Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (59 page)

    
“I may
need a few more things,” Raszer replied, “depending on what sort of country
we’re going to be crossing. I was told you guys could help me with that.”

    
“As long
as you don’t ask for porters and a five-star chef.”

    
“Not
everyone from L.A.’s a slave to luxury,” said Raszer. “Although I’ll admit I
could use a massage and a hot bath.”

    
“Well, there’s
a
hamam
outside of town if you like
it rough. They’ll scrub the scales right off your hide.”

    
“Maybe
when this is finished,” Raszer said. “Speaking of porters, though, can you
steer me toward a couple of reliable guides, guys who can keep me clear of
combat zones? I’m told I need to get to Hâkkari.”

    
Chrétien
shot Dante a grin and kept it on for Raszer. “Will we do?” he asked.

    
“You’ll
more than do,” said Raszer. “If you’re up for it.”

    
“The
question is, are you? Ever been that deep into eastern Turkey?”

    
“I’ve
never been deep into Turkey at all. But I take it you have.”

    
“The
twelve of us, we’ve all played the Urfa route to Hâkkari and the crossroads.
But only Dante and I have seen what happens if you take the wrong fork.”

    
“And
lived to tell the tale,” Dante added.

    
“And
lived to tell the tale,” Chrétien repeated, and punctuated it with a fist pump.
“Dante was in debt bondage to that motherfucker for nearly two years.”

    
“I got
out when he sent me to blow up a resort hotel in Mersin. People would have
died. That’s where I drew the line. That’s where I started to rewrite the
rules. Bad things happen when you ask the wrong people how you can serve them.”

    
“Doesn’t
that sort of moral judgment violate the rules of The Gauntlet?” Raszer asked.
“Aren’t you supposed to rely on God and the puppet masters to pull you out?”

    
“The way
we came to see it,” Chrétien replied. “The way the Fedeli see it, God makes the
rules until you’ve played long enough to know that God’s the eye of the heart.
That’s the epiphany. God sees us with the same eye that we see God. The whole
point of The Gauntlet is to become your avatar, to leave your old shell at the
side of the road and take on the spiritual body. Then you can be a baba for
other pilgrims.”

    
“And
what happens to your old shell?”

    
“Wind
drift. Carrion. Buzzards peck at it. Sun bakes it. Bullets rip through it.
Doesn’t matter. You’re dead to it. That much, the Old Man has right. He just
has fucking everything else wrong.”

    
“So
you—you and Dante—were in service to the Old Man. Did you meet him?”

    
“Never
stood closer than twenty-five meters. He won’t allow it. But the guy has
presence, I will tell you that. From any distance, you know he’s there. You’ll
see it when you get there . . . if you’re able to get in. He’s got those kids
under some heavy rain. He’s shown them the black gnosis, and when you see that,
all the curtains come down and you don’t know there’s any light out there. Your
girl, she’s in a dark place.”

    
“I was
told she was in a garden—”

    
“It’s a
garden, all right, but it’s a garden of ignorance. Like fucking Disney World on
DMT. A garden ruled over by a very jealous god. You know what he calls
himself?”

    
“The
Lord of Time?”

    
“When
he’s not calling himself Melek Ta’us. The Peacock Angel.”

    
“Melek
Ta’us,” said Raszer. “That’s Lucifer, right? In the Yezidi sect. The angel who
wouldn’t bow to the demiurge.”
  

    
“Yeah,
but the Yezidi wise men—you’ll meet some of them on our way—they’re not buying
it. They know it’s a scam. The people in the villages around there, they buy
it. And the fighters and tribesmen—enough of them—swallow it, too.”

    
“Totally,”
Dante added. “That’s how he got forty warlords and ten thousand tribal Kurds
and Persians to pay him tribute.”

    
“And my
lost girl—Katy—how does she serve him?” Raszer asked.

    
“You’ve
heard the stories. The Old Man took those Marco Polo legends about
Hassan-i-Sabah building a paradise on Earth for his assassins and built a theme
park for nihilists.” He paused, sobered. “And the girls—American. Uzbeki.
Azerbaijani. And especially Iraqi girls, blown out of their homes by the war.
They pour across the border into Syria with nothing but the clothes on their
backs and nowhere to turn but the sex trade. The Old Man’s agents scoop them up
and put them to work. And the Syrians look the other way because the Old Man is
helping to solve their refugee problem.”

    
“So,”
Raszer said softly, “it
is
a
trafficking operation.”

    
“Yeah,”
Dante replied. “Girls. Opium. Guns. But it’s a shitload more than that.”

    
“His
belief system sounds like a real mixed bag. Yezidi dualism. Ismaili
antinomianism. Postmodern nihilism.”

    
“All and
none of the above,” said Chrétien. “This guy’s a warlord for the new age. He
pulls threads from a dozen different local traditions and knits them into a
Persian rug of lies. There’s only one thing the Old Man
really
believes in.”

    
“What’s
that?”

    
“Annihilation,”
answered Dante.
 

    
“Tell me
something else,“ said Raszer. “The Fedeli d’Amore—”

    
“All
will be told,” said Chrétien, “in the right set and setting.” He pulled the truck
to a halt in front of what looked like a fallen house of cards built from
two-ton slabs of white granite.

