Maria Hudgins - Lacy Glass 02 - The Man on the Istanbul Train (21 page)

“So I’m a genius?” Lacy stepped ahead of him and walked backwards, tripping over a root.

“Only if you find a connection. You haven’t found jack, yet.”

“MacSweeney, that’s the carpet man, told me something about that rug, something that’s needling me, but I can’t remember what it is.”

“Why don’t you call MacSweeney again?”

“That’s exactly what I intend to do. That’s why I’m headed for Four Bars Hill.”

Bob Mueller came up behind them, jingling car keys in one hand. The van awaited with its windows open under the shade of a pistachio tree. Some considerate worker, probably Tyler, who did most of the driving, had thought to cool it off for them. Lacy watched Paul and Bob drive off in the van, then turned her boots toward Four Bars Hill.

* * *

She let it ring until it went to voice mail, then left Elbert MacSweeney a message. Telling him this was about Max Sebring’s carpet, she asked him to think hard about the meeting in the village where Max had taken possession of it. “You told me there was something about that day but you couldn’t remember what. I’ve found some odd symbols scattered about outside that central diamond with the tree of life. Do you know anything about them? Anyway, please try to remember what it was you couldn’t remember.” She dictated her new phone number but warned him not to expect to get through and said she’d call again as soon as she could.

Returning from the hill, she ran into Henry Jones. He’d parked his little blue Fiat under the same tree the van had recently vacated, then stood in the shade waiting for her. “What did I tell you? Huh? What did I tell you?”

“You know the guy!”

“Yep.”

So this was how it was to end, Lacy thought.
Not with a bang but a whimper.
After all her work, she was about to learn the identity of the man on the train from a fellow worker she met the same day the poor guy got killed. She almost resented Henry’s casual attitude.
Yep. Yep? Is that it? There should be trumpets or something.
“Don’t keep me in suspense, tell me!”

“His name is Clifford Craven. Was. He was an electrician who did contract work at the museum and at the Foundation offices occasionally.” Henry touched Lacy’s elbow and guided her through the camp, leaning into her and talking as they went. His breath smelled of peanut butter. “I didn’t know him that well, but I know he did something that pissed Max off because Max told me to fire him. So I did.”

“You don’t know why?”

“I can’t recall. It couldn’t have been anything important or I’d remember.”

“When was that?”

“Oh … must have been about three months ago. It was just after Max and I got back from a trip to China. I didn’t actually fire him because he wasn’t actually an employee. He was a subcontractor. He did electrical work and his brother did plumbing. What I did was, I told the people in charge of the physical plant at the museum to strike his name off the list of approved contractors. I remember running into him the next day in the back hall at the museum and him looking at me like .
 
.
 
.” Henry tilted his head back and gave Lacy a cold stare down the length of his nose. “Like, ‘I’m not going to forget about this.’”

“So you think he was coming here to get even with Max? Or you?”

“It would certainly be a good way to stay off the suspect list if you intend to do something dirty, wouldn’t it? Man dies—or maybe he intended for
two
men to die—at an archaeological dig. Even if the deaths were suspicious, the police would suspect only the people
at the camp
. You could hop the next plane back to the U.S.A., tell folks you’d been to Disneyworld or wherever for a few days. Who’d think to suspect you?” Henry stopped under an almond tree and wiped his brow with the tail of his shirt. “Who’d even think the guy had a passport? I bet he’d never been outside the U.S. before.”

“You think he meant to kill both of you?”

“I don’t know. It’s possible, though.”

“Then who killed
him?”
Lacy wished Henry would resume the walk. She fanned her face with her floppy hat.

“I haven’t figured that out yet.”

“And then Max actually does die, of a heart attack, at almost the same moment someone kills Clifford Craven and tosses him off a train. Come
on!”

“Coincidences do happen. It’s only in mystery stories that they don’t, because readers would say, ‘come
on,
’ In real life, they
do.”

“A man I met on the train introduced himself as Jason. Jason Rennie or Rennick or something like that. Said he was a policeman from New York and he was here helping with a training program for new recruits. I think he killed
 
.
 
