Meaner Things (3 page)

3.

MASTER PLAN

Ten
years
ago

I first encountered Emma Virtanen when our eyes met across the proverbial crowded room. Well, a not too crowded lecture theatre actually. My general arts course included a philosophy component and, as Emma was doing a straight philosophy degree, Professor Faris’ philosophy of aesthetics course brought us together. Or at least into the same large room.

It was a Monday, nine a.m. class. I sat at the back and sipped a double espresso coffee, pleased with myself for having made it to the lecture. That didn’t always happen.

Old Faris, or ‘Faristotle’ as he was universally known by his students, was droning on in his usual nasal monotone. I looked around the room through half-closed eyelids and there she was. Blonde and slim and Scandinavian-looking and very, very attractive. My eyes settled on her for a good long examination.

I remember she wore her hair in what I later discovered she called her ‘Cossack style’, tied together like a pony tail but so high up that it stuck right out of the top of her head, like a shiny blonde fountain. I’d never seen anything like that before; only she could get away with it. A couple of months later she got it all cut off and adopted a tomboy look. She was like that.

I thought about how nice it would be to get to know her, to hang out with her, to be her boyfriend. In other words, I enjoyed a good long fantasy about something that was never going to happen. Let’s face it, I was always the onlooker in these things; it was the athletic types and the slick types and the ‘I’m hurting inside, please fulfil me’ empathetic types that always got the girl.

I was the classic bridesmaid and never the bride. Hell, I never even got as far as bridesmaid.

Looking back, I realise how lonely I was then; in fact, always had been. Not all Irish boys fit the rambunctious stereotype, I certainly didn’t. As a child I’d been the detached, quiet type, the solitary thinker, always more of an observer than a doer. When asked what I wanted to do in life, I’d shrug and say I didn’t know; if pressed I’d say I dreamed of becoming a writer, a famous novelist. I was never part of a gang or a clique and I suppose that built up resentment in me, made me want to prove that I was smarter than the pack. Maybe that’s why I eventually became drawn to figuring out clever ways past other people’s barriers . . .

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Suffice it to say that I continued to be the ‘Solitary One’, even after stepping off the boat – well, aeroplane actually – when my parents immigrated to British Columbia from Northern Ireland when I was eleven years old. A new country, new school, new friendships that I never quite made; these all conspired to make me even more the resentful loner. When the testosterone kicked in and I began noticing girls, they failed to notice me very much. Needless to say, that bothered me in my teens at high school and it bothered me when I arrived at UBC and witnessed everyone else pairing off. It hurt to be the odd man out.

So was I going to do anything about it now? Not a chance. I just didn’t go up to complete strangers and ask them out. As I said, despite being Irish, I wasn’t the garrulous type, not even with a few pints in me.

Instead, I was my usual slightly creepy self. I followed her. At the end of the lecture I sidled out of my seat and managed to time it so that I was right behind her when we got to the exit. She left the building and walked off down the street, her backpack hanging off one shoulder. I kept back so that she wouldn’t notice me, but still close enough to enjoy a nice rear view of long, slender legs and small hips in tight jeans.

Several blocks later she stopped at the traffic lights. In order to look natural I had to keep walking, so ended up standing close behind her. There were just the two of us and I could see her face a little from the side. I noticed that she seemed distracted, head down, in a world of her own.

The lights changed and she stepped forward. I looked away from her face and saw the bike come flying down the hill straight at us.

It was an instantaneous thing; there was zero time to think about it. I grabbed her arm and yanked her back as hard as I could. She stumbled back into me and I held her by the waist to prevent us both from falling over.

The bike whizzed past, the cyclist laughing.

I let her go immediately and took a step back. She looked at me and then at the cyclist who was now a small figure at the end of the block.

“God, that was close,” she said.

“Stupid moron,” I replied, “Could have landed you in hospital.”

“You’re right, I should pay more attention.”

“You seemed a bit preoccupied.”

“Yeah, you could say that. Could’ve cost me.”

“I’m Michael,” I said, and held out my hand.

She held my fingers in hers for a split second. The faintest of handshakes, but friendly enough.

“I’m Emma. Pleased to meet you, Michael. Thanks for doing that.”

Normally I’m hopeless at these things. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred I’d chicken out and walk off, but it was now or never.

“Fancy going somewhere?” I said, “Maybe a drink at the bar?” Somehow I got the words out, but there was a quiver in my voice.

She looked me up and down and seemed amused. I flushed red with embarrassment and got ready to be rebuffed, expecting to hear a polite version of
now
you’re
pushing
it
buddy
. Then she started to laugh.

Only then did it occur to me that even the Students’ Union bar didn’t open for several hours yet.

“Let’s go have a coffee,” she said, “and talk about idiot cyclists.”

I could have sung with joy.

*

Soon were spending a lot of time together. We didn’t go out much – she said she didn’t have much money and neither did I – so mostly we just watched a movie or hung out in her room or mine. She asked about my family, which was a pretty boring topic, although didn’t talk much about hers.

“What would you do if you had heaps of money?” she asked me one night, about a week after we met.

“Build the world’s largest cat sanctuary,” I replied, thinking it would amuse her.

Instead, she launched into an epic fantasy about going anywhere and doing anything she wanted. I sat back and listened while she went on about spending her summers in Whistler, learning to ski, and her winters in Barbados, sunbathing on her own private beach.

“That would make you happy?” I said.

She laughed. “Of course it would. Wouldn’t it make you?”

“I suppose so.”

