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

by Maria Hudgins

  Maybe the mixup happened at the checked luggage belt. Mystery Man sees Max’s coat lying on a nearby seat. Max isn’t paying attention—he’s watching for his luggage to appear on the belt. Mystery Man needs a nice trench coat and swipes it. But Milo saw the man in the coat at the hotel, and people who stay at the Pera Palace Hotel and wear handmade alligator shoes normally aren’t the sort who steal coats, she reminded herself.

  Lacy studied the bank of numbers above the elevator door, mentally pushing the amber light down from the ten it seemed stuck on. She eyed the arrow that pointed to the stairwell but figured the elevator was still a better bet.

  Or it might have happened days later, she thought. If only Milo had mentioned a specific date. Still, she was incredibly lucky to have met him at all. Lacy hoped he’d call soon and hook her up with Mehmet the cabbie—and with himself, as well. Milo. There was a story there.

  The elevator door opened and Lacy hopped in.

  Maybe Max and Mystery Man knew each other. Maybe they knew they’d be in Istanbul at the same time and had gotten together for a drink or a meal. Max left his coat on the back of a chair and Mystery Man intended to give it back to him. Could that be the reason he was on the train? Was he going to see Max? Not to return a coat, surely, but perhaps about something important. Perhaps Max invited him to join them at the dig. She wished she’d told Henry everything. Why had she been so secretive?

  When she reached the printer at the back of the lobby, she found her photo still two orders back in the queue. She looked at her watch and willed the printer to hurry up, fearing MacSweeney would leave the museum before she got there.

  * * *

  She ran from the tram stop, past the Blue Mosque, and across the Hippodrome with the freshly printed photo in her bag. Her goal was the serene museum housed in a sixteenth century Ottoman home built by Süleyman the Magnificent for a vizier who subsequently fell out of favor and had to be strangled. She found Elbert MacSweeney sitting on a bench in the lush central garden, eating a late lunch. Breathless, she dropped her backpack on the grass.

  “Sure, I know Max Sebring,” MacSweeney said. “We’ve been emailing back and forth for a year. He had very specific ideas about the rug he wanted made. He was delighted when I called and said it was finished. I told him I’d ship it to him but he said he was coming to Turkey anyway and he would pick it up. I don’t think he wanted to trust it to shippers.” He smiled and the sun glinted off a gold tooth.

  “I’ve seen the rug.” Lacy sat on the grass at MacSweeney’s feet. “Did he come here, to the museum?”

  “No. I met him at the little shop we have in the village where the rugs are made. Same place I’m going this afternoon. I introduced him to the woman who had woven it. She couldn’t wait to show him her loom and the plants she used for the dyes. I think he enjoyed it.”

  “Was he alone?”

  “No. He was with a guy named Henry.”

  “Henry Jones. Yes. He’s at the dig site, now.”

  “Oh yeah? With Max?”

  He hadn’t heard. Lacy explained that Max had died a few hours before she arrived at the dig herself, so she never had a chance to meet him. MacSweeney’s questions and expressions of sympathy took several more minutes, during which time he balled up his sandwich’s wrapping paper, recapped his bottled water, and looked at his watch. Lacy rushed to get to the point of her visit.

  “Did he have anyone else with him or did he meet anyone while he was there? I’m trying to track down another man whose path must have crossed Max’s.” To the questioning look she got, she responded, “He had Max’s trench coat and I met him, but I didn’t get his name. This other man. I really need to find him.” Not the whole truth, but MacSweeney was obviously in a hurry to leave, so she cut it short. “Did Max and Henry drive there in a rented car?”

  MacSweeney stood and squinted at the sky over the museum’s tile roof. “Right. Blue car, I think. I suppose it was rented, and they had no one else with them. If they met up with anyone else I don’t think it was there, because I know pretty much everyone in the village. A stranger sticks out like a sore thumb in a place like that.”

  Lacy grabbed her backpack and stood, dusting off the seat of her pants. “Take a look at this.” She handed him the photo fresh from the hotel’s printer.

