Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation

by A. W. Hill

  He motioned beyond the false sky. “Where I came from. Outside.”

  “What are you then . . . God?”

  “Not by a long way. But a priest gets to borrow God’s eyes once in a while.”

  She drew back. “You’re a priest?”

  “Don’t be ashamed. Priests are men, too.”

  “Not here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Circumstances permitting, she might have chosen to answer the question, or she might not have. As it was, Raszer saw her eyes widen as the words left his throat, and an instant later he was seized from behind and dragged to his feet by two men in pale green robes. A third stood by, holding a Kalashnikov. In a muffled tenor, he ordered, “Bring him” in Arabic.

  Raszer looked back over his shoulder as he was taken away, hoping to make a parting connection with Katy. If he was now to be granted an opportunity to make his plea for her, he wanted to feel that in some small way she might be complicit. She had risen to her feet. Behind her, the other girls who’d been listening in had come forward, and a group of the males flanked them jealously.

  A few things became marginally clear as Raszer was removed from the Garden: Despite her altered state, she knew who Katy Endicott was, even if only in the third person. The entire conversation had likely been witnessed from somewhere beyond the perimeter. She was alive, and real enough, but she was also a game piece and had been used to bait him. This he had to remember: Play the game.

  They passed through a small grove of persimmon trees, then into a darker stretch of junglelike foliage, and finally into total blackness. When the light returned, they had left paradise behind and were in the bowels of the castle.

  He couldn’t get a fix on the time of day. The corridor was narrow, and the walls of ancient rock sweated with damp. He assumed they were in a subterranean level of the fortress, within the mountain itself. There was an acrid smell of urine and other effluents: the odors of fear. Raszer’s mood went black. He wasn’t being led to the throne room to share mint tea with the monarch. He was to be interrogated.

  It was a small room. If your aim is to squeeze someone, you don’t want to give them a sense of space. The odor was stronger here, inseparable from the mineral scent of the stone. To his relief, there were no visible instruments of torture. There were two crude wooden chairs, and a rear door of rusted iron. They led him to one of the chairs and stood back. Presently, the iron door swung open heavily and a fourth man entered and sat down opposite him. He was not what Raszer had expected, and then again, he was.

  He was five feet, six inches of compact flesh in a Green River Security officer’s uniform, had graying blond locks, and was pushing sixty. He wore a Maltese cross around his neck and had “Jesus Loves Me” tattooed on his right forearm. Heavy folds of skin dropped over his eyes. He was the mercenary commander from the crossroads.

  “American?” he asked in a Midwestern accent.

  “Canadien,” Raszer answered.

  “Doubt it,” his questioner shot back. “But you do speak English, right?”

  “Oui. Yes.”

  “Excuse me, but go fuck yourself, Padre. We don’t exactly go by military convention here, but for the record, who is it you say you are and why are you here?”

  “My name is Gilles Deleuze. I am a Franciscan priest from the Taize community in France. We received a petition from a Catholic lay organization that works to retrieve missing girls believed to have been trafficked. My travel was arranged by International Refugee Relief in Iskenderun. I have all the documents.”

  “I really don’t give a rat’s anus about your ‘documents.’ And just who is it you think’s been trafficked?”

  “The young woman’s name is Katy Endicott. American. I—”

  “Right.” He drummed his fingers on the table, stood up, and walked around to Raszer’s rear. “Fuck this. Did Greenstreet send you?”

  Raszer considered his answer for perhaps a second too long. The interrogator nodded to the robed men, both of whom came forward and grabbed Raszer’s arms. The mercenary leaned in close enough for Raszer to feel the breath on his ear, reached between his legs, and clamped his testicles in the vise of his right hand.

  “Believe it or not, my friend, I’m the good cop. Now, if you force my hand, I’ll pop your balls out like peas from a peapod.”

  “That”—Raszer swallowed hard as the sweat broke—“would not be wise.”

  “And why is that?”

  “The U.S. State Department knows of my mission.”

  “Oooh,” replied the interrogator, squeezing harder. “The State Department!”

  “And others. But you are interfering with my memory.”

  The interrogator released just enough of his grip to allow Raszer fleeting relief. “Play smart. What’s the point in holding out when we already know who you are?”

  “I’ve told you who I am,” Raszer said. “But there is something more.”

  “And what’s that?” Finally, the mercenary took his hand away.

  “I have something the Old Man wants. Something that was stolen from him.”

  The interrogator glanced at his three accomplices, then glared at Raszer. “Okay, ‘Jill.’ I’ll be Jack, and you and I will go fetch a pail of water.” He stood up and nodded to the robed guards. “Take him in. Call for me when he starts to leak.”

  “You seem a clever man,” said Raszer. “So you must know that my being here changes the game. Let me walk out with one girl, and you keep the advantage.”

  The mercenary nodded to the iron door. “We’ll talk after your baptism,” he said.

