by A. W. Hill
“Create a thought-form . . . an egregore,” Raszer said.
“Right. You did your homework, mister. Anyhow, one day that summer, this big limo pulled up the dirt road to Johnny’s trailer, back up in San Gabriel Canyon. I lived up there then, at least as much as I did at home. This tall guy in a dark suit got out ’n whistled for Johnny. He coulda been any L.A. limo driver, any race but white. Hell, I couldn’t tell. Nowadays, everyone in L.A. looks either Arab or Mexican.”
“Just the one guy that day?”
“Yeah. Anyhow, Johnny kinda sashays down there ’cause he doesn’t like to come to anybody’s call . . . not since he got back from Babylon. And Henry goes with him. Henry was Johnny’s magical shield. Ever since what happened over there, they’re thick as thieves. Got so Johnny and I couldn’t even fuck without Henry hangin’ around, doin’ his voodoo on us, so eventually we just included him. That’s when I found out that Henry and me had this . . . connection. We didn’t even have to be in the same room, and we could get off just thinkin’ about each other. It was wild. Mystical, kind of.”
Raszer decided that he also needed another drink. She had a full wind, and now that she was going, she might go on for a while. “And what happened at the limo?”
“The guy popped the trunk and the three of ’em walked around back to look at whatever was inside. I couldn’t see from where I was. Dope, I figured. I saw Henry’s face go a little weird, and then Johnny said, ‘Yeah, I can move this.’ I could see Henry shaking his head, which is what made me think it was some kind of weapons. But Johnny blew him off, because Johnny was the shit and he wanted to do whatever these guys wanted him to do, ’cause he wanted to move up in the organization.”
“But Henry wasn’t so hot on the idea.”
“He was at first,” she said. “When they first got back from Iraq, they were both all fired up on go-pills and this gnarly root that they used to chew on all the time, and spouting off about how they’d had this beautiful mindfuck over there and realized that all the moral laws the world goes by are bullshit and don’t apply to the knowers of truth, and that the only thing that matters is pure anarchy, because God is chaos and you have to embrace the chaos—and that it’s a state of mind, like being really awake for the first time in your life, and this state of mind has a name and the name is kee-ya-mee . . . and there was this glowing peacock who was Lucifer—”
“Qiyami,” Raszer said quietly.
“That’s right,” Ruthie said. “That’s what they called it. Wouldn’t begin to know how to spell it.”
She popped another olive into her mouth and sucked out the pimiento. The waiter strolled by, and she promptly bottomed up the rest of her drink and handed him the glass with a nod and a wink.
“I gave you a two-drink limit,” said Raszer.
“Yeah, you did,” she replied. “But he doesn’t know that.”
“So what made Henry have a change of heart?”
“Henry figured everything by magic. His black stones, and whatever his thought-forms told him, which of course was just him talkin’ back at himself. Henry used to say he loved me. He said I was the pussy his girl-self had. But who he really loved was Johnny. Not in a fag way. Henry wanted Johnny to be a holy warrior, a master. They had these big dreams about goin’ back to the Middle East and being anarchist mercenaries, but it was like some stupid game. Johnny wasn’t ever gonna be master of anything except a trailer in Azusa. I know that now. Anyhow, Henry’s magic told him things were fucked up. And then there was other stuff that went down . . . ”
Her voice trailed off, as if down a long tunnel, and her head hung limp for a moment. The gin was getting to her. She might be hard-boiled, but she was also a tiny thing, probably not more than a hundred pounds. Raszer let the “other stuff” go for the
time being and seized on something else.
“You said Johnny and Henry’s trip was like a game. Could it have been?”
“Could have been what?” She was slurring a bit, and knew it, and tried to cover it up.
“A game. Like World of Warcraftor Dungeons Dragons. Could they have gotten into some weird role-playing thing when they were in Iraq with all the other gameboys?”
“Whoa. I’ll have to think about that one. It seemed pretty real to me. They ran meth, they ran girls—these little sluts from Duarte and Upland who worked the truck stops in San Bernardino—and at the end, they ran guns to Compton. It just kept gettin’ heavier. These guys were testing them, setting them up for something big.”
“Like what?”
She shrugged her shoulders. She wasn’t telling yet. Instead, she said, “So, have you decided yet if you wanna fuck meor not?”
“Excuse me for a minute,” said Raszer, pushing back. “Nature calls.”
She shrugged again and waved him a little bye-bye.
When he returned from the men’s room, Ruthie’s head was on the table. He wasn’t particularly surprised. He’d had a feeling about the third martini. He made apologies to the waiter for what looked a little less than chivalrous, paid the check, and eased her up from the table, folding her arm gently around his neck. The bar’s matronly hostess cocked an eyebrow on their way out. Raszer pressed a $5 bill into her palm and said, “My daughter . . . has to learn to pace herself.”
Outside, the downdraft from the mountains was stiff and the stars glowed like coals. Raszer’s Jeep was parked on the far side of the plaza, and even a scant hundred pounds dead drunk is no waltz. To passersby, he thought, it must have looked like he was dragging a corpse.
