Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation

by A. W. Hill

  “So, what was all that about?” she asked, zipping up her bodysuit. “I got a little amped up. Had to discharge my battery.”

  “Do you always have an erotic response to fear?” he asked, and took another bitter sip. “Or was it something I said?”

  “Somethin’ you did, maybe,” she replied. “Sniffin’ around me like a big dog. Shit, I guess you answered my question, all right.”

  “What question?” he said, knowing full well what she meant.

  “The one I asked you back at the bar, Sherlock. Whaddaya think?”

  “Oh, that one,” said Raszer. “You should never ask a man that question. You might not get the answer you want to hear.”

  “Oh, yeah? And what do I wanna hear?”

  “If you’re asking the question, then what you want to hear is yes.”

  “Well, I guess you know everything, don’t you?” She waited for a second, then sat beside him. “So who was outside?”

  He lied, sort of. “Nobody. But I think we should get you home. You ready?”

  In reply, she kicked her shoes off, pulled down the quilt, and rolled into bed.

  “Don’t think I better go home tonight,” she said. “I feel like a snooze. Home. Ha! Not like anybody’s waitin’ up, ’cept maybe Angel, with his prayer beads and his whip.”

  “Friday’s his big day, right?” said Raszer, laying the quilt over her.

  “Yeah, right. Good Friday. Never could figure out what’s so good about it. Neither could my f . . . neither could Silas.”

  “Where do they do it? The crucifixion?”

  “Out in the foothills east of Arroyo Seco. They’ve got a morada—a chapel—out there, and all the stations of the cross marked out. It’s a weird scene. Sad, too.”

  “I’d like to see it,” said Raszer. “Any chance?”

  “Could be arranged,” she said. “If you’re that into it.” She plumped up the pillow and settled in. “You know what I’d like right now?”

  “I’m afraid to ask.”

  “Somethin’ to eat. Is there a candy-bar machine around here?”

  “No, but there is a breakfast kitchen off the main salon. It’s not do-it-yourself, but I could probably scrounge you a muffin if it’s not locked.”

  “That’d be just dandy,” she said, and smiled sweetly.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “You owe me one.”

  It took Raszer a minute to locate the kitchen lights, and another to locate the pantry, and all he could scavenge was a roll and a banana. Faintly, he heard a car start up, and thought nothing of it. When he got back to the room, Ruthie was gone and so was the Jeep. I borrowed your car, read the hastily scrawled note. Come to the porch of the Taos Inn at 7 tomorrow night. There’s somebody I want you to meet.

  Raszer stood for a moment with the roll, the banana, and Ruthie’s note in his hands, taking stock of the altered circumstances and wondering how concerned—and how pissed off—he ought to be. Then he set them all down and began to undress, tossing articles of clothing one by one over the rocking chair near the hearth. On foraging through his duffel bag to retrieve his toothbrush, he noticed that its contents were unsettled. A moment later, he affirmed that the Jeep wasn’t the only thing Ruthie had borrowed. Henry Lee’s black rock—the one he’d pilfered from the evidence room in San Dimas—was missing. He didn’t at first see any particular reason for alarm. It didn’t surprise him that she’d gone through his things. She was the type and, despite the kittenish behavior, was probably still suspicious of his motives and mission.

  In fact, Raszer made Ruthie as the kind of girl whose sexuality was never entirely without design. Besides that, she’d been Henry’s girl, and might have felt she could claim the rock as a keepsake. In any case, an act of petty theft clearly wouldn’t trouble her conscience. He’d have to keep an eye on her, and he’d have to get the rock back.

  He fell into bed, exhausted. As an afterthought, he retrieved the Rumi anthology from the lamp table. Halfway through the third poem, he fell into a sound sleep. There wasn’t much point in troubling himself at this hour. He’d worry when the sun came up.

