Bone Box

by Jay Amberg

  They walk around to the porch without going through her house. The aroma of spiced stew is in the air. With an overhanging roof and a view of Ephesus and the Aegean, the porch has the feel of a veranda. Ceramic wind chimes hanging from one of the rafters jingle in the soft breeze. A low wooden table separates a pair of cushioned wooden armchairs.

  “Would you like a drink?” she asks, waving him to the chair on the left.

  “Anything but raki,” he answers.

  Placing a hand on her chest in mock distress, she says, “Please, I am half-French.” From the Glavine Foundation background information, Travers already knows that her father was a Turkish diplomat in the early days of the Republic and that her mother was a French archeologist. Altay was educated at Sacred Heart and the Sorbonne in Paris and at Cambridge where she completed her DPhil in archeology. But she grew up an international child, and he really doesn’t know how Turkish or French she is—or for that matter, if either culture defines her.

  While she’s in the house, he looks out over the valley to the thin line of sea. The hill falls sharply below the low stone wall just beyond the porch, and shades of green run in patterns to the horizon. The sun is low enough to be bright in his eyes, and the westerly breeze makes the evening comfortable.

  Altay pushes the screen door open with her hip and steps out carrying an open bottle of red wine, a bowl of black olives, and two glasses. He takes the bowl and glasses from her and sets them on the table.

  “How was Ephesus?” she asks as she pours the wine.

  “The restoration was amazing,” he says, “but I like the feel of it here at Saint John’s better.”

  She looks at him for a moment before placing the bottle on the table and taking a seat in the other chair. “What do you mean?” she asks.

  He picks up the glass and swirls the wine. The waves of refracting light bring Homer’s wine-dark sea to mind. “It’s a feeling,” he says, knowing that’s not an explanation. He can’t tell her about the presence, even if he could articulate it.

  “A feeling?” Her eyes, bright with the setting sun, still hold uneasiness. She’s suppressing strong emotion, doing a good job, but her eyes suggest that she’s not going to be able to hold it in through the evening. She raises her glass and tinks it against his.

  He tastes the wine, thinks it’s terrific, and drinks deeply.

  When Altay catches him eyeing the label’s appellation, she says, “The estate’s a family secret.”

  He lifts the glass and turns it in the light. “This is your family’s?”

  She smiles, then does the Cat Woman thing with her eyes, anger supplanting the other emotions that are there. “Leopold and Charles Lee are in town,” she says.

  “In Selçuk?” The night before, neither of them mentioned anything about coming.

  “Yes. Leopold wanted a meeting of all the principals tonight.” She keeps her eyes on Travers. “But I told him that nine tomorrow was the earliest I could arrange it.”

  He realizes, among other things, that Kirchburg isn’t keeping him in the loop. He’s not sure if the Austrian has downgraded him to the Glavines’ messenger boy or upgraded him to Altay’s co-conspirator and therefore an enemy. “When did they get in?” he asks.

  “The afternoon flight. İzmir around seventeen-hundred. Lee is staying at your hotel, but Leopold went more upscale.”

  “Why are they here?”

  She eats an olive. “Because they are Pharisees.”

  She keeps using that term. “Pharisees?” he asks.

  She slips the olive’s pit from her mouth and tosses it over the low wall and down the precipice. “Powerful, arrogant, deceitful, hypocritical, self-righteous men,” she says.

  That seems harsh, particularly for Lee, but Travers remembers how she bristled when she first met him. He drinks more of the wine. “But that doesn’t explain why they’ve come now,” he says.

  “They think I’m holding out on them. Covering up a significant find.”

  He looks into her eyes. “And are you?”

  She selects an olive and slides it into her mouth.

  “Ms. Altay…Sophia,” he says, “are you holding something out?”

  She stares out toward the distant Aegean. “There is something. Something incredibly important.”

  Knowing better than to shout, Well, what the hell is it?, he eats an olive so fresh that it has to have been picked that afternoon.

