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

by Maria Hudgins

  “No possible connection. What? You think he knew the man on the train was going to get killed and he invited me to come out on the train so I could be a witness?”

  “Might it have been to get you out of Istanbul?”

  “I didn’t even see the man in the trench coat until I took the train. My snooping didn’t start until I saw his body fly off the train.”

  “What about the dig director? Bob Mueller, right?”

  “Bob’s known Maxwell Sebring for years, but what possible connection could he have to the man on the train?”

  “What possible connection could anyone have?” Milo held the last glass up to the light and, satisfied, set it on a shelf with its companions. “We’re beating the bushes here. Looking for any connection we can find.”

  “Or make up.” Lacy turned from her sink of soapy water and tried to wink at him to show she was teasing, but winking hurt. “You’re forgetting someone. How about Mehmet?”

  “Mehmet?” He added a derisive snort. “I’ve known Mehmet for years. Ever since I started,” he paused, “since the first time I went to the Pera Palace, Mehmet has been a regular driver. No. Mehmet’s all right.”

  “He’s the only person we know who has definitely seen the man in Max’s trench coat, and we know he gave him a ride to a spot near the Spice Market.”

  “Mehmet and I go way back. He’s all right.” He returned to his easy chair in the living room and Lacy followed.

  With Milo’s coaching, Lacy planned her next moves: Return to the Consulate and apply for a new passport. Return to her hotel room and pick up her laptop. But even the simplest task presented a multitude of obstacles.

  “Problem. I don’t have my key card anymore, and I hardly think I can show up at the front desk looking like this. ‘Dr. Glass? What happened to you?’ A blond woman in western dress walks out and a Muslim woman with a black eye walks in. Gonna raise questions.”

  “No problem.” Milo sprang to his feet and disappeared down a hall that led to the apartment’s back rooms. He returned with some makeup and a pair of sunglasses that looked as if they’d come straight from an Austin Powers movie. “My sister’s,” he said.

  The foundation was too dark for Lacy but she managed, with the aid of a mirror Milo propped up in the front window, to soften the many-hued bruise on her cheek with a dusting of powder. The sunglasses also helped. “Now. About my clothes.” They decided she would travel back to the Old City wearing the abaya and hijab, then change to western dress in a public toilet near the hotel. Milo would go with her but remain at a discreet distance on a different tram car. En route, he said, “I can visually assess the area for anyone following you.”

  Lacy yanked her clothes out of the shopping bag. “I can’t wear this! I’ve been abducted in it. The shirt is bloody and the pants—well, they might do. They’re not too bad.”

  “Go to Sabrina’s room and check her closet.”

  Milo’s sister’s closet yielded nothing in the way of pants, shorts, skirt, or dress that wouldn’t have swallowed Lacy whole, but she did find a gauzy blouse that, knotted at the bottom, would do. Milo advised her not to stop at the front desk on the way into her hotel. He assured her he could open the door to her room without a key card. Now dressed in her Muslim garb and sunglasses, she left the apartment trusting that Milo trailed somewhere behind her.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Lacy walked straight past the front desk and slipped into the elevator. At the fifth floor she got off, checked the halls left and right, and waited for Milo. A cleaning woman’s cart sat halfway down one hall. A family of four walked past her and into the elevator. The lights over the door indicated they were going down. The elevator’s return trip brought Milo up.

  “The woman with bright orange hair is in the lobby.”

  “You saw her?” Lacy felt like a cat up a tree. From here her only way out would be directly past her stalker.

  “But she doesn’t have bright orange hair now. It’s dark brown.”

  “How do you know it’s her?”

  Milo tapped his forehead. “I have my ways.” Following Lacy down the hall to her room, he added, “Spooky light brown eyes peering over the top of a newspaper? Sitting in the only chair that has a full view of both the front door and the elevator? Piece of cake.”

  “Okay, Milo. You’ve been bragging about how I don’t need a key card. Do your stuff.”

