by A. W. Hill
“Fair exchange,” said Raszer. “Fair exchange. Now be a gent and untie me.”
J.Z. pushed one arm into Raszer’s coat, then the other, and turned the collar up. It was a snug fit, but it seemed to satisfy him. “Hnng,” he grunted. He squatted down and untied the first two of three miner’s knots binding Raszer’s ankle. He paused, grinned widely enough to reveal red, diseased gums, and, before undoing the last knot, scooped up the open velvet sack and tossed it carelessly onto Raszer’s lap.
Raszer glanced down. The sack had upended, disgorging its contents onto his groin. He squinted in the dying firelight, then howled in protest and leapt to his feet as the last knot was undone. The old man cackled and pranced about in his new coat.
EIGHT
Raszer strode into Aquino’s office and set the blue velvet sack, its contents restored, on his desk. The cop gave it a once-over and then looked up at Raszer, not without fraternal concern.
“You don’t look so good, Mr. Raszer,” he said, and sniffed. “You don’t smell so good, either. What happened to that nice coat of yours?”
“I traded it,” Raszer said, indicating the sack. “For that.”
Raszer felt no better than he looked. He was still chilled to the bone, having limped back down the Cattle Canyon road wet, aching, and with nothing but a T-shirt to cover his torso, then descended Highway 39 with his windows fully open in order to dispel the lingering odor of J.Z.’s visit to his car and the Egyptian-mortuary aroma of the sack. He’d made the stop only to get the sack into evidence and out of his possession.
Detective Aquino fingered the sack warily, then turned it with the tip of his pencil, observing its embroidery.
“Looks like we missed something up there,” he said, without affect.
“A few things,” Raszer said. “It happens when the locals and the feds are working the same turf. Something always slips through that big jurisdictional crack.”
“I guess that leaves room for the freelancers,” said the cop. He toyed with the drawstring like a kitten. “It’s not gonna jump out at me, is it?” he asked.
“Not now,” said Raszer, and pulled out a chair. “I found it tucked into one of those Japanese lanterns Johnny had hanging around the back of his trailer. The cord was dangling down. In plain view, but . . . well, the light had to hit it right.”
“Uh-huh,” said Aquino. “So what the hell’s in there? A tarantula?”
“Nope,” said Raszer. “I wish. If I’m not mistaken, Detective, it’s Henry Lee’s testicles, gift wrapped and embalmed in oils by whoever did the job.”
“Madre de Dios,” Aquino said, crossing himself.
“You said it.”
Aquino drew open the sack and poked gingerly at the contents with the eraser end of the pencil. “Man,” he said, pushing the sack aside, “what a stink. I’m giving this to the lab guys. If it is what it looks like, it’s a new one for me. ”
He punched a comm line and barked a name into the speakerphone. A moment later, a young duty officer came in. “Jimmy,” Aquino said, handing over the sack, “bag this and get it to the lab. Mark it for the Endicott-Coronado case. I wanna know if those are human testicles inside, and I wanna check them against Henry Lee’s DNA.” The officer took the bag between two fingers. “Don’t peek,” said Aquino, and smiled.
“So, what else did you come across up there?” he asked, regarding Raszer with thinly concealed chagrin.Absently, he parked the pencil on his lower lip and began to chew the eraser.
“I found the calling card of the DJ who did Johnny’s rave.”
“No kidding,” Aquino said. “Are you going to share the wealth?”
“After I’ve talked to him,” Raszer replied .
“Anything else?”
“Yeah,” said Raszer, wiping mud from his brow. “There was. I flushed out an old squatter who lives in one of the outbuildings at the Coronado. Had to take a lump on the head for his company. And hock my coat to get my stuff back. But it’s possible he may have seen something. Somebody cut his tongue out.”
Aquino leaned forward, now engaged enough to pocket his wounded pride. “Testicles, tongues . . . I pray God we don’t find Katy Endicott’s head somewhere. Any connection, Mr. Raszer?”
“I don’t know. The old man is so far gone, I can’t be certain he didn’t do it to himself. He appeared to have done his own stitches. But somebody put the fear of God in him. Either Johnny and his boys or the killers. In any case, he’s not talking.”
Aquino chuckled darkly. “I guess not. I don’t suppose you got anything out of him, then . . . other than a whack on the head.”
Raszer bounced an unformed sentence about the Syrian coin on the tip of his tongue, then swallowed it. A connection between the coin and Katy’s kidnappers was a wild hunch, at best, but giving voice to it would likely bring the feds and the whole counterterrorism establishment stumbling back into the case with their own agendas, and whatever tightrope Katy Endicott was walking might snap.
“No,” he said. “But things don’t generally fall together this way unless there’s an attractor at the center. My read on him is that he saw the murders happen.”
Aquino nodded for a bit too long, and Raszer knew he was being mapped.
“I’ve heard mixed reports about you, Mr. Raszer,” said the cop. “Some guys aren’t sure which end you’re playing. Especially after that gameboy case . . . ”
“Scotty Darrell,” said Raszer, knowing what was coming.
