Maria Hudgins - Lacy Glass 02 - The Man on the Istanbul Train (3 page)

Chapter Three

Paul Hannah trained his binoculars on the trees along the river valley east of the dig site. Standing on the hill he often climbed to watch the sun rise, this morning he aimed to find out what had made the strange noises that awakened him at three a.m. It wasn’t the first time, and the noises, he thought, came from the valley.

A shout.

Startled, he turned toward the tents scattered around the excavation to his west.

“My God! Paul! Bob!” A man’s voice. Down below Todd Majewski, their photographer, stood in a bare spot amid the tents. Arms waving, he turned in a circle, seemingly searching for someone, anyone, in the still-slumbering encampment who could come to his aid. “Paul! Bob! I need help!”

Paul flew down the slope, skirted the corner of an open trench, and nearly flattened Bob Mueller who was crouching to pass through the flap door of his tent. A throng of groggy campers converged on the source of the noise.

Chapter Four

Some one hundred yards past the end of the train, a body lay on the slope, crumpled, eyes open, neck twisted at an unnatural angle. Lacy approached the men gathered around the body and drew close enough to assure herself it was the same unfortunate fellow who had boarded without a ticket. In death, his face seemed more peaceful now. Lacy felt tears rising and wondered if the man had a family or anyone at all who would miss him. Her nose stung with pent-up tears.

The men—and they
were
all men—crowded around the body, a couple of them checking pulse points. They yanked out cell phones and jabbered in Turkish to each other or to unseen listeners elsewhere. The man she had pegged as probable engineer kept a wary eye on the circle of onlookers as he talked on his phone, a finger in one ear.

Lacy spotted the pink shirt of the New York policeman she’d shaken hands with earlier. Sidling up to him she said, “What the hell happened?”

“The poor guy must have fallen off the train. How you can manage to do that accidentally, I don’t know.”

“I saw him. I saw him, but he wasn’t falling off. He was
flying
by the window
.”

The policeman’s head jerked toward her. “You saw him? What do you mean,
flying
?” His black brows knitted into a squint that formed a deep crease above his nose.

“I mean it didn’t look like he was falling. It looked like he’d been thrown. Almost like he was shot out of a cannon. Head first.” She thought about it. “Oh, I don’t know. I can’t be sure. I certainly didn’t see anyone throw him out, but if he fell out, wouldn’t he have been tumbling? Sort of grappling? Grabbing at the air?” She made similar hand motions.

“I don’t know.”

“He wasn’t falling like that. He looked more like a mail sack getting tossed off. Inert.”

“Unconscious?”

“I think so.”

Lacy realized all the men were staring at her. Was she committing a
faux pax?
Was this not done in Turkey? She had been here long enough to adapt to Muslim rules on what women could and couldn’t do but this was a new situation. If travelers of both genders and all ages are on a train, and some of them are persuaded to disembark at an unscheduled stop, can anyone get off, or only men? Her T-shirt was sleeved but her head was bare. She was dressed appropriately for a foreign woman. Still, she felt she was expected to leave.

She tramped back toward her car and her belongings, wishing she’d asked the New York policeman to tell her his name again. Jason something, wasn’t it? She might want to get in touch with him again to satisfy her curiosity. Who was this dead man? What was he running from? Or to? Why couldn’t he buy himself a ticket? Since Jason
Whoever
was out here to help train new recruits, he’d likely be privy to more information in the days to come as local authorities endeavored to locate the dead man’s relatives.

Climbing back aboard, she felt all eyes follow her down the center aisle. Unintelligible mutters. She paused and said, to the car in general, “A man fell off. He is dead.” No response. No one seemed to understand.

Still standing, she saw the dark green trench coat draped casually on the seat across the aisle from her own, its lining exposed and traces of the dead man’s weight still visible in its creases. Lacy picked it up and examined it. She recognized the label as English and expensive. She ran her hands into the outside pockets. Empty. Then she spotted a nametag sewn into the back beneath the designer’s label.

Maxwell Sebring.

Not the usual cheap nametag like the ones her mother ironed onto her school clothes, but woven in a graceful script especially for someone with a lot of money. Lacy dashed out of the car again, ran down the length of the train, and handed the coat to the policeman from New York. “He was wearing this. Make sure they know.”

