Page 88 of Assassin Anonymous

“A church was built in her honor in Geel, the town in Belgium where she died,” he says. “People came from all over Europe, seeking help for psychiatric conditions. Thus began a tradition that still persists today, where the people of Geel take in those who are sick and suffering. They call them boarders, not patients. They are welcomed as part of people’s families. It is not meant to be treatment or therapy. It is purely a thread of kindness that has stretched for hundreds of years.

“This church is named after her. This is where we meet. Every Tuesday night. We picked this location because the pastor is a friend, and I knew we could be safe here. I do not believe in coincidence, but the name of it felt a bit like providence.”

We stand there in the silence, surveying the building.

“There are rules,” Kenji says without looking at me. “We are modeled on Alcoholics Anonymous, but the meetings are small, so they can be less structured. We do not reveal the names we worked under, and we do the best we can to obscure our political affiliations. That is for everyone’s safety. No one must know you are the Pale Horse but me.”

“Thank you.”

“Normally there is a vetting process,” Kenji says. “And that takes time. But from what I see, I believe you are ready to join us tonight.”

“And what do you see?”

He turns to me, looking me up and down, and zeroes in on my eyes. His gaze is so searching I feel compelled to hide from it, but I know that’s not the thing to do. The thing to do is stand here and let him see me.

“Sadness, that you carry like an anchor,” he says. “But more than that, a desire to put the anchor down rather than follow it into the deep.”

“Sounds about right.”

He leads me to the side of the church, down a short flight of stone stairs, and through a door, then a darkened hallway, and around a corner. The church basement is sparse, but large enough to fit a few dozen people for a mixer or a fund-raiser. There’s a folding table holding a coffeepot and an open box of donuts. The walls are robin’s-egg blue and the floor is a black-and-white-checkered pattern.

In the center of the room are four chairs facing each other, just close enough that the people sitting in them could lean forward and stretch and hold hands. Two of those seats are occupied: a Hispanic woman and a Black man, both of them immediately recognizable by the smell of gunpowder in their blood.

“This the guy?” the Black man asks. “Doesn’t look very tough. You sure he’s one of us?”

I get a little closer, let his eyes meet mine, and he nods.

“Yeah, guess he is.” He offers me his hand and we shake. “Booker.”

The Hispanic woman offers me her hand. “Valencia.”

I return the shake. “Like the orange.”

“No,” she says, pulling her hand away, her face going dark. “Never like the orange.”

Booker puts his hands up. “This is a safe space for everything but that.”

I put my hands up in mock surrender and look around. Kenji gestures to the folding table. I pour myself a cup of coffee, just to have something to do with my hands.

“Now,” Kenji says as I sit, placing down a small silver lipstick-sized device. “This will disable any listening or recording devices and obscure our voices. A measure of security, given the things we discuss. And at the start of every meeting, we review the steps:

“One, we admit we are powerless—that our lives have become unmanageable.

“Two, we come to believe that a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity.

“Three, we make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of a higher power, as we understand it.

“Four, we make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

“Five, we admit to our higher power, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

“Six, we are ready to have our higher power remove all these defects of character.

“Seven, we humbly ask it to remove those shortcomings.

“Eight, we make a list of all persons we have harmed, and become willing to make amends to them all.

“Nine, we make direct amends to such people, wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

---