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

by Maria Hudgins

  The logistics of uniting Lacy with her new passport took a few minutes. Milo asked her why she had called the hotel rather than his cell phone and she answered, truthfully in this case, that she’d lost the phone he bought her and it held her only record of his number. After she rang off she located the button that raised the head of her bed, sat up, and buzzed the nurse. She was ready for some clothes. The nurse who helped her dress reminded her to drink water because the doctor wouldn’t dismiss her until she produced a respectable amount of pee.

  Once clad in a cotton hospital gown, Lacy sat back and looked out the window. It was full on dark now. She intended to leave her light on for quite some time and hoped they wouldn’t put a roommate in the empty bed beside her.

  So the driver who ran her off the road hadn’t been Milo after all. Milo was in Istanbul and he couldn’t possibly have been following her on GPS—the very idea seemed foolish now—therefore someone had been doing a damn good impression of him. Maybe not so good, though. The caller had been a man with a British accent, but she couldn’t swear it really was Milo. At the time, she hadn’t questioned it.

  A doctor and a couple of nurses walked in. While one of the nurses took her vital signs, the doctor quizzed her on the state of her head, her eyesight, and her bladder.

  Lacy’s phone rang and it was Elbert MacSweeney returning her call. “Do you remember,” she asked, “telling me about presenting the carpet to Max Sebring? I showed you a photo and you recognized him, but here’s the problem. If that was really Max Sebring, several things aren’t making sense.”

  “The picture you showed me was definitely Max Sebring,” MacSweeney said. “I spent an hour with the man only a week or so earlier. How could I not recognize him?”

  “You said there was something about that meeting, though. Something you couldn’t remember.”

  “Did I?”

  “You did. I’ve been studying that carpet and it’s filled with symbols I’ve never seen in a Turkish carpet before. Symbols that seem to refer to people and events peculiar to the Sebring family. To Max and his wife, Nina, and to their two children who were killed in a plane crash.”

  “Aha! Brilliant! Now I remember.”

  “What was it?”

  “Max did have the woman weave in symbols of his own design. She agreed to do them as long as they didn’t violate the Muslim rule against graven images. Neither she nor I had any idea what they meant, but I remember Max drew them and divided them into five groups. He wanted one group in the center along with the tree of life. The other four were to go into the corners outside the central diamond.”

  “That’s exactly right.” Lacy grasped the phone as if it might vanish in a puff of smoke, like every other lead she’d tried to follow.

  “That’s what struck me as strange. When Max came to pick it up, he went on and on about how beautiful it was and how it was just the right size and how much work it must have taken. But he didn’t even look at the symbols. Wouldn’t that have been the first thing he should have looked at? I even pointed them out to him, and all he said was, ‘Yes, yes. Very nice.’ After all the letters back and forth and the drawings, I wondered why he was completely ignoring the parts he’d been so specific about.”

  “Thank you, Elbert. Things may be starting to make sense.”

  “Did you find the man you were looking for?”

  “Not yet, but things are beginning to shake out. I think.”

  She settled the laptop on her thighs and pulled up the photos Todd had given her, plus the ones she’d found on the Internet. All photos of Max Sebring. She concentrated on the one of Max in a tuxedo, taken a couple of years ago, and the one Todd had taken of Max sitting at a table under a tree. Probably the same table they used at lunch. Max had one hand on a can of Pepsi. Were these photos really of the same man? Simple as it might sound to look at a photo and say, ‘yes, they are the same man,’ or, ‘no, they aren’t,’ Lacy knew it wasn’t easy at all. Witnesses often identify the wrong person in police line-ups. School yearbook editors go crazy if someone loses the ID numbers that go with the photos. Victims scratch their heads over mug shots.

  Here was a man in a tuxedo, body in profile, average build, head turned to face the camera. Thinning hair, salt and pepper, receding hairline, thin lips, dark pointy eyebrows, eyes probably brown or hazel, deep grooves between eyebrows. Clean-shaven.

