by Boston Teran
They were following the coastline north. Terns and gulls broke across the sky with their fleeting calls. Soon the riders came upon the signs of oil. Slicks of it carried on the backs of waves left the shoreline stained and spattered black.
The first sighting of Baku was a slender stylus of flame they rode toward most of the night. They would come to learn it was an oilwell that had been sabotaged. Baku had been taken and retaken since the war began and was now under the control of Russia. It was a place of racial hatred and conspiracies, labor unrest and Bolsheviks systematically plotting to overthrow the government.
They entered Baku through the Icheri Sheher—the old city. Their destination an address along the Alexander Quay. Baku had been built on crude, and there were theaters and concert halls and museums and churches and mansions copied from the arts of Europe and Arabia to match the greed of men anywhere. There were also alleys and vacant lots and gullies of trash where the poor lived in crates and ate dog.
Unshaven and filthy the three traveled the harbor thoroughfare where fleets of oil tankers were being filled and readied to sail. There was smoke across the moon from the well fire, and the air stank with the grit of crude being distilled just beyond the rooftops in the refineries at Cherni Gorod—or Black Town, as the Europeans called it.
The buildings on the block they were searching out were fronted with shops along the street, their windows above stenciled with the gaudy letters of the businesses housed there or with laundry draped down from the sills.
As a precaution John Lourdes thought it best Malek wait, the guide remaining with him, while he went on ahead. They dismounted a street shy of their destination and they led their horses into an alley. John Lourdes left them there and went ahead on foot.
The apartment he was looking for was a walkup. The odor of years permeated the weathered halls. The third floor landing was dingy and dark. Behind the shabby apartment door where he knocked came faintly discernable footsteps. Yet, no one spoke, nothing was said.
John Lourdes knocked again. “Mr. Zadian . . . it’s John Lourdes.”
The door was unlocked and opened quickly. It was the dragoman with a revolver in hand.
“John . . . finally.”
He was barely in before the door slammed shut behind him and locked. The dragoman started across the room. It was a rather drab apartment lit by a single candle. The shut tight drapes made it dusty and claustrophobic.
“Is Malek all right?”
“I thought it best for him and Hain to wait down the street while I came here first.”
The dragoman pressed close to the wall and peeled the drape back just a bit. He was distressed, severely so. John Lourdes saw the gun in the old man’s hand shook.
“Did you see anyone on the quay that aroused your suspicions?”
“No,” said John Lourdes. “Where is Mr. Zadian?”
“Are you certain?”
“As certain as I could be. I came in quick. What’s wrong?”
“Zadian was shot during the escape from Van.”
“Killed?”
“Wounded. He was taken to the prison on the Citadel . . . for interrogation.”
“You know that for a fact?”
“It was my horse shot in the canal.”
“I didn’t know.”
“I made it back to Van by keeping to the irrigation ditches. I saw the others they wounded. And killed. They burned them all in the road. Except Zadian.” He paused, then hurriedly closed back the drape. “Put the candle out. Then come here.”
John Lourdes snuffed out the flame. He came up behind the dragoman. The old man’s breathing had quickened. He opened the drape enough so John Lourdes could see.
“Look . . . Is there anyone that arouses your suspicions?”
There were taverns facing the harbor, and neighborhood cafés, docked ships, drays, so there was no shortage of human traffic to arouse one’s suspicion.
“The contact for the munitions and money who was to meet Zadian here,” whispered the dragoman, “has never arrived.”
John Lourdes turned.
“I’ve waited two days. That’s why—” He pointed to the street.
John Lourdes closed the drape.
“I haven’t been out of here once. I listen at the door. I watch. No one comes.”
John Lourdes crossed the room. He took off his hat and set it on the desk by the candle. A thin band of smoke rose from the wick. This had the makings of an unmistakable catastrophe.
“How did you get out . . . of Van?”
“The night of the escape, Alev came to Mr. Zadian’s home with a wagon. She knew there would be casualties. I thought to ask her.”
The dragoman sat in a worn chair. He kept staring at the window. “They know we’re here.”
“How did Alev arrange it?”
“She and a newspaperman. They requested papers for a relief story. I was to be their porter.”
“You left from the mission compound, I suppose.”
“You’re asking all this for a reason?”
“I believe the compound was under surveillance.”
The dragoman looked the picture of defeat. “I have lost all my family. And now this.”
“Where is Alev,” said John Lourdes.
“At the hotel . . . The Europa.” He then pointed his weapon toward the window. “John, something has gone wrong.”
t w e n t y - s i x
HE DRAGOMAN LEFT the apartment and started up the quay. He kept a good pace afoot, but nothing to arouse suspicion or draw attention to himself. At the corner he was to turn up into a thoroughfare with its streetcars and sidewalk cafés where the neatly attired drank beneath the rosy glow of streetlamps. He never looked back. He was to continue on to a park about two streets away, exactly as John Lourdes had plotted.
