Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (84 page)

    
On this
particular day in the present time, a smuggler or arms merchant climbing the
path to that same vantage point—seeking a good price for contraband, or looking
to purchase dated stocks of old Soviet-bloc munitions and sell them back at a
markup to the U.S. and Britain—would have been greeted by a similar horror.
Stopping in his tracks, mouth agape, he would think,
Poor bastard
. Then, recovering, he would say to himself,
Better him than me
. If he chose to
proceed, he would do so knowing to be very careful, so that he did not end up,
like this man, dangling over an abyss and crying out the thousand names of God.

    
Raszer
had been on the wall for three hours by the time the sun began to bleed over
the eastern horizon. He was suspended by a heavy leather strap from an ancient
iron spike that had been hammered centuries ago into the rock. It was clear
from the vintage of the spike and the wear of the leather that he was not the
first to have hung here. He did not know yet whether it had been an act of
mercy or practiced sadism for them to have left his body intact. That would
depend on how long it took him to die.

    
The
strap had already bitten deeply into his wrists and arrested the circulation of
blood to his hands. He knew this because he couldn’t feel them. The angle of
his suspension guaranteed this because, although the cliff face appeared
perfectly vertical from a distance, it was in fact just slightly oblique. In
order to brace his feet against the rock and bring any relief to his arms,
Raszer had to arch his spine and kick back until his heels found some tiny
notch to rest in, and they never held for more than a few seconds. This action
put even more strain on the strap and on his arms, and with a gasp he would
feel his heels lose their purchase and the panic rush in as he found himself
once again dangling over the chasm, praying that the spike would hold.

    
He
couldn’t have dissuaded them. He had nothing left to offer, and nothing of
value to confess. Besides, as he’d been reminded, truth wasn’t the point of
torture, much less of execution. They’d spelled it out before they took him out
to the cliff.

    
“Before
you die, you will come to a realization: Your life had no meaning. You mattered
to nothing and no one, least of all to God. Whatever god you choose as a buoy
in life will abandon you when death is near.”

    
“Can I
ask you a question?” Raszer had said.

    
“Yes, of
course.”

    
“When
you conjure your servitor from the stone and demand that she work your will on
the world, aren’t you admitting the possibility of grace? If supernatural
agency can move the machinery of the universe, doesn’t that suggest a power
source?”

    
“You
misread us if you take us for agnostics. There are powers in the universe, or
the stars would never have flared into being. They are there to be used. What
there is not is anything that
cares
.
What there is not is anything that remotely resembles
love
.”

    
“I would
trade one moment of my existence for a thousand lifetimes of yours.”

    
“We’ll
see if you feel that way after eight hours on the wall.”

    
The last hours of night, for all their agony, had
offered a kind of hope. With the sun, at least he wouldn’t be so cold. With the
sun, he could be seen, and if seen, pitied, and if pitied, saved.

    
But when
the sun came, it only spread light on the bleakness all around him: ridge after
gray ridge of treeless, grassless, lifeless rock. What sort of angel could be
summoned from this landscape? What kind of terrible djinns had the prophets of
old invoked to do their bidding, only to have them turn on their masters and
demand worship? Marduk? Baal? Yahweh?

    
Raszer’s
right heel, already bruised and raw from the night’s kicking and flailing,
slipped out of its temporary pocket, and as he swung free, the canyon floor
rushed up at him. He felt a spasm, then a bolt of pain in his chest, and
convulsed, drawing his knees up sharply and causing the spike to ping from
strain.

    
He
surmised that his death would come from heart failure. That was probably how
this execution worked. If it was to be, he hoped it would happen before his
spirit broke, though it was usually the other way around. A prisoner in the
Soviet gulag had once written in his journal that the number of hours a man
could withstand torture was directly proportional, by a factor of .333, to the
weight of his soul, a weight that ranged from nine to twenty-seven grams. The
man had probably lost his mind, but the idea made a certain kind of sense.
Raszer began to think that his soul might be of insufficient weight.

    
What he
was feeling was the onset of despair. It came with the sun.

    
About
eighteen inches to his right, and a foot or so above his head, there was an
indentation in the rock, a kind of natural alcove with a narrow ledge. He’d
noticed it after dawn and thought that if somehow he could swing his feet up to
it, he might get some blood flowing back into his trunk. Of course, doing this
would put strain on his tether, and even the slightest movement made him reel
with vertigo. Still, he kept his eye on the ledge, and in what might have been
an hour or might have been an endless minute, he heard the
thwup, thwup, thwup
of massive wings beating the air and watched a
black buzzard—an old-world vulture—come in for a landing.

    
The
creature weighed at least forty pounds and had a wingspan of at least seven
feet. Its top feathers were black and granite gray; its breast was buff
colored. The head was bald and came to a point in a great raptor’s beak that
could probably scoop the beating heart out of a man. Its nearness made him
shudder. The bird did not appear to be the least bit frightened, and seemed
only mildly curious. Though Raszer had no way of knowing, he guessed that it
was a female, and that the ledge was its nesting place.

    
Over the
next two hours, the bird provided his only diversion from agony. The pain in
his shoulders, where muscle was tearing and ball joints were grinding like a
mortar and pestle, was so deep that he began to lapse into brief periods of unconsciousness.

    
When he
came around, the pain was still there, but so was the bird.

