Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (2 page)

    
Scotty
Darrell had strayed off the grid by way of a trail no police agency could
follow. His loss troubled Raszer deeply. Like any good shepherd, he wanted his
sheep in the fold. Like any knight errant, he wanted the dragon good and dead.

    
Scotty
was the only child of a Middlebury College sociology professor and his
mercurial wife, a former Balanchine dancer. The mother had struck Raszer as
fine but unforgiving, as if the rigors of ballet had hardened her to human
failings.
 
Scotty
 
was fey, in the old Gaelic sense of
“touched,” and beautiful, with fine hair the color of wet sand and a beauty
mark above his lip. There had been developmental issues in childhood and
suicidal tendencies in adolescence, and some of the signs had pointed to a
high-functioning autism. He’d disappeared as a result of his participation in a
Internet-generated role-playing game known as The Gauntlet, but Scotty’s folks
had inexplicably failed to contact the police until he’d been AWOL for nearly
three months.

    
The
Vermont police gave the case to the FBI when files found on Scotty’s hard drive
suggested sympathy with Islamists and global anarchists, and the FBI had
contacted Raszer when The Gauntlet’s authors turned out to be two divinity
students at UNC, known by the web names Frater Vanitas and Frater Ludibrium,
who’d reportedly kept a goat’s head on dry ice in their dormitory bathtub.

    
The
Fraters were questioned and released pending further investigation, upon which
they disappeared from both the Chapel Hill campus and the known universe, but
the labyrinthine game they’d devised and the spyware that carried its
evangelical Call to Adventure onto thousands of hard drives lived on long after
operations in the dormitory had been shut down. It was what gamers called a persistent
world, and it burgeoned in that same anarchistic demimonde as Internet cafes
and global positioning devices that allowed for stateless terrorism, but with a
markedly different purpose.

    
The
Gauntlet sought to prove the existence of God by revealing the cosmic
determinism that hid behind seemingly random events. The game’s design showed
an understanding of both chaos theory and Christian evangelism, colored by
Chinese wisdom and quantum mechanics. Moreover, The Gauntlet went well beyond
its forerunners in moving play into the theater of human history. Once you were
in deep, all realities were conditional, and each move affected a hundred others.

    
The game
found its mark among the kind of brainy, introverted kids who might once have
spent after-school hours at the chess club and purchased sleep with dreams of
heroism—children whose futures seemed all too prefigured. The object of the
game was to “ride the snake,” and the means to this end was to give up all
attempts to shape events and allow events to shape you. You could buy in for a
limited run as a Pilgrim or you could enlist all-in as a Peregrine (in the
latter case the university would sooner or later notice your empty desk).
Scotty had opted for the full tour and gotten seriously sidetracked, which was
why his case had wound up in Raszer’s lap.

    
This was
the thing: The game was defined as a form of service to God, but the moves that
got you there might as easily entail gunrunning as good works. The goal was a
kind of heaven on Earth—freedom through servitude—but along the way, there were
tales of jackpots hit, sexual feats performed, and enough exotica to rival the
pitch of any time-share huckster.
Adventure!
Mystery! Intrigue!
Irresistible to bright but underactualized kids like
Scotty. A chance to be real in a different reality. The words not mentioned in
the product description were deception, duplicity and
death
.

    
If only he’d gone deeper
, Raszer
thought, second-guessing himself for the hundredth time. His advertised skill
was missing persons retrieval, but among a certain clientele he’d earned a reputation
as a street-wise shaman, adept at descending to underworlds in pursuit of his
quarry. He was known as a man who’d go to Hell and back to bring someone safely
home.

    
In order
to accomplish this, he had often to do what shamans had always done: wear
masks. These masks might take the form of a deep cover, a foreign language, or
the adoption of an odd habit or tic. They gained him entry and served to
confuse both his adversaries (the deceivers) and his quarry (the deceived). The
trick was to not confuse himself, and to remove the masks in such a way that
the stray would come to see him as a more trustworthy steward of her soul than
its present keepers.

