Gardens of Grief

by Boston Teran

  The bodies lay at the stony bottom of a hundred foot drop. Through his field glasses most looked to John Lourdes to have died from the fall. A small number, perhaps two dozen, had survived long enough to try and drag themselves to a stream, where beyond were woods. He could see the marks their bodies had made scoring the earth. A bare handful reached the water, those looked to have been shot.

  “The men of the village?” said John Lourdes.

  “It would seem so.”

  Crossing the town square John Lourdes said, “Get a rope and ring the bell.” He opened one of the scabbards stored on the pack horse.

  “There are Turks everywhere, efendi. There are Kurd bandits in these hills. The Pasha has opened the prisons of murderers and they ride for the government in armed battalions. Some are stationed at Erzurum not nine kilometers from here.”

  John Lourdes checked the pump action on his M12.

  “If you ring the bell, efendi, someone will hear . . . someone will come.”

  “That’s the goddamn idea.” He chambered 20 gauge shells into the underbelly of the weapon. “Get a rope, attach the clapper, ring the bell. And keep ringing it. I was to meet the dragoman of the vilayet here. I’ve got to know if he’s alive, if anyone from here is left alive who can tell me that.”

  “It’s Malek. The priest. He is the journey.”

  John Lourdes swung a bandoleer of shells over his shoulder. “He is the journey.”

  The ring carried well into the hills, and when it died away Hain rang again. John Lourdes sat on the edge of the well in the town square with the shotgun across his lap and watched. When the right arm of the guide gave way, he switched to the left. And so it went. The mist had finally burned off, and the light fell hard upon the country. A country, John Lourdes thought, that seemed well provisioned with possibility. Then, in the watching, something about the horses gave him pause.

  “Do you have a gun?” said John Lourdes.

  “I have a revolver at my saddle.”

  “Get it. But keep it in a pocket.”

  Hain moved quickly. His head like a hummingbird scanning left and right.

  “How do you know Mr. Baptiste?” said John Lourdes.

  “Baptiste? He was my attorney once. He kept me out of prison. He was a fine attorney, with but one failing. He was not corrupt. Efendi, is there something?”

  “You’re the guide.”

  They first came within sight by a stand of timber. Three riders approaching through the high grass at a slow walk. They maneuvered to keep the sun at their backs.

  Hain was visibly shaken. He slipped the revolver under his grimy blouse.

  They turned up into the street, this mismatched set of men led by an old one. They were not Kurds, nor bandits, not part of the murderers’ battalion. They were Turkish soldiers.

  Recognizing this the guide sprinted forward. He threw himself to the dirt in front of the horsemen. A tone of pleading and supplication in his voice, a dramatic gesturing of the arms punctuated a tortured monologue. John Lourdes did not need a dictionary to know he was being thrown to the dogs.

  s e v e n

  HE OLD ONE stared at John Lourdes. He had a grim and tireless face. He addressed John Lourdes directly.

  “This one,” he said, gesturing at Hain, “tells you are a friend of the Armenian. And looking for the dragoman of the vilayet. That you tricked him to bring you here.”

  The old one, surprisingly, spoke a fair brand of English.

  “Is this truthful?”

  “Who is on the ground, and who is not.”

  The speaker addressed the two other riders quietly. As he did John Lourdes moved the barrel of the shotgun just slightly, for a better killing angle. The old one dismounted. Then, without ceremony, he kicked Hain full in the face.

  “Are you,” he now asked John Lourdes, “friend to the Armenian?”

  “Wouldn’t know one if I saw one.”

  “And the dragoman?”

  “I am a citizen of Mexico. Here to see the country.”

  His questioner took a step toward John Lourdes and as he did the guide came up like a gun-shot djinn and got his arm around that aging throat pressing a black and heavy revolver into the man’s stomach, all the while making this mad trill that shocked the soldiers’ mounts so they skittered and turned. John Lourdes now was up and shotgun ready.

