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

by Maria Hudgins

  “May I have one of these?”

  Not surprisingly, the senior officer said no.

  “If I do find someone who knew him, how would I know? How could we know if we’re talking about the same man or not?”

  The senior officer chewed his lower lip. “If you find someone who may have known him, tell them to come here. We will be happy to show them what we have shown you.”

  Lacy considered what she now knew about the dead man. He was probably wealthy. The expensive trench coat may not have been his own, but the shoes almost certainly were. She could imagine Max Sebring leaving his coat unattended somewhere and returning to find it gone, but not his shoes. The man had foot problems. He carried no wallet, no money, no ID, and no passport, although he was probably not a Turkish citizen. His shoe size was about average for an adult man.

  And he was scared to death.

  Gülden stood at the door, one hand on the brass pull. Lacy turned to the men one last time. “Do any of you know a policeman from America named Jason Rennie? Or Rennick?”

  No response.

  “He’s here to help with the training of some new policemen.”

  “He would not be helping us. We are the Jandarma. The military police. Our training is done with the Turkish army. If he’s helping the police it would be in a city. Ankara or Antalya, perhaps.”

  How could she find him now?

  * * *

  On the drive back to the camp, they passed the site of the bunkhouse although it was too far from the paved road to be seen. Lacy remembered the dog she saw that morning, obviously a nursing mother. Since Gülden would be spending the coming nights at the bunkhouse, Lacy asked her to try and find the puppies. Make sure they were all right.

  “All right?” Gülden laughed. “If the dog belongs to a farmer or a shepherd, he will probably kill the young ones when he finds them.”

  “Kill them?”

  “Drown them, probably.”

  Lacy screamed. “No! That’s horrible! You can’t let that happen!”

  “Unless some local people happen to be looking for sheep herding dogs, the only other option for the puppies is worse than death. It’s life as a stray, scavenging food wherever they can find it.”

  This discussion went on for some time, Lacy suggesting alternatives, Gülden showing little interest. When the air inside the car became heated to the point of possible combustion, Gülden pulled into a gas station and climbed out. Lacy threw some money at her. As soon as the older woman was engaged in the refueling process, Lacy popped the glove box open and quickly rifled through its contents: A rental agreement from the car company, an English language map of Turkey, a city map of Istanbul, a tire pressure gauge, and a receipt for a ten-lira purchase. According to the rental agreement, Henry Jones had rented the Fiat on July 19. The Lufthansa claim ticket was dated July 18.

  Lacy still felt anger pulsing in her head when Gülden climbed back in the car and restarted the motor. She gave herself two miles and several deep breaths before attempting to talk in a civil tone.

  Chapter Nine

  Gülden offered to help her move her tent but Lacy had no reason to wish it any particular place other than where it was. If it were located close to Paul’s tent, she would have wanted to move it farther away, but its current neighbors seemed to be the tents of Süleyman and the photographer, Todd. Her offer to help having been rejected, Gülden turned to leave.

  Lacy called her back. “I’m sorry. I jumped all over you for something you have nothing to do with. Different cultures, different ways. Thank you for driving me today.”

  “No problem.”

  “And thanks for the tent.”

  Gülden nodded and touched Lacy’s cheek.

  Inside the tiny space, barely tall enough in the center for Lacy to kneel in and wide enough, she estimated, to lie in if she slept diagonally, the tent nevertheless came with a sleeping bag, a clean towel, and a washcloth. Gülden had left these for her until Lacy could manage to get her own. She arranged her few belongings in a neat row around the edges: clean clothes, toiletry bag, laptop and its associated cords, cell phone, extra shoes stuffed with extra clean socks. She left her passport and wallet zipped in her duffel bag, but still they seemed vulnerable. As she sat, yoga style, in the middle of her new home she made a mental note to ask Paul if there was a safer place to keep these essentials.

  “Knock, knock.” Sierra Blue popped her curly head through the canvas flap. “Need an air mattress?” She crawled in the rest of the way, dragging a large nylon bag with her. “It comes with its own pump but since there’s nothing to plug it into, you’ll have to do it by mouth.”

