Gardens of Grief

by Boston Teran

  Also by Boston Teran

  God is a Bullet

  Never Count Out the Dead

  The Prince of Deadly Weapons

  Trois Femmes

  Giv—The Story of a Dog and America

  The Creed of Violence

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblence to actual people, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is coincidental.

  Copyright 2010 by Brutus Productions, Inc.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan American Copyright Conventions.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2010937933

  Interior design by Neuwirth & Associates, Inc.

  ISBN: 9781567030563

  Published in the United States by High Top Publications LLC, Los Angeles, CA and simultaneously in Canada by High Top Publications LLC.

  Dedicated to:

  . . . the unnamed

  . . . the unknown

  . . . the lost

  . . . the forgotten

  . . . the imprisioned

  . . . the tortured

  . . . the murdered

  . . . the slaughtered

  . . .

  Every man carries the history of the world in his soul—

  This work is based on historical fact.

  p r o l o g u e

  N JANUARY 1937, in the basement storage room of an old war department building, the files of the Creel Committee from 1917–1919 were discovered. These files were thought to be lost for twenty years, their whereabouts unknown even to the Library of Congress.

  The Committee on Public Information was the most effective propaganda agency ever established in the United States. Among those lost files was a packet of notes, letters and reports by a special agent for the Bureau of Investigation, named John Lourdes.

  PART I

  The Journey

  o n e

  OSTON . . . SO RICH with history and meaning. Of all that is to be written about this great country . . . Boston will always be part of the first page.”

  The young lady at the podium speaking looked out upon an assembly of Americans that crowded Faneuil Hall. Her name was Alev Temple. It was not long after the beginning of the Great War. The air that night was heavy and many in the auditorium, and along the walls or squeezed in doorways, fanned themselves with fliers and contribution envelopes passed out upon their entering that celebrated meeting place.

  She continued, “To stand at this podium, in this place known as the Cradle of Liberty, to be where Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty divined their historic opposition to British oppression, to realize the Boston Tea Party was conceived here, is an honor I wish, I so deeply wish, I had earned. But I have not.”

  The young woman took a moment and addressed her notes. The people were silent but for the occasional shuffling of paper or a lone cough, and for a few seconds she was afraid she would not find her voice.

  “I am a young woman of twenty-two,” she said, “who has achieved nothing to be worthy of this podium, or your presence. So, it would be right to ask, how did I come to be here?” She folded her hands and with dark, charged eyes looked out upon a nation of faces. “I am here because of my father, who was a doctor, and my mother, who was a nurse. Their . . . murder . . . was my passport to this podium. Their willingness to sacrifice their lives by living out the Christian code—I am my brother’s keeper—is what allows me to be the voice of a people in desperate need of all our help.

  “A people who are being driven from their homeland. Whose mothers and daughters, wives and sisters, are being violated, then butchered. Whose fathers and sons, husbands and brothers are being herded like beasts into the desert to be slaughtered.

  “My father, not long before his death, said, “there is not a word in the English language to describe what is happening to those people. Massacre does not suffice . . . annihilation falls short. And if we, as a people, do not stand by “The Creed” our world is built upon, when it comes time a word is created to describe these unnameable atrocities, that word will also come to define the abject failure of our humanity.”

  t w o

  HERE IS NO greater simplicity than the stars. They cast no shadow, and they are forever. And for each and every man, they are the same.

  John Lourdes stood on the deck of an old cargo steamer and looked out upon the secret darkness of the Black Sea. He was on that boat, in the spring of 1915, because he had agreed to become part of the larger enterprise known as war.

  Far off into the night he could make out the first lights of Constantinople anchored along the horizon. With nothing beyond Texas and Mexico to his name, he had been cast upon the waters of the world.

  It came to him quite suddenly, this feeling he had been emptied of the past, and any future tethered to it. That he had somehow slipped the bonds of personal history and birth and now somewhere beyond the silent shore of the new and unknown, he would come to define one John Lourdes.

  John Lourdes watched dawn form across an Ottoman sky as they prepared to disembark. A great mosque with minarets like the lances of fabled titans shielded the light. There were boats everywhere with oddly hung sails and steamers making their way on toward the Caucasus. Anchored in the harbor were ships of the Turkish navy painted in that yellowish khaki, which he had overheard in conversation concealed them against the coastline. From one of the minaret towers came the call to prayer. A figure in white robes appeared like a matchtip, the cadence of his song strange to John Lourdes’ ears.

  Like any traveler he disembarked and secured his luggage and hired a hamal—a porter. He had picked up a few words of Turkish during the trip. But even there, at the crossroads of the world, John Lourdes collected stares.

  Maybe it was the Mallory hat, the western boots and canvas pants, the vest and shoulder holster. The hamal was handed two suitcases; one bore John Lourdes’ clothes, the other articles of his trade. There were two scabbards, one housing a shotgun, the other a rifle.

