Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (69 page)
Read Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation Online
Authors: A.W. Hill
Tags: #Detective, #Mystery, #Mystery & Detective, #American Mystery & Suspense Fiction, #Fiction - Mystery, #Mystery & Detective - General, #Fiction, #Suspense, #General
They entered the Zap Gorge in high
afternoon, and the granite sepulchre of earth closed around them, leaving only
a narrow river of sky eight thousand feet above to mirror the ancient current
below. Dante informed Raszer that there was a village thirty miles away, near
the Uludere junction, where they could rest and find food and provisions. They
knew the Fedeli there, he said, as it had been a frequent base camp for their
trekking forays into the local mountains. It would be a safe stop. “As long,”
Dante added, “as it hasn’t been bombed.”
Just short of their destination, they came
around a bend and encountered a fruit stand commandeered as a checkpoint by a
detachment of the
pesh merga
,
the provisional army of a nascent
Kurdistan. With them were half a dozen Kurdish irregulars, the fierce hill
fighters who were the guerilla vanguard in this oldest of wars. American
involvement had accomplished what a half century of Turkish and Iraqi bullying
had not: It had unified the squabbling factions of the independence movement,
bringing the Marxist PKK into the same camp with the nationalist PDK and PUK.
The hill fighters were turbaned and brown like old gold; but for their new
Russian rifles, they might have stepped from the pages of Kipling. Several were
in animated conversation with a formidable-looking young commander, who broke
the huddle to step into the road and order Francesca to halt. A saber scar ran
from his left ear to his upper lip, his thick hair was crow black, and his eyes
were startlingly blue.
“Let me talk to them,” she said. “I think
we’ll be all right.”
The commander fingered the white T-shirt
dangling from the Land Cruiser’s antenna, while the other soldiers filed out
from the fruit stand and surrounded the cars, rifles at the ready. As he
watched Francesca’s approach, he seemed to Raszer to take the measure of her
stride more than that of her gender, and in this there was a measure of respect
not seen in the West. Raszer could hear only fragments of the exchange, but its
tone was not as forbidding as the fighter’s appearance. Francesca displayed a
series of documents, explaining them in language the soldier seemed to
understand. Then she pointed back up the road, and Raszer knew she must be
relating news of the bombing.
Through the windshield, Raszer saw
Francesca step back. She indicated the road ahead and asked a question that
caused all of the soldiers to prick up their ears and step away. A minute
later, she was back in the driver’s seat and exhaled a sigh of relief.
“I’m impressed,” said Raszer. “What was the
magic word?”
“Philby Greenstreet,” she answered. “And a
100-euro bill.”
“That name travels well.” Raszer said. “How
did you explain us?”
“Pilgrims. Trekking to the old Chaldean
monastery on Buzul Dagi. I said you and Ruthie were a French-Canadian priest
and a fallen woman on a penitential trek.”
“Not that far from the truth,” said Raszer.
“Kiss my ass,” said Ruthie. “Can’t fall if
you never stood up.”
And for the first time on the trip, they
all shared a laugh.
“Anyway,” Francesca picked up, “we’re clear
as far as Ispiria and the pack-in point. Once we’re on foot, it’ll be riskier.
There are Turkish commando units in these mountains, and mercenaries. He told
me the Americans can’t have a ground presence yet because they’re still
officially neutral, so they contract the dirty work out to mercenaries. That
way, they can claim they’re still supporting the Iraqi Kurds while opposing the
Turkish Kurds in the name of NATO. Even though it’s the same army. What a
shitty business . . . and all over an area the size of Belgium.”
Raszer looked around. “And about as
developed as the moon. No farming, no cities, and, from what I’ve heard, not
much oil either . . . except down Kirkuk way.”
“No,” said Francesca, starting off. “It’s
mostly unarable, extreme . . . but it’s also one of the world’s great land
bridges. This was once the kingdom of Urartu. The prophets walked down into
Mesopotamia from these mountains. Noah’s flood covered these peaks all the way
to Ararat. In so many ways, this is where it began. Worth holding on to, don’t
you think?”
“A sacred well is worth more than the water
that’s in it,” said Raszer. “People always spill blood and treasure over land
like this. Bet the Old Man understands that.”
“You can be sure he does,” Francesca
replied. “If this place becomes the prize in a full-out war involving Turkey,
Iraq, Iran, and the Kurds, with the U.S. playing arbitrageur, who do you think
will collect the fee?”
“How much land does he control?”
“It’s not insubstantial, but it’s not about
size. He controls four key passes and has some of the Iranian Kurdish
warlords—wild, renegade bastards—in a kind of thrall.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“But it’s more than that,” said Francesca.
“It’s influence. He’s like a tumor with tentacles reaching into Washington,
Moscow, Beijing, and Riyadh. He’s got something on all of them, because they’ve
all used him to do things they couldn’t admit to.”
Ruthie was staring out the window,
uncharacteristically silent. “What do you say, Ruthie?” Raszer asked her. “Does
all this square with what Henry told you about the Old Man?”
“Henry didn’t tell me all that much,” she
answered. “Except that the most powerful people in the world don’t have titles
or wear crowns, ’n that he was one of ’em.”
Raszer turned back to watch the gorge
narrow into midafternoon blackness, the vaulting rock above having caused its
own total eclipse. He heard his stomach growl. “I suppose I should’ve asked
before,” he said. “Why aren’t you armed, Francesca?”
“There’s a long tradition in this region of
giving protection to pilgrims. If you carry arms, you forgo protection.” She
acknowledged his rumbling belly. “Forty miles the other side of this gorge,”
she said, “is Ispiria. That’s where we’ll leave the cars and gather the rest of
our provisions. And sleep. And eat. I can hear that you’re hungry.”
