At Christmas of 1995, I was living in Los Angeles, working for Walt Disney Pictures as a music executive and newly and blisteringly in love with a Parisian ex-countess who had blown the roof off my marriage. We shared an apartment on Dorothy Street in Brentwood, just around the corner from where O.J. Simpson was alleged to have murdered (and nearly decapitated) his wife Nicole with a diver’s knife while wearing a wet suit (the police tape was still up at the crime site). I had recently purchased my very first Macintosh PowerPC and via a dial-up modem had been making forays across what was then known as “the Worldwide Web” when on Agence France-Presse I came across what struck me as the strangest news story I’d ever read.
There had been what investigators were describing as a mass suicide in a region of the French Alps called the Vercors, not far from Grenoble. Sixteen bodies, among then children, had been found by a gamekeeper laid out in ritual star formation in a mountain pass known as Le Trou de l'Enfer (The Mouth of Hell), gunshots to the head, doused with gasoline and set afire. To these sixteen were soon linked another fifty-three who had likewise been sacrificed in Quebec and Switzerland a year earlier. The agency of their demise was a shadowy “neo-Templar” sect identified as the Ordre du Temple Solaire, the Solar Temple. Yes, robes and cowls and swords and crosses, and all the trappings of pulp mysticism that would soon make Dan Brown a household name. But what made this story different was money. Lots of it. And title and status. We knew all about Jonestown. That was the current model. But those folks had been poor, desperate, and mostly black. One could almost understand their desire for an exit. The Solar Temple’s acolytes were wealthy Europeans with aristocratic pedigrees.
It was a time of buoyant recklessness in my life…and vaulting ego. I had a woman who looked like a French movie star, a job that put me within reach of the summit of the entertainment industry, and an ambition that blazed behind my eyes. I decided to turn the Solar Temple story into what was known as “a literary thriller,” and my conceit was such that I thought I could emphasize the “literary” part and get away with it. I was wrong about that, but in the end, it was still a juicy enough book to be optioned by Paramount and to very nearly become a movie before it crashed into turnaround, never to be resurrected. It’s called ENOCH’S PORTAL, and I’m going to be serializing it here on my Substack, beginning with chapters 1 and 2. I hope you enjoy it.
CHAPTER 1
December 21, 1999. Southeastern France
What was most striking from the air was the purposeful arrangement of the bodies. The reports in Lyon had described the victims as “gathered around a campfire”, but it was clear from 600 meters up that they formed a pattern, a sort of starburst around the nucleus of the still-smoldering pyre. The prosecutor winced as his zoom lens framed the charred forms of three children among the dead, one of them not more than an infant. He counted 14 bodies in the star formation and two more fallen in the drifted snow not far beyond, coronas of blood about their heads. He was dismayed to see that these two - who, for some reason, had not joined the circle - wore the uniforms of Swiss gendarmes.
He directed the helicopter pilot to remain at present altitude a while longer, and racked back the lens to take in the surrounding landscape of dense pine forest and Alpine foothill. They were in the Vercors, a wilderness area southwest of Grenoble, France, known mostly to back-country hikers and Nordic skiers. The day was 21 December, the Solstice, the dark opening of the timeless feast of Sol Invictus, which by a neat ecclesiastical sleight-of-hand had been replaced with Christmas. The place chosen for this ghastly ceremony was La Serre de L’Aigle, The Eagle’s Talon, a rocky, treeless pass through the high country. Glancing quickly at his military survey map and then back at the overview, the prosecutor squinted through the glare and gleaned the overlaying pattern: the human wheel was enclosed in a topographical trinity consisting of three landmarks well-known to students of French antiquity: The Black Mount, the Devil’s Well, and le Trou de L’Enfer, the Mouth of Hell. A uniformed French policeman came to the prosecutor’s side in the port of the helicopter, and squatted with an emphatic groan.
“The wind is picking up!” he shouted through cupped hands. “We should go down, unless you need more time...”
“They’re in the center of a triangle!” said the prosecutor. “Or possibly -” He pointed toward the brilliant blue sky to indicate a third dimension. “A pyramid.”
“I’d rather die in a bordello,” the policeman grunted.
“Yes, Louis,” replied the prosecutor. “But then you would die without grace. These poor souls thought that heaven was on their side.” He signaled the pilot for a minute’s more time, and returned to his camera.
The region known as the Vercors took its name from the root carra - charcoal - and for centuries the peasants here had made a living by creating fuel from the burning of the abundant timber. The prosecutor could not help pondering the connection as the helicopter dropped lower and the odor of charred flesh and cedar ash entered his nostrils. He had been in his kitchen, savoring the aroma of his wife’s simmering pot-au-feu, when the call came from Grenoble. “They’re at it again,” the chief of police had said mordantly, then proceeding to read him the contents of the note which had been pinned to a tree at the crime scene. “Those that come into Thee,” it read, “have the same gate, and through that same gate descend those that Thou sendest. Behold, we offer our bodies and all worldly goods if it will please Thy angels to dwell within us and we with them. Woe be unto the earth, for she is corrupted.” It would later be determined that the message paraphrased a quotation from the works of the 16th century alchemist John Dee, attributed by Dee to the apocryphal Hebrew prophet Enoch, whose visions had found their way into a host of millennial scenarios. The note had been signed with a woodcut of Dee’s emblematic glyph, known as the Monas Heiroglyphica, a footed cross mounted by a circle and semicircle, and now familiar to French authorities. A symbol of Mercurius, god of transit within and between all worlds. The insignia was followed by the name of that strange order to which these poor pilgrims had inexplicably given their faith: Le Temple du Soleil. The Temple of the Sun.
An icy gust shook the helicopter, raising a last lick of flame from the embers below, and the prosecutor ordered a landing. As the product of twenty years of stringent French academic standards, he knew that these voyagers had not been the first to ascend to La Serre de L’Aigle on a spiritual journey. The place had been the trailhead of an Alpine crossing used by the Knights Templar on crusade during the luminous 12th and 13th centuries, during which the powerful and hermetic order operated under papal aegis as the outfit charged with insuring the safe conduct of pilgrims to and from the Holy Lands.
