David Herlihy

by The Lost Cyclist: The Epic Tale of an American Adventurer;His Mysterious Disappearance

  The handsome reverend cast an imposing figure. Tall and fit, with bright blue eyes and a full graying beard, he looked every bit the stern pastor. Sachtleben nonetheless readily detected his host's gentle and humorous side, and soon became quite comfortable in his presence. The missionary, in turn, relished Sachtleben's bright and energetic company. Writing Barton to announce the young man's long arrival, Chambers pronounced his houseguest a "nice fellow."

  Neelie, a petite but strong figure in her own right, likewise took an instant liking to her houseguest. In a letter to her brother, the journalist Talcott Williams of Philadelphia, she remarked: "He falls into our ways and makes no extra trouble." His escort was no less striking. "And who do you think is his interpreter and servant?" she queried her brother. "Why, none other than father's old servant Khadouri! He is white haired now, says he is 75 but he is still hale and strong. He inquired after you and sends special salaams. He takes great interest in the children and takes them on walks. They are both fond of him. How sweet to have one's own childhood linked with that of one's children."

  As much as the reverend admired Sachtleben, he had comparatively little affection for his boss. "If Mr. Worman had only shown the energy he ought to have shown," Chambers lamented to Barton, "this case could have been settled long ago." The reverend had been downright incensed when he received a request from Worman, relayed through Barton, asking that he cease his correspondence with Mrs. Lenz and that he write to him, Worman, instead. Chambers was not about to break his promise to the grieving mother to keep her informed of developments, and he had a message of his own for the controlling editor: "Please let Mr. Worman know that I will communicate to whomever I please what I please."

  Nor did Chambers have any desire to correspond with the Outing man. "As Mr. S. is here and in communication with Mr. Worman," the reverend wrote back tartly to Barton, "no further correspondence need fall to me." He did, however, suggest how Worman might show his appreciation for the hospitality he was extending to the Outing correspondent: "If Mr. Worman wants to recognize services, he might make it possible for me to buy a good bicycle. I have long wished for one. It would be very handy here."

  As soon as Sachtleben was comfortably settled, Chambers took his guest to meet Robert W Graves. The local British consul had likewise lodged with the Chambers family when he settled in Erzurum two years earlier. Since then, the two British subjects had become great friends and collaborators. At present, they were co-ordinating relief efforts on behalf of young Armenians in the region orphaned by the latest wave of violence. And of course, the two were in close consultation regarding the Lenz matter.

  For the time being, until the opening of an American consulate, already approved by Congress, Graves was the closest thing to an American official in the vicinity, and he regularly represented American interests. He even told Sachtleben that if he had an urgent message for Terrell, he could cable Sir Phillip Currie from the consulate, and the British ambassador would relay the message to his American counterpart, saving considerable trouble and expense. Sachtleben was impressed by Graves's evident willingness to help, in sharp contrast to Terrell. The official, in turn, judged the young investigator "very capable and enterprising."

  Graves had a shocking piece of news for Sachtleben. Two weeks earlier, just as the American left Constantinople, the British consul had sent Currie the names of Lenz's alleged murderers, to pass on to the American legation. Graves charged that six Kurds, three sets of brothers from the village of Dahar, in the middle of the Deli Baba Pass, shot Lenz dead in the same pass on or about May 10, 1894. As the consul explained to his boss, the names came from a Kurdish informant who was "usually reliable." Moreover, Graves asserted, the Kurd was not an enemy of the men he accused, nor were their respective tribes at odds with each other.

  According to the informant, Lenz had stopped for the night in the village of Kourdali, about a quarter of the way, as one headed west, into the twenty-four-mile-long pass. The next morning the six Kurds allegedly helped Lenz cross a raging river, only to shoot him as soon as they reached the other side. They took his belongings and left him for dead by the roadside. Several villagers from Dyaden purportedly passed by the body shortly thereafter and recognized it as that of the man who had cycled through their village some days earlier.

