Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (75 page)

    
“Speaking of trouble,” said Shams, with a
nod toward Ruthie, “you’ll want to keep a close watch on that one.”

    
“I knew it,” Francesca said, not able to
conceal a look of vindication.

    
“Then you know more than she does,” Shams
said. “Ruthie doesn’t know if she’s bad or good, damned or saved, ugly or
beautiful. She just survives. She’s pure that way, but you gotta be wary.
Somewhere in there, though, there’s a soul worth saving.”

    
“You feel like telling me how to go about
that?” Raszer asked.

    
“No,” said the phantom Shams, “because I
might be wrong.” He glanced down at his evanescing form. “I’ll be gone soon. As
you can see, I’m starting to pixilate. So listen up: Don’t go by way of the
crossroads. You won’t make it through without more blood. There’s a detour a
half mile short of it . . . take you around the north side of the citadel. Go
straight up the cliff. Make a big entrance. Just you,
rafiq
. Only you.”

    
Raszer nodded, mute. Shams’ legs had
already become memory traces.

    
“A few more things,” he said, as if from a
dust cloud. “First off, tell Ruthie I sent my salutation, and that her man
Henry’s okay with where he is. Second, that little chunk o’ rock in your pack—worth
its weight in diamonds. And the Kurd with the big scar and the blue eyes—him,
too. If you run across him again . . . ”

    
“Wait!” Raszer cried out. But the
apparition walked on, turning only to say, “You’ll see me a second time . . .
if you’re lucky!”

    
Then he vanished like a puff of smoke. In
his path, a trail of violets sprang up.

    
Raszer turned to Dante, who simply nodded;
then he made for where Ruthie knelt in the road. He wanted to deliver Shams’
message before it left him. Six feet away, he suddenly grabbed his head and
stumbled, dropping to his knees.

    
“Christ,” he said. “Where am I?”

    
Francesca came to his side and asked, “What
do you see?”

    
Raszer put his hands out and felt about for
something solid, like a man playing Blind Man’s Bluff. He felt for her, too,
and it maddened him that he could not place her.

    
“I see everything,” he replied, “but it’s
all . . . flipped. No. That’s not right . . . It’s . . . ” He wiped his eyes and
realized he was dripping with sweat.

    
“You’re no’ going to be able to describe
it,” said Dante, who had joined him. “Nobody ever has. But I know what it looks
like.”

    
“Is it happening to you, too?”

    
“Yeah, but we’ve adapted.” He chuckled.
“We’ve been this way a few times. You learn how to fold it in. One illusion
laid on another.”

    
“So, which one do I pay attention to?”
Raszer asked.

    
“Well, if you can figure out how to watch
both at the same time, you might begin to see what’s real.”

    
“That,” said Raszer, “is going to be one
hell of a trick.”

    
“We’re going to get you on your feet,” said
Francesca, “and bring you into the trees. It’s cool in there, and there’s
water.” They took hold of him under the shoulders and pulled him up. “This is
going to feel strange. Just take one step at a time.”

    
They guided him into the grove, and Stephan
Raszer managed—somehow without retching—to take in the oddest sensation of his
natural life. No psychotropic drug had ever come close. It would beggar any
artist’s descriptive powers, though it occurred to him that it might have been
what M. C. Escher was getting at. With Francesca, Dante, and Ruthie all
offering support, he picked up his feet and moved them as he’d been instructed.
But they failed him, because he was moving at once toward and away from the
grove, as if into the vertex of some impossibly angled mirror. How was he to
reconcile these perspectives? On a macroscopic scale, it was as if the galaxies
said to be hurtling outward from the primeval big bang were simultaneously
contracting to their point of origin.

    
They stepped into the grove and laid Raszer
on a bed of startlingly green moss that bordered the little stream. That the
moss was luminous was somehow the least of his surprises. He saw Ruthie remove
herself to a distant tree and fold like a doll.

    
There were birds in the grove, ample shade,
and water so sweet and clear that it seemed a soul could be suckled on it.
Raszer supposed the place was a kind of oasis, fed by the stream when it
swelled, though that could not account for its unnatural serenity. He relished
every minute of rest, because he knew they could not stay long. His profoundly
altered perception would have to be accommodated, and quickly, as a man
abruptly dropped on the moon would have to learn to walk again. He tried to
remember the last time he’d thought he might be losing his mind—there’d been
more than one occasion—and how he’d gotten through it. Not so much by holding
off the madness as by accepting it as another mode of being, like having a cold
or being in love.

    
He felt warmth in his hand and realized
Francesca was holding it. Then he put a question to anyone who might have an
answer: “How long before this tapers off?”

    
“About halfway between here and our base
camp, you should start to get your land legs back,” Francesca responded. “But
it’s not going to go away completely. At least, let’s hope not. It would be a
shame to lose a new sense after coming so far to get
it.” She squeezed his hand.
“What do you feel right now?”

    
He considered her question, and then
something began to happen. The effort of answering caused something to well up
in him. He looked at his companions in turn, doing his best to register them
with his crazy double vision, seeing them—against all good sense—as existing
both outside
and
inside him. He
became aware of the pulse in his left eye and a needling sensation in the iris.

    
“I feel,” he said, “like someone here knows
me. Has known me. Forever.”

    
“Na-Koja-Abad,” someone whispered. Was it
Dante?

    
“Of course I know you, Stephan,” said
Francesca. “How could I not?”

