Lawrence Block - The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep

“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.

I did not move an inch until the ship was out of sight.

I got into the car, a Chevrolet about ten years old, and I understood it well enough. They had been kind enough to leave the keys in the ignition. I turned the car around and drove back to Balikesir, found the house, pulled into the garage, and closed the door. I had work to do. Fortunately I had plenty of time to do it.

Because they would not open those strongboxes until they reached their destination, which would take a day at the least. They wouldn’t open the boxes because they would not trust one another well enough. As long as the locks were unimpaired no one would be able to remove some of the gold before they got back to Sofia and split it into their unrightful shares.

I could see them all, gathered in Father Gregor’s comfortable house, ceremoniously unlocking or breaking open the padlocks, lifting the lids of each box in turn, and finding nuts and bolts and files and weights and nails and screws and rusty hardware of all sorts. Some six hundred pounds of rusty hardware, by my own admittedly rough estimate. Six hundred pounds of scrap metal, some of it lying loose, some of it neatly wrapped in ancient cloth bags and leather pouches. But all of it junk, and all of it theirs, and not a scrap of gold anywhere.

I had presented my unofficial resignation from the Society of the Left Hand. It bothered me in a way-it was, as well as I could remember, the only organization from which I had ever resigned.

But it did not bother me very much.

The gold was where I had left it, piled under a tarpaulin in the farthest corner of the garage. I used a variety of tools to open up the door panels of the Chevy and packed the door solid with gold coins. I stowed more of them under the seats, inside the cushions, under the trunk lining, and on top of the hood liner. It took several hours to pack the car properly. I did not want anything to rattle too obviously. A certain amount of rattling was perhaps inevitable, but one expected rattles in a ten-year-old automobile. I used newspaper and rags to muffle the more obvious rattles, tightened the car up again, patted the fender gently, and went back into the house.

I found a razor and some soap. I got out of my clothes, bathed, shaved, and put my filthy clothes on again. I would have preferred clothes that looked as though they might normally be worn by someone prosperous enough to own a car. I thought of buying some clothes before I left. There would be time for that later, I decided, when I was well out of Balikesir. In some other city, where police were not schooled to be on the lookout for Evan Tanner, I could more safely prepare for the rigor of a border examination.

I went back to the car. The Turkish passport and the Turkish driver’s license were in the glove compartment. Odon had no further need of them, just as he had no further need of the car or of me, and so he had abandoned us all together. I drove out of Balikesir. I drove south and east and south and east and I kept driving for a very long period of time. The roads were bad, and the car would not go over forty miles an hour without the front end shimmying madly. I stopped every fifty miles for oil. From time to time I grabbed a sandwich or a cup of coffee, then got behind the wheel and went on driving endlessly south and endlessly east.

According to the speedometer, I logged about eight hundred miles all told. I drove nonstop for almost two full days. In Antakya, in the southeast corner of Turkey, I finally purchased some decent clothes. I paid for them with gold pieces, which occasioned a certain amount of interest, but gold is apt to circulate in that corner of the world, and the merchant was more interested in cheating me than in calling the gold to the attention of the authorities.

I had no trouble at the border. I did not particularly resemble my passport photograph, but no one particularly resembles his passport photograph, and I drove from Turkey to Syria with little difficulty. I headed due south through Syria, hugging the coast, and had even less trouble passing from Syria into Lebanon. The Customs guards checked my car well enough, but they had no particular reason to take the doors apart, so they didn’t. They looked in the spare tire, they rummaged through the glove compartment, and they let me go.

They missed the gold, the secret documents, and the fact that I was not the person whose passport I carried. Aside from that they didn’t miss a trick.

I stayed at a good hotel in Beirut and put my car in the hotel garage. I told the bellhop that I was interested in finding a reliable gold merchant, and I tipped him a sovereign. Within an hour a young Chinese came to me. Did I have gold to sell? I said that I did. Would I accept fifty dollars an ounce? I said that I would not.

“How much, sir?”

“Sixty.”

“That is high.”

“It is low. You would pay sixty-five if I insisted. Tell your boss that I do not bargain. Tell him sixty dollars an ounce.”

“How much gold, sir?”

“Six hundred pounds.”

“Six hundred pounds sterling?”

“Six hundred pounds of gold,” I said.

He did not wink, he did not blink, he remained wholly inscrutable. He left, he returned. “Sixty dollars an ounce is acceptable,” he said.

“May I meet your boss?”

“If you will come with me.”

I went to a very modern office in a very modern downtown building. A Chinese in a London suit sat across the desk from me and worked out the details with me. I was a very difficult bargainer at first. After the fun and games in Turkey I had given up trusting anyone. But we worked out the arrangements. Several of the Swiss banks maintained major branches in Beirut. I need only open an account in one of them, a numbered account, and the Chinese would deposit funds in my account equal to sixty dollars an ounce for my total consignment of gold. His company had a warehouse where we would have sufficient privacy. I drove the car there, and several of his employees unloaded the gold from the car according to my directions. It was all weighed and tallied before my eyes. I have been unable to decide whether or not the scales were dishonest. On the one hand, the gold merchant seems to have been exceptionally honest, ethical, and scrupulous. But, at the same time, any man’s honesty seems apt to bend when the stakes reach sufficient height.

It made no difference. He could cheat me an ounce on the pound, and it would still make no difference. Because the gold weighed out at five hundred seventy-three pounds and four ounces troy weight or 6,880 troy ounces.

“I will allow an average of.900 fine for the gold,” he told me. “It is coin gold. Some is finer, some not so fine. Some no doubt is counterfeit. Neither of us has the time to check each piece, is it not so? It will be checked before it is sold, and my firm will either gain or lose depending upon the assay. If you insist, we will assay it before paying you, but it would force you to remain in Beirut for another week at the very least. For this reason-”