A short, wiry man with a fringe of black hair and a thick black mustache stood in front of the stove, brandishing a small blowtorch of the sort chefs use to melt glazes. It hissed, and its blue flame darted menacingly toward Paul’s face as the little man stepped forward, greeting them with a big smile.
“Turn that thing off!” Paul dodged backward, avoiding the flame. He introduced Lacy to Süleyman Güler and added high accolades to Süleyman’s cooking. Süleyman added his own admiration for Lacy’s long blond hair, with broken English and a sweep of his free hand down his own head and shoulders.
“What the hell were you doing?” Paul said.
“Stupid flies. Everywhere.” He pointed to a couple of incinerated fly carcasses on the ground. Slapping a hand on the counter as if squashing one, he said, “No good. Dirty.” He held up his blowtorch. “Very good. Kill and cook at the same time. No germs.”
Paul shook his head. Lacy laughed.
Süleyman looked up, relit the blowtorch with a flint striker, and darted toward the end of the counter. Holding one arm aloft, he thrust the torch forward like a fencer’s sword. He turned the flame off, blew on the torch’s tip with a cowboy swagger, and pointed proudly toward the ground. Sure enough, a third fly carcass lay there, feet up. Lacy suspected it was already there and this was pure theatre on Süleyman’s part.
“Lunch ready yet?” Paul seemed unimpressed.
“All ready. Go fix plate.” Nodding toward Lacy, he said. “Nice to meet you, Lacy. Paul talk about you all the time. Glad you finally here.”
Next to the kitchen a long table was spread with the makings of lunch. A few workers inched along, spooning multicolored pastes onto paper plates and piling meats, condiments, and garnishes on slabs of flat Turkish pide bread. As each filled his plate, he retreated to one of several picnic tables under nearby trees.
Paul pulled Lacy toward him. “Why did you tell me not to tell Bob about the man on the train?” His voice at an intimate pitch, he glanced toward one of the picnic tables. Lacy followed his gaze and saw Bob Mueller at one table with empty chairs beside and across from his own. It looked as if he was saving seats for them.
“I don’t want to deal with a hundred and one theories about why a man wearing a coat with a label that said Maxwell Sebring was killed on a train the same morning another man with the same name died here. I’ve heard your theory. I have to think about it and I don’t need a bunch of others to confuse me even more.”
“Look, Twigs. Max was important to everyone here. He’s dead. We’re in limbo, and what happens next is critical. We all care, and we’re all on edge.”
“Of course. And that’s another good reason for me to keep my little mystery to myself. You don’t need me dumping another layer of confusion on top of everything. You and Bob have enough to worry about already.” She grabbed a paper plate and started around the table, filling it with tahini, yogurt, diced vegetables, and some kind of shaved meat, probably lamb. Paul, following her, pointed to the canned drinks bobbing in a tub of mostly melted ice and led her to the table where Bob Mueller sat. Mueller stood, introduced her to the two workers now sitting at the far end of the table and pulled out the chair beside him for Lacy.
Paul took the seat across from Mueller. “Any more news?”
“Henry’s not back from the hospital yet. I wish he’d at least call. And I’m waiting for a call back from Alan.” He tapped the cell phone next to his plate. “What time is it in New York now?”
Lacy and Paul both looked at their watches. Paul, she noticed, still wore his watch with its wide leather band turned so that the face was inside, over his pulse. The sight of this little detail, the leather band nestled in the sun-bleached hairs of his forearm, took her back to Egypt again. Paul grinned across the table at her, as if he knew her thoughts. “Almost seven,” he said. “Still a couple of hours before the office opens.”
“Had you known Max Sebring for a long time?” Lacy asked Mueller.
“Oh, sure. I suppose I first met him about ten years ago.” He paused, as if consulting his mental timeline. “Right. I worked with him at his museum for a while and when we discussed how important we thought this area of the Middle East was, and how little work was being done, he agreed to finance me. I wanted him to bankroll an expedition to Mount Ararat, where I’d already been working for a few years, but he wasn’t too keen on that. He wanted me to find a nice tell in central or southern Turkey where there was a good chance of finding Hittite material. So I did.”
