Bone Box

by Jay Amberg

  Kirchburg shakes his head. “I have nothing…”

  Lee hammers the steering wheel. “Damn it…” He pauses, regaining control. “If you want me to save your…if I’m going to provide you support here…” It galls him to use that phrase, but often the only way to get through to the Kraut is sycophantic bullshit. “…y’all have got to level with me.”

  Kirchburg rubs his knees with his bony fingers. His gold university ring with the red stone glints in the sunlight. “Killing Günter Schmidt was a direct attack on me.”

  The fingers of Lee’s left hand tattoo the window well. The Herr Professor’s faith that the universe revolves around him and his highfalutin academic horseshit just keeps getting more amazing. “I thought he wasn’t your asset,” he says, emphasizing the last word’s first syllable.

  “He is not. But he was. I’ve made a monumental discovery. The greatest find in the history of archeology. I am about to obtain the Christ’s relics. Murdering Schmidt, my countryman, is an obvious attempt to discredit my work here. To assault me.”

  Lee lifts his sunglasses and rubs his left eye. “Who’s doing this, Leopold? Who the hell is attacking you?”

  “Ich… Sophia stole the relics from me.” Saying the name aloud causes a brief tic in Kirchburg’s left temple. “She knows I will get them back.”

  46

  Abrahim has not gone to hell. His face burns but not from an infernal, unquenchable fire. The taste of his swollen tongue is metallic but not sulfuric. Darkness did not swallow him whole. He lies in the mouth of the cave, his head and shoulders in the sun. He could not will himself into eternal damnation. He sat shivering against the cave’s wall until the deeper, slower tremors of hypothermia set in. All he had to do was drift into sleep, and he would have awakened in the sea of fire. But he could not. He wanted to suffer for his sin, but something more profound occurred, a paradox he did not understand then and doesn’t quite fathom now: the more he wished for death, the more he clung to life. The more his remorse weighed on him, the lighter he felt. The desire to live, even as an unspeakably sinful sodomite, surmounted his need to die.

  He dug himself into the cave’s sandy floor, curled tight like a cur, and lay there until the shuddering ceased. And then a cycle began. Each time the shaking stopped, his shame and depravity beat him against the wall. And each time he gave up on himself, life itself pulled him from the dark wall and held him close. His physical appetites, his weakness always, became the strength that kept him alive.

  And, now, exhausted, he feels the sun blister his skin. When he thinks about his actions, he loses hope—but remains alive. Guilt wracks him, but he listens to each breath as though it is his first not his last. He can taste the tufa, gritty against his cracked lips. He can see the light, strobing red and gold, through his closed left eyelid; the swelling over his right eye has gone down enough that light shimmers through the slit. He can hear the wind murmuring in the cave mouth… Feel the prickle… Smell the dust.

  When he squints up at the sky with his good eye, the sun is well past its zenith. The sun has cauterized him as he lay here unaware of time’s passing. Now, the air around him shimmers in the heat. It wraps and holds him, stroking him with each breath he takes. He presses up on his palms and snakes back into the cave. He must forsake the world. The beauty out there would break his heart again. Inside, there are no paintings, no blind saints to sing of his sins. There is nothing but tufa and sand and shadowy darkness. He cannot go back, not after what he has done. But he cannot die either. He must not walk among people, and yet he craves human touch, Sophia’s or anyone else’s.

  He takes the bottle and drinks. The last of his water, still cool, slides down his throat and ripples through him. It, like air and light and the ground beneath him, is life—and he begins to weep again. If only Saint John spoke to him a day earlier, he might be saved. Over the years, I came to see the hollowness of my acts…. I have seen light as well as darkness…. Only love has made me whole again… The words burn into his mind now, all others before them, even the gospels, pallid in the light of their flame.

