Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation

by A. W. Hill

  Just across the way, partially masked by a pine grove, was the Fechin Inn, the most beautiful hotel in Taos. Beautiful not in the Mediterranean way, but like a fine, handmade chair, labored over and loved and rubbed and oiled until it looked more like wood than the trees from which it was made. He had some time before hunger got the best of him, and wasn’t due to brief Monica until two, so he crunched across the fallen pine needles and pushed open the art deco glass doors, wondering if he would know Constance Endicott when he saw her.

  She was smaller than he’d imagined, though it shouldn’t have surprised him. Both of her daughters were the size of those 40’s film stars who looked so grand on the screen but stood barely taller than children. He’d pictured her being closer to the stature of her late husband, Silas, who’d been a veritable oak. But this made sense, too: a china doll, its features all in miniature, like a human banzai tree whose limbs had been kept trimmed to the length of perfect, preadolescent beauty, so as not to intimidate the menfolk. She stood behind the registration counter, a large oil painting of Taos in snow on the wall at her back, and watched him walk up.

  “Good afternoon,” she said. “Checking in?”

  “No, actually. Wish I was. I—”

  She was lovely, like her daughters, but it was a loveliness more lined and bleached than her forty years should have shown. It wasn’t the overbaked-clay look that some desert Caucasians have, but the grayed porcelain of an antique left in the attic. All the fervor was in the eyes and chin, and there Raszer found the only clue to how she’d ended up in a trailer in Taos with a penitential Catholic named Angel Davidos. Ruthie’s leonine fierceness was nowhere in evidence, as it had been in Silas, who, oddly enough, had dismissed Ruthie as “her mother’s daughter.” Freud had been right: We hate most what resembles the incorrigible qualities in ourselves.

  “I just wanted to check your rates,” Raszer said. “Maybe see a room. I’m planning a special occasion. Would you mind showing me—”

  “I don’t think that will be a problem,” she replied, and turned to a young Latina in a print vest. “Lourdes, would you cover the desk while I show Mr. . . . ”

  “Rose.”

  “ . . . Mr. Rose one of the rooms?”

  The girl nodded and stepped to the front.

  “So . . . ” said Mrs. Endicott, coming around to Raszer’s side. “A single? Double? A suite? You said a special occasion . . . ”

  “Yes. Yes, a kind of reunion, I guess. Let’s see a suite. Why not?”

  “Our suites are very nice,” she said, and led him through a native garden fragrant with cactus flowers, and then up a short flight of stairs. “A reunion,” she repeated. “Family? An old fl . . . friend?”

  “Someone who was lost and now is found,” Raszer answered. “Someone I’d like to welcome home properly.”

  She paused at the top of the stairs and turned halfway, her face in shadow.

  “Oh, I see,” she said softly. “Well, I’m sure that she . . . or he . . . will love it here. Everyone does.”

  “She . . . actually,” said Raszer. “And I’m sure you’re right. Have you lived in Taos long? Or are you a newcomer, like me?”

  “Not long,” said Constance, taking out her passkey. “But it feels like home.”

  “Yes, it does. It’s beautiful and rugged and spiritual all at the same time.”

  She pushed open the door of room 233, and sandalwood wafted into the hall.

  Raszer stepped in. A fire was laid in the hearth, and fresh fruit and a bottle of wine were on the table. The mountains made a living mural on the west wall.

  “It’s perfect,” said Raszer. “And probably costs it, right?”

  “Two sixty-five a night,” she said. “It’s our best. We do have less—”

  “That’s all right. Like I said, a homecoming.” He wandered over to the window. “I’m thinking,” he said without turning, “of bringing my family here to live, but I worry a little about the isolation. Do you have children?”

  She cleared her throat and jingled the keys. “I have two grown daughters, but only one is with me. I can’t say that she—”

  Raszer turned. “Grown daughters? I wouldn’t have guessed—”

  She smiled modestly and took a step backward, out of the sunlight. It occurred to Raszer that Constance Endicott might never have been flirted with. Married and pregnant at seventeen, and now nursing the wounds of a Latin flagellant—when had she had the time and the opportunity? She pressed her fingers to her temple and shuddered slightly.

  “Are you okay?” Raszer asked, taking a step toward her.

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s just a sinus headache. The altitude. I’m still not used to it.”

  “I know what you mean. The altitude, the dry air. And then, on top of that, you have to deal with that rumbling that goes on all the time . . . ”

  She trained one eye on him, and for an instant, it seemed to offer him something. Raszer gave back what he could. All he wanted was for her not to feel crazy. Too bad, he mused, that I can’t turn on this thing in my eye at will. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to validate somebody’s psychic intimations with a look?

  He couldn’t have known that, for Constance Endicott, that was more or less exactly what had happened.

  The day turned warm for about two hours after noon. Raszer thought about lunch, then considered an hour or so of bouldering in the rugged foothills Ruthie had identified as the site of the Good Friday ritual. Getting heart, lungs, and mind in shape for the austerity of the Middle East had been another part of his rationale for spending three to four days in Taos.