  Milo pulled a wire coat hanger from the back of his jacket, unwound and straightened it, and used it to measure the distance from the lock to the floor. He extracted a small pair of needle-nose pliers from his hip pocket and bent a couple of right angles near the ends. He stopped and looked around. His voice dropped an octave and his lips hardly moved. “Eyes and ears, Lacy. Tap me if you see or hear anyone coming.”

  While Lacy watched the hall in both directions, she stole a glance at Milo’s sleight-of-hand. He slid the wire under the door and twisted it, feeling for something. In a few seconds the door popped open. He pushed it aside and waved her in with an exaggerated bow.

  Her room was just as she’d left it. Lacy felt as if she’d been gone for a month but it had been only a bit less than twenty-four hours. Her laptop still sat on the desk in exactly the same spot, her clothes still lay strewn about. The bed was made. Was it made when I left yesterday? Fresh towels hung from the bathroom racks, evidence that the maid had been in.

  “Wait.” Milo stopped her with an outstretched arm. “Before you touch anything, check out the whole room. Has anyone been here?”

  “The maid.”

  “Other than the maid.”

  Lacy obediently walked all around the room and the bathroom, looked in the closet, under the nightstand, and used a couple of facial tissues to open the drawers. Milo, meanwhile, swirled the curtains out from the window and examined the rods at the top. He peered inside the lampshades, picked up the phone receiver and looked at it, dropped to his knees and looked under both beds. Standing, he smoothed his hair back over a balding spot, his gaze still darting around the room. He tapped on the thermostat, swiveled the TV around, and ran his hand over its back. Dragging a chair across the carpet, he climbed up and checked the air vents. At last he made a simple pronouncement. “Okay.”

  “I have to take a shower,” Lacy said, grabbing clean underwear from a drawer and congratulating herself on having had the foresight to take these items out of her now-stolen backpack. The clothes she’d left lying around were clean compared to the cropped pants she was wearing, and she wanted to give Milo’s sister her blouse back. She lifted a lock of hair to her nose. It smelled fishy. Luckily, the hotel’s little complimentary toiletries included shampoo and conditioner. She scrubbed her skin pink and stood under the hot water until she felt clean. Her shoulders still hurt from being thrown out of their sockets. And her arms were bruised in several spots she hadn’t noticed before.

  Until she fired up the wall-mounted hair dryer, she didn’t realize her brush was also gone. Standing at the bathroom sink in her bra and panties, she called through the door to Milo. The bathroom door opened a crack and a masculine hand holding a small pocket comb slipped through. “What next, Milo? How do we get out of here?”

  “That woman downstairs may be onto me,” Milo said. “Until now, they’d have had no reason to connect me to you, but I assume she was watching the door and the numbers on the elevator, so she may have made the connection. Let’s assume she did.”

  “She may have called Jason also. They could both be waiting for me to come down.”

  “Do you know any of the hotel personnel well enough to ask for a big favor?”

  Lacy thought about that for a minute, then remembered the nice bartender who always joked with her when she dropped by for a cooling Coke most afternoons. He was a prankster in the mold of Süleyman, the cook. “Husni. If he’s on duty now, I could ask him. What do you want him to do?”

  * * *

  Husni the bartender strode across the lobby, knocking over a flimsy brochure displ
ay and making a lot of noise righting it. On his knees and surrounded by brochures, he called out, in English, toward the front desk. “The dinner Dr. Glass wants sent up is ready. Who’s going to take it?”

  He listened, pretending to hear a reply from a back room, then, louder than necessary, “Room five seventy-two.” Pause. “That’s right! Five seventy-two!”

  Husni walked back across the lobby as far as the swinging doors between the bar and the kitchen, and watched as a woman and a man left their chairs and walked to the elevator. He then made his call from the wall phone beside the doors.

  * * *

  Still in her room, Lacy answered the phone and called out to Milo, who stood halfway into the elevator, holding the door open. “They’re on their way,” she said. Milo let the door close and followed Lacy down the stairs.

  As Lacy walked by the front desk she leaned over and whispered to the desk clerk, “Those thieves who’ve been targeting upscale hotels recently? I just spotted a couple of suspicious characters hanging around on the fifth floor. You might want to check them out.”

