Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation

by A. W. Hill

  Her pulse, felt faintly through her palms, was as slow as a yogi’s. Her newly dilated pupils made her eyes almost black, and soft. She seemed to like the humming. He knew why: There was no drug quite like opium, nothing that made a person feel as cozy and safe. All things became haloed with soft, diffuse gaslight. None of this placidness, however, would survive Katy’s inevitable crash. Soon she’d be climbing the cavern walls, clawing the dirt, and probably kicking him. He began thinking about a new plan.

  After a long time, she decided to speak.

  “Where’re we going?” she asked.

  “Eventually . . . America,” he answered. “After that, where you want to go.”

  “I don’t know about that.” A pause. “I guess I’d still like to see Washington?”

  “Washington . . . ” he repeated. “D.C.?”

  She nodded. “We were going there. For Christmas. Does it snow there?”

  “Sometimes,” he said. “A field trip. Nice. Were they always that nice to you?”

  She kept her eyes on him for a long time in the fading light. Then she dropped her head, shook it from side to side, and began to cry softly. He held her hands firmly, feeling her pulse begin to spike up a little. After a while, he said, “Listen, I’m going over to talk to Francesca for just a minute. Dante over there, he’ll keep watch over you.”

  He stood and nearly toppled over. He was dizzy from hunger and exhaustion. He motioned for Francesca to walk with him.

  “What did they do to you in there?” she asked, seeing him stagger.

  “I’m not ready to talk about it yet,” he replied. Beneath the cave entrance, he lit a cigarette and fell back against the rock. “I can’t believe I didn’t think about this . . . ”

  “About what?” she asked.

  “They got her strung out on high-grade black opium, and she’s going to crash real soon. If she wigs out, they’re going to find this place, and I’m not the least bit sure they won’t kill us all.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think we send you and Katy ahead to the village with the soldiers. Dante and I will keep two of them behind to guide us down later.”

  “I don’t understand. Why don’t we all go?”

  “Two reasons,” he said. “The first is the separate-boats strategy we’ve already agreed to. The second is that I need to think . . . about Ruthie. About what to do.”

  “What to do about Ruthie?” she repeated, moving in close on him. “She walked right in there, as she undoubtedly intended to from the start. She made her choice. Excuse me . . . but fuck her!”

  “I know I should go with your gut, Francesca. I agree, her staying didn’t look coerced. That’s just the problem. There has to have been some kind of deal made, but when . . . and with whom, and for what?”

  “Stupido uomo!” she said. “It’s not enough to survive. You have to figure it all out. You don’t even see the answer right before your eyes.”

  He exhaled a long plume of smoke and regarded her steadily. “Oh, I see,” he said. “Believe me, Francesca of the Fedeli d’Amore. I see.” He stamped out the cigarette. “What time did Monica say the helicopter would be there?”

  She looked at her watch. “In a little less than eight hours: 4:00 am.”

  “I want you to go. You speak Kurdish. I want you to ask the unit leader to radio ahead to Rahim and ask him to meet you halfway. Then stay with him until the chopper comes.”

  “When will I see you?”

  “I’ll be there by four, if not earlier. I just need to work some things through.”

  “And if you are not there?”

  He took her head in his hands. “I will be. But no matter what, you get her—and Dante—into that helicopter before sunrise, back to the vehicles, and back to your base. You promise me, okay? Monica will get me out. Promise me, Francesca.”

  She reached up to touch the scar she’d left him, then sucked in a breath and nodded.

  It took Raszer an hour to prepare Katy to leave without him, and it felt like the rush job it was. He’d earned a small measure of her trust, only to turn her out into a harsh world on her own. He was cutting corners with her soul. He did as much of the restoration work as he could, but came up short. At some point, he muttered words of apology. She looked at him oddly and said, “Just please don’t put me in a truck, okay? I don’t like the dark.”

  “A truck?”

  “If you sell me or trade me to someone. Wherever it is I’m going.”

  “You’re not being traded to anyone, Katy,” he said, taking her hands. “You’re going home.”

  When they had gone and it was just and Dante and Raszer and the two remaining soldiers, Raszer sat down beside the boy and let out a long, low moan.

  “It must take a lot out of you,” Dante said, “someone that damaged.”

  “I’m pretty wrung out. But there’s so much more to do.”

  “I don’t know how you got her out of there so fast. I mean . . . I’ve been in there.”

  “Well, if they knew they were getting Ruthie, I may not deserve much credit.”

  “There’s always a trade-off, isn’t there? What matters is breaking even.”

  “I don’t think even’s going to be enough,” Raszer said, looking long and deep at Dante. “But I wish I’d thought so when I was your age.” He paused. “You’re way ahead of my station. You’re going to have a very interesting life.”

  “Shit . . . I hope it’s half as interesting as yours.”

  Raszer laughed softly. “Why don’t you try to get a little sleep while you can?”

