had indeed come to America, and was still here. I also believed-- with the same disclaimer as before-- that he was either dead or in a place where Anonymoushka would never be able to get at him. I had attempted to convey this to her a couple months earlier, and she had not believed a word of it. She had continued her search, making a living along the way by hiring herself out to various crime bosses and organizations.
I had slowed down to gawk at her, and she noticed me noticing her. She whirled around and said, "Perhaps you ought to make a photograph of me, it would last longer than your opportunity to stand and stare at me like a quizzical ape." Then she paused for a moment, cocking her head. "Say, I know you."
I nodded. "Me too," I said. "I never forget a face. And I especially never forget the complete lack of one."
"Bozhe moi!" she exclaimed, in her strangely-accented Russian. "And I never forget a fright mask! I was hoping I'd seen the last of you! You think you're very clever, don't you, mister crawling vermin?"
"Sister, I know I'm very clever."
"Yes," she said, "and that only makes it worse."
Interestingly, I not only knew exactly what she meant, I agreed with her. Which didn't mean I intended to give it up.
I released Stymie's hand and gave him a little push back toward the building. "Go stand by the wall for a moment," I said as calmly as I could. "Don't go too far, though." The boy nodded and complied. The cabbie Anonymoushka had been grilling rolled up his window, started his engine, and took off.
"What are you here for?" I asked the veiled woman. "If you're looking for that young man there, he is under my protection."
"No, I'm not after him," she said, sounding indignant. "He's from the 'Our Gang.' I would pursue a child? This is what you think? You are foolish. Do you kill children? Is that why you expect it of me?"
"I heard you say you came here for an actor! He's an actor. What other conclusion am I to draw?"
"This boy is the only actor in the world, then? You piddle-head! More than one actor around here! You thought the whole motion picture industry is composed of just this boy here? I bet you're insane, your brain eaten up with syphilis, like all American millionaires! Which is it? You are stupid or you are diseased?"
"You've got quite a rhetorical style there," I said. "Very sweet. And you want to lecture me about making unwarranted assumptions?"
I had a gun in my hand, but I didn't really want to use it. I don't know what it was about Anonymoushka, but I had the strong feeling that she wasn't someone who needed to be killed by me.
"I don't assume anything," was her defiant retort. "You regurgitated cantaloupe! Whenever I have insufficient data in hand to establish undisputed fact, I surmise or I guess. And I am never wrong!"
"That is exactly the same thing as assuming," I pointed out.
She shook her head. "You cannot best me, Charlie, in a battle over semantics. I've been alive forever, and there is no stone anywhere that I have left unturned."
I just shook my head at that one.
"Well, then, tell me what actor you're looking for," I said, trying to sound as reasonable as possible. "Maybe I can help you. Why do you want him? Who sent you? If you're planning on killing somebody, we might need to have a talk."
"If you know what is your goddamn business," she replied, not trying to sound reasonable at all, "you also know what is none of it. Don't fritter away your life asking for answers you will never have. Your brain-pan must be filled with dog waste. You are here to oppose me, of course, just as you have done in the past. I do not take kindly to that, you anemic sloth."
She paused for a moment, and grew thoughtful. "Ah, but of course!" she exclaimed, snapping her fingers. "You must certainly be in on it! Yes, I'm surprised the conclusion took this long to fail to escape me! Where is my brain?"
With that, she reached into her jacket and withdrew two strange objects: a hammer and a little sickle. Both looked quite deadly. I glanced at Stymie and motioned for him to get further away. By now, the crowd outside the station had started paying attention to this odd confrontation.
"What the hell's this?" I asked. "You're not a Bolshevik."
"Damn tooting," she replied. "I am taking back the implements of production from those bloody bastards. It is a statement, cretin!"
She stepped forward and took a swipe at me with the sickle. It appeared to be very sturdy and razor-sharp. I ducked that, but she caught me on the side of the head with the hammer. It, too, was more formidable than it might seem at first glance. It sent such a severe jolt of pain through my skull that I lost my footing. Before I could right myself, another blow from the hammer disarmed me. My foe took advantage of this circumstance to move in close.
