Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (79 page)

    
“Canadien
,”
Raszer answered.

    
“Doubt it,” his questioner shot back. “But
you do speak English, right?”

    
“
Oui
.
Yes.”

    
“Excuse me, but go fuck yourself, Padre. We
don’t exactly go by military convention here, but for the record, who is it you
say you are and why are you here?”

    
“My name is Gilles Deleuze. I am a Franciscan
priest from the Taize community in France. We received a petition from a
Catholic lay organization that works to retrieve missing girls believed to have
been trafficked. My travel was arranged by International Refugee Relief in
Iskenderun. I have all the documents.”

    
“I really don’t give a rat’s anus about
your ‘documents.’ And just who is it you think’s been trafficked?”

    
“The young woman’s name is Katy Endicott.
American. I—”

    
“Right.” He drummed his fingers on the
table, stood up, and walked around to Raszer’s rear. “Fuck this. Did
Greenstreet send you?”

    
Raszer considered his answer for perhaps a
second too long. The interrogator nodded to the robed men, both of whom came
forward and grabbed Raszer’s arms. The mercenary leaned in close enough for
Raszer to feel the breath on his ear, reached between his legs, and clamped his
testicles in the vise of his right hand.

    
“Believe it or not, my friend, I’m the good
cop. Now, if you force my hand, I’ll pop your balls out like peas from a
peapod.”

    
“That”—Raszer swallowed hard as the sweat
broke—“would not be wise.”

    
“And why is that?”

    
“The U.S. State Department knows of my
mission.”

    
“Oooh,” replied the interrogator, squeezing
harder. “The State Department!”

    
“And others. But you are interfering with my
memory.”

    
The interrogator released just enough of
his grip to allow Raszer fleeting relief. “Play smart. What’s the point in
holding out when we already know who you are?”

    
“I’ve told you who I am,” Raszer said. “But
there
is
something more.”

    
“And what’s that?” Finally, the mercenary
took his hand away.

    
“I have something the Old Man wants.
Something that was stolen from him.”

    
The interrogator glanced at his three
accomplices, then glared at Raszer. “Okay, ‘Jill.’ I’ll be Jack, and you and I
will go fetch a pail of water.” He stood up and nodded to the robed guards.
“Take him in. Call for me when he starts to leak.”

    
“You seem a clever man,” said Raszer. “So
you must know that my being here changes the game. Let me walk out with one
girl, and you keep the advantage.”

    
The mercenary nodded to the iron door.
“We’ll talk after your baptism,” he said.

    
The robed guards hoisted Raszer from the
chair and took him into the adjoining room, while behind him the mercenary
commander wiped his hands with a white rag. The door closed heavily. Raszer
stared mutely at the device parked against the opposing wall. A museum piece,
vintage 1550, kept in good use.

    
For just a moment after he’d seen it, he
became a man without moorings.

    
The thought that he was going to be tortured
into a “confession” seemed almost ludicrous until he reminded himself of the
game. In the second and third levels of The Gauntlet, as originally devised by
the Fraters, the player was pursued through cyberspace, and eventually via
emails, text messages, and even phone calls, by a Grand Inquisitor intent on
making him disavow his creed. Of course it made sense that in this demonically
hijacked version of the game, a player like Raszer would have to come to such a
moment as this. Lunatics always literalized their fantasies.

    
The robed men stripped him of his clothes.

    
From studying what allowed rational people
to believe in irrational things, Raszer had learned this essential about faith:
10 percent of it came from being shown something—maybe a miracle, more likely a
beauty never seen or a message never heard. The other 90 percent came from the
will to believe that the thing shown is what it’s claimed to be. A water stain
or the face of Jesus? A dust mote caught by sunlight or a faerie? Raszer had
discarded the agnosticism that argues that such a willing suspension of
disbelief amounts to self-delusion. It wasn’t delusion; it was replacing one
form of seeing with another. It was accepting the possibility of the sublime.

    
The Philby Greens had given him an
implement of survival. A second self. The question was, could he figure out
quickly enough how to operate it?

    
The men led him to the table. He knew
better than to put up a fight.

    
The sloping platform was made of solid oak
and had the dimensions of a single bed. The head end was approximately three
inches below the foot, which put the subject at an incline known as
Trendelenburg position. The physics of it had all been worked out over time
with that exquisite acuity of thought that characterizes the design of all
instruments of torture. There were steel brackets to secure feet and hands, and
straps for the torso. Once the men had secured Raszer’s legs and midsection,
they stretched his arms fully above his head and locked them down at the elbow.

    
He waited for the water.

    
A third man entered the room, this one in
the multilayered black garment of the order’s sharifs. He wore a veil across
the lower two-thirds of his face—a head surgeon from Hades. He smelled of some
aromatic balm, and his eyelids and lashes were darkened with kohl. Raszer had
seen three of his rank of the reviewing platform, all of the same height and
build. Had one of them been the Black Sheikh of Shams’ fable?

    
With what seemed a single motion, the new
inquisitor pinched Raszer’s nostrils shut, inserted an eye dropper in his
reflexively opened mouth, and dosed the back of his throat with a burning
tincture. Raszer felt paralysis spread instantly over the length and breadth of
his body, along with a sickening familiarity: It was a variant of the same dope
with which Layla had incapacitated him in Hollywood.

    
He could feel everything, but he could not
move, except to talk or scream.

