Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (43 page)

    
“Just
the one guy that day?”

    
“Yeah.
Anyhow, Johnny kinda sashays down there ’cause he doesn’t like to come to
anybody’s call . . . not since he got back from Babylon. And Henry goes with
him. Henry was Johnny’s magical shield. Ever since what happened over there,
they’re thick as thieves. Got so Johnny and I couldn’t even fuck without Henry
hangin’ around, doin’ his voodoo on us, so eventually we just included him.
That’s when I found out that Henry and me had this . . . connection. We didn’t
even have to be in the same room, and we could get off just thinkin’ about each
other. It was wild. Mystical, kind of.”

    
Raszer
decided that he also needed another drink. She had a full wind, and now that
she was going, she might go on for a while. “And what happened at the limo?”

    
“The guy
popped the trunk and the three of ’em walked around back to look at whatever
was inside. I couldn’t see from where I was. Dope, I figured. I saw Henry’s
face go a little weird, and then Johnny said, ‘Yeah, I can move this.’ I could
see Henry shaking his head, which is what made me think it was some kind of
weapons. But Johnny blew him off, because Johnny was the shit and he wanted to
do whatever these guys wanted him to do, ’cause he wanted to move up in the
organization.”

    
“But
Henry wasn’t so hot on the idea.”

    
“He was
at first,” she said. “When they first got back from Iraq, they were both all
fired up on go-pills and this gnarly root that they used to chew on all the
time, and spouting off about how they’d had this beautiful mindfuck over there
and realized that all the moral laws the world goes by are bullshit and don’t apply
to the knowers of truth, and that the only thing that matters is pure anarchy,
because God is chaos and you have to embrace the chaos—and that it’s a state of
mind, like being really awake for the first time in your life, and this state
of mind has a name and the name is
kee-ya-mee
. . . and there was this glowing peacock who was Lucifer—”

    
“
Qiyami
,” Raszer said quietly.

    
“That’s
right,” Ruthie said. “That’s what they called it. Wouldn’t begin to know how to
spell it.”

    
She
popped another olive into her mouth and sucked out the pimiento. The waiter
strolled by, and she promptly bottomed up the rest of her drink and handed him
the glass with a nod and a wink.

    
“I gave
you a two-drink limit,” said Raszer.

    
“Yeah,
you did,” she replied. “But he doesn’t know that.”

    
“So what
made Henry have a change of heart?”

    
“Henry
figured everything by magic. His black stones, and whatever his thought-forms
told him, which of course was just him talkin’ back at himself. Henry used to
say he loved me. He said I was the pussy his girl-self had. But who he really
loved was Johnny. Not in a fag way. Henry wanted Johnny to be a holy warrior, a
master. They had these big dreams about goin’ back to the Middle East and being
anarchist mercenaries, but it was like some stupid game. Johnny wasn’t ever
gonna be master of anything except a trailer in Azusa. I know that now. Anyhow,
Henry’s magic told him things were fucked up. And then there was other stuff
that went down . . . ”

    
Her
voice trailed off, as if down a long tunnel, and her head hung limp for a
moment. The gin was getting to her. She might be hard-boiled, but she was also
a tiny thing, probably not more than a hundred pounds. Raszer let the “other
stuff” go for the

time being and seized on something else.

    
“You
said Johnny and Henry’s trip was like a game. Could it have been?”

    
“Could
have been what?” She was slurring a bit, and knew it, and tried to cover it up.

    
“A game.
Like World of Warcraftor Dungeons Dragons. Could they have gotten into
some weird role-playing thing when they were in Iraq with all the other
gameboys?”

    
“
Whoa
.
I’ll have to think about that one. It seemed pretty real to me. They ran
meth, they ran girls—these little sluts from Duarte and Upland who worked the
truck stops in San Bernardino—and at the end, they ran guns to Compton. It just
kept gettin’ heavier. These guys were testing them, setting them up for
something big.”

    
“Like
what?”

    
She
shrugged her shoulders. She wasn’t telling yet. Instead, she said, “So, have
you decided yet if you wanna fuck meor not?”

    
“Excuse
me for a minute,” said Raszer, pushing back. “Nature calls.”

    
She
shrugged again and waved him a little bye-bye.

    
When he
returned from the men’s room, Ruthie’s head was on the table. He wasn’t
particularly surprised. He’d had a feeling about the third martini. He made
apologies to the waiter for what looked a little less than chivalrous, paid the
check, and eased her up from the table, folding her arm gently around his neck.
The bar’s matronly hostess cocked an eyebrow on their way out. Raszer pressed a
$5 bill into her palm and said, “My daughter . . . has to learn to pace
herself.”

    
Outside,
the downdraft from the mountains was stiff and the stars glowed like coals.
Raszer’s Jeep was parked on the far side of the plaza, and even a scant hundred
pounds dead drunk is no waltz. To passersby, he thought, it must have looked
like he was dragging a corpse.

    
When
they got to the car, he opened the passenger door with his little finger,
scooped Ruthie up, and poured her into the seat. He had the key in the ignition
when it hit him that he hadn’t put the top back up and the night was cool, so
he stepped back out and buttoned it up. On a Jeep Wrangler, this was a noisy,
manual operation, but Ruthie didn’t stir or make a sound the whole time. Only
after he’d finished and started the car did it occur to him that for the same
reasons he’d felt the need to snow the hostess, he could not take Ruthie
Endicott home to her mother in this condition.

    
“Ruthie,”
he said, to his conscience as much as to the limp form beside him. Her head had
already found the console, and her forearm was draped over the parking brake.
“I’m gonna let you sleep this off for a while and get some coffee into you
before I take you home, all right? Okay with you?”

