We stopped at the clerk’s desk. I was given back my belt, my necktie, my shoelaces, my pocket comb, my wallet, and my watch. Mustafa took my passport and tucked it away in a pocket. I asked him for it, and he grinned and told me he didn’t speak English.

  We left the building. The sun was absolutely blinding. My eyes were unequal to it. We walked along toward a 1953 Chevrolet, its fenders crippled, its body riddled with rust. We sat in back, and Mustafa told the driver to take us to the airport. He leaned forward, and I heard him tell the driver that I was a very deceptive spy from the United States of America and that I was emphatically not to be trusted.

  They all see too many James Bond movies. They expect spies everywhere and overlook the profit motive entirely. A spy? It was the last thing on earth I would ever become. I had no intentions of spying for or against Turkey or anyone else.

  I had come, quite simply, so that I could steal approximately three million dollars in gold…

  IT HAD begun some months before in Manhattan at the junction of two streams—a girl, and a most noble lost cause. The girl was Kitty Bazerian, who rolls her belly in Chelsea nightclubs as Alexandra the Great. The noble lost cause, one of the noblest, one of the most utterly lost, was the League for the Restoration of Cilician Armenia.

  Kitty and I met at a wedding in Greenwich Village. My friend Owen Morgan was being married to a girl from White Plains. Owen is a Welsh poet with no discernible talent who had discovered that one could make a fair living by drinking an impressive amount, spouting occasional poetry, and seducing every sexy female within reach. He startled me by asking me to be his best man, an office I had never before performed. So I stood up for Owen and passed him the ring at the appropriate time, and afterward Kitty Bazerian danced at his wedding.

  She was small and slender and dark, with fine black hair and huge brown eyes. She stood demurely, garbed in a wisp of diaphanous fluff, and someone said, “Now Kitty Bazerian will dance for us,” and the house band from the New Life Restaurant began to play, and her body sang in the center of the improvised stage, music in motion, silk, velvet perfection, adding a wholly new dimension to sensuality.

  Afterward I found her at the bar, dressed now in skirt and sweater and black tights, which was about right for Owen’s wedding.

  “Alexandra the Great,” I said.

  “Who told you? They promised not to say.”

  “I recognized you myself.”

  “Honestly?”

  “I’ve watched you dance at the New Life. And at the Port Said before that.”

  “And you recognized me right away?”

  “Of course. I never knew that Alexandra the Great was an Armenian.”

  “A starving Armenian right about now. I already had too much to drink and I’m starving.”

  “May it never be said that Evan Tanner let an Armenian starve. Why don’t we get out of here?”

  We did. I suggested an Armenian restaurant in the Village. She asked me why I was so very hipped on Armenians. I told her I was writing a thesis on Armenia.

  “You’re a student?”

  “No, I’m just writing a thesis.”

  “I don’t…wait a minute, you’re Evan Tanner! Sure, Owen told me about you. He says you’re crazier than he is.”

  “He may be right.”

  “And you’re writing about Armenians now? You ought to meet my grandmother. She could tell you all about how we lost the family fortunes. She makes a good story out of it. According to her, we were the richest Armenians in Turkey. Gold coins, she says; more gold coins than you could count. And now the Turks have it all.” She laughed. “Isn’t that always the way?”

  I don’t remember what we had or how it tasted. There was a good red wine with the meal, but we got drunker on each other than on anything else. It does not happen often for me, the special magic, the perfect harmony. It happened this time.

  And outside afterwards, a breeze playing with her marvelous black hair, she said, “I live with my mother and my grandmother, so that’s out. Do you have a place we can go to?”

  “Yes.”

  “But Owen said something about you not sleeping. I mean—”

  “I don’t, but I have a bed.”

  “How sweet of you,” she said, taking my arm, “to have a bed.”

