Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (18 page)

    
As
always, Monica had armed the security system before leaving, and, as often
happened when the day’s work had taken him far afield in mind and body, he had
to reboot his memory for the code. It was the date of his father’s birth, a
date he’d never committed to memory in the deepest sense.

    
He
stepped into the office and was comforted by the trace of Monica’s scent and
the multicolored array of standby lights pulsing gently from the bank of
computer and communications equipment. Raszer sometimes had the vaguely alien
sense of coming home to a particularly well-appointed replica of his “real” home,
like an FBI safe house furnished by a decorator who’d made a study of his past
life. It was his, all right, but it was missing something. Once he’d set his
things down on the bar, the feeling faded.

    
The wine
had been opened, and his MacBook slumbered nearby, awaiting his keystroke to
unveil the Revelations file. A stack of books with pages marked by
three-by-five-inch index cards sat on the black slate, just outside the pool of
light cast by the overhead lamp, next to a fresh yellow legal pad. Some of them
his fingers knew from repeated reference; others, like the M. J. Vermaseren
tome
Cybele and Attis: The Myth and the
Cult
, he’d purchased years before and never cracked. The fact that Monica
could assemble the material so quickly was testament to the weeks on end they’d
spent cataloging it in the early days. With rare exceptions, all new stories
were old myths modulated by the wave of time and historical novelty. Once you
saw this, certain puzzles were solved.

    
Before
heading to the bath, he poured himself a glass of wine and admired the spidery
legs it left on the sides of the glass. He drank, then set MC Hakim’s business
card on the bar and punched in the number. It rang forever before finally
bumping over to an answering machine whose tape had been recycled one time too
many.

    
“Listen
up, party people,” announced a male voice with a north country English accent.
“Tonight’s TAZ is Tantra on Sunset. Trendy and tiny, but oh so Silverlake.
 
Trippy chillout and global trance is the mix,
so leave the agro vibes at home and bring your desiring machines and your kama
suitors, babies. The
puja
begins at
midnight.”

    
In spite
of the slang and its insinuation of pagan pleasures, there was something weary
in the voice, something as worn as the oxide coating on the tape. Raszer
pictured a British expat in his late thirties—maybe even forties—who’d been
around in the heyday of the rave movement and was now playing out his line to a
diminishing clientele. He knew the venue, an Indian restaurant on East Sunset
that converted to a club at the witching hour. The dance floor was barely
twenty feet in diameter, and these days, there would likely be as many nodders
as dancers. In the neohipster demimonde, cool blue cyberfunk had long since
replaced the pink soda-pop fizz of the anthemic Ibiza sound.

    
The
answering machine’s beep came after a small eternity, sounding more like a
bleat. Unsure that he was being recorded, Raszer began his message tentatively.

    
“Hello,
Hakim,” he said. “My name is Stephan Raszer. I’m a private inves—”

    
There
came a drowsy “hello,” for which Raszer was totally unprepared.

    
“This is
Hakim,
”
said the voice from the
recording. “You’re a what?”

    
Raszer
reintroduced himself and offered only the barest hint of his purpose. He
informed the DJ that he would be there around twelve thirty, and Hakim agreed
to a quick chat during his break. “Never met a real PI,” he said wryly. “Might
be a kick.”

AND I looked, and lo, a
Lamb stood on the mount Sion, and with him an
hundred forty

and
four thousand, having his Father’s name written in their foreheads. And they
sung as it

were a new song before the throne, and
before the
four beasts
, and the Elders: and no man

could learn that song but the hundred
and
forty
and
four
thousand, which were redeemed

from the earth. These are they which were
not defiled with women; for they are
virgins
.
 

    
Raszer clicked on the hyperlinked word
virgins
,
and was taken to a display of related passages from Revelations, as well as a
quote attributed to Jesus in Matthew 19:12—the same chapter containing the
admonition on marriage that figures into every Christian church wedding: “What
God hath joined, let no man put asunder.”

    
Hearing
his pronouncement against divorce, the Pharisees had protested to Jesus—in so
many words—”If we’re not free to dump our wives, maybe it’s not such a great
idea to get married in the first place,” to which Jesus replied in cryptic
agreement:

which
were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs
which have made themselves

eunuchs
for the kingdom of heavens’ sake. He that is able to
receive
it,
let him receive
it
.”

    
Raszer
read the passage repeatedly and with increasing speed, until its archaic syntax
morphed into a kind of nonverbal vernacular, a direct feed from page to brain.
It was a technique for reading sacred texts he’d been introduced to when first
under-taking his study, and now he did it automatically. The fact was that
unless you read the original Greek or Hebrew, Sanskrit or Arabic, everything was
filtered through the translator’s biases, and even in the maiden tongue, most
scripture and sutra were secondhand news and at least twice removed from
meaning. The real meaning was esoteric. As Jesus had said time and again in the
Gnostic Gospels: “He who has ears, let him hear.” If this was not the case in
the matter of eunuchs, it was surely true of an even stranger quote Monica had
pulled in from the Gospel of Saint Thomas:

“When
you make the male and the female be one and the same, so that the male might

not
be male nor the female be female—then you will enter the
Kingdom
.”