  The hamal asked in Turkish, in French, in German where he desired to be taken. John Lourdes answered in Spanish, “The Pera Palas Hotel . . . if you please.” The hamal assumed he was a gentleman of importance and treated John Lourdes accordingly, “Si, efendi, si.”

  While on board ship he’d learned the hotel was considered a work of art, built by the French for travelers from Paris who had come to Constantinople on the Orient Express. The Pera Palas featured the first electric elevator in the city, and rumor had it a certain wealthy tycoon had been denied a suite of rooms because of “poor looks.” It was there the U.S. State Department had instructed John Lourdes to take a room.

  Speaking only Spanish, he made himself understood to the desk clerk. The paperwork he presented said he was a citizen of Mexico. He asked if there were any messages as he was expecting one. An envelope was handed to John Lourdes with his room key. As he was taken to the elevator his rifle scabbards drew the attention of passersby.

  In his room he read the note carefully, then put it in the pocket notebook he carried with him. There would be nothing to do till nightfall but wait.

  Not long after the Archduke had been assassinated and the beginning of the Great War, Justice Knox, the head of the Bureau of Investigation in El Paso, Texas, called one of his agents, John Lourdes, to a meeting.

  It was not to be held at the Bureau offices, but at the home of the attorney, Wadsworth Burr. This was done to exact a measure of privacy. The meeting had been requested by a representative of the State Department.

  The gentleman was a Harvard graduate and not much older than John Lourdes. “No matter what the outcome of this meeting,” he said in advance, “it is to be understo
od everything discussed is a matter of national security. And, as such, to be held in the strictest confidence.”

  The representative from Washington had an even temperament and spoke with austere urgency about a plague of overseas concerns facing the government. State was recruiting men from Customs, the Bureau of Investigation, the military, to be stationed throughout Europe and the Ottoman Empire to work clandestinely as information gatherers and couriers. They were to be an advance guard, a reconnaissance force, so to speak. A lifeline of intelligence to help the government understand and evaluate events on the ground and so better confront evolving crises. It was also to be a means for advising the Entente in the conflict.

  It was to be understood the agent would almost certainly be faced with questionable situations, unexpected adversaries, the unknown intentions of associates, confrontations beyond the pure dangers of the war itself.

  These would demand the agent have considerable acuity and, by necessity, be capable of making swift and determinative decisions. The representative then added, precautions would be put in place to protect the agent. At least, as was humanly possible.

  “Your record, Mr. Lourdes, caught our eye. Your time in Mexico with that assassin.” The man from the State Department paused a moment. “But it was your background that we felt would make you particularly useful to us.”

  “My background?”

  “The fact, Mr. Lourdes, that you’re not white.”

  From his hotel window John Lourdes could look down upon the historic harbor known as the Halic, though Westerners called it the Golden Horn. He walked the quay, teeming it was with people. His intention was to kill the hours before the appointed meeting where he was to receive his orders. In truth, the walk was to clear his mind.

  Merchant stalls lined the vast estuary. An infinite passageway of day to day treasures, a living dream to the nearness of the world, and the ultimate temptation to man’s incurable limitations. Yet, there was one aspect to this place of manifest antiquity that could not escape the traveler. It was not white.

  The Greek had harbored there, the Roman, the Byzantine, and the Ottoman. The Crusader had left his mark, as had the Jew and the Muslim. The Halic had been witness to tumult and wars and was the subject of endless works of art. “And if you recall your mythology,” Wadsworth Burr had told John Lourdes upon his departure, “Jason’s hunt for the Golden Fleece.”

  As he had climbed the gangway John Lourdes yelled back, “I’ll keep an eye out for it!” But then, he took a moment and looked toward Burr. They had years and John Lourdes’ father between them. “I know what you’re telling me, Wadsworth. And thanks.”

  Before the war, intelligence had come mostly from missionaries, consuls, and involved nationals. Their information was passed on through letters and encrypted messages. Since the war encryptions were being deciphered and the mails read by the authorities. That’s why State brought in John Lourdes and others, who like him, didn’t measure out their lives half a glass at a time.

  Far down the quay there was a sudden commotion. German officers leading a squad of Turkish gendarmes from stall to stall. John Lourdes watched them leave a trail of havoc in their wake.

  A panic began to spread among the crowd. There were shouts, an oddly pitched whistle. The gendarmes had drawn their weapons. People scattered across the quay as a man in a plain kaftan burst through the crowd. He was sprinting in John Lourdes’ direction, using his forearms and elbows to drive apart bodies and make his escape.

  A German officer was pointing at him. There followed a battery of shots. The air crackled with pistol fire. The whole of the quay was swept up in the moment. The man’s face was strained with the running and the fear. It looked as if he might elude the gendarmes when there was a flashpoint of blackened dust on the front of his kaftan from where the bullet had exited.

