The Thief Who Couldn't Sleep Read Online Free PDF Page A

exploded with strident laughter. Behind the curtain was a set of Teflon-coated aluminum frying pans.
    "For this she trades the Pontiac convertible," Grandma said. "With four-speed transmission and power seats, can you believe it?" The woman who had made this mistake was crying bravely, and the emcee was smiling and saying something about it all being part of the game. "Ha!" said Grandma, and pressed a remote-control button to extinguish the program. "Now," she said, whirling around to face us. "Who is this? You're married, Katin?"
    "No," Kitty-Katin said. "Grandma, this is Evan Tanner. He wanted to see you."
    "To see me?"
    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.
    "He's a writer," Kitty explained. "He is very interested in the story of how you left Turkey. Of the riches and the massacres and . . . uh . . . all of that."
    "His name?"
    "Evan Tanner."
    "Tanner? He is Armenian?"
    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. "Katin, he speaks Armenian!"
    "I knew she would love you," Kitty told me.
    "Katin, make coffee. Mr. Tanner and I must talk. When did you learn to speak Armenian, Mr. Tanner? My own Katin cannot speak it. Her own mother can speak it only poorly. Katin, make coffee the right way, not this powder with water spilled in it. Mr. Tanner, do you like coffee the Armenian way? If you cannot stand the spoon upright in the cup, then the coffee is too weak. We have a saying, you know, that coffee must be 'hot as hell, black as sin, and sweet as love.' But why am I speaking English with you? English I can hear on the television set. Katin, do not stand there foolishly. Make the coffee. Sit down, Mr. Tanner. Now, what shall I tell you? Eh?"
    I stayed for hours. She spoke a Turkish strain of Armenian, and I had learned the language as it was spoken in the area that was now the Armenian S.S.R. So she was a bit hard to understand at first, but I caught the flavor of the dialect before long and followed her with little difficulty. She kept sending Kitty to fetch more coffee and once she chased her around the block to a bakery for baklava. She apologized for the baklava; it was Syrian, she said, and not as light and subtle as Armenian baklava. But that could not be helped, for there was no longer an Armenian baker in the neighborhood. The little rolled honey cakes were delicious, nevertheless, and Kitty made excellent coffee.
    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