Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (65 page)

    
“Lead on,” he said to the phantom. “You
don’t even have to blow in my ear.”

    
He followed because he was lost and because
at the moment, being anywhere had more appeal than being nowhere. Beside that,
he still possessed the hustler’s confidence that he could scheme his way out of
hell if he had to. And he followed because he trusted his nose, and his nose
told him that no scent that fine could issue from evil. With evil, there was
always a whiff of decay, wasn’t there?

    
He followed the scent as if riding a boat’s
wake across a sea of grass and stone. For seconds, it would be lost to him, and
then he’d pick it up again, ahead or off to the right or even behind him. All
the while, to keep himself company and to keep panic at bay, he conducted a
conversation with the thin air or whatever it might conceal.

    
“Animal, vegetable, or mineral?” he asked.

    
“Bigger than a breadbox?”

    
“Christ, how did it get so cold? Did you
have anything to do with that?”

    
“Show me the way to go home,” he sang. “I’m
tired and I wanna go to bed.”

    
“
Watch
your step
,” whispered the wind, and he felt the breath against his eardrum
before stumbling over a rocky outcropping and falling on his face.

    
“Fuck,” he said. The hard earth was like a
serrated blade against the gash in his cheek. He pushed himself up and rolled
into a sitting position.

    
“What a show-off,” he said, flicking the
soil from his wound. “I’m onto you. You’re just
me
in some twisted, noncorporeal way, right?”

    
The grass trembled, and the sweet scent
returned. “Or are you?” he said. “Tell you one thing: I couldn’t wear that
cologne in a men’s locker room and get away with it. If you’re the Devil,
you’re a little fey, aren’t you?”

    
Raszer knew well that these things didn’t
just happen willy-nilly—supernatural experiences, visitations, whatever you
chose to call them. Various agencies had to coalesce. You could label them
outside forces or a message from the captain of your soul, but they were real
enough, and once you’d opened yourself to them, they came often and sometimes
in series. The difficulty was in distinguishing the genuine (which were the
upshot of true extrasensory perception) from the false alarms and counterfeits.
The counterfeits were the work of Satan as Raszer knew him.

    
Satan was anything that threw you off the
true scent.

    
There was a band of loose rock under his
feet. Unnatural, like gravel. The air rippled with the flapping of enormous
wings as a buzzard flew past, low and close. He took a step and stopped to let
his heart slow. There was pavement beneath his feet. He squatted down and
touched it. Asphalt. Still warm from the day’s heat. There were footfalls on
the road. Light. Rapid. A boy of about nine came running out of nowhere. He
spoke in breathless Arabic, casting anxious looks in the direction he’d come
from, to Raszer’s right and the northwest.

    
“They come,” he said. “The men. They come.”

    
“What men?” Raszer called out in the boy’s
tongue.

    
The kid neither replied nor broke stride,
so Raszer caught up and ran along. He couldn’t be sure that the boy did not
suspect him of being one of the very people he feared.

    
“What men are these, my friend?” he asked
again.

    
The boy slowed his pace just a bit and
regarded him warily.

    
“They take the children,” he answered, and
then took off like a shot.

    
Raszer trotted to a stop in the middle of
the road, bent to catch his breath, and watched the kid fold himself into the
darkening mist. He caught the glint off a puddle of motor oil near the shoulder
and looked to the west to see one, then two, then three sets of headlights turn
from a crossroad onto the main highway.

    
Even at a mile, he could tell that the
beams were too widely spaced for the subcompact Toyotas and Nissans people
drove in this part of the world. Once the faint red of the taillights became
visible, he marked off the length of the vehicles and knew he must be looking
at three big, low-slung automobiles, now heading straight for where he stood.

    
To no surprise, his nocturnal spirit guide
had vanished, and he was left utterly exposed and with no better than fifteen
seconds to make himself scarce. On either side of the highway was empty white
scrubland, sloping so gently away that a man would easily be found in the
crosshairs of a night-vision scope. It would be impossible to put himself out
of range in the time remaining, and nothing out there to provide him with
cover. He’d just decided his best option was to crawl into the scrub and lie
flat when he glanced to the east and saw another set of headlights break over a
hill, half a mile away in the opposite direction.

    
All of a sudden, it was rush hour.

    
The lights of this new vehicle were
considerably higher and much more closely spaced, suggesting a small truck or
some other commercial transport. That seemed a far safer bet than what Raszer
feared was coming at him from the west. Some rough and hasty triangulation told
him that the opposing headlights were roughly equidistant, so he opted to go
belly down in the dust until the truck was within fifty yards, and then try to
flag it down. In truth, he really didn’t have any choice.

    
By the time he was settled in the dirt, the
vehicles had covered another third of a mile. Only when he felt certain that
the element of surprise would compel the driver on his left to stop, rather
than swerve, did he rise to a sprinter’s crouch. He’d been granted a small
window of grace by the caravan approaching from his right, for it seemed to be
moving at the stately pace of a motorcade and was still a quarter mile away. He
could only assume that the leisurely speed allowed the drivers to scan the
countryside for prey. He could only assume this because he was paranoid.