“Just think, you and me together, roaming the world. Think of all the good we could do too, while we were enjoying ourselves.”

“Yes, that would be very nice.” I gave her a squeeze. “I can’t think of anything I want more.”

She gave me a serious look. “So how would you get all this money?”

I thought for a minute.

“I’d probably break into the place I worked last summer.”

“Tell me how you’d do it,” she insisted.

That’s what started it. My casual mention of the museum warehouse changed our relationship. Everything afterwards centred on that damned question
how
? How would I break into the place? How would I locate the most valuable stuff? How would I get out again without getting caught? Initially it was just a silly mind game for me. I was happy to play it; it was something she wanted to talk about every time we met and I wanted to keep her happy so that we’d continue going out together.

After a few days of this, I thought she was getting a bit obsessive about it. She got me to describe the warehouse in detail to her, even to sketch plans of its layout which she pored over afterwards.

“Let’s go down, do some reconnaissance,” she said.

That’s when it dawned on me that she was deadly serious; she actually wanted to do it.

“Come on, Emma, you’ve got to be kidding.” But deep down I knew she wasn’t.

After that, there was a friction between us. The next time we met up her responses were curt, as if she was preoccupied. When I broached the topic of the warehouse heist she became even more sullen.

“I’ll get somebody else to do it if you won’t,” was all she said.

That scared me. I knew I was losing her.

When I went home that night I sat in my room with the light switched off and thought long and hard about it. Emma was the most stunning girl I’d ever seen, brainy too, and had a whacky craziness that blew away any small defences I might have had left. I could hardly believe I was going out with her. Truth was, I was wild about her. If I wanted to keep her, I knew what I had to do. I rationalised things, convinced myself it was a victimless crime, a one-off never to be repeated.

I called her the next morning and told her, and we met that evening. We began planning in earnest. From then on she took a different tack altogether, praising me for my planning abilities and telling me I had a gift for this kind of thing. By the time she was done, I felt like Clooney in
Ocean’s
Eleven
.

I have to admit, there was some truth to it. After a while I didn’t need much encouragement. She lit the torch and, once I’d made up my mind, I ran with it. I went downtown for a ‘recce’, the first of many, and discovered scaffolding along two sides of the Orthodox church. When my eyes lit on it, a thrill of elation ran along my spine and my brain started buzzing with possibilities. I walked all the way around the church, checked out the courtyard at the back – the sign said ‘Garden of the Immaculate Virgin’ and had a statue in it – and noted some small trees and shrubbery where tools could be concealed.

I crossed the street and stood directly opposite the church’s scaffolding and the warehouse roof next to it. From this vantage point the gap between them seemed tiny. A temporary plank bridge might do it. Perhaps our crazy idea really was achievable via the roof.

From that point on there was no holding me back. The intellectual and practical challenges of planning the break-in completely consumed me. Before I knew it, I was handing essays in late and getting in trouble with my professors because I was too busy working on the heist.

*

I knew from working in the warehouse that the best stuff was kept in the big room on the top floor. Trucks from the museum were unloaded at the back of the building and their freight, usually packing cases, brought up in the big service elevator. The top-floor storage room was more like a small gallery – I think a dividing wall had been knocked down at some point – and it was this room we had to get into.

“The only possible way in is from the roof,” I told her. We were sitting in a Starbucks, near the warehouse, after completing another ‘recce’. “We’ll use the scaffolding. A plank bridge will get us across.”

She seemed doubtful. “We don’t know if we can get inside from the roof.”

“There’s a door out to the roof,” I replied, “I saw it when I worked there. Never been through it though. We should be able to crowbar it open.”

“Hmmm . . . sounds a bit noisy, very noisy if it’s alarmed. And it’s a way for the cavalry to catch us if we mess up,” she said thoughtfully. “We have to fix that.”

“We could climb down a rope to the ground.”

She snorted. “Are you kidding? It’s way too high up. I’m not risking a broken back.”

“I’ll work on it.”

She looked up, gave me a thin smile, and I knew she was about to hit me with something I might not like.

“Mike, we have to be absolutely certain we can get away from there if something goes wrong. We can’t leave anything to chance; which means we have a bit more work to do.”

“What are you suggesting?” I said.

“We go up there and see for ourselves. Find a better way in, if possible.”

I nodded. “When?”

“Tonight.”

*

After dark we took a late bus downtown and got off a few stops short of the warehouse. When we arrived we groaned simultaneously. The builders repairing the church had erected additional lighting inside a cage of secure wire mesh high up on the scaffolding. We approached it cautiously and saw that it also held a pulley that went all the way up to the top. It would have been a neat way up for us, assuming we could have knocked out the light; but the cage was padlocked, so not something we could use.

“Perhaps it’s for the best,” Emma whispered, “We’ll keep it as simple as possible.”

“Yeah, I’m not James Bond,” I replied.

We went around the back of the church, where the scaffolding was unlit and climbable. At sidewalk level there was a fair degree of shadow cover for the most dangerous move – climbing up the first, ladderless section.

I pulled on my gloves, took a quick look around, and clambered up onto the bottom rung of the scaffolding. Emma followed closely behind and I felt pressure to climb quickly. It wasn’t too difficult and I just kept going until I got to the top.

We rested there a while and then took a look around. I heard a hissed “Yes!” and she waved for me to come to her. At the corner of the building, where a roof buttress above us jutted into the sky, the builders had left some old scaffolding planks that they were no longer using. We pulled one out and gave each other a high-five. It seemed long enough.