Bone Box

by Jay Amberg

  Lee expected the Kraut to piss his pants like this. “Leopold,” he says, “act like y’all are somebody.” He picks up the Coke can, inspects it one last time, and takes a sip without quite touching the lid to his lips. “My board made the decision to withdraw funding. Your board will sure as shit hang you out rather than lose the dollars.” Although funding of archeological sites is the Eagle Consortium stated goal, he has to be done away with so that the Consortium’s unstated and categorically more urgent goal can be met. It’s that simple. In fact, Lee’s got to finish off the Kraut and the Coke and get back to his fundamental task.

  Twisting his gold university ring, Kirchburg mutters, “Amerikan-isch Arschloch!”

  Lee gulps most of the Coke, sits back, and crosses his legs. There it is again—that inbred Teutonic arrogance. Their scorn for Turks is perfectly understandable. And the French. But Kirchburg and all the rest of them have conveniently forgotten the history of the last century. They got an old-fashioned ass-whipping twice, and they’ve been bit players shunted to this godforsaken corner of the world stage ever since. What’s this Kraut really after anyway? To be top dog in this dead science out here in the boondocks?

  As Lee stares across the table at Kirchburg’s florid scowl, he figures, What the hell, give the rope one last jerk. Raising the can of Coke, he says, “I understand how hard-got your situation is. You’ve got to choose between saving the Aegean Association and keeping your di-rectorship.” He shakes his head, smiles, and tilts the can in an ironic salute. “You’re between a rock and a hard place.”

  Kirchburg leans forward and clenches his hands, his boney fingers going white with tension. A vein pulses in his right temple. “I am the Aegean Association.”

  Lee finishes the Coke. The rocks over the Kraut’s shoulder are shaped like sharks’ teeth but are the color of a wetback’s ass. “Not any more.”

  Kirchburg’s fingernails dig into the back of his left hand. “Ich bin…” he begins.

  “Leopold…,” Lee interrupts. It’s time to change the subject. “I have news about your Ms. Altay.”

  Thin lines of blood appear under the nails of Kirchburg’s right in-dex and middle fingers.

  “She has,” Lee continues, “made contact with Allison Wade. Something is about to happen with the documents. The bones, too.” It’s all conjecture, but Kirchburg doesn’t need to know that.

  Kirchburg flattens his palms on the table. The thin cuts where he has just gouged the back of his hand look like runes of an ancient script that, ironically, only he could read. “What? Sophia and that BBC reporter? Where?”

  “I’ll know in an hour.” Lee wonders, not for the first time, at the fact that these high-minded academic eegits are so easy to string up because they’ve got poles up their asses. “I do believe,” he adds, “that Ms. Altay giving those computer files to Joe Travers is what’s caused all this trouble.”

  Kirchburg’s eyes narrow. His breath wheezes. He still hasn’t noticed that he’s gouged his own hand.

  If that don’t beat all, Lee thinks. His work is often hard, but then there are days like this. Despite what Joe Travers said, it helps, of course, to have God on your side.

  67

  The burly guard grabs Abrahim by his arm, yanks him to his feet, and pushes him toward the holding cell’s door. Abrahim is both terrified and relieved. The cell reeks of piss and fear. The old man with the wild white beard has been alternating between vociferous prayers praising Allah and scatological diatribes against the human race. Worse, the Kurd with tattoos slithering down his neck and arms has been eyeing Abrahim in a way he knows all too well. When Abrahim was first dumped in the cell, a small man with a bruised forehead and animosity in his eyes stared at him, licking his lips and tapping the top button of his fly. When that man was removed from the cell, he laughed in Abrahim’s face and said in truculent German, “Sie warden krieger, mein Lieber.”

  After Abrahim stumbles through the doorway into the gray hall, the guard’s grip becomes a vise on his biceps. Abrahim is wearing the white T-shirt, pants, and socks he was issued when he was processed. The police did not beat him then, but they were irate because a European camera crew caught them jouncing him into the station. Being released from that cell is a blessing, but he’s choked by the sense that he is being led to hell. His chest heaves, and small high-pitched squeaks he cannot stop escape his throat. He tries to pray, but words do not come.