  NINETEEN

  Monica blew a kiss to the FBI men on her way up Whitley Terrace, and they returned the favor. They were parked in a red zone about four houses down from Raszer’s, and they’d been to Starbuck’s; both men held the signature cup. Like all things in America, the look of FBI men had changed, even in the relatively brief time she’d had dealings with them. They were less burly, less square-shouldered, less white. But the suits, the rock-hewn faces, and the sunglasses remained, as if the Bureau’s idea of blending in hadn’t really changed since 1955. There was something comforting in that.

  Lars, her Danish bodyguard, was waiting on the front stoop. He sat beneath some sort of Scandinavian porta-shelter resembling a beach cabana on a sling chair that looked as if it might collapse at any moment under his mass. It was fog season, and the nights were cool and damp, but by noon the bleached sun would burn through. He’d been there all night and would remain there through the day, with a short break for lunch and a couple of forays into the surrounding area to check for trespassers. Lars claimed never to sleep, or, at any rate, to be able to sleep with his eyes open. He spun a good yarn about his mother’s ancestors being Selkies, the fantastical seal people of North Sea legend. But Monica felt sure she’d caught him dozing during the long afternoon hours when the sun was warm. As with the FBI men, his assumption of the cloak of masculinity comforted her, even if it was only bluster.

  So far, neither Djapper’s men nor the great Dane had been given cause to demonstrate their prowess, and the first day had passed with the guys in the car and the guy on the stoop eyeing each other warily, which in Monica’s opinion was what men did when they had no real work to do. But this morning, Raszer had emailed her a scanned copy of the photograph, and it didn’t appear to have been shot with an especially long lens. He was worried, and now he had her spooked. As she mounted the steps, picture in hand, she took a breath and prepared to grill the walrus.

  “Morning, Lars,” she chirped. “Sleep well?”

  “Ha!” he answered, standing up and habitually flexing his pectorals. “You know me better, Miss Lord. I sleep like a fish.”

  “So you say. Well, could you try being a shark during the day?” She handed him the printout. “Somebody took my picture yesterday. Too close for comfort.”

  Lars knitted his brow. “Hmm,” he grunted. “It was when you leave. I was to checking out the canyon. Damn.” He glared at the plain black sedan down the street.

  “They’re federal agents, Lars,” she protested. “They’re not gonna send my boss a threat. Somebody took this from right across the street.”

  “Maybe,” said Lars. “But I talk to them anyway. Okay if I keep this?”

  “Sure,” said Monica, but her eyes were on the mail slot, from which a plain white envelope protruded. She stooped to withdraw it. “Now, what do you suppose this is?”

  Lars shook his head and shrugged. “I see nobody all the night, Miss Lord. I don’t move. Not even to use bathroom. You see—” He reached behind him and grabbed what seemed to be a kind of high-tech bedpan, shaped to be worn inside the trousers. From the sloshing sound it made when he held it up, she gauged it had gotten good use. “I have Stadium Buddy. Holds a full liter. Good for the long watch.”

  “Well, somebody was up here, Lars,” she said, tearing open the envelope and unfolding another photo print, this one of Raszer carrying what looked like a very unconscious girl across the threshold of his motel room. This, she reasoned, must be the infamous Ruthie. “I don’t like this, Lars. I think we’d better both go talk to the FBI.”

  Lars narrowed his eyes. “Tonight,” he said, “I will wearing night-vision goggles and set up listening post. No one will come close, even.”

  He smiled in a way that was probably meant to be endearing, so she handed him the crumpled white bakery bag she’d been holding in her left hand.


  “For you, Lars,” she said. “Prune Danish. Your favorite, right?”

  “Every good day begins with prunes,” he said, opening the bag, and offered her one. “You like to sharing?”

  “I’m doing yogurt and berries,” Monica replied. “Same effect, less carbs.”

  The men in the black sedan, Agents Strokh and Jiminez, likewise hadn’t spotted the furtive photographer, but guessed that the picture had been taken from either beside or inside the house directly across from Raszer’s. “We don’t have wraparound or x-ray vision, miss,” Strokh said.