Not far from here lay the small village of Saint Pierre de Cherennes. There, in 1310, fifty-four Templars had been burned to death by order of King Philip ‘the Fair’. The last known Templar Grand Master, Jacques De Molay, followed his cohorts to the stake four years later. For both King Philip and Pope Clement V, the Templars, with their huge cache of gold and much-rumored secret knowledge, had come to threaten the hegemony of Church and State. The Order was accused of misusing its holy mission to the East to consort with Saracens and pagans, and of sympathizing with anti-Roman heretics like the Cathars of the Languedoc, who believed that the body was little more than a container for a spirit that ached to return to God. It was even charged that in Templar ritual, the severed head of the goat-man Baphomet was worshipped, and that the Templars were sodomites whose initiates were required to thrice kiss the anus of a black cat.
The most explosive rumor was that the Templars had been privy to the existence of a hidden royal lineage - the Prieure de Sion - sired by Christ himself in consort with Mary Magdelene, who after Calvary had carried their child to the Port of Marseilles, where he’d then fostered the Merovingian line - the line of Clovis. However farfetched, the idea must have put the Carolingian rulers of Francein a spin. The Templar Order was dissolved and had vanished in its visible form by the 15th century, but the prosecutor knew well that bastard variants had survived under cover of Europe’s profusion of Masonic and Rosicrucian fraternities. He also knew, as did his colleagues at Interpol, that a 1995 missive from the mysterious leaders of Le Temple du Soleil had promised that precisely fifty-four of its New Templars would make “the transit,” presumably to join their 14th century forbears. Twenty- three had died on a farm in Switzerland, and nine within a gated compound in the Laurentian Mountains near Montreal. The prosecutor could account for sixteen more here, in the shadow of the helicopter’s strobing propellor. He sprinted over to a pair of plain-clothed detectives, who were standing over the stiff bodies of a woman and her child, coutured like matching mannequins in the display window of a 16th arrondisement boutique.
“Is Fourche here?” he called out. “Have you found his body?” One of the detectives took the prosecutor’s arm and led him to a corpse on the other side of the fire. Louis, the French cop, stumbled alongside, shaken by the carnage.
“Have a look,” said the detective drolly, pointing to the body of a man burned beyond recognition. “The lab in Lyon will tell us, but the overbite looks familiar.”
“For the sake of these children, let’s hope you are right,” said the prosecutor.
“Who is this man, Fourche?” asked Louis, the police attache.
“The less you know about him, Louis, the better,” answered the prosecutor. “To know of his work is to be absorbed in the mystique of death, and I can tell you: it is not a pleasant occupation.” They turned away from the disfigured corpse and walked closer to the remains of the fire, in which could still be seen the detritus of post-modern ritual: scorched champagne bottles and melted prescription drug vials.
Those around the fire had died three times: by asphyxiation (plastic bags covered their heads), by gunshot - point blank to the head - and finally by the torch. The scene stank of the gasoline which had been used to anoint the bodies before the final conflagra- tion. It stood to reason that the police officers, who displayed only gunshot wounds, had performed the service and then shot themselves...or did it? Among the dead were many of good standing and high station: a psychotherapist, an art teacher, a mayor, and the jet set scion of an internationally famous sportswear manufacturer. Whatever despair had fed their act, it was not want of material comfort.
Most of the victims, including the man tentatively identified as Luc Fourche (‘Luc the Fork’ to Interpol), the cult’s putative co-founder, had gone to their maker wearing the white silk robe emblazoned with the red crusader cross of the order, a fact which lent weight to the prosecutor’s theories about their choice of location. Two days after the discovery of the bodies, he received an anonymous letter care of the Interior Minister’s office, purporting to be a sort of manifesto. It said, among other things, that “death is not what we take it for”, and it provided a forwarding address for the recently deceased: The ‘White Lodge’ in the double-star system of Sirius, the Dog Star. Exactly how they had travelled there was anybody’s guess.
Interpol remained unconvinced that those who had died at La Serre were willing players in some sort of continuing historical drama, and wanted the case handled as a murder investigation. But the prosecutor had seen things on the mountaintop that had burned themselves onto his cortex and stolen his sleep.
Before leaving the scene, he had knelt with Louis to examine the bodies of 34 year-old Marie-France de Villiers and her five year-old daughter. Even in death, the girl’s tiny hand remained folded into her mother’s. Beneath their scorched white robes, they wore identical cashmere coats with fox fur collars. As the prosecutor considered this, the sound of sleighbells jangled the brittle mountain air, and he looked up to see that a horse-drawn traineau carrying five bundled tourists had paused on a slope about two-hundred meters distant. The police on the perimeter of the crime scene waved them away, but the prosecutor’s thoughts were momentarily diverted from forensics. A few kilometers away, in the fashionable chalets of Villard de Lans, there were other women in fur, sipping hot wine and celebrating la belle vie. The woman at his feet was one of them. How, where, and why had her detour occurred? He recalled an e-mail alert he had received two months earlier from a persistent private investigator in Los Angeles, and reproached himself that when one is dealing with the lunatic fringe, one had best pay heed to those who traffic there.
Louis leaned over Mme. de Villiers’ torso and tugged gently on the black plastic bag which covered her head. It had snagged on the chain of a silver pendant which she and some of the others wore round their necks, a pendant bearing the image of a two-headed eagle.
“Masons!” Louis had exclaimed, being himself a member of a venerable policeman’s lodge.
“Maybe...and maybe not,” said the prosecutor. Once freed of the chain, the bag slipped off easily. The prosecutor felt his intestines contract. Although there was a bullet hole in the center of her fine, high forehead, her eyes were fully open and her ice-blue face was frozen in a beatific smile. Louis turned to uncover the head of the tiny girl at her side. The look on her face was identical.