  Sachtleben sat in stunned silence before an overwhelming feeling of relief kicked in. The informant's account confirmed exactly what he had suspected all along, namely, that Kurds had killed Lenz in the treacherous Deli Baba Pass. But he had hardly expected such a gratifying breakthrough so soon after his arrival in Erzurum. Chambers summarized the encouraging situation in a letter to Barton: "We have furnished Mr. Sachtleben with all information important to the prosecution of the case: the place, time, and almost the circumstances of the murder."

  This astounding revelation culminated a rigorous six-month investigation conducted jointly by Chambers and Graves. Initially, both men had been reluctant to get involved, so appalled were they by Lenz's recklessness. "It is most unfortunate," lamented Graves in his first letter to Purinton, "that I was not warned in time of Mr. Lenz's rash intention, or I should have protested against his uselessly risking his life by traversing alone a region which was comparatively safe at the time of Messrs. Allen and Sachtleben's journey, but is now swarming with heavily armed and ferocious brigands." Echoed Chambers in a letter to a colleague, "If young men will take such risks they ought to at least inform those residing on the route—either consuls or missionaries—so that such a mishap as this could be known in time."

  Determined nevertheless to unravel Lenz's fate, the pair worked their special channels to track his progress through Turkey. Chambers in particular tapped his many Armenian friends residing along the Silk Road. One vouched that friendly Turkish officials at the Persian border had waived Lenz's passport fee and had even served him a cup of coffee. A Turk who saw Lenz the next day in Dyaden reported that the American had spent a tranquil night there in a government building before resuming his ride the next morning across the Alashgerd Plain.

  Since Sachtleben had left the United States, the men had communicated additional details to Pittsburgh. They confirmed that Lenz had reached Karakalissa, the third town west of Dyaden, on the afternoon of May 9, 1894. Fifteen miles farther on, just before sunset, according to Chambers's Armenian witness, Lenz stopped in the village of Chilkani. There he found refuge in the home of an Armenian farmer named Avak Parsegh. "Lenz was in good health and spirits," Chambers relayed. "A number of villagers called to see him and his wonderful machine that evening. He spoke two or three words of Turkish and made them understand that he came from Persia and was going to Erzurum. He left early the next morning. About a month later the villagers heard that he had been killed in the vicinity of Koord Ali."

  The pair had collected other testimony affirming Lenz's demise. Parts of his bicycle had reportedly been sold as silver at local bazaars. A rumor in Erzurum held that sometime after the murder a Kurd had discreetly approached a merchant in the Alashgerd, telling him he had something very valuable to show him. The merchant followed the Kurd to a village and was shown a bicycle. Asked what he would pay for it, the merchant replied that it was worthless metal. The dejected Kurd warned the merchant not to breathe a word about what he had seen. Even more chilling, several residents of Zedikan, the last village on the plain, claimed to have seen Lenz's naked body the previous spring, after it had washed up from the Sherian River.

  To be sure, the Kurdish informant's account differed slightly from Chambers's previous findings on one point. It asserted that Lenz had spent the night of May 9 in Kourdali, in the pass, rather than in Chilkani, on the plain. Still, the distance between the two towns was only about thirty-five miles. Conceivably, Lenz had slept in both towns, and the given dates were simply off by a day or two.

  Most persuasively, the Kurd's account was eerily consistent with the dispatch published some months earlier in Le Vélo. It also agreed with a report from the Armenian cor
respondent of the Daily News, a London paper. Dated March 30, 1895, it read: "I am now informed by a merchant of Karakalissa that he knows three inhabitants of the village of Zedikan who saw the body of Mr. Lenz after he was killed. The unfortunate gentleman was shot on the road between Kourtali and Dahar, but nearer to Kourtali."

  Sachtleben was determined to get to the Deli Baba Pass as soon as possible. But as he explained in a letter to Langhans, "I do not merely want to find Lenz's grave, I want to see these murderers punished and an indemnity paid." Of course, he knew well that he would need to secure at least a measure of Turkish cooperation to accomplish any of these objectives—and that would be hard to come by. The authorities would be unlikely to grant him a passport, much less permission to search homes and make arrests.

