Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (67 page)

    
“Wow,” he said, his eyes watering. “Can I
take some of this home with me?”

    
“You’d never get it past the airport dogs,”
said Dante.

    
Francesca nodded. “Not the male ones, at
least,” she said cryptically.

    
Raszer had a thought, but kept it to
himself.

    
There was a small explosion as the vanguard
of spinning fakirs collectively cried out, hurled their glasses to the bricks,
and then danced barefoot in the shards. Not one of them flinched, faltered, or
let out a cry of pain.

    
“That’s the one I want to learn,” said
Dante, looking on.

    
Raszer nodded and felt the flush of the
liquid amber spread into his limbs. It seemed to induce a cathartic reaction,
because he could sense the glass underfoot.

    
Next in the procession came a breathing
mass that soon revealed itself as a train of men and women in interlocking
human circles, alternately revolving and meshing ceaselessly, like the gears of
some elaborate machine. Though Raszer had seen nothing quite like it, he had
heard of such things, and sensed that intricate, ancient ring dances like this
one had been humanity’s original expression of group identity. Within each
grouping, the dancers linked arms and chanted the flute’s melody. Collectively,
the circles interconnected like a child’s paper chain, one turning through the
next, and at first the mechanism remained an illusion. After a minute, however,
Raszer saw that there were breaks in each ring through which the others wove.
Once he’d seen this trick, the next move became apparent: With every full turn,
each circle would “give up” one participant to the next circle, gradually
seeding the links in the chain with members of the other sex, until, when
they’d reached the point of gender balance, they began to shed their opposites
and restore themselves to homogeneity—although with an entirely new makeup of
individuals. In this way, the circles were continuously refreshed and their
members redistributed, so that in a roughly seven-minute cycle, every man had
been linked once to every woman. The front circle was constantly replenished
from the rear. The mathematics of it were pretty impressive.

    
“It’s brilliant, isn’t it?” said Francesca.

    
 
“It’s a giant sorting machine,” Raszer
observed.

    
The waiter delivered a second round. Table
by table, the restaurant’s patrons rose to join the dance.

    
“It’s electrical,” said Dante. “The dancers
who get passed are like free electrons in a circuit. When it gets going fast,
the whole thing starts to hum like a transformer.”

    
“All dance is ultimately about survival,”
said Francesca. She turned to Raszer, clinked his glass, and drank. He did
likewise. “And now,” she announced, to him and to the table, “it’s our turn.”

    
It seemed to Raszer that she had sent him
some code. The prospect of ending the evening in her embrace was far from
unappealing. But the story of this night wasn’t theirs to tell. The dance would
tell it, and the dance did not seem to play favorites.

    
All ecstasy worth the name flows from
repetition at increasingly higher spiritual voltages. For three hours, the
dance wound its way through the hamlet without letting up. At the end of those
hours, there was little left of Raszer as he knew himself. The whole thing was
a quantum blur, and so was he. The night had dropped, the troupe of musicians
had grown to the size of an orchestra, and the air was rich with a sweet,
earthy fragrance that might or might not have included opium smoke as a
component, along with human oils and the vapors of the liquor. As the drums
grew deeper, louder, and greater in number, they overwhelmed all but the
shrillest of the wind instruments.
 
Over
the course of his revolutions, Raszer came to know the face, the breath, the
laugh, and the kiss of just about every soul in the village, save for the
elders and children who’d retreated behind their doors. The dance was designed
to shrink the circles by twos over time: from twelve to ten to eight to six to
four, and with each diminution to increase by inverse proportion the amount of
time the participants spent linked in sweat and sinew.

    
The couples who left immediately joined
other similarly reduced circles, such that their size remained constant, giving
up one couple at a time until, finally, there were only pairs. The sorting
ensured that no woman would end up dancing with the one who’d brought her. When
it got down to dyads, they locked arms and spun themselves into a centrifugal
cloud until, by and by, one of the parade marshals—the holy men—would tap
someone on the shoulder. This, he inferred, indicated a kind of temporary
betrothal: a license to be licentious.

    
It was hard to tell if the system could be
gamed by personal choice. Raszer was pretty sure it wasn’t meant to be, but on
the other hand, the lords of the dance would probably have had to allow some
room for human caprice in their calculations. And so, it was with both surprise
and a certain sense of symmetry that Raszer found himself in his last circle of
six with two fleshy village women, two tall men of indeterminate age, and
Ruthie Endicott.

    
A trio of drummers drew near, heads
bobbing, eyes rolled back to the whites. Ruthie shot sidelong glances to the
older women who flanked her, then leveled a woozy gaze at Raszer. He couldn’t
say how high she was by now. He knew that he was flying. One of the village
women momentarily broke the chain to lift her skirts just above the knee. The
second woman went her one better and took the silky fabric provocatively to
midthigh, then flashed Raszer a wink.

    
Ruthie was not to be outdone. With hand on
haunch, she began to knead the cotton smock she’d borrowed for the
evening—hardly more than a brightly dyed sack—gathering the fabric into pleats
that drew the hem first to her knee, then to her thighs, and finally to her
swaying hips, permitting Raszer and his rivals a glimpse of the what was, after
all, to be the final ground of the dance. The gesture had the power of a claim.
The village women unlocked themselves from the circle and dragged the two tall
men away by the shirttails.

    
They stood in semidarkness at the entrance
to a cul-de-sac, encircled by drums whose rhythm still recalled the original
tune from hours ago. The drummers were faceless, perhaps even veiled. It seemed
that their function was not only to exhort the dancers, but also to give
musical sanction to each act of consummation.