Over the following week, in the safety of his offices, the prosecutor revisted the tableau again and again in his mind’s eye. As holy as church bells at midnight, and as awful as plague bells. How could the two be reconciled? On the Thursday following Christmas, he phoned Louis, who was holding all evidence collected at the crime scene in the police vault.
“The note we found at La Serre, Louis...and the letters that came in through the Interior Ministry... Fax it all to that investigator in Los Angeles. Yes, Raszer. Stephan Raszer, I believe. Americans have a certain kinship with heretics, don’t you think? Perhaps he can shine some light on this mystery.”
CHAPTER 2: Perceval
The problem of opposites called up by the ‘shadow’ plays a great – indeed, the decisive - role in alchemy, since it (alchemy) leads in the ultimate phase of the work to the union of opposites in the archetypal form of the hierosgamos or ‘chemical wedding’. Here, the supreme opposites, male and female (as in the Chinese yang and yin) are melted into a unity purified of all opposition and therefore, incorruptible.
Carl Jung - “Psychology and Alchemy”
Stephan Raszer smiled and began counting down from one-hundred, as the toffee-skinned masseuse jackhammered his buttocks with the heels of her hands. He was reasonably adept at achieving alpha states but found it difficult to relax when an erogenous zone was being worked. It was important that he buy at least forty minutes of serenity before he got on the plane, and the old anesthesiologist’s trick was as effective a mantra as any. Count down from a hundred; by eighty-nine, you’re out.
He’d just begun to drift when the back of his eyelids went hot pink and it occurred to him to query Chandra, the half-Ethiopian masseuse whose touch he’d driven ninety miles for, on the subject of dualism. He rolled his head to the side; his sinuses cleared and the scent of eucalyptus and seasoned redwood entered his nostrils. Chandra was on his tailbone, a good time to get the truth out of her.
“You’re a spiritual person, right, Chandra?”
“I try to be,” she answered softly.
“But,” Raszer continued, “you’re also a body person. You’re totally connected with the physical.”
“Um-hum.”
“Ever feel any conflict between the two?”
“No, Raszer,” she said with a smile. He was the only one of her regulars who made anything but small talk, who actually sought her opinion. “Body is the antenna of spirit. You don’t tune the antenna, spirit can’t go out or come back in.” She did some shiatsu on his lower spine, a trouble spot for Raszer, who spent a great deal of time hunched over arcane texts with enigmatic scripts. Shiatsu was good pain in practiced hands, and Raszer was not averse to pain, in measured doses, if it promised illumination. It had been good enough for Catherine of Sienna.
“Did you ever hear of the Flagellants?” he asked her.
“No. Is that some new death metal band?”
“Ha! It will be soon if it isn’t already. Historically, though, they were a loose-knit movement of medieval penitents who protested the corruption of the church by scourging themselves in public. A lot of them were rich ladies from town in sackcloth. They believed they could free the spirit by mortifying the flesh.”
“Kinky,” she said, and moved down to his feet.
“And then some. But it’s an old idea: body and soul at war.”
She worked the pressure points on his feet expertly, producing more colors: turquoise, sienna, burnt orange. When she laid into his left ankle, however, there was an explosion of scarlet. She felt him flinch.
“You been rock climbing again, Raszer?”
“Just some bouldering at Joshua Tree. The ankle’s bad, huh?”
“I should give you a wrap if you’re going off on another crusade.”
“No time, love. I gotta get back to Tinseltown.”
“Turn over, then. I want to get at that third chakra.”
“That wouldn’t be the one under the towel, would it?”
She shook her head and snorted, not for the first time in their three-year acquaintance.
“Here I am, trying to put you on a higher plane --”
“Good sex is a higher plane, don’t you think, Chandra?” He rolled over while she held the towel over his midsection.
“Can be. With the right person.”
He was half tempted to sit up but reminded himself that he was there to relax. He drew a deep breath and let the words roll out slow. When Raszer was not either physically engaged or sedated, his mind tended to roil with thought, and the words sometimes came out so fast and hard that people took it for a polemic.
“But now,” he said, “that limits ecstasy to the confines of a socially correct relationship. I’m talking about savoring everyday eros. It’s tantric. You and I may never be lovers, Chandra, because that would end what we have, but that doesn’t mean I can’t get a buzz from the way you smell when you walk into the room.”
She paused, her hands hovering above his solar plexus, and took note of the faint throb in her belly. For an instant, she considered locking the door. She took in his long, lean frame, more that of a cowboy aesthete than a weight-trainer. She lingered over the bony, borderline handsome face, with its hawk-like nose and wide, slightly insolent mouth, the only androgynous brushstroke on an otherwise masculine canvas. She studied the steel-grey eyes and close-cropped sandy hair that would soon enough match the eyes. She read the old white scars on his wrists.
“The thing is -” Raszer continued, slurring a bit. Chandra, immobilized, had not moved her healing hands from their position above his center, and the inadvertent Reiki effect was taking him to the bottom of a deep well. “- that as soon as we feel the serpent begin to uncoil, we want to jump somebody’s bones, instead of nursing it, cultivating it, the way the Sufis and the Russian love mystics teach. Sex magic. It’s...” His eyelids fluttered and dropped. A fraction of a second before, Chandra had detected a faint glimmer in the iris of Raszer’s right eye.
Chandra’s toffee cheeks darkened to molasses. She did not possess Raszer’s peculiar knack for drinking deeply without getting drunk, and she felt a bit ashamed of how ready she’d been to “end what they had.” Perhaps he hadn’t noticed; after all, it was only a fantasy. She was about to begin again, on his fingers, when he took her brown hand briefly in his and whispered, “...good stuff...”
