Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation

by A. W. Hill

  Francesca approached and stood next to Raszer. “You okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Fine, thanks.”

  “Hmm,” she said. “You have steady nerves.”

  “Just faking it,” he said.

  “Is there really a difference?”

  “Maybe not,” he said.

  Francesca whistled Adi to her side. “It’ll be sunrise in three hours. We’d better try to get some sleep.”

  “Yeah, right,” said Ruthie, rolling her eyes. “I don’t exactly have Lara Croft in

  my tent to protect me.”

  “Ha!” Francesca shot back. “And who are you? You could have brought thieves from every direction with your howling.”

  Ruthie made a move toward Francesca, and Raszer caught hold of her elbow.

  “All right,” said Raszer. “Here’s what we’ll do. Shaykh Adi will finish the night with the two of you. He’s the hero, anyway. And I’ll take the next watch.”

  “Agreed,” said Francesca. “But check on us, will you?”

  “Of course,” said Raszer. “Make sure your flap is zipped tight.” He stooped to pick up the semiautomatic pistol from the rocky ground. “And try to get along.”

  There was, however, a problem with Raszer’s plan. Shaykh Adi, who until now had tolerated Ruthie, suddenly decided he didn’t like her at all. She entered the tent, and when Francesca then commanded the dog to follow, Adi refused.

  “Maybe he still senses the snake,” Raszer said. “I don’t think animals figure time the way we do. It’s all still happening for him.”

  “He senses something,” said Francesca softly. “But no. I’ve seen Adi kill at least a half dozen snakes, and he usually sticks to me like glue afterward.”

  “You go in first, then call him,” Raszer suggested.

  This strategy succeeded, but not for long. Raszer had just settled into his vigil atop the rise when he heard Adi begin to whimper, then whine, and finally howl. With a curse, Raszer fumbled his way out of the tent and met Francesca and Adi halfway.

  “It’s not going to work, Stephan,” she said. “Something’s wrong.”

  Ruthie emerged halfway from the tent and shook the hair from her eyes. She eyed Raszer. “How ’bout her and the dog sleep with Dante and you sleep in here? What’s with the separate tents, anyway? We’re not fuckin’ Muslims.”

  Francesca parked her hands on her hips and waited for Raszer’s reply.

  Raszer scratched his two-day growth of beard and ran a hand over his polished scalp. Alone with Ruthie was not a place he wanted to be right now. He knew himself too well. A curious and unsettling thing: The more reason he found to mistrust her, the more he found himself inflamed by her.

  “Here’s the deal,” he said. “I’ll sleep in your tent. With both of you. And I’m bringing the gun in case either one of you disturbs my beauty rest.”

  An hour later, as he finally drifted off, he thought to himself that a man could probably do worse than to wrestle a snake before bed.

  THIRTY-TWO

  The coastal fog of spring, rendered milky by the morning sun’s straight-on rays, reached all the way to the front stoop of Monica’s Silver Lake duplex. This was her least favorite time of year. It felt nothing like the Aprils she’d known as a child in southern Ohio. It lacked the kiln-baked clarity of L.A. summer and the stormy drama of what passed for winter. The best thing about it was the jasmine.

  She could smell the bloom as she sat down on the stoop with her tea to read the International Herald Tribune. There was more trouble for the Kurds in the very part of the world Raszer had entered. An article just below the fold all but made it official that the Americans were providing stealth backing to Turkey in the increasingly savage battle to deny its largest minority population a homeland. Some alleged that the Syrians were arming the Kurds, and the Russians were said to be behind the Syrians.

  Raszer hadn’t phoned Monica in forty-eight hours, and she hated that. She knew he was in mountainous backcountry where even satellite communication must be spotty, and she could get only intermittent and questionable fixes on his location by way of the implant. He’d told her that he would leave the phone behind when he reached his destination, but based on his last report, he was still a night short of that.

  Her bodyguard had vanished, paid off, shipped back to Denmark, or died, and the clear message was that the same fate awaited any others. So, she was to remain here under house arrest, exposed and unprotected, and cut off from the technology that might enable her to pull Raszer out of a fix.

  She heard her phone ring. She hoped it would be him, but suspected it wasn’t. It was the wrong time of day. When she got to the phone, she saw that the button lit up was his public contact number, the one he wrote on his business cards for people he cared to share it with.

  “Hello,” she said. “Stephan Raszer’s line.”

  A woman spoke. Soft-voiced, tired. “Is Mr. Raszer in?” she asked.

  “No,” she replied. “He’s on assignment right now. Who’s calling?”

  “But this is his number, right?”

  “Yes. Who’s calling, please?”

  “My name is Constance Endicott.”

  “Hello.” Monica entered the caller ID number into a small terminal beside the phone and received confirmation that the call indeed came from Taos, New Mexico. “How can I help you, Mrs. Endicott?”

  “You know who I am?”

  “Yes, of course: Katy’s mother. We . . . Mr. Raszer is—”

  “Is Ruthie with him?”

