The Thief Who Couldn't Sleep (14 page)

C
hapter 16

I
spent the
rest of the night beneath the porch. After I dropped through the opening, I arranged the floorboards carefully in place above me. I had to be reasonably quiet. A slight noise, even if heard, might be regarded as the movement of a rat, but repeated loud noises would be sure to attract attention. It was difficult to be silent at the beginning, however. I wanted to throw back my head and howl like a hyena. I had found the gold, and there was a hell of a lot of it, and it made a beautiful sight.

There were sacks and boxes and little leather purses, and everything was stuffed with gold coins. The great majority were British sovereigns with the head of Queen Victoria, but there was a scattering of Turkish pieces and a handful of pieces in each lot from other nations. Counting this treasure was out of the question. Instead, I incorporated the small bags inside the larger gunny sacks and tried to calculate the total weight of the treasure.

My guess placed it somewhere between 500 and 600 pounds. I tried to work out the value of the lot, but my mind would not behave properly. I got hung up on such points as whether to use the troy pound of twelve ounces or the avoirdupois pound of sixteen, whether to estimate on the basis of the official $35 per ounce or the $60-rate I was likely to get in Beirut. I decided ultimately that the whole question was academic. I was sitting in the exhilarating presence of somewhere around a quarter of a million dollars in gold. That was all I really had to know.

But how to get it out?

I hated the idea of a boat. The boat that Father Gregor's cohorts might supply would probably be capable of only twenty knots or so, and a trip from the west coast of Turkey all the way around to Lebanon would take days on end. Even a fast boat would be in the sitting-duck category, easy prey to the Turks whenever they got around to realizing who was on that boat.

A plane would simplify things. If the Society of the Left Hand were such a powerful organization, a plane should be obtainable. But I was beginning to feel more and more convinced that the Society of the Left Hand was very little more than the name of an elaborate confidence game and that the boat was going to take the gold right straight back to Bulgaria where Father Gregor would devise at his leisure a way to convey the gold to Lebanon, or to Macao, or wherever he happened to want it.

It might be best to avoid the Left Hand group entirely. But could I manage to get the gold out on my own? No, I could never bring it off. I had to use the Left Hand. And I also had to keep them from knowing what the right hand was doing.

The Society of the Left Hand made contact in the market a day later. A furtive little man with smallpox scars on his chin flashed me one of the secret signs—a particular arrangement of the fingers of the left hand that Father Gregor had taught me. I could have ignored him, as he did not seem all that confident that the ragged peasant before him was really the man he sought, but I knew I would need him, and it seemed pointless to be dodging everyone in Balikesir at once. I returned the sign. He nodded for me to follow him, and I did.

When we were clear of the crowd, he slowed down and permitted me to catch up with him. He gave me another sign, perhaps for insurance, and I made the appropriate countersign. Then he asked me who my father was. I said I had a father named Gregor. He smiled briefly and led me up one street and down another until we reached a large old house in the Arab section.

"We have rented this house," he said. "You will come inside?"

I went inside and met my four companions. There were three others, I was told. One waited in the harbor at Burhaniye with the boat they planned to use. Two others had left to make arrangements for a car. Had I found the gold? I said I had. Would we be able to get it out? I said we would.

They were all delighted.

"We will help you," the scarred one said. His name was Odon; the others had not volunteered their names. "And we will be content with a tenth of the proceeds."

He was the least convincing liar I had ever met in my life. If I had entertained any doubts as to their intentions—and in my wildly optimistic moments I had willed myself to believe Father Gregor's story—they were forever dispelled. There was now only one point that was unclear. I was unsure whether or not they would kill me after appropriating the gold for themselves.

"Where is the gold?"

I explained its approximate location.

"And how much is there?"

I told him my estimate.

"We will go tonight," Odon said. "There is no time to waste. We will go tonight in the car our men are obtaining. We will—"

"A stolen car?"

