Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation

by A. W. Hill

  The whole length of Beachwood Drive was the town at its most alluring, alchemical and absurd. The flats at the bottom, where it spilled onto Franklin Avenue, were still resolutely tawdry, despite the city’s recent cleanup campaign. Shopping-cart people and saucer-eyed waifs shared the sidewalk with aged B-movie actresses who, when they ventured out, still wore red lipstick and dressed like vamps. A few blocks up, you saw them as they had been, coming out of stilt-legged apartment buildings with names like the Casbah or La Paloma, late for their auditions: would-be starlets with ironed hair and a willingness to ruin their reputations in order to make them. It was on a cul-de-sac just off Beachwood that Jack Warner was rumored to have kept a “dormitory” for his studio’s stable of nubile talent. Nearby were the allegedly haunted barracks in which the blacklisted Hollywood Ten had held their clandestine meetings.

  The style of the architecture was equal parts Barcelona, Tangier, and Mitteleuropa, and with the steep ascent, the houses became grander and stranger, though not ostentatious. Raszer’s pulse still throbbed with the climb, for this causeway of eager flesh and yearning spirit, leading to nowhere but the neverland of Old Mulholland Drive, was his Hollywood, a place as indecipherable as a code in cuneiform.

  Hildegarde leased office space in an ersatz Tudor building adjacent to the Annie Besant Lodge, a tiny, whitewashed chapel dedicated to the memory of old Hollywood’s patron theosophist. She claimed that her proximity to the shrine was conducive to the sort of therapy she offered, which was basically Jungian depth psychology with a pinch of mandrake root and eye of newt. She greeted Raszer with a hug and a once-over.

  “Good morning, Stephan,” she said, a trace of German still evident in the Good. “I don’t often see you at this time of day. You look . . . foggy.”

  “It’s the rain,” he said, taking his familiar chair near the casement window. “I can’t seem to wake up.”

  She carried over an embroidered ottoman, set it down in front of him, and parked herself near enough that they were almost knee to knee. Hildegarde was not one for clinical detachment. She was a handsome woman of about fifty, with ash-blond hair and a Nordic build. She was not Raszer’s physical type, which had kept him on the safe side of the doctor-patient divide, but plenty attractive enough to flirt with. Raszer would no more have engaged a male psychoanalyst than he would have hired a male escort.

  “You look ready for Valhalla,” he said. “Like you spent the night throwing thunderbolts with Thor. Maybe we should forget the session and fly to Cabo.”

  “I have never known such a sweet-hearted man,” she said, nailing him with a pair of piercingly blue eyes, “who takes such great pleasure in being a bad boy.”

  “It’s my upbringing, doc. My mother operated a bordello.”

  “Right. So, how are we feeling these days? Still in a funk?”

  “I’d rather you didn’t use that bedside we unless you’re planning on tucking me in tonight.”

  “With you, Stephan,” she said, “the we is more than manner. You are the most incorrigible Gemini on my roster, and I say that as one who isn’t big on astrology.”

  “Yeah, well . . . ” he mumbled, and thought for a moment about how he really was feeling. “I had to take Brigit to the airport this morning.”

  “Ah,” she said, and bit her lip in sympathy. “How was it?”

  “I got into a scrap with the airport security guy,” he said. “The bastard wouldn’t let me go to the gate with her.”

  “Nobody gets to go to the gate anymore, Stephan. You know that. Why did you start a fight you knew you couldn’t win?”

  He stared out the window. The rain was making tributaries on the roof of the Annie Besant Lodge. “It’s the whole scene, I guess. It raises my hackles. The armed guards, the wary ticket agents. It’s too much like the first time. Once they take her to the other side, she’s not in my life anymore, and I feel like I’m busted all over again.”

  “But she is in your life. Be glad for that. And listen—” She leaned forward and touched his knee. “If I know anything about the human mind, I know that Brigit no longer carries a conscious awareness of having been forcibly removed from your house. I’ve been with her. I’ve analyzed her. I know she doesn’t.”

