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

by Maria Hudgins

  Halfway up the hill he met Bob coming down. “Just on the phone with Alan again. No change in the old man’s condition. It’s beginning to look like a permanent coma. Question is, when will they turn off the machines?”

  “Who’s left to make that decision?” Paul asked, swiping his forehead with the back of his arm. “His son is dead. His only two grandchildren are dead. His daughter-in-law’s incompetent.”

  “Family lawyers, maybe. I don’t know.” Bob turned his head to one side and squinted through sweat-soaked eyelashes. His eyes were red from the salt. “They had a memorial service for Max yesterday, just folks from Foundation offices and the museum. Alan said it didn’t seem right, not having anything, but since no one from the family was capable of taking the initiative, they did it themselves. All very low-key to keep the press out. The autopsy results are in. Looks like it was heart failure, but that’s what they always say when they don’t know. No evidence of foulplay, though.”

  “Right. Basically what we expected.”

  Bob didn’t answer. Instead he looked past Paul’s shoulder. “What the hell are they coming up here for?”

  Paul turned and saw the two green uniforms and a woman in western dress approaching. “Is everything all right?” he asked them. “Did you find out what you need to know?”

  “No. Not at all! Things are worse than ever.”

  Introducing herself, the translator took over in what sounded to Paul like a Bostonian accent. “Dr. Glass explained her version of what happened after she heard the scream. It made sense. Then Süleyman Güler told us it was he who had bumped into her and fell into her tent, knocking it askew.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “Then your photographer, Todd Majewski, came up and confessed to the very same thing. He told us he was running toward the commotion when he tripped over a girl—he’s certain it was Dr. Glass—knocked her down and nearly flattened her tent.”

  Paul didn’t know what to say. Bob looked at him, frowning, a trickle of perspiration coursing down the bridge of his nose.

  Captain Kemal said, “One or both of them are lying.”

  “Both of them, probably,” added Sergeant Osman.

  “Pretty woman in trouble, needs an alibi. More than enough men willing to say whatever it takes to rescue her.”

  “They should have talked to each other before they talked to us.”

  Paul said, “Let me talk to both of them. I’ll find out who is lying. I think I know already.”

  “Who?”

  “Let me hold off on my opinions until I talk to them. I’ll come to your station this afternoon—or tomorrow at the latest.”

  “We need to get this mess cleared up,” Bob Mueller said. “We have a lot to do here, and we’re running out of time to do it.”

  “It cannot be helped,” Kemal said, his sharp tone conveying irritation. “You are the ones who called us, remember? We cannot stop an investigation into what appears to be attempted murder just because you find our presence—“

  “Inconvenient!” The interpreter finished his sentence for him, her own voice duplicating the impatience she heard in his.

  Paul dipped two fingers in his shirt pocket and felt the warm gold of the earring. Knowing the police were on their way, he’d taken it from the safe in his tent. This was as good a time as any to hand it over to authorities, he decided. The longer he kept it hidden, the more likely the dig was to get embroiled in accusations of smuggling. These officers wouldn’t lose the item, he was sure, but they probably wouldn’t know what to do with it, either. Whatever they did, he wanted it out of his hands. He hadn’t, however, intended to hand it over to them in the presence of Bob Mueller. His hand rose from his pocket, empty.

  He looked at Bob, still ranting about how they were running out of time, and Paul knew he had to do it. The police were ready to leave. His fingers returned to the shirt pocket. “I want you to take custody of this,” he said. “It’s old, it’s valuable, and it’s stolen. It doesn’t belong here.”

  Mueller snatched the earring from the policeman’s hand. “It does belong here!” He looked as if he were about to hit Paul with his fist. Sputtering something unintelligible, he closed his fist around the earring and ground the knuckles of both hands into his own forehead.

