Read The Thief Who Couldn't Sleep for Free Online

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."
    "Would there have been much?"
    "Oh, yes. Our people in Smyrna were quite wealthy, you know."
    "And the gold was hidden right there in the city? In Smyrna?"
    "Why, of course," old Nezor said. "Where else would it have been hidden?"
    There were no records anywhere of the discovery of the treasure of Smyrna. It was taken for granted by everyone that the Turks had found the gold, but no one knew this for a certainty.
    And there were no records anywhere to indicate that the gold had been cached in Balikesir. There was one woman's memory—and she claimed to be the only survivor who had known of the cache. Balikesir had not burned to the ground. Balikesir had not suffered an earthquake. Balikesir had suffered its private hells, but I could see a house on a hill, a porch with concrete sides and front, surviving through the years, its contents unknown and undisturbed.
    That night I told Kitty. "I think it's still there," I said and explained it to her.
    "Maybe it was never there in the first place. She's an old woman. She went through a big shock back then. Who knows what she remembers? Maybe she really lived in Smyrna all the time—"
    "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.

 
    C hapter 4
    I t 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