Bone Box

by Jay Amberg

  Travers takes a drink of water to dampen the effects of the raki. “And Ms. Altay is focusing on the cathedral?”

  “No.” Kirchburg leans forward, looming over his side of the table. “That would be too logical.” He scratches his beard for a moment. “She is digging holes around the periphery of the cathedral, unearthing stone huts and insignificant shards. Counterproductive in the ex-treme, and an eyesore for tourists.”

  “What Leopold is telling you,” Lee says, “is that she’s trashing the site and putting each of us—the Aegean Association, the Eagle Consortium, the Turkish Ministry of Culture, and the Glavine Foundation—between a rock and a hard place.”

  Travers turns to Lee. “But you said that something must have happened there for Ms. Altay to have left Istanbul so suddenly. Has she discovered something?”

  Lee looks at Kirchburg, who waves his hand dismissively. “Potsherds,” the Austrian says. “An intact amphora, at best.”

  “But then what was her rush?” Travers asks.

  “Laborers and conservators have a tendency to exaggerate their discoveries,” Kirchburg says. He shakes his head and exhales slowly, as though he is weary of dealing with an overly inquisitive child. “And Fräulein Altay is impertinent.”

  Travers glances out the window. The New Mosque is bathed in light, but only the minarets and porch of Suleyman’s Mosque are lit. “Whose hire was she?” he asks.

  Kirchburg sits back, picks up his empty glass, sets it back on the table, and strokes his beard again. “I did. And it was the correct decision. Absolutely. Her education is first rate, her vitae impeccable. In-terviews, recommendations—on paper, there was no stronger candidate. And everyone was taken by her. Even the elder gentleman, William Glavine, interviewed her during his annual inspection of the Selçuk site.”

  “But…?” Travers asks, glancing at Lee.

  “Before my time,” he says. “Ancient history.”

  “She does not,” Kirchburg says, “have the capacity to retain focus on difficult tasks.” He picks up the glass again and holds it so that the light from the candle in the center of the table refracts through it. “This is her second year as Saint John’s site director. Her work last year was acceptable—indeed, exemplary—but this year she has overstepped her authority.” He turns the glass in his hand. “I assure you, Herr Travers, that it is only with much deliberation that I’ve made the decision to terminate her.”

  Travers eats another olive. “If Altay’s firing is a done deal,” he asks, “why am I here? Am I supposed to be the messenger?”

  “No,” Kirchburg answers, looking closely at him for a moment, maybe recalculating something. “As I told you, she is, contractually, a Glavine Foundation employee. The elder Herr Glavine insisted that his own representative conduct a site evaluation prior to my implementing any significant changes.”

  Or the old man will pull the plug on the funding, Travers thinks. He flattens his hands on the table, takes a breath, and smiles at the others. “Okay,” he says. “Good enough. Then that’s what I’ll do. I’m scheduled to fly to İzmir tomorrow morning anyway.” He cocks his head and, still smiling, looks into Kirchburg’s eyes. “We’ll see what Ms. Altay has found at Saint John’s.”

  10

  Sophia Altay’s eyes gleam as she scrolls through the text. Her fingers tremble, and her neck and breasts tingle. Her whole body feels electrified, as though a current is passing through her. Her experience, her whole life, has prepared her for this moment, but she’s still utterly undone. The ossuary itself is a watershed, an epochal discovery in the history of archeology. But the contents, these documents…this letter will change history.

  Wearing a burgundy silk bathrobe, she sits at her computer. Her hair, combed out, is still damp from the shower. Abrahim’s email was waiting for her when she returned to the house after reburying the ossuary. She read the message twice, found the flash drive hidden for her in the restoration house, and then forced herself to shower before she perused the documents. This first letter has taken her breath—if she’d had any idea what it was, she’d never have showered. Abrahim’s flight with the original documents was reckless, but his world is fraught with angels and demons. And his fear of betrayal was overpowering even before the discovery of the ossuary.

