Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation

by A. W. Hill

  “Well, right now I’m going to step out front for a smoke . . . get the sense of this place before I settle in.”

  “Stay close,” Francesca counseled. “We’re safe in the village, but these hills get pretty rough at night, and the night before a Jamkhana is one of those twilight times the baba talked about. The evil is real. Would you like Dante to come?”

  “Thanks, but no. Just need some time in my own head.”

  Raszer was unsettled, and troubled by something the baba had said. He was afraid when it came down to it, he might not have the stuff to “stand against Shaytan in the soul’s clothing.” In the end, the one thing Raszer believed a man could not be was a spiritual coward. And so, from time to time, he felt the need to tempt the Devil.

  The street descended steeply into a canyon, its carefully laid stones giving way first to a rutted dirt road and then to a precipitous footpath. A ball would have rolled a mile or more before stopping, and on the last hundred yards of cobblestone, Raszer had to lean back on his heels to avoid toppling over. The surrounding hills, scrubby, bleached, and wild, were laced with boundary walls and dotted with small stone houses. He saw only one other human being on his way down, a woman who stepped outside her front door to retrieve a bucket and regarded him as if he were taboo. Maybe he was. Maybe local custom was to stay indoors on the night before a festival, for the same reasons people in old Europe had known not to venture out on All Hallows’ Eve. He lit a cigarette. For a long time, it had been his way of whistling past the graveyard. Now that he was old enough to feel mortality’s pull, he saw the perversity: The very thing he used to keep the fear of death at bay would probably kill him.

  It was chilly, and he was glad he’d worn his coat. The days would grow hot as they moved deeper into the land and the season, but the nights would remain wintry for another month. He came across a flock of sheep without a shepherd by the roadside. The animals made no sound to acknowledge his passing; in fact there was no sound other than the whisper of wind in the brush. By the time he’d reached the floor of the canyon, there was also very little light except for the dim glow of retiring dusk. He turned before going on to make sure he could still see the tiny lights of the village. The path began to ascend again, taking him behind a long, low ridge. The wind poured over it like surf and filled his ears, and in its roar he began to hear other things.

  At first, they were things the wind was like: waves, trains, furnaces, and flames. Soon he was able to make out voices, mostly low and monotonal. He reminded himself that this in itself was no cause to question his wits. Alone in the evening of desert in a strange land with a head full of raki and thoughts of final things, he would have been crazier not to hear things on the wind. The voices didn’t alarm him, even when they began to articulate regular phrases and separate into strands of pitch. What did alarm him was that after fifteen minutes on foot, he emerged from behind the ridge and could no longer see the village. What’s more, he’d lost the road. There was nothing under his feet but a steep, unbroken pasture offering not a single landmark. He methodically paced out the vicinity.

  For fifty yards in all four directions, there was no sign of road or path.

  He made sure to return to his starting point after each reconnaissance, so as to maintain his orientation. It was no use. He’d lost all sense of which direction he’d come from. It was as if he were at the axis of a compass and the land was turning around him. There were familiar sensations: the tightening of the throat and the sudden void in the pit of his stomach; the stiffening of limbs. Things that all trekkers—even tourists—experience when they’ve lost their way. Soon, however, the panic escalated, because he became convinced that although he had no idea where he was, his adversaries did.

  On the face of it, he told himself, this was nonsense. He dropped to a squat in the dry grass, took a long breath, and then began methodically to plot his location by the stars. He knew that he’d walked southeast from the village and couldn’t have gone more than a mile. He knew they’d entered the village by a narrow but crudely paved road from the south, and that therefore if he walked due west by about two-thirds of a mile, he should close the triangle and come to the road.

  But then the voices came with new urgency, and a mist rose and threw gauze over the stars. The brush crackled ten feet to his right. He heard some distant perturbation of the night air and suddenly, from the crest of a hill dead ahead, there came a wheel of fire, rolling straight toward him. As he moved aside to let it pass, he identified it as a tractor tire someone had doused with gasoline and torched. The shudder subsided. Effective, he thought, but a pretty low-rent scare tactic for global terrorists. More likely, local hooligans getting a jump on festival day. He’d just about settled his heartbeat when he felt a finger on his shoulder.

  He went into an immediate crouch, then spun on the balls of his feet in all directions. The physical response had to precede the mental, or he was screwed. But despite his readiness to face an assailant, he didn’t really expect one to be there. The tap had had the weightlessness of something reaching in from the other world.

  “Okay,” he said aloud. “Come out, come out, wherever you are . . . ”

  There was neither sound nor touch, but from the wind arose an incomparable sweetness. It was the scent of an Easter morning, of everything good that had ever been promised to him, and all it seemed to ask was that he follow.

  “I’m not all that easy,” he said. “Give me a face to go with the perfume.”

  Then, suddenly, it was gone. The chill air rushed back in to fill the void, and he saw that full night had come down and he was truly lost. Through the mist, he managed again to find the bright stars in Orion and began to make his way westward. After five minutes, he checked the heavens for his bearings and froze. The mist had cleared, but revealed a new sky of constellations he didn’t recognize. Orion was gone; so was Ursa Minor. Everything had shifted, as if the earth had tilted into the southern hemisphere.

