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This is the story that just never ends. Except now it has. Clocking in at 19 pp (single-spaced), The Long Awaited Second Draft. I'm over it.
Pavel
Khazanov
Max, and a Journey
Caused by a Senior Editor at a Local Newspaper in the City of San Ramon,
California, Where This Story Begins and Ends With a SHOCKING Conclusion and a
Message to Become a Positive Contributing Member of Society
I
Max was doodling on a napkin in a
coffee shop on the corner of Sunset Drive and Bollinger
Canyon, in the small suburban town
of San Ramon, California.
He was already on his third or fourth napkin, and what started as an attempt to
craft an engaging episode of a battle involving stick figures with bazookas,
quickly degenerated to a more existential level. There were several scribbles
in cursive, but Max didn’t like them. They looked too roundabout and didn’t
feel like they had any edge to them. Then he started printing. He printed it,
then again, over and over, M-A-X in large letters across the entire napkin. The
sharp points and straight, no-nonsense lines projected assertiveness worthy of
a CEO. “-Sincerely, MAX”- looked like a command of a general. “Thank you for
considering my application. –Sincerely, MAX.” It looked perfect. They had
to hire him, if he’d sign the writing sample like that- he knew that was
the key. Cursive looked too weak, and a full Maximilian was definitely
out of the question. It was simply too soft, too bourgeoisie, too pompous. It
reeked of a parental estate, a coat of arms and an inheritance of old French blood-soaked
money. Something his mother would like.
On his way back from the San Ramon
Tribune offices, where he dropped off the application, she called him and asked
him to please, Maximilian, stop at the Whole Foods and pick up anything you
like, and don’t get the store brand kind, we can afford to splurge, now that
your father has got his fat paycheck in New York City, he should be sending us
all of it for running off with that lowlife slut. She had always referred to
him as Maximilian, sometimes even by her own maiden name, ever since she
came back from Europe three summers ago, and hung the Beaufort Family Crest on
the wall in the upstairs hallway, which she then started calling a vestibule.
She bought the crest in Toledo and it cost her a hundred Euros, which must have
been a bargain, because the lady who sold it to her dropped it from a hundred
fifty when his mother told her that her maiden name was Eleanor Mary-Ann
Beaufort and maybe it was her crest. She thought it made sense and thought
herself a prophet for naming her only child Maximilian, and not a simple
Max, against his father’s wishes.
When Max came home, his mother was
out and something was left baking in the oven, which seemed out of place
because she almost never cooked anything that took longer than five minutes to
zapfry. There was a note under the fridge magnet with Salam Aleikum in
Arabic weave that she brought back from her post-divorce vacation in Dubai.
A bright pink “Congratulations, Maximilian!” in childish print stretched
across most of it, with a small “Walking Antoinette, be right back”
underneath. The oven smelled like burned pie, and smoke was slowly trickling
into the kitchen, but Max did not question it. He walked up the stairs, took a
left at the Crest in the vestibule, and entered his bedroom. It had peach
colored walls and was completely barren aside from a bed, a desk with a
computer flashing a new email, and two art prints on either side of the window.
His mother offered him a choice between two different Renoirs and two identical
Da Vinci’s, so for the sake of non-conformity, and to evade a running joke
about Stereo Lisa, Max went with the still somewhat redundant
Impressionism.
It was the Maximilian that
jumped out at him. “Dear Maximilian Beaufort-Fischer,” the email read. Max
remembered how when he was five years old, his mother wrote a note to Mrs.
Batson, his kindergarten teacher, asking her to please call my son Maximilian,
it is a name that is special to me and I wish my son raised under it, and no
other. His father always called him Max, which may have been the final straw
for his parents’ divorce. For a second, he wondered if his mother could have
managed to get in touch with The Tribune about this, in the time it took for
Max to get home.
Still, Max was excited. He had not
had a steady job since the summer his father left, which was three years ago,
after Max’s 18th birthday. It was as if his parents had decided to
see him through to no longer being a minor until they would allow their
dysfunctional relationship to let loose, and Max was grateful for that. Before
then, he worked a filing and stapling job every summer at his father’s office.
Then, within two weeks of his graduation, Max’s parents divorced, and his
father disappeared to New York
with a partner from his firm. Apparently, as of a month ago, they had won a
class action lawsuit for two hundred million dollars, against some major retail
chain, for not putting up clear return policy signs at their customer service
windows. Meanwhile, Max had dropped out of a state university after less than a
year, and had been going to community college and mostly sitting at home since
then, perfecting his ability to spend every second of his ample free time
researching conspiracies on the internet. Recently, his mother had been pushing him to
apply for work, because Maximilian Beaufort, you can’t just sit around all day
and be idle, it’s noblesse oblige! Max was so shocked that his mother
actually used French in a sentence, that now he was staring at an email
from a Senior Editor Bob Koch at the San Ramon Tribune, and wondered how his
plan of removing his ridiculous full name from public record could have
backfired.
Dear Maximilian Beaufort-Fischer,
We have received your application
for the Copy Editor position at the San
Ramon Tribune. Your interview has been scheduled for Friday, July 27th,
at 9 AM. Please respond to this e-mail
to confirm.
Sincerely,
Bob Koch
Senior Editor
San Ramon Tribune
The letter appeared as perfect
poker-faced efficiency, though he wondered why the Senior Editor himself would
bother with his application. Max’s eyes moved across the email, scrutinizing
every line, up to the advertisements section on the side, where a box flashed
rapidly, in pink and yellow.
“Interested in Fate? Colman
Institute of Cosmology. Visit us online at www.cosmology.com
or call us today at 1-800-4-FUTURE.”
There it was again, the same link
he saw a few days earlier, when Max had first clicked it, on an impulse he
couldn’t understand. Maybe there was something Jungian about the colors, maybe
it was just the concept of Cosmology that caught Max’s attention. At the
beginning of the week, he received a junk email, titled something like, “the
government is watching, Chem Trails.” Max had just gotten past Scientology,
crop circles, and Roswell, so Chem
Trails sounded as good as anything. But the email turned out not to be about
Chem Trails at all. There had only been the advertisement, flashing on the
side, and it threw Max off, not because of the bait and switch, but because
things like that don’t arrive in junk mail. Links to enlarge various aspects of
your body, or maybe something about finding a real-life partner, tonight! for
whatever purposes, but never anything about Cosmology, or Fate. Now he was
looking at it, and he was interested. He was about to click it, like last time,
hoping that this time he’d see something, anything more than the blank
page that came up for him before.
