Blue Damask (38 page)

     The train whistle blew for the next station. Across the aisle Sonnenby woke with a start. “Good God,” he breathed.  “Will I never sleep well again?”

     Elsa quickly touched her nose with the handkerchief and tucked it in her sleeve.  “No.”  She said with finality.  “You will not sleep well until we get to Vienna and you can lie in clean sheets in a soft bed with no alarm clock or telephone or train whistle.  No Bedouins with knives and rifles, no Ministry officials with reams of papers.  No prison cells, no men with swagger sticks.  No straightjackets, no biplanes with machine guns.”

     He smiled as he stretched his arms over his head and rolled his shoulders.  “That sounds wonderful.  But I will not be your kept man in Vienna.  I can smuggle you into England on a forged passport, Elsa.  You could disappear.  Let them think they have killed
you
.”

     She looked at her hands in her lap.  With that option she would evade all troubles by avoiding them completely.  Dr. Engel would feel terrible, that he had sent her away to die in the wilds of Syria.  Her parents and sisters would grieve again.  It would be terrible if they thought she were dead.

    It would hardly be less terrible if she posted a letter from London saying that she had run off with a man she could never legally marry and could not decently introduce to anybody in society.  It would be worse if they discovered who he was.  That she had run off with her patient.  Her patient she had first met in a straightjacket, an illegitimate madman who had killed at least three people while in her company, and probably more when she wasn’t looking.  A man charged with treason.  She tried to imagine the scene of her explanations to her family and stopped before she could get too far.

     She squirmed and asked, “How can I run away from my family, my mother and father, and Doctor Engel?”  She did not look up at him.  She already knew how his face would look.  He would be puzzled.  He had no family to answer to.  He no longer owed fealty to the military structure that had betrayed him.  He could not see how her guilt and shame would poison her mind and eat away at her identity like gangrene in an untended wound.  He did not have the training or experience.  He could not do a diagnostic on her psyche.

     But he did.  His voice was tender when he said, “Tell yourself that there is nothing more important that to love and be loved in return, regardless of anything else.”

     She lifted her eyes.  She wished that were true.

     “Because,” he gave her a stern look, “it is true.”

     “Other things are still important,” she insisted.  “I do love you and I will suffer for it.”  She was thinking of Brunhilde and Ophelia now.

     “
Schatze
, darling,” he said to her, “only if you permit it.”

     The train continued its journey toward Istanbul.  She read a newspaper, she fidgeted, she arranged her papers and Sonnenby’s files.  She did not dare take out his mother’s letters, though she considered that one day it would be appropriate for him to read them.  Instead she took out the two pocket watches and ran her finger over the filigree etching on the heavy silver of Marshall’s, then on the scratched and pitted surface of Descartes’.  She felt their loss as a miserable tightness in her throat and a pain in her stomach that could not be relieved. Sonnenby noticed her expression and leaned over the foot well of the compartment to see what she was doing.

     He saw the watches and a shadow passed over his face.  “I have been reading Descartes’ notebooks and papers,” he told her.  “I have everything he had in his attaché and his satchel.”

     She frowned and looked up at him.  The tone of his voice was wrong for the words.  He sounded edgy.  She looked at his jaw and his neck, then at his temples.  He was agitated and trying to hide it.

     “They are in French,” she told him unnecessarily.

     “Of course they are in French,” he let his breath out.  “I can read French.  Can’t you?”

     She said soothingly, “My French is from school.  I know enough to be polite and avoid getting lost on the Metro, but that is all.  I did not get high marks in French.”  She moved the two watches into the folds of her skirt and out of his sight. “What is wrong?” She asked.

     “Hiding their watches from me does not remove them from my memory.”  He slid forward on his seat and stretched his left hand to take the watches out again.  He flipped open one and then the other and looked at their faces.  Marshall’s was clean and bright, while Descartes watch was old enough to have been his grandfather’s.  “Jean-Philippe’s is a little slow.”  He tapped the crystal.   He gave her a sidelong look.  “I am well, Nurse Schluss.  I see your eyes taking in every detail of my most subtle expressions.  I am feeling fine.  Lucid even.”