  Indeed, Sachtleben anticipated that the Turks would go to great lengths to protect the Kurds, their allies in the Armenian repression. Graves had even withheld the names of the accused men from the local vali for fear that the official, who had yet to assist the investigation, might try to tip off the culprits that the foreigners were closing in on them. At least two of the accused had close ties with the Hamidieh regiment, an irregular mounted force named after the present sultan. Formed four years earlier at the suggestion of the field marshal Ahmed Shakir Pasha, the regiment was fashioned after the Russian Cossacks. The hope was that it would give the government not only a fit and flexible fighting force, but also a means to gain some control over the Kurds, a notoriously independent lot.

  Sachtleben promptly called on the vali of Erzurum to determine just how helpful he was prepared to be. Alas, the official, Hakki Pasha, was not the congenial man the American had met four years earlier, the one who had commanded the cycling demonstration. The present ruler, in the wheelman's estimation, was instead "an infamous scoundrel—who cared nothing about one Christian more or less."

  Predictably, their meeting was tense. The governor questioned whether the cyclist had even entered Turkey, and "he had the impudence to suggest that Lenz might have been a drinking man who simply got drunk and fell off a cliff." The vali nevertheless offered a surprising concession: two zaptiehs to escort Sachtleben to the Deli Baba Pass. As it turned out, the vali was motivated more by duty than goodwill. Shortly after Sachtleben's departure from Constantinople, the porte had acceded to Terrell's prodding and cabled the vali with instructions to provide Sachtleben with an escort, provided he agree to stay within the district of Bayazid, which included the Deli Baba Pass.

  The investigator turned down the offer, however, asserting that he needed at least a dozen zaptiehs. He knew well that his was a tall order. Had the suspects been Armenian Christians, he reasoned, the vali would have been only too happy to meet his demands. But since they were Kurds, the government would do all it could to shield them from justice. Sachtleben was hardly surprised when the vali refused to up the force, claiming that he could not do so without the porte's explicit permission.

  Sachtleben was nonetheless confident that if the American legation in Constantinople leaned heavily on the porte, the vali would be forced to furnish a larger force. It remained to be seen, however, whether Terrell would be willing to push the demand. Chambers, for one, was skeptical. Confided the missionary to Barton: "I fear Sachtleben's efforts will be greatly hampered for want of backing by Mr. Terrell. We laugh at the Moslem cholera doctor who examines the patient through a spyglass. But when that same absurd incompetence appears in one of our own people what can we do?"

  Sachtleben, in fact, fully expected Terrell to balk at his demand. The minister had insisted all along that the wheelman should focus on finding Lenz's grave, in which case two zaptiehs could conceivably suffice. The Texan argued that if Lenz's bones were recovered and identified, the American government would have proof that he had been murdered in Turkey and could therefore insist on the arrest of the murderers, their trial, and the payment of an indemnity. Sachtleben countered that if he were to go to the region simply to search for the body, the suspects would learn of his investigation and destroy any remaining evidence of their crime. They would thus elude justice, and without a conviction, the Turks would have a pretext to refuse payment of an indemnity.

  The solution, Sachtleben concluded, was to whip up enough popular support back home for his demands so as to compel the State Department to force Terrell's hand. It was therefore imperative to inform the public at once that the killers had been identified and that he, Sachtleben, was within striking distance of their homes. Americans would naturally expect their representatives in Turkey to ensure that he was properly equipped for this mission of mercy on behalf of Mrs. Lenz.

  The wheelman took several initial steps to implement his plan. Mrs. Chambers described the first: "After consultation between [William] Nesbitt, Mr. Graves, and Sachtleben, we sent a cable to Constantinople to go from there to London and from there to New York. If properly taken up by the press, it ought to work up something." The bulletin read:

  Constantinople May 21, 1895. Advices received here from Armenia say that the names of five Kurds, who are said to be the murderers of Lenz killed while attempting to ride around the world on a bicycle, are known. It is announced that William L. Sachtleben, who has gone in search of the missing bicyclist, in hopes of recovering his body, or obtaining definite information as to the cause of his disappearance has arrived at Erzurum.

