Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (40 page)

    
An
ink-haired girl with the pallor of a corpse strolled by, jangling face jewelry.
An aspiring screenwriter at a nearby table looked up from his laptop as she
passed, then hammered out a few words, folding the girl neatly into his
scenario. The girl vanished into the daytime blackness of a billiard room with
purple walls.

    
“I
would’ve preferred Starbuck’s,” Djapper snorted. “I really stick out here.”

    
Raszer
smiled, keeping silent his thought, which was that Bernard Djapper
 
would stick out anyplace but his mother’s
living room.

    
“Nah,”
Raszer said. “The worst that’ll happen is that one of these writers will spot
your designer suit and pitch you his movie.” He paused. “I hear what you’re
saying, and it’s not the first time I’ve heard it. But you know I’m going to go
after the girl. So let’s help each other. Where is she?”

    
“No
place you can get to,” Djapper replied. ”No place you could even drop a Delta
Force team into. You’d have to be invited. Our best spies aren’t even that
smooth anymore. They’re technicians, too straight to bend themselves around
corners. But you, Raszer, now . . . ” Djapper widened his eyes. “You’re not
straight, are you?”

    
“I guess
it would take bent to know bent,” Raszer replied. “But let’s be straight about
two things: I need to find Katy Endicott, and if you help me, I’ll try to do it
without stepping on toes.”

    
“I doubt
that would be possible.”

    
“In any
case, I’m going to find her.”

    
Djapper
wiped his mouth again, and the gesture read as a write-off. “I’ll give you two
things. Ruthie Endicott is one. She’s got something, and she knows that sooner
or later she’ll have to come out with it, because otherwise she’s facing a
bleak future.”

    
“Explain.
Has she broken federal law?”

    
Djapper
snorted. He leaned right into Raszer’s face and spoke emphatically, his gravity
undercut by the muffin crumb that remained affixed to his upper lip. “She’s
dangling at the end of a long chain that involves interstate drug smuggling,
human trafficking, industrial espionage, and blackmail—all stuff her boyfriends
were into. The fact is, she should be in jail, and would be . . . except that
we need her loose as bait.”

    
“You
have hard evidence that she was involved in criminal activity?”

    
“Circumstantial,
but solid. Henry Lee had the mouth, but she had the fingers.”

    
“What?
Pushing dope to Azusa High School? Running teenage prostitutes?”

    
“Oh, Mr.
Raszer . . . ”

    
“And all
this can somehow be connected to a mountaintop redoubt somewhere in the Middle
East? To Scotty Darrell, and Layla Faj-Ta’wil? And maybe even back to you and
whoever’s party you don’t want to bust? And you call
me
paranoid?” Raszer shook his head. “What is she, then, some kind
of ‘asset’? Are you playing her?”

    
Djapper
laughed. “No. That would require some trust. She’s a Taos tramp. She’s off the
circuit, but that doesn’t mean she can’t be plugged back in. Her boys came back
from Iraq with a mission. She signed on. They’re dead, and somehow she’s still
alive.”
  

    
“These
people kill to protect the chain. Maybe she’s not really a link.”

    
“Well,
you start pulling on that chain, you’re bound to find out.”

    
“I have
to pull it. It’s my nature.”

    
“It’s
your funeral.”

    
“I don’t
get you. You asked to meet. Part of you seems to want to help me.”

    
“That’s
true. Part of me does.”

    
“On the
other hand, you seem to be telling me that if I pursue this case, I’ll be
stepping into some Operation Mongoose sort of minefield. You seem to be
suggesting that the people you’re tiptoeing around have some common interest
with the people who kidnapped Katy Endicott.”

    
“I never
said that.”

    
“Never
said what?”

    
“That
the Bureau—”

    
“What
about the NCTC? What about Picot?”

    
Djapper
turned to look at the purple-haired girl.

    
“If I
can say so, Agent, you seem a little torn.”

    
Djapper
kept his eyes on the girl, flicked the crumb from his lip, and spoke almost as
if in soliloquy. “That question you asked Picot in the hallway . . . about the
role he was playing.”

    
“Yeah?”

    
“Nothing,”
said the FBI man, wiping his hands. “I just thought that maybe . . . maybe
you’d be someone . . . I’d like to know.”

    
Raszer
was momentarily quieted.

    
“Well,
I’m . . . flattered. And I rarely turn down an offer of friendship.”

    
 
“I’ll tell you about these people: They lame
you, they let you live, and they put you in debt bondage. It all comes down to
what theycan hold over a person’s head.”

    
With that, Djapper pushed back from the table and
stood up.
  

    
When
they hit the bright sidewalk, he offered Raszer a stick from a half-empty pack
of Wrigley’s gum. The flavor was wintergreen.

    
“Your
regular brand?” he asked Djapper.

    
“Kills
the coffee breath.”

    
“Yeah,”
said Raszer, taking out a cigarette. “But it’ll rot your teeth.”

    
“Ha,”
said Djapper, and then again, less jovially, “Ha.”

    
Raszer boarded a DC-10 in the bright coastal haze
of an April morning. Ahead of him in line was a little rich girl clutching an
oversize plush bunny, a reminder that it was nearly Easter, and that he needed
to make a contribution to Brigit’s collection of eggs, the wooden ones the old babushkas
in the Ukraine hand-paint with gnarled fingers. He’d gotten her started when
she was three, and now she scoured flea markets for them.