"We will purchase a car. One of our men has a Turkish driver's license and a passport to match it. There is no chance we will be questioned. We will go to the house and load the gold into metal strongboxes. You understand? We have the boxes in the garage. Come, I will show you."

There were two dozen steel strongboxes in the garage on top of a huge workbench. The bench overflowed with rusted hardware and tools—long rattail files, rusted padlocks, nuts, bolts, washers. Amid this sea of rusted metal the strongboxes gleamed brightly.

"Have we enough boxes?"

I calculated quickly. "Yes. They'll hold the gold."

"Good. We will fill them at the house. You understand? Or, for safety's sake, you will go beneath the porch and fill them. Then, when you are ready, the car will return for them, and we will all go at once to Burhaniye. Before dawn we will all be on our way." As an afterthought, and as further confirmation of the ship's true destination, he added, "To Beirut, of course. We will sail at once to Beirut."

A dismal liar.

That night clouds concealed the face of the moon. It was a bit of good luck. After midnight we drove to the house. Odon stayed in the car with two of the others. Another pair remained at the house—we were to stop for them before making the run to Burhaniye. I scurried onto the porch, opened up my little rabbit hole, and dropped down into my burrow. Another man passed the strongboxes down to me one at a time.

"Shall I wait with you?"

"No," I said. "Go back to the car. It will take me a while. Drive around or return to the house. Come for me in an hour."

He looked dubious. "I could come down there with you. It would go faster."

"We might be heard."

He went away. Eventually the car pulled off. I doubt that they all were in it. I'm fairly certain one stayed behind to make sure I did not attempt to get away with the gold.

I filled all twenty-four of the boxes. They were very heavy, but one could lift them without a great deal of trouble. I estimated each one weighed twenty-five or thirty pounds, which fitted with my original guess at the total weight of the treasure. I had finished packing the boxes by the time the car returned. Odon came to me from the car and suggested that I hand them up one at a time, and he would trek them back to the car.

That would make it a little too easy. I hopped out of my burrow. "I'm too exhausted to lift another thing," I said. "Send one of the other men to do the lifting. I'll wait in the car."

After all, there was no point in making it easy for them. I could picture them quite clearly, taking the last box from me, loading it into the trunk, and driving merrily away while I struggled out of the porch to wave bye-bye at them. No, I wouldn't be taken quite that easily.

I waited in the car. They brought the boxes out quickly enough, one man handing them up, two others relaying them to the car, Odon placing them in the trunk, but they made enough noise to wake corpses.

Lights went on in the house across the way. I had visions of the whole thing going to hell in a handcar. I called to them to hurry, and they hurried, and they hurried, and lights went on in the house whose porch we were robbing. My head ached dully. My mouth was dry. We loaded the last box, and the men piled into the car. In the distance a siren howled. Police? Probably.

Odon started the engine. It didn't catch at first, and I was certain the idiot had flooded the motor. It caught the second time, and we got the hell out of there. He drove well, at least. He put the gas pedal on the floor, and we were back at home base in no time at all.

Odon stuck the car in the garage. "Get the others," he told one of the men. "And hurry. We have to be on that boat before dawn. There's no time."

I got out of the car. I passed the hardware bench, scooped off a curved linoleum knife. As I walked around the car I stuck the knife into the left rear tire, pulled it out fast, and pocketed it. The tire did not blow but went down fast, almost instantaneously. I let one of the others discover it. He pointed it out to Odon.

Odon cursed rather colorfully. Someone remembered that there was a spare in the trunk. He opened the trunk. The spare tire was wedged in behind the strongboxes. Three of us wrestled it out, and in the process I got in a few good licks with the linoleum knife. No one noticed these at first. They thought the tire merely needed to be inflated, and Odon discovered an air pump in the rear of the garage. The damned garage had everything. They tried to pump up the tire, but it wouldn't inflate, and then the one who had passed me the strongboxes spotted the cuts in the tire and showed them to Odon, and Odon went out of his mind. He cursed the two who had purchased the car, cursed the fates for giving him fools for companions and threw in a few words that were not part of my command of Bulgarian.

