Maria Hudgins - Lacy Glass 02 - The Man on the Istanbul Train (16 page)

Lacy stepped out and checked the traffic in her immediate vicinity. Turkish drivers considered traffic laws mere suggestions. Lacy had already decided that Istanbul rivaled or even surpassed Cairo for aggressiveness on the road, putting Rome’s drivers to shame. Thrown into their midst, an American motorist was as helpless as a gnat in a tornado. Horns blaring uselessly, drivers weaved in and out, bumpers nearly touching, turn signals used only for amusement, and wide shoulders for backing up.

She swallowed hard and took a deep breath. “Where’s that map they gave us?”

Milo opened the map on the hood of the car and helped her plot an escape route from the city. He advised her to head for the motorway by driving north past the Dolmabahçe Palace. If she could manage to get onto the motorway in an easterly direction, she could stay with it all the way to Ankara, a distance of nearly three hundred miles. Saying goodbye to Milo, she felt the parting called for a hug and possibly a kiss, but, remembering he was British, she offered her hand and promised to call when she could. She could hardly believe this stranger was letting her leave town with a car charged to his credit card.

Traffic signs! She wished she had paid more attention to them earlier in the summer when she wasn’t behind the wheel and her life didn’t depend on understanding their messages.
Dur
meant stop, as was obvious from the fact that the sign was red and octagonal, but signs with no arrows or definitive shape were nothing more than hints she was probably doing something wrong. She hit her first
Dur
sign when she came to an intersection of the narrow street leading from the rental car lot to a four-lane avenue where she needed to turn right. She stopped and immediately got sideswiped by a car attempting to pass on her left with about two inches less room than necessary. Her side-view mirror snapped forward and the keen screech of metal turned her stomach.
No police! This is the other guy’s fault, but never mind. If the police come, I’ll go straight to jail.
I’m driving without a license. I’m an alien without a passport. And I’m driving a car rented by someone else.

A youngish man in a threadbare jacket jumped out, primed for a fight. His face fell when he saw his opponent, as if he was thinking, “No fair! I can’t hit a woman!” Lacy looked at both cars. Horns were already blaring behind them. Her driver’s side door was scored with the silver paint of his fender, but his car looked as if it hadn’t suffered at all, at least not from this particular collision. A number of other encounters, though, had dinged its body pretty thoroughly. Shouting in Turkish, he pointed to one of the worst scrapes down the side and Lacy couldn’t help noticing it held traces of red paint. Her own car was white.

She peeled off two hundred-lira notes from the cash Joan had sent her. This, she figured, was more than enough to fix the damage she hadn’t even caused.

The young man’s face brightened for a micro-second, then returned to a scowl, but the money zipped out of her hand so quickly she was surprised she didn’t get a paper cut. Problem solved.

The next half-hour was sheer panic drawn out to almost unendurable lengths. Forced more than once into a lane she didn’t want, she had to backtrack through unmarked side streets and, eyes closed, cross intersections that looked like the bumper car concession at an amusement park. When she at last merged onto the motorway, she allowed herself a deep breath and felt like kissing the sign that told her she was, indeed, headed east.
And thank you, Ataturk, for changing the country’s Arabic script to the Latin alphabet.
Had she been making this trip before 1928, she wouldn’t have been able read that sign.

Shadows were already long with the departing day. She rolled down her windows and drove past fields of yellow sunflowers, all their heads turned to the west as if to greet her. What a day.

Chapter Sixteen

As darkness settled, the inadequacy of motorway lighting kept Lacy from seeing lane markers clearly. Buses and trucks, with and without headlights, ruled the road and bullied her little Ford. She decided she wouldn’t try to make it to Ankara that night. Instead, she began looking for a place to stay, checking billboards for promising ads, scanning the horizon for the tell-tale glow of a town. Not yet confident enough to venture off an exit ramp or pull onto the shoulder to check her map, she hoped to exit one time and be done with it.

Meanwhile, she let her mind wander to the larger problem. Who is that guy who called himself Jason? He seemed legitimate because the trench coat made it to the police station, and with a few items still in its pockets. So why did he leave her taped up and gagged? Who was the mystery man on the train, and why was he killed? If he’d been held as she had been, then escaped, that might account for his filthy appearance—not too different from her own—and for his lack of money. Who was the woman with formerly orange hair? How had Jason known Lacy was upstairs over the fish market, and why did he leave her there rather than move her to a more remote spot—or simply kill her?

Jason must have killed the man on the train. She reviewed that hour in her mind, minute by minute. Jason takes a seat in the Pullman car across the aisle from her. He introduces himself and they make small talk for a few minutes. Out of concern for her own safety, she heeds the guidebook’s warning and reveals no information about exactly where she’s going. She does mention going to an archaeological dig and she does tell him her real name. Jason pulls a cell phone out of his pocket, looks at the screen, and leaves through the door at the front of the car. Does her name ring a bell? Does he actually get a call, or is that a pretense so he can get up and leave? If he does he might figure he’d get a better signal in the vestibule between cars because the windows there are open, but it’s also the noisiest place on the train, the wheels and the couplings between cars making a constant racket. 

The man in the green trench coat walks into the Pullman car while Lacy is in the toilet and takes the same seat Jason has just vacated. Was this deliberate? Did he know Jason? Did he know Jason was on board? Did
Jason
know
he
was onboard? He gets up and leaves the car while Lacy is brushing her teeth in the facilities, such as they are. She returns and
the green trench coat is left on the seat.

“I’m an idiot!” Lacy said it out loud to the steering wheel.

It was so clear to her now. Jason was chasing the man in the trench coat. That’s why the poor man had such a haunted look. He was running for his life. Jason must have known he was on the train somewhere. If Jason were really a policeman he’d have identified himself to the train personnel and asked for their help.
Ergo,
he wasn’t really a policeman.