  Lacy looked at the thinly padded sleeping bag. An air mattress would be nice. “Don’t you need it yourself?”

  “I haven’t used it since …” Sierra’s voice trailed off. “Since the first week after I got here.”

  Oh crap! I stepped right into that one, didn’t I? Lacy had two choices. Reject the offer and sleep on the hard ground, or take it. Neither would affect whatever Sierra and Paul had going. Brightly, but not too brightly, she said, “Thanks. I’ll take it.”

  * * *

  Crawling out of her new home on hands and knees, Lacy smelled the aromas of Süleyman’s cooking, soon to be their dinner. Onions frying, lamb roasting, aromatic thyme. The square foot of ground at her tent door had been pounded into a muddy mess over the season by Gülden’s crawling in and out on hands and feet, and the heels of Lacy’s hands slipped, bringing her nose into direct contact with the muck. To her left, Süleyman’s tent stood near the tin-roofed open-air kitchen. To her right, Todd Majewski was emerging upright from his own tent, an abode much taller and wider than her own. His camera hanging from a strap around his neck, Todd scanned the sky and pulled the bill of his NBC Sports cap down.

  “You’re just the man I need to see.” Scrambling to her feet, she swiped the mud off her nose with her forearm and launched into the lie she had concocted for just such an occasion. “Do you have any good pictures of Paul and Bob and Max? I want to send one to our friends in Egypt. Paul and I worked there one season and they’ll be interested to see what he’s doing now, hanging around with Max Sebring and all.”

  Todd went silent for a minute, fingering his camera. “You can’t use them in a publication you know. They’re copyrighted. If I give you a couple to send to a friend, you have to promise. And tell whoever you send them to, they can’t copy them. I don’t normally let anyone …”

  Lacy cut him off. “I promise.”

  He still seemed reluctant but Lacy stood her ground, her eyes wide in anticipation as if a refusal would break her heart. He turned and bent to duck back into his tent. “Wait out here.” He reappeared with a CD, a date scribbled on its face. “You may find something you can use in the people folder.”

  Inserting the CD into her own laptop, she found photos titled Max, Max and Bob, and Max, Bob, and Paul. She copied these to her hard drive, returned the CD to Todd, and studied what she had. All three shots had been taken at one of the picnic tables. Max Sebring with a can of Pepsi on the table in front of him, Paul in his ubiquitous khaki shirt, and Bob posturing for the camera as if expecting this shot to make the cover of People magazine. Max looked about sixty, balding, with a furrowed brow and a stubbly goatee. An altogether ordinary-looking man.

  * * *

  She dropped by Henry Jones’s tent to return his car keys as she promised, before four o’clock. At first, she thought he was crying when she popped in and found him with his head buried in the crook of a bent arm on his little work table, his other hand resting on the keyboard of his laptop, but when she repeated her verbal knock-knock, he sat up. His face was flushed and his eyes red, but Lacy saw no actual tears. “Sorry. I thought I heard you say ‘Come in.’ ”

  “It’s okay,” he said, reaching for the keys. “Any luck?”

  Remembering she’d told him a fib about losing a credit card, she said, “No, but I called and canceled the card. They said it do
esn’t look like anyone’s used it since I lost it.”

  “So. How are you fixed for cash?” The cell phone beside his computer plinked out a few funky notes. Lacy decided that phone reception here was spotty rather than non-existent. Henry picked up the phone and touched a couple of options. “If you need money, I can lend you some.”

  “Oh! Thanks, but I still have a couple of other cards I can use.” His offer surprised her. Perhaps it surprised him, too, slipping out as it did, apparently without thought. “Any news from home?”

  “Mass chaos. The Sebring Foundation is on lock-down, Alan Davis, the director, is on heavy meds.” Lacy’s face must have shown alarm because he quickly added, “Figuratively, of course,” and then explained, “Max’s body is at a morgue in New York. The Sebring family lawyer is calling me and emailing me every five minutes. As if to prove the point, he clicked on his inbox and scrolled down a list of messages, all with that day’s date.