  And here was a man in an open-necked tan shirt. Sitting, facing the camera, thinning hair, receding hairline, three distinct rows of wrinkles running across his forehead like waves. Eyes probably brown or hazel, but he was squinting in the sunlight pouring through the leaves above him, dappling his face and shirt. Thin lips. Bony right hand on Pepsi can. No rings, at least none on his right hand. Short, rather scrubby, goatee. Too bad about the goatee. It kept her from making a good comparison between the shapes of the lips.

  The first photo was about two years earlier than the second, and in two years a lot can change. Thinning hair gets thinner. Graying hair gets spruced up with Grecian Formula. Facial lines get deeper. Noses and ears get longer. Skin sags.

  But one thing won’t change. Barring the use of certain prescription medicines, the wearing of colored contacts, or serious health problems, eye color in adults stays the same. The problem with these two photos was that the lighting was different. One artificial, one natural. If only she could adjust the colors in both to a single standard. This was Lacy’s specialty and she had all sorts of software on her laptop for dealing with color.

  She felt herself shifting into a comfortable groove. Comparing colors. It’s what she did for a living. But to do it, she needed something in both photos that she could be certain were the identical color. Then she could adjust the spectrum in both. Clothing was useless, as was skin tone. Depending on the time of year, the same man’s skin might be very different hues.

  She studied both photos for several minutes and was ready to give it up as a lost cause when her gaze wandered to the bar behind the tuxedo-clad Max. On it, a couple of drink glasses, a tip jar, a can of tomato juice and a can of Pepsi. Pepsi. Red white and blue logo, the same all over the world. It was a start. Manipulating the spectra until the reds, blues, and whites in both matched, she zeroed in on the eyes. Fortunately, both photos had been taken through excellent lenses. She enlarged the eyes, adjusted the shadows cast by the eyelashes, and played with them until she was certain she was looking at an iris from each photo as if they’d been taken under the same light conditions.

  They were not the same eyes.

  Tuxedo Max’s eyes were greenish with flecks of yellow. Max at the dig site had eyes of pale brown. These were not the same man and since she felt certain Tuxedo Max would have been known by many others at the gala affair, she could hardly imagine he was an imposter. Was the man on the train the real Max after all? As nearly as she could remember the haunted face of the man on the train and the police photo she’d briefly seen of the corpse, she could think of nothing to eliminate the possibility. That left dig site Max as the imposter. But how? It seemed impossible. Henry and Bob had known him for years.

  An old-fashioned wind-up clock on the enameled stand beside her bed said eleven o’clock. Her eyes, sunburned and strained, threatened to quit working altogether. She turned off her light and let the thousands of the day’s images float past her closed lids. Max’s passport. Now why did she think of that? One stamp. Ataturk Airport, Istanbul. Hadn’t Henry mentioned both of them going to China about three months ago? The passport itself had been issued in January, seven months ago. Why was there no stamp for China? Because it hadn’t been issued to the same Max Sebring. That had to be it.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Paul drove the van back to camp, giving Bob Mueller a chance to rest in the passenger seat. The van had been getting a workout that day, with two stops along the highway for gas. It was high time, he decided, to fill Bob in on the whole man-on-the-train event and what Lacy had really been doing when she went to Istanbul.

  �
��Why the hell didn’t you tell me about any of this?” Bob’s face reddened. He patted both shirt pockets and both pants pockets, feeling for something that wasn’t there.

  “Lacy asked me not to.”

  “Who’s running this show? Me or her?”

  “I didn’t think any of this involved the dig. A man wearing Max’s trench coat dies on a train. How does that concern us?”

  Bob made a growling noise and tapped an empty orange breath mint box against the palm of his hand. “Lacy tracks Max’s route around Istanbul, she goes to see the man who sold him a rug, and she gets abducted by somebody named Jason. A guy named Milo tells Lacy our cook is a smuggler and he has orders to kill her? It concerns us! It concerns us!”

  “I know that now, that’s why I’m telling you.” Paul paused before going on. He would have given anything for a cigarette. “There’s more.”

  “Go on.”

