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

by Maria Hudgins

  A deep voice said, “What about our pay? We’re not all volunteers, you know.” This question came from a thick-chested man with a large camera around his neck and a ball cap that read, “NBC News.”

  Paul joined Lacy, standing at the back of the group. He leaned over and whispered, “That’s Todd, our photographer.” His breath on her neck felt like a caress.

  Chapter Six

  Lacy took in the whole scene standing a few yards back from the excavation, which was again busy with well-fed workers. What a change. Less than twenty-four hours ago she’d been in Istanbul, and the day before that her plan had been to wrap up her summer’s work and fly back to Virginia. Back to Wythe University and her apartment and into the groove she had worn in the pavement between the two. Every day. Drive to work, unlock office, organize notes, deliver lectures, collect papers, drive home, microwave frozen dinner, read papers, read papers, read papers. The prospect of this summer in Turkey had kept her sane through the monotony of the school year never dreaming she’d wind up on an archaeological dig with Paul Hannah. Or that she’d see a man killed on a train. Or that she’d be standing here now, trying to calm the troubled waters of her mind and deal sensibly with the fact that two men named Max Sebring had died in central Turkey at virtually the same time. Correction: One man she’d been told was Max Sebring and another with a trench coat bearing his name.

  She looked at Paul, his wide-brim canvas hat shading his face, standing in a trench on the north side of the excavation where, he’d told her, the Neolithic level was laid bare. Sierra was nowhere in sight, for the moment at least. The photographer stood at the top of the hill Mueller and Lacy had climbed earlier. He appeared to be shooting a video of the river valley to the south. Lacy wondered why video was necessary given the fact that nothing in camera range would be moving. It seemed to her as if a simple photo or two would better serve to record the scene. The man flipped his camcorder screen closed and started down the hill, then turned and looked back again, as though expecting something.

  Paul held up a sherd and waved Lacy over. “Found another one!”

  Lacy took the small piece of pottery in her hand. One surface of the cream-colored clay had been burnished by rubbing, and a streak of brown-red pigment swept across one side. “Red ochre,” she said. If this was all Paul was finding, she was wasting her time here.

  “You better put that hat on your head, sweetheart,” came a deep voice from behind her. “It won’t do you any good hanging down your back.”

  Lacy turned to locate the source of that advice. It was the photographer, still toting his camcorder in one hand.

  “Todd Majewski.” With a rather somber tip of his head, he extended his free hand to Lacy. Todd was a true redhead. His face was a bright pink and his hands and arms were covered with freckles. He looked more like a Viking or a Scot than a Majewski. “If you’re a real blonde, and I’ll bet you are because hair that color doesn’t come from a bottle, you can’t take chances with the sun out here. It’ll fool you. A couple of weeks ago they almost had to send me to the hospital with sun poisoning. I had blisters, I was throwing up, chills and fever, and I’m still not a pretty sight.” He lifted his cap and showed her the patches of unpigmented skin on his forehead.

  Paul said, “Thanks for sharing, Todd. Fortunately, we’ve already had our lunch.” Then turned to Lacy and added his own warning. “Seriously, Lacy. He’s right. We usually have a nice breeze out here so it can fool you. You may not feel like you’re getting too much sun but you are.”

  “Don’t worry about me. I can take care of myself.” At the moment sunstroke was the least of her concerns.

  * * *

  Paul gave Lacy a trowel and set her to work on a wall in his section of the dig. He showed her how to use the trowel and how to watch for changes in soil. Lacy felt nervous about scraping into virgin ground and making decisions about what to remove and what to leave. She had no problem seeing more color variations than even Paul could see, but her eyes were not yet trained to see what was important and what wasn’t. As the afternoon wore on, she found herself drinking more water than usual, probably because of the sun plus a drying breeze. She felt relief when the sun sank low and the shadow of a clump of almond trees stretched across her workspace. She had removed several buckets of dirt, but had yet to lay bare even the tiniest bit of pottery or anything else possibly created by the hand of man. In spite of the sun block, she felt a glow on her exposed skin.

