“What is it?”
“There are mounted locals ahead. I see a howitzer on the ridge above us.”
“What? The war is over!”
He gave her an exasperated look. A massive explosion shook the air around her, rattled the windows and made the carriage sway sickeningly first to the left and then the right. She and Sonnenby grabbed at the walls and the luggage racks. The scream of metal on metal as the train’s wheels locked reverberated long after the deep echoes of the explosion faded into the distant mountains.
Sonnenby braced his long legs against the opposite seat and pressed his back and shoulders into the cushions. He took Descartes’ pistol from the holster on his hip and held it like he might spin the cylinder. Elsa climbed back on her seat and perched there, on the edge, waiting for him to tell her what to do next. The pistol dropped into his lap.
And then she saw it happening again. His face froze, his eyes widened. All the color drained from his cheeks as beads of sweat stood out on his brow. She looked at his hands because he was looking at them.
His bandaged hands. He tried to lift the pistol again and she could clearly see that his fingers were too swollen from the grave digging to use the trigger. They would not fit through the ring of the trigger guard. He could barely close his hand around the grip. The pistol fell into his lap again.
Elsa leapt across the compartment and put her hands on his shoulders. The car swayed again and she held tight to his body to keep her feet. The wailing of the wheels on the steel tracks continued as the train slowed to its death, though now it was accompanied by the screams of the passengers and the war cries of the charging attackers. She forced Sonnenby to look at her by placing her face nose to nose with his. His eyes had begun to roll up in the now familiar prelude to unconsciousness. She shook him sharply and forced the eyes to reconnect with hers.
“You are not helpless,” she told him firmly. “You are not alone.”
With the flush of adrenaline that comes with crisis, Elsa’s mind flashed on everything she had learned, the death of his mother, the death of the sheikh’s son, the straightjackets, the shackles, handcuffs and the beatings. In each case he had been rendered completely helpless. Helpless against paternal authority, against government, against the military and against the tangible constrictions of leather and brass and steel on his body. He had built his body larger and stronger to compensate for the feeling of adolescent helplessness against his father, yet as his muscles grew stronger, so did the constrictions of society, the military, and honor. And in each case he had been alone.
After the death of his mother there had been no one to turn to, no one to help him, no one to talk to. No one to trust. Ever. No appeals after the trauma. The dead stayed dead. Doors stayed locked. Asylum cells stayed barred.
She shook his shoulders again. His irises dilated. He was going under. The loss of the use of his hands precipitated another instance of complete helplessness in the face of disaster. Even his mind abandoned him in times of crisis. No wonder his psyche cracked under this onslaught of these repeated betrayals.
But his psyche could trust her. She would make it so. She shouted at the top of her voice to get the words into his ears before he could collapse, “You are not helpless! You are not alone! I am here!” When that seemed to bring a spark back to his eyes she pressed her point.
“On your feet, soldier!”
The darkness in his eyes constricted and the brown color returned. He was looking at her now. He was still breathing like a bellows, but now the muscles of his face composed themselves with effort into an expression of intense focus. She felt his bandaged hands on her arms. He was feeling her to make certain she was really there.
She nodded slowly to him as the car swayed and the screaming of the passengers was now punctuated with the pop pop pop sounds of small arms gunfire. “Show me how to use it.” She removed her hands from his shoulders and picked the pistol up from his lap. “Show me.”
He swallowed hard. “Five rounds.” His voice was hoarse.
“What is a ‘round’?”
“Bullets. The hammer is on the empty chamber.” He took a deep breath and sat up. Color started to return to his cheeks. “It is heavier than you think.”
She lifted the pistol to look at the cylinder as he had indicated. He was right. The weight of the metal hurt her wrist.
He said, “Squeeze the trigger, don’t pull at it. Hold the barrel level. The pistol will kick you. Take it in your shoulder, not your wrist. Aim a little low to compensate.”