Raszer emerged limp from the spa a half an hour later and lit a cigarette to put an edge on his eighty-five dollar serenity. A good massage on the eve of beginning a new assignment was one of his many rituals, but he was forever worrying that if he got too comfy, he might decide to skip the wars and stay home. That, in truth, was never a possibility, least of all in the matter of the Temple of The Sun. Raszer was driven to know what made people leave the farm, and toward what blazing, end-of-the-rainbow epiphany they ran. How else was he to confirm that it might be safe for him to set out past the gates, as well?
Three months after receiving the faxed materials from the French prosecutor, Raszer had gotten word that an American woman named Sofia Gould might be “in trouble” with the French-Canadian sect. The lead had come from Sid Jaffe, a Hollywood client whose teenaged son Raszer had retrieved from a saucer cult encamped on Mount Whitney. Jaffe was a skiing buddy of Sofia’s husband, Lawrence Gould, CEO of Empire Pictures Corp., a mini-major with corporate roots in Canada. Gould was as American as a Hollywood mogul can be, but Sofia herself was of French-Canadian descent, a minor actress whose budding career had been effectively nipped when Lawrence Gould carried her away to Hollywood as his child-bride. Gould was fifty-two; Sofia was half that. From all evidence, she was a hothouse flower that had not taken well to transplantation.
Raszer had sent a message back through Jaffe that he was aware of the Temple’s history and m.o. and might be able to help. Two days later, Lawrence Gould, acting through his attorney, requested Raszer’s “credits,” which Raszer took to mean his bona fides as a private investigator. Though it might have suited his impish humor to do so, he did not include in the package his own acting roles in such classics as South Beach Crazy! That, as far as Raszer was now concerned, had been another man. That was before his day of reckoning.
An introductory meeting was arranged in Lawrence Gould’s oak-paneled office atop a high-rise in Century City. The whole thing nearly fell apart over the issue of time as Raszer did all his research at night and rarely rose before ten, while Gould, like most executives, was nervous if he hadn’t closed a deal by nine. In style, temperament, and predilection, few two men could have been less alike, and it was clear from the jump that Gould saw retaining Raszer as only slightly less distasteful than hiring a divorce detective out of a seedy Hollywood walk-up.
“Do you love your wife, Mr. Gould?”
“Yes. I do. Isn’t it obvious, Mr. Razzer?” Gould pronounced the name with a short “a”, as in raspberry. There was a hint of disdain, not only in the deliberate mispronunci- ation, but in the way the silk-suited mogul had fingered Raszer’s business card, as if he feared the ink would rub off and effect some awful mutation.
“That’s Raszer. Rhymes with laser. Stephan rhymes with even.”
“Sorry,” Gould had said absently. He was clearly more concerned with the blinking light on his phone, one of eight incoming lines. “Is it Eastern European? Doesn’t sound Jewish...” Raszer smiled shyly and lowered his eyes. “Anyhow,” Gould continued, “why do you ask? If I love my wife?”
“Because,” Raszer said, doing his best to connect, “if she’s in as deep as you think she is, it’s a good bet that only something just as deep will bring her back.”
“Well then--if it’s love she needs--why should I pay you six-grand a week?”
“Because I can go places you can’t go, Mr. Gould. And wouldn’t want to. And because I’ve made a career of why people like Sofia run away from -”
“People like me,” Gould then broke in, finally attending. “What can he be offering her, Raszer? This guru of hers--this new age con artist?”
“Whether he’s a con artist or a prophet, he can only offer her what she thinks she doesn’t have. It’s for you and me to figure out what that is.” Raszer had gone reflexively for the cigarettes in his pocket, then squelched the impulse, as there was no longer an ashtray to be found in Los Angeles. He drew a deep breath of the recycled office air, heavy with lemon oil and imported wood, and settled back into the chair. Why was he suddenly nervous? He realized that it was because Gould was taking his measure; not only the measure of his dress (a collarless knit shirt, black, and loose-fitting khakis) or his appearance (fit, but decidedly not L.A. buff), but of his worth, of which Raszer was never entirely sure. Gould had the look of a cop who has “made” a perp.
“A tough question,” Raszer continued, “if you don’t mind.”
“Sure, shoot. Hey...didn’t you -” Gould rubbed his chin, as if trying to place his recollection. “Do people tell you ya look like McQueen?”
Raszer chuckled.
“Not often enough... Listen, you’re wife is clearly looking for something. We both agree - if it’s the same group that the French and the Canadians are after - that she’s looking up the wrong tree. But if she’s not in danger, and she wants to stay up there, are you prepared -”
“To let her go?” Gould reached for the framed photograph on his desk and turned it toward Raszer. “Would you?” The woman in the photograph had the eyes of a saint and the mouth of a harem girl; the black hair fell in ringlets around an alabaster face. Raszer was more moved than he’d expected to be.
“She’s not mine to let go,” Raszer answered, “but I need you to know, sir, that even if I can bring her back to ground zero, she may not be the same wife.”
“Can’t you...what’s the term of art? Detox, er....deprogram her?”
“You’re talking about an ‘exit counselor’. They usually work from a presumption of fraud. I’m a tracker. I assume that people know where they want to go but get waylaid. Spiritual hunger is not an eating disorder, Mr. Gould, and your wife...well, I can’t just reinstall the old software. If I can show her the real face of this organization, though, she may well want to come home.”
“Jesus,” Gould sighed. “I don’t even know what fucking religion they practice. She’s been chanting lately. What is it, some Hindu thing?”
“They seem to pitch mostly to disillusioned Catholics.”
“Christ,” said Gould, who Raszer guessed had not had a religious thought since his bar mitzvah. “Why couldn’t she have joined the Scientologists? At least they do career counseling.” Raszer accepted the invitation to laugh. “What is it, exactly, that they believe, Mr. Raszer?”
“The letters found after Grenoble are a smorgasbord of New Age gospel and Rosicrucian mysticism, but that’s all for public consumption. I’m sure there’s more to it. The danger for Sofia is that they also seem to have a huge persecution complex, and for good reason. There are five separate task forces in eight countries investigating banking, bribery, arms trafficking...you name it. You know what happens when true believers feel surrounded, right? Waco. Jonestown. Do you know the story of Masada, Mr. Gould?”