  The robed guards hoisted Raszer from the chair and took him into the adjoining room, while behind him the mercenary commander wiped his hands with a white rag. The door closed heavily. Raszer stared mutely at the device parked against the opposing wall. A museum piece, vintage 1550, kept in good use.

  For just a moment after he’d seen it, he became a man without moorings.

  The thought that he was going to be tortured into a “confession” seemed almost ludicrous until he reminded himself of the game. In the second and third levels of The Gauntlet, as originally devised by the Fraters, the player was pursued through cyberspace, and eventually via emails, text messages, and even phone calls, by a Grand Inquisitor intent on making him disavow his creed. Of course it made sense that in this demonically hijacked version of the game, a player like Raszer would have to come to such a moment as this. Lunatics always literalized their fantasies.

  The robed men stripped him of his clothes.

  From studying what allowed rational people to believe in irrational things, Raszer had learned this essential about faith: 10 percent of it came from being shown something—maybe a miracle, more likely a beauty never seen or a message never heard. The other 90 percent came from the will to believe that the thing shown is what it’s claimed to be. A water stain or the face of Jesus? A dust mote caught by sunlight or a faerie? Raszer had discarded the agnosticism that argues that such a willing suspension of disbelief amounts to self-delusion. It wasn’t delusion; it was replacing one form of seeing with another. It was accepting the possibility of the sublime.

  The Philby Greens had given him an implement of survival. A second self. The question was, could he figure out quickly enough how to operate it?

  The men led him to the table. He knew better than to put up a fight.

  The sloping platform was made of solid oak and had the dimensions of a single bed. The head end was approximately three inches below the foot, which put the subject at an incline known as Trendelenburg position. The physics of it had all been worked out over time with that exquisite acuity of thought that characterizes the design of all instruments of torture. There were steel brackets to secure feet and hands, and straps for the torso. Once the men had secured Raszer’s legs and midsection, they stretched his arms fully above his head and locked them down at the elbow.

  He waited for the water.

  A third man entered the room
, this one in the multilayered black garment of the order’s sharifs. He wore a veil across the lower two-thirds of his face—a head surgeon from Hades. He smelled of some aromatic balm, and his eyelids and lashes were darkened with kohl. Raszer had seen three of his rank of the reviewing platform, all of the same height and build. Had one of them been the Black Sheikh of Shams’ fable?

  With what seemed a single motion, the new inquisitor pinched Raszer’s nostrils shut, inserted an eye dropper in his reflexively opened mouth, and dosed the back of his throat with a burning tincture. Raszer felt paralysis spread instantly over the length and breadth of his body, along with a sickening familiarity: It was a variant of the same dope with which Layla had incapacitated him in Hollywood.

  He could feel everything, but he could not move, except to talk or scream.

  “Let us begin,” said the leader. His voice had a quality that Raszer—had he not been stone terrified—might have found ridiculous. Where had he heard it before?

  Again, he waited for the stream of water to hit his face. Instead, he felt a spike enter the back of his neck just below the skull, and something pressed to his scalp above each temple. God help me, he thought. They’re going to mix water and electricity.

  “Would you like me to stop now?” the inquisitor asked. He must have felt Raszer tense, as a sensitive dentist does when he’s gone too close to the nerve.

  “Yes,” Raszer gurgled.

  “Who are you?” In Arabic. “What is your name?”

  Raszer repeated what he’d told the mercenary.

  “Who is Philby Greenstreet?”

  “A djinn,” Raszer answered. “Nobody.”

  The sheikh nodded to the others, then stepped back with a rustle of silk.

  It was suddenly dark. Not dark as if someone had turned out the lights, but dark as in blindness. As in a total absence of stimulation to the optic nerve. Whatever they’d stuck in the back of his head had short-circuited his vision. A series of images snapped across his brain, not like sporadic video signals, but like dreams. Impossible things.

  He saw Monica in the mirror, but from an angle that suggested her point of view. She stroked the mascara onto her lash, and so did he. She stepped lightly into her pumps, and so did he. He saw the assassin enter the bathroom, snap her head back, and plunge the knife into his heart, and felt a deeper pain than he had ever felt.

  “Jesus!” he screamed.

  “Don’t call for Jesus,” the inquisitor said in Arabic. “He is nobody.”

  The light flooded back into Raszer’s eyes, and he saw his tormentor. The pain was still there, and all warmth had begun to drain from his center.

  “J’ai froid,” he said.

  “Désolé,” replied the sheikh. “Would you like me to stop?”

  “Oui.”

  “Qui est Philby Greenstreet?”

  “Personne.”

  The lights went out again.

