Lawrence Block: The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep

Her father and his brothers had worked industriously. She recalled it all very well, she told me. One afternoon a man had come with news that Smyrna had fallen, and that very night the whole family had worked. There was a huge front porch on their house, wooden on the top, with concrete sides and front. That night her father and her uncle Poul broke through the concrete on the left side. Then the whole family carried the gold coins from the basement and hid them away beneath the porch.

They made many trips, she told me. They carried big sacks and little sacks, and once she had dropped a cloth purse, and the shiny coins had scattered all over the basement floor, and she had to scurry around picking them up and putting them back into the purse. Almost all the coins were the same, she said-a bit smaller than an American quarter, with a woman’s head on one side and a man on horseback on the other, and the man, she remembered, was sticking something with a spear.

British sovereigns, of course. The head of Victoria (Vicki Hanover, that usurper) and the reverse was St. George slaying the dragon. That had been the most common gold coin in the Middle East, I knew; the most trusted gold piece, the coin one would choose to hoard as family or communal wealth.

At last all the coins were in place, Kitty’s grandmother explained, and they filled the space beneath the porch to capacity. And then her father and her uncle mixed cement and carefully patched the opening in the concrete by the light of a single lantern. After the cement set, they rubbed little bits of gravel into it to give it an aged appearance and they dusted it with dirt from the road so it would be the same shade as the rest of the porch cement.

Until then the Turks in Balikesir had been peaceful. But now, once they had heard of Ataturk’s victory a hundred miles to the south, they suddenly grew courageous. The next morning they attacked, overrunning the Greeks and Armenians. They burned the Greek quarter to the ground and they butchered every Greek and Armenian they could find. The violence in Balikesir had not made the history books. Smyrna, sacked at the same time, overshadowed it, and I don’t doubt that similar massacres were taking place in enough other Turkish cities to keep Balikesir out of the limelight.

Kitty’s grandmother, however, had been only in Balikesir and had seen only what took place in Balikesir. She spoke calmly of it now. The burnings, the rape, the endless murder. Children pierced with swords, old men and women shot through the back of the head-screams, gunshots, blood, death.

She was one of the few to survive, but her words indicated that Kitty had been right: “I was young then, and pretty. And the Turks are animals. I was ravished. Can you believe this, to look at me now, that men would want to have me that way? And not just one man, no. But I was not killed. Everyone else in my family was killed, but I escaped. I was with a group of Greeks and an old Armenian man. We fled the city. We were on the roads for days. The old Armenian man died. It is funny, I cannot remember his name. We were crowded together aboard a ship. Then we were here, New York, America.”

“And the gold?”

“Gone. The Turks must have it.”

“Did they find it?”

“Not then, no. But they must have it now. It was years ago. And no Armenian went back for it. I was the only one of my family to live, and only the people of my family knew of the gold. So no Armenian found it, and so the Turks must have gotten it all.”

Later Kitty said, “Damn you, why did you have to go and talk Armenian with her? I couldn’t understand three words out of a hundred. If you think it’s a picnic to sit listening to two people talk for hours and not catch a word-”

“She’s a wonderful woman.”

“She is, isn’t she? You seemed interested in her story. Were you?”

“Very much.”

“I’m glad. How on earth did you learn to speak the language, Evan? No, don’t tell me. I don’t even want to know. It made her whole day, though. She cornered me on the way out. Did you hear what she asked me?”

“No.”

“She wanted to know if I was pregnant.”

“Are you?”

“God, I hope not. I told her I wasn’t, and she said I should get pregnant right away so that we would be married.”

“She said that?”

“That’s not all. She said you have a better chance to get pregnant if you keep your knees way up and stay that way as long as you can. She’s a dirty old lady.”

“She’s grand.”

“You’re a dirty old man. Are you coming to the New Life tonight?”

“Around midnight.”

“Good.”

I took the subway back to my apartment and sat down at my typewriter and wrote up everything I could recall of Kitty’s grandmother’s story. I read through what I had written, then roamed the apartment, pulling books from the shelves, checking articles in various pamphlets and magazines. A broadside of the League for the Restoration of Cilician Armenia alluded to the confiscation of the wealth of the Armenians of Smyrna. But I could find no reference to the cache in Balikesir. Nothing at all.

A few days later the League was meeting on Attorney Street on the Lower East Side. The League meets once a month, and I go when I can. Sometimes a guest speaker discusses conditions in the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic. Other times reports will be read from branches in other cities, other countries. Much of the time is devoted to general socializing, discussions of the rug business, gossip. As far as I know, I’m the only member who isn’t Armenian. At the meeting I looked up Nezor Kalichikian, who knows everyone and everything and who, I knew, had lived in Smyrna. We drank coffee and played a game of chess which he won, as usual. I asked him about the gold of Smyrna.

“The Armenian treasure of Smyrna,” he said solemnly. “What do you want to know about it?”

“What happened to it?”

He spread his small hands expressively. “What happened to everything? The Turks got it, of course. Since they could not rape it or eat it or kill it or burn it, they probably spent it. They couldn’t have kept it long. They managed to rid themselves of the Armenians and the Greeks and the Jews, the only three groups in Turkey who had the slightest idea how to manage money. Yes; I know of the Armenian treasure. Are you really interested in this, Evan?”

“Yes.”

“Any particular reason?”

“Some research I’m doing.”

“Always research. Yes.” He sipped his coffee. “The Armenians pooled their wealth, you know. It was all kept in gold. One did not keep money in paper bills in those days. Not real money, not one’s savings. Always gold. The money was pooled and tucked away for safekeeping in a basement in Smyrna.”

“In Smyrna?”

“Of course. And then the Turks must have taken it, because no one succeeded in getting it out of the country. The whole city was burned, you understand. The wretched Turkish quarter remained-that was the one section that might have profited by a burning-but everything else was destroyed. Ataturk’s troops fired the city, and then, of course, they said that the Greeks and the Armenians had done it. Typical. I’m sure the gold was discovered during the fire. They looted everything.”

“So they would have found the gold.”

“Undoubtedly. If you move there, you’ll lose your queen.”

“Let it go, I moved it. Another game?”

“You resign?”

“Yes.”

We set up the pieces for another game. Later he said, “There was an earthquake in Smyrna a few years after. Nineteen twenty-seven, I think.”

“Nineteen twenty-eight.”

“Perhaps. If the gold had not been found before, it would have been discovered then. So I’m sure the Turks have it.”