Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation

by A. W. Hill

  “Just so. The world is a mere representation. A facsimile! What is lost if it ends?”

  “Nothing will be lost,” said Raszer. “But we will have failed. And if a man can’t see the form of heaven on Earth, there’s no reason to think he’ll recognize it later.”

  “You are clever, but you are wrong,” the bird said, “and living in vapors. We, too, have created a place that many see as heaven, but this does not make it so. You are no less fooled. There is no heaven on Earth, and no God in the lotus. Worldly existence has no purpose other than the acquisition of advantage. You have, however, seen the shadow of the real, which is that Qiyama is here for those who can dispel illusion. We are not many. We draw from a great well of power at the base of the world mountain, which connects in turn to all the wells of all the mountains of all the worlds. Let the human cattle play their games. We are the GamesMasters. We will enter heaven.”

  “Then pull some strings for me,” said Raszer. “I want the girl.”

  “Why save what is already lost? Why settle for a trinket . . . ”

  Raszer said nothing, but watched as the peacock’s image flickered--

  “ . . . When you can have emeralds?”

  --and was replaced by the magisterial figure of the Old Man, robed in vibrant green, at first materializing in the illusory space inside the mirror, then finally taking his place as a mere reflection, seen over Raszer’s left shoulder.

  “Do not turn around,” said a voice richer than the bird’s but of the same unsettling ambiguity. “Regard me only in the mirror, or you will die.”

  “Whatever you say,” Raszer agreed.

  The Old Man stepped closer. An inch or two shy of Raszer’s height, his head was entirely covered except for the eyeholes, and his body was draped in so many layers of silk that it was impossible to determine what sort of frame was underneath.

  “You may take the girl, but only after you have pledged fidelity to me.”

  “I’m already pledged to another.”

  “Do you not know that I can see through your disguise, priest?”

  “You can never be entirely sure, though, can you? That’s the beauty of disguise. All it asks is a grain of doubt. And besides, the purpose of disguise isn’t only to fool others. It’s to allow the wearer to be someone else.”

  “What will you give me, then?”

  “I’ll give you the black stone. I’ll walk out with the girl; she’ll be handed over to a Kurdish unit outside the gates and held at a location close by until it’s in your possession. I doubt Mam Rahim will break the rules, because he knows your mercenaries will play polo with his head and most likely slaughter his family if he does.”

  “And how can you be sure that we won’t . . . ‘break the rules’?”

  There was a lengthy pause.

  Raszer’s sensors began to tick. In the air surrounding them was a distinct electricity. “Come closer,” he said, “and I’ll tell you why I trust you.”

  He heard the slippered foot move across the stone floor and felt the toe against his heel. He heard the soft shifting of fabric and felt the arms encircle his hips. The hands fluttered to rest, one atop the other, over his groin. He froze.

  “Leave the world,” the robed figure breathed, “and be immortal with us.”

  From the breath carrying the words came the scent of methyl salicylate. Oil of wintergreen. He glanced down at the slender hands caressing him, and saw that on one of them, a digit was missing where a ring finger should have been.

  “Layla?” he said. In a heartbeat, the figure folded into thin air like a time-lapse sequence in reverse and returned to the mirror. The red walls lifted like painted flats, and Raszer found himself in an expansive court, watching three black figures—the puppet masters of his new fate—approach him from a colonnade on the far end. In light of what he’d seen, he ought to have been awed by their mastery of the game.

  But Raszer was beyond awe, beyond exhaustion, beyond anything but wanting to make the right move.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  He was allowed to collect his belongings before being taken to Katy. He’d been told that she’d been informed of his coming, but it was clear when they arrived in the garden that she hadn’t exactly packed her bags. He watched from a distance as two of the guards tried to martial her. He grew concerned when she shook her head and began to scoot away from the stream bank where she sat with some of the other girls. When they tried to pick her up, she kicked desperately, broke free, and tore off toward a far grove of plum trees. One guard took off after her; the other turned toward the black-sheathed figure standing beside Raszer and gestured, as if to say, What now?

  Katy’s behavior was not at all atypical of the children, wives, and husbands Raszer had been hired over the last decade to spring from various prisons that most had walked into with eyes open, and it should have ceased to confound him. She flailed wildly, and he flinched when the guard struck her to the ground.

  “This won’t do,” he said firmly.

  “I will take care of it,” said his robed companion.

  “Please,” said Raszer, pressing his luck. “Give me a few minutes with her . . . ”

  “A few minutes,” said the GamesMaster. “The clock is running on this move.”

  Katy spotted him when he crossed the stream; she stilled, her expression as wary as a cornered animal’s. Raszer stopped eight feet short of where she sat beneath the tree.

  “Aïcha?” he said.

  She turned halfway.

  “Do you remember who I am?”

  Just the slightest nod. Mostly in the eyes.

  “I want to take you home.”

  A question formed on her face. Where?

  “No. Not where you came from. Where you belong.”

  He moved a couple of steps closer.