  “Lacy told Henry about all this and about how she went to the police station and saw a photo of the dead man from the train. Henry went to the station this morning and ID’d the guy—well, actually a picture of the guy. They’ve already buried him. Henry says he’s Clifford Craven.”

  Bob turned toward Paul but said nothing.

  “Ring a bell?” Paul asked.

  “Not really. Should it?”

  “Henry says Craven Plumbing and Electric did contract work for the Sebring Museum. Clifford Craven was the electrician half of the business and his brother did the plumbing until Max fired them because he suspected they were involved in . . . you want to guess what?”

  “Smuggling antiquities?”

  “You got it in one.”

  Paul pulled into the parking area, the van’s headlights sweeping across a camp in the process of winding down for the night. Yellow lantern light still poured out from most of the tents. Paul wondered if it was too late to ask Süleyman to scare them up some dinner.

  “What time is it back home?” Bob asked.

  “About three-thirty in the afternoon.”

  “Good. Let’s go to Four Bars Hill and call the museum.”

  * * *

  Bob talked to the museum’s curator, who confirmed that Craven Plumbing and Electric had done work for them but not in the past year. He also confirmed that Henry had dropped the company from their list of approved contractors on Max Sebring’s orders. Heading downhill together, Bob and Paul agreed their next job was to find out who really was doing the smuggling.

  “You’ve still got that earring?” Bob asked.

  “Yeah. Haven’t had a chance to turn it in yet.”

  “Better get that done.”

  Paul felt a load lifted off his shoulders. This was the first intimation that Bob knew the earring wasn’t native to their site. That it had been dropped there recently, and because Paul had found it in a freshly dug trench, it must have been dropped there only a day or two before Paul found it. That meant smuggling.

  “We need to catch them in the act,” Paul said.

  “How?”

  “Several times I’ve seen somebody walking up that hill to the east late at night. It makes sense to me that they’re working in stages. They’ve already smuggled museum pieces out of Iraq and into Syria. Somebody brings the artifacts across the Syrian border as far as here. They drop the stuff off with someone in our camp who sees that the next in line gets it. That way, no one is actually traveling from Syria to Europe with the contraband.”

  “So we do a stake-out?”

  Paul laughed. “You game?”

  “Tonight?”

  “Why not? And tomorrow night and the night after that.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  * * *

  A quarter moon deep in the west spilled a feeble light across the plain. From the crest of the hill, the river valley lay to the east. And to the west, the camp. Four Bars Hill, with the moon behind it, was barely visible over the top of the big dining tent and some quarter mile distant. Paul hunkered down behind a bush on the north slope of the hill, glad for the cover of darkness but wishing he could see better. He chose this spot for the view it would give him of the river valley to the east. He knew he couldn’t be seen by anyone in the camp. It got downright cold here at night and Paul was shivering in his canvas jacket.

  Meanwhile, Bob Mueller sat in a folding chair in the dark just inside the main tent, hidden from anyone walking by. So far he’d noted the passage of three people, each known to him and each heading for the port-a-potty. He lifted the binoculars that hung from his neck and scanned the darkened camp, then raised them to take in as much of the northern and eastern horizon as he could without stepping outside and being seen. Crickets and tree frogs chirped. The night air still held the scent of dying embers from a fire the students had built earlier that evening.

  This was boring but necessary. Would they have to keep it up all night? Tomorrow night? How long? He wondered if he could squeeze one more cup of coffee from the urn on the opposite side of the room. Even cold coffee would help him keep his eyes open. But could he risk leaving his post long enough to try? Süleyman had left stacks of cups beside the urn. It was tempting, but what would Paul say if their hypothetical smuggler walked by and Bob missed him? Was there really a smuggler operating in the area? Bob wasn’t a hundred percent convinced and even if there was, what were the odds of catching him—or them—tonight? What if there were several of them? Would they drive up or walk? Were they already here? Part of the dig? Just thinking about it made his heart beat faster and that was good. A pounding heart would at least keep him awake. Would he and Paul be able to handle it? What if their prey was armed? Neither he nor Paul had a gun because they’d agreed to forbid firearms in the camp. If there were smugglers, and if they did catch them, then what? He imagined what would follow. The police would take the bad guys into custody, Interpol would come and investigate, they’d wring the truth out of them, they’d find the contraband, and the international press would be abuzz. Reporters would swarm in from everywhere, clamoring for interviews with the men who busted the smuggling ring.