  “You mean she’s sublimated it,” he said. “But it’s still there.”

  “Of course it’s still there,” said Hildegarde. “Her bond with you wouldn’t be so strong if her separation from you hadn’t been so painful.”

  “She saw a man drop dead at my house yesterday.”

  “Oh? Who was he?”

  “I think he’s my new client,” said Raszer.

  “Aha,” she said. “Well, if you have a dead man for a client, I think you had better tell me about the case.”

  On the wall behind her was a framed black-and-white photograph of C. G. Jung, the Swiss psychoanalyst and onetime protégé of Freud who’d broken with his mentor over fundamental questions about the roots of madness. Beneath the photograph was a plaque bearing a Latin inscription attributed to him. In translation, it read: Summoned or Not Summoned, God is Present. Raszer glanced at the plaque, then back to Dr. Schoeppe.

  “What do you suppose old C. G. would have had to say about a small black rock in the palm of the goddess Cybele?”

  “You’re being cryptic, Stephan. Explain.”

  “The dead man came to my house to ask for help finding his daughter, who was apparently abducted from a mountain rave a year ago by three men in a black limo. She was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, but she’d fallen in with a bad crowd—renegade boys from the church. There’s a sister from Taos involved—allegedly the catalyst.”

  “And the girls’ mother . . . where is she?”

  “Presumably also in Taos. Probably waiting for the saucers to come.”

  “I love Taos,” said Hildegarde.

  “Me too,” said Raszer. “But it does tend to attract people looking for an exit.”

  “And the black rock?”

  “You’ve been to my house. Out back, there’s a statue of the Phrygian mother goddess, Cybele, that I had shipped from a flea market in Paris. One of her palms is open, like this, and Brigit—scamp that she is—saw fit to put a moon rock in it.”

  “A moon rock.”

  “Yeah,” said Raszer. “They sold like hotcakes for a while. Supposedly fragments brought back from the moon landing. Probably about as authentic as medieval saints’ relics, but from the way old Silas Endicott looked at it just before he keeled over, you’d have thought it came from the seventh circle of hell.”

  She clapped her hands together and stood up. “Let’s take a look,” she said, and went to a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf. She pulled out Jung’s Man And His Symbols, flipped through it, and found nothing. In a lesser-known text, however, she found a cross-reference under Cybele and read, “‘The baitylos, a black meteorite associated with the cults of Cybele and Attis and purportedly found on the summit of Mt. Ida in Pessinus.’” Hildegarde glanced up from the page. “Pessinus . . . that’s in Turkey, isn’t it?”

  “Right. That’s where Cybele’s cult peaked. Sometime around the seventh century bc, though she had a revival in Rome in the early Christian period. What else?”

  “That’s about it—not much to go on, is it?” She licked a long-nailed finger and flipped a page. “Hang on . . . here’s something. “By way of both its physical appearance and etymological association with Cybele, also known as Kybele, Kubaba, and Kube, the sacred stone is thought by some to be mythologically related to the Black Stone in the Ka’ba of Mecca, object of Muslim pilgrimage, and to the Thracian word for dice.”

  “That’s a twisted trail, all right,” said Raszer. “Kube. Cube. Dice. Islam?

  “The Ka’ba was a pagan shrine long before Mohammed consecrated it.”

  Raszer squinted. “Yeah, you’re right about that. Well, any sort of paganism would’ve given the old man tremors, but what are the odds he knew any of this?”

  “I guess that’s for you t
o find out, Stephan,” she said. “Maybe the kids his daughter fell in with were into some kind of ceremonial magic. Maybe the sister . . . left something similar behind.” She replaced the book, then returned to her seat. “The important question is what all this means for you. What you’re going to make of it.”

  “I dunno. I’m going up to Azusa to see the elders of the church—the JWs—this afternoon. They work as a family. They may want me to pursue this, or they may not.”

  “That’s not quite what I meant, Stephan,” said Hildegarde.