  She stands, wipes her sweating palms on the silk of her hips, and brushes her fingers through her hair. She still can’t quite breathe, can’t quite imagine what Abrahim must feel holding the documents. Their existence…merely touching them must be galvanizing. Maybe it’s good that he’s unable to read Aramaic. If he fully understood what he possesses, he would melt…or immolate. He at least had the presence of mind to photograph the documents and the ossuary’s other contents with the site’s digital camera.

  She pulls the bathrobe more snugly around herself and paces tight circles in her office—a clean, well-lit, and organized space in her home. The attached restoration house is a cluttered maze of equipment, records, and artifacts. Normally, she needs both for balance, but in this moment in which the earth is shifting beneath her and the stars are wheeling above, this office with this document on the computer screen is everything. These words glowing in this place are the only thing.

  She sits and scans the Aramaic script again. Both the quality of the reproduction and the idiosyncrasies of the writing make it difficult to read, but the gist is unmistakable. Spinning her pen in her fingertips, she mulls the letter’s provocative opening. Hear, O Israel! Worship the Lord your God and serve Him only. Hear me, all of you, and understand. The Kingdom of God is at hand! The Day of God’s vengeance is upon us. She opens her leather-bound notebook and sets it in her lap. But when she starts to write, her hand shakes the words into runes. She must get control…must carefully transcribe the letter.

  She taps the pen’s tip on the notebook’s page, pixillating a crucifix. Is she in as much danger as Abrahim said? She’s definitely vulnerable—in no small part because he pilfered the ossuary’s contents. But she would be in harm’s way even if he remained. The discovery itself is inflammatory, and possessing the contents is pure peril. Covering up the ossuary will only delay the flashpoint a day, perhaps two. She can’t keep the find a secret for long, but every hour will help. Once the ossuary comes to light again, it will cause a religious, political, and media firestorm. And the moment in which Nihat and Leopold and Charles Lee realize that the contents are missing will be incendiary. In her return message to Abrahim, she left him clear instructions for contacting her at eight o’clock. But she can’t wait for morning. She has to discover where he has gone and what he has done with the ossuary’s contents. She must locate the originals at any cost to herself and, if necessary, others. And somehow…somehow…she must act, at least for a day or two, as though nothing extraordinary has been found at Saint John’s.

  11

  Clenching the Toyota sedan’s steering wheel with his stubby fingers, Kenan Sirhan glowers at Joseph Travers in the rearview mirror. Outside of İzmir, the Toyota speeds on the two-lane roads past fields and stone buildings from another age. The car then winds along steep bluffs on the Aegean coast above coves and beaches in impossibly clear light.

  Sirhan, Sophia Altay’s driver who met Travers at İzmir’s airport, looks like Nihat Monuglu’s cousin—bald and barrel-chested with a bulbous veined nose and a white mustache. Unlike Monuglu, though, Sirhan is dour and surly and speaks only fragmented English. His dark eyes hold barely suppressed rage, and Travers was Motorola’s Vice President of Operations long enough to recognize the look of an employee harboring resentment. In a boom and bust business, he shut down too many factories and laid off or fired too many people to take it lightly.

  Trying to ignore Sirhan’s bile, he looks at the shimmering water and lets Homeric phrases roll out—A favorable breeze, a fresh west wind, singing over the wine-dark sea. Still, he can’t wash away a sense that his visit to Is
tanbul provided none of the uplifting magic he sought. He remembers the second shadow slouching at the cabstand across from Suleyman’s Mosque, Leopold Kirchburg’s curt German and Charles Lee’s Southern slang, and Monuglu’s smoky breath as he suggested that nothing escapes his notice.

  Sirhan takes Travers directly to the Saint John’s Cathedral archeological site. They drive along Selçuk’s main street and wind up a side street to the parking lot by the basilica’s outer fortifications. The sky is clear, and the air shimmers in the noonday sun. Travers buys two bottles of water at the souvenir stand and offers one of them to Sirhan. He shakes his head vehemently and then leads Travers up the marble ramp to the basilica’s main entrance, the Gate of Persecution, flanked by two square towers.