  * * *

  Beginning to feel like a yo-yo, Lacy found herself once again on the tram clattering across the Galata Bridge, the waters of the Golden Horn beneath them. They hiked from the tram stop to the Western Union address she had given Joan Friedman. Lacy carried her few remaining belongings, including her laptop, in the same shopping bag they’d taken away from the clothing store. Milo, struggling to stay on the street side of the narrow sidewalk like a gentleman, walked along with one foot in the gutter and one on the curb.

  “Don’t cancel your credit cards,” he said.

  “What? Why not?” Lacy switched her shopping bag to the other hand and pulled Milo toward her until he could proceed with both feet on the sidewalk.

  “Because if these guys are really stupid—or broke—they may use them and that’ll tell you where they are. You can check your charges online.”

  “More likely, they’ve thrown the cards in a trash can and the charges will be made by whatever bum finds them.”

  “As soon as you see the first charge, call and cancel. Then call the police. Did you write your card numbers on something you keep separate from your wallet? You should always do that.”

  “I think I did, but did I put it in my backpack or my duffle? If it’s in my backpack, it’s gone, too. My duffle is still in my tent back at the dig.”

  “And your passport number?”

  “That too. I photocopied the first page. On the same sheet, I think.”

  “Can you call someone at the camp and tell them to check your tent?”

  “I could if I had their number, but it’s in my cell phone.”

  “Which is also gone.”

  * * *

  The Western Union man gave Milo 780 Turkish lira, the current equivalent of Joan Friedman’s 500 dollars minus transfer charges. As soon as they walked out, Milo once again “visually assessed the area” and handed the money to Lacy.

  She stopped and counted out enough to cover his purchase of the hijab, the abaya, and the phone plus an extra 15 lira. “I need you to do me one more favor. After I leave, I want you to go to the Spice Market and give fifteen lira to the man I stole a scarf from this morning.”

  “You must be kidding! What if he knows your captors? What if they’ve already dropped by and talked to him?” He grabbed her by the elbow and propelled her down the street in the direction they’d come, his face close to hers. “Can’t you see it? Me saying, ‘Please let me pay you for the scarf a young blond American woman stole from you this morning. That’s right. The one those men have been searching for. Ah. You talked to them, did you? And how much did they offer you for information?’” Milo shook his head. “What would be my chances of getting out of there?”

  “Sorry. I didn’t think of it like that.”

  “Tell you what I’ll do. Soon, not today but soon, I’ll go over and leave him fifteen lira in an envelope. Anonymously.”

  Lacy decided that would have to do.

  Milo took 15 lira and handed back the rest. “The clothes and the phone are my gifts to a lovely lady.”

  As Lacy said “Thank you,” she smiled for the first time in more than two days.

  * * *

  Their next visit took them by cab back to the American Consulate. En route, Milo tested the cabbie’s language skills and determined they were safe conversing in English in the back seat. He told her he would help her rent a car in his name. Having no license, no passport, no ID, and no credit cards, she couldn’t rent one herself.

  The interview at the American Consulate was as grim as Lacy had feared. They’d dealt with lost and stolen passports before, but not from a U.S. citizen who could give them a hotel address but no promise she would ever stay there again. The form they gave her to fill out wanted to know how, where, and when her passport went missing. It asked what efforts had been made to recover the document. Lacy wrote the date and listed the place as the Spice Market, but could give them no other information without embroiling herself in a police report. Her honest answers would have been: How? My passport was stolen by the people who abducted me, tied me up and left me to die in a room over a fish stall. Efforts to recover? None. I didn’t report my abduction to the police because …. No acceptable answer came to mind.

  She briefly considered telling the truth and reporting the abduction to the police, but she knew Milo would freak out. You told them what? They’re calling the police? What are you? Crazy? Lacy had no way to know what would happen if they did call the police, but it was a fair assumption that she wouldn’t be allowed to leave Istanbul for a while and her quest for the identity of the poor man buried as a John Doe in the wilds of the Anatolian plateau would be over. The truth would make her sound like a nut case. They’d call Paul and tell him everything. Worst of all, if that guy Jason was actually connected to the police in some way (which she seriously doubted at this point) she could be signing her own death warrant.