  The walls of the yellow-gray room he’s shoved into moan of past pain. The guard shuts the door, leaving Abrahim standing in front of a gray steel table. A man with short hair and a scarred face sits on the other side of the table and glares at him. The smoke from the man’s cigarette hangs whispering in the air. A brown folder and a black metal ashtray half filled with butts lay on the table murmuring of sin. A second, larger man, bald with a thick mustache, stands with his back to the wall. The smudges on the wall hiss of torment, but the standing man is utterly silent, the smoke from his cigarette mute.

  “Sit down.” The scarred man’s words are a command not an offer.

  Abrahim pulls back the steel chair and does as he is told. His hands flutter in his lap like baby birds unable to fly. The man’s nose is sharp and veined but not scarred like the rest of his face. His nails are bitten deep, as though he has his own demons he tries to tear out through his fingers.

  “We know who you are and what you did, Abrahim,” the scarred man growls. His Turkish is from the East, near Mount Ararat where Abrahim was born. His front teeth are crooked and stained yellow from cigarettes. Dark bags sag below his eyes.

  Abrahim has a coughing fit, and his shoulders shake even after he stops. He thinks, God in His infinite wisdom knows, but how do they? He looks down at his jittering hands and then over at the stocky man inhaling his cigarette, the tip a flash of hellfire. The air is acrid from the smoke, the odor of the two men, and his own foul stench.

  The seated man stubs out his cigarette. “Tell us about the murder!” The demon speaking through the man is hideous. “Tell us, Abrahim!”

  Abrahim recoils against the chair’s back. His soul leaps away from this vile creature but cannot escape the room. There was no murder. And, talking about what happened might abate the anguish, might lighten the horrific burden. Words begin to rise from the void in Abrahim’s stomach, but fear constricts them in his throat.

  “Abrahim,” the man says, leaning forward, his hands splayed on the table, those bright bitten nails crossing the folder. “Tell us.” The fiendish voice vanishes for a moment and then reappears. “We know everything anyway.”

  Only God knows everything. Abrahim looks at the man’s flat eyes. The man knows not God—only demons. He knows nothing that matters. Abrahim bows his head, calls back his fleeing soul, retreats into it, and says, “Confiteor Deo omnipotenti…”

  The man slams his palms on the folder. The ashtray jumps. The table rings—more knell than call to prayer. As Abrahim looks up, the man is rising, lunging across the table. Another demon’s voice shouts, “You pissant faggot!”

  Abrahim smells onion seasoned with sulfur.

  The man bares his stained teeth. “You will die in that cell! A Kurdish pedophile will disembowel you through your asshole!” This is yet another demon’s voice, the most fiendish of all. “I’ll send you back to that cell right now. Is that what you want, you fucking fairy?”

  Despite the blazing words, the man’s eyes remain dull. He would do it. His demons would coerce him. But the man himself would take little pleasure in knowing it was done.

  “Confiteor Deo…,” Abrahim begins again.

  “Shut up!” The man cuffs Abrahim’s left ear.

  Abrahim sprawls from the chair onto the floor, his ear ringing—an alarm he has heard before. When he opens his eyes to the thorns pricking the side of his head, the standing man’s shoes are so highly polished that he can see hi
s own blurred reflection. But the left shoe is also scuffed along the sole near the tip. And a shred of cigarette ash lies on the left shoelace. The smell of the ash is different from that of the scarred man’s cigarette, but still somehow familiar. The right shoe cocks as though it will kick Abrahim in the face. He knots himself, throws his arms around his head, and squirms away.

  “Get up!” It is the swarm of demons within the man at the table. The stocky man has still said nothing.

  Abrahim obeys a second time, but his legs are yogurt.

  “Sit!”

  He slouches into the chair and clenches his hands, trying in vain to regain control. His breath comes in short, sucking gasps like those that occurred after his fits as a child.

  “What happened to your fucking eye, Abrahim?” The man fingers the edge of the folder. “Why did the Austrian hit you?”

