The Thief Who Couldn't Sleep (2 page)

"But they say you won't live as long."

"Yes. Though my insomnia probably won't cut off as many years from my life as would smoking, for example."

He frowned. He'd just lit a fresh cigarette and didn't enjoy being reminded of its ill effects. So he changed the subject.

"How do you live?" he asked.

"From day to day."

"You misunderstand me. How do you earn your living?"

"I receive a disability pension from the Army. For my loss of sleep."

"They pay you one hundred twelve dollars per month. Is that correct?"

It was. I've no idea how the Defense Department had arrived at that sum. I'm certain there's no precedent.

"You do not live on one hundred twelve dollars per month. What else do you do? You are not employed, are you?"

"Self-employed."

"How?"

"I write doctoral dissertations and master's theses."

"I do not understand."

"I write theses and term papers for students. They turn them in as their own work. Occasionally I take examinations for them as well—at Columbia or New York University."

"Is this allowed?"

"No."

"I see. You help them cheat?"

"I help them compensate for their personal inadequacies."

"There is a name for this profession? It is a recognized profession?"

The hell with him, I decided. The hell with him and his questions and his rotten jail. "I'm called a stentaphator," I explained. He had me spell it and he wrote it down very carefully. "Stentaphators are subsidiary scholars concerned with suasion and ambidexterity."

He didn't know
trauma;
I was fairly sure
suasion
and
ambidexterity
would ring no bells, and I guessed he wouldn't ask for definitions. His English was excellent, his accent only slight. The only weapon in my arsenal was double-talk.

He lit still another cigarette—the man was going to smoke himself sick—and narrowed his eyes at me. "Why are you in Turkey, Mr. Tanner?"

"I'm a tourist."

"Don't be absurd. You've never left the United States since Korea, according to Washington. You applied for a passport less than three months ago. You came at once to Istanbul. Why?"

I hesitated.

"For whom are you spying, Mr. Tanner? The CIA? One of your little organizations? Tell me."

"I'm not spying at all."

"Then why are you here?"

I hesitated. Then I said, "There is a man in Antakya who makes counterfeit gold coins. He's noted for his counterfeit Armenian pieces, but he does other work as well. Marvelous work. According to Turkish law, he's able to do this with impunity. He never counterfeits Turkish coins, so it's all perfectly legal."

"Continue."

"I plan to see him, buy an assortment of coins, smuggle them back into the United States, and sell them as genuine."

"It is a violation of Turkish law to remove antiquities from the country."

"These are not antiquities. The man makes them himself. I intended to have him give me an affidavit testifying that the coins were forgeries. It's a violation of U.S. law to bring gold into the country in any form, and it's a case of fraud to sell a counterfeit coin as genuine, but I was prepared to take that chance." I smiled. "I had no intention, though, of violating Turkish law. You may believe me."

The man looked at me for a long time. Finally he said, "That is an extraordinary explanation."

"It happens to be true."

"You sat for nine days in jail with an explanation in your pocket that would have gotten you released at once. That argues for its truth, does it not? Otherwise you might have told your cover story right away, accompanied it with a bribe, and attempted to get out of our hands the very first day; before we began to learn so many interesting things about you. A counterfeiter in Antakya. Armenian gold coins, for the love of God. When did Armenians make gold coins?"

"In the Middle Ages."

"One moment, please." He used a phone on his desk and called someone. I looked up at Ataturk's portrait and listened to his conversation. He was asking some bureaucrat somewhere if there was in fact a counterfeiter in Antakya and what sort of things the man produced. He was not overly surprised to find out that my story checked out.

To me he said, "If you are lying, you have built your lie on true foundations. I find it frankly inconceivable that you would travel to Istanbul for such a purpose. There is a profit in it?"

"I could buy a thousand dollars worth of rare forgeries and sell them for thirty thousand dollars by passing them as genuine."

"Is that true?"

"Yes."