  “That’s Max,” he said, and clucked his tongue. “You say he’s dead now? What a shame. You just never know, do you?” He paused, then said, “Henry took a picture of me and Max and the woman who made the rug. She and Max were holding the rug between them.”

  “Is there anything else you remember? Was Max wearing a trench coat?”

  “My dear, how would I remember a thing like that?” He grinned, looking down at his own less-than-coordinated shirt and pants. “There was something, though.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t remember. Something.”

  “It may be important.”

  “Oh, I doubt it. But if I think of it, I’ll call you.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Lacy hadn’t thought to get Henry’s phone number, so she called Paul’s, got no answer, and remembered no one at the dig would answer unless he happened to be standing on Four Bars Hill. She left Paul a message to call her back. Sometimes, Lacy felt, the net effect of the digital age was nothing more than a global game of phone tag. So frustrating. She stopped at a little café a block from the Hippodrome where she’d frequently eaten over the course of the summer and ordered her favorite, a yogurt kebab with fresh pita bread. Half way through her meal she got a call and dashed outside to answer it.

  Milo, in his cultured British accent, told her Mehmet the cab driver was back and would be hanging out in his usual spot until five o’clock. “But you must get here before four-thirty, because when rush hour traffic picks up, you’ll get stuck.” It was already three forty-five. She wolfed down the rest of her meal and paid her tab.

  Jam-packed by this time in the afternoon, the tramcar seemed to groan in protest when Lacy shoe-horned herself into a non-existent space inches ahead of the closing door. She hopped off at the first stop on the New City side of the Galata Bridge and hailed a cab to the hotel. Normally she would have walked, but her time was short. As the cab drew up she saw Milo Dakin waiting for her, arms folded, straw fedora pulled forward, leaning against a lamppost. He looked for all the world like a vintage travel poster. When he saw her coming, he pushed off the lamppost with his shoulder.

  Mehmet, a stocky man of about forty, smoothed his black mustache and straightened up when Milo introduced him. His English wasn’t good so Milo did the translating.

  “Ask him if he remembers the man and his companion.”

  “I’ve already asked him. He does remember.”

  “Did they both go with him?”

  “It was a party of two. Two men.”

  “Does he remember the exact date?”

  Milo talked to the cabbie for a minute. “We’ve already talked about that, too. His company keeps records and I also keep notes in my journal. We have decided it was probably the evening of July 18. That was a Monday.”

  Spooky! Milo keeps notes on the people he sees in the bar of the Pera Palace Hotel? Why? Is he a spy or something? Does he work for the hotel as undercover security? Lacy filed this thought away to consider later. “Does he recall where he took them? Does he have a record of the trip?”

  “He let them out on the other side of the Galata Bridge, near the Eminönü ferry dock.”

  “Ask him if he can describe what the other man looked like. Does he remember what the man was wearing?”

  Again, Milo conferred with Mehmet, this time resorting to hand gestures. “He doesn’t remember what the man looked like. They were in the back seat and he was paying attention to his driving as he’s supposed to do.” Milo paused and smiled at her, as if he had properly delivered the safety disclaimer at Mehmet’s insistence. “He says they spoke English to each other.”

  “Did they have any luggage?”

&nb
sp; Milo relayed Lacy’s question and the cabbie shook his head. He paused, tapped Milo on the arm, and said something else.

  “He says the man in the trench coat was older than the other man.”

  “Thank you.” Lacy figured this was all she’d get from this man but the date, July 18, was enlightening. “Oh! Would you ask him if he’ll take me to the place where he let them off?”

  Mehmet agreed to do so and opened the door to the cab’s back seat. Lacy started to hop in, then turned back to Milo. “And thank you, too! May I buy you a drink sometime?”

  “I can’t think of anything I’d like more. You have my number.”

  The short cab ride took a while because, as Milo warned her, rush hour traffic in this part of the city was hellish. But it did give Lacy time to find out if Mehmet knew anything more about the two men. She found he spoke some English, but she generally had to ask him to repeat two or three times and, after a bit, it became embarrassing. He remembered nothing more.

  She passed the photo she’d shown MacSweeney across the back of the seat. The cabbie shrugged his shoulders.