“A tell is a man-made hill,” Paul said.
“I know,” Lacy said in a faux-offended voice. Lacy noticed Bob Mueller had a tattoo. On the inside of his forearm, a line of black wedge-shaped, marks about five inches long spanned most of the space between his wrist and the bend of his elbow. Cuneiform writing obviously, but Lacy couldn’t read it. She wondered what it said. Its position told her it was meant more for his own eyes than for anyone else. “Was it Max’s idea to look for Croesus’s treasure here?”
Mueller coughed into his stuffed pide sandwich. He glanced quickly toward Paul, then down again. Lacy read the reaction as embarrassment. He probably knew that Paul thought the Croesus thing a silly waste of time. “No. Max and I agreed on this spot because of its proximity to other finds. They’re all around here and this was an obvious tumulus, not a natural formation. This is my fifth season here.”
“But Paul’s first.” Lacy glanced at Paul. “Is—was—this Max’s first season also?” Lacy already knew it was Max’s first season, and her question was mostly to keep the conversation going.
“It was.” Mueller lowered his sandwich and stared toward the open field beyond Paul’s shoulder. “I was really surprised this spring when Max said he wanted to come out and join me.”
“Was that a good thing or a bad thing?”
“They say there’s nothing more useless on a dig than a financial backer.” His voice was guttural, and included a suppressed belch. “Like tits on a bull. They do nothing but get in the way.” He looked at Lacy and grinned. “But I have to admit, he was trying—very trying.”
Lacy laughed and the two young workers at the other end of the table laughed, too. They’d obviously been listening. Paul didn’t laugh, and when Lacy looked at him she saw discomfort in the tightness of his mouth.
“Here’s Henry.” Mueller stretched his neck to peer over Paul’s head.
A plumpish man with straight black hair and a swarthy complexion pulled out the chair beside Paul and sat down, emitting a huge sigh. Lacy’s first impression of him was Indian or Pakistani, but when he spoke his voice was pure Eastern seaboard, U.S.A. She also decided he might be older than his baby-smooth face indicated. Perhaps forty.
“Heart attack. Probably.” Henry Jones announced this as simply as if he were telling them tomorrow’s weather would be the same as today’s. “The doctor said he’d been dead for three to six hours by the time we got him to the hospital, so that would put the time of death at about three to six a.m.”
“Probably?” Mueller said.
“Probably. The doc told me he found petechiae, little broken vessels, in the whites of his eyes. That could indicate choking or intense coughing or something that caused him to struggle for breath.”
“Choking?”
“Not necessarily by someone else. He could have been choking on something he swallowed. Or maybe he wasn’t choking at all. The doc didn’t find anything stuck in his throat.”
“They’re going to do an autopsy, I assume,” Paul said.
“That’s another problem. This is a Muslim country. They don’t believe in mutilation of the human body and they bury their dead as soon as possible. The same day if they can. So no autopsy. Not here, anyway.”
“What? How are we supposed to find out what killed him?” Paul turned a scowl toward Henry.
“There will be an autopsy, but it’ll be done in the U.S., not here. They’re taking the body to the airport in Ankara where they’ll put it on the first non-stop f
light home. I’m going to go with it, so I have to sort of pack up here and hit the road, asap.”
“How will you get to Ankara?” Lacy asked.
“I have a car.”
Paul explained. “Max and Henry leased a car.”
Of course, Lacy thought. How else could Henry have returned here, miles off the beaten track, from the hospital?
“Eat something, Henry.”
“The thought of food right now makes me sick.”
“Back to this morning,” Mueller said. “The ambulance got here before we had a chance to talk. Todd found him, right? Not you.”
“Right.”
Paul said to Lacy, “Todd’s our photographer.”