He was silent for a moment. "I still do not believe you," he said at length. "You are a spy or a saboteur of one sort or another. I am convinced of it. But it makes no matter. Whatever you are, whatever your intentions, you must leave Turkey. You are unwelcome in our country, and there are men in your own country who are very much interested in speaking with you.

"Mustafa will see that you get a bath and a chance to change your clothes. At three-fifteen this afternoon you will board a Pan American flight for Shannon Airport. Mustafa will be with you. You will have two hours between planes and you will then board another

Pan American flight for Washington, where Mustafa will turn you over to agents of your own government." Mustafa, who was to do all this, was the grubby little man who had brought my pilaff twice a day and my toast each morning. If he was important enough to accompany me to Washington, then he was a rather high-level type to use as a prison guard, which meant that I was probably thought to be the greatest threat on earth to the peace and security of the Republic of Turkey.

"We will not see you again," he went on. "I do not doubt that the United States Government will revoke your passport. Unless you are, in fact, their agent, which is still quite possible. I am beyond caring. Nothing you tell me makes any sense, and everything is probably a lie. I believe nothing that anyone tells me in this day and age."

"It's the safest course," I assured him.

"In any case, you will never return to Turkey. You are
persona non grata
here. You will leave, taking with you all of the personal belongings you brought in with you. You will leave and you will not return for any reason."

"That suits me."

"I hoped it would." He stood up, dismissing me, and Mustafa led me toward the door.

"A moment—"

I turned.

"Tell me one thing," he said. "Precisely what is the Flat Earth Society of England?"

"It's worldwide, really. Not limited to England, although it was organized there and has most of its members there."

"But what is it?"

"A group of people who believe the earth is flat, rather than round. The society is devoted to propagating this belief and winning converts to this way of thinking."

He stared at me. I stared back.

"Flat," he said. "Are these people crazy?"

"No more than you or I."

I left him with that to contemplate. Mustafa led me to a rudimentary bathroom and stood outside while I washed an impressive amount of filth from my body. When I got out of the shower he handed me my suitcase. I put on clean clothes and closed my suitcase. I tied my dirty clothing into a fetid bundle—shoes and socks and all—and passed the reeking mess to Mustafa. He was not an overly clean man himself, but he took a step backward at once.

"In the name of peace and friendship and the International Brotherhood of Stentaphators, I present this clothing as a gift and tribute unto the great Republic of Turkey."

"I don't speak English," Mustafa lied.

"What the hell does that mean?" I demanded. "Oh, the devil with you."

We stopped at the clerk's desk. I was given back my belt, my necktie, my shoelaces, my pocket comb, my wallet, and my watch. Mustafa took my passport and tucked it away in a pocket. I asked him for it, and he grinned and told me he didn't speak English.

We left the building. The sun was absolutely blinding. My eyes were unequal to it. I wondered if Mustafa would consider dropping his pose of not speaking English. We would have a long flight together. Would he want to pass the whole trip in stony silence?

I decided that I could probably get him to talk, but that it might be better if I didn't. A silent Mustafa could well be more bearable than a talkative one, especially since I would be able to pick up some paperbacks to read on the plane. And I did seem to have an advantage. He spoke English and didn't know I knew it. I spoke Turkish, and he didn't know that, either. Why give up that sort of edge?

We walked along toward a 1953 Chevrolet, its fenders crippled, its body riddled with rust. We sat in back, and Mustafa told the driver to take us to the airport. He leaned forward, and I heard him tell the driver that I was a very deceptive spy from the United States of America and that I was emphatically not to be trusted.

They all see too many James Bond movies. They expect spies everywhere and overlook the profit motive entirely. A spy? It was the last thing on earth I would ever become. I had no intentions of spying for or against Turkey or anyone else.

I had come, quite simply, so that I could steal approximately three million dollars in gold.