  She tosses the second pit over the wall and then gazes at the wine glowing in the light striking her glass. “They’re…it’s not something from the citadel. And not something I’m simply going to hand over to Leopold.”

  He spits the olive pit into his fingers and flings it over the precipice. Trying to keep his voice even, he asks, “Will you tell me about it?”

  “Maybe. Probably.”

  Aware that she’s playing him, he says, “You’ll have to inform the Glavine Foundation.”

  “I know.” She lifts her gaze from the wine to his eyes. “Le pére. William Glavine, Sr. But the Pharisees will…”

  “You think Kirchburg will steal the credit?”

  She glares at him for a moment before her eyes soften, the green becoming even more vibrant. “No,” she says. “That’s not it at all.” She curls her right leg under her so that she faces him more. “He will certainly steal the credit. That’s what he does. But that’s not it.” She leans toward him. “I love my work. My work is my life.”

  He nods, though he knows he doesn’t really understand because he never actually loved his work. He liked many aspects of it, had good years, became proficient, even expert, and been well compensated—but he never loved it.

  “I told you earlier today,” she says, “that archeology is a puzzle. And it is. You find artifacts and piece them together until you understand…” She gazes at her wine again. “You come to understand the people who lived in that moment…in that time and place.” Putting her glass on the table, she adds, “And if you’re lucky, that understanding leads you to an understanding of yourself, of your moment in time.”

  He nods again, though he has never thought of archeology that way.

  A phone in her house rings, but she ignores it. She traces the top of her glass with her forefinger. Her hand is small but not soft. Her nails are cut short, and her knuckles are chafed. She wears no ring, no jewelry except a single gold rope bracelet. She looks up at him as she begins to speak again. “Once a generation or so, someone finds something that alters the puzzle itself…”

  The intensity in her eyes startles him.

  “…something that changes the way we all understand the world and ourselves.”

  He has no idea what to say but wants to keep her talking. “You mean, something so valuable?”

  “Something beyond value.”

  “But something the Pharisees, as you call them, would take from you.”

  “Yes.” The word sounds hissed. “Or despoil. Or destroy.”

  He watches her eyes harden again. “Is it here?” he asks.

  She takes her glass and breathes the wine’s bouquet, allowing her anger to diffuse. “I need time to understand them…it. And to understand its impact, the effects it will have.”

  “But you suggested this afternoon that you have no time. Or only a little time, anyway.”

  She bites her lip. “Hours. A day at most.” She tilts her glass toward the setting sun and speaks more to herself than to him. “I must decide what needs to be done. Until then, I will not turn anything over to Leopold or anyone else.”

  Neither Altay nor Travers speaks for a minute. Birds call, and traffic rumbles. The fields are going gold, and the sky is at once deeper and brighter. When a gust of wind rings the chimes, she leans back and looks out toward the sea.

  Pushing her at this point will, he thin
ks, do little good, and so he asks, “Did you always love your work?”

  She turns her head slowly, as though she’s hearing his voice echo from a distance. “Yes,” she says. “When I was a child, I visited my mother on sites so I knew there was no glamour in the work. But I still loved everything about it, even the dirt and sweat.” She smiles to herself. “Especially the dirt and the sweat.” She stands, pours more wine into his glass, and adds, “I’ll be right back.”

  17

  While Altay is in the house, Travers eats more olives and chucks the pits into the sunset. Wondering what she’s discovered that might prove invaluable, he imagines a gold reliquary or a cache of precious jewels like the pile Heinrich Schliemann took from Troy. He gazes down the hill beyond the Isa Bey Mosque at the ruins of the Temple of Artemis, said to have been the most wondrous of the Seven Wonders of the World. Now it’s little more than a pile of rubble on especially low ground between Ayasaluk Hill and Ephesus. The temple’s marble pillars were used to build Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, and the remnants with any archeological significance were later carted off to the British Museum. Altay said that the artifact was not from the citadel, and so many layers of vanquished empires and cultures and wealth and grandeur lie within his sight now that he can’t guess if the artifact is Hellenistic or Roman, Byzantine or Islamic. Or something even older. Even more curious is Altay’s attitude. She seems more apprehensive than excited by her discovery, more burdened than uplifted.