  Abrahim covers his mouth to stop yipping. His lips are dry, but his eyes are watering, stinging more from the shame than the blow. When he licks his lips, he tastes salt and iron.

  The man rises from the table, grabs Abrahim by the back of his T-shirt, and twists the collar so that it cinches his neck, burning like rope. Abrahim begins to gag. The man yanks the back of his shirt over Abrahim’s head so that the heat of his fear, trapped beneath the shirt, chokes him. The man’s fingers, the nubs of his nails, rake his back. “What is this welt?” the demons screech. “How did you get this?”

  Abrahim’s soul, caught in his constricted throat, wails silently at the memory. When the cave was empty, when Doctor Altay was not there as she had promised, the man hit him in the face, blackened his eye, then made him kneel. And the man clawed his back just before that climactic, always debasing, moment—and just before Abrahim bit down hard. But how could the interrogator’s demons know all this?

  When the scarred man lets go of the shirt, Abrahim lurches forward, striking his head on the table. Still gagging, he raises his face and pulls down his shirt to cover his back. His soul nests in his chest. He cannot look into the man’s eyes, but he must face these demons. The shame of what he did is hell, but he did it only to save someone he loves—and he murdered no one.

  The man picks up the folder and waves it at Abrahim. “Confess.” It is the man’s voice, not a demon’s. “It is the only way you can be saved.” Or another demon with a less diabolic tone. “The only way.” The man slides the folder across the table. When he pulls a cigarette from his pack, his hand trembles.

  Watching the man’s hand quaver as he strikes a match and lights his cigarette, Abrahim thinks, My Lord and my God. The man’s demons are strong and sinister, but they are not the power in the room. They bow to the silent man. He, that large bald man with the polished shoes and the rich tobacco, holds sway over life and death. He alone is capable of immolating Abrahim whenever he wishes.

  “Open the folder!” The ghoulish voice returns. “See what you’ve done!”

  The silent man drops his cigarette and grinds it into the linoleum. Abrahim’s soul tries to take flight again, but the wailing walls snare it. He can’t make his hand stop shaking enough to open the folder.

  “Look at what you’ve done, you fucking fairy!”

  Abrahim feels the warm wetness and degradation flowing down his leg.

  The man’s hands explode across the table and wrench the folder open.

  The close-up color photograph of the dead man knocks Abrahim back. He gasps, squeezes his eyes shut for a moment, and then gapes at the rolled eyes and twisted neck. Abrahim gags hot sourness, swallows hard, and scratches at his left eye.

  “Look at what you did!”

  The wetness pools on the metal seat.

  The scarred man swats Abrahim’s hands away. “Look at these, you piece of shit!” He spills horrendous photos across the table.

  Abrahim can’t look. It’s too hellacious. He cringes in the wetness. The air is aflame, searing his breath.

  The second man, the Power, steps away from the wall. “Who else was in that cave?” he asks. His voice, though not diabolic, is deep and despotic. “We know someone else was there.”

  Abrahim ignites from the inside out as he realizes that the Power already knows. His chest and forehead are already burning.

  The bald man fires a cigarette with a shining lighter. The smoke is stronger but not as acrid, the odor redolent. “Who did it with you?”

  Abrahim’s hands and feet blaze.

  The polished shoes clap across the linoleum. The Power’s massive fist strikes the table. “Was it the American, Joseph Travers?”

  “No. Not him! No!” The voice is not Abrahim’s but his soul’s. He himself is incapable of speech. His body is engulfed in flame. “I was trying to save So…Soph… Joseph was leading the bad man to…” He remembers being yanked away after the biting and choking and spitting, a tyrannical voice ordering him to run or die, and his body being heaved from the cave.

  The cigarette darts so close to his eye that he can feel its hellfire despite his own conflagration. “Was it Doctor Altay?”

  Abrahim leaps to his scalding feet and faces the Power’s piercing eyes. “No!” he shouts. “No! No! I was protecting her! Saving her!”

  “Tell the truth!” the Power roars. “Tell us what happened in that cave!”

  “I… I was…” Abrahim combusts. “I can’t remember…” Fires rage in his extremities. “I don’t know!”