  “Milo is an interesting man,” she said, speaking slowly but at normal volume. After all, he wasn’t hard of hearing. “Does he spend a lot of time at the hotel?”

  Mehmet laughed, then straightened his face. “He is a writer.”

  Lacy didn’t understand and had to ask him twice more. “He’s a writer?”

  “Yes. He write book.”

  “What sort of book?” This didn’t totally explain Milo’s odd behavior, but it might explain the journal. “Does he write under his own name?”

  Mehmet didn’t seem to understand that second question but attempted to deal with the first. “Book about …” he paused, then took one hand off the wheel, made a circle of his thumb and forefinger, and held it up to one eye. “About war. The big war.”

  “World War Two?” She considered the charade. “About spies?”

  He nodded and smiled as if pleased with their ability to communicate.

  “He writes books about spies in World War Two?”

  “Do not know how many. One book, for sure.” He stopped in front of the Eminönü ferry station. The river behind it also teemed with afternoon traffic. Behind her in the middle of the busy thoroughfare, a tram had stopped between the between north- and southbound traffic lanes.

  “They got out here?” She paid Mehmet and stepped to the curb amid swirling currents of foot traffic. Where to now? Why would these two men, at least one of whom had likely arrived from America that same day, take a cab to this spot? It made no sense that they would cross the bridge in a cab only to take a ferry across the Golden Horn back to the New City they’d just come from. Ferries also left this station and crossed the Bosporus to the Asian side of the city but, if that was their destination, why come here when other ferries and a large bridge ran to the Asian side from the New City?

  Across the busy boulevard lay the Egyptian Spice Market, with its warren of little shops selling spices, herbs, touristy items, and almost anything else one could think of. Lacy had purchased dyes here only a week ago. Near the market, stood the beautiful Rüstem Pasha Mosque with its graceful arches and spiky minarets. Would this have been their destination? Why? The New Mosque, to the left of the Spice Market, was the only other landmark she recognized. Might they have boarded the tram?

  While she waited for a chance to cross the street, an almost impossible feat at this time of day, she smelled fish. Not five yards away, a street vendor was hawking his cartload of fish and mussels on ice, his competitors selling roasted ears of corn, roasted chestnuts, or donuts. Is this where the trench coat picked up its fishy smell? In that first encounter when the man knocked her down in his rush to the train, he would have stood right here before boarding the ferry to Haydarpasa station, as she herself had done. But would the coat have picked up enough of the fishy odor to be detectable days later? No way.

  Crossing the street, she stepped onto a wide plaza busy with men, with Turkish women in small groups, and with tourists, identifiable by their open maps and upturned faces. Since coming to Turkey, Lacy had become used to wearing conservative dress—shirts with sleeves, ankle-length or cropped pants, no bare shoulders—and she always carried a scarf in case she needed to enter a mosque. It made life simpler. Not that she would have been arrested for violating local standards, it was more a matter of manners. When in Rome. The typical Turkish woman on the plaza wore a long dark tunic called an abaya and a scarf, or hijab, a covering her hair. The younger women wore jeans, T-shirts, and the ubiquitous scarf. As usual, she saw a few women shrouded in burkas. She could think of no reason to visit the mosque. It was almost prayer time, and what would she find, anyway, other than what one always found in a mosque?

  She entered the Spice Market and steeled herself for the onslaught of vendors watching for the slightest hint of eye contact. To all offers, she answered Sonra (Later.) More polite, she thought, than Hayir (No.) What am I looking for? It occurred to her that she wasn’t likely to see a sign that said, “For information about the man in the green trench coat, ask here.”

  Surrounded by spice shops, hookah shops, pottery shops, cheese shops, shops selling Turkish delight, figs, rose buds and nuts, shops selling pashminas, rugs, and souvenirs, Lacy stopped and thought. She perceived a certain rough grouping of the shops. She smelled cinnamon. One alley, it seemed, held more spice shops while another was dominated by fabrics and clothing. What would a man from America be interested in? As far as she could tell, all the wares offered here were also offered elsewhere in the city. Maybe he was here to sell something. Perhaps he represented a factory in China that cranked out Turkish souvenirs. That idea had some appeal.