“Right. Where you could probably have prevented a shooting if you’d showed your hand to the police.”
“Or caused a suicide. Sometimes you’re damned either way.”
“I know that,” said Aquino. “Listen, I’m no Joe Friday. I play off intuition, too. I prefer Tony Hillerman’s stuff to police procedurals. But I have to ask you, because my chief is going to ask me . . . you’re not one of those ‘psychic detectives,’ are you?”
Raszer lowered his eyes and smiled to himself.
“I guess you’re going to have to decide that for yourself, Detective Aquino,” he replied. “I don’t put it on my business card, if that’s what you mean. I use the eyes I was given.” He pushed back the chair and stood up. “It’s been a long day. I need a bath and a drink. I’ll call you tomorrow. I’d like to see the evidence taken from the trailer and the lodge. And I’d like to speak to the Parrish boy as soon as possible.”
Aquino got up. “All right, Mr. Raszer. Buenas noches. And, uh, thanks for bringing in the cojones.” He paused. “It’s a funny thing. I was up there. I checked those Japanese lanterns. Forensics covered the site. It just doesn’t make sense that we wouldn’t have found that bag.”
“I don’t need to tell you,” said Raszer. “You have to be looking for it. Buenas noches, Detective.”
Raszer lit a cigarette and rolled down his windows. The fetid odor of the old squatter, not to mention the smell of perfumed morbidity, remained in the upholstery and in his nostrils. They were both very hard smells to lose, but the tobacco helped.
Was it possible that the little sack hadn’t been there when Aquino and his CSIs had scoured the scene? Was it possible that a survivor of that night’s horror had sought to dump an unwanted legacy? Or was it a plant, a lure, an invitation? Raszer parked the thought and left it. It was nearly seven o’clock. There were other will-o’-the-wisps to chase before he lost them, and instructions to relay to Monica before she checked out for the day. He speed-dialed his private office number from the hands-free car phone.
“Yeah, Raszer,” she answered. “Don’t you know a girl gets lonely?”
“Sorry, Moneypenny,” he said. “I’ve been wrestling bears.”
“Right. Don’t call me Moneypenny. It’s patronizing. Besides, she was old.”
“Yeah, but she had a great ass.”
“S’you survived Azusa? No mountain men with banjos tried to sodomize you?”
“You don’t know how close you are. I’ve got a two-inch gash in my skull, my bad ankle
’s back, and I had to swap my grandfather’s duster for a piece of evidence.”
“Aw, Raszer . . . I feel your pain. What can I do?”
“Are you good for an hour of OT?”
“It’s not like I’ve got Clive Owen lined up for tonight.”
“You’re too good for him anyway. Okay. I want you to pull everything you can from the library on castration as a ritual or religious sacrament, particularly as it relates to Sumerian goddess cults or Islamic heresies that might still be active in some crypto form. Plot an epicenter at Karbala in Iraq. That’s old Babylon. Link me to anything on the web that’s not junk, and set up a hypertext. We’ve already got a Cybele connection by way of the moon rocks. Let’s find out how far south her cult got.”
“Can I ask where this is coming from?”
“One of the murdered boys, a kid named Henry Lee, was gelded. He had a knife tattooed on his chest with the words ‘She Made Me Do It.’ He did a stint in Karbala and came home a sorcerer. And I found his balls in a velvet bag with Islamic stitching.”
There was silence on the other end of the line.
“What a difference a day makes,” she said. “Okay. Ritual castration. What else?”
“You remember that breakdown we did of the book of Revelation?”
“How could I forget?” she replied. “That was your first big case. I learned every-thing I know about computers and the Apocalypse doing that.”
“Pull it up from the archives. I’d like you to do a text search for any references to the 144,000 who go to heaven in the Rapture. It’s a central tenet of the Witnesses’ belief system. I remember something, but I need to confirm it.”
Nearly six years earlier, Monica and Raszer had deconstructed and indexed the text of the The Revelation of St. John the Divine, the final chapter in the New Testament and the master script for every end-time scenario envisaged by Western man over the last two millennia. The prophecies of John of Patmos had dogged Western civilization like a bad dream, and Raszer hadn’t been able to think of a better way to orient himself to the mindset of fanatics than to do his own cybernetic midrash on Revelation. You could reject any man’s interpretation, but you couldn’t dismiss the power of the vision any more than you could turn away from a wreck on the highway.
“All right, Raszer,” said Monica. “It’ll be on your laptop. On the bar.”
“Have I told you lately that you’re a goddess?”
“Just yesterday, but I got my period today, so it helps.”
“Speaking of the bar, would you mind opening a bottle for me?”
“Done.”
“And, uh, would you pour me a scalding bath? I’m cold, I’m filthy, and I need to go out tonight and see a DJ—assuming I can track him down.”
“A bath! Oh, now you’re pushing it,” she said. “The goddess can be wrathful when pressed into servitude.”
