The Lock Artist (5 page)

I knew the Ghost had been telling the truth. I had seen enough myself to know that this was the one piece of advice I should never forget. But what was I supposed to do while I was waiting for the next job? How long would I have to stay here, hiding out in this abandoned room above the Chinese restaurant on 128th Street, before somebody paged me and I got to make some money again?

Would I starve first? Would I freeze to death?

The Ghost never covered that part.

______

By the time Christmas rolled around, I was finally leaving the building once in a while. I’d go to a park a few blocks to the south and sit on one of the benches. I finally had to buy some new clothes. I wasn’t broke yet, mind you. I had been well paid for the job in Pennsylvania. Still, I could do the math and see where it was all headed.

To make matters a little worse, one of the men who worked in the restaurant told me I needed to help him if I wanted him to keep giving me food. He gave me a big stack of menus and told me to go to all of the buildings in the neighborhood, to get inside somehow, and to put one menu under each door. I knew that some of the buildings had a doorman at the entrance, and that at the other buildings you had to have somebody who lived there buzz you in. So I wasn’t sure how I’d be able to deliver the menus. I mean, I could have found the back doors on most of these buildings and picked the lock, but was that really worth it?

“You have nice fine face,” the man said. His English wasn’t quite up to speed yet. “People let you in.”

So I took my nice fine face and my stack of menus and I went to the buildings, one by one. I figured instead of hiding it, I’d come right out and let everybody know exactly what I was doing. Show them the menus, make like I was slipping one under a door. I’d throw in a little sign language once in a while, too. That seemed to help. I got into more buildings than not.

One day, when I was working my way down a long hallway, a door opened just as I was about to slide a menu under it. Before I could even stand up, I felt two hands on my shoulders. I was pushed backward against the far wall, so hard I lost my breath.

I looked up and saw the man’s face. It took me all the way back to that man who held up my uncle’s liquor store when I was nine years old. It was that same animal fear in his eyes. A horrible smell of unwashed clothes, urine, maybe that fear itself, it all washed over me. I kicked at his knees and he fell back away from me. Then he ran down the hallway. He slammed open the door and disappeared down the stairs.

I got up, rubbing my shoulders. When I looked through the open doorway, I saw the wreckage inside. The man had trashed the place, looking for anything of value. So he could buy more drugs. Or whatever it was he needed in his life so bad. I could see the refrigerator still open, even the food inside ransacked and ruined now. I closed the door to the apartment and left.

When I got back down to the street, I wrote the apartment number on the back of a menu and gave it to the doorman. Then I went back to the restaurant.

I went up to my room. I counted what was left of my money. I’m living on borrowed time here, I thought. How long until you turn into that man breaking into apartments?

It got colder and colder. The snow came down that night. White at first, but dirty by morning.

I woke up to hear one of the pagers beeping.

I met the men in a diner in the Bronx. A simple cab ride over the Hudson River. It was the yellow pager they had called me on. Now, I knew what the Ghost had said about the yellow pager. This was the general number that just about any knucklehead could use to reach me. Therefore proceed with extreme caution. But I was feeling especially motivated, shall we say. So on that cold afternoon I went into the diner and stood there for a few minutes until I got waved over to a booth in the back, right next to the kitchen doors. There were three men sitting there. One of them stood up, grabbed my right hand, and pulled me close to him for a halfway hug.

“You must be the kid,” he said to me. He was wearing a bright green New York Jets jacket and a gold chain. He had a close-cropped Caesar haircut that he probably spent too much time on. He had one of those razor-thin lines of stubble that ran perfectly along each side of his jaw, meeting in a little soul patch on his chin. You know, a white boy trying to look anything but white.

“These are my boys,” he said, gesturing to the other two. “Heckle and Jeckle.”

So at least he was saving me the trouble of thinking up nicknames. He slid back into the booth and made room for me.

“You want something to eat? We just ordered.” The thin little beard thing seemed to make his mouth look bigger somehow, and I’d come to find out he could never let a minute pass without saying something. Or many somethings. So right off the bat I nicknamed him Bigmouth. He called over the waitress, and she got a menu for me. I pointed to a hamburger.

“What, you don’t talk?” she said.

“That’s right,” Bigmouth said. “He don’t talk. You got a problem with that?”

She took my menu from me and walked away without another word.

“I heard about you,” he said when she was safely out of earshot. “You just did a little something with a friend of a friend of mine.”

That answered my first question, about how on the phone he had seemed to know I was in the city somewhere. I couldn’t help imagining a thousand more shady characters out there, all of them knowing my general location at all times.

“I mean, damn,” he said. “I heard you were young-looking, but God damn.”

Heckle and Jeckle weren’t saying anything. They had milkshakes in front of them, one chocolate and one vanilla it looked like, and they were content to suck on their straws and nod their heads at everything Bigmouth said.

“So here’s the basic situation,” he said, lowering his voice. “We’ve got this buddy of ours . . .”

He’s actually doing this right here, I thought. He’s laying out the whole plan in a diner.

“He works at this bar uptown. They’ve got this fancy room upstairs for parties and big events and stuff. So couple weeks ago, they got this Christmas party going on. Bunch of Jewish guys from the diamond district. Wait a minute, did I just say a bunch of Jewish guys were having a Christmas party?”

Heckle and Jeckle spit up their milkshakes over that one. That’s exactly when I should have got up and walked out.