  To put even more pressure on Washington, Sachtleben wired Worman asking him to induce Mrs. Lenz to make, as publicly as possible, three demands of the Turks: first, the immediate arrest of the accused Kurds; second, the dismissal of the local authorities who had stymied the Lenz investigation; and third, the payment of an indemnity totaling $50,000.

  While he waited for these initiatives to bear fruit, and for his men to materialize, Sachtleben acquainted himself with his environs. Chambers gave his guest a whirlwind tour of the fortress city where the investigator was likely to be entrenched for some time. Nearly a third of its forty thousand residents were Armenians, and other large percentages were of either Persian or Russian extraction. The American noticed the frequent passing of camel caravans plying wares between Persia and the Black Sea, as well as scores of soldiers patrolling the streets. Ostensibly they were guarding against the Russians, who had already invaded the city twice within living memory.

  As it turned out, Chambers had little affection for this remote outpost, despite its picturesque setting at the foot of a lofty mountain chain. Graves was equally down on his adoptive city, branding it "somber and unattractive." He would lament in his autobiography that Erzurum offered

  no fine buildings, broad streets or smiling gardens. The narrow, ill-kept streets are a huddle of crowded mean-looking dwellings with dull grey stone walls and flat mud roofs. The ancient walls, of which some vestiges remain, were replaced after the Crimean war by a rampart and ditch with four principal gates, enclosing an area of three square miles. The town only occupies about one square mile, the rest being mainly deserted graveyards, waste land, and a few meager vegetable gardens. Shops are virtually nonexistent, the retail trade being confined to the narrow alleys of the bazaars.

  Until his men appeared, Sachtleben resolved to gather whatever evidence he could find in Erzurum. The dragoman of the Russian consulate introduced him to an Armenian named Hagob Effendi, who attributed Lenz's murder to the same Kurds Graves's informant had accused. Effendi, however, offered a new detail that he had gleaned from an Armenian friend of his from Chilkani, a certain Garabed Hovagemian. This man claimed to have seen Lenz when he passed through Karakalissa, and he stated that Lenz had made an indiscreet show of money, catching the attention of a Kurdish chief named Moostoe Niseh, also from Chilkani. Hovagemian claimed that Moostoe, who subsequently tried to sell parts of Lenz's bicycle, was the one who had ordered those Kurds to kill Lenz the next day.

  Sachtleben was intrigued. Certainly, Moostoe should be checked out as well, even if he was not among the names given to Graves. Sensing that he might be closing in on the "arch-murd
erer," Sachtleben hatched a plan to speed up the investigation. In advance of his own visit to the Deli Baba Pass and the Alashgerd Plain, he would send a spy to those places to interview the locals and, if possible, to locate the culprits. His agent would also be instructed to purchase, as evidence, any items he could find that might have belonged to Lenz. That way, Sachtleben would be better prepared once he got to those places himself with his armed force.

  On May 20, with Chambers's assistance, Sachtleben interviewed a Protestant Armenian named Khazar Semonian whom Chambers had recommended for the mission. "He wore blue jeans, loose trousers, variegated stockings and approached us in stocking feet," Sachtleben recalled.

  But he had not been long in our presence before we wished that he had left on his shoes and instead had taken off his red fez and dark turban so we could see his face. He sat bolt upright with his hands tightly clasped in his lap. The first question that Mr. Chambers put to him in Armenian was "Have you common sense?" Khazar laughed dryly and vouchsafed a long explanation proving that common sense was his most precious possession.

  Khazar, who made his living as a guide to visiting Kurds around the bazaars of Erzurum, assured the two that he knew Moostoe personally. The candidate was hired on the spot. "We judged him to be an excellent person to ingratiate himself into the good graces of Kurdish women," Sachtleben related, "by making small gifts of mirrors, needles, yashmaks, etc. And from the Kurdish women one can learn a great deal, as they are very independent. They are good gossips."