Maria Hudgins - Lacy Glass 02 - The Man on the Istanbul Train

by Maria Hudgins

  If her private sleeping compartment was only seventy-eight lira, how much could a plain old seat be? Not much.

  “I’ll pay for his ticket.”

  Both men’s heads jerked toward her.

  “He may have dropped his ticket outside,” Lacy said. “He probably did. I saw him running to catch the train. It doesn’t matter anyway. I’ll pay for his ticket now. How much?”

  The conductor stammered something and named a price. Lacy ducked into her compartment, counted out the correct amount from her dwindling supply of cash, and returned to the scene. Launched in the direction of a Pullman car by a push from the conductor, the bedraggled man turned to his benefactor and mumbled, “Thank you, thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it,” she said, hoping her casual tone conveyed the message that this was really nothing—a favor that need not be repaid.

  The man in the green trench coat had tears in his eyes as he turned to leave.

  * * *

  She used the rest of her evening to write notes to herself on how to handle the many things she’d left hanging when she left Istanbul. Appointments with carpet weavers, potters, and suppliers of vegetable dyes had to be canceled or postponed. Her editor needed to know where she was and when she’d submit the finished manuscript of, The History and Prehistory of Color. She composed an email to her father explaining where she was going and why, and saved it to send to his office later when she had an Internet connection.

  Outside, the lights of Istanbul receded and the void of open grassland took their place. The modern, bustling city gave way to the great interior where large empty tracts remained, untouched by the modern age.

  Lacy couldn’t call her parents at home or send email because her mother didn’t know she was in Turkey. She kept in touch with her father, a doctor, through his office email and phone, who then told her mother whatever he wanted her to hear. Occasionally Lacy called her mother but only after arming herself with the necessary lies and from a place with no tell-tale background noises. She could imagine a Muslim call to prayer cutting in as she told her mother she was grocery shopping in Farm Fresh.

  Lacy shivered a little. Lying to her mother felt wrong, but she and her father had agreed this was her best course. Until she was home from the Middle East. At least her mom had approved Lacy’s choice of a career field. But the word botany, to Lacy’s mother, meant greenhouses and herbaceous borders. To Lacy it meant the Amazon jungle, stalking the wild asparagus, and skin diving for seaweed.

  Propping her feet on the lip of the little sink opposite her seat, she crammed a pillow behind her neck and thought about the man whose ticket she’d paid. The man in the green trench coat.

  Shannon—she couldn’t remember his last name now—walked home from the bus stop with her that day in her eighth grade year. Other than being a bit hollow-eyed and never wearing jeans, only chinos—the kind with no belt loops—he was much like the other kids in their neighborhood. Middle to upper-middle class. Parents mostly professionals. They drove Beamers or better. He shared no classes with Lacy because she was on the gifted track and he wasn’t. From Lacy’s house he had to walk another two blocks to reach his own, so on a couple of occasions, especially when it was hot, Lacy had invited him in for a Coke with ice—even though it meant putting up with her mother’s grilling afterward.

  One day, as they walked from the bus, Shannon told her of his F on a math test, and what the teacher had written in red ink on the top of his paper. Upon reaching Lacy’s house, he asked if he could come in. She hesitated. Neither of her parents’ cars was in the driveway and she remembered her mother’s harangue on the subject of boys in the house when no grownups were there. Not knowing when her mother would return, she told him “no,” wondering why he had asked. He’d never done that before. He’d always been reticent about taking her up on her invitations, requiring Lacy to insist, “It’s okay. I promise.”

  The hopeless look on his face when she told him “no” was the same look she’d seen tonight on the face of the man in the green trench coat.

  Shannon didn’t come to school the next day, or ever again. That evening his father beat him to death.

  * * *

  The train pulled into Konya the next morning at eight. Overnight the landscape changed from urban and coastal to dry, rolling hills with mountains in the distance. The morning light was sharp, the land’s profile on the horizon standing out in bold relief. Konya was as far as the sleeping car went. After a brief rest stop at which Lacy stretched her legs and bought a map, all the passengers in the private compartments were switched to a Pullman car.