    
There
was no response, not that he’d expected one.

    
“Ruthie?”
he said, lifting her arm from the brake.

    
“
Mmm
.” It had the tone of an assent, so
he put the gearshift into drive and negotiated the one-way streets back onto
the Paseo. In five minutes, they were at the inn; fortunately, no one was
lounging on the grand portal. He steered her through the blue-framed door of
his room and rolled her onto her belly on the brass bed with its patchwork
spread. She looked even smaller there. Small but formidable, with strength in
the arch of the spine and the shoulders. He noticed in the soft light from the
bedside lamp that her cheeks were rouged and the black hair had red highlights.
She’d evidently designed to play vamp for their first formal encounter. He
decided, for the moment, against the intimacy of removing her shoes. He lit a
cigarette, brewed a pot of the in-room coffee, and sat down in the
stretched-hide armchair with the local paper and the briefing book Monica had
prepared for him.

    
It was a
leather binder with a snap strap and eight years of hard duty, stuffed just
thick enough to be held firmly between thumb and fingers. There were pockets
for his maps, photos, and travel documents, and dividers marking off the main
areas of research: human trafficking and debt bondage, especially for the sex
trade and especially through the Eurasian corridor; a history of Shia splinter
groups and crypto-pagan sects in Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey; a selection of
bulletins from Interpol’s I-24/7 network, detailing recent instances of
political and industrial terrorism and assassination not specifically linked to
any of the known organizations; a primer on MMORGs and ARGs, multiplayer
reality games that had gone global with the explosion of the Internet across
all borders. And there was more—packed in with Monica’s characteristic
thoroughness—including lists of translators, outfitters, doctors, and hired
guns available from Istanbul to Damascus.

    
Most
important, there were the beginnings of the two research threads Raszer had
asked Monica to follow after his meeting with Special Agent Djapper. The first
he’d begun himself with a call to a mathematician in Santa Cruz whose hobby was
graphing the co-occurrence of seemingly random and unrelated events on the
world stage: the hunt for what chaos theory called
strange attractors
.

    
On the
same day, at the same moment in time, a parliament might be dissolved,
blue-chip stock might tumble, and the wife of a minor official in a third-world
country might be kidnapped. What linked these disparate events could be the
collapse of a currency or a phase of the moon or nothing at all—it wasn’t
always logical.

    
Raszer,
wondering if the phantoms he was chasing might be exerting such tidal forces,
had given the mathematician two coordinates: the date and time Scotty Darrell
had shot a tram driver at Universal City, and the date and time of Katy
Endicott’s abduction. The second thread was less theoretical. Given Djapper’s
tip that to enter the nest of these neo-Assassins, “you’d have to be invited,”
Raszer had asked Monica to research which agencies, NGOs, and religious groups
had had luck forging ties to the renegade Shiite factions pocketed across the
Middle East, from Mosul to the Bosporus. If Katy’s abductors did have an
Islamist agenda, he was sure it wasn’t orthodox.

    
Raszer
had begun to think about just how he was going to get in, and in what suit of
clothes. It spooked him to know so little about his adversary. That meant that
any stranger could be his killer. It meant being very stingy with his trust.

    
Slipped
into the binder’s rear pocket was the yearbook photo of Katy that Aquino had
given him. The silent movie sweetheart was even more in evidence at this
age--in the lazy eyes, the plump cheeks, the old-fashioned perm. It seemed
almost as if Silas Endicott had made his youngest daughter over as Mary
Pickford.
Yes.
That was what the eyes
invited.
Make me over.
For some men,
a girl like this would be a collectible.

    
Raszer
studied the photo of Katy, then glanced up at her would-be evil twin, supine on
the bed, and then felt a small shudder of understanding.

    
A cone
from the big sugar pine out front dropped on the roof above his head. If he’d
not recognized the sound, it might have gotten him to his feet. As it was, he
found himself too agitated to go back to his homework. He set the binder down
and walked over to the small, rough-hewn bookshelf beside the bed, not
expecting to find much. Motel bookshelves always seemed to be for show,
containing nothing but a few dog-eared mysteries. He squatted down in front of
the shelf, not two feet from where Ruthie lay. She hadn’t stirred. Not even a
drunk’s little snore. Her fragrance came to him: citrus and musk.
Oranges
? Oranges and damp fur, and that
trace of patchouli. But sweet and pungent, too, like a hard marmalade. Dark and
concealed, like a fruit cellar.

    
On the
lower shelf, parked between the Bible and Grisham, was a slim, small volume of
poetry by the thirteenth-century Persian mystic Jelaluddin Rumi, once little
known beyond his turf. Now, he was a staple on the yoga circuit, but no less a
poet for it:

The tongue has one customer:

The
ear.

    
He flipped through the pages.
They smelled of wood shavings and red wine.

If anyone asks what “spirit” is like,

or
what God’s fragrance is like,

Lean
your head toward him or her

Keep your face there close—and say:

Like this.

    
He heard
her breathing, and when she turned her face his way, the scent came again. He
moved a little closer, sniffing, ears pricked, a bear on its haunches. It was
in her hair. In that blood-black bob, and who knew if that was the real Ruthie,
or if there was a prison cut beneath, ash blond or purple or orange. He set the
book down, keeping a hand on the shelf, and brought his nose to the strand that
lay across her eye and cheek. Her right eye opened under the veil of hair, but
she didn’t move a muscle.

    
There
were two knocks on the blue door, rapid-fire. Soft, but urgent. Then footfalls
on the wood planks outside. Raszer pivoted, still in a squat, then dropped one
knee to the floor. He held his palm to Ruthie as a signal to stay put, keeping
one eye on the door and the other on the big, latticed window to his left.