The piercing shriek of the
downstairs fire alarm broke Max’s concentration. The kitchen was covered in thick
black smoke and Max was spraying the charred remains of an apple pie with a
fire extinguisher when his mother and her Chihuahua
walked through the front door. The Chihuahua
stopped in its tracks and ran out, tugging on the leash, barking furiously, to
escape the developing gas chamber. Please Maximilian, help me, just grab Antoinette
so she doesn’t run away, his mother pleaded. I completely forgot about the
oven, because I ran into Ella on the way back and you know how she is, anyway,
you turned in the application to that newspaper, and I just wanted to do
something nice for you and now it’s all burned, but don’t worry, I knew I
couldn’t trust myself, I brought back some pastries from the store. Max told
her not to worry and said he was going out anyway. He took a pastry with him,
and on the drive back to the coffee house where he spent all of his summer
hiding from his mother, he thought about how she could always bribe him with a pastry,
even now, when he was 21 years old, living the lifestyle of the idle rich,
because his mother cherished him like the precious Faberge Coronation Egg of
her eye, which she has been convinced ever since her trip to Europe that her
family actually once owned, because it would certainly explain why we never
really fit in with your father, that money-hungry worm, thank God I had the
wits to hyphenate my name and yours.
In the coffee shop, all Max could
think about was the advertisement for the Colman Institute of Cosmology. He
tried finding it again, on a neighbor’s laptop, but no search would bring it
up. He figured it must have just been a link to some website where they steal
identities, wondered how he could have been dumb enough to click it the first
time, and considered the possibility of a Caymans account having just been
opened in his name. He quickly rejected this thought as a bit far-fetched.
Still, the question was compelling, and now Max could only wonder about his
fate, as his name stared back at him from a napkin once again.
II
The offices of the San Ramon
Tribune were a one-story building off the Crow Canyon Boulevard Exit of the I-680.
Until Wednesday afternoon, Max had never heard of it, but then he never kept up
much with any of his town’s print industry. He didn’t consider himself as a
reader of anything beyond the front pages of tabloid magazines in line at
supermarkets, and given his questionable attempts at higher education, Max
never thought of work at a newspaper as something particularly fitting. Still, there
was a time when he had actually won the seventh grade spelling bee, beating out
tough competition- Johnny Larente, who later ended up in Harvard. Max figured that
must have been his mother’s reasoning when she dropped a copy editor
application for The Tribune on his desk on Wednesday. She must have picked it
up in the mail, along with a subscription advertisement, because Max found both
of them stuffed underneath a pile of his own letters and magazines. He knew it
was his mother’s way of playing the Invisible Hand, especially considering her
recent noblesse oblige rhetoric. Still, a copy editing job didn’t sound
too bad, and the more Max thought about the possibility of introducing himself
to people as working for the News- maybe bend the truth a little and be a
reporter? not like anybody reads this paper anyway- the more he liked the idea.
As Max approached the front door of
the Tribune offices, he was pleasantly surprised at his own calmness and sense
of control. This calmness started eroding as his hand reached and gripped the
door handle. The sense of touch sent a nervous shiver of awareness down his
spine, which naturally transformed into fright as Max stared at the
receptionist directly in front of him. Max remembered a freshman anthropology
class he once failed, something in it about hip-to-waist ratios evolving into
attractiveness. The receptionist stared him down with a cool look of
superiority, and a bizarre momentary flash of interest. This was un meilleur
pilotage- in his mother’s butchered French- of control, the kind that
dangerously attractive women hone all their lives, and use to forever enslave
those who can’t take the heat. Max could never take the heat. Sill, he
remembered his purpose of being there, and the impending interview was just
enough of an impetus for him to make a quivering request for one Senior Editor
Bob Koch, an appointment. The receptionist, stood up- taller than him- and
silently gestured Max to follow her. Her dark hair fell in wavy locks behind
her as she turned his back towards him, and led him through the electronic pass
key door on the side of the room. Max wondered about such security precautions,
but the receptionist remained silent. Behind the door stretched an eerily quiet
maze of gray-walled cubicles enveloped in a thick smell of cheap coffee. They
made their way down the labyrinth, to the office door that had Senior Editor
printed on it in bold corporate print. At this point, the woman silently
produced another keycard, slid it underneath the doorbell and rang. The
fully-tinted door opened with a mechanized click, and the receptionist turned
to walk away.
“We like to run a tight ship here, Maximilian,”
said Senior Editor Bob Koch, while dropping his thin square reading glasses
down his large, acne-scarred nose and looking over them, with authoritative
gray eyes, which reminded Max of his sixth grade social studies teacher. As the
receptionist closed the door behind him, Max felt the time lapse come to an
end. To his side was a tall Big Ben clock, the pendulum silently oscillating
left to right, reassuring. Max took a breath and looked around. The walls were
lined with wood, dyed to look like mahogany. A shiny name plate was catching
the light of the morning sun through the window and radiating it in a golden
hue throughout the office.
“Please, sit down! I hope Aline and
I have made a good first impression, Maximilian. Can I call you
Maximilian? It reminds me of Spain.”
The Senior Editor stared at Max and waited for a tacit sign of approval. Max
was about to mention the fruits of his recent identity-via-napkin séances, but
before he could say anything, the senior editor’s gaze wandered off, across the
table, to the bookshelf in the corner of the room, dominated by a large leather-bound
tome that looked like it was stolen from the cauldron ceremonies of the Wicked
Witch of the West. The Senior Editor returned his eyes to the desk, and pushed
an advance edition of The Tribune towards Max. The headline read- Mysterious
Nighttime Activity in Parks Has, FBI Looking for Answers. “Truth, Maximilian,
truth is everything, you see,” the editor gestured at the paper. All Max could
pay attention to, besides the comma- he was applying for copy-editing after
all- was the “FBI.” Max had never heard of the FBI looking for anything in San
Ramon, much less in parks, which go on curfew at eleven every night, with
several squads of San Ramon’s Finest serving and protecting the playgrounds
from all potential threats, foreign and domestic, including but not limited to
Max and a few of his old friends firing illegal fireworks for amusement. “Yes, Maximillian.
FBI!” An eerie smile crawled onto the Senior Editor’s face as his reading
glasses dropped down to the tip of his nose. Trying to ignore this, Max zoned
out to a pin on Bob Koch’s bright green tie. A pin resembling C I C reflected
backwards. For some reason, it made Max
remember the advertisement about the Colman Institute of Cosmology. He wondered
why something like that would be advertising on his email, and wished he could
have clicked the link again and not had to run downstairs to extinguish his
mother’s pie and then keep Antoinette- what a ridiculous name- from running
away, against his better judgment.
“—Ah, I see you are looking at my pin” said the Senior
Editor, cutting off Max’s train of thought. “Just between you and me,” he
leaned in, entirely dropping his glasses off his nose, onto his paper-cluttered
desk. “You’re very welcome here, and if you stick around, I will personally
make sure…” His voice trailed off with a sweeping gesture of his hands.
“I’m not sure I—“
“Don’t worry about anything, Mr. Ma-xi-milian
Beau-fort,” The Senior Editor’s nose was almost touching Max’s, so
close, he could spot every one of the tiny burst red blood vessels- he doesn’t
sleep much, does he- in his eyes. The Senior Editor leaned back and pushed his
glasses up, “Those who know, know, you know?”