  She found an overhead bin for her duffel bag and took a seat along the side of the car, windows both behind and in front of her. A hefty guy in a pink shirt smiled and took a seat across the aisle from her in one of only a couple of available seats. With his black stubble-shaded jawline and prominent nose, Lacy’s first impression was Turkish, her second, American. Based on what? Here was that odd thing again. Why did she think American? His white teeth, probably. Americans tend to stand out in foreign places because of their unnaturally white teeth. This second impression was reinforced when he spoke to her.

  “It’s all a test, isn’t it?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Before we have a chance to wake up, they’ve got us running up and down, schlepping our bags from one car to another. They’re testing our endurance.”

  Lacy laughed. “Do you have much farther to go?”

  “No, and neither does anyone else. The end of the line is coming up in a couple of hours. Are you going all the way?”

  “I think I get off at the next station.”

  From a glance out the window, Lacy realized they were moving much slower than before. Had they taken on a different engine at the last stop or was this portion of track worse? They were chugging along at about forty miles an hour.

  The man stood, adjusting his stance as the train lurched, and held out his hand. “Jason Rennie.”

  Or Rennick or something like that. Lacy shook his hand but didn’t stand. She estimated his age as about the same as her own—early thirties. She was aware of not looking her best, wearing the same knee-length jeans and diesel-scented T-shirt as yesterday, but neither did he, with his red eyes and day’s growth of beard. “Is this your first time in Turkey?” she asked.

  “No. I was born here, in fact, but we moved to New York when I was five.” He did have a lovely smile.

  “So what brings you back?”

  “Business, actually. I’m a cop in New York, here on an exchange program. I’ve been in Istanbul for a couple of months but now they’re sending me out here to the hinterlands to help with a new rookie training program. And you?”

  Lacy told him she was a pigment analyst on a mission to help with some archaeological finds. Heeding the warnings in her travel guidebook, she gave out no specific details. Beyond the window on the opposite side of the car, Lacy saw a scarf-swaddled woman trudging along a dirt path with a huge bundle of sticks on her back. Two barefoot toddlers clutched at her long, flowered skirt. “The people out here are farmers, I imagine.”

  “And dirt poor, too. A lot of them come to Istanbul thinking it’s the end of the rainbow and get sadly disappointed. They’re better off staying here.”

  “It seems to me that poverty in a farming area isn’t quite as grim as in a city,” Lacy said. “As long as you have a bit of land, you can at least grow yourself some food. And you don’t have to live in squalor. The air is clean.”

  The man straightened one leg, pulled a phone from his pants pocket, and looked at it. “Excuse me.” He stood and exited through the door on the leading end of the car. Lacy checked her rail map and saw that the stop Paul told her to take would be coming up in less than an hour. He promised to be waiting there to meet her, so she’d better retrieve her toothbrush and toothpaste from the bag she’d stuffed in the overhead bin. Had she been awake before they pulled into Konya, she could have freshened up in the privacy of
her own compartment but the stop had taken her by surprise. She grabbed the necessary items and a fresh T-shirt, then wobbled through the rear door of the car opposite the end where Jason had exited, probably in pursuit of a stronger phone signal. The rhythmic clack of wheels on track grew louder as she passed the open windows in the vestibule and opened another, smaller door. No sink. This toilet was nothing more than the traditional Mediterranean hole in the floor. Planting her feet in a wide stance, she changed T-shirts, then looked sadly at her dry toothbrush. She returned to her seat, determined to find a way to properly brush her teeth.

  Meanwhile, the seat vacated by the New York policeman had been taken by someone else. The man in the green trench coat. She’d hoped not to run into him again. No thanks necessary. No explanations. No promises to “send you a check if you don’t mind giving me your name and address.”

  Having inadvertently made eye contact, she nodded and he nodded back but didn’t speak. His hair a greasy brown rat’s nest, his khaki pants soiled with several different stains, he looked homeless and lost. Strangely though, his trench coat looked fresh and new.

