Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (87 page)

    
His
thinking was sound, but when he stepped quietly up into the heart of the great
cathedral, he felt no eyes on him. He wasn’t all that surprised. It was a place
anyone could disappear into, a place to make anyone feel small. The intricately
ribbed vault of the nave arched to heaven, 140 feet above. The polished oak
railings of the choir and clerestory, luxuriantly wrapped with twinkling
evergreen boughs, were high enough to induce vertigo.

    
Far
above the choir, the massive pipes of the organ rose to lengths of more than
twenty feet. In the stillness of the place, Raszer could hear the pipes
breathing as imprisoned air whistled softly through them. Everything was
prepared. Everything as usual.

    
Except
for one thing: A candle was burning on the altar.

    
He stood
at the crossing and watched its flame strobe at the tempo of a bird’s
heartbeat. The lighting of candles was sacramentally proscribed. No acolyte,
much less a priest, would leave one burning in an empty church. He padded up
the broad, thickly carpeted steps to the altar. The candle’s penumbra formed a
circle eight feet across, but within the circle, there was little light.
Stepping carefully into the dark center, Raszer moved behind the altar. Despite
his caution, he kicked something light and metallic. It chimed like a copper
kettle, and in the aftermath, he heard the swishing of liquid.

    
He
froze. “Ruthie?” he said softly. When there was no answer, he took the candle
from the altar and brought it down to the floor.

    
The
sound had come from a brass washbowl, used by the celebrant to ritually cleanse
his hands before administering Holy Communion. Some of its content had splashed
onto the carpet; it had an acrid odor. Raszer knelt and put his nose into the
bowl, and his nostrils closed reflexively. Urine. “Jesus, Ruthie,” he
whispered.

    
In the
pulsing light, he saw further evidence of her ceremony. She’d jimmied open the
cabinet containing the Communion wine and downed at least one carafe. The
chalice lay overturned nearby, and scattered around it were a few white
Communion wafers. It wasn’t the obvious sacrilege that stunned him so much as
the feral urgency of it. She had accomplished her own transubstantiation: holy
wine into piss.

    
He
stood, taking up the candle and spreading its light into the sanctuary. If
she’d been following the apostate’s path, that’s where she would have headed
next: to the holy of holies. He thought he might find her passed out there, but
he did not.

    
Raszer
set the candle back on the altar and descended to the nave’s central aisle. He
called her name again. The tower bells had begun to chime
O come, o come, Emmanuel
, when he heard a distant siren. A stray
headlight illuminated the rose window above the west entrance. He counted off
each row of pews, passing his hand over the smooth, scrolled wood as he walked.
He had now left the candle’s outer ring, and the nave fell into shadow.

    
A shape registered a second after he saw
it. He stopped, backed up two rows, and revisited what he’d seen. It was a
body, prone on the pew on his right, about halfway down the row. He heard the
deep, measured breathing of sleep.

    
She was
on her side, her right hand beneath her head, her left resting protectively on
the bulky explosive pack she wore against her stomach. He said her name again,
so as not to alarm her when he got close.

    
Then he
sat down beside her and waited.

    
“Still
trying to save my soul?” she asked after a few minutes.

    
“You
tell me, Ruthie. Does it want to be saved?”

    
“Oh, I
don’t guess so. My daddy sure didn’t think it did. He said I was beyond
salvation. Said there was never a teaspoon of good in me, even when I was a
baby.”

    
Raszer
shook his head. “You spend the first twelve years of life seeking your father’s
blessing. If you’re still looking for it after that, you’re in trouble. Grace
has to come from somewhere else.”

    
“Bless
me, Father, for I have sinned.” The sarcasm was there, but halfhearted.

    
“Yeah,
I’d say you have. But that’s not the end of it.” He slipped a worn copy of the
Book of Common Prayer from the back of the pew and began to leaf through it.
When he’d come to the Reconciliation of the Penitent, he read: “The Lord be in
your heart and upon your lips that you may truly and humbly confess your sins.”

    
“There
are too many of ’em,” Ruthie said.

    
“Katy’s
with your mom in Taos,” he told her. “She’s working at the inn.”

    
“That’s
perfect. Clean white sheets every day. That’s where she belongs. This is where
I belong. Some girls answer to heaven, some girls answer to hell.”

    
He paged
again through the prayer book, looking for something. He found it in rite two
of the Daily Evening Prayer.

    
“If I
say, ‘Surely the darkness will cover me, and the light around me turn into
night,’ I will despair. But the darkness is not dark to you, O Lord; the night
is as bright as the day; darkness and light to you are both alike.”

    
She
lifted her head and looked at him, noticing his eye patch for the first time.

    
“What
happened to your eye?”

    
“A
little bird had it for breakfast.”

    
“Did
they . . . do that to you?

    
“To tell
you the truth, I think I got off easy. They blew Dante’s brains out.”

    
She sat
up, wobbled, and rubbed her head. “
What
?”

    
“You can’t be surprised, Ruthie. You’re a long way
from naive.” He turned to her. “Why did you do it? Why did you tell them about
the cave? What was the deal?”

    
“The
deal was you or me. That prick Djapper had so much shit on me from when I hung
with Henry. Interstate transport of illegal weapons. Drugs. Stuff we blew up.
He only played me because he figured sooner or later he’d get to use me. And he
did. He used me in the usual ways, and he used me to get you taken out.”