John Lourdes had left the apartment about a half hour before, through a basement door that opened onto a cart path at the rear of the walkup. To reach the park the dragoman had to pass an outdoor beer garden. There, he pushed aside a caped and filthy drunk who tried to beg for money.
To enter the deeply wooded park one passed through stone gates. The nightwind blew long branch shadows across an empty footpath. The dragoman was intensely wary, and when something stepped from the thicket, he startled.
It was John Lourdes, who took him by the arm and pulled him from the path. Among the deeper reaches of the trees they waited in silence. As only slivers of moonlight filtered through the branches they could not see very far back along the footpath.
A deep quiet settled in that grew more disquieting by the minute. The occasional rustling of leaves and nothing more. Until the sudden and jolting report of gunfire, the flashings from a pistol barrel that momentarily lit the trees.
John Lourdes pulled hard on his companion’s arm. “We’re going now. And be quick!”
On a street corner at the far end of the park the priest waited with the horses. When John Lourdes and the dragoman arrived, he said, “I heard shots.”
Moments later a caped and hooded figure came sprinting down the footpath and out the park gate. It was the guide, who the dragoman now realized was the tramp begging outside the tavern. Hain grinned at the dragoman wickedly while pointing at his own eyes.
“Well,” said John Lourdes. “How many were following?”
Hain raised two fingers and tossed John Lourdes a set of wallets. “Turkish officers.”
They retrieved the dragoman’s mount from where he had it stabled and he led them up through Black City toward the Baladzhary Station. Huge derricks crowded together across the nightsky. Their steel-plated outlines titanic and black upon the horizon. The well fire still burned furiously to the east, and the country around it glowed like the open grate of a furnace. They rode through spills of oil that slopped up around the legs of their ponies and along foundry row the dragoman reined into a wagonpath that led to a stockade. Above the timber gates a sign read:
Ordina Ironworks
&
nbsp; A watchman called to them through a small opening in the wall. The dragoman answered, “Tell Mr. Ordina . . . Malek is here.”
Minutes later the timber gate eased open on its heavy iron hinges, and the guard, with rifle in hand, stood back and pointed to an office along the palisade wall.
In the light of an open door sat a man in a wheelchair. Mr. Ordina was near sixty and had lost both legs and parts of fingers in the Russo-Turkish war of 1877. He invited the men to follow him into his office.
It was a clutter of desks and cabinets and a table crowded with liquor bottles and beer. Mr. Ordina had a driving physicality about him that belied his crippled state, and he wanted to know everything of the priest’s journey from Erzurum to that evening in the streets of Baku. But John Lourdes was quick and clear, there were urgent matters to contend with.
The contact had not arrived. There were no funds, no munitions. And no word, no explanation, no reason. John Lourdes prepared an urgent dispatch in code for Harmon Frost. One of Mr. Ordina’s most trusted men carried it by motorcycle to the telegraph office in Black City. But time would be the enemy to their determination of will.
“Gentlemen,” said Mr. Ordina, “all is not without hope.”
A kerosene lamp flared over a meager supply of munitions in a darkened shed at the rear of the ironworks. Older rifles, cartridges of inconsistent caliber. At least there was dynamite, and a handful of grenade rifles.
“I’ve been building up my own arsenal,” said Mr. Ordina. “For when the revolution comes, and the Bolsheviks try and rob me of all I worked for.”
John Lourdes looked over those few instruments of war. The measure of so little, that was meant to carry the day.
The smell of the wood casings, the packing, the straw and paraffin and lubricant caused John Lourdes to flash on the oil fields of Tampico just nights before his father’s death. The ever-increasing presence of his father became for him near too much to bear. A man he’d hated and fought, was utterly and absolutely alive in the half life of the moment.
Armenian irregulars were camped in the hills waiting for Malek and the munitions. There was a barracks hut within the compound Mr. Ordina had intentionally left empty, so when Malek and those with him arrived they would have a safe place to rest and wash and prepare.
After ridding himself of weeks of road filth John Lourdes lay down to rest, but sleep did not come. Before dawn he rose as men arrived for work, and he discovered a stairwell to the foundry roof from where he could look out upon the peninsula of the Baku.
It was a world beyond anything he had experienced in the oilfields of Tampico. Here was the limitless economy of destruction stretching inexhaustibly from horizon to horizon. Derricks encased in iron slating for protection against fire were buttressed to each other like an interconnected network of endless steel and wood rigging, with great brick stacks smoking in the gold of first light. There were spills of oil around derricks, spills that created rivers following the contours of the earth, spills the size of ponds, the breadth of lakes. And everywhere debris, everywhere garbage, endless cable and masses of iron and metal left to rot and rust in the sun for so long, roads had been built to go around them.
While staring upon that vast construct, he came to realize why he had not been able to rest a while ago, and why his father’s presence had been so real and overwhelming in that shed. With clear and precise emotions, he came to understand the driving force behind that which brought him to this place.