  Altay returns with a basket covered with a red cloth. “The evening’s too nice to be indoors,” she says. “And güveç is best eaten outside.” As she unwraps the bread, steam rises from the oval loaf. “The güveç will be ready in a few minutes.”

  He nods. “You were telling me,” he says, “that you visited your mother at the sites.”

  “Yes,” she answers, “in Greece and in Turkey. She was tireless, very organized. Physically slight, but strong-willed.” She tears a piece of bread from the loaf and holds it steaming above her glass of wine. “My father sometimes referred to her as his Bonaparte.”

  “Has she visited you here?” he asks.

  “No. She died two years ago. Lung cancer. Only sixty-seven.” She puts down her glass. “She had been an avid smoker since her school days.” An ironic smile crosses her face. “She liked Turkish cigarettes as much as Turkish men.”

  He doesn’t pursue the remark. “Did she ever see your work?”

  “Yes. I spent two university summers in Cappadocia. Do you know the area?”

  He shakes his head. The sky is fading and the breeze dying, a sort of nocturne playing as prelude to night itself. He holds his glass in both hands and breathes the wine.

  “In Central Anatolia,” she says. “It’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen. Steep lava formations intercut with valleys. Soft volcanic spires and turrets for miles. For more than a thousand years, people hollowed caves in the cliffs, even entire underground cities. One summer, my job was to explore the cliffs, mapping undiscovered caves.” She waves the piece of bread. “Please, have some.”

  He tears off a piece, but the bread is still too hot to eat so he slides the chunk back onto the cloth.

  “The cave dwellers…the troglodytes…” She smiles again. “They were mostly Christians, so many of the caves were small churches carved in the tufa. Some around Göreme, the Dark Church and the Church of the Virgin Mary, are quite famous now. But I mapped some that had not been seen for centuries.”

  “Are you Christian?” he asks.

  “I’m an archeologist,” she says sharply, but then her voice softens. “My mother was Catholic, my father Muslim. I was an only child, and my parents had careers that took them away from home a great deal. I received strong doses of both religions from grandparents who thought the other religion anathema.” She puts her piece of bread in her mouth, chews for a moment, and swallows. “For a time in my university days I became a Baha’i. But that attempt at mingling the religious traditions only angered relatives on both sides.” She shakes her head. “So now I am unapologetically an archeologist.”

  For a second, he feels time coiling and energy sluicing again. “And those cave churches you discovered,” he asks, “did they affect you?”

  “Spiritually?” She takes a long sip of her wine. “Yes, they did. Exploring them was the best time of my life. Even now, if ever I needed to get away, to take time off from my work, I would go directly to Göreme. There’s a cave church there that only I have visited in a millennium.” She twists more bread from the loaf. “What about you?” she asks. “Where would you go if you needed to get away?”

  He sips the wine and looks into her eyes. “Good question,” he says. Right after he fired himself from Motorola, he went back to Prescott in search of the sense of belonging he remembered feeling as a child. His mother and father had met when she was a nursing student and he was premed at the University of Michigan. After a shotgun wedding in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, the week they graduated, the couple moved to Prescott where he worked the soda fountain at his family’s Eagle Drug Store on the corner across from the Yavapai County Courthouse. Both mother and child barely survived a difficult pregnancy, and Travers’ older sister, Margaret, was born six weeks prematurely. His mother’s tubal ligation followed, and his father’s dream of medical school began to fade. The small town, large sky, open spaces, and easy access to Whiskey Row a block from Eagle Drug beckoned him, but she had trouble appreciating the country music and cigar smoke spewing from the bars, the old miners in their coveralls hanging out in the courthouse square, and the cows straying from the dairy at the south end of town.