    
Special
Agent Djapper was a hidden variable. It seemed clear he was caught in the
crosscurrents he’d hinted about. What else was new? The feds had been playing
footsy with organized crime for nearly a century, and at any given time, half
the investigatory agencies of the U.S. government were plumbing rackets from
inside the sewer pipes. It was a matter of pride for them to think they could
work both sides. Maybe the only way for Djapper to get free of the current was
to pull someone else in.

    
Djapper
had made good on his promise to put an FBI surveillance team on Raszer’s house,
and as this gesture had unsettled Raszer as much as it reassured him, Monica
had won her battle and remained in place, with her $2,000-a-week Danish
bodyguard.

    
The Jeep Monica had reserved for Raszer was a
ragtop red Wrangler, and he promptly unhooded it for the drive from Albuquerque
to Taos. Like a coyote, he wanted to sniff his way into town, making the
perfume of creosote, piñon, and mineral dust part of his own scent, exchanging
its atoms with his own. He wanted to feel as if he’d ridden the wind into Taos
like a hawk, so that once he got down into the maze, he might retain that
perspective. There were three questions he wanted to ask Ruthie Endicott, and
seeing the answers for what they were might require an aerial view.

    
The
first one was a formality, but it had to be asked. Had she received any form of
communication from either Katy or her abductors, whether by proxy, ransom note,
threat, or direct contact, since the night of the abduction?

    
The
second question was operational and, once again, had to be asked. Had

Ruthie’s mother at any time engaged the services
of another private investigator?

    
The
third question was the one that
mattered.
It broke down into three parts: Did Ruthie have any knowledge of how Johnny
Horn and Henry Lee had entered their killers’ employ? Had she ever seen or met
any of these men? Did she still have the emails she’d received from Henry over
the year preceding his death?

    
If
Ruthie had kept the emails, they were presumably not accessible to the FBI,
or
 
Djapper would have gotten his hands
on them already. If she could be persuaded to give Raszer that access, he’d
need to rely less on Djapper’s dubious patronage.

    
As he
ascended the grade from Santa Fe toward his destination, he watched the cloud
shadows creep up the slopes of the Sangre de Cristos like blood spreading on
rough linen, defying gravity, staining the pink rock and pine in shades of royal
purple and midnight blue. In the shaman art of the Chimayo Valley, the
mountains were always defined by the shadows that fell on them. The color of
the shadows changed throughout the day, but was always some variant of blue.
The mesas surrounding Albuquerque were muted, striated pastels—baked colors—and
Santa Fe’s red clay glowed at sundown. But Taos was blue, and blue is the color
of the mystic, the color of blood seen through the bridal veil of skin. It
never surprised Raszer that places of spiritual pilgrimage had become what they
were. It wasn’t the churches or temples or New Age dude ranches built on their
soil; it was the genius of the places themselves.

    
No one
had to tell this to the Pueblo Indians, of course. They were the
longest-standing residents of Taos, still harvesting the sky in a settlement
north of town with no indoor plumbing, content to live and dance and perform
all bodily functions in the sight of their god. People came to Taos for
visions. Even agnostic painters came for vision and called it the “quality of
light.”

    
Whatever
anyone chose to call it, the place had it, and Raszer conceded that as much as
he was here to grill Ruthie Endicott, he was here for an epiphany.

    
He’d
taken the main highway north from Santa Fe and then detoured into the Chimayo
Hills just past the turnoff for Los Alamos, where six decades earlier J. Robert
Oppenheimer had midwifed the atom bomb and declared, “I am become Shiva,
destroyer of worlds.” The old coach road that was now Highway 76 cut through
high country occupied by ten generations of weavers, and was still the route of
choice for art hounds.

    
But
Raszer wasn’t buying art today. He was making a pilgrimage of his own, to a
place pilgrims had come at Eastertime for nearly two centuries, an adobe chapel
known as the Santuario de Chimayo, where, it was said, the soil healed and
visitors were encouraged to sift it through their fingers and cake it on their
wounds. It was ritual, yes, superstition, probably, but Raszer, who undertook
each rescue mission with the awareness that he might not come home, was not
beyond either of these. If the soil of Chimayo healed, so much the better. He’d
need all the psychic armor he could carry.

    
The
Santuario’s builder had cut a well in the chapel floor, through which visitors
could touch the soil below. It was dark inside, even in midafternoon, and as
Raszer stepped in, he was only vaguely aware of another presence: a girl—more
precisely, a young woman—lying prone before the hole in the floor, face to the
ground, arms spread in apparent supplication. Her hair was black—or seemed
so—and fell around her head. She wore a simple sundress, pale blue, and its
skirts had ridden to the top of her brown thighs in the effort to position
herself. Suddenly, she thrust her hands down into the soil, then rose to her
knees, scrubbing her face with the red soil.

    
Only
then did she see Raszer, who was instantly pierced by the whiteness of the eyes
behind the mask of dirt. She fled like a fox.

    
There it
was. Taos. Penitential and erotic. The Spanish legacy, the El Greco languor,
and the shaman-sense that things weren’t as they seemed. No wonder D. H.
Lawrence had asked that his ashes be brought here.

    
Raszer
went to the well and dropped to a squat, inhaling the girl’s afterscent along
with the mineral cologne from below. The trace lingered, but her image became
less distinct with each second. It was hard to know for certain if he’d seen
what he’d seen: hard in the reborn stillness and darkness of the place; hard
after ten years in the liminal zones; hard when hers was the same face and form
he saw in oblique reflections from shop windows, and in his dreams. Seeing her
now was, in any event, a good sign.

    
Nothing
was retrieved by the eyes without first having been cast by the mind on the
tabula rasa of mean existence. Scent was a more accurate gauge of reality than
sight, which was probably why animals survived by it.