  God, how she hated these moments. Think, Monica, think. Truth or dodge?

  “That seems very unlikely. Why do you ask?”

  “I haven’t seen her for four days. A terrible thing happened when Mr. Raszer was here. Maybe you know. A friend of Ruthie’s was . . . killed. She was devastated. Then something else happened—I don’t know what—that frightened her. She got very angry. The next thing I knew, she was gone.”

  “Let me see what I can find out,” Monica said gently.

  “There’s something else.”

  “Yes?”

  “I received something from Katy. A letter. Well, not a letter, really, although it did come in an envelope. It’s a note on a torn piece of muslin. I can’t imagine when she wrote it . . . or who mailed it for her. But it is her handwriting—the note, not the envelope. The envelope has nothing but my name and ‘Taos, New Mexico.’ It’s a wonder it got here. The postmark is from Hamburg, Germany, and the date is August 9 of last year.”

  “What does the note say, Mrs. Endicott?”

  “I’m afraid it doesn’t make much sense. She must have written it very fast, poor lamb. It looks like ‘N.C.D.C. 12-24.’ Then it says, ‘I love you. Katy.’”

  The last words were swallowed hard.

  “I think you should take some hope from this.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Monica.”

  “Thank you, Monica. Bless you. I hope you’re right.”

  Monica set the phone back in its cradle and felt suddenly overcome. She dropped into the nearest chair and let her head fall to her knees. Had she eaten anything today? She couldn’t remember. Then the shudder came, seeming to begin at her very center—in her womb—and moving up her body until it escaped as a sob.

  Through the nearly expressionless voice of the mother, she’d glimpsed the daughter, and what she’d seen had made her wonder if Raszer would ever get Katy out. Men devised the most insidious traps for women, baiting them with protection that really wasn’t protection at all. Sooner or later, Prince Charming became a prison guard.

  Mornings in el Mirai were mostly a state of mind. Evenings, too, for that matter. In the Garden, it was always the same hazy, languid afternoon. The sun never set. The natural light refracted through the massive crystal dome was replaced seamlessly at dusk by artificial sunlight, maintaining the Garden’s moist warmth and extravagant foliage. Morning was whenever Katy woke from opium slumber, and night came when the man-
boys had spent themselves in her and curled at her feet.

  Every two weeks (or so Katy gauged, because all time was relative there), the men and women would file into separate groups and be taken out to the great court for exercises. To counter the soporific effects of the opium and awaken the mass mind, they were roused with stiff doses of MDMA, delivered in honeyed goat’s milk. As one, they mirrored the precise, tai chi–like movements of their instructors for what had at first felt like endless hours but now felt like relief. As she let go of herself, Katy found it easier to be part of the group. They were led through a series of martial routines, some involving knives. Once, she had cut herself, and the blood had surprised her. She felt bloodless.

  These outings and her own bodily cycles were the only way to measure time. In the beginning, she tried to use them to keep count of her days of captivity, but soon she lost track. She began to doubt that there was really another life outside, much less one she still desired to return to.

  Then, little by little, Katy began to forget herself.

  There remained certain markers, if she chose to pay attention. Food was delivered at what seemed to be regular intervals, although it was mostly for the new arrivals, who had not yet lost their taste for meat. Once you had been in the garden for a while, it began to feel unnatural (and like far too great an effort) to take nourishment from anything other than the ripe fruit always within reach. There were offerings of quince, persimmon, kumquat, and peach; plump berries of a dozen kinds that perfumed the breath and stained the hands and lips, and made the simple white smock she wore over her bare flesh look as if it had been dyed for an Indian bazaar; dates that sugared the tongue like marzipan; and figs so engorged with jammy pulp that they split on the branch and infused the air with the scent of a sweet rot. Katy had ceased to have interest in sustenance beyond this, and the opium.

  For a while, her body registered time in the attentions paid to her flesh, the spaces between visits from a familiar boy. But soon there were so many familiar boys, and no part of her they had not visited. The hashish kept their appetites keen, and the opium enabled them to fuck her endlessly, until she was in a state as perpetually swollen as the figs, a sweet soreness made endurable by the opium. The opium made everything okay. In dreams, her father sometimes came to her with eyes of flame, but she woke laughing, not shamed, because the opium vapor blurred the world’s edges. Even so, there was a nausea she couldn’t shake, a feeling of displacement, her stomach left at the top of the roller coaster. And so she begged for more drugs, and when she begged, they took more from her, until the only happiness came with emptiness.

  In recent days, there had been a new kind of forgetting. At least twice, she had awakened and been unable to remember her name. The boys had often talked of how their training had made them forget who they’d been before. For them, forgetting was a matter of mind; for Katy, it was a matter of body. Her body no longer contained a sensing self she recognized. Soon, she anticipated, there would be nothing left of herself at all. It was as this new, nameless person began to emerge that she learned they had something special planned for her.