  Travers’ adoption three years later temporarily bridged the gap between his Eastern mother and Western father, but his father’s one beer with old friends after work gradually slipped into shots and chasers spilling into the night. Travers’ mother often sent him to fetch his father who sometimes rolled willingly home and sometimes tousled Travers’ hair and slurred that he’d be along soon enough, partner. But what Travers recalled most about those years was looking out at Thumb Butte from his back bedroom window, turning on the swivel stools at the counter in his father’s drug store, rearranging supplies in his mother’s small offices first at Saint Joseph’s Academy and then at Sacred Heart Grade School which he attended, going to Saturday matinees at the Studio Theater, and having everybody in town pretty much know who he was.

  People liked his father—some of the women to whom he made regular deliveries, perhaps too much. And though people were friendly to his mother, she never forgave her husband’s falls from the wagon or the talk she sometimes thought she heard. The split was inevitable, but Travers never saw it coming—and the move to Detroit wrenched him from the only world he knew.

  Travers’ visit to Prescott after leaving Motorola was anything but a homecoming. Jack Daniels and Lucky Strikes had done in his father twelve years before. He hadn’t much spoken to any of his boyhood friends in decades, and the two who had attended his father’s funeral had had little to say other than cursory courtesies. His birth mother, whom he had only known was a northern Arizona rancher’s daughter, had never come forward. His house had been razed to build a larger, boxier home. The courthouse still stood and Whiskey Row still thrived, but the town’s sprawl had scoured the old businesses. Eagle Drug was gone along with the dairy, Sears, Woolworths, and the Piggly Wiggly. A paved path wound up Thumb Butte.

  Travers drove to Granite Dells, the swimming hole outside of town that had been the far end of the world for him and his buddies. They rode their Sting-Rays along the path next to the railroad bed, paid their nickels, swung from the tire on the tree’s overhanging branch, and dove from the brown wooden platform. But when Travers returned, the Dells had become a dry gulch. The diving platform stood above ruptured concrete, rusted railings, and twisted ladders. The surrounding granite outcroppings were utterly silent, with no echoes of joyful scre
eches or splashing laughter. On the hills above, the layers of fallen pine needles were already altering the contours of the slopes. And Travers learned again what he already knew—that in America you can’t go home because it’s no longer there.

  Now, Travers smiles at Altay, shakes his head, and repeats, “Good question.” He tilts his glass so that light pools in the wine. “Göreme sounds great.” Leaning forward, he adds, “Sophia, I need you to…”

  Shoes scuff on the concrete as Kenan Sirhan leads Leopold Kirchburg around the corner of the veranda. The Turk looks even more swarthy and stumpy standing next to the pallid and lanky Austrian. Sirhan scowls; Kirchburg, arms folded across his chest, cocks his head, seemingly bemused. Sirhan speaks urgently in Turkish, and the only word Travers understands is Kirchburg.

  By the time Travers stands, Altay is already on her feet, her fists balled at her sides. She says something curt and shakes her head. As she and Kenan exchange terse Turkish, Kirchburg begins to smirk.

  Kenan turns toward Travers, raises his hand, jabs his forefinger violently in the air, and spits Turkish in a threatening tirade that ends with Amerikan. He smells of raki.

  “Hayır, Kenan!” Altay shouts. “Dur!”

  Sirhan wipes his head hard, almost scraping the baldness with his fingernails, and glares at Travers.

  “Hosca kalm, Kenan!” Altay says, barely controlling her voice.

  Sirhan yanks at his mustache and mutters, “Sons of Greeks!” in English. He glowers once more at Travers, turns on his heels, and slouches back around the corner.

  “Gute Nacht, Fräulein Altay,” Kirchburg says. He smiles down at her and then nods to Travers. His pleated slacks are unwrinkled, and his shirt is starched. His variegated beard looks freshly trimmed.