Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (51 page)

    
“You
know, Ruthie,” Raszer said. “I’ve got a feeling about you.”

    
“Yeah?
What’s that?”

    
“I’ve
got a feeling that you know in your soul that whatever it is that makes people
believe that much—enough to beat themselves, enough to lose a piece of
themselves for you—it’s not just mumbo-jumbo. It’s passion. You just forgot how
to believe, because believing meant swallowing your father’s creed or your
mother’s passivity, and you didn’t like the taste of either one.”

    
“Well, I
dunno,” she said, and hopped down from the front seat. She closed the door
softly, then leaned back in for just a moment. “But I’m starting to believe
you.”

    
“Good,”
Raszer said. “Now go inside the trailer and fetch me Henry’s rock.”

    
When Raszer stopped by Nocturno on his way back to
the inn, Shams was gone, and Lon, the owner, claimed not to know where.

    
“He does
that,” Lon said. “Just goes. Sometimes I think he’s fucking with my head. Shams
is only half flesh and bone, you know. The rest of it, he left over there in
the desert. Tonight he said he was going out to smoke a bowl. Never came back.”

    
“Ruthie
said he might be crashing at your place tonight,” said Raszer. “Any chance
he’ll show up there?”

    
“You
never know with Shams,” said Lon. “But my door’s always open.”

    
“Well,
anyhow,” said Raszer, scribbling down the name of the inn. “If he comes back,
would you give him this and tell him he can reach me there?”

    
Lon, who
had the immovable, stone-set face typical of his people, glanced at the note.

    
“You’re
the PI, right? The tracker. Looking for Ruthie’s sister.”

    
“That’s
me,” said Raszer.

    
“My
father was a tracker,” said the Indian. “Piece of advice?”

    
Raszer
nodded. “Always.”

    
“Out in
the world, the scent of prey is everywhere. It smells like fear. But the scent
of a predator, that’s different. The scent of a predator is no scent at all,
unless it’s somethin’ to cover up the blood in his mouth.”

    
“Thanks
for the tip,” said Raszer. He indicated the computers. “And for these.”

    
Lon
chuckled. “I hope you have better luck than that FBI guy.”
   

    
After three hours of sleep at the inn, Raszer was
in the front range of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, free-climbing the face of
a thirty-foot boulder. The sun was still low in the eastern sky, resting
lollipop orange on the hills above Chimayo, and the air was cool and electric.
He’d brought a pack with his rock shoes and the essential climbing
gear—harness, rope, carabiners, cams, and stoppers—but the sight of the boulder
with its fissures etched by the morning sun made him abandon everything but the
shoes and go with feet and fingers.

    
Now, at
twenty feet, he’d run out of cracks.

    
Stupid
, he thought, looking down at
where the skin of the rock curved away and left empty space.
All I need to do is turn my ankle again and
screw things up right
.

    
Raszer
had begun two of his last three jobs limping. People like Hildegarde, his
analyst, kidded him that it was to remind him of his mortality, to keep him
from leaping thoughtlessly into the flames. He’d dragged his bad ankle across
the Australian outback and into the deserts of Morocco, and it had, arguably,
slowed him down just enough to keep him alive. Still, he had no desire to take
it into Turkey, and the prospect instilled enough caution to make him
reconsider the rock face four inches from his nose.

    
He
turned his cheek into the stone, breathed, and allowed the climber’s panic to run its course. The rock came into sharp focus, he
found a divet with his left toe, and he powered up the remaining ten feet to
the top.

    
For the
next four hours, he did more of the same, ascending roughly a hundred feet into
the front range with each climb. He found, without much surprise, his flesh
willing but his spirit weak. This disparity, he supposed, would color the whole
assignment. He was doing it partly on his own dime, for a dead client and a
furtive group of elders whose reasons for wanting their stray back were dubious
at best. He knew less about his destination than he had on any prior job.

    
The
risks to life and limb seemed substantial, and he had a bad feeling about the
project. The overriding factors were pride and desire, desire that had now been
fanned by Shams’ description of a place where—as he’d put it—the world turned
inside out. Desire to reveal a bit more of the holy iceberg.

    
Raszer
worked himself gradually west throughout the morning, toward the cow path that
eventually became Pima Road, location of the
morada
, the starting point of the Good Friday rites of the
hermanos penitentes
.
On some stark ridge north of there, there would be a crucifixion,
and Raszer wanted to see it. He’d brought his binoculars and enough water to
stave off the effects of the midday sun, and hoped to find a perch overlooking
Calvary. He didn’t truly expect darkness at noon. But such ceremonies surely
sent a kind of semaphore to God, and Raszer’s vocational curiosity demanded
that whenever such a signal was sent, he be there to see if God answered.

    
At
eleven fourteen, he came over a ridge and saw the procession leaving the
morada
, with the women at a safe
distance. Their numbers were smaller than Ruthie had suggested. Sign of the
times. Some were stripped down to shorts made of a rough fabric, and flogged
themselves as they marched while singing a hymn that was as raw and spiky as
the chaparral they traversed. The words were unintelligible, but the tune had
the keen edges and plaintive leaps of a Moorish dirge.

    
Above it
all was the screech of the tin flute, playing an accompaniment that was less
complement than commentary. The flute, Raszer supposed, stood in for the sounds
of women mourning the death of a god. Other men, younger, wore blue jeans and
T-shirts: the more recent initiates who hadn’t yet earned the privilege of
pain. Four of them carried the upright post of the cross, and Angel—as
Jesus—bore the crosspiece on his shoulders. When he stumbled—as he did twice on
his way up the steep path—his knees came crashing to the rocks, and he was
beaten by the men portraying centurions until he staggered to his feet. It was
theater, but it was theater that sought the purest catharsis. If it had a
color, the color was purple.

