Bone Box

by Jay Amberg

  Altay purses her lips, takes a breath, and says, “Leopold.” Her voice is flat, without a trace of the emotion it held when she was speaking of her summers spent exploring Cappadocia.

  Travers takes a sip of wine and swirls it in his mouth.

  His pale eyes glinting, Kirchburg says, “I trust that I am not interrupting anything…important.”

  “Sophia and I were about to have dinner,” Travers says.

  Kirchburg’s smile narrows. “I would join you,” he says, taking a step forward, “but I have already dined.”

  Altay reaches for her wine, stops her hand just above the glass, and balls her fist again.

  “Sophia,” Kirchburg says, crossing the porch, “there are matters we need to discuss.” His smile thins to a pinched line.

  Altay stiffens.

  “I have critical concerns…”

  “In the morning, Leopold,” she interrupts. “I have already told you…”

  “I have called repeatedly.” Though Kirchburg’s tone is almost gracious, he puffs his narrow chest and pulls himself to his full height. “You failed to answer.”

  Travers finishes his wine and slips his glass onto the table.

  Altay stares up at Kirchburg’s face. Her eyes fire with that feline antagonism Travers saw at their first dinner in Istanbul, but she says nothing.

  Travers looks out at the darkening sea. A star glimmers well above the horizon, but there is no moonrise yet. The breeze barely stirs the silent chimes.

  “Tomorrow, Leopold,” Altay says.

  Kirchburg strokes his beard with his index and middle fingers. His gold, opal studded university ring flickers. “I am here now,” he says. “Your position requires…”

  Travers squares his shoulders. “Herr Kirchburg,…” he begins.

  “I am speaking to the Fräulein,” Kitrchburg says without taking his eyes from Altay’s face.

  “Yes,” Travers answers, watching Kirchburg. “And I’m talking to you.”

  His lips twisting, Kirchburg glances at him.

  “Doctor Altay,” Travers says, “has told you that whatever you need to talk about can wait until morning.”

  Kirchburg shifts his gaze to Travers. “You do not comprehend the situation.”

  Travers scratches the side of his nose. “That may be true…”

  Kirchburg’s face darkens with the fading light. “If you do not leave now, I will have you removed from your position with the Glavine Foundation.”

  Travers holds Kirchburg’s gaze. “That,” he says, “sounds like a threat.”

  “It is a fact, Herr…”

  “Stop it, Leopold!” Her eyes gleaming, Altay looks from Travers to Kirchburg. “Leave!” She glares at Kirchburg. “Both of you!” Without looking away from Kirchburg, she touches Travers’ forearm. “I apologize, Joe.”

  Travers brushes his hand along her shoulder. Still staring at Kirchburg, he says to her, “Another time. Thanks for the wine.”

  Altay steps away, crosses between the two men to the screen door, opens it, and enters the house, letting the screen door clap behind her. She then shuts the interior door without slamming it.

  Travers takes the piece of bread he broke from the oval loaf. The aromas of the bread and the güveç hang in the air. Raising the bread, he says, “I’ll see you out, Leopold.”

  Kirchburg shakes his head. He continues to scowl at the closed door for a moment before shifting his gaze to Travers. His thin smile is condescending, as though to suggest to Travers that this skirmish may be ending in a draw, but he, Travers, has no idea what the war is much less how to win it.

  “The front gate, Herr Professor,” Travers says.

  18

  Travers wakes from a dream of tunnels, caverns, and subterranean cities. Lost in a labyrinth lit only by flickering votive candles, he makes his way along stone corridors lined with images of saints so faded that the red of their robes and the gold of their halos are barely visible. The passageways widen and narrow in a pattern he can’t figure out. Intermittently, shadows sweep the periphery of his vision, but he remains alone. The ground beneath his bare feet is sometimes smooth flagstones and sometimes gritty cinders. The air blows hot, then becomes cool and still, then sultry, then dank. Behind the sweet odor of melting wax lurks a mustiness, as though he has stepped into an ancient vault recently opened. Broken wheelbarrows, discarded shovels, heaps of potsherds, and rows of dark plastic bottles line the walls. And piles of children’s bones lie at each of the domed intersections.