“Sure. I’m a Jew, aren’t I? But listen...for six a week, I don’t wanna hear a lot of mystical mishegaas, o.k.? I want to know if my wife - or my bank account - are in danger. And I want to know about this little French putz... Luc, what’s-his-name...”
“Fourche. Luc Fourche. Who your wife claims to have met in Cannes, right? There’s just one problem with him, Mr. Gould.”
“What’s that? And for chrissake, call me Larry.”
“Interpol has four different files on Luc Fourche. Four files, four different men, one of whom died in Grenoble. You don’t have a photograph, do you?”
“No. But I can sure as hell describe the little sonofabitch.”
“Good” said Raszer, getting up. “We’ll get to that.” Gould rose as well, and Raszer leveled his gaze. “Can I ask you one personal question, Larry?”
“Sure” Gould replied. “Now that we’re on a first name basis.”
“Are you concerned that your wife - and this man, whoever he is - might be having an affair?” Gould considered the question as if for the first time.
“Not a chance,” Gould answered, a little too quickly. “Not her type.”
“Everything o.k. in the bedroom?” He was out of line but had to ask. The difference in their ages made it look like a showcase marriage.
“Let’s put it this way, Mr. Raszer. It’s as o.k. as her moods and my schedule will allow. Any more personal questions?” Raszer nodded his understanding.
“There’s an old bit of Jewish folklore, Mr. Gould. Romance your wife at least once a week, preferably on the eve of the Sabbath. Otherwise, the Devil may step in and father your evil twin.” Raszer extended his hand and smiled empathetically.
“You’re a piece o’ work, Raszer” Gould said, accepting his hand warily. “Are there more of you in the Yellow Pages?”
“As far as I know,” said Raszer, “I’ve got the market cornered for now.”
“I’ve got a personal question for you.”
“Shoot,” said Raszer, leaning into the big mahogany desk.
“You come highly recommended, Mr. Raszer, but you have, to say the least, an unusual - some might even say suspect - profession. You say you’re not a deprogrammer. Hell...you look more like a renegade priest. What makes you tick? Why do you do this?” Raszer smiled. He did not mind being called to account.
“I suppose,” he replied, “because faith is too important an issue to be left to the preachers. People are hungry, and they’re swallowing a lot of stuff they probably shouldn’t, but the hunger is real. You want to know my ulterior motive? I’d like to know if there’s anything out there worth believing in.”
“So you’re...what? A kind of spiritual racket-buster?”
Raszer laughed. “I may have to put that on my business card,” he said.
“I dunno,” Gould mused. “There must be easier ways for a bright guy like yourself to make a living. Why risk your hide?” Raszer lowered his head.
“I’ll tell you why,” Raszer said, “because you’ve put your wife’s soul in my hands. When I was nineteen...” Gould had folded his hands, ready for the pitch.
That meeting had occurred on April Fool’s Day. Today was Father’s Day, another marker in time. Raszer leaned into the wobbly pine railing of the old spa’s deck and chuckled to himself, recalling how Lawrence Gould had responded to his confession as if half-inclined to ask for his check back. His mind was on the memory, but his eyes were on the saloon-style doors of the little haute-cowboy restaurant across the rutted dirt road from where he stood. The restaurant had a good bar, with a wine list suited to the well-heeled industry types who trekked up from L.A. to get patted down and mud-plastered. Raszer had once found a particularly good Sancerre there, and now he started thinking about its cold, flinty slap against the roof of his mouth. He took a last drag on the cigarette.
The meeting had concluded with Raszer saying, “Stay in touch, Mr. Gould. If Sofia is A.W.O.L. for more than twelve hours, let me know immediately. Meanwhile, I’ll start digging.” Raszer had gripped Lawrence Gould’s hand, and it had then been his turn to take the other man’s measure. For all his stature, the studio head had a damp, weak handshake. It had seemed to Raszer that Gould was not at all sure that he could best the Temple’s offer for his wife’s affections.
Raszer ditched the cigarette and headed across the road toward the swinging doors, stopping in mid-path to observe a mule deer in the scorched chaparral. The canyon air smelled of sage and eucalyptus. He was in Ojai, a sleepy cowboy town about ninety miles north of Los Angeles which came alive once a year to host, of all things, an avant-garde classical music festival. Ojai was nestled in a magnificent transverse valley, reputed to be streaming with telluric potency, and had served as the location for Shangri-La in the Ronald Coleman version of Lost Horizon. It was also the home of the Krotona Institute, founded by the self-styled sorceress Madame Blavatsky, queen of the 19th Century parlor occultists, and it was the Institute’s library of arcane texts - as well as Chandra’s hands - which had drawn Raszer north on the eve of his departure for the Old World.
Aside from his chronically offended ankle, Raszer felt as fit as he had in more than a year. He’d been on a two-week crash diet which consisted mostly of soy protein and wheatgrass, but where he was going, the fashionable abstemiousness of Southern California would seem as distant as the stars. His hiker’s frame and the ruddy flush induced by the sulfur baths suggested good health but could not entirely mask the deep fissures born of prior excess. When Raszer was not nursing his lost sheep, he was often in need of being nursed.
The place he had come for succor was called Windsor Hot Springs, and the eponymous vein gurgled and steamed sulfurously from a gash in the woods about a hundred yards north of the main building. On that spot a few years ago, the spa’s founder and his young son had been killed instantly when the limb of an oak, sawed just short of the breaking point long before by a rare bolt of California lightning, chanced to fall at that moment on the unsuspecting pair as they knelt to inspect the source of their fortune.