    
By the time he launched himself back onto
the pavement, he had already identified the vehicle of his hoped-for salvation
as a
dolmus
, one of the little buses
that move the Turkish citizenry from village to remote village in the absence
of a good rail line.
Surely it will stop
,
he told himself, as he began to wave his arms with an authoritative urgency.
The fog had begun to roll onto the road again, and although it provided a
measure of cover, there was also the risk that the driver wouldn’t see him in
time. Raszer glanced quickly over his shoulder. The motorcade had sped up. He
waved his arms more insistently. From the look on the bus driver’s face as he
ground to a halt on the center line, Raszer surmised that he probably wouldn’t
have stopped, except to avoid running him down. Once he had, Raszer wasted no
time leaping on.

    
“Is there a village nearby?” he asked in
rushed Arabic. “I’m lost.”

    
The driver blinked. It was not his native
language. It took a moment for him to compute the response. “There is only one
village on this road. There we go.”

    
“Good,” Raszer said, and smiled. “Allah is
merciful.” He watched the movement of the caravan past the driver’s-side
window. The cars rolled out of the mist one by one. On identifying the first,
he felt momentarily silly. Far from being sinister, it was a lumbering grocery
truck, probably the thing that had held up the traffic. “I will pay when we get
there,” he assured the driver. “Let’s go.”

    
The second set of headlights brought
nothing more dangerous than a vintage Mercedes—a rarity in these parts, to be
sure, but hardly the Fourth Horseman. The driver dropped the bus into gear but
kept his foot on the brake, as if wondering for a moment if he shouldn’t eject
this anxious stranger. The third set of headlights flared on the windshield,
and Raszer heard Turkish pop music playing faintly from a car radio. The lights
passed slowly and faded like a wink, but the music continued to issue from a
stationary source. The bus driver turned to his window, and Raszer’s pulse
hammered his larynx.

    
The third vehicle had stopped beside them,
long and sleek and so black that it stood out even against the half-hearted
night. He waited for the tinted window to be lowered, part of him wanting to
see the face behind it, and part of him poised to leap from the bus and
scramble into the brush for whatever advantage distance and darkness might
provide. Time skipped in place like the second hand on a broken watch. The
window remained up, but Raszer knew that the eyes on the other side could see
him in the green glow of the dome light. The question was what they saw. Was it
Stephan Raszer or Father Deleuze? Attempted flight would point only to the
former. The limo’s idle had dropped to a soft growl.

    
The bus driver turned away from the window
and lifted his foot from the brake.

    
“Bless you,” Raszer whispered as the little
vehicle began to accelerate.

    
It wasn’t until they’d covered half a mile
and he was sure that the black limo wasn’t going to pursue them that Raszer
turned to survey the cabin for a seat and saw her. She was four rows back,
right on the threshold of invisibility, her features lit only by the dull glow
from the instrument panel. The pumpkin-colored hair—or wig, in this case—was
pinned up, its tail sprouting like a flame from the top of her head. Her lips
were parted and the lipstick matched the hair. Her green eyes were wide and
staring. Raszer recognized the sleeping boy beside her as Mikhail from the
Fedeli d’Amore compound. He must, he thought, be her escort.

    
“Hello, Ruthie,” he said. “Fancy meeting
you here.”

    
He watched her watching him, reconstructing
his face: restoring the hair to his shaven head, the natural color to his dyed
eyebrows, the flesh to his disfigured cheek.

    
The she raised her hand tentatively above
the seat back and gave a little wave.

    
The
air crackled the minute they set eyes on each other. Francesca and Ruthie were
opposites, and not the kind that attract. Francesca was self-possessed and
strong spined, and had the spiritual fierceness of a woman who has seen the
world to be a deeply fucked-up place and steels herself each day to fight off
its many evils and cultivate its few precious goods. Ruthie Endicott was also
fierce, but in a feral, reactive way. She had also seen the world’s blemishes
and seemed to feel she was one of them. She’d determined to be the antagonist,
rather than the protagonist, in the story of her life. Both women were willful,
utterly authentic and dead certain of their sexuality, and that’s probably where
the trouble began.

    
“How did she find us?” Francesca whispered,
after taking Raszer aside.

    
“Well, it would appear that Mikhail brought
her here.”

    
“Yes,” she said, with some impatience, “but
how did she find Mikhail?”

    
“I’m still trying to figure that. She says
. . . that Shams told her long ago where to find the
Fedeli
. That’s possible, though getting here
this quickly couldn’t have been easy. She says she borrowed the money from her
mother’s boyfriend. That’s also possible. A stretch, but possible. She says she
wants to be the one to bring her sister home. I don’t think that’s going to
happen, but I’ll have to do some—”

    
“She’ll put us all at risk.” said
Francesca. “I can smell it.”

    
“She’ll alter the equation, that’s for
sure.”

    
Raszer knew instantly that he’d come across
as a shade too flip. Francesca’s long, fine nose thinned, and her dark brows
shifted in preparation for a display of Mediterranean temper.

    
“You go out—foolishly—without letting any
of us know. You are gone for three hours—”

    
“Three hours?” He shot her a doubting look.
“How is that possible?”

    
“Three hours,” she affirmed, pointing at
her wristwatch. “And you come
      
back
. . . with her. What are we supposed to think?”

    
“I don’t know,” Raszer said. “I think I
need to sleep on it. Which bunk is mine?”

    
Francesca indicated the cot Ruthie had
already passed out on.

    
“She saw your pack underneath.” said
Francesca. “She has a sharp eye, and a better nose, and she has already made
her claim.” She paused. “Sleep well, Father.”