“Meanwhile, Clifford Craven and Henry rent a car, pick up Max’s custom-made rug, and drive out here while Michael and Elaine hold Max captive and worry about what to do next. Clifford apparently has an alternate passport that identifies him as Max Sebring and no one here doubts him. After a couple of weeks of pure hell, Max escapes. He has to find a way to get out here and confront Henry in front of witnesses. He has no money or any other belongings, so he jumps the turnstile at the Haydarpasa train station and makes it onto the same train I’m on. I first noticed him at the ferry station and again at the train station because he knocked me down and he smelled terrible. After all, he’d been held prisoner for two weeks in a room with no facilities, and over a fish shop. I see him a third time, about to get thrown off the train. I feel sorry for him and pay for his ticket.”
Lacy paused for breath and her voice softened. “There’s something about helping a person that binds you to them, you know? There’s that old Chinese saying that if you save a man’s life, you’re responsible for him. I always thought that was backwards, but now I see what it means. When he got killed and thrown off the train like so much garbage, a picture imbedded in my memory, I felt as if it was my fault that he was even on the train.”
“You can’t possibly blame yourself,” Gülden said.
“I don’t really, but then I found his trench coat with the name tag Max Sebring, and, well, you know the rest.”
“No we don’t,” Bob said. “Why did Henry pick that same morning to kill this guy Clifford?”
“Because they all had phones and were madly calling back and forth, probably all night. Does anyone know where Henry and Clifford were that night? I’m sure they were on Four Bars Hill and going nuts. Michael would have told them Max escaped and was on the train heading this way. I doubt that Michael caught the train before it left Istanbul, but we made several stops during the night and, somehow, he caught up and boarded the train. Come to think of it, we had just made a thirty-minute stop in Konya. I’ll bet that’s where he boarded the train.” Lacy paused, fitting these new pieces into her picture.
“Go on!” Bob prodded.
“Meanwhile Henry and Clifford are having heart failure. Michael calls and tells them he’s killed Max. He had to. In a couple of hours Max would’ve been here and screaming his head off. Now what? No Max. No ransom. Time to pack up and get out of here. They knew that eventually Max’s body would be identified. I’m guessing their original plan was to disappear and assume new identities once they had the ransom money in their hands. But now there’d be no money unless Max’s father came out of his coma immediately and remembered he was about to pay his son’s ransom before he stroked out.”
Paul said, “Here, I’ll bet, Clifford starts to assert his options. Max’s body is currently in the hands of the gendarma. Henry is the only one of the four who can be definitely identified. The other three, as far as anyone back home knows, are at Disneyworld or wherever. Henry is vulnerable and Clifford may have pointed this out. Somehow, I think Clifford wasn’t the brightest of the bunch. So Henry decides Clifford has got to go. He suffocates him and leaves him lying on his cot.”
Lacy took over again. “Now they’ve got two bodies, one is wrongly assumed to be Max Sebring and one is wrongly assumed to be a drifter.”
Sierra, hanging on Lacy’s every word, had scooted so far forward in her folding chair it threatened to collapse on her. “Wait! Are you saying that Michael didn’t complain when Henry killed his brother?”
Paul said, “He may have complained but we wouldn’t know about it, would we? And then what? Michael wasn’t in any position to tell the cops.”
Lacy silently thanked Paul for answering a logical question she herself had not thought through, then continued. “Henry sees a chance to pass Clifford’s body off as Max. He can take advantage of the lack of embalming to insure the casket remains closed, but there will be an autopsy back home. No way around that. I’m not sure how he managed this part. Of course, Henry had formally identified the body as Max before it left Turkey. Maybe that was sufficient. Anyway, their best chance at this point is the old switcheroo.
“Next problem. What to do about me? I’d met Michael on the train, although he introduced himself as Jason Remmick. I tell him I’m going to an archaeological dig but I don’t say where. I even hand him Max’s trench coat with Max’s name inside, and I tell him to give it to the police. After all, he told me he is a policeman. Did I see that label? Michael doesn’t know, but he passes this information along to Henry, and Henry keeps a close eye on me in camp.
“Then I borrow Henry’s car. Gülden and I go to the train station and to the gendarmerie. Now he knows I’m snooping.”
“Did you tell him where you went?” Paul asked.
“I told him I was going to the train station because I lost my credit card.”
“Ohh!” Gülden’s hand flew to her mouth. “I think Henry asked me where we’d gone. I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to tell.”
“There’s no reason you should have known,” Lacy said. “But once he knew I’d been to the gendarmerie, he knew he had to silence me. That night he sees me going into Paul’s tent but he doesn’t see me leaving it. He waits outside in the dark until he sees a female coming out of Paul’s tent. He attacks her.”
Sierra winced. “Why did he hit me only once? Why didn’t he finish me off?”
Paul, sitting next to her, put a hand on her shoulder. “You screamed. Or somebody screamed. Thank God. If no one screamed, I’m sure he would have finished you off.”
“Your scream woke everyone up,” Bob said.
“Anyway, Sierra, I’m sorry you had to take the attack that was meant for me,” Lacy said. “But that was only the start of it. Monday morning Henry took me to the airport in Adana so I could fly to Istanbul. His buddies are waiting for me when I get off the plane. Elaine rides into town on the same shuttle bus as I do, but at the time I don’t know who she is.
“I’m sure they tracked me to the Pera Palace Hotel, to my interview with Elbert MacSweeney, and to the Spice Market. I go there only because I learn that two weeks earlier the real Max and another man were taken there by taxi. By that time I’m getting too close for comfort and they have to stop me. Jason—excuse me, Michael—catches up with me in that god-awful room over the fishmonger and tosses me out the window. I wake up the next morning, bound and gagged.”
Sierra said, “And again! Why didn’t he finish you off? These guys didn’t flinch at murder. Why were you so lucky?”
Bob Mueller’s head snapped up. “He couldn’t carry her body out while people were still there shopping. Bound and gagged? No way. If he’d tried to carry her out unbound and ungagged, she might have come to and started screaming.”
“Good point.” Gülden studied her hands folded in her lap but didn’t look up.
“So he taped my hands and feet and left me there unconscious. I wonder why.”
“To get a wheelbarrow?” Süleyman suggested this so timidly they all cracked up.
“Something like that,” Lacy said. “Carrying dead weight is not easy.” She stopped long enough to wet her parched mouth with the bottle of water in front of her. On the advice of the nurses she’d been forcing liquids all day. She looked across the table at Bob Mueller’s bare arms and, again, wondered what that cuneiform tattoo meant. She asked.
“You notice it’s on the inside of my arm so I’m the only one who sees it right side up? It’s a reminder to myself. Loosely translated, it says, “Success comes to those who don’t quit.”
“Exactly what I was saying to Lacy just the other day,” Paul said.
“Funny, what I heard was, ‘You are the stubbornest girl I ever met.’ ”
Chapter Thirty
Paul followed Lacy to the top of Four Bars Hill and sat on a rock while she phoned Milo Dakin. They talked for more than a half-hour but Paul said nothing about the fact that the call was on his phone and his dime. Lacy knew this, but the white Ford rented to Mil
o was totaled, lying in a mangled heap somewhere north of her current location, and Milo was liable for the damages. He lived with his sister in a walk-up flat, no job, only known source of income a book that probably sold no more than a half-dozen copies a month, if that. He couldn’t pay and it would be wrong to ask him to. Lacy told him to do nothing until she came to Istanbul. She’d go with him to the rental agency and take full responsibility herself.
There went her discretionary spending for all of next year. Her father should be back at his office in a day or two and she could get him to cover it for now. She’d pay him back and her mother would never know. She promised herself this was the last time she’d ask her dad to bail her out of a jam.
“How will you get to Istanbul?” Paul asked when she’d hung up and joined him on the rock.
“I can take Henry’s car. It’s from a different rental agency, but I can turn it in for him.”
“Did Henry ask you to do this?”
“I suggested it.”
“Awfully nice of you, considering he tried to kill you three times.”
“I’m not being nice. I can’t fly without a passport and I intend to use his car in Istanbul until I’ve run all my errands. Like going to the American Consulate again. The taxi cost an arm and a leg last time.”
“I’m sorry about everything, Lacy. I wish … I never called you.” Paul’s head hung low between his shoulders, his elbows on his knees. Lacy couldn’t tell if he was crying but his voice caught on the word “wish.”
It was more than she could take. After four attempts on her life. After her dream of being with Paul unceremoniously burst like a little bubble, she was now down about twenty thousand dollars in wrecked cars, plane tickets, and hotel bills. Her entire body was scraped and bruised. She hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in ages, and her nerves were raw. All it took was, “I wish I never called you.” She dissolved in a heap, her battered head against her bruised knees.
Paul pulled her over, kissed the top of her head, then her cheek, then her lips. He drew back, studying her face through the glasses that had become twisted on his face by the close contact. “I have issues, you know. You don’t want to get mixed up with me, Lacy, and I won’t let you.”
“Can we talk about it?”
“Maybe. But not tonight. Tonight we celebrate.”
He pulled her to her feet and they started down the hill together. Lacy felt better. She was alive, she hadn’t quit, and Paul had just kissed her. “I guess I won’t get my dinner at the Four Seasons now,” she said. “Henry bet me a dinner at the Four Seasons that he could identify the man on the train if he got a look at the police photos.”
“The Four Seasons in Istanbul? Wait. He could identify the man. Henry was right so you owe him dinner.”
“But he identified the man in the photos as Clifford Craven. That was wrong.”
“Tell you what. How about I go to Istanbul with you? I need to go anyway and Bob can manage things without me for a few days. I’ll take you to the Four Seasons.”
Lacy thought. It’s a two-day drive. We’d have to stop for the night somewhere. Linus Pauling Hannah, you’re mine. But all she said was, “Okay, you can do the driving. I have no license.”
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