  Now he was at a rain-streaked window, his little palm pressed against the pane, as if to feel the torrent through her fingertips. He could see her reflection in the glass, pensive, waiting. She called for her father, and a man in a duster appeared in the room behind. He took her from the stool, his enormous copper-stained hand over her mouth, and folded her roughly over the back of the sofa. He was strong enough to do it with one arm; the other lifted her dress. The man stank, and he was wet from the rain.

  “Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God!” Raszer screamed. “Brrriiiigggiiittt!”

  He felt himself entered, and violated, and torn, and bleeding, and there was no one there to stop it. No father. No mother. Not even Monica, because she was dead. The sounds that came from his throat were not sounds that he could associate with himself or anything human. They were the sounds you’d hear if you put your ear to the wall of hell. The lights came back on, but Raszer couldn’t see because his eyes were full of tears.

  “Would you like me to stop?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Who is Philby Greenstreet?”

  “Je suis Philby Greenstreet.”

  Something happened in the time between. He figured out what he needed to do. If the dreamlife of his second self was suffering unendurable torture, he would seek a lesser hell in the dreamlife of the first, the primary self. If that’s what it was. Another time, another table, another group of robed practitioners, and death hovering close by.

  His heart had stopped, though that wasn’t how the attending doctors had put it. Like all priestly elites, they spoke in code. The place inside his head became a big, noisy room suddenly emptied of people, in which an alien sound, heard only faintly below the previous din, was now very much audible. The sound—which might have been the drone of the heart monitor—began to separate into strands. Other voices in other rooms. He rose from the gurney and walked, pulling the IV cart along with him. He turned a corner and saw the floor nurse, slipping his personal effects into a plastic bag. He stepped through a door into a room without walls. The voices there were louder. A young woman was in the Muslim posture of prayer, toes curled under, forehead pressed to the ground. She looked at his face and then at his wrists, which were cut and dripping large amounts of blood onto the floor. Her wrists were bleeding, too. “How could you do this to us?” she asked him. He bandaged the girl’s wrists, then staggered back and doubled over in pain.

  The sudden jolt of the defibrillator panels then obscured all sound and light. There were flashes of illumination—comic-book lurid. Pow! Zap! Sizzle! His spine whipped. The room began to fill again. The doctors were back. He felt a searing pain in his left eye, as if a blown ember from a nearby fire had entered it. “Look,” said the nurse. “Do you see that? His eyelid is burning.” The doctor leaned in, then leapt back, a hand on his cheek. “Jesus! What the hell is that?” Another voice said, “He’s on fire from the inside. Impossible. Turn off the lights.”

  A curtain was parted. “Let him cool off,” said a voice in Arabic. “Then we will proceed.” Raszer felt hardness rise up under him with the color red.

  There was something warm on his shoulder blades. It was the only part of him that felt relief. The warmth, he realized after opening his eyes, was the sun. He was alone on a balcony that protruded from the base of the fortress out over the chasm, and he was face down in a pool of his own sweat. The floor was of some dark-age amalgam, painted a faded red, and the walls rose to his solar plexus. They had dressed him in a pair of drawstring muslin pants, a nominal concession to modesty. He stood with difficulty and walked slowly to the wall. He rested his arms on it and remained there for quite a while, bending to cough out phlegm and bile when the urge came.

  Far below, through the valleys beneath the serrated mountains, the Silk Road caravans had traveled, laden with peppercorns and coffee—things men had once killed for. The position of the sun made it midday. Raszer was there an hour before anyone came.

  The curtains parted.

  “Are you feeling better?” the man asked, in an unnervingly delicate voice.

  “That’s all relative, isn’t it?” Raszer replied.

  “As all things are,” answered the sheikh.

  The voice, the robes, and the bearing were similar—identical, in fact—to those of his torturer, but it seemed possible that this was a different man.

  “All things? Even Allah?”

  “If by Allah, you mean that which presides over the machinery of the universe, this is coeternal with the universe . . . but its interpretation by man is relative.”

  “The Qur’an—some would say—is also an interpretation. Is its truth relative?”

  “The truth of the Prophet’s revelation is not in the text. One must have eyes to see it. Most see only words, and no word can be read without prejudice. Worse, men try to divine moral law from them, and there is no kinship between law and revelation. The truth of the Qur’an is that there is no truth but God, and God is incomprehensible.”

  “I wonder what truth you hoped to divine from torturing me.”

  “Tru
th is not the point of torture.”

  “Truly,” said Raszer. “Are you the god of this place, who determines who will suffer and who will be granted pardon?”

  “Anyone can be a god,” replied the sheikh. “Consider the dog taken from its mother and placed in a strange home. It has been stripped of the familiar, and will offer unqualified devotion to the first person who provides it with sustenance . . . even though that person may in the next moment beat it severely. Shall I demonstrate?”

  “It wouldn’t have effect, and I know that’s what you’re after. I’ve been to the well of nothing, and found it wasn’t empty. You can take everything, and God will still be there. That is the reason to develop faith: to survive monsters like you.”