Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (72 page)

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Authors: A.W. Hill

Tags: #Detective, #Mystery, #Mystery & Detective, #American Mystery & Suspense Fiction, #Fiction - Mystery, #Mystery & Detective - General, #Fiction, #Suspense, #General

BOOK: Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation
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Her bodyguard had vanished, paid off,
shipped back to Denmark, or died, and the clear message was that the same fate
awaited any others. So, she was to remain here under house arrest, exposed and
unprotected, and cut off from the technology that might enable her to pull
Raszer out of a fix.

    
She heard her phone ring. She hoped it
would be him, but suspected it wasn’t. It was the wrong time of day. When she
got to the phone, she saw that the button lit up was his public contact number,
the one he wrote on his business cards for people he cared to share it with.

    
“Hello,” she said. “Stephan Raszer’s line.”

    
A woman spoke. Soft-voiced, tired. “Is Mr.
Raszer in?” she asked.

    
“No,” she replied. “He’s on assignment
right now. Who’s calling?”

    
“But this is his number, right?”

    
“Yes. Who’s calling, please?”

    
“My name is Constance Endicott.”

    
“Hello.” Monica entered the caller ID
number into a small terminal beside the phone and received confirmation that
the call indeed came from Taos, New Mexico. “How can I help you, Mrs.
Endicott?”

    
“You know who I am?”

    
“Yes, of course: Katy’s mother. We . . .
Mr. Raszer is—”

    
“Is Ruthie with him?”

    
God, how she hated these moments.
Think, Monica, think
.
Truth or dodge
?

    
“That
seems very unlikely. Why do you ask?”

    
“I haven’t seen her for four days. A
terrible thing happened when Mr. Raszer was here. Maybe you know. A friend of
Ruthie’s was . . . killed. She was devastated. Then something else happened—I
don’t know what—that frightened her. She got very angry. The next thing I knew,
she was gone.”

    
“Let me see what I can find out,” Monica
said gently.

    
“There’s something else.”

    
“Yes?”

    
“I received something from Katy. A letter.
Well, not a letter, really, although it did come in an envelope. It’s a note on
a torn piece of muslin. I can’t imagine when she wrote it . . . or who mailed
it for her. But it is her handwriting—the note, not the envelope. The envelope
has nothing but my name and ‘Taos, New Mexico.’ It’s a wonder it got here. The
postmark is from Hamburg, Germany, and the date is August 9 of last year.”

    
“What does the note say, Mrs. Endicott?”

    
“I’m afraid it doesn’t make much sense. She
must have written it very fast, poor lamb. It looks like ‘N.C.D.C. 12-24.’ Then
it says, ‘I love you. Katy.’”

    
The last words were swallowed hard.

    
“I think you should take some hope from
this.”

    
“What’s your name?”

    
“Monica.”

    
“Thank you, Monica. Bless you. I hope
you’re right.”

    
Monica set the phone back in its cradle and
felt suddenly overcome. She dropped into the nearest chair and let her head
fall to her knees. Had she eaten anything today? She couldn’t remember. Then
the shudder came, seeming to begin at her very center—in her womb—and moving up
her body until it escaped as a sob.

    
Through the nearly expressionless voice of
the mother, she’d glimpsed the daughter, and what she’d seen had made her
wonder if Raszer would ever get Katy out. Men devised the most insidious traps
for women, baiting them with protection that really wasn’t protection at all.
Sooner or later, Prince Charming became a prison guard.

    
Mornings
in el Mirai were mostly a state of mind. Evenings, too, for that matter. In the
Garden, it was always the same hazy, languid afternoon. The sun never set. The
natural light refracted through the massive crystal dome was replaced
seamlessly at dusk by artificial sunlight, maintaining the Garden’s moist
warmth and extravagant foliage. Morning was whenever Katy woke from opium
slumber, and night came when the man-boys had spent themselves in her and
curled at her feet.

    
Every two weeks (or so Katy gauged, because
all time was relative there), the men and women would file into separate groups
and be taken out to the great court for exercises. To counter the soporific
effects of the opium and awaken the mass mind, they were roused with stiff
doses of MDMA, delivered in honeyed goat’s milk. As one, they mirrored the
precise, tai chi–like movements of their instructors for what had at first felt
like endless hours but now felt like relief. As she let go of herself, Katy
found it easier to be part of the group. They were led through a series of
martial routines, some involving knives. Once, she had cut herself, and the
blood had surprised her. She felt bloodless.

    
These outings and her own bodily cycles
were the only way to measure time. In the beginning, she tried to use them to
keep count of her days of captivity, but soon she lost track. She began to
doubt that there was really another life outside, much less one she still
desired to return to.

    
Then, little by little, Katy began to forget herself.

    
There remained certain markers, if she
chose to pay attention. Food was delivered at what seemed to be regular
intervals, although it was mostly for the new arrivals, who had not yet lost
their taste for meat. Once you had been in the garden for a while, it began to
feel unnatural (and like far too great an effort) to take nourishment from
anything other than the ripe fruit always within reach. There were offerings of
quince, persimmon, kumquat, and peach; plump berries of a dozen kinds that
perfumed the breath and stained the hands and lips, and made the simple white
smock she wore over her bare flesh look as if it had been dyed for an Indian
bazaar; dates that sugared the tongue like marzipan; and figs so engorged with
jammy pulp that they split on the branch and infused the air with the scent of
a sweet rot. Katy had ceased to have interest in sustenance beyond this, and
the opium.