  Paul knew Bob’s mind was careening from one calamity to another: If the police take it, we’ll never get it back. If we don’t hand it over, we’re leaving ourselves wide open to a smuggling charge. If the Turkish authorities discover we’re hiding finds from them, we’ll lose our permission to dig. If that earring really is from the hoard of King Croesus, and the newspapers find out, it’ll be Katie-bar-the-door. We’ll look up and here will come every treasure-hunter from five continents swarming across these hills, wagging their metal detectors before them. Paul felt a little sorry for him.

  Bob raised his fists toward heaven, head thrown back, then, slowly, lowered them and dropped the earring into the policeman’s still-outstretched hand. Softly and without raising his head, he said to Paul, “You can consider our partnership at an end.”

  Paul said to the policeman, “We need a receipt for the earring.”

  The two officers looked at each other and at the interpreter, muttering back and forth in Turkish.

  “We do not have a receipt book with us.”

  “I hardly think a handwritten note would suffice in this case,” Paul said. “We have to have an official receipt.”

  After more muttering in Turkish, Kemal said, “Since you have already promised to come to our station this afternoon, why don’t you bring this item with you when you come? We can give you a proper receipt at that time.”

  Paul stuck out his hand for the earring and dropped it back in his shirt pocket. He knew he and Bob were not finished talking, but what they had to say must be done in private. Until it was in the hands of a Turkish official, that gold earring would continue to burn a hole in his pocket.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Lacy felt better knowing that Süleyman had vouched for her whereabouts at the time of Sierra’s assault. Returning to her laptop in the big tent, she found the cook clearing the last of the breakfast items from the tables, tying off trash bags. Little Madison Penrose stood at the table where the most recently collected goodies were displayed awaiting Bob’s or Paul’s examination before being hauled off to Gülden’s lab at the dorm.

  With a pin-prick of guilt, Lacy remembered this was what she was supposed to be here for, yet she’d spent no more than a few minutes so far on her assigned task of checking the artifacts for traces of color and identifying the pigments. She walked over and began examining the finds, bending over the table for a closer look.

  “Here. This’ll help.” Madison lifted the ten-power hand lens she wore on a string around her neck and handed it to Lacy.

  “Thanks. Am I allowed to pick these up?”

  “Sure. After all, we peons brought them in here. If we can touch them, you certainly can.”

  Lacy grinned at her, opting not to take issue with Madison’s characterization of herself and her co-workers as peons. There were dozens of pottery sherds, some rather large, laid out on one end. Hittite, obviously, with complex designs painted on their outer surfaces in red and yellow ochre, black charcoal, white chalk, and what appeared to her was malachite. The items on the other end of the table were drab by comparison. Paul’s Neolithic material was smaller, plainer, and in every way less attractive than Bob’s. But Paul’s life was committed to the Neolithic. It was the only period that interested him. Even when they worked in Egypt together, surrounded by the flashy spectacle of Eighteenth Dynasty tombs, she had seen Paul’s eyes stray to the layered limestone cliffs, as if he were thinking, Where’s the Neolithic? I’d love to dig into those hills.

  Süleyman left his cleaning chores and joined her. “I told them, Dr. Glass. I told them I knocked you down and it was so very soon after I heard the scream that you couldn’t possibly have been anywhere but inside your tent
when it happened.”

  “I know, and I thank you. It was a shock to come back last night and find out the police thought I did it.”

  “Was this your first time? Being accused of attempted murder?”

  Lacy checked his face and found, as she suspected, a tight-lipped determination not to laugh. “In Turkey, yes.”

  Madison giggled. “Keep the hand lens as long as you like,” she said as she ran out.

  Süleyman tilted his head and looked at Lacy, his sly grin fading. “You have had a great influence on my wife.”

  Lacy wasn’t sure she’d heard that right. “What do you mean?”

  “Do you remember the dog you found at the house that night when you slept there?”

  “The one that woke me up with her wet nose?”

  “You were, after all, sleeping on the ground.”

  “I probably took her favorite spot.”

  “My wife says you and she argued about our ways with dogs. How, in Turkey, we do not let them live in our houses.”

  “It wasn’t about that. It was about killing the puppies.”