  “I know that’s not what you meant,” said Raszer. “I’m stalling.”

  “In light of your present state, you may be tempted to see this thing as a chance for personal redemption, dropping out of the blue as it did.”

  “The sky hasn’t been blue for weeks,” said Raszer.

  “Don’t play,” she said, crinkling her brow. “The thing is, not everyone who is lost can be found, or wants to be. We do what we must, as best we can, and accept that not all riddles yield to our wits—not all mysteries are fathomable.”

  Raszer suddenly felt moved to break into song. “Ya do what you must, and ya do it well,” he chanted nasally. “Now, there’s a synchronicity.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Hildegarde.

  “Buckets of Rain,” he explained, nodding to the window. “It’s a Dylan tune.”

  “Ah,” she said. “But you do know what I mean.”

  “Yes, but human mysteries—I think—have their roots in some kind of detour, some hidden variable that alters what otherwise would have been a person’s route. If you can work your way back to that detour, you can get to the bottom of things.”

  “Sometimes, yes,” she said. “Otherwise, I don’t suppose there’d be much use for my profession, either. Just try to give yourself a little slack. You redeemed your lost years the first time you helped someone in trouble. God does not subscribe to the Hollywood dictum that you’re only as good as your last picture.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” said Raszer. “God’s a tough critic.”

  “I think you’re speaking of someone closer to home,” she said, and banked a glance off the old scars on his wrists.

  “Don’t accuse me of ‘ego inflation,’ he said, unconsciously massaging his right wrist. “I’ve never bought into the ‘I am God’ thing.”

  “No, Stephan,” she said. “You’ve strapped your ego into service of the Grail, which is noble in a medieval sort of way, but it’s still very much exposed. You take failure badly, and that stunts your chances of ever putting the cup to your own lips.”

  “Maybe,” said Raszer.

  She let him sit in silence while the rain played rat-tat-tat-tat. Now he couldn’t get the Dylan tune out of his head.

  “Tell me something, Hildegarde,” he said. “What gives a man a sense of worth?”

  “If you’re talking about worth in the world,” she said, “there is no universal. For you, I’d say it’s the belief that your actions are effective . . . in an almost magical way.”

  He got up and walked to the window. Once again, the rain was falling hard enough to make sheets. “I had a seven-year streak,” he said quietly. “All that time, I felt her breath on my shoulder, her hand guiding my wrist. But now . . . ”

  Raszer turned to Hildegarde, and the look in his eyes was very much like that of a man in love. “For me, being worthy is knowing that I’m Her man.”

  Hildegarde smiled. “You’re speaking of your Lady. Your dark muse. The one who gave you the light. The one who came to you in your dreams when you were a boy.”

  “How many men have you treated who lost their virginity to a succubus?”

  “Only one who’s fully functional.”

  “I pushed her out of my head for almost twenty years,” he said. “It scared me that much. Until that day in the hospital. She’s the one who brought Brigit back. She’s the one who gave me my . . . ”

  “Your calling. And now you feel she’s deserted you.”

  Raszer didn’t answer, and his therapist did not press.

  “I’ll make you some root tea,” she said, standing, and touched his shoulder lightly. “If you’re going to face the elders, you’d best be wide awake.”

  “Ah,” said Raszer. “The famous root tea.” He turned back to the window and directed his gaze past the eaves of the Annie Besant Lodge to the wet street, where at that moment a sleek black Lincoln was prowling up Beachwood Drive to where the money lived. Don’t be crazy, he thought, shaking off a shiver. It could be any movie star.

  FOUR

  “Azusa . . . wow,” Raszer said aloud, as he drove past paint-starved little houses displaying Uncle Sam’s colors and thought, I could be in Chattanooga . . . or heading up into the Blue Ridge from Front Royal, Virginia.

  He was not in either of those places, but could be forgiven for having a weird sense of geographical dislocation. Raszer was a scant forty minutes out of Hollywood by way of the eastbound 210 freeway, but no drifter left here without bearings would have recognized the place as California. Azusa is part of the Los Angeles no one knows.