“I—“ Max’s hands tightened on the arms of the chair,
feeling distinctly out of the loop on something.
“No more on this.” The Senior Editor glanced on the paper
headline. His concentration broke for a moment as he grimaced, quickly reached
for a red marker and X’d out the comma, muttering something about someone’s
incompetence, under his breath.
“Mr. Koch, about the Copy Editing job…?”
“Don’t worry about that, Mr. Beau-fort.” The
Senior Editor deliberately raised his voice to the volume of a business conversation.
“You may start working today if you like, Aline will set you up.” As Max stood
up and turned to leave the room, the Senior Editor caught his gaze and winked, contorting
his face slightly too much for the act to look natural.
III
Max walked out of the Senior Editor’s office perplexed
and frustrated. Frustrated because Mr. Bob Koch apparently took a particular
notice to Max’s full name, and thus shattered any hope of his recently
cultivated self-clarity. Max was perplexed because something was missing. The
Senior Editor clearly assumed something about him, and it had something to do
with the pin on the Senior Editor’s lapel, a pin that somehow reeked of déjà
vu. Max couldn’t get the backwards C I C out of his mind. This, the FBI
apparently taking interest in the night-time happenings of the San Ramon City
parks- all of it seemed like it was meant to frustrate, the Uncanny reaching
out to him and practically slapping him in the face.
Max’s moment of self-reflection broke again, as he
realized he was walking towards the reception room. The receptionist, maybe
ever-so-slightly more interested in his cowering existence introduced herself
to him as Aline Gramont. She handed him a paper packet with a stack of papers
and a set of keycards. “These should get you into the main room and to the
printing press. The back door needs special access.” When Max tried to ask why
security was tight, she merely shrugged. “Go to the middle of the room, the
empty one is yours, I’ll send the files to your desk in a moment.”
A distinct feeling of office fatigue settled on Max the second he entered
his newly-delegated piece of corporate fealty. He sat down behind his empty,
gray plastic-finish desk and his life started flashing before his eyes. Max
took that as a sign to get up and look around. It was a medium-sized room with
a few large windows on either side of it, with Max’s own enclave exactly in the
middle, just far enough away to only experience the light from the large
fluorescent lamp hanging directly over his chair. Over the wall of his cubicle,
Max could clearly see the two desks ahead of him, with two people about his age
sitting at each of them. Their computer screens displayed some sort of a
videogame. They were both on the phone, and he could catch snippets of conversation,
involving rocket launchers, Gatling guns, and casual profanity. Max leaned over
the divider, and as he cleared his throat to say something, the man in the desk
in front of him quickly punched the power on his screen and nervously turned around.
“Hi, I’m Max, I’m new here?”
“Great,” the man grunted disinterestedly, apparently
annoyed at the interruption.
“Nice to meet you.” The man just shrugged his shoulders,
flicked his screen back on, and continued his rocket launcher rampage through a
ravine strewn with decimated corpses of variously clad soldiers, civilians,
mutants, and machines.
As he looked around the room, Max got the distinct
feeling of Evading Responsibility. When he was applying for the job, he had a
vague image of overworked reporters and photographers, speeding through
hallways, collecting scoops, scanning vast amounts of important things on a
copier that would be dramatically prone to breaking down. He knew that the
Tribune was just a local circulation, but still, he expected a bit less apathy.
In the cubicle behind his, a thirty year old man was making an origami crane
out of the Arts and Entertainment section. To the side of him, a young blonde
was reading something online, occasionally taking notes in a memo pad, but
mostly just typing messages on her cell phone. In the corner of the room that
led to the office kitchen, he saw two men standing around and laughing. A
couple of people were casually idling in and out of the print room, carrying
advance editions, and bringing them over to Aline, whom Max could see through
the glass in the reception door. Max knew he could probably get away with just
flying low, sitting at his desk and staring into empty space for the next
several hours, but his sense of conscience got the better of him. Max got up and
walked to the reception, frightened at the thought of calling his quantum
singularity by name. She was already looking up from her computer, looking at
him as he stumbled through the door.
“I still haven’t received any files,” Max managed to
squeeze out.
“I will send them to you when they’re ready,” she said,
without looking up from her computer screen, strewn with newspaper templates
and word documents.
“Anything I should do until then?”
“Relax.”
“Can I step outside? For a moment?”
“Doors are on lock-down till 5. Security.”
She clearly ended the conversation with her usual shrug,
and went on with her work. Max thought of Cerberus as he made his way back to
his cubicle. He was locked in, and he was pretty sure this sort of thing was
illegal. Still, he knew he had to cherish those waning moments of starting out
at a new job, when no one expects you to do anything. Max walked to the
kitchen, and listened in on the conversation of the two men, who were quietly
talking about Eerily Not Anything That Max Could Discern, but that wasn’t going
to stop him from his chance to make human contact.
“Hi, I’m Max.”
“Huh?” The two turned towards him. They were both in
their twenties, about the same height and build. One had short dirty blonde hair,
and the other one had a blue Yankees cap on.
“I’m Will,” said the blond one, breaking the awkward
silence.
“Alex.”
Max had a list of typical conversation starters running
through his mind, and none of them seemed to fit in.
“So the place is on lockdown?”- he blurted out before
thinking much longer.
“Yeah.” Said Alex, gesturing towards the Senior Editor’s
office.
“Is it the FBI?”
“Who knows,” said Will, with an apparent clarity of
someone hiding something.
“Yeah. Who knows,” said Alex.
“So, uh, what do you guys do here?” It felt like forcing
a weather conversation, but Max was desperate.
“Just, you know.”
“You know, what?”
“You know, just whatever,” said Will, turned to the table
and reached for the large office candy jar. Alex reached for the coffee maker. It
all felt like a bad cop movie, and Max was ready to kill.
“Look, just sit tight. You’re a copy editor, right? So go
edit,” said Alex, motioning with his head in the direction of the cubicles. Max
sighed and walked back to his desk. When Max sat down at his computer, the
article he was to edit was already up, a memo of things to check was on his
desk.
Max spent the rest of the day searching the cyberspace for Bob Koch, Aline
Gramont, FBI in San Ramon. It was fruitless. Closer to 5 o’clock, he saw Will and Alex enter the Senior Editor’s
office, and then come out. A loud buzzer reverberated throughout the room, and
all of its inhabitants proceeded to file out of the building. The Senior Editor
passed by his cubicle, and Max was about to say something, but the moment
missed him. Only then did Max notice the folded up slip of paper on the floor.
On its front was the backwards C I C symbol, from the Senior Editor’s pin. On
the inside was a handwritten map, with a barely visible “10:00 tonight!” in the corner. Max looked up, to see Bob Koch heading out the front door.
Their eyes locked for a second. The Senior Editor awkwardly winked, and
disappeared into the parking lot.