Henry stared in the direction of Max’s tent for several seconds before continuing. “I went out for my morning walk, like I always do, about six o’clock. I didn’t look in on Max before I went, but I sort of walked by and didn’t hear any noises coming from his tent so I figured he was still asleep. He has a dock with speakers for his iPod and first thing every morning he turns it on and plays Vivaldi. ‘Spring’ you know, from ‘The Four Seasons.’ Does a few exercises, you know, before breakfast. Anyway, I walked on by and went out to—“ he nodded toward a hill west of the camp, “—and on down to the plain.”
“Four Bars Hill,” Paul said.
Lacy raised her eyebrows at him.
“We call it ‘Four Bars Hill’ because it’s the only place around here where you can get a good phone signal.”
Henry nodded and went on. “It must have been close to seven when I got back and heard Todd yelling. He was yelling, like, ‘Oh my God! Oh no!’ So I ran down. I think I was the first person to get there. Todd was kneeling at Max’s cot, doing CPR like crazy. I told him you were supposed to put the person on the floor so we dragged him off and put him on the floor and kept on doing CPR for a minute or two, but by that time half the camp was inside with us and someone said, ‘He’s gone. There’s no way.’”
“I think I said that,” Bob Mueller muttered.
“And he was feeling fine the night before?” Lacy asked.
“Yeah. I turned in about eleven but when I went to my tent, Max was still in the big tent with about a half dozen others and they were talking about the battle of Kadesh.”
“Battle between the Hittites and the Egyptians,” Paul explained to Lacy.
“Were you there?”
“It was before my time.”
“No, smart ass, were you there last night for the discussion?”
“I’d already retired for the evening.”
With whom had you retired, Lacy wondered. She looked around for Sierra Blue and, again, caught a glimpse of yellow at the corner of a tent. To Henry she said, “I noticed Max had a new-looking Boracık rug. Where did he get it?”
Henry’s eyelids fluttered and his chin jerked back. Lacy wondered if it was because she recognized the rug or because she had obviously been inside Max’s tent.
“He got it right before we came here, at a little burg south of Istanbul. He knew the guy who’d had it made for him. They’d been calling back and forth for a year and the guy met us with the rug and introduced Max to the woman who weaved it.” He tilted his head to one side. “How do you know about Boracık rugs?”
“It’s my specialty, color, dyes—especially dyes from plants.”
“Lacy has perfect vision,” Paul put in. “You know how some people have perfect pitch? They can hear one note on a piano and tell you it’s a C-sharp. Lacy can see a piece of blue material and tell you it’s the same exact color as a shower curtain they had when she was six years old. And she’ll be right, every time.”
“Assuming you can find the shower curtain,” Lacy said. “How would you know if I was lying?”
The three men chuckled, but didn’t laugh. It wasn’t the right time for a laugh.
Mueller looked at his phone, still lying beside his paper plate. “Why didn’t you call me, Henry? I was going nuts, waiting for word from the hospital.”
“I did call you. Twice.”
“Oh. That’s right.” He picked up the phone and touched its screen. “No reception down here.”
“When did you get here?” Henry Jones turned his attention to Lacy. His warm brown eyes below straight black eyebrows looked like division signs without their top dots.
She told him about her train trip and about Sierra picking her up in the van, but omitted any mention of the death on the train or the guilt still nagging at her. Without these her description sounded, to her own ears, like fiction. Nothing she said sounded the least bit like the journey she’d actually taken. Her memory was of a frightened man, of wheels clacking through her dreams, of a body flying past a window, of the heel of her boot smashing glass, of a body sprawled on the slope beneath the tracks. Instead she was telling Henry that the most traumatic part of the journey was arriving to find no Paul waiting for her.
She looked away and spotted several dig participants hanging around the buffet table. “I noticed a big bowl of fruit over there. I want an orange. Can I bring you men anything?” Dessert, as in most Turkish meals, was fruit. Lacy had been in the country long enough to become used to the absence of cakes and pies. She grabbed an orange and stood a little back from the table as she peeled it. Those standing nearby, most of them college age, were checking her out while trying not to stare, but their conversation had dwindled to a feeble pretense.