    
Army
nurses know to hold a mortally wounded soldier’s hand. A small comfort, but no
man wants to die alone. In the absence of better company, the vulture became a
fixture, a companion, in Raszer’s dramatically reduced world. It perched with
as much dignity as an ugly animal can, preened itself, and paused every so
often in the midst of its toilet to cock its head at Raszer, not in a
reproachful way, but as if to say,
What do
you make of me
?

    
In view
of his experience with the peacock, Raszer half expected the buzzard to talk,
maybe to engage in some great dialogue about truth and death. But the bird
revealed nothing, and this was the thing that began to peck away at the tiny
egg of spiritual fortitude Raszer had left.

    
If God
would not grant him a talking bird, even at death’s door, then maybe the jig
was up. If there was to be no illumination at the end, then maybe there had
never been light. Pain can take a man’s mind to such places. But what finally
pierced the last membrane of spirit was an idiot’s epiphany about why the
vulture had kept him patient company for so long, a realization that an
ordinary man would have come to far earlier.

    
It was
going to eat him.

    
The habit
of coming to the ledge had undoubtedly been bred into the birds over centuries
of seeing corpses hung out like suet for their consumption. The vulture was
doing what it had always done: It was waiting for him to die.

    
You’ll be waiting a long time
, Raszer
said without words.

    
The bird
looked him up and down, as if to say,
Maybe
not. You don’t look so good
.

    
Appearances can be deceiving
, Raszer
replied.

    
Not to a scavenger
, the bird seemed to
answer.
We know
. In a single,
practiced motion—as if casually plucking a grape from the recess of a vine—the
vulture extended its long neck, thrust its open beak into Raszer’s right eye
socket, and, with a shake of its head to loosen the sinews, removed his right
eye.

    
It sat
for a moment with the organ held delicately in its beak, then swallowed it in
one gulp.

    
Raszer’s
system immediately entered salvage mode. It hadn’t happened. No. It could not
have. Delirium. Time could be reversed. Yes. Go back, go back. And if it had
happened—if his right eye were in the vulture’s stomach—he would get it back,
the way fishermen retrieve arms from sharks’ bellies.

    
All
these thoughts occurred as adrenaline coursed through his arteries and
bootstrapped him into a panicked state. Fight or flight—only, he could do
neither.

    
He began
to taste blood and feel wind in the orifice.

    
As long
as the bird remained there, sated and self-satisfied, Raszer’s sense of affront
would grow. That, he couldn’t stomach. He braced, arched his back, and pumped
out from the wall, swinging his legs up to the ledge and kicking furiously to
dislodge the interloper. The vulture fought back, pecking his calves and feet,
tearing off bits of flesh and fabric, but then, after brief battle, flapped its
big wings twice and took off.

    
For a
few moments, Raszer’s bloodied feet rested on the ledge, his body in a strange
hammock position. Then his heels slipped off the stone, and with a terrifying
jerk and a creak of leather, he swung back to a dangling stop. Through the
clouded lens of his left eye, he saw that a party of armed men was ascending
the path to the fortress gates and appeared to be flanking a prisoner. The
summit of the path was about thirty feet to his right, and level with the
position of the spike that held him to the wall.

    
Once his
remaining eye had cleared and focused, he saw that the armed men were the Green
River officer and his posse, and that their captive was Dante.

    
And this
was when the draining of Raszer’s hope became a hemorrhage. Not the merciful
flow from the cutting of a major artery, leading quickly to unconsciousness and
death, but the steady oozing from a thousand small internal cuts.

    
Dante.
In the space of a four-day trek, this highlands Huck Finn, with his skinny body
and nest of golden hair, had become for Raszer a counterweight to the anomie of
the Scotty Darrells and Henry Lees of the world. And during their climb of the
north wall, something had passed between them that, once given, couldn’t be
taken back.

    
Dante’s
wrists were shackled, and he looked to have been beaten around the face. The
American had him by the arm, and pulled him roughly to the edge of the path,
where the slope raked steeply down to the floor of the canyon. Dante’s face
creased in sympathy as he looked on Raszer, half-dead and half-blind. His lips
began to form words. A repeated phrase, something he wanted Raszer to know.
It’s over
? No, not that.
It’s okay
? Almost. No.
She’s okay. She’s okay
.

    
The
commander pressed the muzzle of his pistol to the back of Dante’s skull, fired
once, and shoved the body over the edge. He wiped his hands on his cavalry-blue
trousers, parked them on his hips, and gave Raszer a nod.

    
The most
awful thing of all was that Raszer couldn’t summon a response.

    
None of
this enterprise had been remotely worth its price in grief. None of it. One
girl might have been pulled from the wreckage, but another had crashed and made
the tally a net zero. Three people—all of whom Raszer might have treasured as
friends—were dead. Scotty Darrell was dead. And the beast roared. Fuck it.

    
So he
hung his head, and he wept. From the eye came tears, and from the empty pocket
of flesh came blood, mixing as they ran over his lips. His body jerked and
heaved as he was wracked with a grief that came in bolts from the center of his
belly. Raszer didn’t pray for death—that wasn’t in his repertoire. What he
prayed for, and finally cried out for, was to be known to someone, and, in
being known, to have worth.

    
For a
long time, it was very quiet. He didn’t let his eyelid drop, because there was
no longer any comfort in darkness, or any point in trying to concentrate his
will. Instead, he kept his good eye on Dante’s corpse, believing that somehow
his vigil would keep the scavenging birds away. The feeling had left his
shoulders and hands, and he knew that was a bad sign. It became apparent to him
that he was going to die soon.