    
It was a
risky business, but until Scotty Darrell, he’d beaten the odds and had been
recognized by local and international police agencies as an exotic bird dog
who, despite his knack for sniffing up the wrong cracks, was worth giving
considerable leash.

    
He
hadn’t gained his expertise by way of an advanced degree in criminal psychology
or counseling, nor through years of police work, though studying all things
germane to his vocation was a constant activity. He’d dropped the only course
he’d ever taken in cult deprogramming (now euphemistically called exit
counseling) when it became apparent to him that the core of the art was a
contempt for faith, and the methods all too similar to those of the enemy.
Raszer’s occupation came closer to being a “calling,” for before undertaking
it, he had been—of all things—an actor. A failed actor, to be sure, but not
thereby a bad one. In any place but Los Angeles, where fake it ‘til you make it
is the rule, he might have had more difficulty earning his PI license.

    
The one
thing required of all shamans, from the Arctic Circle to the stark,
dusk-painted mesas of the Southwest, was that they die and be reborn, and
Raszer had. His heart had stopped, just short of bursting, seven years earlier.
It had been a tragedy of his own making in more ways than one. In those days of
cocaine and cold gin, Raszer had courted heart failure the way a $50 hooker
courts HIV, pissing away even the sweet wine of fatherhood. His death had been
a penance: the propitiation of a deity from whom he’d grown distant. Monica,
barely out of college and making a hundred a week as his press agent, had been
at his bedside in hospital. Even his adulterous wife had shown up to see him
off. It was she who’d screamed first when his vital signs returned, not because
it meant she’d have to endure the divorce proceedings after all, but because,
along with the heartbeat, there was a beam of light pulsing from his right eye.

    
Now,
Raszer felt cause to wonder if the intervening years hadn’t been some sort of
extended NDE, a lucid dream waltzing him to this moment of sad truth. He leaned
over the wooden railing, feeling old ghosts rush in with the fennel-scented
updraft from the canyon, and realized that he was probably depressed enough for
meds. The wind shook the eucalyptus trees, freeing the raindrops to mat his
chopped, ash-blond hair. He lit a cigarette and walked into the garden.

    
It
wasn’t just losing Scotty that had gotten him down. It was the reprise of his
oldest terror: that the earth was, at root, a place of loss. On that signal day
seven years ago, he’d thrown dice with a goddess, gambling his own life in
exchange for Brigit’s when a childhood illness had ravaged her kidneys—his way
of making up for being a lousy dad. The bet paid off, Brigit recovered, and in
gratitude, a reconstituted Raszer had made a vocation out of leveraging his own
soul to save others less durable. He placed ads in the personals and the trade
papers even before he was fully licensed:

SOMEONE YOU LOVE IS MISSING. CALL STEPHAN RASZER, INVESTIGATOR OF
SPIRITUAL CRIME.

 
   
This being Hollywood, capitol of religious
flim-flam and a place where people came to be lost and then found, the ads were
answered. He walked through fire for each client, and with each gig, the heat
cauterized his old wounds. It was bliss while it lasted, it was redemptive, and
it didn’t hurt that he’d gotten a nice house in the bargain.

    
Just
beyond the small plots of mint, mandrake, and
Salvia divinorum
was a statue of Diana, goddess of the hunt, carved
from coral by an old sailor on Santorini. On the pedestal, beneath her drawn
bow, Raszer had placed a small, jeweled box, and in the box was a lock of
wheat-colored hair. It had belonged to the only woman who’d loved him for all
he was and wasn’t, unconditionally and to death in his service. She’d been
beheaded in the Moroccan desert by a man Raszer had pursued, and Raszer had in
turn disemboweled the man with a seven-inch knife.

