Bone Box

by Jay Amberg

  In the glimpse she caught of Joe when she first arrived, he looked beleaguered—haggard and beat-up. He suffers from that American tendency to wing it rather than consider secondary or tertiary causes and consequences, and he really seems to have no clear concept of what he’s going to do next. She also saw Leopold on the Sarihan’s terrace, a story above the crowd but not quite at the height of the infrared dishes. He was with a short, pale, ferret-faced man she didn’t recognize. Leopold wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, which he then folded fastidiously.

  The little man pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered one to Leopold, who nodded and took it in his spindly fingers. If she hadn’t known Leopold better, she would have thought the pair comic. As Leopold waited for the man to light the cigarette, he snapped the head off one of the gardenias in the flower box next to him and began to scan the crowd below him. Her heart raced for a moment even though she knew that Leopold couldn’t see her, much less identify her. Angry with herself for still reacting to the arrogant Pharisee that way, she counted to ten before again looking up. The little man was lowering his lighter from Leopold’s cigarette to his own. Leopold took a deep first drag and tilted back his head. As he exhaled, Leopold said something, dropped the gardenia’s crushed petals into the box, and smiled dourly.

  Now, a swarthy man brushes against her shoulder, trying to get a better look at the chaos around the podium. Jostled by the crowd, she needs to get away from the Sarihan immediately. She glances up at the rooftop terrace, but there’s no tall Austrian there. Leopold is coming down from the roof, will be somewhere about, probably heading her way. Joe, the poor bastard, continues to run amuck. Though she has not seen either Charles Lee or Nihat Monuglu since she arrived, they must be around. Any number of reporters might recognize her.

  She tightens her veil, turns, and, pushes against the flow of the crowd. By the time she reaches the periphery, she has regained some control. Fifteen meters from the military police cordon, she notices Leopold’s little ferret-faced friend working this side of the crowd. He slouches along, hands in pants pockets, glancing at each individual. He’s sauntering, a gait too nonchalant for the circumstances, his gaze covertly scrutinizing each person.

  When the ferret’s focus falls on her, she veers toward an MP with his gun at cross-arms. He is young and broad-shouldered, with a stoic visage and pockmarks on his cheeks. He was supposed to staunch the overflow coming up the lane, but the real action is the people mulling and muttering within the cordon. He, like the other MPs, faces the lane but repeatedly glances over his shoulder toward the Sarihan Hotel.

  The ferret follows her. She glances back only once, but it is enough to see that his narrow eyes have locked on her. He can’t know who she is, but he has apparently caught her scent—a woman alone who must be his prey. She quickens her pace, the MP now turning to look toward her hurrying in his direction. She keeps her eyes lowered but steps directly up to him. “The infidel following me,” she says, “attempted to molest me in the crowd.” She gazes up, seeing the MP’s face darken, the pockmarks turning scarlet. She lets him look into her eyes, bows her head, and bustles by him down the narrow, crowded lane.

  “Dur!” she hears, but she doesn’t look back. Over the rustle of the crowd, there’s a thud—a rifle’s stock striking someone hard.

  63

  Glinting polyglot babble showers Joseph Travers. The air is stifling as the crowd goads him. One swarthy guy is waving a white flag…no, sheets of paper, the press packet. A fat man grabs at him with fingers that look like sausages. Travers has to get away from the crowd, needs to find out how much damage has been done. And he’s got to get in touch with Sophia Altay—though if she knows what happened here, she may not contact him at all. Fending off people with both arms, he quickens his pace up toward the Sarihan Hotel’s main entrance.

  Her shoulders thrown back, Allison Wade steps in front of him. Though her wide blue eyes are fervid, he doesn’t look away. Ravi stands behind her with his camera on his shoulder, but its lens is pointed down toward her heels. “You bloody bastard!” she snaps.

  Travers doesn’t say hello, but he doesn’t push past her either.

  “That flash drive…,” she says. “Eight different versions of the documents were emailed to the BBC.”

