Blue Voyage Page 15

  “No. This I cannot believe,” Lazar said, scowling. “She left you contact information. Yes?”

  “She didn’t,” I insisted. “We were all on a tour. When we came back she’d just . . . left.”

  Lazar and Vasil spoke quietly to each other in Turkish.

  Should I scream? I knew they were armed. Then I remembered that Orhan had said people wanted to find any lead on the smuggling ring, so they could collect the reward money offered by Interpol. My theory that these guards were also bounty hunters seemed even more likely now. What if they’d seen Sage buying stuff from the Baklava Guy and thought he—or Sage—was up to something? From twenty yards away, they could have easily observed that transaction, especially if they had binoculars. They might have seen enough to get suspicious, and not know that everything she’d bought was a trinket, gifts for her family. If they wanted her as a lead for reward money, maybe they saw me as a means to an end. They weren’t going to shoot me.

  I hoped.

  Lazar’s glinting eyes were on me again. “Before she left, did she give you something?” he demanded.

  He couldn’t be interested in the Freya Stark book, could he? He had to have seen the transaction with the figurines and that’s what he wanted to know about . . . right? I shook my head. “She just bought some souvenirs,” I said. “Cheap stuff.”

  Lazar and Vasil exchanged a look. Lazar translated for Vasil.

  “If you’re looking to catch thieves and smugglers, you might go check out the Museum in Fethiye, across from the carpet shop,” I said, trying to sound helpful. “I heard it got robbed yesterday. Maybe someone there has information.”

  They stared at me. Vasil did not loosen his grip on my pack.

  “You are saying your friend went to this museum?” Lazar demanded.

  A mistranslation of my English suddenly seemed like a great place to hide. I nodded.

  He muttered something to Vasil.

  Vasil shoved me out of the alley.

  I stumbled, then ran to catch up with Mom and Aunt Jackie, not once looking back.

  15

  The Dalaman airport was even more crowded and crazy than the Marmaris docks. It was teeming with all types of people, tourists from all over the world, it seemed—the air was thick with a mix of languages. Inside, the place was boiling hot—no air-conditioning—and so crowded you could hardly find a clear path.

  On top of everything, I was having some kind of delayed freak-out from my encounter with Lazar and Vasil. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking. I gripped my backpack straps hard, half expecting someone to try to pull it off of me again.

  What kind of security guards acted like that, grabbing innocent people in the street? Yes, at our first meeting Lazar and Vasil had thought I was up to no good, swimming up to a boat containing rich passengers, at midnight. But it sounded as if they weren’t even working for the Clarksons anymore. Now that the cruise was over and the Clarksons were headed to Istanbul, they were free to be bounty hunters. Still, I was a teenager. Where did they get off scaring young, foreign travelers like that? I wished I could get in touch with Ron and Judy and tell them their security guards had accosted me in the street.

  Accosted me. Because that’s what happened. Wasn’t that a crime? I had to tell Mom. But when? Aunt Jackie was having cramps, and she was in and out of the bathroom every few minutes. Telling her and Mom that two scary dudes had pulled me into an alley didn’t seem like the best way to make her feel relaxed—and then I’d have to explain how I knew Lazar and Vasil, and tell them about my midnight swim with Sage. Besides, I reasoned, I hadn’t been hurt. I was just scared. And those guys weren’t after me; they were after Sage. Unfairly, I thought, because no way would she be involved in a smuggling ring. She was American! An exchange student!

  I was suddenly so glad to be leaving the Turkish coast. The thought of never seeing Lazar and Vasil again made me feel deeply relieved.

  After checking in for our flight, Mom, Aunt Jackie, and I got in the seemingly endless security line with our carry-on bags. We shuffled along like prisoners.

  My backpack hung like a dead weight off my shoulders; the heat made it feel as if it weighed a ton. My hair clung to my face, and all my clothes stuck to me. I felt disgusting.

  We finally reached the conveyor belt for the carry-on screening. I tossed my backpack onto it, relieved at having the pressure lifted off my shoulders.