  Shoppers intent on the dazzling array of colors and smells around them did not raise their eyes, as Lacy now did, to the area above the stalls—a hodgepodge of arches and windows, fancy and plain, some letting in sunlight and some not. Lacy had never noticed that second level before. What purpose would it serve? Offices? Storage? Of course. Storage. All these merchants needed places to store their inventory, and they’d probably love a spot to get away from the crowd now and then. Have a glass of tea. Rest a bit.

  At the end of one hall, the rosy light of fading day slanted in and caught millions of tiny dust motes. Lacy headed toward the light. A man pushing a handcart made her swerve out of its way and when she saw what lay in it she nearly threw up. She grabbed her mouth and jumped back. A huge cylindrical mass covered in dark grey hair filled the cart. It seemed to have stitches up one side and several protuberances that resembled vestigial appendages of some sort.

  A man in a nearby booth laughed and approached her, speaking English. “It is just cheese,” he said in English, still grinning. “Inside a goat’s skin.”

  “Thank you,” she called over the noise, and ducked through an arched opening into fresh air. Actually, not fresh air, as the overwhelming stench of fish assaulted her nose. Her churning stomach couldn’t catch a break. Here, along the outer wall of the market, lay another section she’d not seen on previous visits. Meat, fish, and produce of all sorts were arrayed in stalls lining both sides of a narrow walk. Eggplants, octopus, okra, and anchovies. The smell of fish overpowered everything else. No wonder they put these shops on the perimeter, open to the sky.

  Now, this would certainly do the job!

  The men working along this row must go home at night reeking of fish. She paused and looked up. Was it possible? Was this where Mystery Man went when he left the taxi? He must have hung around for a while. Did he work here? Lacy knew she had to find a way to go upstairs and find out what was above the fish shops. Vendors on both sides were starting to call to her. That’s what I get for slowing down. They all think I want to buy.

  For the next quarter hour, Lacy ambled up and down pretending to study the produce and moving along as soon as the nearest vendor attacked with his spiel. The stalls formed a more or less continuous display along both sides with their awnings nea
rly touching those of the vendors facing them. Some eight feet from one side to the other, shoppers in the aisle jostled each other as they passed. She spotted a couple of spaces between adjacent stalls that led into darkness. Some of the stalls had doors or curtained openings behind the workspace and some seemed to have nothing but a solid wall. She considered asking a vendor which way to the nearest women’s toilet, deliberately not following directions, and dashing into one of the dark passages. This seemed too risky. Whoever she asked would probably watch to make sure she went the right way. Fortunately, business was brisk. Electric lights were starting to replace the fading daylight. Some of the stalls were so busy at this hour the vendors couldn’t possibly watch anything beyond their own stock and their cash drawer.

  The alley Lacy chose to try first was located between two fishmongers. Above their awnings hung several windows with glass but without the bars she’d seen on a number of the others. Fishmongers wouldn’t store their product upstairs because it was delivered fresh every day by local fishermen. In fact, that would be true of all the produce, too. Maybe not the nuts or items that would last for a while, but refrigeration being what it was, and electricity unreliable, daily delivery was the only thing that made sense for restocking perishables. So what would they store above their stalls? Perhaps she’d soon know.

  She ambled the length of the passage again and watched from a distance. Fading sunlight streamed in across gaps in the second floor façade. Lacy decided she had three stalls to worry about. The one on the immediate right of the alley she wanted to explore seemed to have closed up for the day, leaving only bare, sloping shelves still wet from melting ice. The fishmonger on the left was doing a brisk business. The produce stand across from it, selling bananas and figs, was tended by one man, arms folded, watching the passing shoppers. He had no customers. She waited until two women indicated an interest in the figs and engaged the man in discussion. Glancing toward the busy fishmonger’s stall, Lacy saw that both attendants were occupied rearranging fish and shoveling ice around them. She slipped down the fishmongers’ side of the passage and ducked into the alley, not daring to look back until she was well hidden from the light.