Lawrence Block - The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep

Half a dozen sheets of photocopied blueprints. Blueprints for what? I had no idea. A dozen sheets of ruled notebook paper covered with either the mental doodling of a mathematician or some esoteric code. A batch of carefully drawn diagrams. A whole packet of confidential information, no doubt stolen from someone and destined for someone else. But stolen from whom? And destined for whom? And indicating what?

When I first opened the case it had scarcely mattered. I had packed everything away and taken a taxi to the Dublin airport. There were no flights to the Continent until morning, I learned, unless I wanted to fly first to London and then make connections to Paris. I did not want to go to London at all, not now. I used the American passport to buy a ticket to Madrid and paid for it with American money. I left the case in a locker and went back into town. At the lost and found counter of the bus station I explained that I’d left a pair of glasses on a bus, and asked whether anyone had turned them in. Five pairs were brought to me, and I would have liked to try them on until I found a pair that wasn’t too hard on my eyes, but this might have aroused suspicion. I picked a pair that looked rather like the ones in William Alan Traynor’s passport photograph and thanked the clerk and left.

By flight time I was back at the airport. I took my attaché case from the locker, lodged the envelope of unidentifiable secret papers between my shirt and my skin, and incorporated the currency with my own small fund of money. I tucked my two extra passports (and Mustafa Ibn Ali’s) into a pocket, combed my hair to conform to the passport photo, and put on the glasses. Their previous owner had evidently combined extreme myopia with severe astigmatism. I hadn’t worn them five minutes before I had a blinding headache.

I’d have preferred using another passport and going without glasses, but there were good reasons for being Traynor. The glasses did change my appearance somewhat, and with my own photo plastered over every newspaper in Ireland it seemed worthwhile to avoid being recognized as Evan Michael Tanner. Besides that, the Traynor passport was the only one with an Irish entry visa stamped on it. The tall man had evidently used it to enter Ireland six weeks earlier.

I got blindly through customs, with my attaché case receiving only a cursory check. The flight to Madrid was happily uneventful, the landing smooth enough. The Aer Lingus stewardess made cheerful announcements in English and Irish and served reasonably good coffee. I kept my glasses on and kept my eyes closed behind them. Whenever I looked at anything, it blurred before my eyes, and my head ached all over again.

Once I was through Spanish customs, I dug out the R. Kenneth Leyden passport and showed it as identification when I changed pounds to pesetas at the Iberia desk. I put the glasses away, hoping I would never have to wear them again, and headed for the one man in Madrid who could help me on my way to Balikesir.

At the time, never having met Esteban Robles, I had had no idea he was a lunatic.

The packet of secret papers bothered me. If I had known just what they were, I might have had some idea what to do with them. Knowing neither their source nor their destination nor their nature, I was wholly in the dark.

I could destroy them, of course, but that might prove to be a bad idea if they were as valuable as they seemed to be. I could mail them anonymously to the Irish Government-the Irish certainly seemed anxious to recover them. I could send them to the American Consulate, thereby doing what could only be regarded as patriotic while passing the buck neatly enough.

And yet, in a sense, I felt a sort of debt to my anonymous benefactor, the tall man who had been shot down by the Irish police. However invalid his assumptions of my identity, however suspect his motives, he had done me a good turn. He had provided me with three passports to spirit me out of Ireland and away from the manhunt that sooner or later would have caught up with me. He had endowed me with a supply of capital that would help me on my way to Balikesir. My own funds were perilously close to being depleted, and his pounds and dollars and francs were welcome.

He had also supplied me with a change of underclothing and socks, which I now put on. It is difficult, if not impossible, to wear the socks and underwear of a dead man without feeling somehow obliged to carry out his mission. But who was he? And which side was he on?

He was not on the Irish side; that much was obvious. All right, then, suppose he was an enemy of Ireland. Why would he be spying on Ireland? What precious information could the Irish possibly have that he or his employers would want? And who could his employers be? The British? The Russians? The CIA? The answer was unattainable without a knowledge of the nature of the documents, and they remained as impenetrable as ever.

At least no one knew I had them. I could destroy them or retain them or send them somewhere and, for better or for worse, I would be forever out of it. Unless-

It was a horrible thought.

It was possible, I thought suddenly, that the tall man had let someone know what he’d done with the documents. He could have sent off a wire or dashed off a fast letter to his employers. They’re on to me but I’m sending the stuff with your man Tanner, he might have wired.

And someone at the other end would have realized that Tanner was not their man at all, and that he ought to be gotten hold of in a hurry. And then what?

Things, I thought, were getting awfully damned involved.

I looked at my three passports. If the tall man had spread the word, those passports were dangerous. His men would probably know the names he was using-Traynor and Leyden and Boehm. If he was a Yugoslavian spy, for example, it would not do to present any of the three passports at the Yugoslavian border. But this left me as much in the dark as ever. If I only knew for whom he worked, I could avoid those countries. But I didn’t. Maybe he was a Spanish spy, as far as that went-though why Spain would be spying on Ireland I could not imagine.

I was getting nowhere. I gave it up, put everything back in the attaché case, closed it, and stretched out on Esteban’s unsanitary bed. My head was spinning, my stomach recoiling from the combined effect of fear and bad coffee. I went through my little repertoire of Yoga exercises, relaxing, breathing deeply, and generally easing myself out of my blue funk.

Esteban had still not returned when I got up from the bed. I tucked my attaché case under the bed and left the room. In a bookstore near the university I bought a pocket atlas and calculated a route to the French border. I stopped at a café and had a glass of bitter red wine. I thumbed through the atlas again and plotted the remainder of my trip. Spain, France, Italy, Yugoslavia, and Turkey-that seemed the best route. That gave me four borders to cross, with each one promising to be slightly more hazardous than the one before it. But it could be done. I was certain it could be done.

Esteban was waiting for me. He ran to me and embraced me furiously. “You were gone,” he said accusingly. “When I came back, you were gone.”

“I went out for some air.”

“Ah, who can breathe in the fetid stench of fascism? But the streets are dangerous. You should not have gone out. I feared that something might have happened to you.”

“Nothing did.”

“Ah.” He scratched at his beard. “It is not safe for you here. It is not safe for either of us. We must leave.”

“We?”

“Both of us!” He spread his arms wide as if to embrace the beauty of the idea. “We will go to France. This afternoon we rush to the border. Tonight, under the cloak of darkness, we slip across the border like sardines. Who will see us?”