He was obviously not at all pleased. "We have to get another car," he said. "Damn it to hell, somebody go out and steal a car. We have to—"

An argument developed. Two of the men utterly refused to make the trip in a stolen car. Another pointed out that they could get a tire in the morning and they could use some sleep for the time being.

"And if in the meanwhile someone runs off with the gold?"

"None but us know of it."

"And if one of us does so?"

"How? In a car with a flat tire?"

The wait-until-tomorrow crowd carried the day. Odon locked the trunk and closed the garage door. We all trooped inside the dingy house. A cupboard yielded up a bottle of rather poor brandy. We all drank, and Odon's spirits began to improve with drink. We drank and sang and drank and danced and drank, and one by one we dropped off to sleep until at last all of us were sleeping peacefully.

All but one of us.

When they were asleep, when it was as safe as it was likely to get, I slipped out of the house and into the garage. With such an abundant supply of tools around, the locked trunk was not much of an obstacle. I was very busy for almost an hour. Then I slipped back into the house. They were all still asleep.

I suppose the most intelligent move would have been to murder them in their beds. I cannot honestly say that the thought did not occur to me. It did, and I felt foolish rejecting it out of hand, but I could not possibly have done otherwise.

I had killed men in Macedonia. I told myself as much, reminded myself that I had quite fiercely gunned down men who had done absolutely nothing to me, while I was now unable to kill a group of unpleasant men who intended to rob me blind. This did not seem to make any difference. The men I had killed in Macedonia had been gunned down in the heat of real or imagined revolutionary passion. It was quite a different matter to slash half a dozen throats in the dark of night. I was evidently incapable of it. And, actually, I was more than a little pleased by the discovery.

But I did not suspect my fellows shared my reservations regarding the murder of sleeping men. And so I contrived to be obviously awake before them. Odon sent a man out to buy a tire. He came back with it and put it on the car. There was another argument: Should we or should we not wait for darkness? We decided not to wait. Around two in the afternoon we all piled into the car and headed for Burhaniye.

It was an easy drive. The ship, a trim little cutter, lay at anchor, with a thickset man on board. He came down to greet us. The harbor officials were taken care of, he reported. They would look the other way. We need only load the ship and be off.

Odon took me aside. He handed me a sack full of padlocks. "You must lock the strongboxes," he said. "It is only fitting, as you are the man who will receive the greater share of the gold and you must be assured that we do not try to cheat you. If the boxes are not locked, we might take more than our share during the voyage. Do you understand?"

"But I trust you, Odon."

He very nearly blushed. "No matter," he said. "You take the boxes from the trunk. Inspect their contents, if you wish, and lock them. Then pass them to us, and we will relay them into the boat. And then we will all get on board and be off. For Beirut."

I could not avoid the feeling that he had never told a lie before meeting me. I went to the trunk and Odon opened it with his key. I locked each box in turn and handed the boxes one by one to Odon's men, who carried them to the ship and came back for more. By the time I was handing over the final box, all of the men had managed to work their way onto the boat. Only Odon was left, and just as I passed him the final box, a man called his name from the ship.

"Ah," he said, "there seems to be trouble on board. Wait right here, I'll be back in a moment."

"I'll go with you."

"Oh, it's not necessary. Ah, what's that down there?"

I looked where he pointed. He had picked up the tire wrench and he telegraphed the blow so completely that it took a certain amount of effort to let him hit me at all. But he got me—going away, just a glancing blow on the side of the head. It hurt and it staggered me, and I followed through and sprawled in the sand.

It occurred to me as I lay there that there was a glaring flaw in my plan. Suppose he hit me a second time while I lay there like a lump? Suppose he very neatly caved in the back of my skull?

A glaring error. But, after all, I was new at this sort of thing. In any case, Odon didn't try for a second shot. Perhaps he was as unused to hitting people as he was to lying. He dropped the tire iron, tucked the strongbox under his arm, and ran to the ship.