He was coming around. The soldier in him was taking over. She moved the barrel and pointed it toward the door. Screams and the sounds of splintering wood and breaking glass cascaded down the corridor, getting louder.
She nodded that she understood and practiced holding the pistol steady. The barrel wavered all over the sliding door that opened to the corridor. She needed two hands to steady the weight. Then she needed to sit down to steady her elbows. She sat across from him and put one of her feet between his knees on his seat to brace herself. In a small voice she asked, “what if there are more than five of them?”
He had no time to answer as the door slid to the side and a rough-looking man with dark hair and eyes and a bristling mustache shouted something in Turkish. The barrel of a gun larger than hers poked through the door. He shouted again at Sonnenby who raised his bandaged hands in a slow sign of surrender. She aimed and squeezed the trigger. The man was only a meter away. Point blank.
As Sonnenby had warned, the pistol kicked back, sending a shooting pain through her wrists. A round hole appeared between the Turk’s eyes and he dropped like a marionette in a jumble of arms and legs. She lowered the pistol between her knees to rest her wrists. Another man appeared in the doorway, his face registered shock and confusion as he looked for the source of the bullet that killed his comrade. He could see clearly that Sonnenby was unarmed, his empty hands were raised high over his shoulders. This man waved his pistol about the compartment, but when his eyes touched Elsa they kept on moving past her and did not look in her lap. She was just a woman.
She lifted the pistol and squeezed the trigger. This time the bloody hole did not drop him because she had not hit him properly. He spun about, his pistol fired wildly at the ceiling and bits of wood floated down on Sonnenby’s head from a hole above him. She had struck the Turk in the neck. He dropped his weapon and put both hands to his throat as a spray of frothing red spattered all of them. She squeezed the trigger again, this time with one eye closed and her arm braced against the seat behind her. This time she was ready for the recoil, took the jolt in her shoulder instead of her arms, and the second hole over the Turk’s ear dropped him upon the body of the other.
The third man to approach the compartment started firing before he appeared in the doorway. Elsa glanced quickly at Sonnenby to see if he had been hit. No.
Sonnenby dived for the floor as the seat behind him exploded into splinters and fluff. The man in the corridor had a shotgun. Elsa did not wait for him to emerge among the chaff, but moved the barrel to shoot through the thin compartment wall into the corridor where she had deduced the shooter might be standing. She kept squeezing the trigger until she heard it clicking impotently.
“This is what happens with five!” she cried. “I need thirty! I need forty! Verdammnt diese five rounds! Five! Goddamned stupid five! Five is not good, it is not good!”
No one else tried to enter the compartment in the next few seconds. Elsa threw her pistol down and crawled over Sonnenby to where the first Turk’s handgun had fallen. Sonnenby helped her by scissoring his legs and kicking it toward her. She had it in her hand as they both sat in a jumble on the floor between the two seats in a now very crowded compartment. His large body was wedged in the foot well between the two seats and she sat between his knees, both of their legs stretched out straight in front of them, their feet resting on the bodies of the dead Turks. She could feel his sturdy chest behind her back and his warm breath in her hair. H
is arms steadied hers on either side. She heard more shouting in the corridor. More men were coming.
Sonnenby spoke low, translating. “They are calling the names of these two men, they are asking them if they have found me. They are asking if there are more people in this car, and if any of the passengers are armed.”
Elsa’s hands shook as she lifted the Turk’s pistol. “Oh no!” she cried, “Oh no! This one doesn’t have a hammer or a cylinder with ‘rounds’ in it!”
“That’s a Mauser, darling. It’s better.”
She pulled the trigger at the corridor, waving the barrel back and forth like spraying a hose. But nothing happened. The voices and thundering boots were louder now. An entire army was converging on their compartment. “It’s empty! It’s empty! Gott im Himmel! Nichtig! Nichtig!”