It seemed that Anonymoushka intended to do something dreadful to me. It also seemed that there was nothing I could do just then to prevent it. She had me at a decided disadvantage. To make matters worse, Stymie-- who had scampered halfway down the block at my behest, turned around and was now charging back in our direction. He seemed to me making a beeline for my gun, where it lay on the sidewalk several feet away from me. I didn't care for any of the half-dozen or so possible outcomes of that scenario.
But Anonymoushka was paying Stymie no mind. She now stood over me with the sickle raised above her head. It appeared that this could well be curtains for the Black Centipede, barring anything unforeseen. But remember what I said earlier-- the unforeseen cannot be barred. Perhaps one day I will learn to foresee the unforeseeable...
Before the blade could come down on me, a ghostly pale hand closed around Anonymoushka's left wrist, and a dark brown one did the same to her right. The faceless assassin was jerked upright and pulled away from me by two young women I recognized. Seeing them now brought a smile to my lips.
Here were Patience and Prudence, trusted Praetorian Guard and jills-of-all-trades to the Stiff, one of Zenith's new organized crime czars.
I had met them before, and they had impressed me deeply. Their faces were identical, save for their coloring. Prudence had pale white skin and dark hair. Patience had it the other way around. They were an enigma, one of many that infested my world in those days. Nobody knew who or what they really were, where they had come from, or how they had become so proficient at the many tasks they performed. I have remarked elsewhere ("Funeral for a Fiend," Pro Se Presents, March 2012) on the peculiar impression they somehow gave that they were exactly 20 years old, to the minute, give or take nothing. This impression did not change with the passage of time.
The only real constant in this world is the fact that nothing ever goes as anticipated. This has been true since the Garden of Eden. It should be distilled into a mathematical equation. I have no doubt that it could be done by someone with the right kind of mind. But it is a truth that none of us ever seem to internalize, myself included. We persist in the illusion that we can know just what the immediate future holds, and that we are in control, barring any unforeseen circumstances. Will we never learn that all circumstances are unforeseen?
And in any given situation, you may expect to see the last person you'd ever expect to see. Because he or she will be there, count on it.
When I arrived at Zenith Central Station, I found Stymie Beard with no trouble at all. Him, I was expecting to see, and he was right where he said he would be. Had I not known who I was looking for, I probably would have failed to recognize the child star. He was dressed in ordinary clothing, rather than the ragged urchin "uniform" he sported in the films. Also, he was minus his trademark derby.
I, too, enjoyed a degree of anonymity. I attracted a great deal less attention than one might expect of a man walking around in broad daylight wearing a black mask with a silver centipede emblazoned on it. I had developed a few techniques for going unnoticed, no matter where I was or what I looked like. They involved things that could be lumped under the heading of ESP, and occasionally veered off into the mildly occult.
Stymie seemed pleased to see me, and I was pleased-- and relieved-- to find him here in one piece. I approached him with a sort of jocular formality and gravely shook his hand. He played along for about two seconds, then gave in and grabbed me around the waist, burying his face in my jacket. I'm not too accustomed to displays of affection-- the crowd I run with is not very demonstrative-- and I patted him awkwardly on the head.
I am always awed by the trust of a child. It's one of the few things I regard as genuinely sacred.
Once he pulled himself together a bit, I squatted down to look him in the eye.
"Stymie, it's good to see you, and I want to hear what you have to tell me. But, as an adult, my first duty is to scold you without mercy for doing something as foolhardy and dangerous as this."
He looked down at the floor. "Okay," he said in a low voice. "Go ahead. I have it coming."
"I just did. That was it, what I said to you just now. That was your scolding."
He looked at me with mild skepticism on his face. "Really? Just that? I figured you was going to chew me up and spit me out."
I shook my head. "That's what your parents are for. And I do not envy you when they get their hands on you. I've had my say, and there's no point in belaboring it. You understood what I said to you. You know what you did, and why it was bad."
He nodded. "I know. But what I heard..."
"It has to do with DeMilby."
"Yes sir, it sure does.What I heard him talking about scared me. I knew it was for real, and... I just didn't know what to do. I was pretty sure nobody would believe me if I told them. Except for you, that is. I decided I couldn't take any chances. I followed him from the studio to the train station in Hollywood. When he got on the train, I did, too. There's all kinds of ways for a kid like me to do that without anybody knowing. I hid in the baggage car and it took me hours and hours to calm down and stop shaking over what I heard. I just had to kind of lay there behind some trunks until the worst of it went away."