  “The one I gave you is real,” he answers. The throng stops pressing, apparently waiting for the next skirmish involving this American idiot. Three cameras are trained on Wade and him, but none of them is Ravi’s. She is now in it with him.

  “You conned me!” Wade is standing straighter so that they are eye to eye.

  He looks into her eyes. Her gaze is strong, but without, he thinks, a lot of depth.

  “No!” he says. “It’s real.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out the flash drive. “This…” He shakes his head. “The others are fake!”

  “You’ve already been completely discredited in the American media,” she snarls.

  They’re shooting the messenger! he thinks.

  “An out-of-work technocrat!” She’s breathing hard, and her pink skin is going red. “Exploiting the situation!”

  Still holding up the flash drive, he shakes his head again. Her eyes may be pretty, the blue specked with green, but he sees ambition with only a modicum of concern. John the Apostle’s letter doesn’t speak to her as it does to him. The documents are newsworthy. They’ll alter careers, influence governments, and affect the geopolitical landscape—but they will not touch her to her core. The fact of the letters’ existence and the news they stir are more important than what they actually say.

  “This circus,” she sneers, “you set everybody…”

  “No!” he interrupts her, waving the flash drive. He’s angry, but as much at himself as at whoever doctored the documents. “Sophia Altay was set up. I was set up! There are multiple versions of the printed copies, too.” He turns the flash drive over and stuffs it back in his pocket. The air is suffocating; his whole body is sweating. The crowd around him is oscillating, the light at the edge of his vision strobing. “You yourself said there were eight electronic versions!” All of his remaining energy is in his voice. “That news conference wasn’t news!” He pauses, trying to catch his breath. People around him are talking, but he barely hears them. “We were all duped. Everybody. Everything’s tainted!”

  Ravi raises his camera so that he can shoot over her shoulder.

  Wade pulls her phone from her pocket. “Righto, Joe,” she says, her voice irate. She raises the phone. “But if you’re going to stop the proliferation of the tainted”—she spits the word—“versions, contact Altay! Right now!”

  “No,” he says, “it doesn’t work that way.”

  “Here’s my mobile.” She hands it to him.

  He takes the phone, glances at its screen, and looks again into Wade’s eyes. There’s no way he’s going to contact Altay with Wade and this crowd hovering around him—even if he could.

  Wade curls her upper lip. “If you want her version to have any bloody credibility, you’ve got to provide the originals. You’ve got to get Altay to come forward with them.”

  Still gazing into her eyes, he hands back the phone. “You’ll get your story, Al. An exclusive. And it’ll be real news. I promise. But Sophia isn’t going to answer her phone now.”

  “Then voice mail her,” she says. “Or text her. Or email her. But do something.” She shakes the phone in front of his face. “Every second you waste makes her original letters look more bloody dubious.”

  64

  The moment Travers hobbles away from Wade, the crowd descends on him again. He’s only forty feet from the Sarihan Cave Hotel’s main entrance when he trips over one of the black television cables and goes down hard, scraping his elbow and forehead. People press in on him, blocking light. There’s no air at all. A dead grasshopper lies in the tangle of cables. Everythin
g hurts, the headache and queasiness joining with the older injuries in an excruciating whirl. He places the palm of his right hand on the flagstone, rises to one knee, and looks up. Video cameras aim at him from among the clamoring mob. One man has glistening folds of fat rolling down from his chin. Another has forests in his nostrils.

  When Travers stands, he reels with nausea, doubles over, and pukes. As the vomit splatters on the flagstones, the circling crowd shuffles back. He coughs, clears his throat, and coughs again. He drank a lot of water, but he hasn’t eaten anything all day except for the flatbread as Leopold Kirchburg badgered him on the way to the Sarihan in the morning.

  He spits onto the flagstone and takes two swaying sidesteps. His torn toe throbs, and blood trickles from his elbow. Emphatic Turkish volleys around him, but no one grabs at him. The puke, it seems, has made him untouchable. The flagstones shift and bob when he again staggers toward the Sarihan. The ring of people swirls as he wends through the crowd.