  “Yeah, well,” Monica said, “what’s to keep them from bashing in the side door, then? Maybe one of you should get out and take a walk once in a while. Sheesh. Where do cops get the idea that a stakeout is like a night at the drive-in?”

  “We’ll do our very best, miss,” Jiminez replied with training-school civility.

  “Will you let Agent Djapper know that we’re being stalked on both ends?”

  “Yes, ma’am. We will,” said Strokh.

  Unsettled, Monica booted up the office and made herself a cup of jasmine tea. She passed up the berries for now and regained her composure by going methodically through the morning routine: Interpol’s I-24/7 site, the State Department’s human-trafficking bulletins, Homeland Security’s unreliable threat assessments, the somewhat more reliable wire services, and the LAPD’s overnight arrest reports, all of which she and Raszer had obtained hard-won access to.

  In addition, she checked out the weather, travel alerts, disease outbreaks, and exchange rates for every country her boss might conceivably step into. Finally, she went through email from thirteen different servers, six of them as encrypted and snoop-proof as current technology allowed.

  The first set of graphs from the chaos mathematician in Santa Cruz had come through. Depending on how one read the tea leaves, they might or might not be revelatory. On the day Scotty Darrell had wounded a driver at Universal Studios, the price of the company’s stock had dropped rather dramatically—before the shooting had occurred. Disney and the corporate owners of the Six Flags chain had also taken hits in the ripple effect that followed. Up to that point, big entertainment-sector stocks had largely weathered the economic shitstorm that had battered the country in recent years.

  Also on that day, and perhaps only whimsically related, the L.A. City Council had banned lap dancing, and the French parliament had passed an ordinance requiring Muslim girls to remove their veils in French public schools. There were other simultaneities, some absurdly far-flung, including an IAEA announcement that a significant quantity of enriched uranium had been reported missing from the Ukraine.

  She emailed the mathematician her thanks and simultaneously began to download two large files, one from the BBC and one from a Swiss blog–cum–pirate news service known as Charlie Hebdo. Both reports dealt with the strange-bedfellow relationships that American Christian evangelicals had cultivated with Zionists, on the one hand, and with the sworn Islamist enemies of Israel on the other.

  The dalliance between the Christian Right and the Israeli Right had been well reported, but the kinship between crusade and jihad was murkier, not to say counterintuitive. Understanding it required investigating at least as far back as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, when American evangelicals had found common ground with the likes of the Taliban in their opposition to godless communism, and employing the sort of tactical thinking that is common in criminal organizations but foreign to most people.

  What seized Monica’s attention was a mention of a conference held in Damascus in 2002 by a group calling itself the International Interfaith Council. According to the report, the IIC was a creation of the Chalcedon Foundation. The stated goal of the conference was ecumenical outreach, but given its timing in the wake of 9/11—Monica was thinking like a chaos theorist now—the secret agenda might have been grander and more alarming.

  Some of the organizations represented at the conference were unfamiliar, but she recognized its principal American sponsor. The Chalcedon Foundation was the fountainhead of Christian Dominionism, the doctrine that held that Old Testament law ought to be the final word on Earth in these end times preceding the Second Coming. God’s law trumped man’s law, which meant that government should, if necessary, become an instrument of divine rule.

  Theonomy, they called it, but there were other names. Western cosponsors of the conference included the Christian Broadcasting Network, the Unification Church, and the American Enterprise Institute, and among the attendees—cloaked in the guise of something called the Admiralty Group—was what might have been a deputation from the Church of Scientology. If this weren’t spooky enough, the Swiss report went further. It alleged that on May 3, 2002, the last day of the conference, a private jet had landed in Damascus and disgorged a passenger registered as Morton Lutz, otherwise known as then assistant under secretary of state Douglas Picot.