  I passed through the metal detector fast. I just wanted to get away from the crowd and on to our gate, where there might be some actual air to breathe. Especially for Aunt Jackie’s sake. Her skin glistened with sweat.

  Mom and Aunt Jackie gathered their bags at the end of the X-ray machine, and put their sandals back on. I put my shoes on, too, but my bag wasn’t with theirs.

  The conveyor belt had stopped. A red light was flashing.

  At one of the X-ray machine monitors, a discussion was going on, in Turkish. The guy working it called someone over, then someone else, until there were four security officials gathered around the screen, looking and pointing at the monitor. One of them held up the bag in question. “Whose is this?” he called out to the thronging passengers.

  I hesitated, then raised my hand. It was my bag, though it suddenly looked strange and unfamiliar to me, hanging from this guy’s hand.

  “I must to open,” he said.

  I nodded. What else could I do?

  “Oh, no,” said Mom. “Do you think it’s your sunscreens, Zan? You’re supposed to put those in a clear plastic bag.”

  “I did.” My face burned. Why did this situation have to be somehow my fault?

  But the screener, who had taken my backpack over to a metal table, wasn’t interested in my sunscreen. He flung the plastic bag of bottles aside without even looking at them. He had snapped on latex gloves and was rummaging through my bag now, unloading it item by item. Out came my wallet, my emergency tampons—how embarrassing!—and packets of tissues and hand wipes. A light sweater to wear on the plane. The Lonely Planet guide.

  And then, from deep inside the pack, in the hidden interior pocket, he removed a black cloth bag with a drawstring. It was about the size of a book, only it was bulky and misshapen, not flat.

  “What is that?” Mom asked.

  “I don’t know!”

  “What do you mean you don’t know?”

  “I mean, I don’t know! I don’t know what that is!” This was getting scary. I did not own a black cloth bag with a drawstring.

  The security official opened the bag. Onto the metal table, he poured out the contents, which made a loud clattering sound. Four shiny golden figurines.

  Two security guards appeared at my side in an instant. “We have some questions for you, miss,” one of them said, taking me by the arm. “We need you to come with us.”

  The whole room seemed to be spinning. “But those aren’t mine!” I protested. “I don’t even know how that stuff got in my backpack! Please, let go of me!”

  “We need you to come with us,” the security officer repeated, more firmly.

  “You can’t just take her away!” my mom cried, jogging after us as they started walking and pulling me along. “Get your hands off her! That’s my daughter. She’s sixteen!”

  “You must come too, madam,” said one of the officers.

  “Excuse me, there must be some mistake, some huge mix-up somewhere,” said Aunt Jackie. She switched to Turkish, and I could tell from her gestures and tone of voice that she was explaining that I was her niece, that we’d just returned from a Blue Voyage, that I was just a kid. As she did, my thoughts pulsed. Sage. Sage. Sage. She must have slipped the figurines in my pack when she came to my room to leave me the book yesterday!

  The guy holding my arm just shook his head when my aunt was done talking. “This is a very serious matter. Those figurines most likely are antiquities. They are forbidden to tr
ansport within or outside of Turkey.” He looked at me with disgust, a look I remembered all too well from run-ins with security guards at various stores.

  Only this time, I wasn’t guilty.

  “I’m innocent,” I protested. “I can explain. My friend must have put them in there.”

  My friend. Some friend.

  “I am sure it is a very interesting story,” said the security official, “but you must explain it to the police.”

  16

  The guards confiscated our carry-on bags, then marched us down a series of cinderblock corridors until we came to a small windowless room. This room was worse, way worse, than any holding area I’d been in at drugstores or in malls. The walls were painted a sickly green. The air was soupy, stirred by an oscillating fan whose metal blades were coated in dust. When the guards left, the door latch clicked loudly. Except for our luxurious furnishings—a metal table and some folding chairs—this room seriously felt like jail. I paced the steps to measure it: eight by ten feet. Slightly larger than my cell in juvie would have been. The size of our Pottery Barn living room rug back home. A rug I suddenly desperately wanted to see again in my lifetime.