  They told her she was favored, and gave her another name.

  They gave her a retinue of attendants, and the ripest fruit.

  Katy didn’t remember writing a note on the fabric she’d torn from her smock, but she did remember the boy’s face. Some secret memory trace held Scotty, as it held all kindnesses shown to her in an unkind life. There was a second face she remembered. She saw it when she closed her eyes, and, in the absence of mirrors in the garden, had decided that it should be—must be—her own future face. It was the face of a girl like her, but one who was wicked and wise. As Ruthie, she could exist here. As Katy, she was already dead.

  The Valley of Serpents was one of the oddest natural formations Raszer had ever found himself in. Less a valley than an enormous V of black flint, it looked like a runoff channel cleaved by a corps of giants. Its sides were steep and slick, and everything that skittered down them wound up accumulating in the center until it was carried away by the winter rains. Francesca told him that in November, the cleft often filled to a depth of forty feet and was as thick with mountain vipers as a pot of boiling spaghetti.

  They identified three varieties of snake in the first mile, the nastiest of which was known as Wagner’s viper. There were hundreds of these, in shades of orange and umber and rust. Most seemed to be in the process of slithering back up the slippery banks by the time the party entered the valley, which gave the enormous wings of featureless rock the appearance of an exotic, trembling butterfly.

  The serpents still in the shadowed cleft were sluggish from the early morning’s cool. Francesca and Dante had brought with them long, forked branches of walnut they’d whittled to precision and now swept across the rocky path like dousing rods, scooping up the somnolent reptiles and flinging them as high up onto the banks as they could. For the first fifteen minutes, Ruthie covered her head each time a snake was hoisted, but after a while, even she got used to the routine. They sang verse after verse of a Sufi drinking song as they proceeded, their voices producing a cascade of echoes.

  By the sun, they were in the cleft for only ninety minutes, but it felt like hours. When they began their ascent to what Francesca told Raszer would be the last and highest of the passes before the alpine terrain gave way to high desert, they were already nerve-tired and damp with the sweat of apprehension. No one wanted to look back, but at four thousand feet, approaching the leading edge of a glacier, they finally stopped to review their accomplishment.

  “Fuck,” said Ruthie. “Do we have to come back the same way?”

  “Best not to think about it now,” said Francesca. “Let’s just get there.”

  Raszer thought about the reality of provisions, illness, and war, and realized it was time to see if he could get another call through to Monica. She was to have spent the last two days collecting emergency resources for a fast exit.

  “We’re working on a chopper, Ruthie,” he said. “I doubt your sister will be in any shape for hiking. The challenge will be flying through here without getting shot at.”

  “The best would be a Red Cross helicopter,” said Francesca, “or something made up to look like one.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” said Raszer. “How much farther to the pass?”

  “We’re going to try to make it by noon,” she answered. “Then we’ll eat. Let’s get going. There may be snow.”

  “Just one party after another,” Ruthie said. “Snakebite, then frostbite.”

  At eight thousand feet, the ragged edge of the glacier spilled across the path in a tongue of ice a mile wide, slowing their pace by half. After another five hundred feet of ascent, the air began to thin out and their steps grew even more labored.

  They stopped to share the last half liter of water, the last they’d have before reaching a glacial stream that Francesca had told them would parallel the path on their descent. A few hundred yards farther, and they entered the clouds, and for some time had only the rhythmic tap-tap-tap of the snake sticks fore and aft to keep them in line. It was a wholly alien experience to be guided by sound, rather than sight—the experience of the blind. The first impulse was to freeze; after all, who could know what precipice might lie ten feet ahead?

  Dante did know, of course, and could have walked it blind and deaf. Once Raszer had relaxed into that sureness, the attenuation of his sight and the consequent sharpening of his hearing became almost pleasant. Along with the rarefaction of the air, the touch of dizziness caused by altitude, and the muffling of footsteps inside the cloud came a kind of altered state. They passed beneath a ledge, and the sun was momentarily lost. Raszer imagined himself without sight, and wondered what meanings beauty might have in the absence of vision. Then, suddenly, he felt a sharp, searing pain in his left eye, as if it had been pierced through.

  He staggered to a halt and bent over. Had he walked into something?

  “Everyone all right?”
Francesca called out.

  “Think so,” said Raszer, feeling his eye and finding it undamaged. “Just a headache, I guess. Blood vessels, maybe. Altitude, probably.”

  “The altitude, aye,” Dante echoed. “We’ll be headed down soon.”

  They came out from under the ledge, and the vapor was instantly suffused with a white light that made it seem incandescent. A rush of icy air followed. Ruthie called out from inside the cloud.

  “Tell me there’s something on either side o’ this path, dude . . . ”

  “Just follow the sticks,” Dante counseled. “Keep ’em lined up in the space between your ears, and you’ll be fine. Hold on to Adi’s tail if you want.”

  “So you’re saying there’s nothing there, right? How long is the drop?”