  It was about a week after that when I finally did meet Kitty’s grandmother. Kitty had told me several times that I would enjoy the old woman’s story, and she became especially enthusiastic when I showed her my membership card in the League for the Restoration of Cilician Armenia. She had never heard of the group—rather few people have, actually—but she was certain her grandmother would be delighted.

  “She has some pretty grim memories,” Kitty said. “She was the only one of the family to get away. The Turks killed everybody else. I have a feeling she got raped in the bargain, but she never said anything about it exactly, and it’s not the kind of subject you discuss with your grandmother.”

  KITTY LIVED in Brooklyn, just across the bridge, in a neighborhood that was largely Syrian and Lebanese with a scattering of Armenians. We walked from the subway. It was early after. Her grandmother sat in front of the television set.

  Kitty said, “Grandma, this is Evan Tanner. He wanted to see you.”

  She was a gnomish little woman, her still-black hair parted absurdly in the middle, a strange light dancing merrily in her brown eyes. She was smoking a Helmar cigarette and had a tall glass of a dangerous orange liquid beside her. This was her life—a chair in front of a television set in her daughter’s house. It was extraordinary, her eyes said, that a young man would come to see her.

  In Armenian I said, “I am not Armenian myself, Mrs. Bazerian, but I have long been a great friend of the Armenian people and their supporter in their heroic fight for freedom.”

  Her eyes caught fire. “He speaks Armenian!” she cried, “he speaks Armenian!”

  “I knew she would love you,” Kitty told me.

  “Kitty, make coffee. Mr. Tanner and I must talk.”

  And the old woman’s story was a classic. It had happened in 1922, she told me. She had been but a girl then, a girl just old enough to seek a husband. “And there were many who wanted me, Mr. Tanner. I was a pretty one then. And my father the richest man in Balikesir…”

  Balikesir, a town about a hundred miles north of Smyrna, was the capital of Balikesir Province. She had lived there with her mother and her father and her father’s father and two brothers and a sister and assorted aunts and uncles and cousins. Her father’s house was one of the finest in Balikesir, and her father was the head of the town’s Armenian community. A fine house it was, too, not far from the railroad station, built high upon a hill with a view for miles in all directions. A huge house, with high columns around the doorway and a sloping cement walk down to the street below. Of the five hundred Armenian families in Balikesir, none had a finer house.

  “The Greeks were at war with the Turks,” she told me. “Of course, we were on the side of the Greeks, and my father had raised funds for the Greeks and knew many of their leaders. There were thousands of Greeks in Balikesir, and they were good friends with the Armenians. Our churches were different, but we were all Christians, not heathens like the Turks. At first my father thought the Greeks would win. The British were going to help us, you see. But, then, no help came from the British, and my father learned that the Turks would win after all.”

  It was then that the gold began to come to the house in Balikesir. Every day men brought sacks of gold, she said. Some brought little leather purses, some brought suitcases, some had gold coins sewn into their garments. Each man brought the gold to her father, who counted it carefully and wrote out a receipt for it. Then the man left, and the gold was put in the basement.

  “But we could not leave it there, you see. The bandits were already at the gates of Smyrna, and time was short. And my father had in his hands all the gold of all the Armenians of Smyrna.”

  “Of Balikesir, you mean?”

  She laughed. “Of Balikesir? Oh, no. Why, there were only five hundred families of our people in Balikesir. No, they brought all the Armenian gold of Smyrna as well because they knew that Smyrna would fall first and they knew, too, that my father was a man who could be trusted. Just a few sacks would have held all the gold of Balikesir, but the riches of Smyrna—that was another matter.”

  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 saw 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 and the reverse was St. George slaying the dragon. That had been the most common gold coin in the Middle East.

  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.

  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 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. 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.”

  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 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.

  The night I told Kitty. “I think it’s still there.” I said and explained to her.

  “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?”

  “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.

  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.

  As it turned out, there was only one slight matter I hadn’t counted on—how was I to know the damned Turks would arrest me?