    
Raszer
got out and turned a circle. The impression was of limitless whiteness. It was
a vista drained of all primary color but for the hard blue of the arching sky.
In the distant hills, there were patches of state-irrigated land, but few and
far between, like pieces of a quilt that would never be finished. In the
foreground, masked by the uniform color of the soil, were dozens of
outcroppings—carved blocks of bleached stone eight to ten feet high, fallen in
upon themselves and concealing chambers beneath. Raszer realized he must be
standing in an ancient graveyard, final resting place of chieftains and kings,
and that below him must lie a vast underground mausoleum.

    
“Who’s
buried here?”

    
“It goes
back at least to the Hittites,” said
Chrétien
. “Maybe farther. But the herders and peasants
moved in centuries ago and have squatted ever since. No one bothers them, and
so far, no one bothers us. It’s sacred ground. There are hundreds of
underground chambers, cool in the summer, warm in the winter. All you have to
do is keep to your own turf and respect everyone else’s. And you can’t beat the
rent.”

    
“And the
outfitting business keeps you going?”

    
“Mostly,
yeah,”
Chrétien
answered. “At least a hundred trekkers come through here every season, headed
to Nemrut Dagi or other places on the pilgrim’s map. And then there are the
Gauntlet players. They can’t pay, but we put them on the road anyway. Pro
bono.”

    
“And we
fix things,” added Dante. “The people from the villages, they’re crazy about
junk electronics: portable TV’s, cell phones, MP3 players . . . anything that
runs on batteries. But they’re not much good with soldering irons and
integrated circuits.”

    
“And you
are.”

    
“We’ve
got some world-class geeks in our band of merry men. Guys who might be running
companies in Silicon Valley if they hadn’t taken up The Gauntlet.”

    
Raszer
turned to Dante. “Want to show me around?” he asked.

    
“Sure,”
the boy said. “Follow me down. The others should be making it back from their
morning rounds pretty soon.”

    
Now that
the sun had reached full morning, Raszer gauged the outside temperature at
around eighty-two, but as soon as they stepped over the threshold of the burial
chamber, it plummeted ten degrees, and grew cooler still as they penetrated the
vault. A narrow entrance passage broadened after about ten feet, and he felt,
more than saw, the chamber expand on all sides, for his eyes had not yet
adjusted to the darkness.

    
It was
as quiet as any place of the dead ought to be, yet the air was pregnant with
echoes. Every footfall, every click of the tongue, left two, three mimetic
replicas behind. This led to a host of odd sensations, and only increased
Raszer’s feeling of displacement. Whoever had built the tomb had made room for
a lot of tenants, because it was clear from the multiple air currents in the
crypt that it continued for hundreds of subterranean yards, maybe farther.

    
Raszer’s
nose picked up damp canvas, sweet Turkish tobacco, kerosene, and fresh mint,
and through the soles of his boots he felt the floor change from stone to thin
carpet. Dante took his elbow and led him to sit on the rug beside a hookah and
a pile of blankets. Gradually, his pupils dilated, and before long he realized
that there were more than just the three of them.

    
A shaft
of sunlight penetrated the entry passage and spilled onto what Raszer now saw
was a very faded Persian rug. Directly across from him sat a young woman
flanked protectively by two boys Dante’s age. She wasn’t classically beautiful,
except at the forehead. The face was long and bony, the eyes deep set beneath
heavy brows, a generous mouth pierced by a silver ring. But the more he looked
at her and she at him, the more impressed he was. She was formidable.

    
“Will
you take some mint tea?” she asked.

    
“Yes,
please,” said Raszer.

    
“Father
Deleuze,” said
Chrétien
,
“this is Francesca. She’s the only mother we’ve got. She speaks sixteen
languages, including all the major Kurdish dialects. And we’re all madly in
love with her. The dude on her left is Mikail. And this is Jean.”

    
“Glad to
meet you all,” said Raszer. “And now that I have, it begs a question. None of
you look more than twenty-five, but for you to have been here when Shams was
doing his tour, you’d have to have begun playing when—”

    
“If you
try to count years,” said
Chrétien
, “you’ll make yourself crazy. There’s a little trick you learn when
you get to the Ninth Circle of Gauntlet play. It’s called stopping time.
Time—chronological time—flows over normal people like a river because they’re
not in synch with the flux, with the now, the immediate. They fight the river,
and the river leaves the sediment of years on them. They get left behind, and
they get old. But if you’re in synch with the river, you don’t collect
sediment. You just float.”

    
Raszer’s
eye widened. “Are you saying you’ll never grow up, as long as you stay in
play?”

    
“Think
of it,” said
Chrétien
, “as
being like an astronaut in suspended animation on a ship approaching an event
horizon at something near the speed of light. We’ll get older, but slowly. If
we return to the world, though, it catches up with us.”

    
“Now
that,” said Raszer, “is quite a trick. Maybe the greatest trick of all.”

    
“No.
There’s better. Dante, why don’t you begin with our blessing?”

    
Dante
extended his hand to
Chrétien
,
who in turn linked his with Raszer’s, and then, like fog creeping in from seven
separate passages leading off this central chamber, the rest of the group
materialized, until twelve of them—thirteen, counting Raszer—were joined in a
circle, hand to hand.

    
Dante
recited:

To every heart which the
sweet pain doth move,

And unto which these words may now be brought

For true interpretation and kind thought,

Be greeting in our Lord’s name, which is
Love.

    
“I know that,” Raszer said. “From somewhere
. . . ”

    
“The original Dante’s message to the
original Fedeli d’Amore,” said Francesca.

    
“It was his bid for membership in their
secret society,” added the present-day Dante. “And it worked.”