  But what if the hotel had caught Jason and his female cohort and called the police? They might be in custody already. Lacy laid the Consulate’s pencil on the Department of State form and buried her face in her hands. The police would question her about her abduction. Might she and Jason end up at the same police station? Would a police computer link her name with that of the occupant of the room Jason may have been caught breaking into? Too many unknowns.

  What she wanted was to get out of Istanbul.

  She erased “Spice Market” from the form, having settled on a generic story about losing her backpack somewhere, probably when she’d set it down outside the Topkapi Palace. She kept her report sufficiently vague to convince the Consulate official it was useless to call the police. On the line for “efforts to recover the document” she indicated that her black eye and bruises were sustained when, in her haste to return to the Topkapi Palace, she had crossed the street without looking and been forced to dive for the curb.

  Her original passport now officially invalidated, she filled out another form requesting a new one. Tramping through the lobby to rejoin Milo, it occurred to Lacy that performances like hers were what gave blondes a bad name.

  * * *

  Milo leased a small Ford with a stick shift. Lacy nudged him at the counter and whispered that a stick shift in a foreign country might be more challenge than she could handle, but he whispered back that all their cars had manual transmissions.

  Outside the door of the rental office, Lacy found a drink machine dispensing soft drinks and water. She bought a bottle of water and used it to take more aspirin. Her head was pounding again.

  Once they were seated inside the car, Milo searched for a place to insert the key, grappled with the hand brake, and, attempting to find reverse gear, turned on the windshield wipers instead. When he finally backed the car from its space in the rental parking lot, he drove it out the gate and onto the nearest curb, where he parked it and turned off the engine.

  “All yours,” he said.
>
  “Can you drive me to the city limits at least? Or to a place where I can practice a little before I take my life in my own hands?”

  “I can’t drive.” Milo’s face reddened and he turned it toward the side window to avoid her gaze.

  “You can’t drive?” Lacy thought she must have heard him wrong. “But you showed the man your driver’s license!”

  “I used to drive. In England. When I moved here I got a Turkish license using my British one and I’ve kept it up to date but they never made me take a driving test. The last time I drove a car was twenty years ago and on the left side of the road.”

  Lacy stepped out and checked the traffic in her immediate vicinity. Turkish drivers considered traffic laws mere suggestions. Lacy had already decided that Istanbul rivaled or even surpassed Cairo for aggressiveness on the road, putting Rome’s drivers to shame. Thrown into their midst, an American motorist was as helpless as a gnat in a tornado. Horns blaring uselessly, drivers weaved in and out, bumpers nearly touching, turn signals used only for amusement, and wide shoulders for backing up.

  She swallowed hard and took a deep breath. “Where’s that map they gave us?”

  Milo opened the map on the hood of the car and helped her plot an escape route from the city. He advised her to head for the motorway by driving north past the Dolmabahçe Palace. If she could manage to get onto the motorway in an easterly direction, she could stay with it all the way to Ankara, a distance of nearly three hundred miles. Saying goodbye to Milo, she felt the parting called for a hug and possibly a kiss, but, remembering he was British, she offered her hand and promised to call when she could. She could hardly believe this stranger was letting her leave town with a car charged to his credit card.

  Traffic signs! She wished she had paid more attention to them earlier in the summer when she wasn’t behind the wheel and her life didn’t depend on understanding their messages. Dur meant stop, as was obvious from the fact that the sign was red and octagonal, but signs with no arrows or definitive shape were nothing more than hints she was probably doing something wrong. She hit her first Dur sign when she came to an intersection of the narrow street leading from the rental car lot to a four-lane avenue where she needed to turn right. She stopped and immediately got sideswiped by a car attempting to pass on her left with about two inches less room than necessary. Her side-view mirror snapped forward and the keen screech of metal turned her stomach. No police! This is the other guy’s fault, but never mind. If the police come, I’ll go straight to jail. I’m driving without a license. I’m an alien without a passport. And I’m driving a car rented by someone else.