His voice was deep and even. “No it’s not. Well, yes it is. Calm down. Look at the top. The part over the stock. The handle. Look. Elsa. Look here. Elsa. Elsa. This clip is empty. Pull it out, put the other one in. Here it is. Here. It fits in the top.” He fumbled a bright arc of shining bullets from the dead Turk toward her and she took them. “Right in the top. There. Like that. Good.” Her hands were shaking but she ejected one stripper clip and positioned the other. She felt the clip slide in and lock itself inside the pistol. These bullets were much larger.
“This weapon will take your hand off if you don’t hold it right.” He touched her hands to position them correctly on the pistol and helped steady her elbow as another Turk entered their car and stopped just outside the compartment before theirs. The Turk shouted and Elsa waited for the translation but Sonnenby said, “Just shoot him, Schatze.”
She squeezed the trigger again and again sending the shots blindly through the thin veneer of the compartment walls. Powerful recoil accompanied each shot and it blew enormous holes in the train. Sonnenby had her elbow braced against his chest and steadied her with his arms. More men entered the car and more fell. She stopped counting, and didn’t hear the return fire, though the splinters and bits of the train’s interior paneling and upholstery filled the air around her. Turkish bullets exploded the seat beside her and she felt one whiz through her flying hair. She fired and fired until the clip was empty, then reloaded the clips with ammunition from the dead Turk’s body with Sonnenby’s hand guiding hers to set the clip properly.
The pistol was hot and her trigger finger continued to twitch until she had emptied this clip as well. Her ears rang with the reverberations of the powerful bangs and her shoulders ached from the repeated recoil. Sonnenby lowered her arm and gently removed the weapon from her fingers. There was no more shouting. No more gunfire. Wails and cries in the distance was all she could hear once the ringing in her ears stopped.
She took a deep breath. “I like the Mauser.”
“Me too,” he answered.
An hour later they stood next to the howitzer on the rise over the tracks and watched the local villagers loot the train. The blast from the shell had struck the track and another had put a hole through one of the tender cars. The combination of a loosened track and the force from the lateral strike had derailed four of the cars. Colorful forms darted to and fro, empty-handed going in, heavily laden coming out. Piles of looted goods, guarded by younger sons, appeared here and there, dotting the landscape. Their own baggage lay safe at their feet. Sonnenby examined the big gun much as she would examine a patient. He touched it here and there, poked and prodded it, tested the undercarriage and sighted along the barrel.
“Amateurs,” he decided. “They shot at the train like it was a gazelle or a deer.”
“It was enough,” she noted.
“Indeed,” he murmured. “Look at us, Elsa. We are now on foot four hundred kilometers or more from Istanbul, and the Turks are engaged in a civil war.”
“There is a station closer. We can pick up the train again there.”
“Maybe.” He took the fedora off his head and slapped it against his knee. When he moved to slide it over his hair it was decidedly out of shape. “But I am not sure I want to be on a Turkish train again.”
She shook her head in agreement. “What should we do?” His high boots were perfect for marching across this rough landscape, but her shoes were not. She lifted her skirts and looked at them. They were sturdy, but were not designed for cross country. And her baggage. Minimal now, but heavy enough to make twenty miles a day an achievement. And a civil war? She scanned the hills above them.
The other passengers milled about at the rear of the train. This band of Turks was not an organized group of soldiers, though most likely their leaders had once been Turkish soldiers. The men who had converged on their car had known how to use their weapons, they had a great variety of small arms. Elsa and Sonnenby had picked up more ammunition from their bodies. Sonnenby had indicated a Luger with his bloody hand and she picked it up and put it in his kit for him. The Mauser was in its wooden holster with its strap over her shoulder and extra stripper clips looted from the dead. She rested her hand on it every now and then. It felt good.
When the looting was over there would be twenty or thirty passengers waiting for rescue from Konya. After listening to Turkish discussions in the resulting milieu Sonnenby had decided to move them quickly away from the train.