And it was not that it shocked him, for it was a true account of all that he was. But that the revelation had come precisely now, and it was as simple as a single word.
One hundred and fifty Armenian volunteers were living alongside a quarry owned by the Ordina Ironworks. They existed in tents and huts patched together with scrap and mud plaster. The priest arrived with one wagon bearing the sparse munitions. The volunteers stood like nervous spectators staring at him. Stepping from the saddle, Malek put out his hands and spoke, “Am I not among friends and patriots?” With that, John Lourdes watched as the volunteers crowded up around Malek bowing, many wept openly, and as always, the priest greeted each man as if a brother from birth.
When a moment allowed, John Lourdes took Hain and the priest aside so they might speak privately, “Tell him . . . I’m going to meet with the German.”
The guide hesitated. “Efendi?”
“You’ll be coming with me.”
The guide explained to Malek, who responded, “How will you know how to find him?”
“I already know.”
The guide told this to the priest, who answered immediately, “It was foolish of me to ask when I was certain of the answer.” The priest was concerned. “A confrontation is inevitable. Better now.”
John Lourdes, it seemed, had more to say. The priest saw and spoke to the guide. The guide said, “He sees there is something else on your mind.”
“I learned something,” said John Lourdes, “through coming here that made me able to convince Harmon Frost I was the one to do this. What I learned is . . . the people who sent me don’t like outsiders. They are uncomfortable going to people outside their small group. Even though they chose me because I look like an outsider. Because I look “not white.” I have Mexican blood in me. But I am still one of them. Even though I don’t have the temperament they are comfortable with . . . or the attitude . . . or the personality . . . I’m one of them. I had proven myself one in Mexico. I didn’t realize how much I was one of them. It surprised me to realize that. So, I convinced him. I was, in some ways, the lesser of two evils. But I was one of theirs.”
Malek took all this in, in the same manner that was his way. Then he said, “That may be the reason you convinced them for you to be here . . . but it is not the reason you are here.”
The guide translated.
“No. It is not the reason.”
“But you know the reason, which is why you told me this story?”
“Yes.”
John Lourdes knew the priest would not to ask him the reason, for that would cheat him out of coming to the moment in his own time.
Malek said to the guide, “Tell him to err on the side of caution. Tell him . . . we need him.” As Hain began to speak Malek stopped him. “No . . . Just tell him to be careful. The rest might be too much of a burden. And we all have enough burdens.”
“What is he saying?”
“He said . . . be careful.”
“All that for two words?”
The Fire Temple of Surakhany was a sacred place whose origins were unknown. It consisted of a walled enclosure with a square tower and portal in its eastern gate. In the center of the compound was a shrine the size of a gazebo made of plastered- over stone and brick. There were four arched portals in the shrine that faced each point of the compass, and there were four chimneys from where fire rose into the sky. In the center was a firepit where a flame continually came out of the ground.
A millennium before oil had been discovered in Baku that fire burned from naphtha leaking out of the pores of the earth. First seen by ancient caravans, word of its mystery spread. It became its own Star of Bethlehem and soon men came to that place to worship the flame itself.
Even at the last of twilight the tourists came, as did those who had made the pilgrimage to pray. Along with these was a deeply troubled Alev Temple. The dragoman had disappeared. She did not know if John and the priest were alive. She covered her eyes as if to hide from a despair she so profoundly felt.
“Alev.”
Her hands came away from her face as she turned, unsure of what she had heard. John Lourdes saw she had been crying. She went to him and grasped his vest and held it, pressing her forehead into his chest.
“You’re alive,” she said.
“So it seems.”
“My faith was shaken. So I came here to—”
He told her the priest was fine, as was the dragoman.
“How did you find me here?”
“I followed you from th
e hotel.”
“You followed me?”
“I need to find the German.”
“He’s here? In Baku?”
“Closer than that.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Unless I have reasoned incorrectly, he will use you to try and hunt us out. That’s why I’m here. To be found.”
She looked, suddenly, very frightened.
“We don’t have much time, you and I,” he said.
“I see.”
“I’ve left an envelope for you at the Europa. In it is information on two Turkish officers killed last night who worked with the captain. The Russian authorities should be notified.”
He took her hand in his. “You seem to know this place.”
“My parents came here often. When my mother was pregnant with me, she went into labor right here. My father loved to tell the story I was conceived and born here. You see, they honeymooned in Baku, of all places. Missionary doctor and nurse. There are pictures of me as a little girl . . . right here. As a matter of fact, my father named me for this place. Fire Temple . . . Alev Temple. Alev means fire. It was a silly family joke. I must admit.”
“Memories.” he said.
“And now . . . I have another.”
Her voice seemed to fail her.
“I’ve been notified I’m to leave Russia,” she said. “That I’m not to return anywhere within the Turkish empire. The relief agency discovered what I did in coming here. Rather than being removed, I am being reassigned to Europe. To the war in France.”
He had been watching the tower gate, and there in the darkening portal, in civilian clothes, was Rittmeister Franke.