Fortune...the word danced like Shiva across Raszer’s mind as he caught himself staring into the woods. These woods of the West, with their scrub oak, mesquite, and tinder-dry brush that crackled under your feet, were different from those back East which he’d known as a boy. Back then, he had found himself drawn again and again into the forest’s wet, loamy embrace in pursuit of a phantom. He had been just eleven when he first saw - or thought he saw - her, darting from mossy tree trunk to lush bracken like a pre-pubescent Morgan le Fey. As he entered adolescence, she assumed more womanly proportions, and his trips to the woods took on an erotic flavor. He would leave the forest with a sweet ache in the region of his solar plexus, and sometimes with an odd but not unpleasant tingling in his nipples that made him feel ashamed. For a time before his thirteenth birthday, he had harbored a secret and terrible fear that he was growing breasts and turning into a woman, but he kept going back anyway. As much as the woman of the woods frightened him, she was also his first love.
Sofia Gould was, likewise, a phantom. Tall and swan-like in bearing, she had an unsettling ability to slip in and out of Raszer’s field of view. She had all the substance of quicksilver. Her dark beauty was of another century, possibly even another consciousness. She was a beauty for men who love the ideal of beauty as much as its corporeal expression. In appreciation of this, Raszer found unexpected common ground with her husband.
He had begun his assignment with routine surveillance. Outwardly, it was no different from the work of a divorce dick shadowing an adulterous wife, although the betrayal observed is far more profound. Cult adherents, Raszer had found, exhibited body language and behavior that was either furtive or brazenly purposeful, and this behavior said a lot about the level of their devotion. Sofia displayed neither. She simply attended to her life - whether it was prayers to the Virgin at a grotto in Malibu Canyon or visits to her erstwhile agent at ICM - with the practiced detachment of a Parisian shopkeeper closing up for August. It seemed to Raszer that she was already somewhere else, and that he was tailing a ghost.
On May 1, he had followed her home from a late afternoon trip to an herbalist on Montana Avenue in upper Santa Monica and had lingered outside the gates of her Mandeville Canyon home long after she’d vanished through the portico. He sat in the car and gripped the wheel, trip wires snapping in his mind. The jasmine on her trellis; the gables of her Tudor home; the red mailbox at the end of the drive: all had become numinous, haunted by her desire for rebirth and his uncertain pledge to abort it. Although he hadn’t yet said the words to Lawrence Gould, Raszer was convinced that Sofia was preparing to die. He came to that conclusion even before getting independent confirmation that the Temple was organizing another field trip.
He left his car as dusk fell and moved quietly around the tall hedge to the west side of the house, where she kept her private bedroom and a shaded patio. Her reading chair was empty, though a book lay open on its face: a history of the Cathar heresy. He hopped the wrought iron fence and came down inside the hedge in a crouch. Fifty yards away, in the north yard, a Mexican gardener was stringing party lights around the shrubbery. Raszer crept up to the house and pressed his body into the brick, just beside the frame of her bedroom window. She was seated at her vanity table, her body masked by the mirror, the right side of her face faintly visible through the lace, haloed by a flickering votive candle. Her lips were moving as if in prayer, the right eye open but unseeing. The gardener plugged in an extension cord, and the little white lights came on en masse, throwing an antique glow against her window. Raszer turned on his weak ankle and lost his footing. His head bobbed into the frame and he caught the glint off a surgical blade she held poised in her right hand. Sofia registered his movement and froze, her eye suddenly focused. Raszer dropped to all fours and scampered along the hedge until he reached a narrow canal which passed beneath a chain link fence and emptied into the wash and the concealing foliage of the canyon. It was possible she’d seen him, but not for long enough to imprint. Raszer circled back to his car. Two weeks after that, Sofia Gould disappeared, and it was now Raszer’s job to track her down.
At 39, Raszer could reasonably claim that he had snatched a personal victory from the jaws of disaster. He had overhauled his identity from the spare parts left after a failed marriage, a venomous custody battle, and an acting career which he had determinedly blown away along with numerous powdered substances. His last attempt at professional redemption had led to his being unceremoniously escorted off the Paramount lot. In the midst of his headlong plunge, he had nearly lost his daughter, Brigit, to a rare liver disease. He’d been only blearily aware that she was ill, even though they had once been thick as thieves. Soon after that, Raszer collapsed. All this did not happen because Raszer was a failure as an actor, though he was nobody’s idea of a success. It happened due to an act of sabotage perpetrated on himself by himself. It happened because, in Raszer’s words, his life “wasn’t right.”
When his daughter survived and recovered, he considered it an act of grace. He staggered to his feet and found himself with a strange flaw in his right eye and the one hunger which had been there all along: his desire for what the ancient Greeks had called gnosis; direct knowledge of the divine. It was a rarefied passion, shared variously by mushroom-eating shamans, Neo-Platonic philosophers, and a few odd physicists. To fund his quest, he set about rebuilding the bridges to L.A.’s new money which he hadn’t burned and designing a gig which would pay him reasonably well to search for faith in that sprawling, centerless Bedouin camp by the sea. He knew what it was he wanted to do, but there were currently no listings for soul-saver or shaman in the Employment listings, much less for Grail Knight. He found it, instead, while browsing the L.A. Weekly Personals. The notice read:
“To His Supreme Holiness Chakra Khan: If my daughter is with you, please send her home. I will do anything. I will even direct your movie. Charitably, Gordo.”
The ad had been placed by one Gordon Wexler, a successful director of made-for-TV movies, who was fond of quoting New Age aphorisms and had once commented favorably on one of Raszer’s performances. It seemed his lonely teenaged daughter had taken his enthusiasm for a charismatic stuntman-turned-yogi to the adolescent extreme and run off with the guy. Raszer tracked her to a trailer camp near Sedona and earned the trust of her oily guru by posing as a disciple of Carlos Castaneda. For a week, he sat reverently at Chakra Khan’s feet. Then he took the girl off to the red rocks for two days and nights on a makeshift vision quest, after which, she accompanied him home to L.A. On the rocks, the girl told her grateful dad, she had come to understand that we are never truly alone. Raszer took the success for what it was: beginner’s luck. But he had found a worthy use for his acting skills and a serviceable m.o.: defrock the false and the true stands naked.