    
It was Ruthie who found their beat.
Perfectly. With each orbit of her hips, she backed a few inches further into
the cul-de-sac. Had Raszer wanted to retreat or delay, he would first have had
to break through the tightening circle of drummers at his back, but he had no
wish to retreat. The three-hour ceremony had succeeded in suspending time, and
with it, all sense of causation. Now there was only a single moment of wanting,
and what he wanted was this girl.

    
A few yards deeper into the cul-de-sac was
what appeared to be an abandoned donkey cart, its bed sloped at a
forty-five-degree angle between two rough-hewn wooden wheels, anchored by its
heavy, rusted hasp. A single kerosene lamp, its glow reduced by a
soot-blackened enclosure, hung from a post overhead. The youngest of the
drummers set down his instrument, shinnied up the post, and snuffed it out. In
the seconds that followed, the village—already dark—grew darker still, as all
lamps were extinguished, all candles blown out.

    
Raszer peeled off the sweat-dampened black
hoodie he’d worn as a buffer against the night’s chill, and laid it over the
unfinished cedar slats of the bed. Then he placed one hand on Ruthie’s right
elbow and the other on the back of her neck and lowered her gently into place,
letting her brace her bare feet against him. He slipped his hand under her knee
to part her legs, then caressed her center until she cried out. He kissed her,
swallowing her tongue and holding it with his breath until he was inside her,
and when he had released it, her lips curled into a smile.

    
She breathed into his mouth the words “Now
you’re in real trouble, mister.” And he was.

    
This would change everything. Sex always
did.

    
The
pale sun rose over the front range like a blob of mercury, gradually displacing
the lid of dawn. They had been on the road to Hakkâri for three hours. Raszer
had taken shotgun position so that he and Francesca could map out the approach
to the neo-Assassin fortress, which, by her estimate, they would reach in three
days, weather permitting—the first by car and the second two on foot. The
distance was not excessive, but the terrain was exceedingly rough, and the
primitive routes riddled with Turkish army roadblocks and PKK flashpoints.

    
Ruthie leaned forward and laid her elbows
on the seat back. “Did we do it last night?” she asked Raszer, eyes bloodshot
behind her red bug glasses.

    
This drew a gesture from Francesca that
Raszer knew well: a biting of lip, a lowering of eyes, a turning away to stare
out the window at the passing whiteness. Like tea leaves, it required
interpretation. It might have registered disdain for Ruthie’s ignorance of the
nature of the ceremony they’d joined in, it might have signaled disapproval of
Raszer’s lapse in judgment, or it might have been something else.

    
There’d been an hour’s worth of strenuous
argument that morning over whether Ruthie should be sent back to Suayb with
Mikhail, who had finally boarded the 7:00
am
dolmus
alone.

    
The principal reasons for their eventual
decision to allow her onboard—with Francesca dissenting—were arguable, and
Raszer knew it. The first was a sense that she was a loose cannon, more
controllable nailed down to deck than rolling free. The second line of
reasoning, Raszer thought more compelling: If Katy Endicott, after more than a
year of captivity in a cloud-blanketed mountaintop fastness, was in the classic
cultic mindstate, she might not want to come back to the world without some
sign of what it held for her. Ruthie was a bright, shiny lure. She had been for
Katy before, and she had been for Raszer only last night. Ruthie Endicott was a
human chaotic attractor.

    
There were other reasons Raszer kept to
himself. The first was that he suspected she knew more than she let on, and
that he might eventually get it out of her. The second had to do with the
kinship born of lovemaking. He wanted to see her home.

    
“Once we get to Daglica,” said Francesca,
aiming a finger at a point roughly forty miles east of Hakkâri on Raszer’s
survey map, “we’ll leave the cars and pack in. The high passes are snowed in
until late May, and even if they weren’t, anyone stupid enough to drive into
the Buzul Dagi right now would lose his car to the PKK or the Turks . . . maybe
even the Americans. The days will be hot and the nights will be cold, and
everyone will have to carry his weight.” Raszer watched Francesca’s glance
shift to the rearview mirror. It was ostensibly to affirm that Dante was still
on their tail in the second Cruiser, but his eyes dropped and remained fixed on
the middle of the backseat.

    
“If you’re worried about me carrying my
weight,” said Ruthie, “don’t be.”

    
“Experienced hikers die in those mountains.
What experience do
you
have?”

    
“Plenty,” said Ruthie, and sat back hard.

    
“Right,” Francesca replied tightly. “All
the wrong kind.”

    
“This is bullshit,” Ruthie spat.

    
“Enough,” Raszer said, raising his voice.
“Things change. You try to play that to your advantage.” He leveled his eyes at
Ruthie. “Ruthie, if you don’t want to be sent to Istanbul on the next bus,
you’ll jump to every word she says. She will keep your head attached to your
body.”

    
He aimed a finger out the side window.

    
“I don’t know if you noticed,” he went on,
“but ever since we started climbing into these foothills, there’ve been
vultures in the sky.” Raszer turned back to Francesca. “Now, you were saying .
. . ”

    
By
midafternoon, the windows were caked with dust the color of camel hair. The
dust found its way into everything and had an adhesive consistency that
reminded Raszer of metal filings clumped by a magnet. The mountains here were
no one’s idea of pretty, but against the preternaturally blue sky, they did
have a stark mineral magnificence—God’s own quarry, set aside for the making of
Adam and his dusty kind. There were flashes of places Raszer had been
before—the Golan Heights, or even certain stretches along the California–Nevada
border—but nothing in his experience quite compared to the emptiness.