C
hapter 2

I
t had begun
some months before in Manhattan at the junction of three streams—a job, a girl, and a most noble lost cause. The job involved preparation of a thesis that would win Brian Cudahy a master's degree in history from Columbia University. The girl was Kitty Bazerian, who rolls her belly in Chelsea nightclubs as Alexandra the Great. The noble lost cause, one of the noblest, one of the most utterly lost, was the League for the Restoration of Cilician Armenia.

I first saw Brian Cudahy on a Saturday morning. My mail had just arrived, and I was sitting in my living room sorting it. I receive a tremendous amount of mail. I'm on hundreds of mailing lists and I subscribe to a great many periodicals, and my mail carrier detests me. I live on 107th Street a few doors west of Broadway. My neighbors are transients and addicts and students and Orientals and actors and harlots, six classes of people who get little in the way of mail. Bills from Con Ed and the telephone company, slingers from the supermarkets, quarterly messages from their congressman, little else. I, on the other hand, burden my mailman with a sack of paper garbage every day.

My bell rang. I pressed a buzzer to admit my caller into the building. He climbed four flights of stairs and hesitated in the hallway. I waited, and he knocked, and I opened the door.

"Tanner?"

"Yes."

"I'm Brian Cudahy. I called you last night—"

"Oh, yes," I said. "Come in." He seated himself in the rocking chair. "Coffee?"

"If it's no trouble."

I made instant coffee in the kitchen and brought back two cups. He was looking all over the apartment. I suppose it's a little unusual. People have said that it looks more like a library than an apartment. There are four rooms besides the kitchen and the bath, and in each room the walls are done in floor-to-ceiling bookcases, almost all of which are full. Beyond that, there's rather little in the way of furniture. I've a large bed in one room, a very large writing desk in another, a few chairs scattered here and there, and a small dresser in still another room, and that's about all. I don't find the place unusual at all, myself. When one is a compulsive reader and researcher and when one has a full twenty-four hours a day at his disposal, not having to allot eight for sleep and eight for work, one certainly ought to have plenty of books on hand.

"Is the coffee all right?"

"Oh!" He looked up, startled. "Yes, of course. I . . . uh . . . I'm going to need your help. Mr. Tanner."

He was about twenty-four, I guessed. Clean-cut, bright-faced, short-haired, with an air of incipient success about him. He looked like a student but not at all like a scholar. An increasing number of such persons pursue graduate degrees these days. Industry considers a bachelor's degree indispensable and, by a curious extension, regards master's degrees and doctorates as a way of separating the men from the boys. I don't understand this. Why should a Ph.D. awarded for an extended essay on color symbolism in the poetry of Pushkin have anything to do with a man's competence to develop a sales promotion campaign for a manufacturer of ladies' underwear?

"My thesis is due the middle of next month," Cudahy was saying. "I can't seem to get anywhere on it. And I heard that you . . . you were recommended as—"

"As one who writes theses?"

He nodded.

"What's your field?" I asked.

"History."

"You've a topic already assigned, of course."

"Yes."

"What is it?"

He swallowed. "Sort of offbeat, I'm afraid."

"Good."

"Excuse me?"

"Offbeat topics are the best. What's yours?"

"The Turkish persecutions of Armenians during the late nineteenth century and immediately before and after the First World War." He grinned. "Don't ask me how I got saddled with that one. I can't figure it out, myself. Do you know anything about the subject, Mr. Tanner?"

"Yes."

"You do?" He was incredulous. "Honestly?"

"I know a great deal about it," I said.

"Then can you . . . uh . . . write the thesis?"

"Probably. Have you done anything on it to date?"

"I have notes here—"

"Notes that you've shown an instructor or just your own work?"

"No one's seen anything yet. I've had some oral conferences with my instructor but nothing very important."

I waved his briefcase aside. "Then I'd rather not see your notes," I told him. "I find it easier to start fresh if you don't mind."

"You'll do it?"

"For seven hundred fifty dollars."

His face clouded. "That seems high. I don't—"

"A master's degree is worth an extra fifteen hundred to industry the first year. That's minimal. I'm charging you half your first year's differential. If you try to haggle, the price goes up, not down."