  The more Bob thought about it, the more he didn’t mind the wait. His pounding heart drowned out the chirping crickets and now he was wide awake.

  * * *

  Thoroughly chilled, Paul shifted his weight, which dislodged a stone that rattled down the slope, dislodging others as it went. The noise it made was probably not as loud as he thought it was but it set off a mini-landslide. Small creatures hiding nearby darted here and there in response to the noise. A lizard skittered across his outstretched leg.

  He heard a twig snap. The sound seemed to come from the top of the hill several yards from his hiding spot. Turning his head, he saw a dark figure picking its way down the hill in his direction. Paul froze in his squatting position and held his breath. The figure passed by no more than five yards away from him and continued down the slope. It was a big man, heavily built, and he was carrying a long stick. But he wasn’t using it as a walking stick. He held it at its midpoint, swinging it along at his side. The moonlight caught the object for a moment and Paul saw it was a crowbar.

  The man stopped well short of the river. Paul watched him search the ground for a minute, walking back and forth through the short vegetation that peppered the flood plain. The man flashed a cone of light on the ground for no more than a second, then snapped it off.

  Paul had to stand to see the man’s whole body past the curve in the hill. Fortunately, just enough moonlight reflected off the river water to cast the man in silhouette. The figure stabbed the ground with the crowbar, then pumped it back and forth as if to settle its curved end under something. He stood back, and with both hands on the upper end of the lever gave it a firm downward shove that forced his shoulders up around his neck.

  Paul took off down the hill, ripping off his canvas jacket as he ran. He concentrated on maintaining a straight path, avoiding rocky outcrops and gullies.

  He intended to throw his jacket over the man’s head, momentarily confusing
him, but at the last second, after Paul was airborne, the man jerked around. His beefy arm flew out whipping the crowbar around, but Paul landed a solid kick to the ribs beneath the armpit.

  His prey bent forward and Paul’s left knee delivered a debilitating blow to the man’s coccyx. He hadn’t really wanted to do that. The broken tailbone would need surgery. Couldn’t be helped. The crowbar pinged against a rock a couple of feet away. For several seconds, the lump on the ground didn’t move. Then the arms bent into a push-up position. Paul took aim at the man’s sciatic nerve, just below the fold of the buttocks, and slammed his right boot into the vulnerable spot. That would keep him down for a while.

  Paul found his jacket on the ground, and from its pocket pulled the skein of waxed twine he’d stuck there earlier in anticipation of this situation. He trussed the inert form hand and foot. The flashlight his victim had used earlier lay beneath his shoulder. Paul turned him face up, grabbed the light, and flicked it on.

  The face belonged to Todd Majewski.

  Paul determined that Todd still had a strong pulse and, using his long distance two-fingered whistle, signaled for Bob to join him. The eyelids fluttered as Paul heard Bob scrambling down the hill, muttering something about needing backup. One of them would have to go to Four Bars Hill to call the police.

  “Look at the piece of shit we caught,” Paul said. “It looks a lot like our multi-tasking photographer. How about watching him while I try to find out why he was sleepwalking way down here.”

  Paul took his own flashlight to the disturbed patch of earth where the crowbar had dug in. He found it alongside a pumpkin-sized boulder some thirty yards from the river’s edge. Another rock lay a few inches from it, conveniently serving as a fulcrum for lifting the boulder. Todd moved and groaned loudly when Paul plied the crowbar and dislodged the boulder.

  “Well, well. Looky here!” Paul said.

  The boulder had concealed a plastic-lined hole. Paul pulled out a five gallon bucket, pried off its lid, and found a jumble of ancient artifacts the Baghdad Museum and Interpol would very much like returned to their rightful homes.