  Sweating and disoriented, he rolls over on the bed and stares at the ceiling. Birds are chirping over the rattle of the air conditioner, but he blinks only darkness. He sits up and squints at the digital alarm—4:47. He’s at the Hitit Hotel on the main road at the outskirts of Selçuk in southern Turkey, not in some macabre underground maze. When he returned to the hotel from Sophia Altay’s house, he saw Charles Lee swimming laps in the pool. Lee had an efficient, even mechanical, stroke, and he didn’t notice Travers. Travers had a far greater need to walk than talk so he left the hotel. The road was busy at first, but none of the passing vehicles even slowed to check out the solitary rambler. An hour out of town, as the traffic subsided and the stars spread around a quarter moon, his mind traveled back along the path he had so often trod the last three years…

  Were there signs along the way to Jason’s suicide? In retrospect, of course there were. Tom handled the divorce better than Travers thought he would, but Jason, who had his mother’s moods, did not. School was easy for Tom, and baseball provided both outlets and rewards. Nothing came easy for Jason, except electronics.

  Over the next few years, Travers paid greater attention to his career and his relationship with Christine, who was markedly more subtle and stable than Mary. He continued to provide Jason with state of the art gadgetry, which wasn’t what he needed. Though Travers called the boys every Sunday evening, his conversations with Jason were usually labored. Notre Dame proved a good fit for Tom, but Jason, home alone with Mary, seldom left the basement his last two years in high school. Father and son went out to dinner every second Wednesday of the month. Jason was often sullen, but sometimes, when he had a brainstorm about a movie he would make or a digital innovation he had in mind, he became exuberant. Mary complained to Travers about Jason screaming threats of suicide at her during their endless arguments, but the boy never used the word with Travers. Between confrontations with his mother, Jason got high, surfed the net, and tinkered with his inventions, never quite finishing any of them.

  Two thirty-day stints in Chicago hospitals’ “young adult programs” had little lasting effect on Jason. The Friday of what would have been the Thanksgiving vacation of his freshman year in college, he rigged a hose from the exhaust of his mother’s BMW to its window. His use of foam and tape to seal the window was both clever and meticulous. And Travers has been walking through the nights ever since…

  Now, Travers wobbles to his feet, teeters into the bathroom, and turns on the light, which buzzes before snapping brightness all about him. By the time he returned to the hotel around midnight, the bar was closed and the lobby empty. His Amish phone held no messages from Altay or Kirchburg or Lee or anyone else, and so he went to sleep only to wake at the subterranean labyrinth. Now, despite his nocturnal trek and his lack of sleep, he’s wired. The face in the mirror looks haggard, but the eyes gleam. He douses himself with cold water in the shower and brushes his teeth. His fingers and toes tingle. He isn’t exactly hyperventilating, but his breathing is quick. When he pulls on shorts and a T-shirt, his legs and arms quiver. His feet prickle in his walking shoes as he goes down the stairs and out into first light.

  The moon is still well up. Cars and trucks pass him at intervals, slapping the cool air and splashing light across the pavement. A man on a black bicycle peddles by. A cock’s crowing interrupts
traditional Turkish music playing somewhere among the flat-roofed buildings at the base of Ayasuluk Hill. Though the sun isn’t yet up, the citadel holds light. A tour bus with tinted windows blows past him. A single, large black-winged bird soars like a shadow.

  The jangling in his hands and feet abates as he walks into town, but he still feels disjointed. Women with scarved heads huddle silently near a flatbed truck with its motor running and its exhaust pipe belching blue-gray fog. A block farther on, men slouch smoking on a wooden wagon hitched to a tractor. Travers’ breathing doesn’t calm until he makes the turn toward the cathedral’s gate. A mangy black dog tracks him, wagging its tail and barking, but no boys are selling Roman coins.

