Maria Hudgins - Lacy Glass 02 - The Man on the Istanbul Train

by Maria Hudgins

  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 peop
le 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.

  “Toast man!” she greeted him.

  “Huh?”

  “You still look like a piece of toast.” In Egypt, Lacy had told Paul his persistent monochromisity reminded her of toast. His wardrobe consisted almost exclusively of tan shirts, tan or khaki cargo shorts or pants, and brown steel-toed boots, their leather cracked with age. His hair was brown, his eyes like caramel candy, his skin smooth and evenly tanned. His arms, she noticed, were several shades darker than they had been the last time she’d seen him, and the hairs were bleached white.

  Paul saw her looking at his arm and laughed. “Burnt toast, maybe.” He steered her toward a rocky outcrop in the shade of an olive tree. “I have to talk to you. Have a seat.”

  From the van behind them, Sierra called out, “What do you want me to do with your bag, Lacy?”

  Lacy didn’t know how to answer that. She looked at Paul.

  “Leave her stuff on the ground. I’ll take care of it,” he said.

  Lacy avoided looking toward Sierra. Right now she didn’t want to deal with the issue of where she’d be staying. The sun glinted off Paul’s round glasses and into her own eyes. He planted one boot on the boulder next to the one Lacy sat on.

  “It’s been an ungodly awful morning,” he said. “Max, our backer—our benefactor, I guess you’d call him—is dead. He died this morning.”

  “I’m so sorry.” Lacy felt a jolt as the image of the body on the slope flashed through her mind. She assumed Paul was talking about a wealthy man, probably an American, who bankrolled the dig but wasn’t personally involved. If he died this morning, that would mean he actually died last night because it wasn’t yet morning in America. “How did you hear about it?”

  “Because he died here. In that tent over there.” Paul pointed toward the cluster of tents where Lacy now saw several people milling around.

  “He was here?”

  “His foundation funds a number of projects, but this year he said he wanted to get his hands dirty. Instead of only collecting finds and prepping them for the museum, he wanted to do the hard work with us.”

  “How old was he?”

  “About fifty-five, maybe sixty.”

  “Awfully young for a sudden death like that. What was it? Heart attack?”

  “We don’t know yet. Might’ve been. Henry, his secretary, went with the ambulance to the hospital and he isn’t back yet. Hopefully, he’ll have something to tell us about why he died.”

  A soft breeze swirled through the cluster of almond trees and cooled Lacy’s sweaty hair and neck. “Had he been sick?”

  “Nope. He was fine last night. I talked to him after dinner about how to handle … oh, never mind. Not important now. He was fine last night but when Todd, our photographer, went to his tent this morning to find out why he hadn’t come to breakfast, there he was. Still in bed and stone cold dead.”

  “Could you tell how long he’d been dead?”

  “I couldn’t. Maybe they’ll be able to make an estimate at the hospital.” Paul poked a blade of grass through his front teeth.

  “What about his family?”

  “Bob Mueller is trying to call them, but there isn’t much family. The wife’s not mentally competent. Alzheimer’s or something. I don’t exactly know. And then there’s Max’s father, who,” Paul took a deep breath, “had a stroke last week. He’s still in the hospital, in a coma. So Bob’s trying to get through to someone from the Sebring Foundation but they’re in New York where it’s only,” Paul looked at his watch, “four a.m.”

  “I guess it sounds crass, but what does this mean for your funding?”

  “I don’t know, but now is not the time to ask. Very uncool to say, ‘Sorry about Max but what about our money.’”

  “Right.” She looked out across the dig site where several workers were engaged in routine work, probably because they didn’t know what else to do.

  “We can meet payroll this Friday, but after that, who knows?”

  “Wait a minute. Did you call him Max?”

  “Yeah,” Paul said, wrinkling his nose quizzically. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose with his middle finger, a habit Lacy hadn’t thought about for nearly two years. She wondered if it was Paul’s unconscious way of flipping a bird to the world.

  “And he’s head of the Sebring Foundation?” Lacy felt adrenaline rush to her feet and fingertips. “Max Sebring? Given name, Maxwell Sebring?”

  “We all called him Max,” Paul said. “But yeah, it was Maxwell, actually.”

  “Maxwell Sebring couldn’t possibly have died here this morning because Maxwell Sebring died on my train this morning, somewhere between here and Konya!”

  * * *

  Paul stared at her.

  Lacy waited for him to ask for an explanation of her strange statement, and when he didn’t she studied his face. Omigod, he thinks I’m kidding! He must think I’m a total hard-hearted jerk, waiting for him to ask me to explain so I can spin out some ridiculous pun or something. “Paul, have a seat. Let me tell you what happened on the train this morning.”

  She told him the story including her buying the man a ticket and finding the trench coat, but leaving out some details, like the policeman from New York. Paul’s eyes darted to the dig, to the tents, to the field behind them. Obviously preoccupied with his own problems, he kept watching that open field as if hoping for a cloud of dust announcing the return of Sebring’s secretary. Lacy wondered if he was even listening.

  “So! Here I am, all stoked to tell you about the death of Maxwell Sebring on my train this morning and you tell me Maxwell Sebring died here! At about the same time.”

  Paul glanced over his shoulder again, then looked at her, his head tilted. “I don’t know what to say, Twigs. What can I say? You say it happened, it happened.”

  “Is that it?” Lacy ignored his use of the nickname she hated and popped up, spinning around on the toe of one boot. “Is that all you can say?”

&
nbsp; “Incredible coincidence.”

  “Coincidence?”

  “They do happen.”

  “No! I miss a flight and the plane crashes. That’s coincidence. Two American men with the same name die, in Turkey, less than a hundred miles apart, on the same day. That’s not coincidence. That’s something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh for God’s sake. I don’t know! But there has to be a connection.”

  “Sit down.” He patted the boulder beside him. “The connection is obvious. No mystery. A connection, but no mystery.”

  Lacy sat, jiggling her left foot to work out the adrenaline.

  “Max flew into Istanbul about two weeks ago. He probably spent a couple of days in the city before coming out here. While he was there, he may have lost his trench coat. Or maybe the bum you saw on the train stole it. Yesterday, the guy decides he needs to go east, and he hops a train but can’t buy a ticket so he takes his chances on avoiding the conductor. Hey, he’s a bum! He’s dirty and his clothes smell, but his nice new trench coat is clean. No mystery.”

  “You should have seen the look on his face.”

  “Sort of a haunted, wasted, defeated look? That’s how bums look.”

  “If I hadn’t bought him that ticket, he’d have been thrown off at the first stop and he’d be alive right now.”

  “Knock it off, Twigs. Bad logic.” Paul stood, glanced across the field behind them one more time, and grabbed her wrist, pulling her up from the boulder. “Let me show you around.”

  Chapter Five

  Lacy’s only previous work in archaeology had been in Egypt two years earlier, and the contrast between the settings was stark. The tomb she helped to analyze in Luxor fairly vibrated with color. Color on the walls, color on the ceilings, color on the coffins and the pottery and the linens. She had to brace herself each day for the onslaught of color. Kheta Tepe—that was what Sierra called this site—was drab. Unpainted mud-brick walls, plain clay pottery reduced mostly to sherds, box-like pits with sharp corners that appeared not one bit different from the soil all around.