  Nihat Monuglu stands by the rosebushes to the right of the hotel’s arched stone entrance. “Joseph,” he says, “I will help you.” His face is flushed, and sweat is beading on his forehead and neck.

  Travers takes a stutter step and stops. His saliva is gummy, the taste sour.

  “Hayır!” Monuglu shouts at the people following Travers. “Dur!”

  Those closest to Travers stop jabbering.

  Travers finds his balance, plants his feet, and beats back the pounding in his head. “I’ve had enough of your help,” he says. Blood trickles from his elbow.

  Monuglu takes a long drag from his Yenidje. As he and Travers stare at each other, he exhales smoke through his nose. “You must come with me,” he says, his voice low.

  The video cameras form a semicircle around the two men.

  “Arrest me, if you want,” Travers says.

  “We…” Monuglu glowers at Travers and reaches for his arm but stops before he touches him. “I will take you to your hotel. You need to…”

  Travers swallows bile. “If you’re going to arrest me, do it.”

  Monuglu’s scowl erodes. “Come with me,” he says.

  Travers wipes his mouth with his sleeve. His chest is tight, and his stomach churns. His sweat goes cold again. “It was you,” he says to Monuglu, loud enough for the reporters to hear. He pulls the flash drive from his pocket and holds it up to the light. “You had the documents. You tampered with those translations.”

  “No. You are wrong.” Monuglu’s face is impassive, but his eyes burn. “You do not know what you are saying.”

  Travers raises the shining flash drive. “You…,” he says. “You….”

  Monuglu clenches his fist. “You are making a mistake,” he says. His voice, though firm, sounds sad.

  The world goes on wavering as Travers slowly turns. The pink and red roses ripple. Above the crowd, the trees’ white blossoms bow. The dwellings carved into the tufa spires shift and surge. Half a dozen polychromatic hot air balloons drift across the sky. It’s all very bright, very colorful, but it’s not making any sense at all.

  65

  Abrahim slips through the cleft into the box canyon, but his passage, he is sure, has not gone unnoticed. The sun is still strong, and the tourists along the road he crossed pointed at him. One old crone ululated. And he must have presented a savage, even diabolic, sight. The scabs on his bare feet have cracked open, his black pants are filthy with grit, and his shirt is sullied with sand and stained with grape juice. His sunburnt and grimy face must look feral; his hair is matted and caked with red dirt. He can see with his swollen eye, but it still feels the size of a pomegranate.

  Panting, he looks toward the boulder, but she is not there. She is not foolish enough to venture here in daylight as he did. It is not merely that he is stupid, though trekking from the cave and threading his way through the tourists was idiocy. No, it goes deeper. He needed to move among people. His depravity drives him from humans, but his humanity inevitably pulls him back. And, he could no longer stand the isolation of the cave. He could not remain apart, much less go on seeking death. He needs her touch, or any touch, even a brutal one.

  And so he has returned here, where she has been, where they last met. He crosses to the boulder and brushes his trembling fingers along its surface. His hands are sticky with grape juice, and the black flies are already sizzling around his hair and shirt. They haven’t yet swarmed as they did in the mouth of the cave, but they will soon. He turns, leans against the boulder, and buries his face in his hands. He is beyond despair in some dark terrain so arid that each breath he takes cuts his throat.

  The flies whir about his head and hands and shoulders, scribing arcs in the air. The cacophony rises as he falls into the depth of his seclusion. The flies sing a nefarious song, their chorus a litany of his iniquities. And above them, a deeper voice chants, Kill yourself. Do it. Do it. Do it! But a faint voice beneath the chorus and soloist whispers Saint John’s words: Love has made me whole again. The buzzing, though, becomes remorseless, and he claps his hands over his ears. Do it! the voice hisses. And the faint murmuring continues, too: In the end, there is no other way. I have come to love….