IV
Max was trying to make sense of the map while still attempting to control
the steering wheel of his aging brown station wagon, left over to him from his
father, from a time before 200-million-dollar class action settlements. The map
was leading him somewhere, but while its suggestion to turn west onto Crow
Canyon Boulevard appeared to make sense in the beginning, Max soon found
himself speeding through the darkness of uninhabited farmland. He felt like he
had seen himself do this before somewhere, in some dream, that resembled a
black-and-white vampire movie. Through his rear-view mirror, he could see the
lights of the car that had been following him for the twenty minutes since he
left any trace of civilization behind. He pulled over, and the car passed next
to him. Max tried to sneak a glance and saw that Senior Editor Bob Koch was
inside, still wearing his suit, and his bright green tie with the pin on it.
Max let him pass and followed. A minute later, the Senior Editor pulled over to
the side of the road and turned off his car. Max stopped as well, and leaving
the emergency lights on, walked over to Mr. Koch’s door. As he approached the
rolled down window, he saw that Mr. Koch looked extremely shaken.
“Hello, sir, I saw you and in the car and I…”
“Oh, Mr. Beaufort, thank God it’s you! I thought I was being followed. They’ve
been looking for us now, it isn’t safe and we must be quick!” The Senior Editor
quickly rolled up his window and switched the ignition. Max returned to his car
and continued to follow the Senior Editor’s red taillights through the dark
countryside, almost lulling him to sleep. In another fifteen minutes, the
lights on the Senior Editor’s car went out, and Max could barely see its
outline, turning off the road towards a non-descript barn. They parked outside,
and the Senior Editor wordlessly gestured Max into the building, and down a
cobwebbed flight of stairs. The rusty metal door to the cellar had a 3-digit
mechanical code lock. The symbol was scratched next to it, made visible by a
dim light bulb, hanging from the ceiling.
“Mr. Beaufort, I apologize for the rushed timing, but we must be quick, and
it is now or never. Shall we?” The Senior
Editor locked his eyes on Max’s at point-blank range, and Max was afraid. He
thought about turning around, he thought about cosmology, he thought about
getting himself into something- something sinister, something that could lead a
man to keep his office doors under an electronic lock, and to have automatic
blinds, probably bulletproof, covering his windows. But, there was conviction
in the Senior Editor’s dead-pan gaze, and for the first time in his life, Max
felt something. He felt driven. So he nodded. The
Senior Editor punched in the code- 1-9-9, and waved Max into the open door. “Welcome,”
he enunciated with a quiet precision.
The cellar consisted of three other people, all sitting at a large round
table at the center of the room. Aline Gramont sat closer to the door, facing
Willie and Alex, who were apparently surprised to see Max enter the room. The
Senior Editor made his way to the dimly lit far corner, and produced a tray
with a decanter and four glasses out of the darkness.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, our newest addition.” Aline curtly smiled. Willie
and Alex looked over at each other. Max took a seat at the table, with the
backwards CIC sign crudely painted in the middle, covered up by maps, notes,
telephone numbers, and Polaroid pictures of various locations, people, and bad
camera angles. The Senior Editor sat down at the slightly more ornate of the
seats, and proceeded to decant a clear brown liquid into the glasses.
“Ms. Gramont. Mr. Weston, Mr. Pallen. We are well, and we are strong, and
soon we will make our move! A toast to our new member. Maximilian Beaufort,
may your name be blessed with glory!” Everyone around him raised their glasses.
Max thought fast and went along with it. As he brought the drink to his nose,
the faint smell of turpentine took over him for a moment- he hadn’t drank
anything this vile since his seventeenth birthday party, when three of his
friends got into a bizarre exchange of fluids that proceeded to dominate high
school discussion for the rest of Max’s senior year.
“Please pardon the lack of quality this week, with the recent accruing
costs of our endeavor, we have become a bit strapped. Which brings me to my
point. Sir Weston, Sir Pallen…”
Sir? thought Max. The imagery was getting consistently more medieval, and
the more he looked around, the more reminders of Days of Yore started creeping
into perception. The round table, the bizarre crest painted in white house
paint on one of the cellar walls. An odd phrase in Latin script, circumscribing
the CIC. Meanwhile, Aline reached under the table, produced a long, iron sword,
and handed it to the Senior Editor, who had been solemnly pacing back and forth.
“Maximilian, first you must swear to us that you are not one of them,”
said the Editor, the sword pointing straight at Max’s trachea.
“Sir, I don’t think this is a good idea,” said Willie.
“We have no choice, William. We no longer have the luxury of time. The
storm is gathering, and we must raise our numbers if we are to survive it. So,
Mr. Beaufort, as you can see, you are witnessing us in a precarious situation.
Should you accept this oath, then…”
“La Mondo Estas Via,” spoke Alex quietly. Max had lived in California for long enough to know that it wasn’t Spanish.
The sword seemed to be self-explanatory as far as the consequences of rejecting
the offer. He caught a brief squinting prelude to a smile passing over Aline’s
eyes. Everybody was dead silent, and Max was ready to scream.
“We take a blood oath,” the Editor enunciated, “so we have evidence. If you
are an informant, we will know. We have many friends in very high places, so
you had better be sure you are not one of Them.”
The building pressure, the tip of a medieval long sword scraping his Adam’s
apple, it had all felt totally absurd. Max only had come to work for the paper,
not to get swept up into a bizarre medievalist cartel. He knew there must have
been something to it, something to his name, repeated over and over in its full
variant, ringing, sharp, the peasant blood money, the noblesse oblige,
Max wondered if his mother had anything to do with it.
“Mr. Beaufort, do you believe in fate?” asked the Senior Editor, his eyes
glistening from the overhanging light.
Fate? Max wondered. Somehow, the word had come up more in the last week
than it ever had before in his life, and it was starting to get out of hand.
Meanwhile, the Senior Editor lowered the sword to a more comfortable level,
removed his glasses, and locked his bloodshot eyes on Max’s face.
“Mr. Beaufort, you were probably brought up to think that you were
normal, average, just another piece of this quotidian decay, this ever-so-unremarkable
existence. Who would have thought, the great Duc de Beaufort rolling over in
his grave, at this disgrace, his own kin!”
Max quickly thought back to the crest in his Vestibule. Something had changed
with his mother, after all, ever since she came back from Europe. She never really talked about it, but Antoinette, the crest, noblesse
oblige- his mother had been thrown
out of the country club after the divorce, because they didn’t feel she would
belong, and then all this self esteem? What if she had learned of something in
Europe? What if it wasn’t all a farce? Those who know, know kept
repeating in his head, the odd phrase that the Senior Editor had whispered
early in the day. That, the bizarre inscription, the sword, and the symbol,
everywhere, with its medieval simplicity…
“You’ve royal blood in you, Maximilian.”
Max was now sitting down, gazing at the pictures on the table, the
listings, the strange numbers of bank accounts all piled up, government notices
with state seals and official inscriptions.
“It has been taking us some time to track down all the
data, but it’s out there, these Jacobins couldn’t hide it forever!” The
Senior Editor’s voice had gone from cool and careful to loud and agitated, as
he rummaged through the papers, eventually picking out a picture of a vaguely
familiar man posing for an official photograph.