    
“Let us begin,” said the leader. His voice
had a quality that Raszer—had he not been stone terrified—might have found
ridiculous. Where had he heard it before?

    
Again, he waited for the stream of water to
hit his face. Instead, he felt a spike enter the back of his neck just below
the skull, and something pressed to his scalp above each temple.
God help me
, he thought.
They’re going to mix water and electricity
.

    
“Would you like me to stop now?” the
inquisitor asked. He must have felt Raszer tense, as a sensitive dentist does
when he’s gone too close to the nerve.

    
“Yes,” Raszer gurgled.

    
“Who are you?” In Arabic. “What is your
name?”

    
Raszer repeated what he’d told the
mercenary.

    
“Who is Philby Greenstreet?”

    
“A djinn,” Raszer answered. “Nobody.”

    
The sheikh nodded to the others, then
stepped back with a rustle of silk.

    
It was suddenly dark. Not dark as if someone
had turned out the lights, but dark as in blindness. As in a total absence of
stimulation to the optic nerve. Whatever they’d stuck in the back of his head
had short-circuited his vision. A series of images snapped across his brain,
not like sporadic video signals, but like dreams. Impossible things.

    
He
saw Monica in the mirror, but from an angle that suggested her point of view.
She stroked the mascara onto her lash, and so did he. She stepped lightly into
her pumps, and so did he. He saw the assassin enter the bathroom, snap her head
back, and plunge the knife into his heart, and felt a deeper pain than he had
ever felt.

    
“Jesus!” he screamed.

    
“Don’t call for Jesus,” the inquisitor said
in Arabic. “He
is
nobody.”

    
The light flooded back into Raszer’s eyes,
and he saw his tormentor. The pain was still there, and all warmth had begun to
drain from his center.

    
“
J’ai
froid
,” he said.

    
“
Désolé
,” replied the sheikh.
“Would you like me to stop?”

    
“
Oui
.”

    
“
Qui est
Philby Greenstreet?”

    
“
Personne
.”

    
The lights
went out again.

    
Now
he was at a rain-streaked window, his little palm pressed against the pane, as
if to feel the torrent through her fingertips. He could see her reflection in
the glass, pensive, waiting. She called for her father, and a man in a duster
appeared in the room behind. He took her from the stool, his enormous
copper-stained hand over her mouth, and folded her roughly over the back of the
sofa. He was strong enough to do it with one arm; the other lifted her dress.
The man stank, and he was wet from the rain.

    
“
Oh,
God! Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God!
” Raszer screamed. “
Brrriiiigggiiittt!
”

    
He
felt himself entered, and violated, and torn, and bleeding, and there was no
one there to stop it. No father. No mother. Not even Monica, because she was
dead. The sounds that came from his throat were not sounds that he could
associate with himself or anything human. They were the sounds you’d hear if
you put your ear to the wall of hell. The lights came back on, but Raszer
couldn’t see because his eyes were full of tears.

    
“Would you like me to stop?”

    
“Fuck you.”

    
“Who is Philby Greenstreet?”

    
“
Je
suis Philby Greenstreet
.”

    
Something
happened in the time between. He figured out what he needed to do. If the
dreamlife of his second self was suffering unendurable torture, he would seek a
lesser hell in the dreamlife of the first, the primary self. If that’s what it
was. Another time, another table, another group of robed practitioners, and
death hovering close by.

    
His
heart had stopped, though that wasn’t how the attending doctors had put it.
Like all priestly elites, they spoke in code. The place inside his head became
a big, noisy room suddenly emptied of people, in which an alien sound, heard
only faintly below the previous din, was now very much audible. The sound—which
might have been the drone of the heart monitor—began to separate into strands.
Other voices in other rooms. He rose from the gurney and walked, pulling the IV
cart along with him. He turned a corner and saw the floor nurse, slipping his
personal effects into a plastic bag. He stepped through a door into a room
without walls. The voices there were louder. A young woman was in the Muslim
posture of prayer, toes curled under, forehead pressed to the ground. She
looked at his face and then at his wrists, which were cut and dripping large
amounts of blood onto the floor. Her wrists were bleeding, too. “How could you
do this to us?” she asked him. He bandaged the girl’s wrists, then staggered
back and doubled over in pain.

    
The
sudden jolt of the defibrillator panels then obscured all sound and light.
There were flashes of illumination—comic-book lurid. Pow! Zap! Sizzle! His
spine whipped. The room began to fill again. The doctors were back. He felt a
searing pain in his left eye, as if a blown ember from a nearby fire had
entered it. “Look,” said the nurse. “Do you see that? His eyelid is burning.”
The doctor leaned in, then leapt back, a hand on his cheek. “Jesus! What the
hell is that?” Another voice said, “He’s on fire from the inside. Impossible.
Turn off the lights
.”

    
A
curtain was parted. “Let him cool off,” said a voice in Arabic. “Then we will
proceed.” Raszer felt hardness rise up under him with the color red.

    
There was something warm on his shoulder
blades. It was the only part of him that felt relief. The warmth, he realized
after opening his eyes, was the sun. He was alone on a balcony that protruded
from the base of the fortress out over the chasm, and he was face down in a
pool of his own sweat. The floor was of some dark-age amalgam, painted a faded
red, and the walls rose to his solar plexus. They had dressed him in a pair of
drawstring muslin pants, a nominal concession to modesty. He stood with
difficulty and walked slowly to the wall. He rested his arms on it and remained
there for quite a while, bending to cough out phlegm and bile when the urge
came.