  Unable to stop the polemic, he stands, yanks his bespattered shirt over his head, and tosses it across the boulder. The flies follow it but return to him a moment later. His back bubbles with pain. His wrists that he scraped with sharp stones sting, as does the side of his chest. The light smearing the walls doesn’t fall on him, but the heat distends heavily from the rock wall, pressing him to his knees. His bones feel as though they are ossifying. Millennia crumble into seconds. His bones become those desiccated bones he has hidden. He can’t live with the knowledge that he alone is responsible for those fractured femurs, that ancient sternum and clavicle and skull. He must stay alive until he understands—or she tells him—what to do with those holy and unnerving relics. The baked air burns his lungs. When he closes his eyes, the flies’ black voices take up the soloist’s chant—Do it! Do it! Do it! The flies do not bite but their dirge chafes him until he swats at his ears and eyes and temples.

  Water. If he cleanses himself, the refrain may cease and his bones regenerate. The diatribe may drown. He careens to the rivulet trickling from the crack in the rock. Like that small voice repeating Saint John’s words, the water merely whispers. But it is cool as it runs over his palms. He cups his hands, hurls water at his face. The sharp wet slap stops the dark canticle for a second. Then he is scooping and splashing, scraping wetness across his cheeks, wringing it through his hair, flinging it against his bare chest. He pants, his nipples hard. Blood courses. Breath catches, then deepens.

  The voices still themselves for a moment. But then they return. No, these are different voices. External. Exterior voices. Someone is coming. The hellhounds are coming for him. He rises from his knees and turns, his hands at his sides. Water pulses from his fingertips. He could fight, but it would be futile. He could hide, but there are only boulders and sunflowers. He could be lifted aloft by a host, but miracles are for saints not sinners. The flies swarm him, their drone deafening. And the soloist wails: You are worthless. Give up. Give up! Saint John’s entreaty fades beneath the cacophony.

  66

  As Charles Lee and Leopold Kirchburg sit at the white corner table on the Sarihan Hotel’s rooftop terrace, Lee scrubs his Coca-Cola can’s lid. Minute black particles he can’t rub off stick to the aluminum. Kirchburg scowls across the table at him, his trademark glare not worth a bucket of spit now. Kirchburg is staying at the more upscale Ottoman House, but Lee, who remembered his chat with Joe Travers at this table, wanted the meeting here so that it’s outside and away from the Kraut’s turf. This meeting has also gotten the bad taste of that earlier talk with Travers out of Lee’s mouth.

  The media vermin have slithered away from the Sarihan’s grounds, and the acorn cracker’s credibility is in th
e crapper, flushed down and leading the parasites through the Turkish sewers to Altay. The sun has fallen behind the rock the hotel’s cut into, and the air has cooled. The patio has, all in all, proved a fine spot in which to hang Herr Kirchburg.

  “They wouldn’t dare do that!” Kirchburg proclaims. The blotches on his cheeks look like reddish puddles.

  Lee wipes the lid once more, drops the napkin on the table, and, remembering that a dollop spilled the last time, carefully opens the Coke. “I think they can and will,” he says flatly. “I tried, but it looks like a done deal.” It was, in fact, his idea to cut the Kraut’s funding, but Kirchburg doesn’t need to know that. He’s bound to do something rash, and Lee is not about to become his target. “Your second asset got his ass arrested,” Lee says. “And my superiors don’t like it a lick. Y’all are smearing shit on our boots.”

  “Nein. Herr Lang was detained, not arrested. And he was not my second anything. I met him today…here at this hotel just before Herr Travers… He approached me with information… His accuser disappeared without filing charges… He… This…”

  Kirchburg stops himself, apparently because even he can figure out that nitpicking over these issues now—as though this is some asinine academic debate—is pointless. The little rodent was taken into custody minutes after he was seen with Kirchburg at the Sarihan. In fact, CNN got a shot of the two of them smoking together on this rooftop. The Kraut is up to his withers in dung, and Lee can’t help smearing him even more. “I’d wager,” he says, “that his accuser was Sophia Altay.”

  “She… I will have you removed from your position,” Kirchburg sputters.