  Hain shouted into the side of the old one’s face, “The hind legs of the dog have risen.”

  The soldiers were uncertain and rattling out threats and demands. The old one put up a hand to quiet them then said directly to John Lourdes, “The letter Mr. Baptiste gave to a man . . . had a quote from the Book.”

  “Shoot them, efendi. Shoot them now.”

  John Lourdes threw out a hand, “Wait.” He came forward and eased the gun barrel down just a bit. “You tell me? What Gospel . . . What chapter?”

  “Luke,” came the reply. “Chapter ten.”

  “Verses twenty-five to thirty-seven,” said John Lourdes.

  “The tale of the Samaritan.”

  John Lourdes let the gun barrel drop. He ordered the guide to do the same.

  “I am the dragoman,” said the old one and put out a hand.

  They shook.

  “Efendi,” said John Lourdes, “I almost killed you.”

  “It is you who both were about to be killed.”

  He then motioned for John Lourdes to look over his shoulder. There, in the cool shadows of the church gallery was a boy with a musket.

  A dragoman was an official functionary and, as John Lourdes could best piece together, a sort of trading post politico and interpreter serviceable in a host of Arabic and European languages.

  The two soldiers with the dragoman were his sons, the younger boy with the relic firearm, his grandson. The Turkish uniforms they’d stripped from their victims were a means of moving more freely about the countryside, as they had become hunted men. No Armenian, John Lourdes learned, was allowed to carry weapons.

  They sat about the well, they smoked and drank coffee heated in a battered can. John Lourdes asked about the priest, as was his mission. The dragoman had discouraging news. The priest had been captured in a battle along the Karusi River, which was at the headwaters of the Euphrates. He was now imprisoned at Erzurum. The tribunal’s sentence was, of course, death. Yet, he was not to be afforded the mantle of martyrdom.

  His fate—an insane asylum in Constantinople. There he was to be broken. He was to admit the Armenian was at the root of all trouble within the Ottoman Empire. To confess the Armenian had been, and was now, in consort with Europe and the Entente in trying to overthrow the legitimate government. That a free state financed by the industrial west was to be designed without the Muslim. And that the free state was to be paid for with the Dardanelles and the Persian Gulf. And with the prize of prizes—the oil fields of Basra and Baku. As the priest Malek had told the people, “The holy water of the future will come from the well of oil.”

  The dragoman and his sons meant to confront infamy. Theirs was a plot to free the priest. John Lourdes asked if he might know the plan, to lend reasonable advice, if he had such to offer. To that end, a ride to the prison at Erzurum must be undertaken.

  Erzurum stood upon a flat plateau amidst a vast plain with nothing to hold back the wind. Where the sun was, sheer mountains rose tipped with snow. Erzurum had been at the crossroads of violence since wars with the Seleucids and Parthians.

  Their small band passed through the shadow of the fortress gate and along a stone boulevard lined with trees. There were many soldiers and tourists and women wearing black chadors so that only their eyes were revealed. Above the rooftops were minarets glazed with tiles, and they shined like some striking image against the sun.

  On a long dirt street were the bazaars where traders and cobblers sold their wares beside food merchants and goodsmen and jewelers of Oltu tasi that had been carved into prayer beads and pipes and necklaces.

  The dragoman and his sons were dre
ssed now in common garb and rode quietly with their noses toward the ground. They put up their horses and dismounted, and John Lourdes and Hain followed them up a flight of stairs to a rooftop café. From their table they could look across the pavilion to the prison.

  It was walled and grim, with a guard station and rifletower beside an iron gate. There was a courtyard framed by two stories of barred windows. In the empty dirt courtyard a man stood chained to a stake.

  “Malek,” said the dragoman.

  He, alone, was there. On view to all in the prison, to all who walked past the gate. His clothes less than that of a beggar, he was left to urinate in the dust where he stood barefooted.