“This man, Maximilian, is John Edgar Hoover,
perhaps you’ve heard the name?” Max thought of images having something to do
with Kevin Costner. He had come across that name before, in his earlier
conspiracy theory pursuits. The JFK assassination, the Roswell alien landing, and now… Jacobins?
“He had always been a Jacobin, his parents were Jacobins,
their parents were Jacobins, if you only knew how much all of you have lost, we
have no hope of recovering most of it. Mr. Weston, your father probably thought
he was some country plowman, Mr. Pallen, you think the Russian Revolution was
just a coincidence? Ms Gramont, I can’t even begin to tell you…”
“I know, sir.” She said, gently motioning him to sit.
“It was one of his plans, how do you think he financed
his little blackmail operation? He had to do it off the books, a lot of it, and
so he needed money, and he knew where to find it, the Jacobin prick. The thing
is, he couldn’t have used up all of it, centuries of empire don’t just go away,
Mr. Beaufort, they just vacation in Monte Carlo, I don’t suppose you’ve been
there?” The name rang a bell, though Max couldn’t think of any particular
souvenirs off hand, just a faint recollection of one of a myriad places his
mother kept repeating, her mantra of The Good Life.
“La Mondo Estas Via,” said Alex again.
“What will you have us do, sir?” Willie looked straight
at the Editor, while leaning over the table, his biceps bulging out of his baby
blue polo shirt. There was a balance of power here, and Willie was clearly on
the strongman side of it.
“Mr. Weston and Mr. Pallen,
you are off to investigate all of this,” the Editor motioned towards a
non-descript Polaroid. “Ms. Gramont has been kind enough to provide us with
this, and his present address, so your job shouldn’t be too difficult. Find out
as much as you can about him, and report back next week.” The Senior Editor
shifted his gaze onto Max. “As for you, Mr. Beaufort, you must bide your time.
Acquaint yourself with Ms. Gramont’s forthcoming report. Stay focused, be
ready. You’ll have your moment soon. Meanwhile, welcome to the New World Order,
Mr. Beaufort!” Koch smiled, gave him his usual grimaced wink, and quickly walked
out, followed by Willie and Alex, carrying the Polaroid.
“Jacobins?” Max managed to inquire, in Aline’s wake.
“Figure it out, Mr Beaufort, as someone with your credentials, I’m sure you
can handle it.”
V
Max could handle it, as well as just about
everything uttered in the cellar. Later in the night, he had been looking up
the Jacobin Club of the French Revolution, the bizarre incantation they kept
repeating- “The World is Yours,” in Esperanto, apparently. The only thing Max
couldn’t figure out was how exactly he would fit into all this. Royal blood?
Max ran his name through the search engines, and eventually came up with a
Beaufort- an illegitimate son of some French king, four hundred years before.
Given the French nobility’s apparent propensity for mistresses, how much of
that blood or that money could still be flowing in his veins? Max
wondered. He had drawn the backwards C I C symbol, staring at its medieval
simplicity. The Crest had been hanging in the hall for months, but Max had
never bothered to look at it. Maybe it was more than just a cheap tourist trap.
“Those who know, know,” he thought he heard his mother
say behind him, but as he turned around, she had already started vacuuming in
the room over.
He started reading the report, which Aline Gramont had
handed to him. It was an article about FBI embezzlement, Finally, Exclusive
State Secrets Revealed. It made National Inquirer credible by comparison.
“Don’t question it, Mr. Beaufort,” she said in response to his email.
Max spent the weekend anxious and agitated. He spoke to his mother, and she
had apparently heard of the Beaufort story, except of course my parents didn’t
tell, why would they know, Maximilian, I only learned it in Europe by accident,
and had I’d known, your father and I would have never… The railing divorcee
modus operandi was the one thing that topped all of Max’s other subjects of annoyance
towards his mother. Still, he couldn’t resist the bait of filial pride, the
Freudian need to impress. Noblesse oblige, he had answered to her
question about the new job. She was about to ask, but Max knew when to make a
dramatic exit, the kind to leave his mother with just a taste of importance.
Besides, given the Order’s surveillance activity- an Order was what they
used to call these sorts of things, before the Jacobins, Max assumed- it was
probably a good idea to keep quiet. He was unsure how deeply Koch’s
organization ran. The “friends in high places” could just have been a
preventive bluff, and yet there was something believable about the sword at his
throat, the pinprick, dripping his blood on a yellowed faux-aged writ, a je
ne sais quoi de sinistre about it all. And the sign, everywhere the sign. Oddly
capitalized words spelling out the C I C, a crowd of medievalist conspiracy
theorists flooding the net, waiting for the return of Arthur, the Elvis of the
Dark Ages, and all of them mentioning this, the sign. When Max had been a
child, he had heard about π, that strange constant that the Greeks would
find a fascination with, and their modern incarnates would find God in. It had
become a reoccurring number in his life- the room number of his ill-fated
college dorm, price of a drink, the time on the clock as Max feverishly
searched for some evidence of Koch’s New World Order.
He had not found it. But he had found the sign, like the 3.14, the C I C acronym
coming up in eerily unlikely places, a money laundering operation through the
Micronesian island of Nauru, the sign appearing in the shadows, in the webcode,
unrendered, but there, like a mutant gene, taking over Max’s insomnia. And all
along, cosmology, fate. You are getting yourself into something, said Max out loud, burning his retina on
the computer screen.
The article was in print on Monday, and there
was an odd commotion at the office. Everyone seemed a little more rushed, a
little more focused. Strange Esperanto phrases were surfacing everywhere. The
thirty-year-old man behind Max’s office was writing something attentively, the
blonde woman was glued to her screen. Everybody had the paper edition on their
desks. Willie and Alex were nowhere to be found, though Max thought he saw a
glimpse of the Senior Editor, speaking to them outside the building for just a
minute. They had exchanged an ominous black portfolio, and when the Senior
Editor returned to his office, the door and the blinds remained shut until
closing time, at which point the Senior Editor made his usual exiting walk,
discretely dropping off a C I C- inscribed note on Max’s desk. It was another
meeting, and this time the hour was midnight. As he drove home, Max
wondered where all of this was going. The stunt with the article seemed atrocious,
and for all of his ignorance of the press, Max had always thought that the
market would nevertheless enforce some semblance of a standard of accuracy.
Clearly, the San Ramon Tribune seemed to exist unperturbed by these forces. In
fact, there was something bizarre about it all, Max was realizing, as he for
the first time in his life started paying attention to the newspaper kiosks
around the city. San Ramon Tribune was a ghost- a vague denial by the
overworked old man in a safari hat, hiding from the warm California summer sun, sitting at
the plaza on the corner of Alcosta and Bollinger Canyon Blvd, near the coffee shop
where Max would spend his after-work hours in recuperation.