  “I see.” He nodded. “Anyway, she has thought about what you said and she has found a home for the pups. There is a shepherd we know who lives a few miles west of the bunkhouse. He has let her move the dogs into a shack where they will be safe until the pups are big enough to be weaned. In the meantime, we are asking around for shepherds who will take them.”

  Lacy felt tears rising. “That’s wonderful,” she whispered. If Süleyman had been American she would have hugged him but, wary of breaking Muslim rules, she let her face show how she felt. “So they’ll probably be trained up to be sheep herding dogs?”

  “They will not need much training. These dogs have instincts. They know what to do with sheep.” He turned and headed back toward his over-stuffed trashcan but Lacy followed him.

  “Where is Gülden? I miss her. I haven’t seen her since I got back.”

  “She is at the bunkhouse.”

  “Good. I’m going there myself in a little while.”

  At that moment, Paul popped through the entry flap calling over his shoulder to an unseen petitioner for his attention. “Give me a minute!” To Lacy he said, “Can we talk?”

  * * *

  Paul led her around the edges of the excavation and up to the hill where Bob Mueller had taken her at their first meeting. The same hill which a man she assumed was Todd had been ascending late last night, her assumption based solely on the hefty silhouette and the billed cap. On their way around the site, squinting from the glare of the sun, Lacy dodged workers bent to their tasks, some with handkerchiefs or hand towels stuck under their hats to protect their necks. Several called out to Paul for help or to ask him to take a look at something.

  “Be with you in a minute,” he said and nudged Lacy onward. From his pocket he pulled the same earring he’d shown her the night before, and held it up to her ear. “Looks good on you. Too bad we don’t have its mate.” When they reached the summit, he stopped, dropping the earring back in his shirt pocket.

  “Bob says I’m outta here. Our partnership is dissolved.”

  So numbed by the events of the last few days, Lacy’s reaction to this rather important announcement was simply, “So you have to leave, now? What about all the Neolithic stuff you’ve found?” Lacy kept her tone neutral, preferring to hear more before offering an opinion on what at first blush seemed a sorry state of affairs. One would expect Paul to be devastated by this turn of events, but he didn’t sound devastated. He might have used the same voice to say, The fence is down on the back forty. I’m gonna ride out and fix it. Then she noticed he was chewing furiously on something, his jaw muscles taut. He spat a greenish wad into the dirt.

  Paul told her about the showdown on Four Bars Hill. “I think Bob’s already regretting what he said but he doesn’t know how to take it back. Somewhere, deep down, he knows I’m right. He knows this earring doesn’t belong here. It’s not Hittite, it’s not Lydian, and it’s not Phrygian. It’s from the Iraq Museum, looted during the U.S. invasion. Interpol is looking for it and the museum needs it back.”

  “Surely Bob knows what would happen to both your reputations if you were caught with it.”

  “That’s why we’re up here. I’m giving him a few minutes to cool off and think. We’re all supposed to be going to the dorm to see Gülden, but I’ve been thinking. Would you mind not going with us right now? I can talk to Bob in the van if it’s just the two of us, and I think I can bring him around.”

  “No problem.”

  Paul draped an arm over her shoulder and kissed her on the temple. His breath smelled like grass.

  “Do you think it would be all right if I went into Max’s old tent?” Lacy asked. “It’s still up, isn’t it?”

  “Sure, but Henry may have packed up Max’s stuff.”

  They picked their way down the hill and across the dig site, with more calls to Paul for help. Again, he promised them, “Later.” Drawing back the mesh flap of Max’s tent, they looked around. It appeared much the same as before. Max’s tent, much larger than Lacy’s, afforded headroom down the central roof spine. Paul approached the table where Max had spread an array of finds. He picked one up, put it back in the same spot, and stared at the array. “This makes no sense.”

  “What?”

  “Look. Max was obviously arranging these. They’re in four rows, but based on what? If he was classifying them, what was he classifying them based on? Style? Fired versus unfired? Red clay versus yellow clay? Hittite versus Neolithic? What?”