The man she had pegged as the engineer ambled toward them, one hand extended. The policeman from New York handed him the coat.

* * *

Back aboard, Lacy looked at her watch. According to the printed schedule she held they should have arrived thirty minutes ago at the station where Paul was waiting for her. Would he get antsy and leave without her? She imagined him standing on the platform, fiddling with the yo-yo he always carried in his pocket to keep himself entertained and his hand busy—much as Turkish men fiddled with their worry beads. When she’d originally met him in Egypt, he’d explained having taken up the hobby to help him quit smoking. Now he was skilled enough, she knew, to entertain others with it.

Paul was the reliable sort who wouldn’t leave even if she was late, and thinking this made her feel even worse about keeping him waiting. When she called up a mental image of Paul, it was his smooth, sensual mouth she remembered most clearly. She couldn’t imagine those lips with a cigarette between them.

She heard a siren and stood to look out the windows on the north side of the car. Two blue vehicles with “Gendarmerie” emblazoned on their sides sped westward on the road running parallel to the tracks. An ambulance van followed a moment later. Lacy wondered how the police would go about investigating. They’d need to know the names of all passengers, wouldn’t they? Her ticket had no name on it. She’d paid for her ticket and the dead man’s ticket with cash. Would they realize they needed to know this? Would they realize the dead man they were loading into the ambulance might be the victim of foul play and not of an accident?

Some fifteen minutes later the train chugged to life and resumed its journey. A conductor walked through and wrote down the name of each passenger. Lacy made certain he noted next to her name that she had actually seen the man fall from the train and was the one who pulled the alarm. She gave him her phone number and showed him her passport. 

Convinced the conductor had everything the police would need to get in touch with her later, she asked him how long to their next stop.

“About ten minutes,” he said.

She grabbed a brush and lip-gloss from her duffel bag. Wobbling to the leading end of the Pullman car where she hoped to find a toilet with sink and mirror, she stopped. Beyond the door between the passengers and the cubicle adjoining the next car, uniformed men were busily measuring, dusting, and photographing. One of them waved her away.

* * *

No Paul.

Lacy looked around the tiny station and quickly determined that Paul was not among the dozen or so people standing on the platform. Several of her fellow passengers greeted friends or relatives with excited chatter, obviously eager to tell what had happened, everyone talking at once.

She looked around again, hoping to see Paul rounding the far end of the building, wondering what to do next. She had his phone number. She unzipped the side pocket of her duffel bag to retrieve her phone and heard someone call her name. She looked up.

A young woman with dark, tousled hair and rose-tinted glasses approached her. “You Lacy Glass? Sierra Blue. Paul sent me to pick you up.”

“Oh.” Lacy tried to hide her disappointment that Paul couldn’t be bothered to do this himself. “I’m sorry you had to wait so long. We had a little incident a few miles back.” Lacy told the story while Sierra steered her toward a battered Volkswagen van parked nearby in an unpaved lot. “The question is,” Lacy finished, “Did the man die before or after he fell off the train? And did he fall or did someone push him?”

“Aha. Big mystery.” Sierra’s tone did not indicate any great interest. She slid a side door of the van open and indicated Lacy could stash her duffel bag there, behind the passenger seat. “We’ve had our own problems at the dig today. That’s why Paul couldn’t come to pick you up.”

The van was like a sauna inside. Still morning, the sun nevertheless had been beating down on the metal top for an hour or more and the temperature inside had risen to at least 120° Fahrenheit. The stagnant air smelled like dirt. Lacy peered into the back of the van and saw a jumble of tools, tarps, and plastic five-gallon cans.

Sweating, Lacy scanned the dashboard hoping for evidence of an air-conditioner but found only a couple of radio dials. Sierra backed the van out of its parking spot. Her right ear was lined with eight silver rings from the helix at the top to the bottom of the lobe. She sported an enviable tan that made Lacy’s fair arms look anemic. They headed south on a two-lane road through dry, dun-colored terrain. Bundles of sesame stalks, arranged in tepee-like formations, stood, drying, in fallow fields. Beyond one field Lacy saw a cone-shaped hill, obviously man-made since the land all around it was perfectly flat. Was this what archaeologists called a tumulus? Did it cover an ancient burial site? She asked Sierra.

