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

by Maria Hudgins

  A youngish man in a threadbare jacket jumped out, primed for a fight. His face fell when he saw his opponent, as if he was thinking, “No fair! I can’t hit a woman!” Lacy looked at both cars. Horns were already blaring behind them. Her driver’s side door was scored with the silver paint of his fender, but his car looked as if it hadn’t suffered at all, at least not from this particular collision. A number of other encounters, though, had dinged its body pretty thoroughly. Shouting in Turkish, he pointed to one of the worst scrapes down the side and Lacy couldn’t help noticing it held traces of red paint. Her own car was white.

  She peeled off two hundred-lira notes from the cash Joan had sent her. This, she figured, was more than enough to fix the damage she hadn’t even caused.

  The young man’s face brightened for a micro-second, then returned to a scowl, but the money zipped out of her hand so quickly she was surprised she didn’t get a paper cut. Problem solved.

  The next half-hour was sheer panic drawn out to almost unendurable lengths. Forced more than once into a lane she didn’t want, she had to backtrack through unmarked side streets and, eyes closed, cross intersections that looked like the bumper car concession at an amusement park. When she at last merged onto the motorway, she allowed herself a deep breath and felt like kissing the sign that told her she was, indeed, headed east. And thank you, Ataturk, for changing the country’s Arabic script to the Latin alphabet. Had she been making this trip before 1928, she wouldn’t have been able read that sign.

  Shadows were already long with the departing day. She rolled down her windows and drove past fields of yellow sunflowers, all their heads turned to the west as if to greet her. What a day.

  Chapter Sixteen

  As darkness settled, the inadequacy of motorway lighting kept Lacy from seeing lane markers clearly. Buses and trucks, with and without headlights, ruled the road and bullied her little Ford. She decided she wouldn’t try to make it to Ankara that night. Instead, she began looking for a place to stay, checking billboards for promising ads, scanning the horizon for the tell-tale glow of a town. Not yet confident enough to venture off an exit ramp or pull onto the shoulder to check her map, she hoped to exit one time and be done with it.

  Meanwhile, she let her mind wander to the larger problem. Who is that guy who called himself Jason? He seemed legitimate because the trench coat made it to the police station, and with a few items still in its pockets. So why did he leave her taped up and gagged? Who was the mystery man on the train, and why was he killed? If he’d been held as she had been, then escaped, that might account for his filthy appearance—not too different from her own—and for his lack of money. Who was the woman with formerly orange hair? How had Jason known Lacy was upstairs over the fish market, and why did he leave her there rather than move her to a more remote spot—or simply kill her?

  Jason must have killed the man on the train. She reviewed that hour in her mind, minute by minute. Jason takes a seat in the Pullman car across the aisle from her. He introduces himself and they make small talk for a few minutes. Out of concern for her own safety, she heeds the guidebook’s warning and reveals no information about exactly where she’s going. She does mention going to an archaeological dig and she does tell him her real name. Jason pulls a cell phone out of his pocket, looks at the screen, and leaves through the door at the front of the car. Does her name ring a bell? Does he actually get a call, or is that a pretense so he can get up and leave? If he does he might figure he’d get a better signal in the vestibule between cars because the windows there are open, but it’s also the noisiest place on the train, the wheels and the couplings between cars making a constant racket.

  The man in the green trench coat walks into the Pullman car while Lacy is in the toilet and takes the same seat Jason has just vacated. Was this deliberate? Did he know Jason? Did he know Jason was on board? Did Jason know he was onboard? He gets up and leaves the car while Lacy is brushing her teeth in the facilities, such as they are. She returns and the green trench coat is left on the seat.

  “I’m an idiot!” Lacy said it out loud to the steering wheel.

  It was so clear to her now. Jason was chasing the man in the trench coat. That’s why the poor man had such a haunted look. He was running for his life. Jason must have known he was on the train somewhere. If Jason were really a policeman he’d have identified himself to the train personnel and asked for their help. Ergo, he wasn’t really a policeman.

  Jason recognizes the trench coat and knows the man can’t be far away. He’s probably in an adjacent car or one of the toilets. He finds his prey in the vestibule and kills him, and throws him off the train. Jason, built like a bullmastiff, could have broken the smaller man’s neck easily. Assuming no one will see the body as it rolls down the embankment out of the sight of passengers, Jason could also figure the broken neck would look like a result of the fall.

  What a shock it must have been when, seconds later, the train comes to a screeching halt, alarms clanging! And then, as he’s standing outside commiserating with the other men huddled around the body, I bring him his victim’s trench coat!

  Lacy spotted a billboard with a picture of a swimming pool, a cozy bedroom, “3.5 km” in large letters accompanied by an arrow pointing straight up, and the logo of a hotel chain. Couldn’t be any better than that. She checked her odometer and added 3.5.

  With one eye on the odometer, she had another thought. Why had Jason given the trench coat to the police? Then another thought. Why not give it to the police? Perhaps the coat and its label were of no importance.

