Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation Read online

  NOWHERE-LAND

  A Stephan Raszer Investigation

  A.W. Hill

  for P.K.

  PROLOGUE

  SCOTTY DARRELL stood in the field of winter wheat and felt the wind stab the wet spot on the front of his corduroys. He let out a sob. Somewhere along the last leg, he’d wet his pants. I’m nineteen, he thought, and I peed my pants. He hadn’t done that since the age of seven, and had vowed then that nothing would make him do it again.

  Scotty didn’t know where he was or how he’d gotten there, but that was the point of The Gauntlet, an alternate reality field game that made Dungeons Dragons look like Simon Says. It began on the web and moved with disorienting speed onto a global gameboard, where the moves were determined by fate, the I Ching, and the kindness (or malevolence) of strangers. After a certain number of moves, you couldn’t retrace your steps to the trailhead. Chaotic play was built into the game; no algorithm could map its logic. The GamesMasters had studied everything from aboriginal rites of passage to Stockholm syndrome, all to fashion a separate reality to which the player would ultimately surrender.

  Then came the good stuff. Then came God, whatever that was.

  Scotty had bought into The Gauntlet when the call for “pilgrims” had traveled through cyberspace to the Middlebury College library server, attached to a piece of stealth spam with the heading “WE KNOW WHO YOUR DADDY IS.” Though his nominal father was a tenured professor at Middlebury, Scotty had always suspected he might be adopted. He couldn’t resist opening the potentially viral attachment.

  Now, thirteen months later (maybe fourteen—he wasn’t sure), he was playing the Seventh Circle, two ranks from the top level of the game. His last contact with the Masters—not counting the fake-out—had been from an Internet café in Butte, Montana, but that had been ages ago in gametime. He was “riffing,” and not that well. He had no money and no ID, and had moved into winter without a coat. If he didn’t find his next Guide soon, he would have to admit defeat. Although his status was transnational, it panicked him that he didn’t know what country he was in. If it was the United States, then he supposed he was in Kansas, but it could just as easily have been the Ukraine.

  Beyond all that, Scotty Darrell had done some very bad things in the real world. And although these things had been done in the person of his game avatar, he couldn’t shake them. Guilt draped him, but lightly—a clammy discomfort like the dampness in his trousers.

  He stopped and remembered. The wind rose and cooed through the grain. His mother’s voice: little Scotty’s soul has flown, lights are on but no one’s home.

  Stumbling through the wheat, his sneakers suddenly hit blacktop. He dropped to his knees and offered a prayer. He stood up, and had not been walking the median strip for more than fifteen minutes when the black Lincoln Town Car rolled up on his right and he was invited inside. “Get in, Scotty,” the man said. “It’s a new game now.”

  ONE

  It had been raining in L.A. for ninety-six hours, and still no floating cars. For Stephan Raszer’s young daughter, Brigit, who knelt on a high-backed chair in the dining area with her palm pressed against the streaming picture window and her eyes trained on the Cahuenga Pass, this was a disappointment. Her father had told her fantastic tales of how in “old L.A.”—in the days before flood control—the winter rains would spawn such currents that automobiles cresting the hills would be rafted into Hollywood like logs on a theme-park ride, coming to rest only once they’d hit the flats of Hancock Park. Like god Shiva, children take a certain careless pleasure in catastrophe.

  Raszer himself was not enjoying the rains. In years past, he’d welcomed them as a recess from the unrelenting sun, an excuse for skipping the California gold rush. This year, they seemed a nagging reminder that his Argonautic enterprise—a very private investigative service specializing in the retrieval of lost souls—was on the reefs. He rose, foul-tempered, from the futon in his room and grimaced at the stained-glass Grail window he’d installed at great cost four years earlier. Its Book of Hours colors had bled to shades of gray in the joyless morning light. He cursed his extravagance. Raszer had always spent what he earned; now there was nothing left to spend.

  “Damn the rain!” he growled in an Ahab voice, partly for Brigit’s benefit. He lit a cigarette. The last affordable vice—and, at seven bucks a pack for his brand, barely.

  “Oh, Daddy,” she chided as he entered. “I want it to rain harder. I like it.”

  “Yeah, I know, sweetheart.” Raszer padded over and kissed the top of her head. “Rain makes kids feel safe and grown-ups feel helpless.” A muscle twitched in his right temple. There it was again. Each time he kissed her, he had call to remember how he’d nearly lost her, and cause to pledge that he would never risk losing her again.