  Lacy recalled seeing vending machines, but where? When she stepped into the toilet area, she had looked through to the next car. It seemed to have a sort of buffet or snack bar. She grabbed her toothpaste and brush, wobbled through the join between cars and found a vending machine that dispensed bottled water. She backtracked into the vestibule, the track noises assailing her ears again, and stepped into the hole-in-the-floor toilet where she took a wide stance and managed to crack open the bottle, brush and rinse her teeth, and spit into the hole—all without dropping anything. She returned to the same seat, but now the scruffy man was gone. He’d left his trench coat on the back of his vacant seat, as if he planned to return.

  She studied the map she’d bought when she changed trains in Konya. Although it was a great map for archaeology, with dozens of ancient sites marked in this section of the country, all the words were in German. They hadn’t had one in English. Which of these was Paul’s dig site? Or was his even marked? The train was entering a region that the map showed to be nearly blank compared to the western coast Lacy had left behind. Fewer roads, fewer towns.

  Lacy folded the map, stood, and stretched. At that moment she saw something fly past the window. Quickly. So fast it was only a blur, but she got a good enough glimpse to know it had flown out from the train itself. Most likely from the leading end of the very car where she now stood. A man. Body limp. Khaki pants.

  “Stop the train!”

  * * *

  Lacy screamed it out, and her fellow passengers all jumped, startled, but none reacted as if they understood her words. “A man fell out! A man!” she shrieked, pointing to the window, but by now the train was past the point where he must have landed. Emergency. Stop train. Can’t stop train. Driver is way up front. Many cars away. Must be a way! How can you stop a train? Emergency, handle, break glass—something. They must have something.

  Hadn’t she just seen something red? Something behind a glass? Where? She looked around the car, then remembered. She dashed through the door at the end of the car and into the vestibule where she was surrounded by more doors leading to the next car, to the toilet, and to the outside. A rectangle of plate glass embedded in the bulkhead caught her attention. Behind the glass, a bright red handle. Though she couldn’t read the Turkish instructions, her common sense told her to break the glass and do something to that handle.

  Lacy yanked off one boot and smashed the glass. She pulled on the handle and, for good measure, twisted it. A deafening alarm sounded immediately as if coming from all directions at once. The train screeched to a halt, metal banging against metal.

  She flew to the window in the exterior door and saw that the ground sloped down from the tracks to a dry, dusty field some ten feet below. Where was he? Not here. How far had the train traveled between the time she saw him fly by and the time the train actually stopped? Lacy tried the door handle and found that it did open. She hurried down the steep steps of the train to the ground and continued a few feet. She heard shouts and looked toward the head of the train. Several uniformed men were already gathering outside the engine. She turned away from them to scan the slope in the opposite direction, looking for a sign of khaki, a prone human form—anything. Passengers all along the train began opening windows, poking heads out, shouting, and opening doors.

  Lacy took off toward the head of the train, hampered by having one bootless foot. She considered climbing back aboard and retrieving the boot, probably still lying in shattered glass, but decided to retrieve it later. It wasn’t far to the head of the train.

  “A man fell off!” She yelled and pointed. “Back there.” As she reached the uniformed men, now being joined by more men, she added, “I pulled the alarm.”

  One man, possibly the engineer, nudged a taller man toward her, probably the one who understood and spoke English best.

  “Are you certain?” the tall man asked. “How far back?”

  “Yes, I’m certain, but how far back, I can’t say exactly. Not too far.” To Lacy, the interval between seeing the body fly out and pulling the emergency handle seemed to have taken an hour, but in retrospect, she realized she must’ve moved very quickly.

  Shouts flew up from beyond the tail end of the train.

  Turning, Lacy saw several men waving their arms, shouting, and pointing down the slope. The men took off in that direction, but the English-speaking man caught Lacy by the arm and told her to go back to her car. “You have lost a shoe.”

  “It’s okay. I’m okay.”