  John Lourdes told his companions he would walk the street alone and survey the prison close at hand. He passed under the shadow of the tower, which fell long across the earth. The walls were of rough-cut stone as was the tower, and the gate iron was thick as the bone of a human thigh. The guards were indifferent to his passing, for many who went by the gate slowed in their curiosity over this chained likeness of a man.

  Malek stood in the prison sun staring straight ahead. He gave the guards no notice, nor any to the shouts and calls of the prisoners from their cells, and none to the citizenry passing in the street. He was unto himself, alone in a place beyond question or reason.

  He was not a tall man, nor a powerful man. Though his face hair was scored with gray and the earthy skin marred by lines, John Lourdes thought him to be about fifty, the same age as his father would be, had he lived.

  It was only when Malek took a slow and awkward step to one side, as if to keep the blood coursing through his legs, that John Lourdes saw the priest’s feet. Truly saw them. From the rooftop he had appeared barefooted. It was so. But there was something attached to the bottom of those naked soles. Something the color of iron, and when the priest put a foot down there was a discernable clunk, sending up a small bundle of dust.

  Horseshoes. They were nailed to his feet. John Lourdes kept staring to make sure the evidence of his eyes was correct. And yet, there was nothing about the man, nothing in the way he stood or moved, to suggest such an atrocity had been inflicted upon him.

  John Lourdes had seen men like this in the west. In the fenceless counties of Texas and Mexico. Men, usually older, but not always, who bled more, endured more, had been defeated more, suffered and survived more, yet whose very being seemed to support the flesh of the body on a scaffold of character and soul. Men, who even when exhausted beyond endurance, inhabited an unassailable place.

  Such men could, and did, have tortured or flawed characters, they could be broken or destroyed. And though the universe is not in the business of the commonplace or the extravagant, the universe does not lie.

  John Lourdes turned his attention to the layout of the courtyard, to the heavy wooden doors on the prison square, the forty yards or so of barren space between Malek and the gate. He assessed the guards’ ability to command the scene, the weapons the men carried, how the gate locked and was hinged to the stone, the street as a means of defense and escape. He took out his notebook and began to draft his first ideas. Then, after a few moments writing, he stopped.

  Four men, he thought, four men. He looked across the pavilion to where they watched him from the café. Four men, and one is old and one a boy.

  As he crossed the pavilion, he noted a company of riders coming up through the bazaar. At the head of the column was Rittmeister Franke. John Lourdes quickly crossed inside the rippling cloth of a trader’s tent.

  The German was followed by brother officers and members of the Turkish Special Organization that had been with him on Le Minotaur. But the other men with him were not troops.

  It was a commission of the foul and the wretched. Recruits from some dark nightmare with scythes across their shoulders and double headed axes protruding from scabbards. Some carried rifles and scimitars, and clubs fleshed with metal arrowtips. Their clothes bore the filth of the nation and this cast of horribles gave no man his due, nor expected any.

  The guide came up behind John Lourdes and leaned into his shoulder. “The officers . . . They were on the same boat as you.”

  “Yes. Who are those others?”

  “Remember, efendi, I spoke of murderers let out of the prisons if they would ride for the government. These are the ones released to hunt and kill the Armenian.”

  e i g h t

  IGHT FELL ABOUT the prison. The barred windows left their image upon the walls. John Lourdes and the dragoman faced each other over a candle on the rooftop. The old one explained his plan. John Lourdes listened and smoked and considered. When done, the dragoman asked, “You have looked, you have heard. Now, tell me what you think.”

  From beyond a street of rooftops a muezzin made the evening call to prayer. The lilt of the words hung on the still air like silk. John Lourdes did not know what they meant, but the chant seemed plaintive and touched with the promises of faith.

  He looked toward the prison. There was a great wheel of light above the tower roof made of lamps. It stood out across the city like a burning eye. He was able to watch the guards there taking their time of the adhan. In the darkness beyond the gate the priest waited on daylight.

  “John Lourdes . . . What do you see?”

  “Efendi, I see you are not enough.”