  As Travers follows, Sirhan marches under the stone arch and past the old man at the ticket booth on the left. They file up through the ruins of the cathedral, moving too quickly for Travers to get a good look at any of the restored columns or red brick and white stone walls. Though mostly they cross packed red dirt, geometric floor tiles line the area near the tomb of Saint John the Apostle. A boy is trying to sell coins to an elderly couple in the apse, but no other tourists are around.

  They cut through the octagonal baptistry and come out into a work area with a white railing and an orange sign that says:

  GIRILMEZ

  KEIN ZUTRITT

  NO ACCESS

  A single-story, white stucco building with a burnt-orange tile roof stands among the pine trees to the west. To the north, the stone citadel with its massive jutting towers crowns the highest point of Ayasuluk Hill. Archeological flotsam rings the work area—piles of timber, stacks of loose rocks, rows of pillar segments, a cement mixer, and an old steel mining conveyor. A dog barks in the distance, and pale blue smoke swirls from the stucco building’s brick chimney. Near the building, a thin young raven-haired woman sits under a tree on what looks like an ice-cream-parlor chair. She leans over a wheelbarrow full of murky water cleaning a ceramic shard. When she sees Sirhan and Travers, she slips the shard onto a drying screen, leans back, and shouts something in Turkish.

  The door to the building beyond her opens, and Sophia Altay steps out. She looks almost girlish in work boots, blue jeans, and an old brown T-shirt. Her hair is pulled back under a red bandana. She thanks the young woman and nods to Sirhan, who bows slightly and backs into the shade of the nearby pine trees. As she comes forward, Altay wipes her hands on her jeans. “Welcome to Saint John’s, Joseph,” she says. Her eyes, more brown than green against her T-shirt, show a concern, even anxiety, that he didn’t see during dinner at the Blue House Hotel.

  “Thanks,” he answers. “I’m glad to be here…to be out in the light.”

  She takes a deep breath, brushes the back of her hand across her mouth, and waves toward the top of the hill. “Well,” she says, “would you like to see the dig?” She glances at her watch. “Or, are you hungry?”

  “The dig would be good,” he says, holding out one of the water bottles for her.

  “No, thank you,” she says, nodding to Sirhan. “But…”

  Sirhan starts to lumber over, stops, glances first at her and then at the ground, and shakes his head again. Altay offers the bottle to the young conservationist, who looks at Travers with large brown eyes, takes the bottle, and murmurs, “Teşekkür ederim.”

  Travers and Altay follow a dirt path toward a cyclone fence topped with strands of barbed wire. Just before they turn by the old rubble-stone outer fortification, she pulls a bunch of grapes from a vine climbing the fence. Offering some to Travers, she asks, “How was the meeting?”

  He eats a couple of the small, tart green grapes. “You were missed.”

  Her step falters for a second, and she yanks two of the grapes from the bunch, pops them into her mouth, and chews hard. “Each of those gentlemen,” she says, twisting the last word, “has an agenda that runs contrary to my work here.”

  “That may be true,” Travers says as he looks up at the monolithic citadel. He doesn’t add that Monuglu knew about their dinner and that Lee had information about which flight she took from Istanbul. Instead, he asks, “Against you or the work here?”

  “Both,” she says. “I know what’s best here. And I won’t bow to any of them.”

  The certainty in her voice doesn’t surprise him. “Still,” he begins, “you should…”

  “Don’t tell me what to do,” she snaps. “None of those Pharisees understands…” Shaking her head, she takes a deep breath. “You were there,” she says, the edge in her voice only a little less sharp. “Would it have mattered if I was at that meeting?”

  He looks at her as they pass a line of bicycles leaning against the stone wall. “Maybe not,” he says. “But it still would’ve been better if you and Professor Kirchburg talked…”

  “Leopold…” She practically spits the name.

  He stops, picks a grape from the vine next to him, and rolls it be-tween his thumb and finger. “Nothing’s a done deal, Ms. Altay,” he says. “At least as far as I’m concerned.”