Raszer was now the sole proprietor and one of only two full-time employees of a highly specialized detective agency that he called, in wry imitation of West L.A. emporiums, Raszer’s Edge. The wordplay and its nod to Somerset Maugham worked because his firm was dedicated to a very peculiar kind of missing persons search. In L.A., you had to have an angle, and that the more acutely it was carved, the better your chances for cutting through the milky haze which lay over the city on most days. On the first couple of jobs, he winged it in the time-honored style of Hollywood, where you are what you say you are. Then he buckled down, took the required 300 hours for a P.I. license, and hit the books and the Internet for a solid year. He spent three months in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains with a Hopi tracker. From the Salvadoran ex-Marxist guerilla fighter who tended his neighbor’s pool (and now aspired to bourgeois normalcy), he learned to use a knife. He studied the Corpus Hermeticum, The Zohar, and the writings of Plotinus. He underwent a reasonably intensive course of Jungian therapy with what was left of his SAG medical insurance. Along the way, he read the Bible for the first time.
Raszer presented himself to clients as a shepherd, and he never took a fee unless he was fairly certain that the sheep had stumbled into poisoned pasture. He disliked terms like “cult victim” and referred to the objects of his search as “strays”. He understood people like Sofia Gould; how they were haunted at every turn by Peggy Lee’s query: is that all there is? Raszer was an outsider, too, and outsiders understand both the hunger for inclusion and the desire to flee.
The key to Raszer’s fascination with terra incognito may have lain in the yellowed stack of vintage Fantasy comics which he still kept in the hall closet, or in the H. Rider Haggard novels he’d read as a boy. It had assuredly burgeoned with the biography of Sir Richard Francis Burton he’d encountered at twenty-one. Burton, the prodigious British explorer, secret agent, and linguist who had shocked Victorian sensibilities with the first English translations of The Kama Sutra, had been Raszer’s most enduring hero. It was in Burton’s journals that he had first run across the word gnosis. There were the events of his 19th year, the events he had summarized for Lawrence Gould. That was the year when his phantom lady reappeared in a new guise and demanded a price much higher than a walk in the woods.
A more recent impetus behind Raszer’s curious enterprise lay, however, in his exclusion four years earlier from his father’s last will and testament. His father, who had fashioned himself as a Kerouac-style vagabond, had deserted his family when Raszer was five, appearing only in tantalizing cameos throughout Raszer’s youth. On his death, he finally cut the cord with the words ‘I make no provision in this will for my only son, to whom I have left other gifts.’ From that moment on, Raszer had felt himself to be, essentially, an orphan, and now he received a handsome fee to track down kindred souls. With each dollar he collected, he was earning back small pieces of the legacy his father had denied him.
On the day Lawrence Gould sent him off to find his Sofia, Raszer had felt an uneasy sense of fruition. He had sacrificed sheep with Satanists and waited on desolate hillsides for the arrival of flying saucers, all for the sake of a good bounty and a peek behind the veil, but this was the case he’d rewritten his life for.
The Temple of The Sun was far and away the most secretive organization Raszer had ever been asked to penetrate. It appeared to have its geographical roots in the Lake Leman district near Geneva, Switzerland, from where it had spread into France, French Canada, and even Australia. One Canadian official had recently suggested that the cult was involved in money laundering, bank fraud, arms trafficking, and even acts of political terrorism, but these were charges frequently leveled against sects in an attempt to “flush them out” or frighten them into dissolution. This particular gang was operating in a murky area where the line between murder and suicide was obscured by the smoke of sacrament. The word “occult,” Raszer knew, meant not ‘magical’ or ‘supernatural,’ but simply...hidden. Raszer had been off the payroll for a week when Sofia vanished on May 12. Despite the urgency of Raszer’s warnings, Gould had not wanted to fork over another week’s salary for photographs of his wife reading martyrdom histories in the Malibu hills, even though he had found a scalpel in her vanity drawer and a sun sign drawn in blood around the date of June 20 in her diary. He decided instead to put her in the hospital, and that must have done it. She took only a single suitcase-full of clothing, and left the big house in Mandeville Canyon otherwise undisturbed, but for a puzzling note laid his pillow. It was two days before Gould could bring himself to phone Raszer. Gould seemed embarrassed, maybe even ashamed. Perhaps he hadn’t taken the conjugal advice, and now felt like the Devil’s cuckold. Raszer tried to shore up his client’s dignity.
“Don’t blame yourself, Lawrence” he said. “From what I’ve learned, these people have a serious pitch. Let’s just get on this before she gets too far.”
“I read on the net,” Gould stammered, “that Princess Grace was in with these nuts. They say that’s what got her killed.”
“I don’t know about that,” said Raszer, “but there’s no question we’re dealing with some very upmarket snake oil here, if snake oil it is.”
“What the hell is a Cathar, Raszer? Is it some kind of weird sex cult?”
Raszer allowed himself a private smile. Religion was easily the least understood aspect of human endeavor, except perhaps for sex.
“A medieval Christian-Dualist sect from the South of France. They believed that the material world was the creation of the Devil. The Church trumped up charges of sexual perversion, and the Pope’s armies wiped them out, down to the last man, woman, and child. Why?”
“I mentioned a few weeks ago that maybe we should try again to have a kid. Sofia’s got some, uh...plumbing problems...but most o’ the doctors seem to think it’s psycho- somatic. She said that, as a Cathar, she couldn’t bring a child into this world.”
“That’s really important, Lawrence,” Raszer said. “Read me the note.”
“It’s not much,” Gould said. Raszer could hear him unfolding it and sensed that his big, damp hands were shaking. “It says: ‘Dearest Larry. Try not to hate me too much. I have tried so hard to live in your world, but it’s dark all the time, like a drug-sleep I can’t wake up from. Where I’m going, the light is brilliant and clear. Pray for me, if you can. In your way. Did you know that the most beautiful word in the English language is oblivion? Love, Sofia.’”