.
 
.Craven.” Having a name to put in place of “mystery man” wasn’t coming naturally to her yet. “Is it possible this Jason is really working for you guys? I mean for Sebring? Did Max have personal security people?” As she said it, Lacy realized that couldn’t be true unless the Sebring Foundation had tracked her down and abducted her in Istanbul. That made no sense, but for the moment she was only throwing out random ideas and waiting for Henry’s response.

“Bodyguards? No. No reason to need them. He wasn’t a controversial person, and he kept a low profile. Plus, if anyone
had
discovered a plot to kill Max, they would’ve told me. If they were working for us, they wouldn’t chase the guy over here and not tell us about it.”

“But what if they couldn’t reach you? The phones .
 
.
 
.”

“Our phones worked fine in Istanbul.”

“Maybe they didn’t find out until you were already out here.”

“I call the office almost every day. No, Lacy. Your conspiracy theory won’t work. Or, as they say in Virginia, ‘That dog won’t hunt.’” He stopped walking and grabbed her wrist, his dark gaze intense. “Why did they wait two weeks? Why did they break into our rooms at the Pera Palace? I think they were looking for something they thought we had—something smuggled or stolen—and after they’d combed Istanbul for it, had to come out here to get it.”

“So they may not have had any intention of killing Max.” She pondered the ease with which she and Henry had progressed from a man with a grudge to a whole group, now referred to as
they.
“Back to poor Mr. Craven. What happens to his body now? Did he have a family?” Lacy resumed her walk toward the camp and Henry followed.

“He had a brother, of course. The plumber. The first thing I did when the police showed me the photos was to call the museum and get the number of Craven Plumbing and Electric. I called and told the brother the bad news. He cried like a baby.” Henry shook his head as if to expel the memory. “He’s flying over to claim the body and take it home.”

“The unembalmed body of a man they buried wrapped in a cloth a week ago?”

Henry made a face and shook his head again. “Whoever has to dig him up deserves hazardous duty pay.”

They had come to the hand-washing station outside the big tent. Süleyman hurried past balancing a huge tray of flatbreads on his head and disappeared into the tent. It was nearly lunchtime and workers were beginning to toss their trowels and brushes into their buckets in preparation for the midday break.

Henry stopped walking and said, “Here’s what I think. I won’t be surprised if the police find that Craven was involved in the smuggling game. I’ve had suspicions there was something going on at the museum for the past couple of years—nothing that involved our own people, and I think I can vouch for the provenance of every item we have on display. Max was scrupulous about that. But whether there might be stolen or illegal things in the back rooms, I can’t say. We have boxes of artifacts we haven’t studied yet.”

“And this guy Craven may have been using the museum to sort of launder the contraband?”

“Something like that. Hell, I don’t know.”

Henry dipped his hands in the water barrel, wiped his hands on his pants, and reached for the bottle of hand sanitizer they kept on a rock beside the barrel. Clumps of sweaty workers, heat radiating from their bodies, streamed past them into the tent.

Lacy stepped out of the traffic. “What were the names of Max and Nina’s children who were killed in that plane crash?”

Henry rubbed his hands together and frowned. “Rachel and George. Why?”

Before Lacy could explain the reason for her question, Süleyman popped out of the tent. “Are you going to the bunkhouse?” he asked her.

“Well, yes. I have a car and Paul said he wanted me to look at the finds there, but he and Bob have already left.”

“I know. That is why I asked. May I ride with you? We could stop off and see the puppies on our way back.”

In comparison to the dark thoughts and words of the past hour, a visit to see the puppies sounded to Lacy like lollipops and rainbows.