    
In just two degrees, Raszer’s separate queries
about the identity of the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ “Little Flock” of 144,000 and
the history of sacramental castration had been drawn together in a way that put
a new spin on Aquino’s virgin-sex-ring theory. Suppose virginity—of one sort or
another—
was
a factor, but suppose it
wasn’t about the lust of middle-aged men for young girls. Suppose it was about
devotion. Or control.

    
Raszer left
the thought there, reminding himself only of what he’d already learned on so
many previous cases: Given half a chance, predators would always use the tools
of religion to augment their power over prey. It was the same story with every
clique that deserved the pejorative
cult
,
whether it was Manson’s Family or Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple or L. Ron
Hubbard’s Church of Scientology. There was always an agenda, and if it wasn’t
about personal power, it was about power on a broader scale.

    
The
castration material was more extensive and more eye opening than he’d expected,
and there would be a few nights’ work in digesting it. Several items, however,
jumped out of Monica’s hastily assembled list of bullet points:

•
    
The earliest
evidence of ritual castration was found in Sumerian texts from the temple of
the goddess Inanna at Uruk, in present-day Iraq. A sample quote from high
priestess Enheduanna, dated 2300
bc
: “Inanna
turns a man into a woman and a woman into a man.”

•
   
The priests of the cult of Phrygian mother-goddess
Cybele, instituted around the time of King Midas (725–675
bc
)
and fashionable in Rome of
ad
295–390,
were known as the
Galli
, and
castrated themselves
in imitation of her
divine son/lover Attis, who had done so in penance for his betrayal. According
to myth, the birthday of Attis was December 25. Unlike other pre-Christian
mother-son cults, the cult of Cybele and Attis was a cult of
abstinence
.

•
   
Origen, the great scholar and theologian of the early Christian
church, also “made a eunuch of himself” for the kingdom of heaven’s sake.

•
   
In the mid-18th century, an ecstatic
Christian sect known as the
Skoptzy
or
Skoptji
arose in the Oryel region of
Russia, with ritual self-castration as its badge of membership. The sect
attracted military officers, merchants, and the nobles of St. Petersburg, and
by 1874 counted 5,444 members (incl. 1,465 women) and tens of thousands of
sympathizers. The Skoptzy claimed that they were following Christ in Matthew
19:12, but that
their mission would not
be complete until their numbers had reached the 144,000 of Revelation 14:3-4
.

•
   
Just as
castratis
had
guarded the harems of the caliphate, the Holy Ka’ba of Islam and its
black meteorite
are to this day secured
by an elite guard of eunuchs.

    
    
Raszer
poured himself another glass of wine and lit a cigarette. The business about
the gelded priests of Cybele he’d vaguely recalled, and it had been on his mind
since seeing the morgue photo of a neutered Henry Lee laid beside the black
baitylos
rock on Aquino’s desk. But
Raszer hadn’t been able to make the connection to Iraq until seeing that the
Sumerian Inanna had also demanded the family jewels. And the gospel passages
with their bizarre echo in the Russian sect seemed to suggest a trail of
cognitive cookie crumbs that led right to the door of the Witnesses by way of
their belief in the special status of the 144,000.

    
Could a
cult of sexual negation born at the dawn of history have survived, like a viral
spore, into the twenty-first century? Monica’s accompanying web links seemed to
hint that it could have, because there were sites—many related to the
transgender community—with names like Alt.eunuchs.com and Men Without Balls. He
who has ears, let him hear. Sex and gender had
always
been big issues in religion.

    
Raszer
pushed back from the bar, paced, put out his cigarette, and then pulled on a
gray turtleneck he’d retrieved from his closet. At this stage, he had to beware
of red herrings. They were always present where the occult was concerned,
because the occult, by its very nature, concealed the truth by way of an
elaborate shell game. The unwise player could easily be drawn off the bead.
Nothing yet made the case for substantive linkage of Henry Lee’s emasculation,
Johnny Horn’s reactive brand of anarchy, the Witnesses’ literal reading of
scripture, and Katy Endicott’s abduction.

    
Except
for one thing: The faceless men who had come for Katy had not, despite Emmett
Parrish’s confused testimony, simply materialized from the fog. They had been
drawn there, like sharks to blood in the water. They were the “outside agency,”
unaccounted for by any other factor. They were Katy’s detour, and one of
them—Raszer was all but certain—had in the death struggle with three strong,
young men lost his lucky coin: the Syrian dirham with the bullet crater. If the
man and the coin were companions, then Katy might be outside the bounds of U.S.
law. Raszer set the coin on the legal pad and drew the lamp over. He retrieved
his loupe from beneath the bar and took a closer look at the badly worn face.
Now he was certain it was a woman, and she appeared to wear a crown. Could a
Syrian goddess have demanded—as Cybele and Inanna did—the ultimate pledge of
fidelity from her male devotees?