  But the sun was high and he was feeling oddly spent, almost as if the signs of premature aging Ruthie’s mother had evinced had made him feel his own age more keenly. And lurking somewhere beneath this fatigue was the awareness that he was a target, and that venturing alone into the wilderness might be foolhardy. So he returned to the inn to call Monica.

  Out front, he found his Jeep waiting. The keys were dangling from the ignition, pinning a note that said: Remember: Meet me at the Taos Inn at cocktail hour. We’re going to see a friend. He went inside to make the call.

  “Everything quiet at home?” he asked her.

  “Everything except my nerves,” Monica replied.

  “I told you we should’ve locked the place up.”

  “You know damn well I couldn’t have tracked you as effectively from my place. Besides, with a 260-pound Norseman and the FBI on-site, how much safer could a girl be? If they’d put SWATs on the neighbors’ rooftops, we could probably nail these guys the next time they come around.”

  “Maybe,” said Raszer. “And maybe not. How’s Lars?”

  “I think he has some issues with the FBI. He practically accused the two agents of taking my picture, and he stands out there with his chest out, like he’s daring them to come closer. I wonder if he had a run-in with the feds at some stage of his career.”

  “Maybe it’s an alpha-male thing,” said Raszer. “He is a Viking. And with you being an athletic blond, you’ve got the Brunhilde thing going. I can almost picture you with a breastplate.”

  “Yeah. Anyhow, I’m glad he’s here. How’s Ruthie? Has she come across?”

  “Little bits at a time. The Johnny-Henry dynamic is clearer. And there’s an unnamed someone she wants me to meet tonight. About what happened in Iraq, I think. She stole my car, but then she brought it back. She seems to be her own woman.”

  “Just don’t sleep with her.”

  “I have no plans to sleep with her, But, you know, if women would stop looking for affirmation through sex, that advice would be a lot easier to follow.”

  Monica had no retort, and when she resumed, she chose a new subject. She told Raszer about the first set of chaos graphs, and the odd fact that Universal Studios had taken a beating on Wall Street before its tour had suffered Scotty’s assault.

  “And you’re thinking somebody triggered a little foreshock in the market,” Raszer said. “A l
ittle panic wave whose real purpose might be somewhere else?”

  “I’m not sure I took it that far,” she replied, “but basically, yeah.”

  “Hmm.”

  Then she told him about the conference in Damascus.

  “Well, now,” Raszer said, after a pause. “That’s pretty interesting. And you say no major news organization covered it?”

  “They weren’t invited,” Monica replied. “It sounds more like a meeting of the families. This renegade BBC reporter—the same guy who stirred up so much trouble a few years ago by claiming that Al Qaeda was a trumped-up Western bogeyman—he got the scoop, and then the Swiss blogger ran with it and did an exposé.”

  “So let me understand: We’ve got a secret meeting organized by Christian theocrats and attended by Islamic theocrats and an assortment of faith peddlers, all of them with an authoritarian bent and connections in Washington, which is represented in the person of Douglas Picot. A meeting of the faithful, to seek common ground in the strife-torn Middle East. And there’s not a Jew in sight.”

  “That’s about it, Raszer,” Monica said. “No Jews, no Catholics, no mainline Protestants, and, if I’m reading this right, they pretty much excluded the three-quarters of the Muslim world who consider themselves moderate. So . . . what do you make of it?”

  He lit a smoke and stepped out onto the portal, then spied a hammock strung between two pine trees twenty yards distant and took the phone there. It was exposed, but it was also in plain sight of every room at the inn, and therefore as safe as any place he was likely to perch.

  “Let’s begin with what isn’t hidden. Hardcore evangelicals and hardcore Shiites both see themselves as alienated from the mainstream. Marginalized by the modern world. They’re Abrahamic in their outlook. The Sharia is basically Old Testament law: clean, severe, unambiguous. Both are distinct minorities within their traditions, but minorities with muscles and weight. The Nusayris run Syria with only about eleven percent of the population; fundamentalists controlled Congress with less than that. So much for the surface.

  Beneath that it gets weird, like it always does with Puritans—especially when they get a whiff of power. I picked up something a long time ago from guys like Adler and Reich: When a group’s been on the outs for too long, its way back in is usually some kind of fascism, using the state as a spiritual bludgeon.”

  “Okay,” Monica said. “I get all that. But what were they brokering so soon after 9/11? What was going on in the private suites and the sheiks’ tents? That’s what I want to know. And why was the State Department there?”

  “I think the answer depends on whether they saw what was coming. If you’d known in 2002 that this whole thing was going to degenerate into global sectarian war and cripple the ruling parties on both sides, then you might have wanted to move into position to grab the spoils, negotiate the peace, even before the war was over.”

  “What kind of peace, Raszer? What would the terms be?”

