Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (7 page)

    
“Good
morning, Stephan,” she said, a trace of German still evident in the
Good
. “I don’t often see you at this
time of day. You look . . . foggy.”

    
“It’s the
rain,” he said, taking his familiar chair near the casement window. “I can’t
seem to wake up.”

    
She
carried over an embroidered ottoman, set it down in front of him, and parked
herself near enough that they were almost knee to knee. Hildegarde was not one
for clinical detachment. She was a handsome woman of about fifty, with
ash-blond hair and a Nordic build. She was not Raszer’s physical type, which
had kept him on the safe side of the doctor-patient divide, but plenty
attractive enough to flirt with. Raszer would no more have engaged a male
psychoanalyst than he would have hired a male escort.

    
“You
look ready for Valhalla,” he said. “Like you spent the night throwing
thunderbolts with Thor. Maybe we should forget the session and fly to Cabo.”

    
“I have
never known such a sweet-hearted man,” she said, nailing him with a pair of
piercingly blue eyes, “who takes such great pleasure in being a bad boy.”

    
“It’s my
upbringing, doc. My mother operated a bordello.”

    
“Right.
So, how are we feeling these days? Still in a funk?”

    
“I’d
rather you didn’t use that bedside
we
unless you’re planning on tucking me in tonight.”

    
“With
you, Stephan,” she said, “the
we
is
more than manner. You are the most incorrigible Gemini on my roster, and I say
that as one who isn’t big on astrology.”

    
“Yeah,
well . . . ” he mumbled, and thought for a moment about how he really was
feeling. “I had to take Brigit to the airport this morning.”

    
“Ah,”
she said, and bit her lip in sympathy. “How was it?”

    
“I got
into a scrap with the airport security guy,” he said. “The bastard wouldn’t let
me go to the gate with her.”

    
“Nobody
gets to go to the gate anymore, Stephan. You know that. Why did you start a
fight you knew you couldn’t win?”

    
He
stared out the window. The rain was making tributaries on the roof of the Annie
Besant Lodge. “It’s the whole scene, I guess. It raises my hackles. The armed
guards, the wary ticket agents. It’s too much like the first time. Once they
take her to the other side, she’s not in my life anymore, and I feel like I’m
busted all over again.”

    
“But she
is in your life. Be glad for that. And listen—” She leaned forward and touched
his knee. “If I know anything about the human mind, I know that Brigit no
longer carries a conscious awareness of having been forcibly removed from your
house. I’ve been with her. I’ve analyzed her. I know she doesn’t.”

    
“You
mean she’s sublimated it,” he said. “But it’s still there.”

    
“Of
course it’s still there,” said Hildegarde. “Her bond with you wouldn’t be so
strong if her separation from you hadn’t been so painful.”

    
“She saw
a man drop dead at my house yesterday.”

    
“Oh? Who
was he?”

    
“I think
he’s my new client,” said Raszer.

    
“Aha,”
she said. “Well, if you have a dead man for a client, I think you had better
tell me about the case.”

    
On the
wall behind her was a framed black-and-white photograph of C. G. Jung, the
Swiss psychoanalyst and onetime protégé of Freud who’d broken with his mentor
over fundamental questions about the roots of madness. Beneath the photograph
was a plaque bearing a Latin inscription attributed to him. In translation, it
read: S
ummoned
or
N
ot
S
ummoned
, G
od is
P
resent
.
Raszer glanced at the plaque, then back to Dr. Schoeppe.

    
“What do
you suppose old C. G. would have had to say about a small black rock in the palm
of the goddess Cybele?”

    
“You’re
being cryptic, Stephan. Explain.”

    
“The
dead man came to my house to ask for help finding his daughter, who was
apparently abducted from a mountain rave a year ago by three men in a black
limo. She was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, but she’d fallen in with a bad
crowd—renegade boys from the church. There’s a sister from Taos
involved—allegedly the catalyst.”

    
“And the
girls’ mother . . . where is she?”

    
“Presumably
also in Taos. Probably waiting for the saucers to come.”

    
“I love
Taos,” said Hildegarde.

    
“Me
too,” said Raszer. “But it does tend to attract people looking for an exit.”

    
“And the
black rock?”

    
“You’ve
been to my house. Out back, there’s a statue of the Phrygian mother goddess,
Cybele, that I had shipped from a flea market in Paris. One of her palms is
open, like this, and Brigit—scamp that she is—saw fit to put a moon rock in
it.”

    
“A moon
rock.”

    
“Yeah,”
said Raszer. “They sold like hotcakes for a while. Supposedly fragments brought
back from the moon landing. Probably about as authentic as medieval saints’
relics, but from the way old Silas Endicott looked at it just before he keeled
over, you’d have thought it came from the seventh circle of hell.”

    
She
clapped her hands together and stood up. “Let’s take a look,” she said, and
went to a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf. She pulled out Jung’s
Man And His Symbols
, flipped through it,
and found nothing. In a lesser-known text, however, she found a cross-reference
under
Cybele
and read, “‘The
baitylos
, a black meteorite associated
with the cults of Cybele and Attis and purportedly found on the summit of Mt.
Ida in Pessinus.’” Hildegarde glanced up from the page. “Pessinus . . . that’s
in Turkey, isn’t it?”

    
“Right.
That’s where Cybele’s cult peaked. Sometime around the seventh century
bc
,
though she had a revival in Rome in the early Christian period. What else?”