  Mustafa was poor company. He stayed with me like a summer cold straight onto the plane.

  We sat in the tourist section. Evidently the Turkish Government intended to reroute spies as economically as possible. The ride to Shannon was long, choppy, uncomfortable, and supremely dull, and it was made even more uncomfortable and dull by the fact 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 could probably cancel my passport. It was unfair.

  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 simply could not return to the United States. I simply could not land in Washington.

  I looked over at Mustafa. We would be landing at Shannon. Shannon Airport in Ireland. Ireland. Not Turkey, not the United States of America. Ireland. And we would have two precious hours between planes. We would get off this plane, Mustafa and I, and we would wait in Shannon Airport for two hours before it was time to board our flight for Washington. I would have two hours to rid myself of Mustafa.

  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 Clann-na-Gaille and the Irish Republican Brotherhood. If I could find some of those people—any of them—I was safe. They would be my sort of people, my spiritual brothers. They would hide me, they would care for me, they would conspire with me!

  I closed my eyes, tried to bring the map of Ireland into focus. Now what was the city right near Shannon?

  Limerick.

  Of course, Limerick. And I knew someone in Limerick. I was sure I knew someone in Limerick. Who?

  It was Dolan, PP Dolan, Padraic Pearse Dolan, named for the greatest of the Easter Monday martyrs who had proclaimed the Irish Republic from the steps of the Post Office in O’Connell Street. And he didn’t live in Limerick City but in County Limerick, and I remembered his whole address now: PP Dolan, Illanaloo, Croom, Co. Limerick, Republic of Ireland.

  If only I could get rid of Mustafa.

  I looked at him, sitting contentedly while the music was piped into his ears. Dream on, I told him silently. You’ll get yours, little man.

  We finally landed at Shannon, taxied, stopped. I walked at Mustafa’s side into the small one-story airport. Our luggage had been checked through to Washington, so there was no real customs check. We stood in one short line, and a pleasant young man in a green uniform checked our passports. Mustafa handed both passports to him, and the man returned them, and Mustafa took them both and pocketed them. He seemed very pleased with himself. He had my passport, after all, so where could I go?

  Indeed, where could I go? Mustafa led me to a bench, and the two of us sat side by side upon it. I looked around. There was a door that led to the Shannon Free Shopping Center. There was a booth where two, beautiful, green-clad girls dispensed travel folders. There was a men’s room.

  Of course!

  I stood up. Mustafa rose to his feet at once and glared at me. “The men’s room,” I said. “The toilet. I have to use the toilet.” He understood every word, of course, but we were both still pretending that he didn’t. In desperation I pointed at the men’s room door.

  “I can’t go anywhere,” I said. “You’ve got my bloody passport. Come along if you want.”

  And, of course, the little bastard came along.

  The men’s room was a long narrow affair. I walked the length of it, and my Turkish shadow stayed at my side. I paused in front of the last stall and asked him if he wanted to come in with me. He smiled and took up a position directly in front of the stall. I closed the door and bolted it.

  So he thought I was James Bond, did he? Fine. Just for that I was going to be James Bond.

  I sat down on the throne and slipped my shoes off. I shrugged out of my jacket and hung it on the peg. I placed the shoes side by side, toes pointing outward, right where they would most likely be if I were doing what I had ostensibly come to do. I hoped Mustafa would be able to see the tips of the shoes.

  I crawled under the partition, around the next toilet, under the next partition, around still another toilet, into another stall, all the way down to the end. I did this as quickly and as silently as possible, squirming on my belly like a pit viper, and certain that I was going much too slowly and making far too much noise.

  I was in the very last stall when I heard the outside door open. I stopped breathing. A man came in, used the urinal, left. I wondered if Mustafa was still standing there like a soldier. I peeked out at him, and there he was, a cigarette dangling from his lower lip, his eyes focused stupidly upon my shoes.

  I slipped out of the stall, lowered my head and charged.