Ispiria
was at the eastern mouth of the gorge, on a summit reached after a long climb
out of darkness into the burnt-gold and diminishing sunlight. It was not a
village, as such, but a reconstituted Assyrian Christian abbey, now used as a
combination outpost and field hospital for the Kurdish fighters and their
families. In the court surrounding its ancient fountain, a Kurdish wedding was
in progress. The sudden explosion of raucous sound and color was an elixir
after the starkness of the road.
Francesca and Shaykh Adi hopped out and
were greeted warmly by a man who was possibly the oldest living creature Raszer
had ever laid eyes on. His
kaffiyeh
was crimson, his
jellaba
was white
silk, and his eyes—like the young Kurdish commander’s—were the color of the
pigment ground from lapis lazuli. After all of them had been introduced and
toasted by the wedding party, they were shown to a colonnaded quadrangle of patchy
grass in the shadow of the church’s domed roof, where they could lay their
bedrolls and recuperate before what Raszer was told would be a full meal.
Dante pulled the Land Cruisers into the
side-by-side stalls of an unused stable annex and barred the doors. The keys
were entrusted to a young monk.
Behind the main structure, the abbey’s
property extended to the mountainside and was bordered by the colonnade. Their
billet was just to the near side of this. Ruthie collapsed almost immediately,
while Francesca and Dante retired to a shaded corner for what appeared to be
their afternoon devotions. Raszer dropped his gear and headed immediately back
to the wedding, the holy dog at his heels. He was intrigued by the old
villager, captivated by the backhills twang of the music—a kind of Anatolian
hillbilly sound—and at this moment felt the need for a crowd, even if he was a
stranger in the midst of it.
He found a vacant place on the fountain’s
rim that the late-afternoon sun still warmed. Within twenty minutes, he
guessed, the last of the light would be swallowed up by the gorge they’d just
emerged from. He picked out the bride, a lovely copper-skinned girl of probably
not more than sixteen, in a blossoming green skirt with a white underdress.
Like all the women and most of the men, she took delight in dancing. The smiles
were unforced, the sensuality unabashed.
Someone shouted behind him, and Raszer
reflexively turned his head. The low-angle sunlight had swathed the white peaks
to the northeast, painting the rock like gold leaf. What impressed him—made him
shield his eyes, in fact—was the mirrorlike intensity with which the mountain
reflected the light. Its crown suddenly burst into refracted flame, as if
concealing a supernova. There were more cries, and a disparate chorus of
ahhhs
, as the wedding party stopped to
observe the spectacle. Raszer stood, turned, and followed the villagers to a
rise in the street. The old man in the crimson headdress came to his side,
holding the hands of two children. He offered both Raszer and Shaykh Adi a nod.
“English?” he asked, with a heavy accent.
“
Français
,”
Raszer replied.
“Ah,
comment
allez-vous
?” the man asked. “You are a long way from home.”
“
Très
bien, merci
.”
Raszer pointed to
the mountaintop. “
C’est sublime
.”
The
sense of the miraculous was redoubled by what happened next. The sun dropped a
notch farther and the beam directed at the summit was suddenly as focused as
that of a laser. By his own poor scientific reckoning, some kind of
interference pattern was being created by the cross-hatching of direct and
reflected light, and in the heart of the blaze there appeared the form of a
city unlike any he’d ever seen or imagined. Like a dreamer’s Constantinople
formed of white gold and sheathed in ice, it shot spire upon spire into the
darkening sky, fingers reaching for the face of God.
“
Qu’est-ce
que c’est
?” Raszer asked the patriarch. The dog whined softly.
“Na-Koja-Abad,”
the
man answered. “Home.”
“How many days’ journey?” Raszer asked, for
he was still—despite his heart’s own semaphore—trying to fix the place in the
coordinates of a measurable world.
“A life’s journey,” answered the man with a
chuckle. “For some, more.”
He asked if Raszer knew Arabic, and Raszer
nodded.
“This then you must remember:
Wahdat-ul-wujood
. All in God and God in
all.” The elder rubbed his chin. “You are a man of light seeking the light,” he
added, studying Raszer’s face. “Carry what you have seen here. It is the only
truth. There is no death where this vision lives. Allah be praised.”
“Yes,” said Raszer. “Allah be praised.” He
paused. “This vision . . . this place-- does it have anything to do with El
Mirai, the citadel of the one they call the Old Man?”
The man put his finger to his lips and
shook his head. “One mimics the other, and for some, that is enough. But they
are as far apart as diamond and glass.” As an afterthought, he whispered, “Old
Man—ha! I am the only old man here!”
When Raszer looked up again at the
mountain, the city was gone.
A
mile on foot into the
Baskale
valley,
they came across a vast field of yellow tulips, their stems bent so that the
cups were overturned and facing the earth.
“
Ters
lale
,” said Francesca. “Crying tulips. The Bektashi say that they bow in
submission to Allah. And weep for the children of Ali.”
“They grow in this bowl because it collects
the rain and the warmth of the sun,” said Dante. “But once we climb out of this
valley, you won’t see anything but the toughest wildflowers. And on the far
side of Güzeldere Pass, it’s a desert.”
Their provisions had been supplemented by
stock from a storage locker the Fedeli kept in Ispiria for the treks they led
in late spring and early fall. They now had nylon rope and climbing hardware and
supplies for sudden mountain storms, though Francesca’s forecast was that the
weather would remain dry and might even turn hot. If they sustained a brisk
pace, Raszer estimated they’d make their destination by the morning of the
third day. The plan was to then make a base camp at the foot of the citadel,
and for Raszer to ascend to el Mirai alone the next morning.