Glancing around at the other picnic tables, she decided the dig participants gravitated toward their own kind at mealtime, because a couple of the tables were filled with men in Turkish garb and women wearing head shawls. These, she figured, were the paid participants Paul was referring to when he’d mentioned meeting payroll. Other tables held only young people in Western dress—college kids, unpaid, working for course credit.
She introduced herself and held out one hand, sticky with orange juice, then drew it back, apologizing, and wiped it on her pants. Grinning sheepishly, she altered her gesture to a wave.
One by one, the kids introduced themselves. Two had Turkish names and accents but the others sounded American. The last American girl to give her name was Madison Ledbetter, and Lacy recognized her as the little mop-top whose hair Süleyman had nearly incinerated. Madison asked, “What are they saying over there? About Max Sebring?”
“Henry Jones just got back from the hospital and he really hasn’t said much yet that you don’t already know.” Lacy felt hesitant to tell them anything about Max’s death. The information should come from Bob Mueller or Paul, not from her.
“Oh, come on. We know he just got back from the hospital. We watched him drive up. But we don’t know anything else. They haven’t said jack to us since the ambulance left this morning.” Madison turned to the others for back-up.
“Well, you know that Mr. Sebring is dead.”
“Not really. We weren’t even sure of that,” Madison said.
“He looked dead,” another said.
“But the ambulance pulled out with its sirens on. I thought they only did that if there was a reason to hurry.”
“He didn’t look sick.”
“And he wasn’t that old, either. I mean not really old.”
“The doctor couldn’t give Henry a definite cause of death,” Lacy said. She stopped herself before she went any further and steered the conversation to the reason she was here and the fact that she, too, was associated with a college, albeit in the role of instructor rather than student.
As Lacy returned to her table she saw that Sierra had taken Lacy’s seat opposite Paul. But the seat on Paul’s right was vacant so she headed for it. Sierra glanced toward her then reached across the table, placing her hand over Paul’s. Undaunted, Lacy made deliberate eye contact with Sierra, took the empty seat and said, “The kids I was talking to over there want to know more about Max Sebring. They feel like they’re out of the loop because no one has told them anything.” She didn’t know what to call them. Kids? Workers? Students? None of those s
ounded right. They might be kids, but sensitive about being referred to as such. And how did she know if they were all students? Workers sounded like “hired hands,” which didn’t exactly fit, either. Oh well, she’d ask Paul later.
“Lacy’s right.” Paul slipped his hand from beneath Sierra’s and picked up his canned drink. “We’ve told them nothing but we need to. Bob? You or me? Time for a meeting?”
“I’ll do it.” Mueller got up and headed toward the clearing at the edge of the excavated area.
“I don’t know what we were thinking,” Paul said. “All wrapped up in our own thoughts, I guess.”
“And not thinking too clearly, either,” Sierra glanced at Paul’s hand, still wrapped around his Coke can. Her gaze flicked quickly to Lacy, then away. “After all, neither of us got much sleep last night.”
Oh, God. The remark caught Lacy by surprise. Her heart felt as if it might pop up through her throat. Sierra’s message: Back off. He’s mine. Lacy felt a flush rise to her cheeks but she ventured a look at Paul anyway. His face looked like her own felt. She decided one thing then and there. Paul may be with Sierra or not. He may have the interest in me that I thought he had, or he may not. But one thing’s for damn sure. He’s not going to have both of us. If he’s with Sierra, I’ll look at his pottery and then I’m out of here!
* * *
The picnic tables emptied and all the dig participants followed their leaders back to the work area, some sitting on the edges of excavated spots, some on the grass. Bob Mueller raised one arm for their attention and relayed the news Henry had brought back from the hospital. They had questions. “What about our funding?” “Did he have a family?” “Did it look like there’d been a struggle?” “If our funding is cut off, when do we leave?” “Will we still get our twelve hours’ credit?”
Maria Hudgins - Lacy Glass 02 - The Man on the Istanbul Train Page 5