His mother got the paper, Max had realized
quickly, as she greeted him that night with the proverbial
it’s-the-thought-that-counts feast of undercooked chicken and over-dressed
salad. She asked Max about it all, about the Jacobins and the FBI, the
connection, is it really true? I knew there was always something special about us,
Maximilian, I just knew it. Max merely nodded along, and recited what he
could remember, which was not much. He had spent the entire day online,
searching for any possible threads, any links, confirming or denying. Then,
just before leaving for the midnight rendezvous, Max found
Nothing, a conspicuous Nothing, a single hit, a blank black page. As Max highlighted across, a
black script appeared.
“Deepe
in a crypte belowe the castel’s keype, sleype King Artur and his knyghtes. A
povre potter, ycleped Peter Thompson, fyndes his wey unto the crypte, and reyses
Artures Swerd and Horne, fro the Tombe roialliche ymade. Armour quyke clatters
on every seyde and tombes rounde open, and thenne are stille. In grete agaste,
he relinquishes the blade, and nevere blows the Horne. ‘Potter Thompson, Potter
Thompson, hadst thou blowne the Horne, Thou hadst beene the greatest man that
evere was yborn.’”
The source code teemed with number sequences,
chains and chains of them, and in the middle of it all, the C I C, pressed
together between rows of command lines, “La Mondo Estas Via,” transliterated,
lurking in Greek gematria.
VI
The midnight meeting went on in a
similar fashion as previously. The Senior Editor talked at great length about
the impending Time To Act, the FBI, the Jacobins. Alex and William were mostly
silent. More Polaroids appeared on the table, shuffled and reshuffled, and
placed into portfolios. A map of San Ramon, with mysterious scattered X’s had
materialized on the wall by the time Max had arrived, and the conversation
seemed to imply the now-familiar ‘those who know, know’ mantra about it all.
Max kept his patience until the end, always waiting on the brink of a new
revelation, but never quite getting there, a distinctly third-string-quarterback
sensation, especially considering everything that he had already learned, of
the CIC, the Esperanto, the chain of bizarre medievalist signifiers slowly but
surely expanding and encroaching on Max’s life.
The strange incantation, Potter
Thompson, Potter Thompson kept playing repeating itself in his mind. There
was something elaborate about it, something addictive. Max hadn’t been sure
before, but now there was something going on in this particular conspiracy, as
the signs coalesced themselves around. It was the distinct feeling of being
Onto Something, something better than crop circles and Xenu. Max knew what he
saw, and the fact that the incantation, like the Colman Institute of Cosmology,
had evaporated out of all apparent cybernetic existence- there had to be an
answer, and the Senior Editor seemed to have it, and Max thought it was his
right to know. Noblesse Oblige, in his mother’s words, and suddenly the phrase
felt imbued with meaning.
After the following work day, Max
had decided to follow the Senior Editor home. Like all men growing up after the Cold War age of spy movies, Max prided
himself on his finely tuned clandestine observational skills. All the years of
spy movies were finally paying off, as he tailed Bob Koch’s Mercedes Benz
through the convoluted suburban side streets. Max knew the golden rule of car
stalking- two cars behind, adjacent lane. His father’s old brown station wagon
was not the most stealthy of vehicles, but the Senior Editor didn’t seem to
notice him. Eventually they had entered a residential area, and Max watched the
Senior Editor pull into the garage of a non-descript track house, down the
block. Max exited his car. This was the neighborhood where he used to play Cops
& Robbers when he was younger, back when jumping fences wasn’t such a legal
faux pas. Soon enough, Max was treading through the Senior Editor’s
backyard, peering through the bushes. The living room was littered with
photographs, inscriptions, scattered texts covering up unrecognizable
furniture. Max was starting to feel a little dishonest about the whole thing,
when an unmistakable barrel of an 18th century hunting rifle
appeared in the window, trained straight at him.
“Mr. Beaufort, espionage is not your forte,” Max heard
the Senior Editor’s voice through the window. A sudden cold, blunt shock crept
through his neck and into his cerebellum.
Max regained consciousness with the distinctly clichéd
feeling of being duct-taped to a kitchen chair. Aline Gramont and the Senior
Editor were facing him, sitting on matching recliners.
“Ah, Maximilian!” the Senior Editor enunciated in
classic interrogator fashion. “I am sure you thought you could get away with
this?”
Max’s sea-sick vision shifted to Aline, who was silently
staring him down, with none of her usual smirk.
“Ms Gramont, your astute
diagnosis has proven quite valuable in catching this traitor.” Traitor?! “Yes,
traitor, in the worst sense. If only you knew, Maximilian. I suppose
we’ll find out everything soon enough,” spoke the Senior Editor, while ruffling
around in a tall cupboard behind Max’s chair. He heard a sound of something
somewhat heavy being dragged across the wooden shelves.
“Your great-uncle was
particularly fond of these.”
The board was a foot wide
and across, with a handcuff and a levered corkscrew. Max wasn’t particularly
versed in medieval torture techniques, but it didn’t take long for him to
figure this one out.
As a teenager, Max had
always thought about what he would do in such a situation- a top secret agent,
for someone’s government, preferably Her Majesty’s- the title doesn’t get much
better than that- an agent dropped behind enemy lines, captured by the evil
henchmen, tortured as they would prematurely reveal their master plan in true
comic book fashion, only to be thwarted by his superior stamina, the kind that
comes from Training With The Best. However, at the moment, the only thing Max
was considering in regards to torture survival technique, was how to not wet
his pants- a consideration he was quickly losing. The talking came naturally.
“Who put you up to this? Was it them? Tell me,
speak to me, Maximilian!” the senior editor shouted, as he proceeded to
lock Max’s hand into the handcuff. So Max told them everything, everything he
had ever learned, he told them about the codes, about the FBI, the Esperanto, he
even mentioned Peter Thomson, except what does it all mean-
“Potter Thompson?” The
Senior Editor paused in his tracks.
“Yes, Potter Thompson, something about a sword and
a horn a-and, really, I was only looking, I don’t- “
“What do you know about
Potter Thompson?” The Senior Editor’s bloodshot eyes were within an inch of
Max’s.
Several moments later, Max was sitting on the
Polaroid-infested couch in the living room, rubbing his duct-tape-burned
wrists, trying to remember everything he saw on the page.
“A sign, Maximilian, you have found a sign, a sign
from them, from the others!” There was something demonic in Bob Koch’s
scattered gaze.
“Potter Thompson, it is an old tale, that he had… this must stay between
us. No one can know, our order, our future, the world depends on this, Maximilian!”
That night, Max tossed and turned through visions of Medieval Thumbscrew
Torture, eerie crypts, moving sarcophagi, waking dead, the incantation, ‘Peter
Thompson,’ shifting and permeating into words and languages Max had never
known, Esperanto encroaching on his thoughts, and everywhere the sign, the
endless C I C, hovering, watching, waiting.