“A holiday party, I mean! A Hanukkah party, whatever. Anyway, they’re having this party, and this one guy, he gets totally lit up, right? I mean, he’s just falling down drunk. And my buddy, he’s helping the other guys carry him down to the street, so they can call a cab for this guy. They get him down to the coat check room, and they sit him down there, you know, so they can find his coat and everything. My buddy goes off to find it, and when he’s gone, this drunk guy gets talking to his friends. Nobody else is around, right? They’re just having this private conversation. And this drunk guy, he’s saying about how he’s got all of these diamonds stashed away at his house in Connecticut. Like a million dollars’ worth, all in a safe. And this guy’s friends are like, watch what you’re saying, man. You can’t go around talking like that or the wrong person will hear you. You know? And the drunk guy’s going, oh, you guys have been in business with me for years, I’d trust you with my life. That whole thing. Only the whole time they’re having this conversation, my buddy’s right around the corner there in the coat check room, and he can hear every single fucking word they’re saying!”

The waitress came back with the food just then, so Bigmouth hushed up
until she walked away. Then he finished his story while we were eating. Bottom line, his friend looked up the man’s name on the invitation list, then found out where his house was in Connecticut. It was just over the state border, in Greenwich. When the friend called the man’s place of business, they told him that the man was down in Florida until after the new year.

So lo and behold, these guys were going to break into the house and steal that million-dollar stash of diamonds. With my help, of course. Then Heckle and Jeckle would finally get to do their part in this whole deal, by turning those diamonds into cold hard cash. They both had connections in the jewelry business, I was assured, and they’d be able to move them even if they had laser-inscribed identification numbers.

Now, I had already gotten my bad feeling about these guys the first second I saw them, and everything that happened next just made me feel even more uneasy. I remembered what the Ghost had said about this kind of situation, how I should just get up and walk away if my gut told me to.

But hell. I needed to make some more money eventually, right? They were talking about a big score, and they seemed to have everything covered.

So I got in the car with them. Okay? I got in the car.

Bigmouth was driving. Heckle and Jeckle were in the back. I had shotgun for once in my life. “The seat of honor,” Bigmouth said as he opened the door for me, making a big deal out of it. “For the man of the hour.”

It was New Year’s Eve. Did I mention that yet? We were riding up to this man’s house on New Year’s Eve.

“My buddy lives in New Rochelle,” Bigmouth said. “We’ll pick him up on the way. It’ll be just the five of us. That sounds about right, eh?”

He looked over at me. He was driving fast on I-95, heading straight to Connecticut. Like a lot of New Yorkers, I figured, he didn’t drive more than once a month, and it showed.

“So this is what you do, eh? You’re a safecracker? I mean, that is so fantastic. How’d you ever get started doing that?”

I shrugged. I didn’t figure he’d know any sign language.

“Hot damn, you really don’t say one fucking word. Ever! That is so fucking cool, isn’t it, guys?”

Heckle and Jeckle both agreed that it was fucking cool.

“You’re like a silent assassin. Except you assassinate safes instead of people, right?”

The Ghost was right, I thought. You walk away. No matter how big the score seems to be, if it doesn’t feel right, you turn around right then and there and you walk away.

“Besides, what’s this guy doing with all those diamonds in his house, anyway? Am I crazy here? Isn’t he just
asking
somebody to come take them?”

But how do I do that now? I can’t tell him to stop the car, tell him to leave me here by the side of the road.

“I mean, just the sheer stupidity of this guy, right? Actually talking about it in public? Are you kidding me? We need to do this just on general principle, wouldn’t you say?”

More nodding in the backseat. I looked out my window as we whizzed by every car in the right lane.

It didn’t take us more than a half hour to hit New Rochelle. We rolled up to a little house not far from the Long Island Sound. Bigmouth’s buddy came out and squeezed into the back with Heckle and Jeckle. He reminded me of half the football players back at Milford High School. Big in a white middle-class kind of way, strong as an ox, but probably just as slow on his feet.

“This is the kid,” Bigmouth said to him. “Shake his hand.”

The Ox put his right hand over the back of the seat and squeezed mine. “Fucking kid is right. Are you sure you can do this?”

“He don’t talk,” Bigmouth said. “He just opens safes. That’s all he does.”

We got back on the expressway. Through Mamaroneck and Harrison, past a dozen golf courses all closed up for the winter. To the Connecticut state line.

“So here’s the deal,” the Ox said. “The safe is right in the guy’s office. On the first floor. There’s a window there that’s already open and waiting for us.”

“Vinnie did a little advance work on this,” Bigmouth said, actually dropping his friend’s name. “What he did was, he went to the guy’s house and tried a couple of the windows, until he found one that was open, right? He opens it and then he runs away. And he waits. Does the alarm go off? Do the cops come? He waits and he waits. Nobody comes. So he goes back, throws like what, a big rock through the open window?”

“A branch,” the Ox said.

“A branch, okay. He throws a big branch in there, in case they’ve got one of those motion sensor things, right? He runs away again, he hides. He watches for somebody to come. Nobody comes. So he goes back
again
! He climbs right in the window, right? Walks around, I don’t know, does jumping jacks. Climbs back out, runs away, and hides. Nobody comes.”

“So then I finally know the alarm system isn’t on,” the Ox said. “So I go in and look around the place. First painting I see on the wall, right there in the office . . . Bam! I lift it up and there’s the safe.”

“It’s right there waiting for us,” Bigmouth said. “We go and we get it. Happy New Year.”

“I think I get a little bigger share, too,” the Ox said. “I mean, all the advance work I did? Putting my neck on the line, crawling into the house? Not to mention the fact that this guy was my lead to begin with.”

I tuned them out at that point. They wrangled over the shares while I ran down all the things that could go wrong. It actually sounded pretty simple. As long as everything the Ox was saying was true, we should be able to get in there, take the diamonds from the safe, and be back on the road in half an hour. Forty-five minutes tops. The only problem might be getting my share of the haul, but I figured what the hell. If I’m out, I know I get nothing. I was already getting nothing today. If I’m in, at least I’ve got a chance at seeing some big money.