    
Raszer
picked out Ruthie with his binoculars, but it was yet another version of her,
this one with long black hair to match that of the young Latinas in her
company. How many wigs she had, and how she paid for them, were questions for
which Raszer conceded he might never get answers. Why she had them was becoming
easier to guess. Ruthie was trying to find a me she liked better than the one
she’d been born with.

    
There
were nineteen women, all walking a rough trail through yucca and creosote.
Ruthie walked with her spine straight in spite of the steep incline, and had an
arm wrapped around her mother’s waist. She looked as proud and pious as the
other women. Almost exemplary. The loose, gauzy skirt she wore draped her lower
half in a way that was both devotional and provocative. She was the Magdalene,
complete with earthenware jar of balm. Raszer found this Ruthie the most
intriguing one yet.

    
The
women arrived at the overlook and took their places along the rocky wall like soldiers
on a parapet, while the men descended into the canyon, singing their grim
alabados
, marking time with the stroke
of stalk against torn skin. From a distance too great to see blood or feel
empathy, their procession was as fiercely erotic as an El Greco canvas, but
eroticism is what distance from violence allows.

    
Raszer
saw Ruthie brace her left arm on a boulder and lean hard into the canyon,
shading her eyes from the midday glare of the sun. She turned abruptly to her
mother and shouted something urgently. Then she pivoted about and, for a few
moments, scanned the massive slope behind her. Raszer knew she was looking for
him. One by one, the older women fell to their knees and crossed themselves,
followed by the younger ones. Only Ruthie remained standing, and suddenly she
bolted, following the men down into the arroyo.

    
Raszer
began to run, too, and his heart was again in his throat. He swung wide of the
women, to the side of the overlook opposite Ruthie, where a steep trail spilled
rock debris down the walls of the canyon. The far side of the chasm rose in
steppes, one of them a small butte of soft stone, pink as flesh. On the butte,
a stake had been erected, and on the stake hung a naked man, his bearded chin
fallen to his chest, his bald head crisscrossed with lacerations. Ruthie raced
ahead of the men, who had slowed their pace to gape at the sight. When she was
within thirty feet, she began to scream.

    
“Shaaaaaams!
Shaaaaams!”

    
Raszer
scrambled down the nearly vertical rockfall, tumbling twice and tearing open
the skin on his wrist and elbow. He raced the perimeter of the butte to the
only clear path up, the path that Ruthie had taken, and the closer he got, the
more wind was pulled from his lungs.

    
Ruthie
tried frantically to shinny and claw her way up, to reach her friend’s feet, as
if she imagined she might pull the nail from his flesh and set him free. By the
time Raszer reached her side, her hands and bare feet were full of splinters,
but she would not stop climbing, and she would not stop screaming.

    
They had
crucified him on a
stauros
, a single,
massive upright at least fourteen feet high, and Ruthie must have known they’d
done it for her sake. This was the way the Witnesses claimed it had been done
to Jesus. There was no true cross, only this profane axle joining heaven and
hell. Shams’ arms had been extended above his head, his wrists bound to the
stake, and the rope looped around his neck so that when he tired, strangulation
would follow. A single spike had been driven through his feet. The high sun and
the wind’s hot breath had already dried the river of blood that had coursed
down his thighs from the wound left when they’d cut off his genitals.

    
Raszer
pulled Ruthie down into his arms and collapsed to the pink dust, crushing her
into a fetal ball, rolling her to and fro. When the screaming stopped, she
began to moan, and he moaned with her. He said nothing. Nothing would have
done.

    
The
hermanos
slowly gathered round, hands
clasped in front, eyes down. Angel had been relieved of his cross and came
forward, falling to his knees, still carrying a whisper of the song on his
breath. He looked up, then at Raszer and Ruthie, and reached his hand forward
to touch her trembling shoulder.

    
Raszer
nodded to Angel and said quietly, “Her friend. A good friend.” Then, just as
quietly, he cursed. Nothing ever changed. Herod and Pilate still ran the show.

    
“¿
Porque, amigo
?” Angel asked. “
¿Porque
?”

    
“
No se
,”
Raszer said. “
No se
.”

    
After a few minutes, Ruthie’s mother arrived and
knelt at Ruthie’s side, and Raszer gingerly handed the girl over.

    
“Who did
this?” asked Constance Endicott, her throat tight with fear.

    
Raszer
thought he had better not answer. Instead, he stumbled to his feet,

opened his pack, and hammered a piton into the
stake at a height of about three feet. He took a step up and pounded in another
one, and that brought his shoulders to the level of Shams’ head. He took the
rope from around his neck, and as Shams’ jaw slackened slightly, Raszer noticed
that a small paper scroll had been inserted into his mouth. Upon removal, it
appeared to be a plain white business envelope, sealed with an extravagant
amount of old-fashioned, red sealing wax.

    
On
closer inspection, Raszer discovered embedded in the glob of wax the severed
front half of Shams’ tongue.

    
A cloud
passed over the sun, and the butte fell into shadow. Over the crest of the
front range was the faintest purple penumbra: an approaching spring cloudburst.
As the ropes binding his wrists fell away, Shams’ arms dropped, but slowly,
like a bird folding its wings. With the envelope in his hand and Shams’ torso
laid over his right shoulder, Raszer carefully descended and laid the corpse on
the soft rock. He stripped off his topshirt and laid it over Shams’ midsection,
covering the wound. He did not want anyone but the coroner to see that the
killers—in the fashion of barbarians from time immemorial—had stuffed the
severed organs into the hole.