Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation

by A. W. Hill

  “Specifically,” the American continued, “you’re in Iskenderun, Turkey, formerly Alexandretta. The French got it in the carve-up after the First World War, and they still parlent français in the cafes. Everywhere else, you’ll hear Arabic or some variety of Turkic. There also happens to be an American air base nearby.”

  “It’s easy to get lost between cultures in the Hatay,” said the man called Rashid. “Syria is only a few kilometers away, and it would be closer if she had her way.”

  “Lost is right,” said the American. “That brings us to you, Mr. Raszer. I understand you’re here to find a girl, and we can help you. But a woman as the object of a quest is always more than a woman, right? Do you know what the stakes are?”

  “You’ll have to let the sap drain from my skull. How long have I been out?”

  “A while.” The American extended his hand. “Philby Greenstreet,” he said. “My people had it changed from Greenblatt three generations ago, but that doesn’t seem to have fooled anyone.”

  Raszer shook the hand and kept his game face, but felt a cold flush he associated with taking psychotropics in the wrong setting.

  “Why,” he asked, “do I feel like I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole?”

  “Because you did,” replied his host. “You came out on the other side of the world.”

  “Then I guess the only thing to ask,” Raszer said, following the rules of the game, “is whether you can make use of a keen mind and a steady heart.”

  “You bet we can,” the man replied. He gestured toward his companion. “This is my partner, Rashid al-Khidr. We pretty much run this I-double-R office.”

  “I-double-R?” Raszer repeated.

  “International Refugee Relief. We do our part to put a Band-Aid on the collateral damage from the wars: displaced families, orphans, visa and sanctuary applications.”

  “Human trafficking?” asked Raszer.

  “That too. When we have the resources.”

  “Right. I have a hazy recollection of being told about you. Very hazy. You’re the ‘mirror,’ right? Should I expect to meet any more Philbys along the way?”

  “You never know,” said Greenstreet Number Two. “Not to worry; things will come back to you when you need them—kind of like a foreign language. You were given some of the geopolitical picture on the other side. In Islamic parlance, the zahir: the outer reality. Important for keeping your bearings. But you won’t master the game without batin: the inner meaning. That’s what we’re for.”

  “Let’s stick with zahir for a minute,” Raszer said. “Tell me where it is I’m going.”

  “That’s not strictly a matter of geography,” Greenstreet answered. “On the map, you’ll be going across the Mesopotamian flood plain of southeastern Anatolia. Ethnographically speaking, it’s the land of the Dimili Kurds. Mostly Alevi Shiites, which is to say, not really orthodox Muslims at all. The whole region’s a war zone these days, but it’s a picnic compared with your destination. You’re headed into some of the roughest, most lawless terrain on the planet: the Hâkkari highlands, where Turkey, Iran, and Iraq meet. A piece of turf claimed equally by the three nations and the Kurds, and currently held—feudally speaking—by the Old Man.”

  “On the way there, time moves in reverse. You’ll see the world Alexander saw. You’re going across the country of the Sin-worshippers, the fire jumpers, the sword swallowers, dervishes, and the devotees of the Peacock Angel.”

  “When do I meet the lotus eaters?” Raszer asked.

  “If it lives and spouts heresy,” said Greenstreet, “it’s out there. The whole stretch, from Gaziantep to the Iranian border, is a world apart. Like I said, nominally Shia, but Islam around here is as much a matter of brand loyalty as shared belief. You’ll cross the Tigris and enter the oldest continually inhabited settlements on Earth. En route, you’ll pass by some of the best-kept secrets in civilization. And just when you think maybe you’ve reached the source of it all in the high country near Hâkkari, everything drops into nothing, like some huge cataract falling straight to hell, and no satellite can map it, and no drone can fly over it, and that, Mr. Raszer, is where your girl is. Literally, in the middle of fucking nowhere.”

  “Well, let’s go, then,” said Raszer, slipping woozily off the table. “What’s the mode of travel? And what sort of souvenir do you want me to bring back for you?”

  “Other than your skin, just an account. We’d like to know how these people turn bored college kids and pissed-off hayseeds into sleeper agents and saboteurs. Ishmaels, they call themselves. Or Isma’ils, after the son of the sixth imam, Jafar. Isma’il.”

  “I’m aware of the mythos. It’s all lifted from the Nizari Assassins, right?”

  “That’s all subterfuge. We know you know cults, Mr. Raszer, but believe me, this isn’t Jonestown. It’s deeper, wider, and much, much slicker than that. This guy’s the angel of the bottomless pit. His only religion is . . . ” He turned to the Kurd. “Rashid?”

  “Nothing,” said al-Khidr. “Nihil. He tells the Sunnis he’s their man and the Shia he’s theirs, and collects tribute from the Kurds by telling them he’s playing both for their benefit. His elite soldiers secretly pledge fealty to an iteration of the Syrian-Nabataean goddess Atargatis—but his own beliefs are more subtle. If indeed he has a God, it is the apotheosis of the nunc: the crack between spirit and substance, where all ceases to be. The blackness at the bottom of a well. Negation.”

