Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (62 page)

    
“Obviously,
but who?”

    
“Scotty
saw a lawyer his parents brought in, and an outside doctor checked him over at
the lawyer’s insistence.”

    
“Not
likely it was either of them,” said Raszer.

    
“Not
likely, but at this stage we can’t dismiss anyone. Jesus, what a mess. You see
these things on the news, but close up, you can’t imagine the damage.”

    
“Christ.
This is going to push the mother off the deep end. Does she know?”

    
“It
makes a shitty job even shittier, Luis, that’s for sure. I feel like I’ve
outlived my usefulness.”

    
“Not to
me,” said Borges. “Know what my grandmother used to say?”

    
“No.
What?”

    
“You
walk through graveyards, don’t be surprised if the dead follow you home.”

    
“I’d
better go, Lieutenant,” Raszer said. “Will you let me know what develops?”

    
“I
will,” said Borges. “You be careful. And if you find yourself without any cards
to play, come home. I wouldn’t advise bluffing with these people.”

    
“Thanks,
Luis. You be careful, too.” Borges clicked off, and Monica was back on the
line. “Monica,” he said. “I think I may need some protection.”

    
“Let me
see what I can find over there. How many men?”

    
“Maybe
three, four. To station along the approach to this . . . fortress.”

    
“What do
you want me to do about our files? Should I try and retrieve the data?”

    
“No. Not
now. We’ll rebuild everything when I get home. For all purposes, we’re closing
up shop.”

    
The moon was full, and bright enough to make
bobbing shadows on the pale rock. People were dancing wildly, arms in the air.
The empty whiteness of the rising land was even more apparent by night, when it
glowed as if absorbing ultraviolet from the stars. There was music—of
saz
and spiked fiddle and frame drums
hammered in furious counter-rhythm—and vocalizing in blue moans and ecstatic
shouts.

    
The
temple ruins at Sogmatar were a second-century watchtower built of blocks
quarried from the same white stone that formed the low, surrounding hills. But
the place was older than that. It was at the northernmost reach of Mesopotamia,
an outpost of the Babylonian moon god, Sin, and his orgiastic Sabian cult but
long before that, a shrine of Venus in one of her guises. There were Syriac
inscriptions on the rock, and a crescent moon carved on the tower. From here,
on the Anatolian massif, the Tigris on its southeastern course passed through
the first cities and had carried away the blood of the first wars. Down that
red river—maybe not far—some white-knuckled Alabama kid clutched his rifle as
he felt the breath of ancient gods on his neck.

    
This
place now served as the ceremonial ground of the band of brothers into whose
hands Raszer had been delivered. It was about twelve miles north of the
Fedelis’ Suayb retreat. They had traveled here in a small fleet of old Land
Cruisers, and later been joined by a ragtag collection of visitors, local
twentysomethings of both sexes who had evidently trekked in from neighboring
villages. Altogether, there were about thirty bodies dancing a dithyramb
beneath the moon, firelight strobing their brown flesh. They were grouped
tightly atop a flat expanse of rock. Shouts went up and the huddle broke as the
dancers drew back to reveal what was in their midst.

    
On a
seat once occupied by a priest of the moon god, Stephan Raszer sat
cross-legged, his freshly shaven head reflecting moonglow. Francesca held a
straight razor in her hand and appeared pleased with her work. She looked to
Chrétien for assent. Nodding approval, he approached Raszer and regarded the
transformation. “Not bad,” he said. “It’s amazing what changing just a couple
of features will do.”

    
Someone
brought Raszer a tarnished mirror. At first, it startled him not to recognize
his own face. He realized he hadn’t looked in a mirror since leaving Taos, and
wondered if it was possible that the disembodied feeling he’d had over the last
twenty-four hours might be linked to a change in his appearance greater than
what the girl could have accomplished with a razor, a brush, and a pair of
tweezers. Could his inner state somehow have been externalized? No, he
concluded quickly. Too crazy. And yet. His scalp was hairless, and his eyebrows
had been thinned and dyed with henna, and these cosmetic strokes had changed
everything.

    
“Wow,”
he whispered. “That’s some makeover.”

    
“It’s
all about directing attention,” Francesca said. “For example, you haven’t
stopped looking at my lip ring since you got here, so you probably haven’t
noticed my chin. A shaved head alters the shape of a face. Different eyebrows
make different eyes. But you’re not finished yet. We need something to draw
attention away from your mouth. That mouth gives you away.” She smiled. “I’ll
bet the girls like that mouth. It’s full of bad intentions.”

    
“What do
you have in mind?” Raszer asked, now aware of her dimpled chin.

    
“Well,
there is one little touch that would do it, but it would involve some
scarification.”

    
“Scarification?”
Raszer repeated.

    
She ran
a fingernail gently down his left cheek, stopping just short of his mouth. “If
we make a cut along this line, it will be the first thing people register. It
will be the thing they remember. But we’d have to let it scar, and then you’d
be stuck with it.”

    
“Kind of
a souvenir.” He paused. “To remember you by, Francesca. If you think it will
make the critical difference, go ahead.”

    
In
truth, the only thing that concerned him was that it would frighten Brigit.

    
“We
can’t use the razor, though,” said Chrétien. “Too clean a cut. If it’s going to
scar over right, we need some rough edges. A piece of flint, maybe.”

    
Raszer
slipped off the stool and surveyed the site. There were other shrines on other
rises in the land—he counted four within sight—each one reflecting the silver
from above, but this one seemed to be the hub. He’d read about the Sabian moon
worshippers. Their rites were wild and had survived here well into the Muslim
era. The new priests of Allah had for a time coexisted with the old priests of
Sin, or Marilaha, or the most ancient: Bel.
Bel
.
Be’el. Betyl. Beth-El. Ba’al. Baal. Baetyl. Sacred rock. There were thousands
of chips of all sizes scattered in the vicinity. He picked up one about the
size of his palm from beside the fire and handed it to Francesca. “Let’s do
it,” he said, and sat down before her.