  One by one, workers dropped by and introduced themselves, sitting on their haunches at the edge of the hole she was slowly enlarging. Lacy invariably steered the conversation around to two questions: How well did you know Max Sebring, and did you hear or see anything odd last night? A couple of the workers had heard noises, like someone walking around outside the tents. One put the time at about two a.m. Several had heard animals, probably dogs, yip or howl or clunk around in the kitchen area, possibly turning over a pot, but none had been curious enough to get up and look out of their own tent. They had all been here long enough to get used to the night noises. Even the sound of someone walking past their tent wasn’t considered a cause for alarm, according to the little mop-top, Madison, because people often got up in the night to go to the latrine which, Lacy heard, consisted of a port-a-potty well away from the dig and the tents, but it was permissible to simply slip off over the hill, an option that appealed particularly to the men.

  The light began to fade and the dinner gong rang. Lacy followed the others as they stashed their equipment in a small shed and gravitated toward the main tent drawn as if by an invisible magnet. They washed up at one of two large earthenware crocks outside the entrance. This tent was several times the size of any other and held enough tables and chairs to seat everyone. Around the walls inside, a fringe of recent finds rested on the ground and on folding tables. Lacy wandered over to a table covered with potsherds someone had grouped into five piles. She picked up a couple showing traces of paint and found grey, black, and brown. Some showed reddish brown, but she couldn’t identify the pigment visually since most of the samples appeared to have been fired. Something felt odd about the grouping, but Lacy couldn’t figure out what it was.

  Süleyman had set up a buffet table along one side of the tent with hot casseroles, baked vegetables, and fruits. Lacy filled a plate and took a seat at the table where Paul and Bob Mueller were already sitting, nothing left on their plates but apple cores and orange peels. Henry Jones joined them.

  “Why are you still here?” Paul asked. “I thought you’d left for the airport.”

  “Change of plans.” Henry slapped a knife full of butter across his flatbread. “There’s another man from the Sebring Foundation already in Ankara. I didn’t know that. He was there to study the artifacts in the museum but the office decided to let him go home with the body and keep me here. We’ve got some loose ends they want me to tie up.” The loose ends, he told them, had mostly to do with funds Max had wired to a Turkish bank and a couple of items Max had purchased but not yet picked up.

  Lacy wondered if Max’s purchases involved any more rugs. The man was a big spender because handmade silk rugs did not come cheap. But then he was rich, wasn’t he? Rich enough to have his own foundation to fund things like this dig. Who would inherit all his money? Max’s family consisted only of a comatose father and a disabled wife.

  Paul stood up. “Sorry I have to leave, but tonight’s my night to lecture. Bob and I take turns. Lacy, I’ll see you when I finish.” With that, he threaded his way through the tables to one side of the tent. There was a general shuffling as workers turned their chairs around to face him.

  “Paul’s a good speaker,” Henry whispered in her ear. Twisting his mouth to one side, he added, “The kids think Bob’s boring. They love it on nights when it’s Paul’s turn.”

  Lacy glanced across the table to Bob, hoping he hadn’t overheard that. He’d turned his chair to face away from them. He couldn’t have heard.

  Paul raised an arm for
attention. “I’d like to introduce a friend of mine, Lacy Glass. We worked in Egypt together and I asked her here to look at our painted pottery. Lacy is the world’s foremost expert on pigments and dyes. I lured her away from the work she was doing in Istanbul on carpets, tiles and … whatever. Lacy? Stand up, please.”

  Feeling warm blood rising to her face, Lacy stood.

  Paul waved her up. “Come here, Lacy. I want to show them something.”

  What the hell? Not, “I want to show you something,” but “I want to show them something.”

  Paul took her hand. “Lacy can do the weirdest things with her shoulders. She’s double jointed. Show them, Lacy.”

  “What?” How dare he? She wasn’t a circus freak. She had no time to formulate the response Paul deserved, briefly considered a knee to his privates, but said, “I only perform for money. Big money.” The audience laughed.