  “I have to leave for a little bit, but I’ll be back for you. With Ruthie.”

  He sat down beside her, and she didn’t move away.

  “Aïcha was born here,” she said quietly. “She’ll die outside.”

  “That’s probably true,” Raszer said. “But there’s another woman waiting. None of us is ever just one person. The thing is to choose the one you like best and settle in with her. It won’t be the one your father or mother knew. If you choose wisely, it’ll be the one that most resembles the reflection of God’s face in your heart.”

  She rolled her eyes up to the false sky. “But the world is gone. They told me so. All in flames.”

  “After the fire, Katy, things grow again.” He paused. “Silas, your father, died a few weeks ago. So you’re free to be whomever you imagine yourself to be.”

  She didn’t seem to know how to connect to the information.

  “Listen,” he said. “You know about the game, right? The boys told you?”

  She nodded.

  “All I’m asking . . . is for you to let me be your guide.”

  “But I don’t know how to play,” she said.

  “That’s all right,” he said. “I’ll teach you.”

  Raszer left her there, beside the tree, in the counterfeit garden, beneath the counterfeit sky, and made his way out. The minute he set foot on the rocky ground outside the enormous iron gates, things resolved for him in a stark and sobering way. He understood why Ruthie had come, and why he’d allowed her to stay. He saw that she, too, had a character to portray in the “chaotic fiction” of his current enterprise. In truth, she might in large measure be its author, given that she had brought him to Shams, and Shams had ushered him into whatever sort of gamespace he now occupied.

  TINAG. This is not a game. Not like any he’d ever played, anyway.

  And though he might have wished for the cup to be taken from his hands, he also understood that whatever Ruthie had set in motion had already fixed certain probabilities.

  A detachment of Green River mercenaries accompanied Raszer to the place half a mile down the access road where he’d previously arranged to meet Dante and Ruthie. Raszer couldn’t be su
re if the guards’ silence was a consequence of orders from their captain, or of the fact that a number of them appeared to be Central or South American, with the high cheekbones and sculpted fierceness of jungle fighters. In any case, they weren’t the talkative sort. These were the new model soldiers of fortune, drawn from death squads in places like Chile and El Salvador. They also represented a new kind of colonialism, since their commanders were mostly American or British—some Belgian or even Dutch. The East India Company lived. The empire never ended. The pan-Islamic wars had built them into a global private army, at the calling of anyone with a fat enough purse.

  “We’ll stop up here,” said Raszer, pointing to an overlook up ahead, “and wait.”

  The gunman who seemed to be nominally in charge asked, “How long?”

  “As long as it takes,” said Raszer. “They’ll come.”

  The mercenaries remained at arms. They didn’t banter, or squat in the white soil to share cigarettes or pictures of girls back home. They were, after all, professionals.

  After about twenty minutes, Dante’s sun-bleached head cropped up from the boulders, on the side of the ridge opposite the sanctuary entrance. This was good. Had he shown up too quickly and come from the right, the gunmen would have quickly deduced the location of the cave. Dante hesitated when he saw the battery of automatic weapons, and ducked out of sight until Raszer had called out a second time.

  Cupping his hands, he shouted the prearranged all clear: “The king is dead!” And then, when the boy had come within twenty yards, “Bring Ruthie!”

  “It’ll take some time!” Dante called back.

  “That’s all right! I need her here! Katy needs her!”

  When Dante had gone, Raszer finally sat. It didn’t matter that the ground was hard, or that two muzzles were trained on him. It didn’t matter that they’d just as soon saw off his head. The sun was warm, he was bone-tired, and after he had smoked a cigarette, he lay back against an angled rock and slept.

  In his dream, he’d misplaced a set of keys and could not enter his own house. Other doors of other houses were unlocked, but not his. He was making tea in the kitchen of one of the houses when a woman appeared. It was his wife, but he didn’t know her. She pointed at him and asked, “What’s wrong with your face?”

  When he woke, it was to the prodding of the head gunman’s toe.

  “Wake the fuck up,” he heard the man say.

  Ascending the rocky path from the right was a figure whose form vibrated in and out of register, like a desert mirage. Long strands of auburn hair whipped across her round face. At first glance, she seemed a runaway from his dream.

  What the hell is this? he said to himself.

  It was Ruthie as he’d seen her the first time, waiting on the deck of her stepfather’s trailer. It was Ruthie as Katy.

  How long, he wondered, had she been preparing for this entrance? How remarkable, to have thought to bring the wig and the dress to the other side of the world, to carry them, secreted in her pack, across a mountain range. For a long time, she seemed to be moving in place. If he was not mistaken, she was smiling.

  He said, when at last she stood close, “You think we’re playing dress-up?”

  “You are, aren’t you?” she replied.

  Dante now appeared in the brush on the left, and Raszer signaled him over.

  “We’re on,” he told the boy. “Everything as planned. I’ll be at the gates in an hour. Once things are in motion, go back and wait for us. We’ll meet you there.”