  “Atargatis,” Raszer repeated. “Syrian. Negation. Ex nihilo, ad nihilo. Shit.”

  “They’re oblivion seekers,” Greenstreet said. “A professor at Harvard once told me that there are really only two belief systems in the world, coiled around each other in the human psyche. A dyad, he called it. He said that philosophical truth consists in believing both at the same time, and that dismissing one in favor of the other leads to totalitarianism. One is the conviction that this is truly the best of all possible worlds, and the other is that it’s the worst. Great drama is all about the conflict. To be, or not to be. The truth gets lost in translation, of course, but that’s how you’ll slip through.”

  “I just hope I come out with my tongue,” said Raszer. “And my testicles.”

  “I hope so, too. You’re referring to their taste for dismemberment. Doctrinally, that comes from their pledge to this goddess, the one Rashid mentioned. In her heyday, her devotees gelded themselves. At least, that’s the line he feeds his troops.”

  Raszer strode over to his pack, squatted, and fished until he came up with the Syrian coin he’d traded his duster for. He held up its face. “This goddess?” he asked.

  His host took the coin, eyed it, and nodded. “That looks like her.” Glancing at his watch, Greenstreet said, “Let’s get a bite, shall we? Do you like your food spicy?”

  “I’d like anything that’ll burn this fog from my brain.”

  Greenstreet went to the desk, parked the handgun behind his belt buckle, and slipped on a sport coat. On the adjacent wall was pinned a large map of Turkey and the bordering countries, dotted with dozens of colored tacks marking out routes traveled by refugees and the traffickers who exploited them. Raszer retrieved his cigarettes and Zippo and walked over to the map.

  “May I ask your expert opinion, Mr. … Mr. Greenstreet?”

  “Sure,” said his host. “You can ask.”

  “Is there something…anything…that connects Katy Endicott with the rest of the Old Man’s milk carton kids? Some common quality he sends his scouts out to look for?”

  “I can’t say for sure,” Greenstreet replied, “never having seen them all in one place. But I’ll give you a semi-educated guess.”

  “That’s good enough for me.”

  “Remember the Manson girls? Squeaky, Sadie, and the rest. Your turf, right?”

  “I suppose you could say that,” Raszer replied.

  “Well…that rare combination of physical appeal, native intelligence…and mal-leability. Add in antisocial tendencies, some daddy issues
, and stir. How’s that?”

  “And the reason these abductions aren’t causing more of a public outcry…”

  “They will. Once we shine a light on ‘em. But, for now, these are mostly the kids that nobody misses a whole lot. Someone did miss your Katy. That’s why you’re here.”

  Raszer nodded, and returned his eyes to the map.

  “Which of those routes am I taking?” he asked.

  “You and Rashid will be flown to Gaziantep. You’ll take a dolmus to a safe house just outside of Urfa. In the morning, you’ll be called for by a young man named Dante and bused to Harran—one of the weirdest places in the world, for my money. From that point on, we don’t know you, and you’ll be in the care of the Fedeli d’Amore.”

  “I guess Shams knew whereof he spoke. The Fedeli—”

  Greenstreet held up his palm, then tapped the face of his watch. This portion of the briefing was over. “Let’s walk,” he said, “and eat. Rashid will cover the rest.”

  As soon as they stepped outside, Raszer smelled the Mediterranean. There were other scents, too, of olive and citrus rind and fig, but the primeval tang of that most ancient of seas overpowered them. Farther down this great fishhook of coastline lay Beirut, Haifa, Gaza, and, at the barb, the once great city of Alexandria.

  They walked three abreast up the steep, narrow street toward the old quarter, casting long shadows. Raszer struck a match on stone and lit a cigarette. Little was said, because too much needed saying. After a few minutes, Greenstreet gestured and said, “Here we are. The Saray. Best restaurant in Iskenderun. And the best view.”

  A dozen small tables spilled onto the street from the canopied double doors of the restaurant, each one with fresh flowers and a million-dollar panorama of the curving coastline and the turquoise sea. Greenstreet took the most isolated table and gestured for Raszer to sit. He did so gratefully, because his legs had suddenly turned to soft clay. The entire setting—the solid, cloudless sky that merged seamlessly with the water, the whitewashed buildings, the cobblestone street—began to evanesce, then flicker back into register like a silent-movie image. He was accustomed to arriving in a foreign country and feeling oddly out of whack, as if he’d been teleported and hadn’t yet fully reconstituted, but this state was profoundly unsettling. In a word, trippy.

  Greenstreet must have seen the uneasiness cross Raszer’s face, because he smiled and said merely, “You’ll get used to it.”

  Used to exactly what, Raszer had to wonder, for of all the strange places he’d toured his mind to, this was perhaps the strangest. A question passed over his lips without any forethought. “How close is the world to disaster, Mr. Greenstreet?”

  Greenstreet shot a glance at the Kurd, then said, “At any given time in history, Armageddon hovers, waiting just on the other side of the curtain. It could take the form of a comet, plague, climatic shift, or barrage of dirty bombs going off in major cities, and all it needs is a little encouragement. In the years leading up to 9/11 and the months and years that followed, that encouragement was given. The most reactionary elements in Christian and Islamic fundamentalist circles lay down together, blessed by the agencies of state in which they’d entrenched themselves, and conceived a beast.”