  It rains with a vengeance in Los Angeles, gray battalions of storm rolling in from eight hundred miles offshore like the skyborne funeral of a defeated warrior, drummers beating out mad, insistent rhythms on the flat rooftops from Venice Beach to San Bernardino, the swelling ranks of mourners contained only by the mountains that flank the basin like shrugged shoulders.

  The rain paints a different city, a conquered city of empty, mirror-surfaced streets. For as long as he’d lived there, Raszer had looked forward to this annual transformation. Transformation was, after all, his stock in trade. This year, it was only bringing unwelcome hints that the corpse in the funeral cortege might be his own.

  He stumbled into the kitchen, where there were other things that evidenced his short-lived affluence. He owned one of those big, professional chefs’ stoves with a gas grill on top, and a collection of cast-iron skillets and cooks’ knives that would have done Escoffier proud. Cooking was Raszer’s only real hobby, as the others comprised his work. He had neither an investment portfolio nor a retirement plan. Until the crash, he’d had three savings accounts: one was a backup for his chronically overdrawn checking account, the second for the little place he wanted to build someday in Baja, the third was for Brigit. All but the third had now been exhausted, and that one he wouldn’t touch. He’d taken out a second mortgage on his Whitley Heights home instead, and was consulting for the LAPD’s Missing Persons Unit.

  He pressed himself a thickheaded cup of Ethiopian coffee, scooped up the telephone, and stalked out the back door to the covered pine deck overlooking his meditation garden and the canyon chaparral. The garden, watched over by sentinels of polytheistic statuary placed amid the rosemary, thyme, and purple ice plants, was another product of good fortune. He punched in a phone number while watching beads of water run down all four of the goddess Kali’s arms. The rain had let up, but not for long. The call was to his twenty-nine year-old research assistant, Monica Lord.

  “Monica?” he said after three rings.

  “I see you made it through the night.”

  “You coming to work today?”

  “Not if you’re gonna be as cranky as you were yesterday. Besides, the pass is flooded. You want me to hire Charon to ferry me across?”

  Raszer’s silence drew a sigh from her. She knew he needed to maintain the ritual of work, even when there was no work to be done.

  “Listen,” she said, “I’ll come, but you gotta promise you’ll let my chiropractor adjust you. It might restore your balance.”

  “I’m not sure that’s the sort of adjustment I need,” he said. His mood darkened further when he noticed the hillside mud oozing like lava into his hot tub.

  “You want me to stay with Brigit tonight so you can prowl the roadhouses?”

  He leaned heavily on the wet wooden railing.

  “Damnit, Monica,” he said. “I can’t shake thi
s funk. I lost a stray. He’s off the grid, and this fucking rain of bad luck is God giving me the waterboard.”

  He heard her blow the bangs out of her face, a prelude to straight talk. “Let go of Scotty Darrell. You lost your game on one job. One in seven years. You used to do it regularly in the old days.”

  “Yeah, but then I only hurt myself.”

  “Check again, Raszer. There was always collateral damage.”

  Scotty Darrell was a stray. Stray was Raszer’s term for the runaways, cult adherents, and other lost sheep whom he’d been--until recently—paid handsomely to return to pasture. The runaways were usually running to as well as from something—most often to the fire from the frying pan. The others had been “taken” in one way or another. This they had in common: all had lost their way, and all had gotten mixed up in the Devil’s business.

  Tracking strays was a specialty within an already specialized field, and Raszer got nearly all jobs on referral. If someone near and dear had gone missing, if a spiritual swindle was suspected, if you feared physical harm, and moreover, your fears had risen to that inexpressible conviction that a human soul was at risk, you might find yourself eventually on Raszer’s doorstep. If he took your case, it would be because the evidence suggested that an abuse of faith had indeed occurred, and that it was critical that your loved one be restored to “the grid.” By the grid, he didn’t mean some Cartesian straight and narrow, but something more like the lattice of a quartz crystal.

  Raszer was nobody’s idea of orthodox, but he did hold fiercely to one article of faith. He believed that sanity and spiritual health required that we be wired into a circuit which had as its power source the dynamo of the Godhead. He could see it, everywhere, spinning out its fibers. The Tantrists conceptualized it as a mandala, the Taoists as a path, but for Raszer it was a net woven of grace.

  If he was aware of being cradled by that net now, it was because he could still recall a time when it hadn’t been there for him at all. It was the one safe place to be; everything else was what the kabbalists called sitra ahra: the other side. Perversely, that was exactly the borderland to which his jobs took him. He guessed he had a score to settle there.

  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: