Blue Voyage

by Diana Renn

  I came back. “You’d rather sit here? And see who pops by for a cozy chat?”

  “No. I don’t know. I just wish we had a flashlight or something. It’s creepy.”

  “Of course it’s creepy!” I said. “Evil people dropped us into a cave and left us to die! They weren’t going to send us to Disneyland. Anyway,” I added, softening my tone, “the only way out is through. I didn’t find another exit in this room, did you?”

  “No,” she admitted.

  “Okay. So we’re going to go through this tunnel. Let me just tie my dress somehow. It’s dragging me down.” I tied two knots in the skirt to hike it up a little and free up my legs.

  “Good idea,” said Sage, doing the same. “And I’m going to lose the trench coat. It’s just getting in the way.”

  I heard only rustling sounds as we made our adjustments, and then Sage cried out.

  “What? What?” I exclaimed. “Are you okay?!”

  Click-click. Whoosh. Sage was bathed in the soft white glow of a cigarette lighter!

  “Coat pocket,” she said, smiling. “My friend at the hammam is a heavy smoker. These are her clothes. I suddenly realized she might have a lighter in her pocket!”

  I’d never felt so grateful for someone being a smoker.

  “There’s not a lot of fluid left, but let’s see how far we can get. And there’s this.” She passed me a stick of gum. “Dinner’s on me. Thank me later.”

  I popped the gum in my mouth and nearly cried as my mouth watered in appreciation. Water. This gum might have to last me awhile. I remembered one of my climbing instructors telling me about a time he’d gone rock climbing and dropped his water bottle—he’d sucked on pebbles to stimulate his saliva glands. We could do that, but it would only bring temporary relief. Eventually, if we didn’t get out from underground and get water, the dehydration would do us in.

  We started crawling. Sage led the way this time. Progress was slow, as she held the lighter with one hand. Our shadows loomed and flickered alongside us, as if ghosts were following us. I knew I shouldn’t feel afraid. I tried to imagine what kind of story Nazif would turn our shadows into, if he were to do a puppet show. I conjured the image of his beautiful bird puppet, leading me out of the cave. Maybe I was dehydrated, or the drug hadn’t worn off completely yet, but at times I could have sworn I saw Nazif’s shadow bird, flitting just ahead of us, around the corner, leading us back to safety.

  The tunnel seemed endless. It took a few twists and turns, and went slightly uphill, which seemed encouraging, but then it dipped sharply and went downhill again.

  “Fluid’s getting really low,” said Sage as the lighter flame sputtered. Shick, shick, shick. She flicked it a few times, and sparks flew out.

  “Then I think we should save it for emergencies,” I said.

  “I would consider this to be an emergency,” said Sage.

  “Maybe not, right? Things could always be worse,” I countered. “That’s our family motto, anyway.” Mom’s motto, which I now wanted, more than anything, to believe . . . and to hear her say again. I’d been so annoyed when she used the phrase on our first day in Turkey, when we’d gotten lost driving. But now I understood why she said it. Her optimism was her way of keeping herself together—and maybe keeping our family together, too, in some way. Because if you didn’t have hope, what was left? You would just crumble inside. You’d give up.

  Sage flicked the lighter off and put it in her skirt pocket. We crawled through the darkness, moving a little faster now that Sage had use of both hands. “I love that your family has a motto,” she said. “I wish my family had had one.” She paused. “I wish I’d had your family.”

  I couldn’t help laughing at that, even though there was nothing funny about our situation.

  “I’m serious.” Sage sounded hurt. “I saw you and your mom and your aunt on the boat, that first day, and I was just so jealous, I could barely stand to be around you guys at first.”

  “Jealous!”

  “I probably gave you the evil eye. So now all this bad stuff happening to you is my fault.” She thought a moment. “Actually, it is all my fault. I’m sorry. I destroyed your vacation.”

  “Apology accepted,” I said. “But you have to understand, I never considered myself on vacation in the first place. And it’s not all your fault. Remember, my uncle Berk was mixed up in all this. Maybe he’s the one to blame. You see? My family’s a complete mess. There’s not much to be jealous of.”

  “Just because your uncle got entangled with a smuggling ring and might have gotten murdered doesn’t mean your family is a complete mess.”

  “That’s not even the half of it.” I hesitated, then told her more. “My parents are splitting up. My dad’s the Massachusetts attorney general. And he’s running for governor. He had an affair with a campaign donor, and it went public.”

  “Oh my God,” she said.

  More words tumbled out. Unstoppable, like rocks rolling down a cliff. I told her the rest. About my friends dropping me. The Athleta incident. Everything. It felt good to talk about it out in the open at last—even though this cave wasn’t exactly out in the open, it felt good to talk. Not to a shrink, but to someone my age. To a friend.

  “That’s really horrible,” Sage said. “You’ve handled it so well, though.”

  “I have?”

  “Yeah. And I’m still going to say it: I’d take your family over mine. Any day.”

  “Why?”

  “You guys actually like each other,” said Sage. “You want to be around each other. So you’re not perfect—who is?—but you keep trying to connect with each other. I mean, you and your mom came all the way to Turkey to see your aunt! And then you dropped everything to help her! My family just gave up. And I gave up on them, too. You know the story I told you about the suitcase my parents gave me?”

  “Yeah. How it encouraged you to be a world traveler?”

  “Right. I told you they said ‘Just go,’ like ‘Just go off and have adventures.’ But that’s not what they actually said. They said ‘Go’ as in ‘Get out.’ They said, ‘If you don’t like this house, you can go try to make it on your own.’ So that’s exactly what I did.”

  We crawled in silence after that, each of us lost in our own thoughts. Or maybe we were conserving our strength at that point. We’d been creeping for a long time now, and there was no end in sight. But at least we were in it together.

  The tunnel ascended again. “Good sign,” said Sage, her voice raspy. “Up leads to out.”

  “I like up, too,” I said, thinking of my climbing walls. Would I ever see Burlington Boulders again? Or my mom? Even my dad would be a welcome sight right now. I’d have those stupid appetizers with him and Victoria if I could just get out of this endless maze.

  Suddenly Sage stopped short, and I crashed into her.

  “Oof. Why’d you stop?”

  “Shhh. Hear that?”

  I listened, and heard a scraping sound. “Rats,” I guessed, shivering. “Or bats?” My skin crawled. Sage flicked on the lighter. No rats swarmed around us. No bats hung above. But the weak light showed that the corridor made a Y. One tunnel went left, the other right. We listened carefully. Murmuring. Tapping. Footsteps. Voices.

  “I hear men talking,” Sage whispered. “Off to the left, I think.”

  “Is it Lazar and Vasil?”

  “I don’t know. They work with a lot of people. But we don’t want to end up in some office here. Let’s go right. And we’d better stop talking.” She shut off the lighter.

  We resumed our crawling, in silence now, and went on as quietly as we could. Suddenly the tunnel widened and got taller, and we were able to stand up and walk, stooped over and pushing ourselves along off the walls. My hands stung, and I knew they were scraped and bloodied. But the wider tunnel made hope surge inside me. We had to make it out of here alive
! I thought of all the things I still had to do. Like find a real boyfriend someday. Like be a counselor at a climbing camp for kids—I’d be really good at that. And I wanted to be an awesome older cousin to Aunt Jackie’s baby. And travel more—maybe even with my mom again.

  Suddenly we heard men’s voices echoing down the hall. Behind us, and not far.

  “Oh, no!” hissed Sage. “They’re on to us!”

  Then we heard feet pounding on earth, coming after us—or were they echoes of our own footsteps as we began to run, too? I couldn’t be sure. I just bolted. The tunnel went up, and up, and up, slanting at a forty-five-degree angle. Was I imagining it, or was it just a little bit lighter now?. A man began shouting at us. We scrambled faster, forward, onward . . . turned a corner . . . and found ourselves staring at a narrow crack in the wall, where a bit of light leaked through. We flung ourselves against the wall, feeling around the crack for anything that might give way. The footsteps behind us grew louder.

  “This part of the rock wedged in here is fake!” Sage cried, grabbing hold of a crudely cut rectangular wedge of stone that was about her height. She slammed her body against it, and more light leaked in around the edge. I joined her in slamming my body against it, too, and after three tries the slab door groaned open.

  We ran outside. Into air. Sweet, fresh air! I drank it in great gulps.

  “Don’t stop!” cried Sage, and we ran on.

  Pink sky. The sunrise hurt my eyes, but it felt good. I didn’t care what it was doing to my skin. I stumbled, and gaped at the landscape. I’d seen pictures in Lonely Planet, but in person it was so much more intense.

  I could hardly breathe. I motioned to Sage to stop, and I tried to catch my breath. Then I looked up and saw we were surrounded by tall mounds of pink and gray earth made of volcanic material. They were long and slender, paler and rounded at the top. “Holy crap,” I said, managing a laugh between gasps. “It’s a land of giant . . . male . . . um . . . phalluses?”

  Sage coughed violently and spat some dust she’d inhaled. “They’re called fairy chimneys, actually,” she rasped, “sculpted by hundreds of years of wind and erosion. But this is no time for nature appreciation. We have to get out of here.”

  “So soon?” Lazar came running from behind a fairy chimney. Alone. “You ladies are quite the escape artists.”

  Rage boiled up inside me. “Is this the place you brought my uncle to?” I yelled. “Is this where he fell? After you pushed him?”

  He regarded me coolly. “Your uncle was a liar. He was supposed to bring me that urn when I summoned him here. But he gave me an empty backpack, and for that he paid the ultimate price. I am a businessman. I do not play games.”

  “I don’t play games, either,” I said. “Like cave hide-and-seek. You had no right to lock us up in there.”

  “We know your client has the urn now,” said Sage. “We know Ron Clarkson got it at the hotel before we passed out. So if he has the urn, and you got your money, you can just leave us alone!”

  He took a step toward us, a vein twitching at his temple. “You have damaged my business!” he shouted. “My clients heard that silly Australian woman talking to her husband in Fethiye. They heard her mention a golden seahorse urn she found. This urn was found on a hillside. My clients got worried. I was forced to tell them they might leave Turkey without the urn. This was unacceptable to them. And to me. Now they worry about information leaks. They do not feel safe doing business with me anymore.” He paced, his hands balling into fists. “I know you talked to police. Maybe to your father. Maybe to other people. I must know everyone you talked to.” He stood directly in front of me, so close I could feel his breath hot on my face. “If you want to save yourself, you will come talk to me now. Back in my office.” He gestured toward the narrow crevice that looked like a crack in a mesa wall, through which we had managed to exit his underground lair.

  “Wait. How did the Clarksons know we were looking for the urn in the hotel?” I demanded. I didn’t know where I was finding my courage, but as long as he didn’t have a weapon in his hand, and Vasil wasn’t with him, I wanted answers. Besides, the longer we stood outside in the open talking, the more hope I had that someone might come by and save us—despite the completely desolate landscape stretching out in all directions.

  “Zan, what are you doing? You don’t have to ask him all this. Let’s get out of here!” Sage hissed.

  “We helped get the urn back, in a way,” I said to her. “So I think he owes us an explanation.” I folded my arms across my chest and glared at Lazar. At my uncle’s killer. “So. Did you have spies following me around or something? Who told the Clarksons about the urn in the hotel?” Please don’t let it have been Nazif.

  “Smart girl,” he said, narrowing his eyes at me. “Yes. Too bad I didn’t get to you earlier. You’re just the kind of young person I like to hire. You are correct. The new maids at the hotel worked for me.”

  I felt sick to my stomach. The harmless-looking old ladies I’d seen Mustafa talking to in his office the day before the party? Spies. I should have known. I should have found some reason for Mustafa not to hire them. Sage had said Lazar had used hotel staff spies before for information and for attempts to find the urn. Lazar seemed to have an endless supply of hired help to give him inside information. I could have prevented the Clarksons from coming to the party if I’d just remembered all that and spoken up. Once again, just like not telling anyone about my dad and Victoria, my sitting on information had caused an avalanche of bad results.

  Lazar smirked. “You are wondering how they heard, yes?”

  I nodded. They’d barely had time to start their jobs, they were such new hires.

  “They heard you and the bellboy talking, through a heating vent in the wall. Never trust old houses. Once I had this information, I told the Clarksons that you planned to search for the urn in the guests’ room during the party. They insisted on coming to the party to get the urn themselves. Then we discovered a new problem.” He took his eyes off Sage and looked at me, and his gaze, so full of hatred and even disgust, seemed to pierce my soul. “I learned that you have a famous father. A politician. Yes?”

  Mutely, I nodded, as he took a step toward me.

  “Government connections. Maybe embassy connections. We knew you would talk, and maybe you had talked already. I gave Judy something to put in your drink. What a lot of extra work you made for us!”

  “How did you get us out of the hotel?” Sage demanded. “That party was full of people.”

  Lazar laughed, though it came out more like a sharp bark. “The band that came to the party? They work for me as well. Some musicians took a break during the puppet show. They rolled you up in carpets. They took the carpets, with you in them, out the front door to make room for a dance floor. Nobody questioned this.”

  Wait. We’d been rolled up in rugs?

  “Then, before anyone even knew you were missing, you were on your way to the airport and to my company’s private plane,” Lazar concluded.

  “You’re right, we did make a lot of work for you,” I said. “Why not just take us out into the alley and slit our throats?”

  “Too much risk. I needed to kill you because you know too much about my business. You could talk to officials. Okay, so I kill you in Istanbul. But then there are problems. Your father would use his political connections for a long investigation. I am an expert at avoiding such things. But the Clarksons, they were afraid. They said if I killed you, I must make it look accidental.”

  I glared at him. “We accidentally got sealed up in a cave city?”

  “Yes.” He looked at Sage. “Your friend Sage from the cruise contacted you, inviting you to Cappadocia to go rock climbing. You boarded a bus and went to meet her. You left a note for your family.”

  “Well, they’d never believe that. They know Sage doesn’t like heights. She wouldn’t go rock climbing.” T
his was true. They’d seen her turn green, I was sure, at my uncle’s cliff tomb ceremony in Fethiye. I felt a surge of hope and tried to signal that to Sage, who flashed me a stricken look. My family would find the fake note. They’d know something was wrong. They’d send help to Cappadocia. Maybe Inspector Lale herself.

  But how soon?

  Lazar looked back at me, his eyebrows knitting together. “I didn’t intend for you to die in there immediately,” he said. “You owe me something.”

  I held out my empty hands. “I have nothing.”

  “Information,” he said. “I need to know everyone you girls talked to. I will give you this chance to come on your own, to my office in the cave city, with no force.”

  “No way,” said Sage. “We’re not going back in there with you. Or ever again.”

  Keep him talking. Buy more time. My family, or Nazif, will send a search party. How big is Cappadocia, anyway? I tried to steady my voice. “And the Clarksons? Where did they go?” I asked. Movement from behind a fairy chimney filled me with momentary hope, but then I saw it was only a bird. A large bird resembling a vulture, nothing that Nils or Ingrid would have wanted to find. It uttered an ugly squawk and flapped away.

  “With us,” Lazar said, frowning, clearly getting impatient with my twenty questions game. “They picked up their other parcels at my office and departed. But now I have told you enough. You owe me information. Your turn. Maybe you need some motivation.” He reached into his back pocket. I gasped, and clutched Sage’s arm, expecting to see the dagger with the jewel-encrusted hilt.

  Instead it was a wire brush. He held it in one hand and tapped it in the other. Then he reached down to the ground and brushed away some of the footsteps he’d made in the dust. I watched in horror as I realized what he was doing, and how the signs of a scuffle at the top of a cliff could so easily be erased in the volcanic dust.

  Lazar looked up at me and smiled. “You see? Erasing people is not so difficult,” he said. “Cleaner. It is more my style, to create an accident. Fewer questions later. Come back to the cave and we talk, or we take you with force.”