    
He didn’t ask her to explain herself, nor
did he attempt to articulate the other thing he felt, which was that these
people had in an instant become his only world—the sum of all his worlds. He
would die to protect them from harm. There was a brief pain in his left iris as
the stream of light broke through and hit the leaves above undiffused.
Francesca was the first to see it. She leaned in.

    
“How do you do that?” she asked.

    
“It’s the hole in my dike,” Raszer said.

    
“Or the crack that the light gets through,”
said Dante, recalling his story.

    
“Have you always had it?”

    
“No. It came with a loss.”

    
“Someone died?”

    
“Yeah.”

    
“Someone you loved?”

    
“You could say that.”

    
“And after that, your life was different .
. . ”

    
Raszer took a glance around at the
fantastical grove. “Definitely,” he answered. A pause. “I think seeing Shams
like that set it off. Some kind of resonance.”

    
She peered into Raszer’s eye and tracked
the thread of indigo light that issued from it up to its terminus on the leaves
above. A small voice rippled across the grove.

    
Ruthie, cooling her feet in the stream,
called out, “I saw it before. On the night of the big jam. When we were—”

    
She hesitated, seeing Francesca raise her
head, then continued, “So you’re sayin’ that was real back there? If that’s
true, where’d he come from . . . and where’d he go?”

    
“Not a mirage,” said Raszer. “More like
what Henry used to talk about.”

    
“What did Shams say?” Ruthie asked warily.

    
“He said to tell you that Henry’s okay with
where he is.”

    
Ruthie smirked reflexively, but couldn’t
hold it. Despite herself, she was moved.

    
“He also warned us away from the
crossroads. He said we wouldn’t make it through. He suggested we detour around
to the north side of the citadel and go straight up the cliff. Can it be done?”

    
“It can be done,” Dante replied, “with a
full kit. We’re carrying less than that. You’d have to free-climb a good part
of it. Are you in shape for that?”

    
“I guess we’ll find out,” said Raszer.

    
From the cover of massive boulders five
hundred feet above, they observed the fabled crossroads. It didn’t conform to
the mental image Raszer had been carrying.

    
That image—with him since Taos—was more like
that mythical Mississippi Delta junction where young guitarist Robert Johnson
had pawned his soul to the Devil for the gift of the blues. With date palms and
dromedaries. But this place was as far from the Mississippi as you could get.
This place was Nowhere-Land, the event horizon of a black hole into which he
would soon cast flesh and fate. The roads that intersected here were rutted old
camel tracks amid bleak, haunted mountains.

    
Yet it was hardly deserted.

    
There was no sign of the Mephistophelian Black
Sheikh of whom both Henry Lee and Shams had spoken, but they had plenty of
company. On the near side of the dusty crossing, a mixed company of uniformed
pesh merga
and irregular Kurdish hill
fighters, rifles in hand, had taken position. Facing them down from the far
side were an equal number of gunmen, of various races but mostly white, wearing
black T-shirts and cargo pants. They cradled assault rifles with sniper scopes
in their thick arms and wore pistols in thigh holsters. Some had shaved heads; others
had heavy-metal manes tied back from long faces bearing chin beards and
goatees.

    
The only one wearing anything like a
uniform was the apparent commanding officer, a short, square-shouldered man
with the features of a young Jon Voight but lines that said fifty and a haircut
that said George Armstrong Custer. Even from a distance, what set him apart
from his company was that he looked like an actor who’d been digitally matted
into the scene. The effect caused Raszer to blink and check through Dante’s binoculars.
Face to face with his Kurdish counterpart at the crossroads, the CO was engaged
in heated argument. His alpha body language suggested he was winning, but the
Kurd, for his part, was holding his ground with less display. On both sides,
there seemed to be a lot of tension. Things looked ready to blow.

    
“Mercenaries,” Dante hissed.

    
“And they’re not natives,” said Raszer.
“American or European. Can you make out the patch on the CO’s jacket?”

    
“Green River Security,” said Dante. “The
M-rated Blackwater. The top guys are renegades who broke away from PMCs like
Jax and Dyncorp ’cause they thought they’d gone soft on the teat of the U.S.
government. The foot soldiers are mostly Salvadoran and Columbian. The top
gun—”

    
“Does not look friendly,” Francesca said.

    
“No, he doesn’t,” Raszer agreed.

    
Ruthie came to his side. “If they’re
Americans, maybe they’ll—”

    
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, girl,” Dante blurted.

    
“Enough,” said Raszer. “We’re not going to
announce ourselves, but before we move on, I need to get an idea of what the
issue is down there. I’m going to follow that gulley to the outcropping about
twenty feet from the road and find out what I can hear.”

    
“Too dangerous,” said Francesca. “And
unnecessary.”

    
“I disagree,” said Raszer.
“Respectfully—but I disagree.”

    
“Then I’ll go with you,” she said. “I’m
light on my feet . . . and I know Kurdish.”

    
Raszer gave her a steady look, and nodded.

    
It took them more than ten minutes to work
their way down to a vantage point. They had reasonably good cover for most of
the way; the danger lay in setting loose the scree that covered the mountains.
Halfway down, Raszer lifted his binoculars and confirmed what he’d both
suspected and hoped: The Kurdish captain was none other than the young soldier
with the piercing blue eyes. His men were a racial mix. Some were dark as
Egyptians, others almost as fair as Dante. The Kurds claimed the lineage of the
ancient Assyrians, but trade and conquest had long since had their way with the
gene pool. Kurdish people were bound together by land and shared history—and
the solidarity that comes with being the common enemy of their neighbors.