  To dispel the dream, Travers needs to be above ground and in the open—and he wants to feel the sunrise. The gate is shut, but, remembering the rock, he pushes hard against the door. It scrapes back an inch so he puts his weight into it. When he gets it open a foot, he slides through the opening. He shuts the gate and shoves the rock back in place. As he walks past the ticket booth and up into the ruins, birds sing in the pines. Light tips the marble columns ahead of him, but the partially restored brick walls are dim silhouettes. When he reaches higher ground, he looks over Selçuk’s roofs to the eastern hills limned with light.

  He sits on a stone bench in the western courtyard so that he can watch first light traverse the fields and orchards out to the Aegean. He presses his palms against the cool stone and rocks slowly, feeling the breeze on his face. Birds begin swooping forays to his left, and up through the pines on his right a light is on in Altay’s house. The sun tricks him, flashing first on the distant water and then igniting the hills above Ephesus before touching the back of his neck. Still unable to shake the dream despite the sun’s warmth, he stands and climbs onto the top of the curtain wall. He sets his feet apart and stretches his arms as if to bid the dawn some pagan greeting. He raises his eyes to the pale gold sky, and then he glances down.

  The body lies crumpled on the rocks at the base of the wall sixty feet below. One black shoe is missing. The legs of the pants are askew, the bulky torso contorted, and the white shirt stained dark at the collar. The head is twisted to the side, the bald skull split as though Sirhan dove to the boulders. Blood discolors his mustache above his frozen grimace. Travers’ breath catches. He drops to his knees and teeters forward as though he, too, is going to plummet from the curtain wall.

  19

  Sophia Altay starts when Travers hammers at her window. She whirls from her computer and pulls open a file drawer on her right.

  “Sophia!” he shouts through the windowpane. He’s sweating hard, and his breathing is ragged.

  She hurriedly saves and closes a file and then shuts down her computer. As she steps toward the window, the lamp from her computer table backlights her body in her white nightgown. Her hair flows wildly over her shoulders. Alarm shows in her eyes.

  “Sophia!” he shouts again. He can’t get out any other words.

  Her eyes narrow. And then she seems to know. She turns from him and leaves the room. He stumbles through the rising birdsong toward the patio. The air is cool, but his skin prickles as though he’s been in the sun all day. She’s already out the door by the time he turns the corner.

  Grabbing his shirt with her left hand, she yells, “What, Joe? What is it?”

  He chokes down bile and opens his mouth, but words still won’t come.

  Looking up into his eyes, she wipes sweat from his forehead with her right hand. “What happened?” she asks.

  He catches his breath and blurts, “Kenan!”

  “What?” She twists the fabric of his shirt. “Where?”

  “The curtain wall. The base.”

  Her hands slip from him. Her eyes brimming, she steps back. Then she leans forward, sagging into him. “No, no, no,” she murmurs into his chest.

  He swallows bile, but he can’t rid himself of the image of Sirhan’s crumpled corpse.

  She steps back and looks out at the gathering light. “No…no,” she says again. “It’s already starting.”

  20

  Travers needs to walk, but there’s no chance of that happening. He stands with a uniformed Selçuk detective in the shade of some pine trees near Saint John’s curtain wall. The detective is ruddy and handsome, with thick black hair and a mustache. His English is good, but he’s having difficulty understanding why Travers walked into town before dawn, pushed open the gate, and climbed onto the curtain wall directly above a corpse. For his part, Travers is trying not to comprehend why the detective keeps repeating questions about his movements and why, though the answers aren’t changing, he keeps writing in his small black notebook.

  Another officer is interviewing Sophia Altay separately on her patio. Evidence technicians are milling at the base of the curtain wall, but they seem in no hurry to remove Sirhan’s body. In full daylight, the corpse doesn’t look any less grisly. The authorities are keeping people out of Saint John’s, but a crowd of men and boys has formed in the garden behind Asa Bey Mosque.

  Leopold Kirchburg marches through Saint John’s nave and atrium toward Travers. His tailored pants and pressed shirt look out of place among the ruins. He frowns, his eyes bright with anger and his face blotched with red spots. He ignores Travers, nods to the detective, goes over to the wall, and looks down at Sirhan’s corpse. He then turns back and speaks to the detective in German. Travers gets his name, direktor, and Ephesus but nothing else.