  “Maybe someone came in and played with them.”

  “You mean like playing trains, putting them in lines? Do we have any five-year olds here?”

  Lacy glanced around again and saw no evidence anything else had been played with. A duffle bag sat on Max’s cot, open but full of folded clothing. She couldn’t remember seeing that before. Against the wall, Max’s boots still stood at attention beside a stack of empty storage crates. The rolled-up Boracık rug was still there. Lacy grabbed its two outer corners and unrolled it with a flourish. She sat, cross-legged, beside it, impressed once again with the fine handiwork. Using Madison’s hand lens, she parted the pile with her fingers and examined the base of a strand. The weaver had used the Turkish double-knot method of fixing each of its hundreds of thousands of silk strands to its unique spot in the overall pattern. The dominant colors, she saw again, were the red of madder root, and the yellow-green of native Turkish buckthorn berries.

  Paul, meanwhile, rifled through the duffle bag on the cot. He picked up a dark blue booklet and handed it to Lacy. “Max’s passport.”

  Lacy opened it. The laminated photo page had the usual basic information—standard photo, full name, date and place of birth. Issued last January. “I’m jealous. Max has a passport but doesn’t need one. I need one but don’t have one.” She flipped forward through the document pages and found only one immigration stamp, Ataturk Airport, July 18, and a colorful Turkish visa stamp. That date squared with the date she’d seen on the rental car agreement in the glove compartment of the Fiat and on the claim ticket. They’d arrived on July 18 and rented the car the next morning. She handed the passport back to Paul.

  Returning her attention to the Boracık carpet, she looked more carefully at the central diamond with its background of madder red. It was surrounded by several concentric rectangular bands, each with its own repeating pattern. A large tree of life symbol dominated the center of the diamond. Muslim law forbade the depiction of graven images, and the symbols, including that of the tree of life, were so stylized as to be unrecognizable to the uninitiated.

  But something she had never seen before in a Turkish carpet lay outside the central design. When divided longitudinally, the two sides of a carpet were always mirror images. Symmetry was part of their charm. But in this one, the four triangles formed by the placement of the large diamond within the innermost rectangular border, its points touching the border top, bottom
and sides, contained different symbols in each. What happened to symmetry?

  She studied the symbols in each of the four triangles. One held the hands-on-hips symbol that usually meant motherhood and a roman letter N. In a second, the ram’s horn, symbol of power or heroism, and a roman letter M. On the other two, she found a number of bird symbols: The falcon, a celestial messenger or a symbol of longevity. The hawk, which meant roughly the same thing. The hair band, symbol of a young girl still unmarried. The nightingale, the soul of the dead.

  And more birds. Or were they airplanes? They looked more like airplanes, Lacy thought. In these last two triangles she found the letters R and G. All the Roman letters were in a block style and were repeated upside down as if reflected in a pool.

  “Paul, what were Max’s children’s names? The ones who were killed in a plane crash?”

  “I don’t remember. Bob told me about the crash, but I don’t remember their names. Why?”

  “I’ll bet anything their names started with an R and a G. What is his wife’s name? The one with Alzheimer’s or whatever?”

  “Nina.”

  “Bingo! Look.” She waved Paul over. “Four separate triangles. In the center, the tree of life surrounded by symbols that stand for family, happiness, and hope. In each triangle, the first letter of a name—M for Max, N for Nina.” She pointed as she talked. “In Max’s triangle we have masculine symbols. Power. Heroism. In Nina’s we have motherhood, sorrow, longing.” Lacy’s hand moved to the third triangle. “Young woman, hoping for marriage, celestial messenger, the soul of the dead, and a symbol I haven’t seen before, but it looks suspiciously like a Cessna Skyhawk to me.”

  “Or a dragonfly.”

  “Dragonflies have four wings.”

  “So, you’re telling me this rug symbolizes the Sebring family.”

  “I think so. Let’s find Henry. I need to know what those two kids’ names were.”