When they got to the car, he opened the passenger door with his little finger, scooped Ruthie up, and poured her into the seat. He had the key in the ignition when it hit him that he hadn’t put the top back up and the night was cool, so he stepped back out and buttoned it up. On a Jeep Wrangler, this was a noisy, manual operation, but Ruthie didn’t stir or make a sound the whole time. Only after he’d finished and started the car did it occur to him that for the same reasons he’d felt the need to snow the hostess, he could not take Ruthie Endicott home to her mother in this condition.
“Ruthie,” he said, to his conscience as much as to the limp form beside him. Her head had already found the console, and her forearm was draped over the parking brake. “I’m gonna let you sleep this off for a while and get some coffee into you before I take you home, all right? Okay with you?”
There was no response, not that he’d expected one.
“Ruthie?” he said, lifting her arm from the brake.
“Mmm.” It had the tone of an assent, so he put the gearshift into drive and negotiated the one-way streets back onto the Paseo. In five minutes, they were at the inn; fortunately, no one was lounging on the grand portal. He steered her through the blue-framed door of his room and rolled her onto her belly on the brass bed with its patchwork spread. She looked even smaller there. Small but formidable, with strength in the arch of the spine and the shoulders. He noticed in the soft light from the bedside lamp that her cheeks were rouged and the black hair had red highlights. She’d evidently designed to play vamp for their first formal encounter. He decided, for the moment, against the intimacy of removing her shoes. He lit a cigarette, brewed a pot of the in-room coffee, and sat down in the stretched-hide armchair with the local paper and the briefing book Monica had prepared for him.
It was a leather binder with a snap strap and eight years of hard duty, stuffed just thick enough to be held firmly between thumb and fingers. There were pockets for his maps, photos, and travel documents, and dividers marking off the main areas of research: human trafficking and debt bondage, especially for the sex trade and especially through the Eurasian corridor; a history of Shia splinter groups and crypto-pagan sects in Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey; a selection of bulletins from Interpol’s I-24/7 network, detailing recent instances of political and industrial terrorism and assassination not specifically linked to any of the known organizations; a primer on MMORGs and ARGs, multiplayer reality games that had gone global w
ith the explosion of the Internet across all borders. And there was more—packed in with Monica’s characteristic thoroughness—including lists of translators, outfitters, doctors, and hired guns available from Istanbul to Damascus.
Most important, there were the beginnings of the two research threads Raszer had asked Monica to follow after his meeting with Special Agent Djapper. The first he’d begun himself with a call to a mathematician in Santa Cruz whose hobby was graphing the co-occurrence of seemingly random and unrelated events on the world stage: the hunt for what chaos theory called strange attractors.
On the same day, at the same moment in time, a parliament might be dissolved, blue-chip stock might tumble, and the wife of a minor official in a third-world country might be kidnapped. What linked these disparate events could be the collapse of a currency or a phase of the moon or nothing at all—it wasn’t always logical.
Raszer, wondering if the phantoms he was chasing might be exerting such tidal forces, had given the mathematician two coordinates: the date and time Scotty Darrell had shot a tram driver at Universal City, and the date and time of Katy Endicott’s abduction. The second thread was less theoretical. Given Djapper’s tip that to enter the nest of these neo-Assassins, “you’d have to be invited,” Raszer had asked Monica to research which agencies, NGOs, and religious groups had had luck forging ties to the renegade Shiite factions pocketed across the Middle East, from Mosul to the Bosporus. If Katy’s abductors did have an Islamist agenda, he was sure it wasn’t orthodox.
Raszer had begun to think about just how he was going to get in, and in what suit of clothes. It spooked him to know so little about his adversary. That meant that any stranger could be his killer. It meant being very stingy with his trust.
Slipped into the binder’s rear pocket was the yearbook photo of Katy that Aquino had given him. The silent movie sweetheart was even more in evidence at this age--in the lazy eyes, the plump cheeks, the old-fashioned perm. It seemed almost as if Silas Endicott had made his youngest daughter over as Mary Pickford. Yes. That was what the eyes invited. Make me over. For some men, a girl like this would be a collectible.
Raszer studied the photo of Katy, then glanced up at her would-be evil twin, supine on the bed, and then felt a small shudder of understanding.
A cone from the big sugar pine out front dropped on the roof above his head. If he’d not recognized the sound, it might have gotten him to his feet. As it was, he found himself too agitated to go back to his homework. He set the binder down and walked over to the small, rough-hewn bookshelf beside the bed, not expecting to find much. Motel bookshelves always seemed to be for show, containing nothing but a few dog-eared mysteries. He squatted down in front of the shelf, not two feet from where Ruthie lay. She hadn’t stirred. Not even a drunk’s little snore. Her fragrance came to him: citrus and musk. Oranges? Oranges and damp fur, and that trace of patchouli. But sweet and pungent, too, like a hard marmalade. Dark and concealed, like a fruit cellar.
On the lower shelf, parked between the Bible and Grisham, was a slim, small volume of poetry by the thirteenth-century Persian mystic Jelaluddin Rumi, once little known beyond his turf. Now, he was a staple on the yoga circuit, but no less a poet for it:
The tongue has one customer:
The ear.
He flipped through the pages. They smelled of wood shavings and red wine.