"So, he got off the train here? Do you know where he went?"
Stymie shook his head. "I know he was going to a hotel, but I don't know which one. I'm afraid you might be in some danger, sir. A lot of it."
"Okay," I said, standing up straight and taking him by the hand. "You can tell me all about it. Have you had anything to eat since you got on the train?"
"No, sir."
"Well, that will have to be remedied first. Come on, let's find a nice diner. And we need to phone your parents, too."
*
As always, there was a line of taxis at the curb in front of the building. As we walked past them, something caught my eye. A woman was leaning on the roof of one of the cabs, with her head stuck through the open window on the passenger side.
She was tall, dressed in a very simple dark red skirt, blouse, and jacket. She had on a wide-brimmed red hat with a thick veil that covered her face. She looked very familiar, and when I heard her speak, it sent a chill through me.
"The actor," she was saying. "Did you see the actor come out here? Did he get in one of these other taxicabs? Where would such a person go in this city?"
Here, then, was the proverbial last person I would have expected to see. The woman was one of the more peculiar individuals I had encountered since donning the mask: Anonymoushka, the Woman Without a Face. She was called this for a very simple, straightforward reason-- she had no face. Why or how this was, I had never learned. She had no eyes, no nose, and only a small, thin slit, barely an inch wide, for a mouth. This was not a conventional deformity, nor was it the result of an accident. The skin that covered the front of her skull was smooth and unblemished. There were no scars, no signs that anything else had ever been there.
She must have been blind, but she evidently had some means of navigation that was equal, and possibly superior, to eyesight. It may have been telepathy of some sort, or perhaps a strange, organic "radar." Of course, it could just as easily have been something supernatural.
She had once been a prominent member of the Russian Secret Police, under Tsar Nicholas II. After the Revolution and the fall of the House of Romanov, she was the only surviving member of that organization who remained loyal to the Tsar-- or to his memory, at any rate. Beginning in 1918, she had worked her way through a list of names, a roll call of individuals she blamed for the murders of Nicholas and his family and the betrayal and destruction of the monarchy. She eliminated them one by one, with extreme prejudice. Her activities had not attracted much attention in the general bloodbath that followed the Bolshevik takeover.
Before she left Mother Russia, she had checked off every name on her list but one. The general consensus was that this individual had died in 1916-- that's what it says in all the history books.
I believed-- though I could not be certain-- that this individual had indeed come to America, and was still here. I also believed-- with the same disclaimer as before-- that he was either dead or in a place where Anonymoushka would never be able to get at him. I had attempted to convey this to her a couple months earlier, and she had not believed a word of it. She had continued her search, making a living along the way by hiring herself out to various crime bosses and organizations.
I had slowed down to gawk at her, and she noticed me noticing her. She whirled around and said, "Perhaps you ought to make a photograph of me, it would last longer than your opportunity to stand and stare at me like a quizzical ape." Then she paused for a moment, cocking her head. "Say, I know you."
I nodded. "Me too," I said. "I never forget a face. And I especially never forget the complete lack of one."
"Bozhe moi!" she exclaimed, in her strangely-accented Russian. "And I never forget a fright mask! I was hoping I'd seen the last of you! You think you're very clever, don't you, mister crawling vermin?"
"Sister, I know I'm very clever."
"Yes," she said, "and that only makes it worse."
Interestingly, I not only knew exactly what she meant, I agreed with her. Which didn't mean I intended to give it up.
I released Stymie's hand and gave him a little push back toward the building. "Go stand by the wall for a moment," I said as calmly as I could. "Don't go too far, though." The boy nodded and complied. The cabbie Anonymoushka had been grilling rolled up his window, started his engine, and took off.
"What are you here for?" I asked the veiled woman. "If you're looking for that young man there, he is under my protection."
"No, I'm not after him," she said, sounding indignant. "He's from the 'Our Gang.' I would pursue a child? This is what you think? You are foolish. Do you kill children? Is that why you expect it of me?"
"I heard you say you came here for an actor! He's an actor. What other conclusion am I to draw?"
"This boy is the only actor in the world, then? You piddle-head! More than one actor around here! You thought the whole motion picture industry is composed of just this boy here? I bet you're insane, your brain eaten up with syphilis, like all American millionaires! Which is it? You are stupid or you are diseased?"
