The Lock Artist (38 page)

So big freaking deal. That nagging voice in the back of my head, sounding exactly like the voice of the Ghost. You can open a cheap little combination lock now. That voice stayed in my head until the next morning, when I headed back down to Detroit. The air was heavy with the threat of rain. Finally, the clouds opened up and I was soaked through in a matter of seconds. I got to West Side Recovery and rolled my bike to the door. I knocked and waited another full minute in the rain before the Ghost appeared and let me in.

“How did you do with the lock?” he said. “Try not to drip on everything.”

I took the lock from my pocket and held it up for him.

“It doesn’t look open to me.”

He stood and watched me work on it while the rain pounded away outside. Right, left, right. Boom. I pulled the shackle open and handed the whole thing to him.

“Don’t start acting like a smart-ass,” he said, snapping the lock shut. “I’ll throw you back out in the rain.”

He turned toward the back office. I followed him. About halfway, he picked up another combination lock off an old table and threw it directly over his head. I wasn’t expecting it, and as usual the light level was about one-quarter what it should have been. I was lucky to snag the lock out of the air just before it hit me in the face.

I was still working on it when we had passed through the office, down the narrow hallway, and out into the backyard. The rain rattled off the green plastic, so loud we might as well have been standing inside a giant snare drum.

“Okay, then,” he said. Then he stopped when he saw I didn’t have this second lock open yet. Even while walking in near darkness, trying not to trip over a thousand pieces of junk, I was supposed to have it open already? He folded his arms and watched me, maybe two minutes going by, but each of those minutes feeling like an hour. When I finally got it open, he grabbed the lock from me with such utter contempt I was sure I was headed for the front door again. Instead he just threw it on the workbench and told me to wait where I stood.

He pushed open a sliding door. A dozen rakes and hoes and other assorted
garden tools came tumbling out at him. He swore and karate-chopped his way through them until he was standing inside a storage room. There was a single naked lightbulb in the center of the ceiling. When he pulled on the string, nothing happened.

More swearing. More junk being kicked aside or tripped over. Then the Ghost backing out of the room, pulling out something on a dolly and struggling with the weight of something covered in a dusty white sheet.

He rolled it back away from the door, telling me to get the hell out of the way before he gave himself a hernia. He stopped and let the thing settle on the floor. Then he tried to catch his breath.

I knew what it was, of course. Four feet high, maybe three feet wide, two and a half feet deep. The exact shape of a medium-sized safe. But why was this particular safe kept in the storage room, hidden under a sheet?

“This is the first thing you have to see,” he said, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief. “Get ready, because this is about as obscene as it gets.”

He pulled the sheet off, raising a cloud of dust. It was a safe, all right, but it had been torn apart in every way you could conceivably tear apart a safe. On one side, the outer shell had been stripped away, the middle layer of concrete apparently hammered at until the inner layer was finally exposed and somehow pried open.

I walked around the back of the safe and saw that a square-foot rectangle had been cut straight through. Then as I got to the next side I saw yet another rectangle, this one with blackened edges. Finally coming around to the front, I saw that a half-dozen holes had been drilled. On the top of the safe, there were three more holes.

“I’m going to go through this once,” the Ghost said. “So pay attention.”

He closed his eyes for a moment and took a deep breath.

“As you can see, this particular safe has been violated. The man who did this was experimenting with several methods of forced entry. On this side, you’ll see brute strength at work. Actually prying open the damned thing like it’s a big tin can. Then gouging out the concrete. It must have taken days to do that.”

He moved around to the back.

“Here, a high-speed disk cutter. Again, a lot of time, a lot of noise. Then over here . . .”

He went around to the rectangle with the black edges, started to put his hand down, and then pulled back like the thing was still molten hot.

“You can use an oxyacetylene torch to cut right through the metal like
this. Of course, that means lugging a big tank of fuel and another tank of oxygen. A thermic lance will get even hotter. Like six thousand degrees. You realize how hot that is? If there was something inside that safe, what do you think the chances are it wouldn’t be ashes by the time you got through? Hell, you can burn the whole building down.”

He stood there shaking his head for a moment, then walked around to the front of the safe.

“Our man drilled through here. Which at least uses a
little
bit of intelligence. A little finesse. I mean, you have to know exactly where to drill to bypass the whole locking mechanism. It’s different on every safe. Some have special protective plates now that make it a lot harder, so sometimes you have to come at it from a different angle.”

Finally, he let himself touch the safe, putting a finger in one of the holes drilled on the top. Then he knelt down by the dial.

“On some safes you can punch the dial.” He pulled the dial right off and handed it to me. As I held it I noticed the chips along the edge, where it had apparently been pried away.

“Older safes, you can still use explosives,” he said, running his hand along the edge of the door. “Gelignite is a plastic explosive, similar to nitro. Just a little bit in the right place. A jam shot, they call it, and you’re in business, assuming you don’t blow your hands off.”

He pulled the door open and showed me the inside. It was strange to see the green-filtered daylight coming through the various holes, big and small.

“Like I said, newer safes make it a lot harder to do any of this stuff. Besides those plates, there are lock-out mechanisms that get triggered when you try to go through the outer walls. Some have a steel cable running all along the perimeter. You break the wall, you break the cable, and it jams up everything. I mean, it makes the whole thing useless, even for the owner.”

He closed the door, took the dial from me, and tried to replace it. When he moved his hand away, it fell to the ground. He didn’t bother to pick it up.