It was three in the morning, that time of night when darkness seems darker
than usual. Max ran the name up and down search engines, fleeting from one page
to another, his eyes growing accustomed to webcode, seeing between the tags and
the scripts, catching glimpses of number sequences, protocol addresses that
would blurring together into pure mathematical anonymity. The numbers would
refer onto each other, a closed loop circling around something, a chain
of online signifiers not wishing to be seen, and the name, the stamp, Peter
Thompson, echoing everywhere, in full or in clusters, separated by strings of
four-digit numbers. 1981-2006, 1983-2007, 1986- A creeping tingle
pinched its way up Max’s spine, vertebrae by vertebrae. This was a graveyard.
It had rules, maps- signs and names pointing to other pages, dates and times
last updated, an outgrowth of the dot.com generation. They were businessmen,
teachers, techies, teenagers, their inadvertent last wills and testaments
forever caught in an incestuous cycle of virtual coalescence, terabytes of
space, storing, waiting. Most were just the Fates’ regular short-changed
patrons, but some were self-aware, people with terminal illnesses, depressed
suicidal egomaniacs deliberately leaving a mark in the all-absolving
cyberspace, that Mystical Body of this final generation. And Someone had
taken the pains to track it all down, to plant it with reference points. After
a little while, Max was no longer reading the pages- there are only so many
lives he could absorb before it would become monotonous, just a stilled heart
beat of an endless leviathan, primary sources safe for a thousand years in
their obscurity.
Eventually Max found it, the end of this line, another ominously black
blank page sending his desktop-illuminated room into darkness. As he
highlighted across, he saw a hundred names, a hundred pairs of dates, and the
bottom inscribed with an illegible font. A couple word processor operations
later, the C I C and the Esperanto didn’t come as much of a surprise. A moment
later, when Max reloaded, the name list had grown visibly longer. Max looked
more carefully. Among the names, the list read Alexander Pallen, William
Weston, Aline Gramont, Robert Koch, Maximilian Beaufort-Fisher. The
death date was blank. A moment later the entire list was gone.
By the time the sun rose, Max had caught his second wind,
the elated feeling of adrenaline rushing through his aching joints. He made his
way to work, to find the office building empty and locked, with a small note
was stuck to the front door, with what looked like a police seal. There
was no one in sight, save for a lone car parked in the distance. His phone
buzzed in his pocket. “Meet me around back, S.E. B.K.” Max circled the
building, and entered a dark, narrow alley, the picturesque kind, where the
discovery of a dead body would only feel right. A dim yellow light glowed above
a non-descript metal door, and Senior Editor Bob Koch was standing to the side.
He was nervously surveying the alley, side to side, his hair frazzled, his suit
unkempt, with shirt-tails hanging out from under the coat.
“They’re onto us, Maximilian, they have found us, somebody has, they
have…” the Senior Editor’s eyes zeroed in on Max’s. “You didn’t sleep?”
“I…” It was a mirage, wasn’t it? The same mirage as Colman Institute of
Cosmology, as Peter Thompson. There was never any proof, a-and how am I
supposed to put this together anyway, Jacobins, Medievalists, online
graveyards, it was all…
“Fate, Maximilian! You have found him. Here, in this city. The
names, do you remember anything about the names?”
“I don’t know, they were all just dead, except…”
“Were there…”
“There were us.”
Max started pacing the alley back and forth, feeling the adrenaline
interact with his malnourished joints. He felt alacrity take over as he scanned
ridges of nearby roofs, streets, intersections, the empty parking lot. His eyes
fixed on the lone car in the distance.
“We haven’t time, Maximilian,” the Senior Editor heaved quick, deep
breaths. “I have been searching, researching, I have tracked down everything we
must know, I have found the documents linking us, I know where they are, Maximilian,
we must find them before they do!” Senior Editor Bob Koch’s speech
increasingly accelerated as he talked about Peter Thompson, the poor artisan
who had found Arthur’s crypt, sword and his horn, unauthorized, unbidden. “He
had dropped it and run out, and now, now he’s looking again, and this time he
won’t drop. Peter Thompson is a man, Maximilian, and he is after the
same thing we are, and we must stop him before he eliminates us like he
eliminated everyone on that list!”
The Senior Editor paused, nervously looked around, his breath heaving. He
pulled Maximilian in, closer, until their noses were almost touching.
“There is something else, Maximilian,” he said, in a barely audible
whisper. “I still think there is a traitor among us. I had thought it was you,
but now I think its… I have sent Mr. Weston and Mr. Pallen to investigate. I
haven’t heard since. Stay focused, do not trust anyone! The time is now,
Maximilian, you must find Peter Thompson, find him and...” The Senior
Editor opened his briefcase and handed Max a sealed package. As Max took it, he
felt the hard metal outline of a handgun through the gray plastic.
VII
Max didn’t know where to start looking. What he did know,
was that the car he had spotted in the distance had followed him the entire
half-hour commute up through the winding countryside to the cellar where Max
planned to begin his investigation. He pulled in behind the abandoned building,
broke open the package, and placed the gun into the small of his back. It was
already getting near nine o’clock, and the sharp contrast between the sun and the
dark stairway blinded Max’s burned-out retina. He closed his eyes and tried to
remember the combination on the lock. He had seen that number before, it was
Roman gematria, another transliteration of the C I C, stamped and road-posted
throughout the internet graveyard. There was a conspiracy here, Max
thought as he shuffled his way through the disarrayed pile of Polaroids on the
table, the same face appearing over and over, a small P.T. in block
letters on the back of every picture.
The ceiling light flickered and went out, throwing the
room into darkness, as the door burst open, with the silhouette of a man,
illuminated by the natural outside light. The silhouette shifted through the
darkness, and Max glimpsed a momentary outline of a firearm, in his hand.
“Don’t come any closer!” Max had trained the sights onto
the man, flicking the safety switch off. “Who are you? Why are you following
me?”
“Are you Maximilian Beaufort-Fisher?” spoke the voice in
a raspy New
York
accent. “My name is Peter Thompson. I am here because…”
“I know who you are!”
“Oh?” The voice sounded surprised. Max fumbled for more
words as he clandestinely negotiated his way to the exit.
“Look, Mr. Fisher? Is it Mr. Fisher or Mr. Beaufort? I
was only hoping you could tell me something about Robert Koch, Senior Editor at
the San Ramon Tribune?”
“Put the gun down!” shouted Max across the room, while
edging his way through the dark space. He saw the outline of the silhouette
lower his weapon. Now was Max’s chance to escape. He backed towards the
doorway, the outdoor sun blinding his vision of the room. He thought he saw the
silhouette raise his hand again. Max’s body surged into action as he lunged
himself towards the man, striking him on the side of his head with the back of
his handgun. The man dropped to the floor. Max flicked on the light and
approached the body, which was unintelligibly writhing in pain. Max reached
into his jacket pocket, and pulled out a wallet. The New York State ID read Peter
Thompson, the business card had a seal of some sort of an Association of
Clinical Psychology. Max reached for the man’s necklace, sticking out of his
shirt. A silver backwards C I C was playing in the light. On the back of the
necklace, a small inscription, in Esperanto.