  “I want a lawyer,” said Mom, talking loudly toward the closed door. “Or to talk to someone at the consulate.” She banged on the metal door with her fist. “Hey! Somebody, help us! We are US citizens!”

  “It doesn’t quite work like that here, Kitsie,” said Aunt Jackie, slumping in a chair. “They do have the right to question us at the airport if we have something suspicious.”

  Mom sank into the chair next to her. “I just hope we’ll be released in time for our flight.”

  “I’m sure this is a bizarre misunderstanding,” said Aunt Jackie. “Of course Zan wouldn’t have knowingly carried real artifacts.”

  “Or any artifacts!” I said. “I didn’t know they were in my bag! They belong to Sage!”

  Aunt Jackie nodded. “I understand. And I’ll call my attorney in Istanbul if things start looking bad.”

  “How?” Mom demanded. “They took away our phones! Our only link to outside civilization! They’ve cut us off!”

  Welcome to my world, I refrained from saying out loud.

  “We’ll get to make a call,” Aunt Jackie reassured her. “They’ll have to give us a phone.”

  “By the way . . . what would be ‘bad’?” I asked Aunt Jackie in a small voice. “I mean, bad enough to call your lawyer about?”

  “Well, a conviction of antiquities smuggling can mean years in prison. And months in detention just waiting for a hearing,” she said, a grim expression on her face.

  Prison! Oh. My. God. Maybe Lazar and Vasil were really on to something, looking for Sage. Maybe Sage was one of the people the police had been looking for, too, on the boats. She could be someone working with a smuggling ring, and maybe Baklava Guy was, too! They’d sure talked a long time. They had to have been up to something that afternoon. Why else would Sage have sent me out of sight with a pastry delivery to the back of the boat, only to buy those earrings and figurines the moment my back was turned?

  More strange facts began to add up. She’d boarded our boat very late on day one of the cruise, just before we left the dock—and only after the police and coast guard officials had finished with their dock inspections. Could that have been a strategic move? And could she have left the cruise early, making up a fake excuse, because the heat was on in Fethiye, too?

  After a loud rap at the door, two police officers entered. They drew up chairs and faced us across the table, then introduced themselves as Inspector Kemal Turan and Sergeant Emre Aksu. I tried to convince myself that these were the good guys. Inspector Kemal looked like a history teacher or something, with graying hair and wire-rimmed glasses. One of his hands had a slight tremor. Sergeant Emre had tufts of gray hair growing in his ears and nostrils, and furry, caterpillar eyebrows. He also had a terrible cold; he sniffed constantly and dabbed his red, watery nose with a tissue. I reminded myself these guys were human, and their job was to get information. That’s all. And this time I had nothing to hide. This wasn’t the Athleta incident, Part Two.

  Inspector Kemal set the four gold figurines down on the table, one by one, lining them up like chess pieces, his broad shoulders angling toward us. Then he sat back in his chair and looked at me, as if waiting for me to make a move—as if we were playing a game. I could hardly breathe. Finally he lowered his wire-rimmed glasses and asked me, in a stern voice, to tell him everything I knew.

  As clearly and simply as I could, fighting to keep my voice steady, I told him about how Baklava Guy had sold Sage the figu-rines and a pair of gold and turquoise earrings on the boat. I explained how she must have put them into my backpack when we were on the ruins tour without her. Then I mentioned the security guys from the Clarksons’ boat, and how they’d grabbed me in Marmaris and demanded to know where Sage had gone.

  Mom let out a horrified little cry. “Those men laid hands on you? Pulled you into an alley? Oh, Zan. How could that have happened and you didn’t even tell us?”

  “Because—because—” I faltered. Now I was entangled in lies. Again. If I’d told Mom the guards had grabbed me, I would have had to explain how the guards knew who I was in the first place, and then I’d have had to explain about the nighttime swim to the Anilar, which would be more ammunition for Mom not trusting me.

