Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation Read Free Page A

meaningless as tea
leaves to anyone not looking for meaning. He saw for an instant a connection
with Scotty Darrell’s plight. Advanced Gauntlet players were not allowed to
take maps, compasses, or written directions on the road. The only navigational
tool permitted was the I Ching , the
ancient Chinese oracle of broken and unbroken lines. The Gauntlet’s guiding
philosophy was drawn from the text accompanying hexagram number twenty-five:
“It is not favorable to have a destination in view.” Raszer looked for a sign
in the scattered twigs, but saw only confusion.
         He
tossed his cigarette onto the saturated ground and cursed. Raszer’s divinatory
powers, which could be considerable when he was at his best, went to shit when
self-doubt came to town—his goddess abandoned him.
         He felt
a tug on his trousers. It was Brigit. She’d been nosing around his library
again and come up with a gold-leaf Tantric text that he’d bought at auction two
years earlier for $350. It had first been translated for the English-speaking
world by Sir Richard Francis Burton, and was highly prized for its scandalous
full-color plates. Brigit had happened on an illustration of the “plow”
technique of sexual intercourse.
         “Is this . . . ” Brigit asked with artful
innocence, “what sex looks like?”
         “That’s
the sacred union of Shiva and Shakti, the joining of male and female energies.
Powerful mojo.”
         She
cocked a chestnut-colored eyebrow. “That how you and Mommy did it?”
         “If we
had,” said Raszer, taking the book just in time to dodge a raindrop, “things might’ve
gone differently.” He indicated the hand-stitched binding. “And this, Pandora,
is a very rare book. If you’re gonna browse, stick to paperbacks.”
         “They
don’t have pictures,” she replied, then tossed her head and went back inside,
leaving Raszer a bit lighter. He could see the woman in her already in that
little toss of the head—or, rather, he could see how her greatest charms as a
woman would be those qualities of childhood she retained. After a moment’s
pause, he followed her inside and went to return the volume to its stall.
         Raszer’s
library commanded the largest of three bedrooms. Although it contained nearly
three thousand titles, the library was devoted to just two subjects: the
history of man’s fevered pursuit of divine secrets and cosmic truths, and the
lesser history of how that desire had been manipulated by darker agencies . There were selected volumes on
forensics, criminal psychology, and international law, but these were
subservient to the grand topic of spiritual hunger and the lengths to which
human beings would go to satisfy it.
         Raszer
had at first tried to organize the whole in subsets—alchemy, astrology,
Buddhism, Catharism, and so on—but found so many overlaps and cross-currents
that it worked better to arrange them associatively, that is to say, in the
manner of his thought processes, which were those of a detective. Thus, each
section of the library became a history of the cases he’d taken on, and of the
person at the nexus of each case, and this system gave him a convenient mnemonic
device for locating any volume at a moment’s notice.
         The
categories dealing with world religions and wisdom traditions were so broad
that they merited their own shelves, but individual books had a way of
migrating to the matter at hand. The entire library had been ingeniously and
continuously cataloged by Monica, who was not only his researcher, dispatcher,
and de facto publicist, but the woman who knew his mind and methods best. Her
organizational method utilized links that, in aggregate, yielded more than
462,000 cross-references.
         Natural
light in the library was provided by a set of north-facing French doors. These
opened onto a cloistered patio and an herb garden, within which a number of the
species owed their cultivation