Max ran out of the cellar, and floored it back to the
city, to the Senior Editor’s house. The dirt spots on his windshield played in
the sunlight, obscuring street signs and things in the periphery. Every car was
suspect, every pedestrian, highschoolers on vacation, carrying their
basketballs, model soccermoms walking their dogs and their young children, all
of them sneaking up on Max’s blurred, tired vision, and all of them looking
back at him. Max burst through the Senior Editor’s front door, switching the
sights of the gun from futon the living room to the kitchen hallway, filled
with an incoherent blur of male and female screams. It was Aline Gramont,
duct-taped to the chair, held down by Willie and Alex, the Senior Editor pacing
back and forth, with a bewildered gaze. Aline’s right hand was locked under the
lever, the thumb screw pressing down.
“Tell me where the money is, Ms. Gramont!” the Senior
Editor was shouting, choking on Aline’s neck. “I know they put you up to this,
I know you found it, I know because I have found it too, and I have found our
Peter Thompson, Maximilian found him, didn’t you, Maximilian?” the
Senior Editor trained his eyes on Max and motioned him into the kitchen. “We’ve
found our traitor, William and Alexander have found her, just typing away
in the coffee shop, plotting our elimination!”
“You guys are all fucking certifiable!” screamed Aline at
the top of her lungs.
“Tighten that lever, Mr. Weston!” The Senior Editor
watched Aline’s body surge into agony as Willie rotated the lever clockwise,
ever so slightly.
“Peter Thompson was after me,” started Max, his speech
slurring more and more as he told everything that had happened. “He even had
the necklace, the backwards C I C, sir, what the hell is it!”
“The C I C, Mr. Beaufort, it is the alpha and omega, it
is the key, it is the Order, our Order, Maximilian-“
“It doesn’t mean jack shit, you nutjobs!!!” Aline looked
up at Max, her eyes pleading.
“Aline?!” They all froze as they heard the front door
slam open again. A moment later, the shape of Peter Thomson, bruised and
limping, appeared in the hallway. As Willie and Alex lunged for him, he fired
his gun. There was no burst, no gunshot, just the sound of a snapping spring, a
whishing of the wind, as Alex dropped to the ground. Willie knocked the gun out
of the man’s hand, threw him against the wall, and proceeded to pummel.
“That’s enough, Mr. Weston, bind him up next to her.”
Mr. Weston promptly pinned Peter Thompson’s emaciated body to another kitchen
chair, duct-taping him quickly. Max reached for Alex’s body- a dart sticking
out of his leg.
“Ok, Maximilian, now would be the time!” gestured
the Senior Editor.
“For what?!”
“To kill this Peter Thompson, to kill both of them,
the Jacobin traitors!”
Everyone in the room snapped to attention at these news.
“Mr. Fisher, please let me explain!” Peter Thomson raised his eyes
at Max.
“Let me explain!” shrieked Aline.
“Everybody shut the hell up!” Screamed Max at the top of his lungs,
frantically waving his gun along the entire arc of the room. “What the hell is
the C I C?!”
“It’s nothing, it’s a joke, it doesn’t mean anything, it’s Esperanto!”
screamed Peter Thomson. “My mother gave it to me when I was younger, she was one
of the original linguists, I don’t even know what it stands for!”
“Don’t listen to him, Maximilian, you know what it is, you know what
you have to do!”
Maximilian paced his way across the room.
“Max, I’m a doctor! And your boss is a certifiable lunatic!”
“Don’t you dare talk about Mr. Koch like this!” shouted Willie, slapping
Peter hard in the temple with his palm.
“Check my wallet if you don’t believe me, Aline, you tell them!”
“He’s telling the truth!” sobbed Aline, “Max, please put the gun down, he’s telling the truth!
It’s all my fault!”
“What the hell are you talking about, Aline?!”
shouted Max, waving the weapon frenetically at Aline’s face.
“I’m the fucking Alpha and Omega, the C I C, the
graveyard, I did all of it, please, Max, just put the gun down! It was all just
to get at him!”
Aline gestured with her head at Peter.
“Ms. Gramont,” stepped in the Senior Editor, “I
am getting tired of this nonsense! Where is the money, where are the titles and
the deeds, where did you hide it, where are they?”
“They don’t exist, you assclowns, all of you
with your Medieval Times obsession, how could any of you ever believe that for
a second, you’re all as nuts as he is! Jacobins?! Arthur?! Excalibur?! Are all of you
guys five years old?!”
“You fucking did this, didn’t you?” Peter locked
his eyes on Aline’s.
“No, you did this, you piece of shit, you married piece of shit!”
“Maximilian, please silence them both!” Max looked up at
the Senior Editor, who was staring him down, calmly, unflinchingly.
“Maximilian Beaufort, now is your chance! I
offer you your destiny, your past, your fate! Noblesse oblige, Maximilian!” Max switched between
Bob Koch, Aline, Peter, Willie and Alex. The Senior Editor had become the
calmest person in the room. It was another kind of world, another kind of
existence that the Senior Editor was offering, with his believer's drive, and
focus. He was a prophet, and the Tribune was his voice, and the workers were
his acolytes. It really was a network, a New World Order. A fine line
between reality and delusion, erased and superseded, the movements in the chain
being the operating variable, the experience, the proverbial
It’s-The-Journey-Not-The-Destination. Noblesse Oblige, the code, giving his
mother back her sense of control, a drive to Behave Accordingly-
“Max…It isn’t real,” whispered Aline. Her
thumb was gushing blood, caked and oozing in a pool on the wooden frame of the
torture device.
Max had lowered the weapon. Although
first, he secured the Senior Editor and Willie into the remaining two kitchen
chairs. Then he called the police. Then he lowered the weapon. A vendetta,
Aline went on, with the story about her and Peter Thompson, the doctor, back in
New York- the usual eulogy of heartbreak and revenge.
Apparently, somewhere in the middle of a year of doubletiming her with his
wife, the doctor had told her about a case he had to testify in, an insanity defense
for Koch, an editor of some East Coast paper he had run into the ground, with
his visions of medievalist cartels. “Prone to violence, cultism.” Got off easy, put on
some medication and sent off to California to get over it. Soon
after, Peter Thompson disappeared himself. Aline was understandably upset. Finding
Koch and Thomson both living in the same town was serendipity. The rest was Wikipedia,
web design, and lots of creativity.
By the time Max had come out of police questioning, and
made it to his house, it was night time. As he dozed in and out of sleep, he
kept thinking about the C I C, the Senior Editor, noblesse oblige, dreams of Monte Carlo. He thought about his father, always telling the
proverbial story about his own dad, Maxim, from Russia to Ellis Island, “with
just one dollar in his pocket, Max. And he didn’t complain, he just worked his
way up. That’s nobility for you.”
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