  “How much?” Paul got a funny look on his face as if he knew he’d said the wrong thing. When Lacy didn’t answer, he squeezed her shoulder and added, “Nevermind. Maybe later.”

  The workers roared. They took it to mean she would perform her contortions for Paul alone—later, in private. She slunk back to her seat, praying she wouldn’t trip over a chair on the way. Her cheeks burned. Where was Sierra? She glanced over her shoulder. Aha. There she was. Sierra sat at a table near the spot from which Paul was speaking. Her lips were clamped shut so tightly they had vanished altogether.

  Henry tried to talk to her when she returned to her seat, but couldn’t do so without disturbing Paul’s lecture on Neolithic flint. “Let go outside. Do you mind missing some of this?”

  “Not at all.”

  In the dark, Henry steered her around the edges of the excavation with a hand on her elbow. They headed toward the parking lot. Paul’s lecturing voice faded, soon replaced by the night sounds of crickets and distant dogs baying at the moon. The glow from the big tent now hidden behind other tents, Lacy could see tiny points of light in the distance from open fires between them and the jagged line that far-off mountains traced against a star-speckled sky. The scene before her looked, she imagined, as it would have thousands of years ago.

  “As I was trying to tell you,” Henry said, “Max opened a bank account in Adana to keep the dig running and also for his own personal use. When he found something he wanted to buy, he could write a check without worrying about international monetary crap. At tax time, he always sent me to meet with the Foundation’s accountant and figure out what was personal and what wasn’t.”

  “Had you been with him long?”

  “Twenty years.” Henry paused and repeated, “Twen-ty years. Hard to believe. I started working for him right after college.”

  “Paul says Max had no family to speak of, but he was married, wasn’t he? They had no children?”

  “Actually they did have two children, but both of them were killed.” Henry stopped walking and turned to her, as if gauging whether she wanted to hear the story. As if it might be a long story. He hitched up his jeans, which had worked their way down below the mound of his belly.

  “Killed? What happened?”

  “Max and Nina had two kids, Rachel and George. George was a couple of years older than Rachel. He’d just finished his undergraduate work at Tufts and was planning to start graduate school in engineering when a friend with a small plane flew him to Rachel’s school and picked her up. They were flying home for spring break.” He paused a few seconds. “Something happened. Whether it was engine failure or pilot error or what, they never found out, but the plane went down and all three were killed.”

  They both paused a moment. Henry glanced quickly toward her then away, the whites of his eyes reflecting the light from a bulb mounted at the corner of the parking area.

  “Of course, Max and Nina never got over it. Nina was a nice woman. I always liked her.” His voice drifted off as if he was remembering her as she used to be. “But actually she wasn’t the strongest person in the world, you know? Emotionally, I mean. Clingy. You know what I mean?”

  “I do.”

  “She had a sort of breakdown when Rachel got suspended from high school for smoking pot. Nina went to pieces. ‘Oh, my poor baby! She’ll never get into college!’” Henry pitched his voice high his hands on the sides of his head. “Anyway, Rachel did get into a good college and everything was cool. Then the plane crash.

  “Both children. Gone in an instant. It’s understandable they wouldn’t get over a thing like that.”

  Lacy glanced toward him. Against the background of stars, his profile looked regal, as if it belonged on an ancient coin.

  “Max kept going, kept up his work with the Foundation and the museum, but sometimes it was like he was just putting one foot in front of the other. Nina went downhill fast, got hooked on tranquilizers and painkillers, quit eating, and finally took to her bed. She never leaves her bedroom now. They’re calling it Alzheimer’s but that’s just a handy name, I think.”

  “She has people taking care of her?”

  “Round the clock. Has for years.” He paused and looked toward a hill to the west.

  Lacy wondered if that was the Four Bars Hill where they all went to make phone calls.