  “You want the paranoid answer?” he asked.

  “It’s usually the closest to the truth, isn’t it?”

  “Let me think about it before I speak it.”

  “Do you want me to keep digging?” Monica asked.

  “Oh, yeah. And see if you can find out if the Jehovah’s Witnesses sent a rep.”

  “Raszer?”

  “Yeah?”

  “How about we have the professor run a chaos graph on the conference dates?”

  “Good idea.”

  “Raszer?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What if nothing is true? What if these people who call themselves fundamentalists aren’t Christians at all? What if they’re something else altogether?”

  “Ah,” he said softly. “Now you’re standing in my shoes.”

  She swallowed hard. “And how do you know what’s genuine and what’s fake?”

  “You don’t always.”

  “Does anybody know the truth?”

  “Those who know don’t say. And those who say don’t know.”

  For a few minutes after Raszer signed off, he sat in the hammock with his feet on the ground, feeling dizzy. He realized he hadn’t eaten. An aching melancholy, something like loneliness, came over him with the change of light in the west. He knew what she was going through. It was one thing to say this stuff, and another to feel it deep inside.

  He then did something that he never, ever did when there were killers in the tall grass. He laid back, watched the sun play hide-and-seek with the pine boughs, and slept. He dreamed of eggs. Eggs in pale yellow and speckled blue, gilded eggs and eggs bejeweled with rubies, ostrich eggs and serpents’ eggs, all rolling down an expansive grassy steppe that sloped dramatically to the desert floor far below, where a man in a white robe with a red sash waited.

  Raszer might have slept the day away, if not for the trace of wintergreen that drifted through the pines at about four o’ clock. He’d never especially liked the smell, and now he was beginning to hate it.

  TWENTY

  “Thanks for bringing my car back . . . undented,” said Raszer, tossing his keys onto the pale green table. “At least you’re an honorable thief.”

  “I only steal what I need,” Ruthie said. “I’m a practical girl.”

  “And you stole Henry’s sigil to do some practical magic?”

  “What in hell’s a sigil?” she asked.

  The previous night’s prewar Berlin hairstyle was gone, and Ruthie now displayed a sunset-red townie cut, cropped and blunt cut. It was closer to the look he’d expected, except that her round cat’s face was scrubbed clean and free of makeup. She wore an army green T-shirt and baggy cargo pants and made Raszer think of those bright-eyed, barely legal Alabama girls they’d sent over to serve in the slaughterhouse in Babylon. The sexuality remained but was now more androgynous. Was this, too, intentional?

  “Don’t be coy, Ruthie. You knew Henry’s MO. He’d summon his ‘thought form’ down into the rock and then do some voodoo. I’m just wondering why that rock.”

  “Well, since you know so much, you oughta know that it can be any rock, or statue, or whatever, but a power object is best. Somethin’ with some history. And that rock—the one with the big dimple in it—if what he said was true, it’s got some history.”

  “Tell me.”

  “If I tell you, I’ll have to kill you,” she said, and the corners of her mouth curled.

  “Do I have time for a drink?” Raszer asked, pulling out a chair. The Taos Inn’s broad porch was about half-full with locals and a few off-season tourists and the wooden floor creaked drily as the waitress approached.

  “Sure,” said Ruthie. “We got all night.” And then she added, “At least, until it’s time to see my friend Shams. Order one for me while you’re at it.”

  “Sure,” said Raszer. “How about a Virgin Mary?”

  “Very funny,” she said. “I’ll have a Dos Equis.”

  Raszer ordered two of them and turned to Ruthie. So, Shams must be his mystery contact for the evening. Interesting name. The sun dropped into the V between two distant peaks, and gilded the Taos Inn with a diffracted ray. Raszer sat back. He decided to let the matter of the black rock go for now. “Tell me about Shams,” he said. “He or she?”

  “He’s a he,” Ruthie answered. “But I think he’s seen it from both sides.”

  “How so?”

  “He told me that he lived as a woman for a year, wearing a burka and sucking off the soldiers who came over the border between Iraq and Turkey. He said he wanted to understand Muslim women and the ‘mystique of the veil.’ I guess he does now. Funny thing is, he said it wasn’t all that unusual over there, men dressing up as women. The soldiers didn’t seem to care. A mouth is a mouth, right?”

  “So what’s his story?” Raszer asked. “Was he in the fight over there? Did he know the boys, Johnny and Henry?”

  “He didn’t know ’em, but he could’ve,” Ruthie said. “He was based in Karbala at first. Then in Mosul. He enlisted right a
t the beginning. First in line. Not because he was gung-ho or anything. I think maybe he thought it’d be a good way to die. He was, like, thirty or something. Shit, I dunno how old the guy is. I just know he’s the shit. After three fuckin’ tours, he still wasn’t dead, so he figured maybe he was immortal. He signed up with Blackwater and went back. He said he had to finish the game.”