The train had not been stopped to get Sonnenby, but to loot the food and supplies and baggage and fuel. Trains were being searched by mercenaries for anything of value. Sonnenby had a hefty price on his head, estimates between one and five thousand pounds, British sterling. The more people talked the larger the amount grew. It didn’t matter if the talk was true or not. If one man decided Sonnenby was worth a guinea that would be incentive enough to drag his body to town and demand something, even if he didn’t get it.
“In this situation, I am valuable even if I am only worth a donkey.” He scanned the horizon as she was doing.
“Just how much are those damned shares worth?”
He shook his head. “I can’t say. All I know is that I need to be dead to release them from the trust.”
She understood how little one man’s life could be worth to a government or a corporation. When they measured Sonnenby against an entire navy and against the idea of national security his life was worth very little. But when she looked at him she could not see trading any number of battleships for him, or millions of dollars of oil stock. He was hers now. The British were not going to take what was hers. They had taken her brothers. They would not take Sonnenby. She put her hand on the Mauser and tightened her jaw.
He saw her do that and said, “Elsa.”
She looked up at him.
“This changes things.”
“Of course. We will have to take that route,” she pointed to the west, “but stay off the road. We must keep the tracks in sight, as they are our best guide.” She lifted her skirt and then her ankle. “I want to loot some better boots from one of the dead Turks. And get some kind of army backpack for my baggage. We need water. I am thirsty.”
He frowned. “That is not what I meant.”
“What did you mean?”
He sat down. She would not. She paced back and forth behind the howitzer, her hand resting on the comforting grip of her Mauser. Below her the looters were loading their goods on donkeys and horses and mules and women. The other passengers were sitting in the shade of the upright cars, waiting.
“We cannot show our passports in Istanbul, Elsa. They will arrest us. Separate us.”
She stopped pacing. “Oh.” She had been concentrating on picking up the Orient Express there. She made a face. It was probably time to tell him about the power of attorney.
His face was serious. “I am saying we might not want to go back at all. That sheep herder job is looking better. I cannot let anything happen to you. You were almost killed on that train. But being a living shepherdess is better than being a dead therapist, though I hate to think of you living in the dirt. I like to imagine you in a blue beaded ball gown dancing Viennese waltzes or sitting in
an opera box.”
She raised an eyebrow. “No,” she told him firmly. “I refuse to be another dead child for my poor papa and mama.” She stood next to him. “And if I do not return to Doctor Engel I will not be Elsa Schluss anymore.” She didn’t know how to say this in English any better than that.
“You would be Elsa Sinclair, Lady Sonnenby.”
“But I would not. You cannot marry me. And as an Anatolian shepherd you would no longer be Sinclair nor Sonnenby. You would not even be Henry. After a time you would begin to regret that decision, you would begin to hate yourself as a sheep herder. You would see yourself as a coward. I know you. Gott im Himmel, I know you. We go west. Follow the tracks. We walk into the British Embassy in Istanbul. We show them our passports. We are Elsa Schluss and Henry Sinclair, Lord Sonnenby. We can solve this problem as sane, professional people.”
He bent his head until his chin touched his chest. The brim of the fedora wavered.
She continued quickly before he could despair, “I have papers that can secure a medical hearing for you. Doctor Engel will provide you with an affidavit that will be taken very seriously. Even in London. After that it is up to the lawyers. It is in your government’s best interests to have you declared sane. You can then sell them the stock and be done with it. I believe the merger is more important than a treason charge. Perhaps they will investigate what happened to you in Cairo. I suspect you may use those shares as a gambling chip and get that charge dismissed.”
The brim lifted and she could see his eyes. Wary.
“Henry,” she continued gently, “we do not change who we are by geography. We are only ever who we believe we are. We have to live with ourselves first, before we can live with others.”
She touched his shoulder. “You will have to trust me on this one. Come with me to Vienna to see Doctor Engel, and then return to London. I will wait for you.”
Blue Damask Page 35