  In his mind, Raszer went back over every frame of the time Ruthie had spent inside the fortress. He didn’t believe he had ever fully taken his eyes off her. Yes, he’d left the sisters alone in the Garden, but they’d always been in his sight and had never with a third person. Yet Ruthie had stepped into her sister’s place as seamlessly as an understudy replaces an actor in a Broadway production. Raszer was stuck on the why. And in the far chambers of his mind, he was trying to figure out some way to avoid the consequences it implied.

  There was the slightest ripple of sound around his ears, but not enough of a signature for his brain to subject it to analysis. The Kurdish soldiers—who knew, as hill fighters, that an unsuppressed sneeze could draw a bullet—made no sound. He scanned the area surrounding the narrow slit of a cave entrance and saw no movement. Dante was curled up nearby, but Raszer was certain he hadn’t stirred. Now came another sound, this one defined enough for his mind to replay: a stone skittering down the steep mountainside and landing with a plunk. Every hair bristled. There was trouble. Raszer rose to a crouch and crossed the cavern to Dante.

  “Hey!” he whispered, and kept some distance so the boy wouldn’t wake with a shout. “Listen to me now. You’ve got to go, got to get out of here.”

  It took a few seconds for Dante to put things in register. “What? Why?” he asked.

  “No time. Is there another way out of here? When I saw you this afternoon, it looked like you’d . . . is there a rear exit?”

  Dante nodded, troubled. “For a skinny guy like me. But—”

  “Then go. Now. And whatever happens, make sure Katy’s on that first chopper out.” The boy hesitated, and Raszer gave him a push. “Wake up. Go.” He paused. “And live.”

  Once Dante was out, Raszer climbed into the main entrance, a near-vertical shaft on the boulder-strewn mountainside. The moon had now risen level with the opening, its pale glow illuminating his face. He hoisted himself into the chimney and boosted himself up to its mouth, keeping his eyes at ground level. A second later, he heard a whispered but percussive pffftt-pffftt, followed by an exhalation and a thump. The first was probably the sound of a high-grade silencer, at least 90 decibels of attenuation. The second was unmistakable: a body hitting the hard earth.

  There was suddenly open gunfire, the second Kurdish soldier’s defense. A cascade of silenced gunshots followed, and then the call, “He’s down.”

 
It was the voice of the American mercenary.

  It was a nightmare’s conundrum. Raszer didn’t want to go back down, because he’d be cornered like an animal. He didn’t want to run, because in open country he would be too easy a target. And if he remained where he was . . .

  His neck was suddenly in a vise grip. They pulled him out of the chimney and tossed him roughly onto the rocky ground.

  “Right where she said he’d be,” said the American, a gray lock of his center-parted hair over one eye. “Six more weeks of winter for you, my friend. I hope you brought a coat.” He dropped to one knee, leaned in, and said, “A piece of advice: Never, ever trust a whore.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  The plateau from which the fortress of El Mirai commanded the landscape had been heaved up from the earth a hundred million years before. Its highest point, a mere 2,700 feet above sea level, made it one of the lesser formations in the range, but its monolithic form—along with the remarkable land ramp leading to its summit—more than compensated for its size. Its reputation as a seat of supernatural (and malevolent) power stemmed from a history enhanced by centuries of legend.

  This much was known: At some point in human memory, a meteor the size of a house had slammed into the valley floor at the mountain’s base, throwing up a titanic amount of earth and creating the land bridge that led to the gates. In the annals of Islam, the fortress had over the centuries been host to more than one form of exotic heresy, sometimes nominally Muslim, mostly not. The mountain’s location in a remote wasteland claimed by everyone, but deeded to no one, had made long tenancies possible. As far back as the tenth century, Islamic cartographers had been known to say, “The land to the east belongs to the Sassanids of Persia, and this to the north and west to the Seljuk Turks. This to the south is Urartian, but this—this land in the center—belongs to Shaytan.”

  Finally, there was the light that gave the fortress its name. At certain times of day, under certain conditions, one could look across the broad canyon from a nearby vantage point and see nothing but brown rock and blue sky where the castle had previously been. Inevitably, this vanishing act occurred when the viewer was pointing out El Mirai to a skeptic.

  In times past, a party approaching El Mirai from the south would have seen—if the light was right—the fortress spread like a medina in shades of pale green and saffron yellow across the rocky crown. Below its massive walls, the cliff face was sheer and striated, and dropped nine hundred feet to the slope. At a certain point when ascending the land bridge, the angle of view would reveal the scaffold—beside and below the enormous iron gates—where the enemies of El Mirai were hung from the cliffside, sometimes headless or limbless, and left as offerings to the huge black vultures who were the true gods of this place.