    
For a while, her body registered time in
the attentions paid to her flesh, the spaces between visits from a familiar
boy. But soon there were so many familiar boys, and no part of her they had not
visited. The hashish kept their appetites keen, and the opium enabled them to
fuck her endlessly, until she was in a state as perpetually swollen as the
figs, a sweet soreness made endurable by the opium. The opium made everything
okay. In dreams, her father sometimes came to her with eyes of flame, but she
woke laughing, not shamed, because the opium vapor blurred the world’s edges.
Even so, there was a nausea she couldn’t shake, a feeling of displacement, her
stomach left at the top of the roller coaster. And so she begged for more
drugs, and when she begged, they took more from her, until the only happiness
came with emptiness.

    
In recent days, there had been a new kind
of forgetting. At least twice, she had awakened and been unable to remember her
name. The boys had often talked of how their training had made them forget who
they’d been before. For them, forgetting was a matter of mind; for Katy, it was
a matter of body. Her body no longer contained a sensing self she recognized.
Soon, she anticipated, there would be nothing left of herself at all. It was as
this new, nameless person began to emerge that she learned they had something
special planned for her.

    
They told her she was favored, and gave her
another name.

    
They gave her a retinue of attendants, and
the ripest fruit.

    
Katy didn’t remember writing a note on the
fabric she’d torn from her smock, but she did remember the boy’s face. Some
secret memory trace held Scotty, as it held all kindnesses shown to her in an
unkind life. There was a second face she remembered. She saw it when she closed
her eyes, and, in the absence of mirrors in the garden, had decided that it
should be—must be—her own future face. It was the face of a girl like her, but
one who was wicked and wise. As Ruthie, she could exist here. As Katy, she was
already dead.

 

    
The
Valley of Serpents was one of the oddest natural formations Raszer had ever
found himself in. Less a valley than an enormous V of black flint, it looked
like a runoff channel cleaved by a corps of giants. Its sides were steep and
slick, and everything that skittered down them wound up accumulating in the
center until it was carried away by the winter rains. Francesca told him that
in November, the cleft often filled to a depth of forty feet and was as thick
with mountain vipers as a pot of boiling spaghetti.

    
They identified three varieties of snake in
the first mile, the nastiest of which was known as Wagner’s viper. There were
hundreds of these, in shades of orange and umber and rust. Most seemed to be in
the process of slithering back up the slippery banks by the time the party
entered the valley, which gave the enormous wings of featureless rock the appearance
of an exotic, trembling butterfly.

    
The serpents still in the shadowed cleft
were sluggish from the early morning’s cool. Francesca and Dante had brought
with them long, forked branches of walnut they’d whittled to precision and now
swept across the rocky path like dousing rods, scooping up the somnolent
reptiles and flinging them as high up onto the banks as they could. For the
first fifteen minutes, Ruthie covered her head each time a snake was hoisted,
but after a while, even she got used to the routine. They sang verse after
verse of a Sufi drinking song as they proceeded, their voices producing a
cascade of echoes.

    
By the sun, they were in the cleft for only
ninety minutes, but it felt like hours. When they began their ascent to what
Francesca told Raszer would be the last and highest of the passes before the
alpine terrain gave way to high desert, they were already nerve-tired and damp
with the sweat of apprehension. No one wanted to look back, but at four
thousand feet, approaching the leading edge of a glacier, they finally stopped
to review their accomplishment.

    
“Fuck,” said Ruthie. “Do we have to come
back the same way?”

    
“Best not to think about it now,” said
Francesca. “Let’s just get there.”

    
Raszer thought about the reality of
provisions, illness, and war, and realized it was time to see if he could get
another call through to Monica. She was to have spent the last two days
collecting emergency resources for a fast exit.

    
“We’re working on a chopper, Ruthie,” he
said. “I doubt your sister will be in any shape for hiking. The challenge will
be flying through here without getting shot at.”

    
“The best would be a Red Cross helicopter,”
said Francesca, “or something made up to look like one.”

    
“I’ll see what I can do,” said Raszer. “How
much farther to the pass?”

    
“We’re going to try to make it by noon,”
she answered. “Then we’ll eat. Let’s get going. There may be snow.”

    
“Just one party after another,” Ruthie
said. “Snakebite, then frostbite.”

    
At eight thousand feet, the ragged edge of
the glacier spilled across the path in a tongue of ice a mile wide, slowing
their pace by half. After another five hundred feet of ascent, the air began to
thin out and their steps grew even more labored.

    
They stopped to share the last half liter
of water, the last they’d have before reaching a glacial stream that Francesca
had told them would parallel the path on their descent. A few hundred yards
farther, and they entered the clouds, and for some time had only the rhythmic
tap-tap-tap
of the snake sticks fore and
aft to keep them in line. It was a wholly alien experience to be guided by
sound, rather than sight—the experience of the blind. The first impulse was to
freeze; after all, who could know what precipice might lie ten feet ahead?

    
Dante did know, of course, and could have
walked it blind and deaf. Once Raszer had relaxed into that sureness, the
attenuation of his sight and the consequent sharpening of his hearing became
almost pleasant. Along with the rarefaction of the air, the touch of dizziness
caused by altitude, and the muffling of footsteps inside the cloud came a kind
of altered state. They passed beneath a ledge, and the sun was momentarily
lost. Raszer imagined himself without sight, and wondered what meanings beauty
might have in the absence of vision. Then, suddenly, he felt a sharp, searing
pain in his left eye, as if it had been pierced through.

    
He staggered to a halt and bent over. Had
he walked into something?

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