  He turned back to Ruthie. “Let’s go. I’ll explain on the way.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  The party made its way from the garden, slowly threading the maze of corridors, and finally entered the vast atrium inside the fortress gates. Raszer had Katy’s right arm, Ruthie her left, and they were flanked by the gunmen, with the American and the three black-robed GamesMasters in the rear. Katy’s gait was uncertain, like that of someone leaving a sanitarium after a long period of bed rest. Her eyes, after more than a year in the Garden’s unceasing light, could not adjust to the dimness of the halls.

  Outwardly, she was in pretty good shape, though all her muscles had gone slack. Psychically, it was another story. She kept looking back toward the garden as if she’d forgotten something. Most likely, she’d been taken there initially in a drugged state, as he had, and, because it presented such an extraordinary illusion of limitless space, had never even considered that it might be contained within the walls of a stone box.

  When they reached the inner gate, Raszer turned to the American. “If your men have nervous trigger fingers, tell them to park them. You may think you know the score, but you don’t. Just let me walk away with Katy, and not a shot will be fired.”

  The first gate rolled open, and when blue sky appeared through the second, heavier gates, it was picketed with the rifle barrels of the Kurdish unit.

  In their midst stood Francesca, cradling a small wrapped bundle. Raszer gave her a nod and she stepped forward. The Kurds leveled their rifles, and the mercenaries of El Mirai responded in kind. Taking Francesca’s package with one hand, Raszer handed Katy off to her with the other.

  In the immediate wake of the exchange, Katy cast an anxious glance at her sister, who’d stepped back from her place at Raszer’s side. She stood now in the crossed shadow of the mercenaries’ rifles. He couldn’t read Ruthie’s face, but caught the almost imperceptible shake of her head. Before he could reflect, other shadows swept across and the sound of massed boots on scree signaled the arrival of a second unit of Green River mercenaries. He counted eighteen of them, and they surrounded the Kurdish unit, pinning them between their guns and the castle gate. Raszer turned to the black sheikh nearest him. He presumed it was his own tormentor, but could not be sure.

  “If one shot is fired, we all will die,” he said.

  After a beat, the sheikh turned to the mercenary leader and gave a nod. It was barely more than a tic, but it served its purpose, and tension dropped a notch. Raszer put the parcel into his hands, took a step back, and turned briefly to check Ruthie. She hadn’t moved. He narrowed his eyes and motioned for her to join her sister. For the second time in fifteen seconds, he saw that same faint shake of the head. He kept his eyes on her as his pulse rose and his mind raced to decipher her body’s code.

  The sheikh unwrapped the bundle, put the stone to the sky, and turned it until the idiosyncratic dimple revealed itself. He handed it to the second of his rank and motioned him inside. After the man had disappeared, the GamesMaster raised his palm and said, “Wait.”

  After a few minutes, there came from within the fortress the sound of fervent incantation. Raszer reasoned—if reason had a place here—that the chant was addressed to the stone, and that a servitor was being summoned. Magick, like expensive drugs, had to be tested before the buy was made. And bluffs had to be called.

  Raszer looked to Ruthie. Her eyes were on her sister. He couldn’t help but wonder now, remembering the Polaroid snapshots he’d seen that day in Detective Aquino’s office, if that look said, Let’s play the game we used to. You be me, and I’ll be you.

  There was a sharp cry of affirmation from inside, followed by the shout “Atar’atah! Hi-yae Ho-nae!” The robed man nearest Raszer nodded, and Raszer motioned for Francesca and the Kurdish detail to move out. The two remaining Masters slipped through the gates as they began to roll shut on massive iron casters. He walked to Ruthie and held out his hand, and when she gripped it, he thought for an instant all might be well. The rear gates would be sealed in another ten seconds, and the outside gates had already begun to close. She released his hand, put her arms around his neck, and kissed him on the mouth before backing through the line of gunmen and into the crack that remained between light and darkness. He lunged for her, but found a muzzle in his face and the ranks closed. An instant later, the gates came together with a gnashing of steel teeth.

  Raszer cursed the sun, and had momentary reason to wonder if it was any more real th
an the one that shone on the Garden.

  They had switched places.

  When they had reached the sanctuary and stationed their guard, he sat down with Katy not far from the vertical cave entrance, a man-size rabbit hole that offered just enough light for her to see him. He chose not to question her about the mechanics of the exchange. He didn’t question her at all, because he didn’t yet know what answers he was looking for. He could see that her own gates were drawing shut, and might remain closed for a while. He’d seen it in so many of his strays: this icing over, this pulling into the shell. There was shame to deal with, and rage, and fear, and, most confusing of all, there was missing the devil you knew—in this case, a devil with an opium fix—and the captivity you had come to trust. And so Raszer took her hands in his, and after a while began to hum a tune to her. Francesca and Dante sat nearby, their backs against the cavern wall, while the Kurdish retinue covered the entrance. It would be dark in an hour, and Raszer had decided they’d wait for morning.