  47

  Returning to the Alfina from his walk, Joseph Travers stops at the Local, the restaurant next door to the hotel. It is just after ten, and the townspeople have gathered there for a dance under the stars. The music is Turkish, but with an amplified big band sound. The young women dance together in their long skirts and loose blouses. The older women, heads covered with scarves, sit at tables around the patio’s periphery, talking and gesturing. The older boys and men stand in clusters smoking. The younger children dart about among the groups. It is, Travers thinks, like a square dance but with more arcane rituals and taboos. He leans on the low wall along the street and watches the girls in colorful swirling skirts sway with the music. The rhythm is slow and the movement beautiful. Monuglu’s two men, whom Travers has come to think of as Hulk Major and Hulk Minor, give him twenty yards leeway. They have changed out of their brown uniforms into dark pants and light shirts, and now they stand together smoking and watching the young women with an intensity far greater than Travers’.

  Travers lets the music fill him and waits for whatever’s going to happen. He got the message, handwritten in English and unsigned, when he went by the hotel’s office before dinner—

  Take your walk at dusk, but remain local after ten.

  How Sophia Altay found out where he was staying wasn’t clear, and he didn’t understand the second part of the message as he reread it over his lamb stew served in a clay pot at dinner—but he assumed the message had been analyzed by any number of interested Turks. After dinner, he cut the toe out of his left shoe to get it on over the swelling. He then hobbled into Ürgüp, which, with its few souvenir shops and clubs around the main square, hadn’t seemed to have decided yet whether it was going the way of Göreme into the modern world. As he climbed back up the hill toward the hotel, Monuglu’s hulks followed at less than a discrete distance. The evening call to prayer followed the trio, and it was only when Travers slowed by the Local that the message made sense.

  As he headed farther out into the hills above Ürgüp, the darkening sky lifted him. Physically, he was a mess, a general achiness from having been rousted and interrogated permeating every part of him that didn’t feature a specific pain. But he was outside, trekking under a rising moon and spreading stars in a light breeze—and Altay was going to contact him upon his return.

  Slowed by his injuries, Travers didn’t try to lose Monuglu’s hulks. Their dark heavy shoes were made for standing around looking menacing not for hiking. Neither man was built for clambering over boulders, and so Travers took it easy, wanting to lull them into complacency, which, from the look of them slouching along the wall outside the Local, has worked. Hulk Major lights one cigarette from another and nods toward two young women gliding arm in arm across the patio.

  Travers scans the Local, wondering if Altay is one of the veiled women. The knots of older women are so tight, though, that it seems unlikely. An empty flatbed truck flying a Turkish flag from its cab rumbles by. A song ends, and static scratches through the Local’s sound system before the next tune begins. The crescent moon and its trailing star hang above the massif into which both the Alfina and Local are built.

  A motor scooter whines by heading down into Ürgüp. Travers shifts his weight so that there is less pressure on his left foot. The skirts and blouses wave with the music. One of the young boys tackles another on the lawn, and both roll around laughing. The scooter’s whine Dopplers back through the music. He turns to look just as it fishtails to a stop near him.

  “Joe!” a voice shouts from beneath the full visor of the rider’s blue helmet.

  The scooter is already moving again by the time he has his leg over the back. He throws his arms around her waist, almost swinging off the other side of the scooter. They are already up the hill and leaning into the turn befo
re he even thinks of looking back at Monuglu’s hulks. Sitting up higher than Altay, close in against her, he tucks his head behind her helmet and feels the new pain where he just singed his calf on the scooter’s tailpipe. The bike is a Peugeot, sleek, metallic blue and silver—and she winds it fast over the road. The sky wheels, and the scooter bumps onto a dirt track. Altay’s stomach is firm against his palms, her breath even. They rise gradually, the headlight’s beam jiggling past low shrubs and rocks. Another sharp turn, a grove, and she cuts the lights and motor into dark silence even before the scooter stops.