“Shit,” said Raszer, forgetting his bedside manner.
“What the hell is this, Raszer?”
“It’s a suicide note, Lawrence. Written five weeks in advance.”
“Fuck me.”
“You mentioned she’d made a prior attempt.”
“Younger. Maybe fifteen. She still has the scars on her wrists.” Raszer tugged unconsciously on his own sleeve.
“As an actress, did Sofia take direction well?”
“Like a schoolgirl.”
“This isn’t going to be easy, Larry...but I will find her.”
Over the following weeks, the two men had spoken often, Gould always anxious to know what Raszer had come up with, and Raszer usually giving the same response. “Hang tight, Lawrence. I need to pin her down.” He would not board a plane until he had located Sofia down to a square block and was certain that his movements would not trigger flight. Reliable data was very slow in coming.
Raszer had made one startling discovery, however, which not even the task force in Lyon had stumbled on. He played out an obscure lead from a jailhouse informant in Montreal and learned that the present-day Temple was a schismatic offshoot from a crypto-Masonic lodge formed in 1970 which had called itself the Reformed Temple. Its founder had been a former Gestapo member, known to travel in the clandestine world of European secret police organizations. The virulent bloodline of the Reformed Temple could be traced all the way back to the Germanen Order, a theosophical lodge founded in 1912 and counting among its initiates a young Adolf Hitler. An odd legacy to have attracted the loyalty of a rich American girl with a Jewish sirname. What could any of this have to do with Sofia’s 12th Century soulmates, the martyred Cathars of Montsegur? The only link had to be some bowdlerized version of Rene Guenon’s Traditionalism, or maybe with the Vichy Catholics of southeastern France. And was the Temple’s pitch earnest fanaticism or highbrow con? Money was changing hands. Who, if anyone, would profit by the death of these innocents?
On the borderlands that Stephan Raszer had made his beat, easy political and ethical distinctions dissolved, and everyone played a high-stakes game of ‘button, button...who’s got the button?’ The ‘button’ was nothing less than the Elixir of Immortality, and in its quest were made some really strange bedfellows. Raszer stepped through the saloon doors into the little bar and ordered his white wine, then reconsidered. “Scratch the Sancerre,” he said to the leather-skinned bartender, “Make it Scotch on ice.” He scanned the rack for his favorite bar scotch. “White Horse.”
He had left himself the evening to return via the 101 to L.A. and cross the last few t’s before a noon flight from LAX, first to Montreal, then to London, then on to his final destination. Just two weeks earlier, the prospects of pinning down Sofia before her date with the reaper had seemed bleak. His leads had dried up; the informants had dummied up. He had been very close to turning the case over to Interpol, though he feared that was as good as signing her death warrant; cult suicides were often precipitated by the perceived proximity of the “Inquisition.” He had narrowed her possible location to three places: Martinique, Tenerife, or Prague, but it was not until he put his ass fully on the fire that things got cooking. They reached boiling when a man named Stocker Hinge returned his phone call.
Hinge was an erudite and somewhat controversial researcher in the field of “emerging religions.” He was a “mole,” and had written his best papers from deep inside the sects he’d penetrated. He also had an odd thing for limericks. Raszer had been initially reluctant to enlist one of his own kind in the quest. Finally, he’d had no other choice. On June 1st, Stocker Hinge had phoned Raszer from a private line in his offices at the Centre pour L’Observation des Nouvelles Sectes in Montreal, the city which was purportedly the current base of the Temple. Hinge’s message was brief and cryptic: “I may have something for you, Stephan. I’m going to introduce you to a man we’ll call Mr. X.”
The cloak and dagger stuff always tickled Raszer.
Stocker Hinge proposed a risky gambit which would put Raszer at the center of the ceremony and advance “Mr. X’s” agenda, as yet troublingly undefined. All that was clear was that he held a grudge, and wanted to stick it to his erstwhile comrades. For his part, Hinge would get a vicarious peek behind the velvet curtain, sans risk. He probably intended to use Raszer’s experience as the basis for his next paper, but it didn’t matter. In agreeing to the plan, Raszer got the information he needed. Sofia Gould was in Prague, the capitol of the Czech Republic.
Shooting past the technicolor green soybean fields north of Camarillo, Raszer dropped his vintage Avanti into third gear just to hear the engine’s sweet protest. He fumbled in the glove box for a tape and popped in Geoffrey Oryema, the Ugandan Leonard Cohen. The sound system in Raszer’s old coupe was high-end mono, and he’d searched long and hard for the components; he thought the idea of stereophonic sound in a moving vehicle with a noise floor of 80 db was a joke.
The throbbing body rhythms of the African’s music brought Raszer back to the massage table, and the honeyed overtones of the kalimba evoked the remembered scent of a South African sojourn: sweet, grassy air, musk oil and hashish. For less than an instant, he flashed on damp, coffee skin in a hut near Mmabatho, and felt a tingle in his groin, recalling the way the Lesotho girl had lifted her dyed skirts and opened herself to him without the slightest hint of Western shame. The sense memory of her sex smell took Raszer tumbling again across space-time to a remote Coptic monastery in Egypt. There it is again, he thought. The residual vibration of sex and the trailing perfume of the oceanic feminine were inseparable in Raszer’s mind from his groping attraction to mystical experience, notwithstanding the fact that women had a habit of dangling his feet over the fire. Women wanted something from him, of that he was certain, but he’d lost the memory of what it was. He no longer heard the secret language they spoke, though he was sure that he once had. Back then, in the woods, before his nineteenth birthday. He downshifted at the Hwy. 134 junction, and eased over into the right lane, heading down through the Cahuenga Pass into Hollywood and his Whitley Heights home office. There would undoubtedly be another binder-full of briefing papers for him to read over dinner, prepared with consummate skill by his research assistant and other half, Monica Lord.
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