  Lacy smelled oranges. Turning, she found Bob Mueller behind her, his proximity betrayed by his ever-present orange breath mints. “Lucy! I haven’t seen you all day. Where have you been keeping yourself?”

  She launched into an explanation that didn’t conflict with the story she told Henry, then saw a look on Mueller’s face—eyes darting from Henry to her and back again—that told her he wasn’t listening, that he couldn’t have been less interested, and really wanted her to leave. Lacy cut short her story and backed out of the tent.

  Once outside, she paused and listened. Bob’s voice—excited, hurried—seeped through the nylon wall but so muffled she couldn’t make out the words.

  * * *

  After dinner it was Bob’s turn to do the evening lecture. Paul suggested a walk and led Lacy out of the big tent toward the rise east of the excavated area. This was the spot where Paul and Bob had been standing, arguing, earlier in the day. Now, with thousands of stars in an indigo sky and the horizon back-lit by a thin strip of lingering day, peace reigned. A whiff of smoke from an unseen fire drifted by. Lantern light and Bob’s monotonous lecture voice from the big tent faded into nothing. At the top of the rise, they stopped.

  “What were you and Bob arguing about this morning?”

  Paul jammed his fists into his shorts pockets. “You don’t mince words, do you, Twigs?” He paused a minute before answering her question. “He’s got this hare-brained idea that Max wanted to close down the dig. He says Max had decided this site was about played out and they’d be better off to put the money toward surveying the whole area with ground penetrating radar, aerial photography, and various sorts of high-tech stuff.”

  “But you’ve just discovered the Neolithic material. You’ve hardly even touched it.”

  “Exactly. I’d be screwed. More to the point, Henry says he never heard Max say any such thing, and if Henry hasn’t heard about it, Max never said it. Henry and Max were together practically all the time and if Max ever said anything to anyone about closing down this site, Henry would have known about it. If Max ever wrote to anyone about it, Henry would have typed the letter. Fact is, Bob’s making this up to suit his own purposes.

  “Which are?”

  “He wants to find something spectacular. Croesus’s treasure, treasure from Babylon, King Midas’s gold—the Ark of the Covenant. Hell, he doesn’t care as long as it’s spectacular and it makes him famous. He’s bored with this dig but, hey, I’m sorry! Archaeology can be boring!”

  “Speaking of which, what am I supposed to be doing here? So far, I’ve put in maybe ten minutes’ worth of work looking over your finds.” She glanced at him, silhouetted against the faint glow above the horizon.

  He pulled a yo-yo from a pocket in his shorts. He must be under considerable stress. Surely by now his smoking habit was licked. He executed a perfect Rock the Baby. “What the hell? You found cinnabar. That alone is enough to keep us busy for weeks.”

  “Keep us busy? Who’s us?”

  Paul didn’t answer. Instead, he put a hand on her shoulder and gave it a gentle push. “Let’s go back. To my tent.”

  * * *

  Paul used a flashlight to illuminate the inside of his tent. It was as large as either Henry’s or Max’s, but jammed with several times more equipment and books than they had. He struck a wooden match to light a kerosene lantern, then popped the top on two cans of Coke, handing her one. Meanwhile, Lacy looked around for feminine undergarments or any other evidence of Sierra Blue’s occupation of the site. Instead, she spotted a small safe under a ten-gallon bucket filled with rolled-up graph paper. Paul waved her toward a canvas chair and claimed a seat for himself on the edge of his cot. Hanging along one side of its metal frame, a strip of canvas divided into pockets held his toiletries, a can of bug spray, a roll of toilet paper and a couple of books. Lacy decided the cot might be wide enough for two if they were good friends. Paul saw her looking at the safe and said, “If you have anything you want to put in the safe, feel free.” Then, “What did you find out at the police station today?”

  “How do you know I went to the police station?” She took a sip from the can and found its contents lukewarm but otherwise not bad.

  “Gülden told me.” He bent forward, elbows on his thighs, Coke can dangling from the fingers of one hand. “Look, Lacy. Be careful. You may be sticking your nose where it’s not wanted.”