  “Ich spricht Deutsch nicht,” the detective says.

  Kirchburg switches to English. “Why was I not notified immediately?” His voice is flat, devoid of emotion, but ire burns in his eyes.

  The detective stares at Kirchburg for a moment. He is ramrod straight, probably ex-military, and Kirchburg, though imperious, is not his commanding officer. “The investigation follows standard procedures, Herr Kirchburg,” he says.

  “I must be fully informed about this…,” Kirchburg says.

  The detective scratches his mustache. “A Turkish citizen has died,” he says. “An accident has occurred.” He keeps his voice even, but color rises in his cheeks to match Kirchburg’s. “Procedures must be followed. The man’s relatives must be contacted. In time, information will be available to all interested parties, including any foreigners involved.”

  Kirchburg pulls himself up to his full height. “I see,” he says. A note of condescension creeps into his voice. “I will speak directly to your superiors, the mayor of Selçuk, whom I know well, and to officials at the Ministry of Culture.”

  The detective jots something in his notebook and then nods. “If you must.”

  Turning to Travers, Kirchburg says, “Where is Fräulein Altay?”

  “An officer is interviewing Director Altay,” the detective says.

  Kirchburg turns and strides toward the house.

  “You must wait until we are finished here,” the detective calls, but Kirchburg keeps walking.

  21

  Travers finds Sophia Altay in the office he saw her in at dawn, though that moment seems like a long time ago. As he enters, she slides a black laptop computer case onto the floor next to a bulging backpack. Her desktop computer is off, her file cabinet closed, her chair pushed under her desk. She wears a loose white blouse buttoned to the neck, a long khaki skirt, and brown walking shoes. Her hair is pulled back in a tight braid. Her eyes are bright, but not a tiger’s—as much prey at the moment as predator.

  It has taken him more than two hours to catch her alone. The police are officially treating Sirhan’s death as an accident, but the detective told Travers to remain in Selçuk. Leopold Kirchburg shut down the Saint John’s dig until further notice and stationed Teutonic-looking young men at the site’s main entrance and along the path leading up from the restoration house. Charles Lee, who arrived half an hour after Kirchb
urg, quizzed Travers about what he had seen and why he had been, as Lee said, cat stepping in the ruins at sunup. Finally, the detectives joined the technicians at the base of the curtain wall, and Altay’s elderly foreman drove Kirchburg and Lee in the tractor up Ayasuluk Hill so that they could inspect the excavation site.

  Altay is obviously bolting, and so Travers asks only, “How are you?”

  “How do you think I am?” she snaps. Then, glancing around the office, she takes a deep breath and says in a softer voice, “Not good, Joe. Not good at all.”

  He scratches the stubble on his chin. “The police are calling…it…an accident, but…”

  Fire lights her eyes. “It was no accident.”

  He doesn’t think so either, and he knows far less than she does. “Why do you say that?” he asks.

  She lifts the backpack a couple of inches and then lets it drop. She scans the office again, puts her hands on her hips, inhales, and slowly releases her breath. “He…Kenan…was working for…was going to…”

  When she doesn’t answer further, he nods at the backpack. “How do you know it wasn’t an accident?”

  She takes another breath, bites her lip, and looks him in the eye, seeming to gauge him. “Because I’m the target. I’m next.”

  “What? Why?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “So you’re running?”

  “No.” She shakes her head. “I’m not running. There’s something…”

  He takes a step toward her and then holds back. She looks both younger and smaller standing next to her backpack. Her gaze is neither hard nor fierce, but her eyes are no longer vulnerable. She didn’t tell him what was important the night before, and she isn’t going to tell him now.

  “It will look like you…” he begins.

  “It doesn’t matter what it looks like. Not at all.” Her voice is low but not soft. “I’ve got to do this.”

  “How can you walk away from…?” He waves in the direction of the restoration house and the citadel. “…your job? The Project? You said it was your life.”