"You've got quite a rhetorical style there," I said. "Very sweet. And you want to lecture me about making unwarranted assumptions?"
I had a gun in my hand, but I didn't really want to use it. I don't know what it was about Anonymoushka, but I had the strong feeling that she wasn't someone who needed to be killed by me.
"I don't assume anything," was her defiant retort. "You regurgitated cantaloupe! Whenever I have insufficient data in hand to establish undisputed fact, I surmise or I guess. And I am never wrong!"
"That is exactly the same thing as assuming," I pointed out.
She shook her head. "You cannot best me, Charlie, in a battle over semantics. I've been alive forever, and there is no stone anywhere that I have left unturned."
I just shook my head at that one.
"Well, then, tell me what actor you're looking for," I said, trying to sound as reasonable as possible. "Maybe I can help you. Why do you want him? Who sent you? If you're planning on killing somebody, we might need to have a talk."
"If you know what is your goddamn business," she replied, not trying to sound reasonable at all, "you also know what is none of it. Don't fritter away your life asking for answers you will never have. Your brain-pan must be filled with dog waste. You are here to oppose me, of course, just as you have done in the past. I do not take kindly to that, you anemic sloth."
She paused for a moment, and grew thoughtful. "Ah, but of course!" she exclaimed, snapping her fingers. "You must certainly be in on it! Yes, I'm surprised the conclusion took this long to fail to escape me! Where is my brain?"
With that, she reached into her jacket and withdrew two strange objects: a hammer and a little sickle. Both looked quite deadly. I glanced at Stymie and motioned for him to get further away. By now, the crowd outside the station had started paying attention to this odd confrontation.
"What the hell's this?" I asked. "You're not a Bolshevik."
"Damn tooting," she replied. "I am taking back the implements of production from those bloody bastards. It is a statement, cretin!"
She stepped forward and took a swipe at me with the sickle. It appeared to be very sturdy and razor-sharp. I ducked that, but she caught me on the side of the head with the hammer. It, too, was more formidable than it might seem at first glance. It sent such a severe jolt of pain through my skull that I lost my footing. Before I could right myself, another blow from the hammer disarmed me. My foe took advantage of this circumstance to move in close.
It seemed that Anonymoushka intended to do something dreadful to me. It also seemed that there was nothing I could do just then to prevent it. She had me at a decided disadvantage. To make matters worse, Stymie-- who had scampered halfway down the block at my behest, turned around and was now charging back in our direction. He seemed to me making a beeline for my gun, where it lay on the sidewalk several feet away from me. I didn't care for any of the half-dozen or so possible outcomes of that scenario.
But Anonymoushka was paying Stymie no mind. She now stood over me with the sickle raised above her head. It appeared that this could well be curtains for the Black Centipede, barring anything unforeseen. But remember what I said earlier-- the unforeseen cannot be barred. Perhaps one day I will learn to foresee the unforeseeable...
Before the blade could come down on me, a ghostly pale hand closed around Anonymoushka's left wrist, and a dark brown one did the same to her right. The faceless assassin was jerked upright and pulled away from me by two young women I recognized. Seeing them now brought a smile to my lips.
Here were Patience and Prudence, trusted Praetorian Guard and jills-of-all-trades to the Stiff, one of Zenith's new organized crime czars.
I had met them before, and they had impressed me deeply. Their faces were identical, save for their coloring. Prudence had pale white skin and dark hair. Patience had it the other way around. They were an enigma, one of many that infested my world in those days. Nobody knew who or what they really were, where they had come from, or how they had become so proficient at the many tasks they performed. I have remarked elsewhere ("Funeral for a Fiend," Pro Se Presents, March 2012) on the peculiar impression they somehow gave that they were exactly 20 years old, to the minute, give or take nothing. This impression did not change with the passage of time.
As they wrestled Anonymoushka away from me, back toward the curb, I saw that Stymie had picked up my pistol, but was unsure what to do with it. I beckoned him to my side, took the gun, and stood up. Taking him by the hand, I moved over to the wall of the building and leaned back to observe.
This, I was sure, was going to be good...
CLICK HERE FOR CHAPTER SIX
This, I was sure, was going to be good...
CLICK HERE FOR CHAPTER SIX
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