  Travers, having traveled from a festive dance to an isolated valley in ten minutes, doesn’t let go immediately. She takes his right hand, peels herself free, and slips off the scooter. He slides off, too, but onto his left foot, causing a quick jig. The burn hole in his hiking pants is only the size of a cigarette, but the material is stuck to his leg. She removes her helmet and shakes out her hair. Even in the pale moonlight, her eyes shine. She pushes the scooter behind a thick stand of bushes, lays the helmet on the seat, and pulls out a broom of brambles lashed to a stick.

  “Wait here,” she says as she disappears into the night.

  He locates the North Star, but, in truth, he’s all turned around. He couldn’t find his way back here to save his life.

  When she returns, whisking the broom over the ground behind her, she says, “Follow me.”

  He does, but not over any trail he can make out. Tufa spires rise around them, and, as they climb, the valley falls to darkness below. The pain in his leg intensifies, but he doesn’t lose sight of her back. Her hair, bouncing in the moonlight, gleams darkly. They crab across a boulder and then squeeze between two massive rocks before heading upward again. When they can go no farther, she doubles back across the face of an outcropping—and vanishes.

  Vertigo isn’t exactly the problem, but even as a boy in Prescott he never much liked precipitous heights. He’s glad it’s dark. Seeing the situation more clearly might freeze him. They are high up an escarpment away from any trails, and he has no idea how long or rough the slide is down into the darkness of the valley. Taking a series of deep breaths, he pauses before stepping out above the abyss. He might as well be blind. Raising his arms to horizontal, he turns toward the rock and slides along it face to face. His hands provide balance but little purchase. The grainy tufa feels as though it might disintegrate under his sweating palms.

  48

  Altay pushes the blocking stone across the low, narrow entrance as Travers stands, panting, in the center of the cave. A section of the roof has sheered away, and the moon provides just enough light for him to see her movements. The cave, about thirty feet long and twenty feet wide, is, even in the dimness, obviously a church. The stone altar stands below the oval of sky. Faint images of saints adorn the walls above the low ledge running along the sides. Indentations, perhaps stands for icons, are cut into the walls at intervals. Altay’s computer lies on her backpack, a dark lump among other lumps in the corner farthest from the sky hole.

  “It’s good to see you, Sophia,” he says once he has caught his breath.

  Combing her fingers through her hair, she nods. Her khaki pants are tight, and her blue T-shirt is loose. With her helmet on, she might have been mistaken for a boy as she flew by on her scooter. She shakes her head so that her hair falls loosely on her shoulders. “You lost the files I gave you,” she says, her tone like it was that first evening in Istanbul.

  “They were stolen.”

  “You were carrying the flash drive with you on the street?”

  “Yes. I’m pretty sure the guys who mugged me, Günter Schmidt and another man, worked for Leopold Kirchburg.” He sits down on the ledge. “Did you know Schmidt?”

  “Not really. I knew who he was. He worked security for Leopold last year. But not at Saint John’s. At another site.” As she steps over closer to the altar, light catches her eyes. “How did he know you had the flash drive?”

  “I was being watched, I think. Since Istanbul.” He rolls up the leg of his hiking pants. The burn, the size and shape of one of Monuglu’s Yenidjas, feels much larger.

  “Since Istanbul?”

  “Yes. Probably even before our dinner. But I recognized Schmidt from the next day. He followed me. And somebody, I think, followed him.”

  She chews on her lower lip. “But how did they know you had the flash drive?”

  “I used it at the internet café—when I emailed you.”

  She rubs her palms on her hips. “You read the files?”

  “I looked at them. I couldn’t read anything.”

  Exhaling, she shakes her head.

  “How did you find me?”

  “There’s not much between Göreme and Ürgüp.” She shrugs. “I had a boy from town deliver the note.”

  He scratches the side of his nose. “I have another question.”

  She folds her arms in front of her chest.

  “What was Kenan yelling at me about that night when he brought Leopold to your house?”

  She sits on the ledge next to him. Closer to him, she is more of a shadow. She smells like the desert he knew as a child. “About your firing me,” she says. “About how you Americans are such arrogant pigs. Always stomping in and acting like you own everything.” Her smile is sad. “About closing down the Saint John’s site…firing him.”