    
The
dancers had moved back and slowed to a willowy sway, quiet now. “I’ll have to
be fairly brutal about this,” Francesca said, examining the stone for its
sharpest edge, “if it’s to look like a wound.”

    
“I
understand,” said Raszer. “I’ll try not to hit back.”

    
A smile
crossed her lips, and without preface, she leaned in and kissed him full on the
mouth, her jeweled lips parting just enough for him to feel her tongue against
his teeth and taste the silver in her ring. Then she took a step back and
struck the blow while he was still dizzy from the kiss. Blood ran into his
mouth and he felt the night air in the cut, but he was surprised by how little
pain there was. She held the towel against his cheek to staunch the flow, then
took his hand and moved it into place.

    
“Press
firmly,” she said. “Until your pulse slows. We’ll have to cauterize it to keep
it from getting infected.” She raised her eyes to Dante, who then went to the
fire and probed through the white-hot ash with a stick, looking for a suitable
stone. Raszer lifted the cotton towel from his face and tossed it to the boy to
use as a mitt.

    
“I want
you to lie down,” said Francesca. “Over there.” She indicated a slab of stone,
half-buried in the alkaline soil, and led him to it, then motioned for him to
lie down. All the while, she kept hold of his fingers.

    
“I’m not
a virgin, you know,” said Raszer. “In case that matters to Venus.”

    
“Venus
will have to take you as you are.” She placed her free hand on his forehead.
“Dante,” she called. “If it’s hot enough, bring it over.”

    
Dante
folded the towel over twice and removed from the fire a smooth stone the size
of a child’s fist. From the corner of his eye, Raszer saw Chrétien signal the
musicians, and they began to play an incantory rondo that had a bit of the
blues in it. The dancers started swaying again, but with a certain restraint.
The other members of the Fedeli were mixed in with the locals, some of them
having paired up for the dance with village girls who wrapped around them like
vines.

    
The
dancers stirred, and two in the front parted to let through Shaykh Adi, the

    
Fedelis’ canine
dai
, who came panting to the altar. The dog nuzzled Francesca and
then lapped wetly at Raszer’s open wound.

    
“The
baba’s blessing,” said Francesca.

    
An
instant later she pressed the stone to Raszer’s cheek and he heard the hiss of
his own skin being seared. The
saz
played a reedy lick, and Francesca stroked his newly shaven head. The dancers
drew nearer, the smell of flesh was in his nostrils, and for a moment, Raszer’s
mind’s eye left his body and raced out over the Sumerian plain.

    
He heard
his name called, but he did not answer to it. For now, it belonged to another.

The
Toyota lurched over a steep embankment and came to a stop, its engine surging
twice before dying. They were atop a mesalike land formation just above the old
traders’ road, a passage that had been there in one form or another since the
days of Marco Polo. Francesca cranked the ignition, and the engine protested
with a deep and ominous whine. A second attempt, and it turned over.

    
“She’s getting old,” Francesca said. “She’s
gone 118,000 miles on the same set of valves. All the dust here wears them down.
But she’ll make it to Hakkâri.”

    
Raszer nodded, less than reassured. There
were four of them in the Land Cruiser, Francesca taking turns at the wheel with
Dante, and Raszer sharing the backseat with the dog, Shaykh Adi, who’d taken to
laying his perpetually drippy muzzle on Raszer’s thigh, the loose flaps of his
cheeks spreading like a skirt and leaving an expanding wet spot on Raszer’s
khakis. He’d have preferred Francesca’s head in his lap, but could hardly say
no to a holy man. Given the dog’s exalted status, his affection might be a form
of grace.

    
The Land Cruiser’s luggage area was loaded
to the ceiling with gear. There were boots, climbing slippers, heavy woolens,
axes of half a dozen sizes and weights, and three hundred meters of nylon
climbing rope, along with the other essential hardware of the craft. It seemed
like overkill to Raszer, who liked to travel light.

    
They had left Suayb before dawn and had
been on—or off—the road for close to eight hours. It was now approaching high
noon, and even at 4,400 feet, it was getting hot. They were traveling high
roads, some roughly paved and some not much more than cattle paths, skirting
the Turkish–Syrian border and dodging north as necessary to avoid battlegrounds
in the ever-metastasizing war.

    
The virus of conflict that had traveled up
the Tigris by way of the American invasion had now spawned opportunistic
infections from the Hindu Kush to the Caucasus. Closest at hand was the bloody
game of tit for tat between the Turkish army and Kurdish separatist forces, in
which U.S. troops had been given the impossible role of referee but were slowly
and surely being drawn into the fight. Antiaircraft fire issued from the floor
of the valley below, and there were bright flashes of light in the hard blue
sky, followed by concussions that shook the mountains like the bass on a
hip-hop track. Based on what could be seen at this height, a battle analyst
would have had a hard time drawing conclusions about the alignment of forces,
much less putting points on the scoreboard.

    
There seemed to be both Turkish and U.S.
aircraft in evidence, dropping payloads on whatever and whomever was
unfortunate enough to be wedged between the two steep mountain ranges. From
time to time, a fearsome-looking eggbeater would swoop into the breach and
pepper the foothills with fire, but it was hard to identify its target. The
official story was that the Turks were raining hell on the Kurds and the PKK’s
stingers were hitting back, while the Americans were bombing the middle ground,
ostensibly in an effort to enforce a ceasefire and—at all costs—prevent Syria
from throwing in with Turkey against the Kurds and rupturing the NATO alliance
in the process.