  She stares at him, her eyes narrowing in the sunlight, and says, “You have no idea, Joe. No idea.”

  He tosses the grape away. “I need some time to…”

  “Time?” She lifts the bunch of grapes, begins to speak, and looks off toward the horizon. “Time?” she repeats, half coughing and half laughing.

  Turning before he can say anything else, she climbs the hill away from him.

  He glances in the direction she was gazing. Beyond the stand of pines, the sloping groves, and the fields, the Aegean is a thin blue ribbon binding land and sky.

  12

  A tractor pulls a flat wooden wagon around the side of the citadel and down the path. Five men sit on the wagon with their legs dangling over the side. Travers has almost caught up to Altay when the tractor stops so she can speak to the driver, a wizened old man with white stubble and a black cap. They talk for a moment over the engine’s racket, and then she greets each of the laborers on the wagon. Their boots are dusted with red dirt, their dark pants grimy, and their shirts soaked with sweat, but they all smile at her, crooked teeth gleaming under mustaches.

  As she watches the tractor rumble down the hill, Travers says, “I really don’t react well when someone I’m working with stalks off a second time. You should know that.” He smiles. “And talking with me, will, I think, help.”

  She stares up at the citadel.

  He’s sweating through his shirt, too, the heat a little like it was during his childhood summer days in Prescott, Arizona, where the sun scorched rocks and stunted creeks. “How’s the dig going?” he asks.

  She tugs at her bandana, sucks in her breath, and scuffs her boot in the red dirt. Exhaling, she turns toward him. “Slow,” she says. “Steady.”

  He opens the water bottle and takes a swig. “What drew you back here so quickly?”

  She selects and eats half a dozen grapes one at a time. “I belong here.” She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. “I’m of more use here than there.”

  He waves at the citadel. “Have they found something?”

  “Nothing there that would please Leopold.” She shakes her head. “But come, I’ll show you.”

  As they approach the summit, she says, “We’ve discovered mud-bricks and potsherds proving that this hill was inhabited well before the Mycenaeans and the Hittites built their first forts. People have lived here for more than four thousand years. In fact, one of Ephesus’s incarnations was likely founded at the peak of the hill.”

  Up close, the thick stone walls and fifteen towers make the citadel look like a medieval European fortress complete with battlements and crenellations.

  “And,” she adds, smiling dryly, “there remains a serious dispute over exactly where in the area Saint John died.”

 
“The apostle?”

  “Most scholars agree that John the Apostle brought the Christ’s mother to Ephesus from Jerusalem after James, her second son, was murdered. There’s a shrine, a reconstructed house, on a hill the other side of Ephesus.” As she talks, her voice becomes more calm without losing any certainty. “No tomb or other physical evidence links the site to Mary, but successive popes during the last century declared it an official place of pilgrimage. At this time of year, thousands of Christians visit the House of the Virgin every day.” She gazes down at the ruins of the cathedral. “John moved to this hill after she died.”

  “And he’s said to have died here?”

  She nods.

  “Down by the cathedral or up at the citadel?”

  She waves at a large cairn near the bluff about halfway up from the cathedral. “Or somewhere in between.”

  Travers looks toward the cathedral’s excavated columns and walls. Two boys are running through the right transept, but the area is otherwise empty. “And you believe it?” he asks. “That John came here?”

  “Absolutely.” Her eyes glint. “I know that John lived and died on this hill.”

  She is almost smiling as she turns and waves toward the citadel. Though the conversation isn’t really over, he follows her up the path. They enter the citadel through its eastern gate overlooking Selçuk. Because the diggers are down at the restoration house for lunch, they have the site to themselves. As soon as they’re inside the walls, noise abates and light sparks around them. Dirt tracks lead to the small stone mosque with its truncated minaret and to the remains of the cistern. Worn paths cross among the archeological trenches. Grass sprinkled with yellow and purple wildflowers spreads to the walls.