  “What do you mean? A man wearing a stolen trench coat falls off a train and dies. What could possibly be sinister about that?” she asked, her tone heavy with irony.

  “Nothing,” he said. “That is, nothing to do with us, or Max Sebring, or this camp. But you said the man flew off as if he’d been thrown. So it could’ve been something more than a simple fall.” He paused, as if waiting for Lacy to react. “You don’t know anything about this man and you don’t know what he was involved in, but if he looked as desperate as you say he did and if someone did kill him, you’re talking about serious stuff. Maybe drug smuggling. Maybe underworld crime of some sort. Shit, I don’t know!”

  “Paul, do you think it’s possible to smell fear?”

  He placed his Coke can on the rip-stop floor, then gave it a little twist to settle it into the ground beneath. “Smell fear?” His face looked pained in the flickering lamplight and Lacy was fairly certain her clumsy question had disturbed him. Did it remind him of Palestine and of whatever events led to the death of his wife? At length, he cleared his throat and croaked, “Animals can. I’m not sure about people.”

  “The police let me see the clothes the man had been wearing. They’d already buried his body. Did you know they do that? Anyway, when they opened the bag and dumped out his clothes, I thought I’d pass out from this horrible odor. Not like sweat or a dirty body. Nothing like that. More like feces or a skunk or something. But the word that popped into my head was fear, and, oddly enough, his trench coat didn’t have that smell. Then it occurred to me that he wasn’t wearing the coat at the time of his murder.”

  “Murder?” Paul questioned her use of the word.

  “At the time of his death.”

  “If, as you suggest, people emit a pheromone or something when they’re scared to death…” he paused, then added, “or would that be a f-e-a-r-omone, he’d have been emitting it like crazy as he flew through the air, even if it was an accident.”

  Paul’s play on words told her he wasn’t taking this seriously. She counted to ten. “I need to go back to Istanbul.”

  “What for?” He pulled off his glasses. The lamplight magnified the tempting cleft in his chin and the indentation across the bridge of his nose from the pressure of the wire rims.

  “I want to find out where he came from and why a rich English-speaking man got thrown off a train like so much garbage.” Doubling up one leg until her heel rested on the chair seat and her chin on her knee, she added, “And you don’t really want me here, anyway.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’ve already got your hands full.” As soon as she said it, she could have kicked herse
lf.

  “Ahh.” He stood up and stared at a perfectly blank stretch of tent. “Sierra. I’ll admit I didn’t think of that when I asked you to come here. What it would look like, I mean. Sierra and I … it’s not serious.”

  “And you think I care?”

  “No! I don’t think that. I mean … I don’t know what I mean. You’ve got me confused.” He bent over and picked up his glasses that had fallen to the ground. “Don’t make me say anything I’ll regret, Lacy.”

  She kept her face blank. Instinct told her to change the subject. “I’m sorry I missed your lecture on Neolithic flint last night.”

  “Don’t lie.” He straightened up and grinned.

  “I’m not lying. I remember how, in Egypt, you worked on the tomb but you were always on the lookout for anything that dated back to the Neolithic. Why Neolithic?”

  He didn’t say anything for a minute. “I’m not sure I can explain it without sounding like a zealot.” He polished his lenses with the tail of his khaki shirt.

  Lacy waited.

  “Something happened about ten thousand B.C. Humans had been human—Homo sapiens sapiens—for more than a hundred thousand years. People had brains that seem to have been just like ours, yet they piddled around making stone tools and gathering berries and shit like that until about ten, maybe twelve thousand years ago. Then, bang! All of a sudden, they’re building towns, worshiping gods, making toys for their kids, weaving clothes, making jewelry, trading goods, and writing! What happened?”

  Lacy didn’t want to ruin this by making a stupid guess so she tilted her head to one side and shrugged.

  “Some people call this the Neolithic Explosion. Some call it the Neolithic Revolution. Some say it wasn’t all that sudden—more like a gradual evolution. But it happened here. Right here. And I want to understand why.”