“Possibly,” Sierra said, as if the possibility wasn’t of any particular interest. “This part of Turkey and down southward into Syria is peppered with more ancient sites than you can shake a stick at. Only a few of them are being excavated because that takes money.”

Over the next half-hour, Sierra told her she was from New York and soon to graduate from NYU with a master’s in Middle Eastern Studies. She adored field work and was considering switching to archaeology for her PhD. Lacy lost count of the number of times Sierra mentioned Paul’s name as she talked about the dig site they were approaching. The tone of her voice softened slightly each time she uttered the single syllable.
Paul.

Some fifteen minutes into their journey, Sierra finally asked her a question with the word
you
in it, and Lacy thought she was ready to change the subject. Not quite. “When was the last time you saw Paul?”

“We worked together in Egypt a couple of years ago. The last I heard, he was teaching a martial arts class in Cairo.”

“He had to. He told me he was completely broke when he left Luxor.” Lacy had wondered about Paul’s source of income at the time, but didn’t feel she should ask. Grants from various foundations bankrolled everyone else but Paul had no visible means of support. While Sierra droned on, Lacy watched the arid landscape roll by her window and thought about the man whose life had ended on that embankment in the middle of nowhere. What was he running from? Or to? An American man, she knew from the few words she’d heard him speak, or possibly British. She hadn’t heard enough to pick up a particular accent, but he was a native English speaker for sure. Expensive trench coat. Personalized with a professionally designed and stitched-on tag. Ordinary but dirty clothes. Haunted eyes. Why couldn’t he buy his own ticket? What if she hadn’t bought the ticket for him?

He’d have been escorted off the train at the first stop outside of Istanbul and handed over to authorities. He’d never have made it past Izmit, and he’d be alive now! I bought him a ticket to death!

“Are you staying in the dorm or on site?” Sierra asked.

“Pardon?” Lacy shook herself back to the present. “I didn’t know I had a choice. What’s the dorm?”

I was only trying to help him.

“The dorm is part of the building we use for our finds. It’s about a twenty-minute drive from the dig, but some of the workers stay there. It’s much nicer than the dig site. They have an actual bathroom and a kitchenette. And the truck hauls everybody to and from the site every morning and evening, so people who stay there don’t miss anything.”

It doesn’t matter what you meant. If you hadn’t bought that ticket, he wouldn’t have been killed.
Sierra’s last few words still echoing through her head, Lacy said,
“What about the site? Tents?”

“Right.”

“How do the people who stay there eat?”

“We have a mess tent and a cook,” Sierra muttered, slowing down to make a left turn and steer onto two parallel tire tracks that snaked across a barren field and over a rise a mile or more away.

Her lower jaw banging against her skull as the van bumped along, Lacy spoke carefully to avoid biting her own tongue. “Where do you stay? At the site or at the dorm?”

“I stay at the site.”

Lacy got the picture. Sierra wanted Lacy off-site and away from Paul as much as possible, so she had recommended the dorm. But she herself stayed at the site. Given the choice, Lacy decided she’d rather live in a tent on site. This could get interesting. “I’ll stay wherever Paul wants me to,” she said.

* * *

Sierra pulled under an almond tree and turned off the motor. From the passenger-side window Lacy saw a broad expanse of tan-pink ground, pitted and carved out in dozens of rectangles like a giant, multilevel maze. A dozen variously sized tents—tan, white, blue, and army green—clustered on one side of the excavated area. Wheelbarrows, sifting screens, all the paraphernalia of archaeology, ringed the excavated area. The sight took Lacy back to Egypt, to the west bank of the Nile, and to the last time she had seen Paul.

She stepped out of the van and stretched.

“Lacy! God, it’s good to see you!” Paul Hannah strode toward her. His thigh muscles, she noticed, formed a rippling W above his knees, toned by the constant kneeling and rising an archaeologist must endure. He yanked off his wide-brimmed hat and flicked it, like a Frisbee, to the ground. He looked great.

He grabbed her up in his arms and held her. Lacy felt his lips brush her ear and told herself this was no time to cry. He drew back, holding her at arm’s length.