    
“That’s
about it—not much to go on, is it?” She licked a long-nailed finger and flipped
a page. “Hang on . . . here’s something. “By way of both its physical
appearance and etymological association with Cybele, also known as Kybele,
Kubaba, and Kube, the sacred stone is thought by some to be mythologically
related to the Black Stone in the Ka’ba of Mecca, object of Muslim pilgrimage,
and to the Thracian word for
dice
.”

    
“That’s
a twisted trail, all right,” said Raszer. “
Kube
.
Cube.
Dice.
Islam?

    
“The
Ka’ba was a pagan shrine long before Mohammed consecrated it.”

    
Raszer
squinted. “Yeah, you’re right about that. Well, any sort of paganism would’ve
given the old man tremors, but what are the odds he knew any of this?”

    
“I guess
that’s for you to find out, Stephan,” she said. “Maybe the kids his daughter
fell in with were into some kind of ceremonial magic. Maybe the sister . . .
left something similar behind.” She replaced the book, then returned to her
seat. “The important question is what all this means for you. What you’re going
to make of it.”

    
“I
dunno. I’m going up to Azusa to see the elders of the church—the JWs—this
afternoon. They work as a family. They may want me to pursue this, or they may
not.”

    
“That’s
not quite what I meant, Stephan,” said Hildegarde.

    
“I know
that’s not what you meant,” said Raszer. “I’m stalling.”

    
“In
light of your present state, you may be tempted to see this thing as a chance
for personal redemption, dropping out of the blue as it did.”

    
“The sky
hasn’t been blue for weeks,” said Raszer.

    
“Don’t
play,” she said, crinkling her brow. “The thing is, not everyone who is lost
can be found, or wants to be. We do what we must, as best we can, and accept
that not all riddles yield to our wits—not all mysteries are fathomable.”

    
Raszer
suddenly felt moved to break into song. “
Ya
do what you must, and ya do it well
,” he chanted nasally. “Now, there’s a
synchronicity.”

    
“I don’t
understand,” said Hildegarde.

    
“Buckets
of Rain,” he explained, nodding to the window. “It’s a Dylan tune.”

    
“Ah,”
she said. “But you do know what I mean.”

    
“Yes,
but
human
mysteries—I think—have
their roots in some kind of detour, some hidden variable that alters what
otherwise would have been a person’s route. If you can work your way back to
that detour, you can get to the bottom of things.”

    
“Sometimes,
yes,” she said. “Otherwise, I don’t suppose there’d be much use for my
profession, either. Just try to give yourself a little slack. You redeemed your
lost years the first time you helped someone in trouble. God does not subscribe
to the Hollywood dictum that you’re only as good as your last picture.”

    
“I’m not
so sure about that,” said Raszer. “God’s a tough critic.”

    
“I think
you’re speaking of someone closer to home,” she said, and banked a glance off
the old scars on his wrists.

    
“Don’t
accuse me of ‘ego inflation,’ he said, unconsciously massaging his right wrist.
“I’ve never bought into the ‘I am God’ thing
.
”

    
“No,
Stephan,” she said. “You’ve strapped your ego into service of the Grail, which
is noble in a medieval sort of way, but it’s still very much exposed. You take
failure badly, and that stunts your chances of ever putting the cup to your own
lips.”

    
“Maybe,”
said Raszer.

    
She let
him sit in silence while the rain played
rat-tat-tat-tat.
Now he couldn’t get the Dylan tune out of his head.

    
“Tell me
something, Hildegarde,” he said. “What gives a man a sense of worth?”

    
“If
you’re talking about worth in the
world
,”
she said, “there is no universal. For you, I’d say it’s the belief that your
actions are
effective
. . . in an
almost magical way.”

    
He got
up and walked to the window. Once again, the rain was falling hard enough to
make sheets. “I had a seven-year streak,” he said quietly. “All that time, I
felt her breath on my shoulder, her hand guiding my wrist. But now . . . ”

    
Raszer
turned to Hildegarde, and the look in his eyes was very much like that of a man
in love. “For me, being worthy is knowing that I’m
Her
man.”

    
Hildegarde
smiled. “You’re speaking of your Lady. Your dark muse. The one who gave you the
light. The one who came to you in your dreams when you were a boy.”

    
“How
many men have you treated who lost their virginity to a succubus?”

    
“Only
one who’s fully functional.”

    
“I
pushed her out of my head for almost twenty years,” he said. “It scared me that
much. Until that day in the hospital. She’s the one who brought Brigit back.
She’s the one who gave me my . . . ”

    
“Your
calling. And now you feel she’s deserted you.”

    
Raszer
didn’t answer, and his therapist did not press.
  
 

    
“I’ll
make you some root tea,” she said, standing, and touched his shoulder lightly.
“If you’re going to face the elders, you’d best be wide awake.”

    
“Ah,”
said Raszer. “The famous root tea.” He turned back to the window and directed
his gaze past the eaves of the Annie Besant Lodge to the wet street, where at
that moment a sleek black Lincoln was prowling up Beachwood Drive to where the
money lived.
Don’t be crazy
, he thought,
shaking off a shiver.
It could be any
movie star
.

“Azusa . . . wow,” Raszer said aloud, as he drove
past paint-starved little houses displaying Uncle Sam’s colors and thought,
I could be in Chattanooga . . . or heading
up into the Blue Ridge from Front Royal, Virginia
.