“Point is . . . no matter how well made a safe is, you can get it open if you try hard enough. You take it away to a warehouse somewhere, you put enough time into it. Enough sweat, enough heat, enough noise . . .”

He pushed himself up, back to his feet, wincing as he straightened his back.

“They all open eventually. If you don’t care how much brutality you have to inflict on it. If you don’t care what the safe looks like when you’re done.”

He grabbed the sheet, one corner in each hand. He billowed it open and
let it settle on the safe. Hiding it once again, the way you’d draw a sheet over a dead body.

“I told you this would be ugly,” he said. “I hope you agree. If you don’t feel the same way that I do about this, you should leave right now.”

I wasn’t totally sure what he meant, but I wasn’t about to leave.

“These are the methods of crude men. They can’t face the challenge that a safe presents to them. They can’t face the safe on its own terms. So they do what? Same thing men have been doing for thousands of years, right? They resort to violence.”

He grabbed the dolly and tucked it under the safe.

“No patience. No skill. No intelligence. Just brute strength. They have to
break
something. It’s the only way they know.”

He pushed down on the dolly, tried to tilt the safe back. Then he stopped.

“Here, you do it. Wheel this thing back into the storage room. I can’t stand it being out here another minute.”

He stepped aside so I could take my turn with the dolly. I grabbed it by the handles, tried to tilt the thing back. It was way too heavy.

“Imagine trying to wheel this thing out of a building,” he said, “so you can take it back home with you and break it open. Can you even conceive of doing such a thing?”

I pulled back harder, felt the damned thing move a little bit. On my third try, I finally got it tilting and then had to fight the momentum. One more inch and it would have flipped right over.

“Easy, Hercules. Why don’t you go put this thing away before you kill somebody.”

I got it rolling in the right general direction. My forearms were burning by the time I got it halfway there. The very same forearms I thought were so strong now, after all that digging in the Marshes’ backyard. I clipped the side of the storeroom door, which rocked the whole wall. With one last-gasp effort, I muscled it into the back corner and let the safe drop into position, the handles ripping right out of my hands. I stood there in the near darkness, catching my breath, listening to the blood pounding in my ears.

When I finally stepped back out, the Ghost was sitting in the rolling office chair, directly in the middle of the Garden of Safes.

“Come and look at these magnificent creatures,” he said. “Absolutely fucking magnificent. What do they make you think of?”

I stood just outside the circle, in the gap between two of the safes. I listened hard to what he was saying.

“You touch a safe the way you touch a woman,” he said. “Never forget that. Do you hear me?”

I nodded.

“The greatest puzzle in the world, young man, the greatest challenge a man can face, is solving the riddle of a woman’s heart.”

He rolled his chair, slowly, to one of the safes.

“This,” he said, putting his left hand against the safe’s door, “is a woman. Come closer.”

I took one step into the circle.

“This,” he said, putting his right hand on the dial, “is a woman’s heart.”

Okay, I thought. I’ll go with this.

“You want to open this, what do you do? Hit her over the head with your club, drag her back to your cave? You think that’ll work?”

I didn’t even bother to shake my head.

“Of course not. You want her to open, you start by understanding her. You understand what’s going on inside her. Come here and see.”

I went closer. I got down on one knee.

“This safe’s name is Erato,” he said. “She’s very special. Very open. Because unlike most safes, you can really see what’s going on inside her.”

He gently removed the felt-lined panel from the inside of the open door. Then he removed the little metal plate from behind the locking mechanism. As he turned the dial, I could see that there was a drive cam turning in perfect sync, behind a set of three wheels. He showed me how the notches in each wheel could be made to line up perfectly, using the right combination, of course, so that the fence above the wheels would fall down into this newly formed channel, which in turn would lower the lever and release the bolt. Letting the handle turn free.

“So simple,” he said. His voice was low now. I could hear the distant sound of traffic on the street. I could hear insects buzzing in the tangled weeds beyond the fence. With the right combination dialed, he turned the handle, and all ten bars were retracted into the door itself, three on each side, two on top, and two on the bottom, each bar two inches thick and made of solid steel.

“That’s how you open a safe,” he said. “Every other safe in the world is just some variation on this same idea.”

I stayed down on one knee. This whole business with the safe being a woman, having a name. That might have sent some people running from the room. But not me.

“It’s easy when you know the combination,” he said, closing his right hand like he was holding something. “But what if you don’t?”

He opened his hand, like a magician showing his audience that it was empty.

“That, my young fucking hotshot, is where the
art
comes in. Are you ready for this?”

I nodded my head. One time, very slowly.

He looked at me for a long time without saying anything.

“You have to be sure about this,” he finally said. “So do I.”

I didn’t move. I waited for him to decide whatever it was he had to decide.

“Okay, then. Pay attention. This is how a real artist opens a safe.”

Now, there’s a certain code I’m probably going against here. The Ghost passed this information down to me, and made it clear that I should keep it to myself. That I should keep it between fellow artists. Maybe one day, if I found the right person, I’d be able to pass it on, but only to that one person. Somebody I’d choose very carefully. Somebody who could handle such a burden. Look what it had done to me, after all. What price this unforgivable skill.

Really, though . . . it’s not like I can just tell you how to do this. I mean, I think I’ve already given you the basic idea. You’ve seen me do it, right? Eliminate the presets first, on the off-chance that the owner was too lazy to change it.

After that, it gets tricky. As you turn the dial, you have to picture that notch on the drive cam. You have to feel where the lever is touching one side of the notch, then, with a little more turn, where it’s hitting the other side. That’s your “contact area.”