“I’ve learned today that we must all be faithful slaves.”
“Will you rub my feet tomorrow?”
“Deal.”
“See ya.”
“See ya.”
Raszer ended the call, tossed his cigarette out the window, and smiled. When all other graces in the world were gone, there would still be Monica.
He pulled into his driveway at eight fifty-six, the Friday freeway traffic having stretched a fifty-minute journey to nearly twice that long. There were people going home to little plots in the Antelope Valley and dusty retreats in Canyon Country who wouldn’t see dinner until almost ten. These were the wages of survival in the world’s biggest suburb. In the rain-scrubbed northeastern sky, a few stars had come out amid the patchy clouds. The hint of desert on the breeze suggested that the clouds would be out to sea by morning, and that the storm season was over. It came to him—for no apparent reason—that it would be Easter in less than two weeks, and he thought of Brigit.
As always, Monica had armed the security system before leaving, and, as often happened when the day’s work had taken him far afield in mind and body, he had to reboot his memory for the code. It was the date of his father’s birth, a date he’d never committed to memory in the deepest sense.
He stepped into the office and was comforted by the trace of Monica’s scent and the multicolored array of standby lights pulsing gently from the bank of computer and communications equipment. Raszer sometimes had the vaguely alien sense of coming home to a particularly well-appointed replica of his “real” home, like an FBI safe house furnished by a decorator who’d made a study of his past life. It was his, all right, but it was missing something. Once he’d set his things down on the bar, the feeling faded.
The wine had been opened, and his MacBook slumbered nearby, awaiting his keystroke to unveil the Revelations file. A stack of books with pages marked by three-by-five-inch index cards sat on the black slate, just outside the pool of light cast by the overhead lamp, next to a fresh yellow legal pad. Some of them his fingers knew from repeated reference; others, like the M. J. Vermaseren tome Cybele and Attis: The Myth and the Cult, he’d purchased years before and never cracked. The fact that Monica could assemble the material so quickly was testament to the weeks on end they’d spent cataloging it in the early days. With rare exceptions, all new stories were old myths modulated by the wave of time and historical novelty. Once you saw this, certain puzzles were solved.
Before heading to the bath, he poured himself a glass of wine and admired the spidery legs it left on the sides of the glass. He drank, then set MC Hakim’s business card on the bar and punched in the number. It rang forever before finally bumping over to an answering machine whose tape had been recycled one time too many.
“Listen up, party people,” announced a male voice with a north country English accent. “Tonight’s TAZ is Tantra on Sunset. Trendy and tiny, but oh so Silverlake. Trippy chillout and global trance is the mix, so leave the agro vibes at home and bring your desiring machines and your kama suitors, babies. The puja begins at midnight.”
In spite of the slang and its insinuation of pagan pleasures, there was something weary in the voice, something as worn as the oxide coating on the tape. Raszer pictured a British expat in his late thirties—maybe even forties—who’d been around in the heyday of the rave movement and was now playing out his line to a diminishing clientele. He knew the venue, an Indian restaurant on East Sunset that converted to a club at the witching hour. The dance floor was barely twenty feet in diameter, and these days, there would likely be as many nodders as dancers. In the neohipster demimonde, cool blue cyberfunk had long since replaced the pink soda-pop fizz of the anthemic Ibiza sound.
The answering machine’s beep came after a small eternity, sounding more like a bleat. Unsure that he was being recorded, Raszer began his message tentatively.
“Hello, Hakim,” he said. “My name is Stephan Raszer. I’m a private inves—”
There came a drowsy “hello,” for which Raszer was totally unprepared.
“This is Hakim,” said the voice from the recording. “You’re a what?”
Raszer reintroduced himself and offered only the barest hint of his purpose. He informed the DJ that he would be there around twelve thirty, and Hakim agreed to a quick chat during his break. “Never met a real PI,” he said wryly. “Might be a kick.”
Raszer hung up, peeled off his T-shirt, and finished the wine. The chill was still on him, as was the scent of the squatter. Beside the legal pad, he set the spiral notepad with the partial web address he’d copied from the toilet seat: a—-n-uts.com Hazid. A shiver ran from the lump on his head to his tailbone. He decided it might be a good mental exercise to try to fill in the blanks while he soaked in the bath, so he carried the notebook into the master bathroom. A candle was burning, and the water was still hot.
The laptop’s screen came up with a file icon flashing against the Moorish desktop pattern. Raszer cinched his bath robe, slipped onto the barstool, andopened the file to a hypertext version of Revelation 14, with underlined passages linking him to pages of
exegesis by scholars and theologians from the fifth century on. The passage Monica had highlighted in red was from verses 1–4:
AND I looked, and lo, a Lamb stood on the mount Sion, and with him an hundred forty
and four thousand, having his Father’s name written in their foreheads. And they sung as it
were a new song before the throne, and before the four beasts, and the Elders: and no man
could learn that song but the hundred and forty and four thousand, which were redeemed