  “I didn’t tell you because you were focused on getting us to the airport so fast,” I finally managed to say. “And I didn’t know about the figurines, okay? I had no idea they were in my bag.”

  “Why would they be so interested in Sage?” asked Aunt Jackie.

  “Reward money?” I guessed. “Maybe they thought she knew something, or someone.”

  “What reward money?” Mom asked.

  I told her what Orhan had said, about the reward being offered for anyone who could provide information about smugglers.

  “It is true some security officers have become bounty hunters, American-style, since Interpol offered this reward,” said Sergeant Emre. He sneezed loudly, mopped his nose with his crumpled tissue, and turned to me. “Perhaps they had good reason to suspect this girl was involved. Approximately how far was the Anilar from the Yasemin when you saw this strange transaction take place between Sage and the boy on the boat?”

  “Maybe twenty yards? Twenty-five?” I guessed.

  “That’d be about eighteen meters,” said Aunt Jackie.

  “This is not reliable data,” Inspector Kemal said to Sergeant Emre.

  “It is, I’m sure,” said Aunt Jackie with a steely gaze. “My niece is a rock climber. She gauges distances all the time on the climbing wall. If she says it’s between twenty and twenty-five yards, then that’s what it was. With binoculars, those guards might have seen what Sage was buying, or seen enough to arouse their suspicions.”

  “I can see how they’d be eager for any lead that would get them closer to the reward,” Mom added. “But here’s what I don’t get. Let’s say Sage bought some spurious items from someone or was helping to transport them to a buyer. She must have known putting them in your pack carried a risk of getting you caught. And why would she want to take that risk? Or get you in trouble?”

  “And why not put the items in your suitcase, which would have been less likely to trigger alarms at the security screening?” Aunt Jackie wondered aloud.

  “I bet she put them in my backpack because my suitcase was locked,” I said. “Mom told me to lock my suitcase all the time.” I sighed. This was either Sage’s sick idea of a parting gift, or she was setting me up to get caught. But why?

  “Then I think it was a spontaneous and desperate decision on her part,” said Aunt Jackie. “She knew the police were boarding boats and checking passenger manifests. She needed to offload the goods.”

  That theory made sense to me. I felt panicky around police all the time, and I hadn’t d
one anything wrong here. And I knew how being skittish about police could lead to bad decisions. Like getting in a car with a drunk driver to get away from a party that police had broken up. Like ditching a bag of stolen clothes in a Dumpster because I’d sighted a police officer on patrol and felt sure he was looking for me.

  “Yeah, I think you’re right,” I said. “Sage had already told me the figurines weren’t worth anything. I can see how I’d be the perfect carrier, since I had no clue about them. I’d be acting normal and I wouldn’t attract suspicion, right? And then she might try to get them from me in Istanbul later, since we had plans to meet up. Maybe she thought I could get them through security, with them hidden in my backpack.”

  “But her mother’s sick,” said Mom. “You wouldn’t have met up in Istanbul.”

  The inspector and the sergeant had been watching the three of us try to sort out what had happened, turning their heads to watch each of us speak as if we were a spectator sport, but now Inspector Kemal cleared his throat and interjected. “Of course, it is entirely possible her mother is not sick.”

  Aunt Jackie nodded. “Maybe the sick mother was her excuse for a hasty departure. And if that were a lie, she could find her way back to Istanbul at some point to try to get the figurines back from Zan.”

  A wave of nausea came over me. My God. Everything Sage had told me might have been a lie! Here I was again, burned by someone I’d let myself trust.

  “So what about the baklava vendor? Why would someone sell valuable artifacts to a random American girl on a boat?” Mom asked the police.

  “Smugglers and black market vendors work in many forms,” replied Inspector Kemal. “The trade in illicit antiquities operates at many levels. Some vendors will sell less valuable black market goods at marked-down prices, from looters, because making some money is better than making no money at all.”

  “Well, if these figurines came from the kid with the baklava, we’re off the hook, right?” Mom said. “And if there’s anything suspicious about these figurines, it’s that boy in the boat you should be after, not us.”