  “Actually, that’s not completely true. That she never leaves her bedroom. Max got a call the other day from Nina’s nurse. She said Nina’s been getting up in the middle of the night, wandering around that big mansion, looking for her children. She’ll go to their bedrooms and knock on their doors. Says she’s trying to wake them up. Max told her doctor to drop by the house and see if she needs a change in her meds.”

  “How long ago did this happen?”

  “The phone call? A couple of days ago.”

  “No. The plane crash.”

  Henry paused. “Six years ago.”

  “What about Max’s father?”

  “He’s ninety, but until a couple of weeks ago, he was in amazingly good health. Then he had a stroke and he’s been in the hospital ever since. The last we heard, he was in a coma.”

  “Was that before or after you and Max came to Turkey?”

  “After. Right after, in fact. Max got the call while we were still in Istanbul.”

  They had come to the far side of the parking area beyond which lay nothing but an open field. They stopped and headed back. A few of the tents radiated faint glows from lamps or lanterns left burning inside while their owners remained at the lecture.

  “Who inherits all of Max’s money?”

  “Good question. I know Max had a will, but I don’t have the foggiest idea what’s in it.” He jammed his hands in his jeans pockets and kicked one foot forward in an exaggerated giant step. “So. What were you doing in Istanbul?”

  Lacy explained her summer’s work.

  “And when Paul called you, you just dropped everything and came out here?”

  “I was winding things up, anyway,” she lied.

  “How did you get here? Bus?”

  “Train.”

  “Aha. The good old Meram Express. How was the trip?”

  “It was nice. Quite luxurious, actually. I had a sleeper compartment so I got a pretty good night’s sleep.” Lacy stopped there, sticking to her decision to tell no one but Paul about the man whose body had been tossed off the train like so much garbage.

  * * *

  His lecture over, Paul apologized for embarrassing her in front of the group. “I’ll never make ambassador with these social skills.” With an arm draped around her shoulders, he led her out to the van.

  Sierra, she noticed, was already standing beside its open door. Paul said, “I’m going, too, Sierra. Can we all squeeze in?”

  Eight or nine kids already sat on the floor in the back of the van, their backs against its sides and their feet jumbled together in the center. Paul grabbed the next worker trying to climb in and steered him toward the shotgun seat. Lacy heard Paul whisper to him, “You sit up front. I’m riding in the back.”

  She climbed in and sc
ooted around, positioning her back against one side and her feet abutting others in the middle. Paul slipped in beside her, knees bent close to his chest.

  The scowl on Sierra’s face glowed in the headlights as she walked around the front of the van to take the driver’s seat.

  “You missed my lecture on Neolithic flint.” Paul steadied himself with a hand on the floor as Sierra slammed the van into reverse and jerked the wheels sharply to the right.

  “Sorry.”

  “You and Henry left.”

  “I wanted to talk to him about Max.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  The chatter around the circle of seated workers had tapered off to nothing, all ears tuned to the conversation between their boss and the new girl. Lacy glanced around and smiled but her expression was probably wasted in the dark. The van was now bouncing across the open field, far from the nearest light. “Max had two children but they were killed in a plane crash.”

  “Yeah. What else did he tell you?”

  Lacy looked at him, letting her eyebrows answer that question.

  “You’re still pissed,” he said.

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “Did you tell Henry about the man on the train?”

  “No.”

  “Because?”

  “I told you already,” she whispered. “I don’t want a bunch of off-the-wall theories. I want to figure it out for myself.”

  * * *

  Sierra backed the van up to the side door of a long, low, cinder-block building and the workers piled out, some carrying baskets with the day’s finds. Inside, Paul introduced her to Dr. Gülden Güler, a small woman in long, loose pants, shirt in a pattern that clashed with the pants, hair completely hidden under a scarf, and brown eyes that sparkled with intelligence. Lacy wasn’t surprised to learn that Gülden was their conservator, in charge of prepping and cataloging finds, but was taken aback when Paul mentioned she was also Süleyman’s wife. They were both Turkish and about the same age, but this scholarly woman and the nutty cook?