If anyone asks what “spirit” is like,
or what God’s fragrance is like,
Lean your head toward him or her
Keep your face there close—and say:
Like this.
He heard her breathing, and when she turned her face his way, the scent came again. He moved a little closer, sniffing, ears pricked, a bear on its haunches. It was in her hair. In that blood-black bob, and who knew if that was the real Ruthie, or if there was a prison cut beneath, ash blond or purple or orange. He set the book down, keeping a hand on the shelf, and brought his nose to the strand that lay across her eye and cheek. Her right eye opened under the veil of hair, but she didn’t move a muscle.
There were two knocks on the blue door, rapid-fire. Soft, but urgent. Then footfalls on the wood planks outside. Raszer pivoted, still in a squat, then dropped one knee to the floor. He held his palm to Ruthie as a signal to stay put, keeping one eye on the door and the other on the big, latticed window to his left.
The boughs of the sugar pine were swaying, brushing the window. Tap, tap, tap. The wind had picked up, and a second cone hit the roof, sobering Ruthie up more effectively than motel coffee. She lifted her head, pushing the hair from her eye.
“It’s just a pine cone,” he said quietly. “Not to worry. I’ll go see what this is about. But just in case . . . why don’t you hit the deck for a minute.”
“If you say so,” she said, obliging. “I hope you’re not gonna get me killed.”
“Not if I can help it,” Raszer said. He went to the bedpost, remaining in a crouch.
A brown satchel that resembled a saddlebag hung over the post, and from its rear pocket he slipped a seven-inch knife with a black pearl handle and a steel blade bearing the stamp of its Swedish maker. He nested it in the back of his jeans and went to the door.
“You’re gonna defend me with a Boy Scout knife?” Ruthie asked from behind the bed.
With his right shoulder levered against the door, he began slowly to turn the knob. “Who’s there?” he asked, for the hell of it. There was at least a chance that the inn’s manager or a disoriented guest had knocked, or even that the winds had blown some debris against the door. Nature had a funny way of teasing its human overlords.
No one answered.
He gave his neck muscles a stretch and shook the stiffness out of his shoulders before cracking the door. The aroma of pinesap entered his nostrils, and blown dust stung his eyes. Pinesap and something else. Wild fennel? Or wintergreen? He realized his hair was on end and that fear had crept in under the wind, but he also knew that these collisions of scent and shiver were at the heart of crime and passion.
As he stepped out onto the planks, keeping his hand on the doorknob, Raszer wondered what an assassin might use to cover the odor of bloodlust. Something sweet? No, sweetness was a lousy cover-up. Something clean. Fresh. Something to remind him of a loving mother whose breath had smelled of betel or mint.
The Inn’s grand portal sprawled to darkness in both directions. A sloping tile roof admitted little moonlight, so, at either end, details went to gray. Nobody was out, but three rooms down, the hollowed-out sound of country radio issued from an open window. Raszer told himself it was too early for this level of apprehension. Five people knew he’d come to Taos: Borges, Aquino, Monica, his daughter, and Djapper. Of the five, the last was the dodgiest, but it would take more than dodgy to tip off foreign assassins. It would take treason.
In a deeper sense, though, suspicion was always apt, especially around shape-shifting women. Ruthie, too, knew he’d come to Taos. The back of his neck bristled as he stepped off the deck and felt soil beneath his feet. Then he heard gravel spitting at the end of the Inn’s long, wooded entrance road, and pivoted to see the taillights of a big, black car pulling onto the Paseo del Sur.
They were here, they knew he was here, and they almost certainly knew whom he was with. The mystery was what they’d come to deliver. It would have been easy enough to kill him at this stage, but it also would have been messy. Killers exhibited an odd kind of patience. They waited until you were almost in their skin.
Raszer dropped to a squat and examined the faint bootprints in the dry dust. His visitor had walked lightly. The prints would be clearer in the morning with the low sun. He stood and padded softly along the access road, the scent of his predator fading with each step. No scent hung around for long in the Southwest, except when the air was dead still. The desert might be the natal ground of religions, but it was also the ally of malefactors. If the Devil had a home, it was in shifting sands and windblown dust.
When a cloud crossed
the moon and snuffed his light, Raszer turned back toward the inn. Except for the scent and the current running up his brain stem, it all might have been illusion. Not even the taillights were a definitive ID. Except for the scent, and a plain white envelope tucked beneath the mat at the door of his room, he might eventually have found sleep that night.
He stooped to pick it up.
Inside was a folded sheet of paper bearing a computer printout of a digital photograph. The photograph was of Monica, leaving his house after locking up for the night. Just a little feint to throw off his balance and let him know that Djapper’s FBI men weren’t the only ones watching over her. Just enough to ruin his evening.
Raszer reentered the room and latched the door. Ruthie was nowhere in sight, and that notched his pulse up a few beats until he saw that the bathroom door was closed. He poured himself a cup of coffee. He sat on the edge of the bed, took a gulp, and enjoyed it not in the least. Blecchh. Even high-grade motel coffee was still motel coffee. After a couple of minutes, his recently comatose guest emerged, flushed and distinctly content.