Chapter Twenty-two

Süleyman held a foil-wrapped lunch plate for Gülden on his lap the whole way to the bunkhouse. Lacy wondered about those two. An arranged marriage, Gülden had told her. How different from anything she’d ever known, and how strange that they seemed to have reversed the traditional roles in a culture bound by tradition. Gülden had more education and the more prestigious job (though not necessarily a bigger paycheck—Gülden had told her Süleyman was head chef at a well-known restaurant). Their coming to this dig was for Gülden’s work. Süleyman was here because of her. It was just luck that the camp needed a cook. Opposite as their personalities were, Gülden reserved and scholarly, Süleyman a prankster who reminded Lacy of an elf, they seemed genuinely fond of each other. Fond enough that he took the summer off from his regular job to avoid being separated from her. Lacy could hardly imagine he’d prefer roughing it in a tent to living in his home in Ankara.
What would it be like,
she wondered,
to have sex with a man your parents picked out for you when you were a child?
She knew that, in times past and in much of the world today, it was the norm. Only in our modern western culture was love, or perhaps lust masquerading as love, considered essential for a good marriage. Did Gülden and Süleyman consider themselves soul mates? Lacy was pretty sure Gülden would laugh at the term.

Gülden was waiting for them when Lacy pulled her little Ford into the gravel parking area at the bunkhouse. Süleyman handed his wife the foil-covered lunch.

She told Lacy, “Paul and Bob are waiting for you in the finds room. You know where it is.” She took her lunch to a wooden table under a tree behind the house, and Süleyman followed her.

Lacy stood outside the open door to the finds room, wary of walking in if a fight was in progress. Hearing no profanity or thuds of bodies hitting walls, she stepped inside. Bob was leaning with his back against the waist-high workbench and Paul was working on a piece of pottery with a toothbrush.

“There you are,” Paul said, stating the obvious. “Good.”

Lacy took her time with the Hittite artifacts on the left-hand side of the room. Bob handed her a large magnifying glass and stood back, allowing her free range of the workbench. The geometric patterns on the Hittite pottery had been worked mostly in red ochre and black, but here again, she found a brilliant red that reminded her of the coral red in the oil lamp of the Süleymaniye Mosque, sometimes called the “color that vanished into thin air” because it could no longer be reproduced. “I suspect this is cinnabar,” she announced. “It’s a highly toxic sulfide of mercury.”

“Just the thing to paint your dinner plate with,” Paul said.

Lacy ignored the quip. “I wish I had that hand-held spectrometer they let us use when we were in Egypt. This needs to be tested for x-ray fluorescence.” She inched her way clockwise and into the area of Paul’s Neolithic display. Flint. Obsidian, a dark volcanic glass. Bone. Human? Pottery sherds, unfired, though some had been burnished by rubbing to a dark sheen. A couple of concave pieces of bone held traces of red—cinnabar again? Lacy knew that skulls found at Catal Hüyük, near Konya, had been painted with cinnabar, and that other pigments had been used there as well: azurite, malachite, and galena. Artifacts from Catal Hüyük dated from about 6,000 to 8,000
BC
. “How old are these?”

“I don’t know yet. I won’t be able to get the carbon dating done until fall, probably.” Paul handed her the sherd he’d found with the streak of red and the speck of green on one corner.

“Wow! Cinnabar, I think. And a tiny bit of malachite. This could be important.”

Bob remained silent.

* * *

Süleyman had probably been standing in the doorway for some time before any of the three researchers acknowledged, or even noticed, his presence. They were scarcely aware of anything but each other, having become so engrossed in their analysis of the finds, and in making plans for lab work that could best be done back home. Bob said that Turkey could legally claim anything they thought important and would certainly be reluctant to let it out of the country.

“When will you be leaving, Dr. Glass? If you need to stay, I can ask one of the students to take me back in the van.” Süleyman stood in the open doorway.

“Oh! I’m ready to go.” Lacy remembered the puppies. She didn’t want to miss out on this chance to see them. Promising them to come back tomorrow, she headed for her car with Süleyman close behind her. The bunkhouse had been almost unbearably hot inside and Lacy’s shirt was soaked, but when she stepped out into the dorm’s tree-shaded parking area, a delicious breeze slipped through. She held out her arms and let it cool her.