    
“Djapper
put you up to that?”

    
“He
bought my fuckin’ ticket. Told me how to find you.”

    
“And if
you’d said no—”

    
“I’d go
to jail . . . maybe worse. Couldn’t take prison. No way. And I couldn’t stand
it hangin’ over my head. Can’t take that shit, either.”

    
“But
Djapper was blown to bits before we even made it to El Mirai. You sold me out
to a dead guy.”

    
“I
didn’t know he was dead. And anyway, who were you? Just some guy who’d fuck me
and walk away . . . the way everybody walks away.”

    
“Yeah,”
Raszer said softly. “So that was it? Life sucks and then you die?”

    
“Pretty
much,” she replied, then leveled her eyes at him. “Except that he told me if I didn’t
cooperate, he could see to it that Katy was raped by dogs, cut into a thousand
pieces, and fed to them for dinner.”

    
Raszer
closed his eyes and the prayer book and let it wash over him.

    
 
After a moment, she spoke again. “Johnny and
Henry told me the stories about the Garden. It sounded like some kind of
peace.”

    
“And
peace is what you wanted?”

    
“I
wanted a whiteout. You know, like how in the movies sometimes everything goes
white? No complications. No fucking choices. I wanted to white out the world.”

    
He
glanced at the bomb pack. “And that’s what you intend to do tonight.”

    
“Damn
straight,” she said. “So why don’t you get out of here?”

    
“Not
without you, Ruthie,” he said.

    
“Why?
What am I to you? I fucked you over, mister. Wise up.”

    
“Shams
asked me to look after you. Said you had a soul worth tending.”

    
She
stared for a few moments, then lowered her eyes. “Shams said that?”

    
“Yeah.”

    
“Shams
was a dreamer. Look where it got him.”

    
“Right.
Look where it got him. Flowers spring up where he steps.” He waited. “Walk out
with me, Ruthie. This whole thing with the Old Man is coming apart. Your
testimony will be worth something, maybe immunity. These guys killed Johnny and
Henry, Dante and Shams. Don’t throw yourself on the pyre for them. Don’t—”

    
Without
preface, she laid her head against his chest, and he held her close for what
seemed a small eternity. “Guys like you screw up everything for people like
me,” she said. “You make it seem like there’s a reason for things. Take me out
of here before I see through your con.”

    
Lightly,
almost chastely, she kissed him, then took his hand.

    
They
made their way breathlessly up the aisle toward the western door. She squeezed
his hand tight and let out a sob of anxiety as he reached for the big handle.

    
 
He pulled the door open and called out.
“Davos! I’m bringing her out. Get everybody back and get your man ready to go
to work. Are we clear to walk?”

    
“You’re
clear,” he called back. “Come ahead and then move away from her.”

    
Raszer
stopped and squinted into the police lights. “Move away? Why?”

    
“Like I
told you,” came the reply, “we don’t know how it’s triggered!”

    
He
squeezed her hand. Arc lights cast the snow in shimmering relief as they
stepped out together. It looked like a movie set. The bells had begun to play “O
Little Town Of Bethlehem.” Raszer’s hand was torn from Ruthie’s and he was
moved hurriedly toward a bomb shield and restrained, while Ruthie stood alone,
blinded, on the uppermost step.

    
The
massive door swung shut behind her, leaving the cathedral in near darkness. A
few seconds later, an explosion ripped into the doors and sent shrapnel eighty
feet into the air, shattering the rose window and littering the pews with
shards of brilliantly colored glass. The wind gusted down to the altar and
snuffed the candle out. The tower bells stuck on the first syllable of
Beth-le-hem
, and kept ringing out the
same note.

    
It was a
long time before anyone stopped them.

    
The January rains pelted the picture window with a
staccato rhythm. Each rivulet took its own form on its way down to the sill.
Some looked like rivers Brigit knew from her maps, and others looked like
anacondas. She turned away, thinking that the rains wouldn’t be as bad as last
year, and that this was all right. There had been enough bad weather. She saw
Dr. Schoeppe coming out of the bedroom and knew that this meant she could go
back in. Brigit approached her with a certain hopefulness.

    
“He’s
better today, don’t you think, Dr. Schoeppe?”

    
“I think
you can call me Hildegarde,” said Raszer’s analyst. “Yes, better. Not great,
but better. Great will take some time. What about you?”

    
“Mmm.
Okay, I guess. Sad a lot. My dad’s always been, you know, excited about things.
Like, ‘Brigit, check this out!’ or ‘Brigit, guess how the ancient Gubi-Wubi
tribe made the sun stop!’ It’s hard to see him not be excited.”

    
“I know.
For a while, you may need to be excited for him. It’s contagious, you--”

    
There
was a knock at the main door—the door Silas Endicott had walked through almost
a year before.

    
“Should
I open it, Monica?” Brigit called into the office.

    
“I’ll be
right there, Brij,” Monica answered, rising from her workstation. She wore a
gray wool tube dress and had newly streaked her hair. She peeked through the
window, then opened the door for Lieutenant Borges.

    
“
Buenas tardes, señorita
,” said the
lieutenant, with a courtly tip of his head. “As always, your beauty is a cure
for the stormiest of Mondays.”

    
“
Buenas tardes
, Lieutenant,” said Monica.
“Lorca couldn’t have said it better.”