  His body was driven forward. A sandal flew loose. He stumbled to his knees. Blood from the wound drained onto the stones beneath his slumping shadow. From somewhere a woman cried out, her voice a pitched fury. Space formed around the man, people stood and watched in disbelief the dying. The gendarmes closed in with guns drawn.

  The man looked up. John Lourdes was a body length away.

  The eyes in the darkened face saw and understood the calamity that had befallen it. One arm rose and stretched out. Was it the useless gesture of a man already dead, or something else—?

  A quick succession of gunshots drove him to the stones. A queer and unsettling quiet spread along the quay. The Turkish police tried to move the bystanders on. This should have been the end of it, but it was not.

  The woman who had been screaming was held at bay by a German officer, but it was another woman that caught John Lourdes’ attention. In cloak and veil she slipped through the crowd. Small, silent, near invisible. Her arms were tight against her body where she protected a child in swaddling cloth.

  She took lean, quick steps, approaching a different German officer near the body. He was caught off guard by this woman clutching a child and put up an indifferent hand for her to stop. But she did not.

  In the path of a few seconds, the world can make itself known. What John Lourdes saw, the German by the body saw, and he understood what was about to befall him, but too late. In the swaddling cloth was not a child, but the wooden stick and thin sheet metal of a grenade.

  At the moment of the blast the woman and the German were so close as to be one agonizing embrace. The two nearest gendarmes were pierced through with wood and metal shards. Their wounds bright pools and slash marks on the gray stone where they lay. Someone shouted a word John Lourdes did not understand: Fedayeen!

  t h r e e

  OHN LOURDES SAT in the hotel lobby that night waiting for his contact. He wrote in his pocket notebook, as was his method, the events of the day.

  A word he had not understood—fedayeen—pronouncing it as best he could, he asked a gentleman behind the front desk to please write it out for him, and explain its meaning. The clerk, an older and rather refined looking fellow, did as he was asked, then staring at John Lourdes indignantly answered, “It means . . . blasphemous murderers.”

  Though he neither grasped or fully appreciated the meaning of what he had witnessed on the quay, it was the stark political barbarity that said to John Lourdes some new level of infamy was being ushered into the world. And that if you were not prepared for it, you would be put under by it.

  And yet, in the hotel lobby one would hardly be aware the incident on the quay had happened at all. Ladies and their gentlemen, all elegantly dressed, waited to dine or for carriages to take them to the theater. The ladies stood together and gossiped, the men regaled about business or themselves. It was as if their private world, was the world, thought John Lourdes.

  “Efendi?”

  John Lourdes looked up from his notebook.

  A tallish man in a long coat, who seemed to be of Arab and Chinese blood said, “The manager,” he pointed to the front desk, “said you are Mr. Lourdes. Is that right?”

  He nodded, and stood.

  “I’m here to take you to Mr. Baptiste—“

  “Mr. Baptiste was supposed to—“

  “There is trouble in the streets tonight. It is not safe.”

  As they crossed the lobby, a number of men who had been at the bar, including one with a tripod and camera, rushed past. The hotel was a notorious crossroads for news and was never short of international reporters and magazine writers.

  A crowd was gathering on the hotel steps as John Lourdes exited the lobby. Coming through the parked arabas and automobiles was a young woman with dark hair and darker charged eyes. She was carrying a torch in one hand and a rolled up cloth in the other. She led a small train of children in peasant clothes. Each carried a lit candle in one hand, while cupping the flame with the other to protect it against the breeze off the Black Sea. A few women followed behind them and one John Lourdes recognized from her tragic fit of tears on the quay.

  The young woman wit
h the torch took up a place at the entry facing the street and had the children squeeze in close so the light from the lobby fell around them. Reporters had begun throwing their questions at her but, despite her youth, she remained composed and silent, till the tripod was set up and the camera ready.

  “A man was murdered today,” she said. “He was shot down within sight of this hotel.” John Lourdes could pick up the slightest trace of a British accent. “He was murdered for two reasons. One, he was a political writer. And two, he was an Armenian. Those were his crimes against the Empire.”

  The man escorting John Lourdes tugged at his coat sleeve, “Efendi, we must hurry.”

  “These are his children,” said the young woman. “And that one is his sister. They, too, are fated to be killed.”

  John Lourdes followed his escort through the crowd and away from the hotel and looked back only when there came a collective gasp from the crowd.

  The bundled-up cloth the young woman had been carrying was, in fact, the dead man’s kaftan. It hung now from her free hand like a shroud, grim and bloody in torchlight.

  John Lourdes was being led up into the Beyoglu by his nameless escort who walked quickly, watching always, anxious, intent, for there were gendarmes everywhere that night and they had retribution on their mind.

  It was the European quarter they were entering, with its embassies and stone mansions and Arabic palaces from before the written word. Along the Grand Rue de Pera the authorities patroled the streets in squads of two and three with lanterns, stopping tourists and searching arabas. The man motioned to John Lourdes to indicate they would avoid the well-lit causeways.