  The Power steps back. His dark eyes widen. He looks from Abrahim’s face to his chest.

  “She was never there…” Abrahim stammers. He becomes Saint El-mo’s Fire, crackling, utterly aflame. “I…”

  The scarred interrogator lunges away from Abrahim.

  Sophia must still be saved. Abrahim’s chest erupts. The flames turn to lava. “I was alone!” he blurts. “All alone!”

  The scarred interrogator’s demons shriek. His pulsing fingers point at Abrahim’s chest.

  Molten heat flows from Abrahim’s forehead. “Soph…Sophia must be saved!” His soul’s voice reverberates around the room, silencing the walls and even the photographs strewn on the table.

  The demons reel from his soul, and even the Power slams back against the wall.

  Abrahim stretches his arms out to the sides. Blood spills from his wrists and hands, spotting the floor. His socks turn red. He looks down toward his thundering heart. The crimson stigmata spreads across the white T-shirt.

  68

  The distant hammering barely reaches Joseph Travers in the dimly lit cavern where he studies the text etched into the walls. The words are English, but the syntax keeps shifting. Whenever he is about to grasp meaning, the words transpose and their sense eludes him. Even chanting them aloud is doing him no good. He is neither lost nor back among the bone piles, but meaning escapes him no matter how hard he tries to comprehend the message cut in stone. When Nihat Monuglu’s Hulks dropped him back at the Alfina Hotel in Ürgüp, he took off his shoes and dirty clothes, brushed his teeth, and washed his face and arm. He then lay down on his bed for just a moment and found himself scanning the juxtaposing text.

  The hammering stops, only to be replaced by a coarse voice that echoes around the cavern, clanging against stone. Light flashes everywhere. When Travers’ shoulder shakes, the cavern’s walls crumble into dust and his headache thunders back. He opens his eyes to Monuglu’s face peering down at him. He doesn’t understand Monuglu’s expression any better than he understood the message engraved in the dream’s wall. The frown is customary, but there’s concern as well as irritation in the Turk’s eyes—and his eyebrows are arched as though he has just asked a question. The hotel room’s overhead light glows behind him.

  Dizzy and sweating, Travers rises on his good elbow. He doesn’t know how long he has been asleep, but it can’t have been long. He’s wearing only his boxer shorts so that his mashed toe, singed calf, and sti
tched thigh are wavering before him. The room’s three-drawer dresser and straight-back chair are swaying. Behind Monuglu, the Hulks swerve as though they are the aftershocks of some disaster. They’ve come for him again, but he has no idea why.

  “Get up, Joseph,” Monuglu says. His white shirt is wrinkled, and his breath smells like an ashtray.

  Feeling bile rise, Travers swallows hard. If he’s going to make it to vertical at all, he’ll have to move slowly. He shakes his head and says, “Nihat, you’ve got to stop…”

  “Get up, now!” Monuglu shouts in his face.

  Travers’ head flops back on the pillow. His headache explodes, and light bursts behind his eyes.

  His voice lower, Monuglu says, “Joseph, you must talk to someone.”

  Travers sits up and swings his feet over onto the floor. “I thought,” he says, “that talking with me is bad for people.”

  “Joking with me,” Monuglu says, “has not worked good for you before.” The usual threat is there, but just as with his eyes, there’s something troubled in his voice—concern, misgiving, something. “It’s the boy. Abrahim.”

  Travers sucks in his breath. There’s nothing to steady him. “What about him?” he asks.

  “The Göreme police found him this afternoon.” Monuglu scratches his mustache. “He is in custody.”

  Travers wonders if Altay knows.

  “The boy is bleeding.” Monuglu takes his cigarette case from his pocket and then shoves it back in. “Maybe dying.”

  “What?” The bile’s back in Travers’ throat. The carpet is about to lurch up and slap him. “They…assaulted him?”

  “No!” Monuglu holds out his hands. “He bleeds.” He rubs the middle finger of his right hand against the heel of his left. “His hands and feet.” He taps his chest. “And his ribs.”

  “What?” Travers repeats. He can’t make the room settle. “Sweating blood?” It takes him a moment to find the word. “Stigmata?”