  “No. Go find your shoe. Briars here.” He pointed to the scrub vegetation along the slope, then ran past her. Lacy plodded on a few more yards until a barb the size of Excalibur jabbed her in the arch of her socked foot. Balancing on her other foot, she pulled out the barb and looked around. Hundreds, maybe thousands more clumps brandishing similar weapons lay between her and the rear of the train. She located her own car, climbed aboard, and found her boot.

  Chapter Three

  Paul Hannah trained his binoculars on the trees along the river valley east of the dig site. Standing on the hill he often climbed to watch the sun rise, this morning he aimed to find out what had made the strange noises that awakened him at three a.m. It wasn’t the first time, and the noises, he thought, came from the valley.

  A shout.

  Startled, he turned toward the tents scattered around the excavation to his west.

  “My God! Paul! Bob!” A man’s voice. Down below Todd Majewski, their photographer, stood in a bare spot amid the tents. Arms waving, he turned in a circle, seemingly searching for someone, anyone, in the still-slumbering encampment who could come to his aid. “Paul! Bob! I need help!”

  Paul flew down the slope, skirted the corner of an open trench, and nearly flattened Bob Mueller who was crouching to pass through the flap door of his tent. A throng of groggy campers converged on the source of the noise.

  Chapter Four

  Some one hundred yards past the end of the train, a body lay on the slope, crumpled, eyes open, neck twisted at an unnatural angle. Lacy approached the men gathered around the body and drew close enough to assure herself it was the same unfortunate fellow who had boarded without a ticket. In death, his face seemed more peaceful now. Lacy felt tears rising and wondered if the man had a family or anyone at all who would miss him. Her nose stung with pent-up tears.

  The men—and they were all men—crowded around the body, a couple of them checking pulse points. They yanked out cell phones and jabbered in Turkish to each other or to unseen listeners elsewhere. The man she had pegged as probable engineer kept a wary eye on the circle of onlookers as he talked on his phone, a finger in one ear.

  Lacy spotted the pink shirt of the New York policeman she’d shaken hands with earlier. Sidling up to him she said, “What the hell happened?”

  “The poor guy must have fallen off the train. How you can manage to do that accidentally,
I don’t know.”

  “I saw him. I saw him, but he wasn’t falling off. He was flying by the window.”

  The policeman’s head jerked toward her. “You saw him? What do you mean, flying?” His black brows knitted into a squint that formed a deep crease above his nose.

  “I mean it didn’t look like he was falling. It looked like he’d been thrown. Almost like he was shot out of a cannon. Head first.” She thought about it. “Oh, I don’t know. I can’t be sure. I certainly didn’t see anyone throw him out, but if he fell out, wouldn’t he have been tumbling? Sort of grappling? Grabbing at the air?” She made similar hand motions.

  “I don’t know.”

  “He wasn’t falling like that. He looked more like a mail sack getting tossed off. Inert.”

  “Unconscious?”

  “I think so.”

  Lacy realized all the men were staring at her. Was she committing a faux pax? Was this not done in Turkey? She had been here long enough to adapt to Muslim rules on what women could and couldn’t do but this was a new situation. If travelers of both genders and all ages are on a train, and some of them are persuaded to disembark at an unscheduled stop, can anyone get off, or only men? Her T-shirt was sleeved but her head was bare. She was dressed appropriately for a foreign woman. Still, she felt she was expected to leave.

  She tramped back toward her car and her belongings, wishing she’d asked the New York policeman to tell her his name again. Jason something, wasn’t it? She might want to get in touch with him again to satisfy her curiosity. Who was this dead man? What was he running from? Or to? Why couldn’t he buy himself a ticket? Since Jason Whoever was out here to help train new recruits, he’d likely be privy to more information in the days to come as local authorities endeavored to locate the dead man’s relatives.

  Climbing back aboard, she felt all eyes follow her down the center aisle. Unintelligible mutters. She paused and said, to the car in general, “A man fell off. He is dead.” No response. No one seemed to understand.