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“She wouldn’t get something like that wrong. Nobody forgets the name of his home town.”
“I suppose not. Evan-”
“Anything could have happened,” I said. “The Turks could have found it, some Armenians could have known about it and gone back for it, the new owners of the house could have remodeled and found it, but still-”
“You think it’s still there.”
“I think it’s possible.”
“Would it be very much?”
“Figure that a British sovereign is worth ten or twelve dollars today. Figure they had about half the actual volume of the hiding place filled with gold. Judging by the size of the porch as she described it and just estimating roughly, yes, it would be a lot of money.”
“How much?”
“I figured it out a little while ago. I can’t really estimate it-hell, I don’t really know that it’s there or that it was ever there in the first place.”
“How much?”
“A minimum of two million dollars. Possibly twice that much. Say three million dollars, maybe.”
“Three million dollars,” she said.
The next morning I went downtown and applied for a passport.
Chapter 4
It had all seemed magnificently simple then. I would fly to Istanbul and find some way of getting to Balikesir. I would work my way through the city-the present population is 30,000-until I found the house Kitty’s grandmother had described to me. Her description was almost, but not quite, as good as a photograph. A very large house, three stories tall, on an elevation not far from the railroad station, and blessed with that extraordinary porch. There could not be too many houses of that description in Balikesir.
If I found the house, I would have to investigate to see if the porch was still intact, then provide myself with an elementary metals detector and determine if there was anything inside. And, if the gold was there, then it would be simply a matter of digging it out and taking it away. A difficult matter, no doubt, but one that could be puzzled out later.
It struck me as very likely that the gold was no longer there or had not been there in the first place. Still, one does not conclude that the grapes are sour without even attempting to see if the vine is within reach.
Three million dollars-
Just a portion of that wealth could do extraordinary things for the League for the Restoration of Cilician Armenia. Another chunk of gold would facilitate a vital worldwide direct-mail campaign for the Flat Earth Society. And more, and more. There was all that gold-perhaps-doing nothing for anyone, lying unattended and unknown, and here were all these marvelous groups able to make such good use of it.
So I had to go.
And it seemed such a facile matter, at least the first stages. I would go to Turkey and work things out from that point on. There was every reason to go and no particular reason not to. Cudahy’s silly thesis was finished and would be accepted readily enough. I had completed my paper for the Jacobite Circle and mailed it off to their offices in Portree on the Isle of Skye. Most of all, I wanted to go. I feel that whenever possible one ought to do the things he wants to do.
How was I to know the damned Turks would arrest me?
Mustafa was poor company. He stayed with me like a summer cold and tried to shepherd me straight to the plane. I made for a newsstand and looked hungrily for something in English while Mustafa tugged at me. He could not have pried me loose with a crowbar. “Your mother was blinded by gonorrhea,” I told him reasonably. “If you don’t let me get something to read, I’ll kill you.”
The selection in English was dismal. There was a Turkish guidebook, a sort of anthropological sex manual by Margaret Mead, and four Agatha Christie mysteries. I bought everything but the Margaret Mead and let Mustafa get me onto the plane.
We sat in the tourist section. Evidently the Turkish Government intended to reroute spies as economically as possible. I had the middle seat between Mustafa and a fat schoolteacher-from Des Moines, I believe-who asked me at once if I was an American. I shook my head. She asked me if I spoke English, and I shook my head again. Then she put on her earphones and went to sleep.
The ride to Sha
The food was good, at least. It was tasteless, naturally, but there was a fairly large piece of some sort of beef on the tray, far more meat than I had had in nine days. There were also some plastic green peas and a crunchy green and purple salad. I ate everything but found myself missing the pilaff. I might never have pilaff like that again, I thought, and then I realized how I could contrive to eat that pilaff in the future. All I had to do was go to Turkey. I would be instantly arrested and instantly jailed, and I would be fed toast and pilaff and pilaff for the rest of my life.
Except, of course, that I would never be able to return to Turkey. The Turkish Government would revoke my visa and never grant another, and the U.S. Government would probably cancel my passport. It was unfair. I had done nothing. I had simply gone quietly and legally to Turkey, but they take people’s passports away from them all the time. Which meant not only that I would not be able to go to Turkey again, but that I very possibly would not be able to go anywhere.
And throughout all of this there would be interrogation-endless interrogation. Why had I gone to Turkey? Who was I representing? What was I plotting? Who? What? Where? When? Why?
I have never liked being questioned. In all my sessions with the Federal Bureau of Investigation I have never enjoyed myself at all. I don’t like having some competent young man sit down in my apartment and ask questions about my friends and my associations and my ideas and all of the rest.
But in each of these sessions-and there have been many of them-I have had one ultimate weapon. I have always told these officious oafs the truth. I have never lied to them. Since they ca
How could I tell them the truth now? How could I tell those people about the Armenian hoard?
No.
I simply could not return to the United States. I simply could not land in Washington.
I looked over at Mustafa. He had his earphones plugged into the wax in his ears and was listening, expressionless, to a medley of folk songs performed by the Norman Luboff Choir. If only there were a way of ridding myself of Mustafa, perhaps I had a chance to avoid returning to Washington. But how? Even if he dropped dead on the spot, if one of Norman Luboff’s singers hit high C and burst a blood vessel in Mustafa’s little brain, I was still stuck on the damned airplane. How could I pry him away from me, and how could I pry myself off the flight?
Sha
We would be landing at Sha
I almost shouted at the beauty of it. I knew people in Ireland! I received mail from Ireland every month; almost every week. I was an active member of the Cla