  Finding the hotel advertised on the billboard wasn’t easy. Lacy didn’t know what town she was in or where the center of it might be. The streets were nearly deserted. When she noticed buildings and lights becoming sparser, she turned around, gears grinding, in a derelict parking lot where a business must have once existed, weeds now splitting and heaving chunks of concrete like icebergs. Backtracking, she saw a brightly lit modern building ahead. She pulled into the porte cochère behind a BMW with its motor running and its headlights on. The name on the building’s glass front doors showed was the hotel she was looking for. How did she miss it? She veered around the BMW and into a nearby parking space.

  With only a plastic bag for luggage, checking into a room might have been impossible without a credit card or driver’s license, but Lacy handed over enough cash for one night and said something totally illogical in rapid-fire English. With her most innocent face she gave a false name. She answered all the desk clerk’s questions in gibberish until he gave up, pretended to understand, and handed her a room key.

  Once inside her room, she turned off the lights and looked out the window. It gave onto a parking lot opposite the front entrance but she had no idea what sort of vehicle she should look out for. She was famished. Should she try room service or the dining room downstairs? Having no desire to deal with extra charges to her room or worry about the true identity of whoever delivered the food, she opted for the dining room.

  * * *

  Her waiter wanted to be friendly. “Just visiting Turkey?”

  “Yes, but only for a couple of weeks.”

  “How do you like, so far?”

  “It’s beautiful. I wish I could stay longer.” Lacy steered the topic in another direction. “Do you have many Americans staying here?”

  “Always a few. Always some English, some French also.”

  “I suppose they usually talk your ear off. The Americans, I mean.” Lacy said it with a smile. She hoped to steer him toward telling her about any Americans who had stopped in today and what they may have said, but it didn’t work.

  “Talk my ear off?” Not familiar with the idiom, he grabbed one ear with his free hand. “No. I still have them.”

  * * *

  Back in her room, she showered and pulled on her old Betty Boop T-shirt, so cozy and familiar. She plugged in her laptop and logged onto the hotel’s Internet. Scrolling through her accumulated email, she found a new message f
rom her parents, still on vacation, and one from Joan Friedman, asking if Lacy had received the money. Joan also wanted more details than Lacy had given her by phone.

  The date, according to her computer, was Wednesday, August 17th. Her return flight from Istanbul back to the dig was for tomorrow. Lacy guessed she’d miss it.

  Near the bottom of the list of emails almost buried among the usual spam, she spied a message that froze her to her chair:

  From: goldenboy360

  Are you proud of yourself? Don’t be. You aren’t home free and you won’t be until we meet and have a little talk.

  * * *

  Okay. Deep breath. Lacy resisted the impulse to hit the delete key and asked herself what she could learn from this message. It had been sent at 4:58 p.m. Turkish time, about the time when she and Milo rented the car. If the message was sent by Jason, this meant he hadn’t been arrested for breaking into her room at her Istanbul hotel—unless he’d been released rather quickly. Might he have sent this message from his cell phone while at the police station? How had he learned her email address?

  Goldenboy360. What did that tell her? The account was gmail. The name indicated the sender was male, therefore not the woman with formerly orange hair. Did the name indicate he considered himself a shining example of manhood? Did he have a thing for gold? The 360 could mean a complete turn or it could mean nothing more than his having been the 360th person to ask for that username.

  If he knew her email address, what else did he know?

  Lacy stood and peeked through the drawn curtains to the parking lot below. Was there anything in the message he sent that could help him find her now? She thought not. She’d seen no request for notification when read, so he wouldn’t know when or if she opened her mail. What about GPS? Did her prepaid phone have it? How about her car? Could he be using it to track her? How could he possibly know about either?

  Lacy wished she knew more about the digital world she lived in. With all her education, she still felt at times like an ignoramus. Unless the creep had followed her and Milo to the rental car office, she saw no way he could be tracking her.

  Why had he sent this message? To scare her?

  Wait. If Jason had evaded the hotel personnel after Lacy told them to check for thieves on the fifth floor, he and his companion would have gone … where? Where would he guess she would go next? To the train station? To the airport? No, she’d need a passport to fly and he had that. To the U.S. Consulate, of course, to apply for a new one. Did he go to the Consulate, watch her go in, and when she left follow her to the car rental office? He could have. At any rate, if he thinks I’m going to meet him unaccompanied by the 1st infantry, he’s crazy.

  Lacy put her computer to sleep and crawled into the big bed. The sheets felt cool and clean against her sore body. For some strange reason, she thought if her mother were here, she’d forbid Lacy to crawl in before they’d removed the linens and turned the mattress over, checking for bedbugs. Ah well. Bedbugs have to eat, too. Might as well be me. That thought sent her to sleep with a smile on her face.

  Chapter Seventeen

  At dusk the next day, Lacy pulled off the road and bounced down the rutted tracks to the dig site, her neck muscles strained from constantly turning to see if she was being followed. Though she had no clue what sort of vehicle to watch for, she reasoned that any vehicle, seen more than once, would be suspicious. She maneuvered the little white Ford around the worst gullies, by this time expertly plying the clutch and shifting gears without that horrible grinding noise. With more than a hint of pride she brought her hiatus to an end, hoping she could tell Paul about it without gloating, but the fact was she had escaped an abduction as few could have done. She had capitalized on her unique bone structure, kept her head—now sore but no longer throbbing—traded gold for a bit of cash, hooked up with a would-be spy, broken into a hotel room, foiled her pursuers, and driven across Turkey with no license, no passport, and no hope of avoiding arrest if stopped. And no hope of being believed if she told the truth.