Jason recognizes the trench coat and knows the man can’t be far away. He’s probably in an adjacent car or one of the toilets. He finds his prey in the vestibule and kills him, and throws him off the train. Jason, built like a bullmastiff, could have broken the smaller man’s neck easily. Assuming no one will see the body as it rolls down the embankment out of the sight of passengers, Jason could also figure the broken neck would look like a result of the fall.

What a shock it must have been when, seconds later, the train comes to a screeching halt, alarms clanging! And then, as he’s standing outside commiserating with the other men huddled around the body, I bring him his victim’s trench coat!

Lacy spotted a billboard with a picture of a swimming pool, a cozy bedroom, “3.5 km” in large letters accompanied by an arrow pointing straight up, and the logo of a hotel chain. Couldn’t be any better than that. She checked her odometer and added 3.5.

With one eye on the odometer, she had another thought. Why had Jason given the trench coat to the police? Then another thought. Why
not
give it to the police? Perhaps the coat and its label were of no importance.

Finding the hotel advertised on the billboard wasn’t easy. Lacy didn’t know what town she was in or where the center of it might be. The streets were nearly deserted. When she noticed buildings and lights becoming sparser, she turned around, gears grinding, in a derelict parking lot where a business must have once existed, weeds now splitting and heaving chunks of concrete like icebergs. Backtracking, she saw a brightly lit modern building ahead. She pulled into the
porte cochère
behind a BMW with its motor running and its headlights on. The name on the building’s glass front doors showed was the hotel she was looking for. How did she miss it? She veered around the BMW and into a nearby parking space.

With only a plastic bag for luggage, checking into a room might have been impossible without a credit card or driver’s license, but Lacy handed over enough cash for one night and said something totally illogical in rapid-fire English. With her most innocent face she gave a false name. She answered all the desk clerk’s questions in gibberish until he gave up, pretended to understand, and handed her a room key.

Once inside her room, she turned off the lights and looked out the window. It gave onto a parking lot opposite the front entrance but she had no idea what sort of vehicle she should look out for. She was famished. Should she try room service or the dining room downstairs? Having no desire to deal with extra charges to her room or worry about the true identity of whoever delivered the food, she opted for the dining room.

* * *

Her waiter wanted to be friendly. “Just visiting Turkey?”

“Yes, but only for a couple of weeks.”

“How do you like, so far?”

“It’s beautiful. I wish I could stay longer.” Lacy steered the topic in another direction. “Do you have many Americans staying here?”

“Always a few. Always some English, some French also.”

“I suppose they usually talk your ear off. The Americans, I mean.” Lacy said it with a smile. She hoped to steer him toward telling her about any Americans who had stopped in today and what they may have said, but it didn’t work.

“Talk my ear off?” Not familiar with the idiom, he grabbed one ear with his free hand. “No. I still have them.”

* * *

Back in her room, she showered and pulled on her old Betty Boop T-shirt, so cozy and familiar. She plugged in her laptop and logged onto the hotel’s Internet. Scrolling through her accumulated email, she found a new message from her parents, still on vacation, and one from Joan Friedman, asking if Lacy had received the money. Joan also wanted more details than Lacy had given her by phone.

The date, according to her computer, was Wednesday, August 17
th
. Her return flight from Istanbul back to the dig was for tomorrow. Lacy guessed she’d miss it.

Near the bottom of the list of emails almost buried among the usual spam, she spied a message that froze her to her chair:

From: goldenboy360

Are you proud of yourself? Don’t be. You aren’t home free and you won’t be until we meet and have a little talk
.

* * *

Okay. Deep breath. Lacy resisted the impulse to hit the delete key and asked herself what she could learn from this message. It had been sent at 4:58 p.m. Turkish time, about the time when she and Milo rented the car. If the message was sent by Jason, this meant he hadn’t been arrested for breaking into her room at her Istanbul hotel—unless he’d been released rather quickly. Might he have sent this message from his cell phone while at the police station? How had he learned her email address?

Goldenboy360. What did that tell her? The account was gmail. The name indicated the sender was male, therefore not the woman with formerly orange hair. Did the name indicate he considered himself a shining example of manhood? Did he have a thing for gold? The 360 could mean a complete turn or it could mean nothing more than his having been the 360th person to ask for that username.

If he knew her email address, what else did he know?

Lacy stood and peeked through the drawn curtains to the parking lot below. Was there anything in the message he sent that could help him find her now? She thought not. She’d seen no request for notification when read, so he wouldn’t know when or if she opened her mail. What about GPS? Did her prepaid phone have it? How about her car? Could he be using it to track her? How could he possibly know about either?

Lacy wished she knew more about the digital world she lived in. With all her education, she still felt at times like an ignoramus. Unless the creep had followed her and Milo to the rental car office, she saw no way he could be tracking her.

Why had he sent this message? To scare her?

Wait.
If Jason had evaded the hotel personnel after Lacy told them to check for thieves on the fifth floor, he and his companion would have gone … where? Where would he guess she would go next? To the train station? To the airport? No, she’d need a passport to fly and he had that. To the U.S. Consulate, of course, to apply for a new one. Did he go to the Consulate, watch her go in, and when she left follow her to the car rental office? He could have.
At any rate, if he thinks I’m going to meet him unaccompanied by the 1
st
infantry, he’s crazy.

Lacy put her computer to sleep and crawled into the big bed. The sheets felt cool and clean against her sore body. For some strange reason, she thought if her mother were here, she’d forbid Lacy to crawl in before they’d removed the linens and turned the mattress over, checking for bedbugs.
Ah well. Bedbugs have to eat, too. Might as well be me.
That thought sent her to sleep with a smile on her face.