  Jesus, he thought with a shudder. Can the Devil do that? The scent came again, and this time he followed.

  “Lead on,” he said to the phantom. “You don’t even have to blow in my ear.”

  He followed because he was lost and because at the moment, being anywhere had more appeal than being nowhere. Beside that, he still possessed the hustler’s confidence that he could scheme his way out of hell if he had to. And he followed because he trusted his nose, and his nose told him that no scent that fine could issue from evil. With evil, there was always a whiff of decay, wasn’t there?

  He followed the scent as if riding a boat’s wake across a sea of grass and stone. For seconds, it would be lost to him, and then he’d pick it up again, ahead or off to the right or even behind him. All the while, to keep himself company and to keep panic at bay, he conducted a conversation with the thin air or whatever it might conceal.

  “Animal, vegetable, or mineral?” he asked.

  “Bigger than a breadbox?”

  “Christ, how did it get so cold? Did you have anything to do with that?”

  “Show me the way to go home,” he sang. “I’m tired and I wanna go to bed.”

  “Watch your step,” whispered the wind, and he felt the breath against his eardrum before stumbling over a rocky outcropping and falling on his face.

  “Fuck,” he said. The hard earth was like a serrated blade against the gash in his cheek. He pushed himself up and rolled into a sitting position.

  “What a show-off,” he said, flicking the soil from his wound. “I’m onto you. You’re just me in some twisted, noncorporeal way, right?”

  The grass trembled, and the sweet scent returned. “Or are you?” he said. “Tell you one thing: I couldn’t wear that cologne in a men’s locker room and get away with it. If you’re the Devil, you’re a little fey, aren’t you?”

  Raszer knew well that these things didn’t just happen willy-nilly—supernatural experiences, visitations, whatever you chose to call them. Various agencies had to coalesce. You could
label them outside forces or a message from the captain of your soul, but they were real enough, and once you’d opened yourself to them, they came often and sometimes in series. The difficulty was in distinguishing the genuine (which were the upshot of true extrasensory perception) from the false alarms and counterfeits. The counterfeits were the work of Satan as Raszer knew him.

  Satan was anything that threw you off the true scent.

  There was a band of loose rock under his feet. Unnatural, like gravel. The air rippled with the flapping of enormous wings as a buzzard flew past, low and close. He took a step and stopped to let his heart slow. There was pavement beneath his feet. He squatted down and touched it. Asphalt. Still warm from the day’s heat. There were footfalls on the road. Light. Rapid. A boy of about nine came running out of nowhere. He spoke in breathless Arabic, casting anxious looks in the direction he’d come from, to Raszer’s right and the northwest.

  “They come,” he said. “The men. They come.”

  “What men?” Raszer called out in the boy’s tongue.

  The kid neither replied nor broke stride, so Raszer caught up and ran along. He couldn’t be sure that the boy did not suspect him of being one of the very people he feared.

  “What men are these, my friend?” he asked again.

  The boy slowed his pace just a bit and regarded him warily.

  “They take the children,” he answered, and then took off like a shot.

  Raszer trotted to a stop in the middle of the road, bent to catch his breath, and watched the kid fold himself into the darkening mist. He caught the glint off a puddle of motor oil near the shoulder and looked to the west to see one, then two, then three sets of headlights turn from a crossroad onto the main highway.

  Even at a mile, he could tell that the beams were too widely spaced for the subcompact Toyotas and Nissans people drove in this part of the world. Once the faint red of the taillights became visible, he marked off the length of the vehicles and knew he must be looking at three big, low-slung automobiles, now heading straight for where he stood.

  To no surprise, his nocturnal spirit guide had vanished, and he was left utterly exposed and with no better than fifteen seconds to make himself scarce. On either side of the highway was empty white scrubland, sloping so gently away that a man would easily be found in the crosshairs of a night-vision scope. It would be impossible to put himself out of range in the time remaining, and nothing out there to provide him with cover. He’d just decided his best option was to crawl into the scrub and lie flat when he glanced to the east and saw another set of headlights break over a hill, half a mile away in the opposite direction.

  All of a sudden, it was rush hour.

  The lights of this new vehicle were considerably higher and much more closely spaced, suggesting a small truck or some other commercial transport. That seemed a far safer bet than what Raszer feared was coming at him from the west. Some rough and hasty triangulation told him that the opposing headlights were roughly equidistant, so he opted to go belly down in the dust until the truck was within fifty yards, and then try to flag it down. In truth, he really didn’t have any choice.

  By the time he was settled in the dirt, the vehicles had covered another third of a mile. Only when he felt certain that the element of surprise would compel the driver on his left to stop, rather than swerve, did he rise to a sprinter’s crouch. He’d been granted a small window of grace by the caravan approaching from his right, for it seemed to be moving at the stately pace of a motorcade and was still a quarter mile away. He could only assume that the leisurely speed allowed the drivers to scan the countryside for prey. He could only assume this because he was paranoid.