* * *

Süleyman directed her to the shepherd’s realm, off the highway on the opposite side and a mile or so south. He got slightly confused a couple of times, causing Lacy to back up, turn, and try another dirt road. At last, they pulled up to a tumble-down shack strewn about with rusty equipment of uncertain function. A couple of scrub pines shaded the shack from the midday sun, and Lacy asked, “Where does the shepherd live?”

“There.” Süleyman pointed. Lacy turned and saw an old man in a dirty, worn-out jacket and with a multicolored
taqiyah
on his grey head. He shambled toward them aided by a gnarled walking stick. Süleyman led her into the shed. The mother dog looked up and growled. Süleyman held Lacy back with an outstretched arm.

“I know,” she whispered. “I’m not going to invade her space.”

Slowly, Süleyman shuffled across the straw to the dog’s side, making odd cooing noises as he went. The dog thumped her tail, then stood up, wagging, but with a wary look as if her upper lip were poised for a snarl. Süleyman knelt beside the pile of rags that served as the puppies’ bed. He rose and motioned Lacy forward.

Determined not to scare the mother, Lacy pushed her canvas hat to her back, letting the chin strap hold it, and inched forward with the back of her hand extended for sniffing. This was what you did when meeting American dogs, but how would this basically feral animal interpret the gesture? She kept a close eye on the mother and moved a few inches closer. Süleyman moved back. The dog’s tail wagged a tiny bit and her head tilted to one side.

She recognizes me. How smart is that?
Based only on a chance encounter a week ago, this dog, she could tell, remembered her and seemed to know she meant no harm. Wordlessly, in case the dog understood only Turkish, she moved still closer and slowly, slowly, dropped to her knees. The dog sniffed her hand and, lowering her head, sat down again.

The puppies were clumped together in the nest of old rags, which someone had placed here. Wiggling, mewling, using their little paws like paddles, they seemed almost ready to crawl out of the nest and start causing their mother real problems. How would she ever keep track of them when they started to walk? Lacy counted five. One particularly brave one crawled toward her. It looked a lot like a baby seal, she thought. Its eyes were open, so Lacy guessed they were all about two weeks old. Then she saw that another’s eyes were not fully open yet, giving it a somewhat dopey look.

Süleyman stepped outside the shed and joined the old shepherd, some thirty yards away and leaning on his walking stick. Lacy, after several minutes of kneeling without touching, ventured a hand forward toward the puppies. The mother stiffened to attention. Lacy moved her hand to the dog’s shoulder and patted her. She relaxed.

The adventurous pup that had been crawling toward her lost its balance and tumbled out of the nest, landing on its back in the straw. It wasn’t hurt but Lacy wondered how the mother would handle the situation. Nuzzling the baby, she pushed it toward the nest with her nose. The puppy was almost home free when it wiggled the wrong way and rolled down again to the same spot on the straw.

Without thinking, Lacy grabbed it up. When she realized what she’d done, she looked at the mother dog. Amazingly, the dog didn’t seem to mind. Carefully, Lacy returned the pup to its proper place and picked up another one. Still no protest from the mother. Lacy stroked the puppy’s downy fur and cooed to it.

The phone in her pocket rang. The mother dog stiffened. Lacy put the puppy down and answered the call.

“Hello, Lacy? It’s Milo.”

“Milo? Oh my God! It’s great to hear you!” Again she picked up the first puppy—the little explorer was crawling out again—and shifted her position to a cross-legged sit. Milo’s cultured British accent reminded her of Istanbul and of his breaking into her hotel room with a coat hanger. “How the hell are you?”

“Listen Lacy, but don’t say anything. Just listen. Are you with a man named Süleyman Güler?” Unable, according to Milo’s instructions, to answer, she waited for him to realize the conundrum he’d created for her. “Okay. You can say yes or no. But nothing else.”

“Yes.”

“Are you in your car? Is he in the car with you?”

“Uh, no and no.”

“Good. Are you outside your car but near it?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have your car keys with you?”

“Yes.”

“You have to get to your car, close the door, lock it, and get away from him. Do it now!”

“What?”

“Don’t talk! Just do it! It means your life!”