  On the Muslim side of the table were arrayed clerics and sheiks of all stripes, from the ultra-orthodox Shiite mullahs of Iran to Sunnis whose strident Wahabism would not have displeased Osama bin Laden. There were renegades from schismatic sects like the Nusayris, and militant pan-Islamists affiliated with Hezbollah and the SSNP. There was no mention of the Ismailis, the radical branch of Shi’ism that had spawned the Assassins and inspired the MO of the organization with which Stephan

  Raszer was now playing hide-and-seek.

  But the mix was weird enough. Televangelists, Christian reconstructionists, neocons, and midlevel American diplomats had broken bread with Islamists in the heart of a country the United States had then been rattling sabers with.

  Monica was about to digest the Swiss blogger’s theory about why the “moderate” Sunnis, who in all but a few countries still constituted the Muslim ruling class, had been underrepresented at the conference, when there came a sudden gust of wind, an aroma of sage, and the sound of pages rustling from around the corner in Raszer’s library. Monica’s throat tightened. She knew immediately that the French doors leading to Raszer’s herb garden had blown—or been pushed—open.

  “Lars!” she managed to croak out. He was on the other side of the front door, or should have been, and it panicked her further when he didn’t answer. She rolled slowly back from her workstation, stood, and entered the short hallway connecting the office with the library. For good measure, she called out. “The gun is loaded, so don’t make me jump.”

  She did not, of course, have a gun. She didn’t have even her pepper spray.

  On the bookstand Raszer kept by the door, the pages of the Qur’an lifted one by one, fanned by the steady northeastern breeze. The door was wide open. The sunlight reflected from the vellum made her squint.

  “Lars?” Monica called out again.

  She stepped out into the little garden, where the ma huang shared root space with moonlight sage and mint. She was alone, and the outside gate remained locked. She stood for a few moments, watching the wind make waves over the plant tops, and then something came to her, the sort of thing that only crazy people think. The sort of thought you don’t give breath to, because breath marries wind and wind carries thoughts into the world of real things.

  She shuddered, wishing she had a lover’s ear to whisper it into, and a lover’s arms for sanctuary from its implications. It’s coming down, she said to herself, a bigger lie than has ever been told, a bigger scam than has ever been worked.

  “Miss Lord?” Lars called out from behind her. She spun around, mouth open to cry out. “I thought I hear something in back,” he explained. “But everything’s quiet.”

  “Yes,” she replied, composing herself. “It is for now.”

  Raszer spent the morning hunting for Easter eggs. He’d been remiss. By the Christian calendar (at least, in the world west of Rome), it was Maundy Thursday, tomorrow was Good Friday, and Sunday was Easter. Brigit would have her egg only if he found it today. He might’ve finessed it by telling her that he was headed into the Byzantine world and observing East
er later this year, but she’d have seen right through it. No, he had to find the egg, and it had to be right, because she would measure his devotion by it.

  Easier said than done.

  The boutiques of Taos had iguanas, dancing shamans, and coyotes, but eggs seemed to have no place in Southwestern iconography. Strange . . . it wasn’t as if birds didn’t lay on the mesa as they laid on the steppes, or that the egg was any less a symbol of regeneration. Maybe here, regeneration was symbolized more aptly by the snake shedding its skin.

  He stopped at the newsstand on the plaza to inquire about books by local authors on the subject of the penitentes, and was directed to the historical society, where he found what the curator assured him was the only reliable account, a slim volume called Brothers of Light, by Alice Corbin Henderson. In a glass case of Pueblo artifacts dressed up and priced as objets d’art, he saw what he wanted for Brigit. A petrified snake egg encased in a geode with crystals as blue as the shadows on the Sangre de Cristo slopes. It wasn’t Russian, and it wasn’t painted, but he closed his eyes and saw her placing it proudly on her bedroom shelf. When he opened them, he found he had to wipe the right eye dry. Until that moment, he hadn’t seen how worried he was, how heavily it weighed on him that this assignment might leave his daughter fatherless.