  By the time he launched himself back onto the pavement, he had already identified the vehicle of his hoped-for salvation as a dolmus, one of the little buses that move the Turkish citizenry from village to remote village in the absence of a good rail line. Surely it will stop, he told himself, as he began to wave his arms with an authoritative urgency. The fog had begun to roll onto the road again, and although it provided a measure of cover, there was also the risk that the driver wouldn’t see him in time. Raszer glanced quickly over his shoulder. The motorcade had sped up. He waved his arms more insistently. From the look on the bus driver’s face as he ground to a halt on the center line, Raszer surmised that he probably wouldn’t have stopped, except to avoid running him down. Once he had, Raszer wasted no time leaping on.

  “Is there a village nearby?” he asked in rushed Arabic. “I’m lost.”

  The driver blinked. It was not his native language. It took a moment for him to compute the response. “There is only one village on this road. There we go.”

  “Good,” Raszer said, and smiled. “Allah is merciful.” He watched the movement of the caravan past the driver’s-side window. The cars rolled out of the mist one by one. On identifying the first, he felt momentarily silly. Far from being sinister, it was a lumbering grocery truck, probably the thing that had held up the traffic. “I will pay when we get there,” he assured the driver. “Let’s go.”

  The second set of headlights brought nothing more dangerous than a vintage Mercedes—a rarity in these parts, to be sure, but hardly the Fourth Horseman. The driver dropped the bus into gear but kept his foot on the brake, as if wondering for a moment if he shouldn’t eject this anxious stranger. The third set of headlights flared on the windshield, and Raszer heard Turkish pop music playing faintly from a car radio. The lights passed slowly and faded like a wink, but the music continued to issue from a stationary source. The bus driver turned to his window, and Raszer’s pulse hammered his larynx.

  The third vehicle had stopped beside them, long and sleek and so black that it stood out even against the half-hearted night. He waited for the tinted window to be lowered, part of him wanting to see the face behind it, and part of him poised to leap from the bus and scramble into the brush for whatever advantage distance and darkness might provide. Time skipped in place like the second hand on a broken watch. The window remained up, but Raszer knew that the eyes on the other side could see him in the green glow of the dome light. The question was what they saw. Was it Stephan Raszer or Father Deleuze? Attempted flight would point only to the former. The limo’s idle had dropped to a soft growl.

  The bus driver turned away from the window and lifted his foot from the brake.

  “Bless you,” Raszer whispered as the little vehicle began to accelerate.

  It wasn’t until they’d covered half a mile and he was sure that the black limo wasn’t going to pursue them that Raszer turned to survey the cabin for a seat and saw her. She was four rows back, right on the threshold of invisibility, her features lit only by the dull glow from the instrument panel. The pumpkin-colored hair—or wig, in this case—was pinned up, its tail sprouting like a flame from the top of her head. Her lips were parted and the lipstick matched the hair. Her green eyes were wide and staring. Raszer recognized the sleeping boy beside her as Mikhail from the Fedeli d’Amore compound. He must, he thought, be her escort.

  “Hello, Ruthie,” he said. “Fancy meeting you here.”

  He watched her watching him, reconstructing his face: restoring the hair to his shaven head, the natural color to his dyed eyebrows, the flesh to his disfigured cheek.

  The she raised her hand tentatively above the seat back and gave a little wave.

  TWENTY-NINE

  The air crackled the minute they set eyes on each other. Francesca and Ruthie were opposites, and not the kind that attract. Francesca was self-possessed and strong spined, and had the spiritual fierceness of a woman who has seen the world to be a deeply fucked-up place and steels herself each day to fight off its many evils and cultivate its few precious goods. Ruthie Endicott was also fierce, but in a feral, reactive way. She had also seen the world’s blemishes and seemed to feel she was one of them. She’d determined to be the antagonist, rather than the protagonist, in the story of her life. Both women were willful, utterly authentic and dead ce
rtain of their sexuality, and that’s probably where the trouble began.

  “How did she find us?” Francesca whispered, after taking Raszer aside.

  “Well, it would appear that Mikhail brought her here.”

  “Yes,” she said, with some impatience, “but how did she find Mikhail?”

  “I’m still trying to figure that. She says . . . that Shams told her long ago where to find the Fedeli. That’s possible, though getting here this quickly couldn’t have been easy. She says she borrowed the money from her mother’s boyfriend. That’s also possible. A stretch, but possible. She says she wants to be the one to bring her sister home. I don’t think that’s going to happen, but I’ll have to do some—”

  “She’ll put us all at risk.” said Francesca. “I can smell it.”

  “She’ll alter the equation, that’s for sure.”

  Raszer knew instantly that he’d come across as a shade too flip. Francesca’s long, fine nose thinned, and her dark brows shifted in preparation for a display of Mediterranean temper.

  “You go out—foolishly—without letting any of us know. You are gone for three hours—”