"It's a deal."

"This is for Columbia, you said?"

"Yes."

"And your grades have been—"

"B average."

"All right. About a hundred-page thesis? And you want it the middle of next month?"

"Yes."

"You'll have it. Call me in three weeks, and I'll let you know how it's coming along."

"Three weeks."

"Don't call before then. And I'll want half the money now, if it's all the same to you."

"I don't have it on me. Can I bring it this afternoon?"

"You do that," I said.

He was back at two that afternoon with $375 in cash. He was just a little reluctant to part with it—I don't think because he would miss the money so much but because this made the deal firm, committed him to a plan that he knew very well was morally reprehensible.

He was purchasing his master's degree. It would be a big status thing for him, that master's, and he'd have gotten it unfairly, and it would always bother him a little, and he knew as much already. But he handed me the money, and I took it, and we both sealed our pact with the devil.

"I suppose you've done lots of theses," he said.

"Quite a number."

"Many in history?"

"Yes. And a good number in English, and a few in sociology and economics. And some other things."

"What did you do your own on?"

"My own?"

"Your master's and doctorate."

"I don't even have a bachelor's," I told him truthfully. "I joined the Army the day I left high school. Korea. I never did go to college."

He found this extraordinary. He talked about how easy it would be for me to go through college and walk off with highest honors. "It would be a snap for you. Why, you could write your thesis with no sweat. The exams, the whole routine. It would be nothing for you."

"Exactly," I said.

Cudahy's thesis was a very simple matter. I already knew quite a good deal about the Terrible Turk and the Starving Armenians. My library contained all the basic texts on the subject and more than a few lesser-known works, including several in Armenian. I speak Armenian, but reading it is a chore. The alphabet is unfamiliar and the construction tedious. I also had an almost complete file of the publications in English of the League for the Restoration of Cilician Armenia. Biased though they were, the League's pamphlets could not fail to impress in a bibliography.

It was pleasant work. Research is a joy, especially when one is not burdened with an excessive reverence for the truth. By inventing an occasional source and injecting an occasional spurious footnote, one softens the harsh curves in the royal road of scholarship. I studied, I ate, I worked out at the 110th Street Gym, I read, I kept up my correspondence, and I developed Cudahy's thesis with little difficulty.

I narrowed his topic somewhat, focusing on the Armenian Nationalist movements that had in large part provoked the Turkish massacres. Hunchak and Daschnak, organized in 1885 and 1890 respectively, had worked to develop a national consciousness and pressed for liberation from the Ottoman Empire. The minor Kurdish massacre of 1894 led to an absorbing parade of Big Power manipulations and was followed a year later by Abdu-l-Hamid's mammoth slaughter of eighty thousand Armenians.

But it was during World War I, when Turkey fought on the Axis side and feared her Armenian subjects as a potential fifth column, that the Armenian massacres reached their height and the phrase "Starving Armenians" found its way into our language. In mid-1915 the Turks went berserk. In one community after another the Armenian population was uprooted, men and women and children were massacred indiscriminately, and those who were not put to the sword either fled the country or quietly starved.

After the war the Soviets took Armenia proper, establishing an Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic. The areas that remained Turkish had largely lost their Armenian population. The last large concentration of Armenians to suffer en masse were those in the city of Smyrna, now Izmir. The Greeks seized the town in the Greco-Turkish War that followed close upon the signing of the armistice. When Ataturk recaptured Smyrna, the city was burned, and the Greeks and Armenians were systematically destroyed. An earthquake further reduced the city in 1928, but by that time there were few Armenians left in it.

Smyrna, then, was an afterthought, a sort of footnote to the whole business. My main focus was on the Nationalist movements, their organization, their development, their aims, and their ultimate effects. I expected to finish the thesis well ahead of schedule and I expected to go no further with the study of the destruction of Smyrna. But I had not then met Kitty or her grandmother.