  He summoned the waiter. “Let’s take a meal together and hope for better times.”

  At four forty-eight in the afternoon on that April day, after they had nourished themselves with generous helpings of flatbread slathered with cevizli biber—a paste of walnuts, chilies, and cracked wheat—and washed it down with cold beer, Raszer glanced at his watch, then at the lengthening purple shadows of their three seated forms, angling sharply away from the table and merging in the middle of the street. His eyes traveled up a minaret to the place from which the muezzin would cry at eventide, then down the steep hill to the sea, and finally back to the middle of the street.

  At that point, he saw that there were just two shadows, his own and that of the red-turbaned Kurd named Rashid al-Khidr. He returned his gaze to the table and confirmed that, indeed, the chair formerly occupied by the man who’d called himself Greenstreet was empty. Moreover, it was pushed in snugly against the table as if it had never been occupied at all.

  “Where’d Philby disappear to?” Raszer asked, his tongue slowed by the beer.

  “Sorry?” Rashid replied.

  “Mr. Greenstreet,” Raszer repeated. “Men’s room? Or is he getting the bill?”

  “I think you must be confused, my friend,” the Kurd said. “Perhaps the travel, or the time shift. You came to us from Mr. Greenstreet, but Mr. Greenstreet is not here.”

  “Now, wait a second,” Raszer insisted. “I know the CIA is good with smoke and mirrors, but I can still hear his last words. He said, ‘Let’s hope for better times,’ right?”

  “Indeed, indeed. You were telling me of your conversation in the airplane hangar, and of how you came to be delivered to us, and of the vision you had just before the hatch was closed. It will not be the last such vision, I am sure.”

  A number of improbabilities passed through Raszer’s mind, each one more outlandish than the one before, and each one in conflict with his bodily experience. It was a credit to the spiritual training he’d undergone that he accepted fairly quickly that he wasn’t going to get an explanation—or anything like the quotidian truth—from the man seated opposite him, and that he might never see the second Mr. Greenstreet again.

  “All right,” said Raszer, and downed the remainder of his beer. “So be it. If he’s gone, then he must have told me all he could. But give me a second to recalibrate. You and I are getting on a private plane for Gaziantep, right?”

  “Yes,” replied al-Khidr. “Just as I told you. In fact—”

  “Just as you told me?”

  Rashid checked his watch. “It should by now be fueled and ready. Shall we go

  collect your things and be on our way?”

  “Why not?” Raszer pushed back from the table. “I’ll take care of the check.”

  “It’s taken care of,” said the Kurd. “Everything is taken care of.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The Cessna’s engine droned. Rashid had said little so far; the pilot had said nothing at all. This had been all right with Raszer, who was still far from clear-headed; he took the opportunity to rest his head against the thick pane of glass. He dozed with one eye closed and the other fixed emptily on the weirdly unfolding landscape below.

  After a minute, he felt Rashid’s eyes on him. “The Bektash Sufis,” said the Kurd, “say that creation is continual. Now you see it, now you don’t.”

  “So do the Australian aboriginals,” said Raszer, without moving his head. But his words were lost in the rumble of the engines.

  After the landing and a brief rest in Gaziantep, they boarded the dolmus. It was evening by the time they reached the small city of Sanliurfa—‘Glorious’ Urfa—so named by Atatürk for its stiff resistance to the French occupiers nearly a century before. In another epoch, it had been Alexander’s Edessa, and before that, if three thousand years of legend carried any historical weight, the Ur of the prophet Abraham, father of the People of the Book. The same stories taught that Moses had stayed here, and that still longer ago, when the land was green and wet, Eve had consorted with serpents and heard God’s footsteps.

  Urfa—Rashid had told him on the bus—was believed by many pious Muslims to have been the historical site of the Garden of Eden.

  Paradise or not, the massive dams and aqueducts erected on the Euphrates plain by the Southeastern Anatolia Project had restored some verdancy to the arid land. As far as the eye could see were fields of olive and pistachio and glacial wrinkles of earth with new growth. En route, they’d passed no less than three dams, the largest of them at what had been the Hittite city of Carchemish. All around them was soil reclaimed from desert by governmental largesse. Only after the stop at Birecik did the surroundings return to their naturally barren state, and within thirty minutes, the windows had accumulated a coati
ng of rust-colored silt.

  The twilight sky over the town of Urfa seemed a different shade from what Raszer had seen through the windows of the dolmus, a different shade from anything he’d seen before. It was magenta at the horizon and deepest purple at the zenith, and the shadows in the old medina were of the same hue.

  The pilgrim cities of Islam all seemed to come brazenly alive at night, as if Allah had retired with the sun, allowing his unruly children to turn the streets into carnival midways. And at the center of Urfa’s hubbub, in the oldest part of the old city, was a colonnaded mosque of great age. Through the columns, Raszer spied a sprawling rectangular pool, its waters roiling and flecked gold by thousands of enormous, teeming carp. There were so many fish that the surface appeared a living organism.