  On this particular day in the present time, a smuggler or arms merchant climbing the path to that same vantage point—seeking a good price for contraband, or looking to purchase dated stocks of old Soviet-bloc munitions and sell them back at a markup to the U.S. and Britain—would have been greeted by a similar horror. Stopping in his tracks, mouth agape, he would think, Poor bastard. Then, recovering, he would say to himself, Better him than me. If he chose to proceed, he would do so knowing to be very careful, so that he did not end up, like this man, dangling over an abyss and crying out the thousand names of God.

  Raszer had been on the wall for three hours by the time the sun began to bleed over the eastern horizon. He was suspended by a heavy leather strap from an ancient iron spike that had been hammered centuries ago into the rock. It was clear from the vintage of the spike and the wear of the leather that he was not the first to have hung here. He did not know yet whether it had been an act of mercy or practiced sadism for them to have left his body intact. That would depend on how long it took him to die.

  The strap had already bitten deeply into his wrists and arrested the circulation of blood to his hands. He knew this because he couldn’t feel them. The angle of his suspension guaranteed this because, although the cliff face appeared perfectly vertical from a distance, it was in fact just slightly oblique. In order to brace his feet against the rock and bring any relief to his arms, Raszer had to arch his spine and kick back until his heels found some tiny notch to rest in, and they never held for more than a few seconds. This action put even more strain on the strap and on his arms, and with a gasp he would feel his heels lose their purchase and the panic rush in as he found himself once again dangling over the chasm, praying that the spike would hold.

  He couldn’t have dissuaded them. He had nothing left to offer, and nothing of value to confess. Besides, as he’d been reminded, truth wasn’t the point of torture, much less of execution. They’d spelled it out before they took him out to the cliff.

  “Before you die, you will come to a realization: Your life had no meaning. You mattered to nothing and no one, least of all to God. Whatever god you choose as a buoy in life will abandon you when death is near.”

  “Can I ask you a question?” Raszer had said.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “When you conjure your servitor from the stone and demand that she work your will on the world, aren’t you admitting the possibility of grace? If supernatural agency can move the machinery of the universe, doesn’t that suggest a power source?”

  “You misread us if you take us for agnostics. There are powers in the universe, or the stars would never have flared into being. They are there to be used. What there is not is anything that cares. What there is not is anything that remotely resembles love.”

  “I would trade one moment of my existence for a thousand lifetimes of yours.”

  “We’ll see if you feel that way after eight hours on the wall.”

  The last hours of night, for all their agony, had offered a kind of hope. With the sun, at least he wouldn’t be so cold. With the sun, he could be seen, and if seen, pitied, and if pitied, saved.

  But when the sun came, it only spread light on the bleakness all around him: ridge after gray ridge of treeless, grassless, lifeless rock. What sort of angel could be summoned from this landscape? What kind of terrible djinns had the prophets of old invoked to do their bidding, only to have them turn on their masters and demand worship? Marduk? Baal? Yahweh?

  Raszer’s right heel, already bruised and raw from the night’s kicking and flailing, slipped out of its temporary pocket, and as he swung free, the canyon floor rushed up at him. He felt a spasm, then a bolt of pain in his chest, and convulsed, drawing his knees up sharply and causing the spike to ping from strain.

  He surmised that his death would come from heart failure. That was probably how this execution worked. If it was to be, he hoped it would happen before his spirit broke, though it was usually the other way around. A prisoner in the Soviet gulag had once written in his journal that the number of hours a man could withstand torture was directly proportional, by a factor of .333, to the weight of his soul, a weight that ranged from nine to twenty-seven grams. The man had probably lost his mind, but the idea made a certain kind of sense. Raszer began to think that his soul might be of insufficient weight.

  What he was feeling was the onset of despair. It came with the sun.

  About eighteen inches to his right, and a foot or so above his head, there was an indentation in the rock, a kind of natural alcove with a narrow ledge. He’d noticed it after dawn and thought that if somehow he could swing his feet up to it, he might get some blood flowing back into his trunk. Of course, doing this would put strain on his tether, and even the slightest movement made him reel with vertigo. Still, he kept his eye on the ledge, and in what might have been an hour or might have been an endless minute, he heard the thwup, thwup, thwup of massive wings beating the air and watched a black buzzard—an old-world vulture—come in for a landing.

  The creature weighed at least forty pounds and had a wingspan of at least seven feet. Its top feathers were black and granite gray; its breast was buff colored. The head was bald and came to a point in a great raptor’s b
eak that could probably scoop the beating heart out of a man. Its nearness made him shudder. The bird did not appear to be the least bit frightened, and seemed only mildly curious. Though Raszer had no way of knowing, he guessed that it was a female, and that the ledge was its nesting place.

  Over the next two hours, the bird provided his only diversion from agony. The pain in his shoulders, where muscle was tearing and ball joints were grinding like a mortar and pestle, was so deep that he began to lapse into brief periods of unconsciousness.

  When he came around, the pain was still there, but so was the bird.