    
He
picked up the box and held it as tenderly as if it housed the clockworks of the
universe, and as he opened the lid, a single tear fell from his eye into the
little nest of human hair. From a nearby live-oak tree came the offended squawk
of a California blue jay, whose nesting routine he’d intruded upon. On the
ground beneath its perch lay the beakful of twigs and fennel stalks it had been
carrying. Raszer set the box down and walked softly to the place. To his eye,
the twigs formed a rough pattern of long and short, as meaningless as tea
leaves to anyone not looking for meaning. He saw for an instant a connection
with Scotty Darrell’s plight. Advanced Gauntlet players were not allowed to
take maps, compasses, or written directions on the road. The only navigational
tool permitted was the
I Ching
, the
ancient Chinese oracle of broken and unbroken lines. The Gauntlet’s guiding
philosophy was drawn from the text accompanying hexagram number twenty-five:
“It is not favorable to have a destination in view.” Raszer looked for a sign
in the scattered twigs, but saw only confusion.

    
He
tossed his cigarette onto the saturated ground and cursed. Raszer’s divinatory
powers, which could be considerable when he was at his best, went to shit when
self-doubt came to town—his goddess abandoned him.

    
He felt
a tug on his trousers. It was Brigit. She’d been nosing around his library
again and come up with a gold-leaf Tantric text that he’d bought at auction two
years earlier for $350. It had first been translated for the English-speaking
world by Sir Richard Francis Burton, and was highly prized for its scandalous
full-color plates. Brigit had happened on an illustration of the “plow”
technique of sexual intercourse.

    
“Is
this
. . . ” Brigit asked with artful
innocence, “what sex looks like?”

    
“That’s
the sacred union of Shiva and Shakti, the joining of male and female energies.
Powerful mojo.”

    
She
cocked a chestnut-colored eyebrow. “That how you and Mommy did it?”

    
“If we
had,” said Raszer, taking the book just in time to dodge a raindrop, “things might’ve
gone differently.” He indicated the hand-stitched binding. “And this, Pandora,
is a very rare book. If you’re gonna browse, stick to paperbacks.”

    
“They
don’t have pictures,” she replied, then tossed her head and went back inside,
leaving Raszer a bit lighter. He could see the woman in her already in that
little toss of the head—or, rather, he could see how her greatest charms as a
woman would be those qualities of childhood she retained. After a moment’s
pause, he followed her inside and went to return the volume to its stall.

    
Raszer’s
library commanded the largest of three bedrooms. Although it contained nearly
three thousand titles, the library was devoted to just two subjects: the
history of man’s fevered pursuit of divine secrets and cosmic truths, and the
lesser history of how that desire had been manipulated by darker agencies
.
There were selected volumes on
forensics, criminal psychology, and international law, but these were
subservient to the grand topic of spiritual hunger and the lengths to which
human beings would go to satisfy it.

    
Raszer
had at first tried to organize the whole in subsets—alchemy, astrology,
Buddhism, Catharism, and so on—but found so many overlaps and cross-currents
that it worked better to arrange them associatively, that is to say, in the
manner of his thought processes, which were those of a detective. Thus, each
section of the library became a history of the cases he’d taken on, and of the
person at the nexus of each case, and this system gave him a convenient mnemonic
device for locating any volume at a moment’s notice.

    
The
categories dealing with world religions and wisdom traditions were so broad
that they merited their own shelves, but individual books had a way of
migrating to the matter at hand. The entire library had been ingeniously and
continuously cataloged by Monica, who was not only his researcher, dispatcher,
and de facto publicist, but the woman who knew his mind and methods best. Her
organizational method utilized links that, in aggregate, yielded more than
462,000 cross-references.

    
Natural
light in the library was provided by a set of north-facing French doors. These
opened onto a cloistered patio and an herb garden, within which a number of the
species owed their cultivation to the library’s small but definitive section on
the husbandry of medicinal and psychoactive plants. Although Raszer was a
coffee drinker by nature, he was also celebrated among close friends for his
teas.