  “But, we are all there is.”

  John Lourdes acknowledged as much. The others around the candle spoke not at all. Except for the guide. He thumbed tobacco into his chibouk and asked in a pleasant tone if anyone had a miracle on them. If not, he would settle for a match.

  The next day John Lourdes reenvisioned the plan.

  He decided the moment for the assault to be the afternoon call to prayer. The night before, he noted that was when the tower guards were at their most vulnerable.

  There were two avenues of escape from the pavilion. The street with its chaotic bazaar, and a smaller street, further down from the gate that cut into the pavilion at an angle. Out that cobbled passway is where they would make the run, if they survived the assault.

  John Lourdes stationed the grandson at the corner of that street, as he could watch for the gendarmes or soldiers that might happen upon the scene, and he could provide support fire on the gate. At the corner the boy staked both his mount and one for the priest and squatted beside them. He took a Qur’an from his blouse. He was to be nothing more than a young man studying the book of divine guidance till it was time.

  The dragoman’s two sons took up positions against the pavilion wall that fronted the prison gate. They sat and played tawula, mindlessly rolling the dice and moving the checkers as the everyday business of life passed by. Between them were rolled up prayer rugs that hid carbines and an ax to break the priest’s chains.

  It had fallen to the dragoman to detonate the tower and gate. John Lourdes asked how this was to be accomplished in broad daylight and within reach of the guard’s spit. The old one then told him a story he had heard in the last few years, and he went about investigating if it were true, for he knew the Armenian and the Turk would eventually feast on the extermination of the other.

  He learned that in 1905 a man named Jorris had improvised an explosive device using a vehicle and a clock-operated bomb. In July of that year, a group of Armenian separatists had attempted to assassinate the Caliph of the Faithful as he entered a mosque for Friday night prayers.

  The dragoman told John Lourdes he had learned how to construct such a device. That they had a truck hidden away and ready to deliver the explosives. In its flatbed were piles of chain and pieces of pipe, along with stacks of odd fittings and shards of iron. All of which was covered with hay and waiting on the device and driver.

  John Lourdes saw the flaw in the old one’s plan and expressed his concern. The flaw being the dragoman. How could he park a truck beside the tower and gate without drawing attention to himself, if not outright suspicion? Would it not be reasonable for the Turkish guards to suspect him of being Armenian and a threat
. What if they confronted him and searched the truck before the planned moment of detonation. And even if he held them at bay till the detonation, but was killed, the support for his sons’ attempt at freeing the priest would be cut in half.

  The dragoman had no answer. How could he? He was not short of mind, he was short of men.

  John Lourdes decided it would be best for the dragoman to cover the gate from the entrance to the street of the bazaar. And to oversee an alternative route of escape laid out in that direction, on the misfortune it were necessary.

  “Who then will drive the truck?” said the dragoman.

  John Lourdes answered, “I will.”

  “Have you experience driving a truck?”

  Of all the questions, thought John Lourdes, he could have asked. “I’ve driven some,” he said.

  The day was windless and clear as John Lourdes downshifted up the plateau road and through the city gate. Erzurum was in a high state of alarm after a series of reports from the news organizations. There were soldiers everywhere. Advance scouts of the Russian army had been spotted by a reconnaissance balloon east of Van, a hundred kilometers from Erzurum. An attack against that city was imminent within the month.

  In the Armenian quarter of Van the citizens were illegally arming themselves for a stand against the Turkish troops stationed there, hoping then to join forces with an Allied assault. In the streets of Erzurum people spoke of the Armenian as a traitor that should be treated no better than tainted meat.

  The truck turned into that street of tents and trading stalls inching through a confusion of human traffic that cursed the truck or slammed their fists on the engine hood at its very presence.

  On the front seat between John Lourdes and the dragoman and hidden under a span of cloth were the explosives and timer. John Lourdes noticed his passenger glance at the seat then look away. It would be a few more minutes yet.