  “And Kenan’s death?” he asks. “What made you so sure right away that it was murder?”

  She looks at him for a moment. “He was trying to sell the bones and the documents.”

  “To whom?”

  “Abrahim didn’t know. But he overheard Kenan speaking German on the phone.”

  “And so Abrahim took the bones and letters?”

  “Yes. To save them. At least in his mind, he was…” She touches Travers’ calf below the burn. Her voice becomes softer. “I’m worried about him.”

  Travers is, too, but maybe not in the same way. “He was all right when I saw him…” Taken by how recent it was, he stops for a moment. “…yesterday afternoon.”

  She goes over to her backpack, unzips a pocket, and takes out a small, white plastic box. “He didn’t meet me this evening. He was hysterical last night when I… Someone had hit him hard, injured his eye.” She returns with the box and opens it in her lap. “Muffler?” she asks.

  He nods as he asks, “Which eye?”

  “It was swollen shut.”

  “Which eye, Sophia?”

  She pauses, turning her shoulders. “His right.”

  “What have you heard about Schmidt’s murder?”

  “That it was macabre.” She takes a tube from the box, opens it, and squeezes ointment onto the tip of her index finger.

  “What, specifically?”

  “Hold still,” she says. “There are a lot of rumors. Some involving you and me. But all of them suggest that Schmidt was mutilated. His genitals…”

  He flinches when she dabs the burn. A sharp inhalation cuts his words. When he can speak again, he says, “The gouged eyes of the saints at the Church Under the Trees in Ihlara Gorge upset Abrahim during the tour.”

  “He is a complex boy.” She takes out a sterile pack of gauze and tears it open without using the finger with the ointment.

  “Sophia, I saw a drawing in his notebook…”

  “He would go to extremes to protect me…” Her voice sounds as though she is crying.

  “If he thought I was coming to see you last night and that Schmidt was following me, would he…?”

  She carefully unfolds the gauze and places it lightly over the burn. “He would not mur… I don’t believe that he would ever kill someone. Not in any circumstances.”

  “Not even to protect you?”

  She looks away, and they sit in silence for awhile. As his eyes adjust mor
e, the saints’ halos appear in the faint light. She wipes her finger on the gauze’s packaging, closes the box, and stows it again in her backpack. She rummages in a bag against the wall and comes back with a liter bottle of water.

  When she sits, she says, “He’s always hard on himself.” She twists off the cap and hands him the bottle.

  “And?”

  She leans back against the wall, a shadow shifting. “I don’t know where he is or what he’s doing, but I know him well. If he hurt Schmidt, he will only hurt himself more.”

  He killed Schmidt, Travers thinks.

  They are quiet again, this time for longer. He drinks from the bottle and hands it back to her. She takes a sip and caps the bottle, then stands and crosses to the oval of sky. She raises her head and gazes upward.

  Turning back toward him, she says, “So you’re sure Leopold has the flash drive?”

  “Am I sure? No. But it looks that way.”

  “And Schmidt followed you here to Göreme?”

  “And Lee. And Monuglu. And Kirchburg.” Shaking his head, he clears his throat. “And half the reporters in Europe and the Middle East. Both the police and the military seem interested in my movements, too.”

  “Mon Dieu, Joseph!” she says before they lapse into silence a third time.

  He pats down the edge of the gauze so that it sticks to the ointment better. Then he stands and comes up next to her. As he looks up into the night sky, he is close enough to smell her and to hear her breathing, but he doesn’t touch her. A cool breeze wafting through the skylight brushes them. “I need,” he says, “to read the letters.”

  49

  When Altay turns on the computer, light splashes up the cave’s walls to the roof. Travers looks around rather than at the screen. The two saints on the arched ceiling hold each other. Their inner robes are white, their outer robes red. Their hands, still clear after all of these centuries, clasp one another. Each saint’s eyes gaze into the other’s. They share one overlapping halo. Another figure, a smaller angel-saint all in white robes, hovers to their right.