  The weather abetted his disorientation. The foothills were ghosted with mist and heavy with new growth. Raszer had spent time in San Gabriel Canyon, had even fished here once with a girlfriend, but the skies had been brilliant blue and the mountains their usual toasted brown. He’d stopped for lunch in Azusa and noticed its Rotary Club retro look, but that was in summer. Now, after three weeks of rain, the little shopping district had the storm-swept air of an Oregon fishing village; the whole town looked as if it were awaiting fulfillment of a biblical prophecy. On every streetlight, posted like yard-sale signs, were handwritten placards bearing the names of the town’s war dead. The names were mostly Hispanic: Rodriguez, Dominguez, Escobar. And when the signs weren’t advertising patriotism, they were advertising religion.

  Near the intersection of Foothill and Alosta, Raszer pulled up to the curb to consult a weathered sign of the sort once erected at the entrance to all American small towns. Its painted centerpiece read: Welcome to Azusa—Gateway to the San Gabriels. On the two-by-four crosspiece above it was written an invitation to all comers: Worship at the Church of Your Choice. On either side, whitewashed pickets hung from rusted chains and pointed the way to the sanctuaries, among them the Kingdom Hall.

  Rising to the north, like the last standing wall of Jericho, was the big screen of the abandoned Foothill Drive-In Theater. No Wal-Mart or Costco had yet claimed the real estate occupied by its sprawling lot, still marked off by the posts that had once done double duty as loudspeaker cradles and soft-drink holders. It’s still 1962 here, Raszer thought. He’d been born in a town that looked like this.

  As he’d expected, the Kingdom Hall was nowhere near as majestic as its name, recognizable as a church only by its stark, white-framed exterior and a flight of concrete steps leading to a double-door entrance. It took a few moments for Raszer to apprehend the incompleteness. The roof came to the usual apex, but there was no crucifix. The absence of the cross, with its associations of blood sacrifice and redemption, made the place feel something other than canonically Christian, and in fact, the Witnesses departed boldly from scripture on this score. According to them, Jesus hadn’t assumed his heavenly throne until 1914, when the New System of Things was declared. Raszer stepped from the car, crushed out his cigarette, and crossed the wet street.

  Entering the unlocked hall’s foyer, Raszer found himself in darkness. The door shut behind him with an echo off polished floorboards and hard surfaces, barely visible as gray half forms in the empty meeting room. This was the very space allegedly trashed by Katy Endicott and her pals, and though it wasn’t hard to feel for her father’s shame, something at Raszer’s core registered all the reasons a teenager might feel driven to raise hell here. It was a cold, utterly humorless room. In place of the fragrance of incense was the caustic odor of Pine-Sol. In place of music, there was only the rain.

  Yellow light spilled f
rom behind a half-open door in the rear of the hall. Through the crack, Raszer glimpsed an old Frigidaire, the droning of its compressor masking the sound of mingled male voices until he’d drawn very close. Suddenly, the door opened fully, and on its threshold stood a silhouetted figure as short as Silas Endicott had been tall. It registered almost as a child until it spoke as a somewhat tightly wound man.

  “Mr. Raszer?” he said. Now the voice seemed almost thrown.

  “That’s me,” Raszer answered. “Am I early?”

  “No,” said the man. “Please join us. We’ve just been discussing what little is known of your work.”

  “Well,” said Raszer, stepping into the kitchen, “I’ll try to fill in some blanks.”

  The short man offered his hand and said, “My name is Amos Leach. I’m Presiding Overseer of this congregation.” He had a common, gray face, the impression of which was made indelible only by a Reagan-esque cockscomb of reddish hair that came to a widow’s peak midway down his forehead. He wore a plaid shirt and dark sans-a- belt trousers. The trousers’ vintage was the only thing that recalled Silas Endicott’s sartorial antiquarianism. Otherwise, Leach and the other elders might have been a group of merchants meeting to discuss the pressing need for a stoplight on Main Street.