  Something was wrong. As soon as Lacy pulled up to a space at the edge of the camp, she felt it in her skin and on the back of her neck. Something indefinable but not good. The canvas tents glowed golden in the sun’s last rays. Some of the tents were gone, she thought. Surely there used to be more.

  Her watch said seven-fifty. Dinnertime. Pocketing her keys, she climbed out and walked through the little olive grove toward the big tent and the mixed aromas of roast lamb and coffee. She should be hearing raucous laughter by now. She stopped. Voices were indeed coming from the tent but they were subdued. Yellow lights from lanterns dotted the encampment, but there were definitely fewer tents. Two silhouettes, men wearing hats, stood on a rise just behind the big tent, beyond the muddy area where the shower enclosure stood. Instead of going into the tent, Lacy slipped around its north side, sticking close to it.

  “You’re screwing the whole thing up!” Paul was facing her way and his voice carried clearly over the distance. “I’ve worked five years for this and I will not let you fuck it up!”

  “You’re forgetting who invited who,” Bob Mueller said, his voice less distinct but no less angry.

  “It’s a wild goose chase. You take off and go walkabout with a damn metal detector and you’re going to lose this spot to whoever the fuck wants to take it over! That gold earring has nothing to do with Croesus. And it’s not Hittite, either.”

  “If we knew what layer it came from, we could narrow that down, but against every rule in the book you decide to pick it up and hide it in your tent!”

  “It wasn’t in any layer. It was lying on the dirt at the bottom of the trench. It could have fallen from anywhere.” Paul began walking in Lacy’s direction and Mueller followed. “Could have fallen out of a damned airplane for all we know!”

  Lacy sneaked around to the front of the tent and waited until Paul and Mueller appeared. Inside, it looked as if the meal was over. People sat around with coffee mugs, their feet propped up on extra chairs.

  “Lizzy. You’re back.” Mueller called to her from the corner of the tent.

  Paul ran to her and grabbed her up in a painful hug. He smelled of earth and sweat. “Where the hell have you been?” Lacy loved the feel of his arms in spite of the pain. She longed to bury her face in the crook of his neck, close her eyes, and drift away.

  “Long story. Hi, Bob.”

  Bob Mueller nodded. “We expected you back this morning. Henry drove all the way to the airport in Adana to pick you up.” His voice flat, he obviously felt she owed them an explanation, and it had better be a good one.

  “Where is Henry? I owe him an apology.” She looked around. Both men stood silent, waiting for an explanation. “I missed my flight and drove here in a rental car.”

  “Since this morning? No way,” Paul said. “It’s a two-day drive, Twigs!”

  “I mean, I rented a car and drove here in two days, missing my flight in the process.”

  “You should have called,” Mueller said, popping an orange breath mint in his mouth.

  “Like I said it’s a long story, but I need to talk to Paul first.”

  Mueller turned on his heel and headed for the big tent, passing Henry Jones who was coming out.

  Henry hailed her and tramped up, his dark eyes locked on Lacy’s. “Where the hell were you? I waited at the gate until the plane emptied. I asked at the desk. They told me you were a no-show.” Lacy’s apologies had little effect. Henry was angry with her and had every right to be. “You could have called.”

  “I lost my phone.”

  “They have pay phones.”

  “I know, Henry, and I am sorry. I’ll explain things better tomorrow, I promise, but right now I need to talk to Paul.”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, I don’t need any more problems! My boss is dead. Technically I’m unemployed, but everyone still thinks I’m in charge. How stupid is that? And I just wasted a whole day trying to meet someone who doesn’t even bother to pick up
a phone and tell me she’s not coming!”

  * * *

  Paul took Lacy to his tent. She let him tell her about the developments on site since she’d left, knowing that her own story would take a long time to tell and would overshadow whatever he had to say. She had decided to tell him everything because nothing less would make sense. She would let him ask her whatever he wanted and she’d answer as honestly as she could. She needed an ally and a confidant now, but she didn’t really expect anything more from him than a tongue-lashing for the risks she’d taken in Istanbul.

  Paul cracked open an Efes beer for each of them and dumped a pile of books off a chair so Lacy could sit. A book titled Treasures of the Iraq Museum landed on top of the pile and slid down at an angle. His cluttered space was even more cluttered than when she’d last seen it. Shed clothes lay everywhere, and papers, several of which looked like printouts of emails buried what she knew was his computer. Empty drink cans, bent like fortune cookies, spilled from an over-full wastebasket.

  Since the attack on Sierra Blue, he told her, a cloud of apprehension had overtaken the site. No longer like summer camp for big kids, nightfall now brought an eerie feeling of unnamed danger. Sierra and several others had started sleeping at the dorm.

  “I thought the place was missing a few tents. I noticed it when I drove up.”