Kitty and I met at a wedding in the Village. My friend Owen Morgan was being married to a Jewish girl from White Plains. Owen is a Welsh poet with no discernible talent who had discovered that one could make a fair living by drinking an impressive amount, spouting occasional poetry, seducing every comely female within reach, and generally behaving like the shade of Dylan Thomas. He startled me by asking me to be his best man, an office I had never before performed. So I stood up for him in a drab loft on Sullivan Street at the ceremony performed by a priest friendly to the Catholic Workers. Neither of them was Catholic, but Owen had lived at the CW settlement on Christie Street for a few months before he discovered the potential of the Dylan Thomas bit. (I'm a member of the Catholic Workers myself, although I don't give them as much of my time as I probably should. They're a wonderful organization.) I stood up for Owen and passed him the ring at the appropriate time, and afterward Kitty Bazerian danced at his wedding.

She was small and slender and dark, with fine black hair and huge brown eyes. She stood demurely, garbed in a wisp of diaphanous fluff, and someone said, "Now Kitty Bazerian will dance for us," and the house band from the New Life Restaurant began to play, and her body sang in the center of the improvised stage, music in motion, silk, velvet, perfection, adding a wholly new dimension to sensuality.

Afterward I found her at the bar, dressed now in skirt and sweater and black tights, which was about right for Owen's wedding.

"Alexandra the Great," I said.

"Who told you? They promised not to say."

"I recognized you myself."

"Honestly?"

"I've watched you dance at the New Life. And at the Port Said before that."

"And you recognized me right away?"

"Of course. I never knew that Alexandra the Great was an Armenian."

"A starving Armenian right about now. Aren't they having anything to eat?"

"It would spoil Owen's image."

"I suppose we have to respect his image. But I already had too much to drink and I'm starving."

"May it never be said that Evan Tanner let an Armenian starve. Why don't we get out of here?"

We did. I suggested the Sayat Nova at Bleecker and Charles. She asked me why I was so very hipped on Armenians. I told her I was writing a thesis on Armenia.

"You're a student?"

"No, I'm just writing a thesis."

"I don't . . . wait a minute, you're Evan
Tanner!
Sure, Owen told me about you. He says you're crazier than he is."

"He may be right."

"And you're writing about Armenians now? You ought to meet my grandmother. She could tell you all about how we lost the family fortunes. She makes a good story out of it. According to her, we were the richest Armenians in Turkey. Gold coins, she says; more gold coins than you could count. And now the Turks have it all." She laughed. "Isn't that always the way? Owen insists he's a direct descendant of Owen Glen-dower and the rightful King of all of Wales. The Sayat Nova sounds fine, Evan. But I warn you, I'm going to be expensive. I'll eat everything they've got."

"I don't remember what we had or how it tasted. There was a good red wine with the meal, but we got drunker on each other than on anything else. It does not happen often for me, the special magic, the perfect harmony. It happened this time.

She talked some about her dancing. I was delighted to discover that she had no higher ambitions. She did not want to become a ballerina, or get a guest shot on the Sullivan show, or found a new school of modern dance. She just wanted to go on dancing at the New Life for as long as they wanted her.

I, on the other hand, have many ambitions and I told her of them. "Someday," I confided, "we'll restore the House of Stuart to the English throne. The Jacobite movement has never entirely died out, you know. There are men in the Scottish Highlands who would rise at any moment to throw out those Hanoverian interlopers."

"You're putting me on—"

"Oh, no," I said, wagging a finger at her. "The last reigning Stuart was Anne. She died in 1714 and they brought over a Hanoverian, a German. George I. And ever since that day the Germans have sat upon the English throne. If you think about it, it's an outrage."

"But the House of Stuart—"

"There have been attempts," I said. "Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1745. All of Scotland rose to support him, but the French didn't do all they were supposed to do, and nothing came of it. The English won the Battle of Culloden Moor and thought that was the end of it." I paused significantly. "But they were wrong."