     But he was still tense, and a vein in his forehead was more visible than normal.  She asked him again, “What is wrong, Henry?”

     He returned the two watches to her.  “Jean-Philippe was doing more than collecting rocks between Basra and Baghdad.”  He leaned back in his seat across from her.  “He has extensive notes on the tribal leaders, the
sheiks
and headmen and
sharifs
of all the tribes from India to Russia.  He has correspondence with men associated with both Anglo-Persian Petroleum and Turkish Petroleum.  The two companies are merging.”

     Elsa did not see the significance.  “He was a geologist for the French.  He was a cartographer. Of course he would be on the payroll of investors.”

     “I am an investor.”

     “Did he know that?”

     Sonnenby frowned.  “Most certainly he did, though he never brought it up, or asked me about my father or told me anything about what he was doing here.”

     She tilted her head up at him.  “How big an investor are you?”

     He shrugged and looked away.  “Big.”

     “How big?”

     “My father was good friends with Gulbenkien.  He holds a certain percentage of the stock.”

     That meant nothing to Elsa.  “Does this have anything to do with that safe in London?”  She was beginning to get a glimmer of what he was getting at.  “Is there an incentive to have the stock transferred?”

     “I would say there are several million reasons to have the stock transferred, and only two ways to do it.”  He looked dejected as he handed her a crumpled piece of paper.

     It was a letter on fine stationary from a law office in Paris.  “I can’t read this very well,” she told him.  “I can see it concerns the disposal of shares of stock in Turkish Petroleum upon the death of your father.”  She looked up at him.  “What does it say?”

     “It says that the shares are willed to me upon the death of my father as a transfer of property.  The shares cannot be traded publicly, but must be sold back to the company if I chose to rid myself of them.”  He paused, “If I am considered
non compos mentis
, they will be held in trust by the crown and cannot be transferred or sold at all.  I have to die to release the shares.”

     “I see.”  She handed the paper back to him.  “Well then.”

     “Incentives,” he said slowly, “that start to make sense now.  Churchill needs a controlling interest for the crown, to keep the oil flowing for the navy.  National security cannot be left in private hands.”

     “And so you are all that is holding up this merger.”  She couldn’t help but look around as if an assassin was poised in the next compartment.

     He asked her, “What can I do?  There is a price on my head.  You cannot be involved.  We should not be travelling together.”

     She frowned.  She understood what he was saying, but something else had occurred to her.  “Why would that letter from a Paris law office be in Descartes’ possession?  It was not addressed to him.”

     Sonnenby put his head in his hands.  “Someone gave it to him.  I think he was supposed to locate me.  The rest of the letter details a short biography of me and news that the Foreign Office had removed me from the hospital and sent me to Damascus in the custody of Marshall.  There are names of people to talk to in Damascus.  He lifted the letter and pointed to a name near the bottom.  “Farmadi.”

     “Farmadi helped me find you.  And I made Descartes get you out of the Army Headquarters,” she murmured.  “And he did.”

     Sonnenby rubbed his face.  “They could have turned me in.  Descartes could have slipped a knife between my ribs.  He could have shot me off my camel.”

     “No, Jean-Philippe was not a murderer, but he could have made a phone call in Baghdad, he could have left you at the headquarters.  He could have abandoned me in the street.”  She shook her head.  “He did not.  He was your friend.  He was my friend.”

     Sonnenby folded the letter and put it in one of his chest pockets.  “He was.”  He looked around the compartment.  “I could use his help now.  And Marshall’s.”  He sighed.  “I can pretend to be dead, Elsa.  I am tempted to disappear in Anatolia somewhere in the mountains and live the rest of my life as a sheep herder.”  He rubbed his face.  “But I cannot ask you to live in the bush.  You need to go to the city.  I would have to live here alone.”

     They were interrupted as a passenger ran past the compartment towards the rear of the train.  Elsa frowned.  Even an urgent call to the water closet would not require such speed.  The passenger was followed by another, then a third.  Sonnenby became alert and moved to the widow.  A loud blast from the train hurt her ears, but there was no station for miles.  They would not be in Konya until the evening.

     Sonnenby was cursing, using English words she did not know.  When he returned to his seat he was grim.

     “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.