The Readymade Thief

by Augustus Rose

  Lee looked the man in the eyes. “I’m a friend of Maria’s.”

  “You know how many Marias I know?”

  “Your niece. We met in the detention center.”

  He took a moment to regard her. “Tell me about my niece.”

  “She’s got long black hair and a tattoo of a boy’s name on her wrist. One of her front teeth is chipped in half,” Lee added.

  “Anyone can describe a photograph.”

  “She was kind to me. When I first got there, I didn’t know anyone. All the girls ignored me. One girl stole my shoes. Maria gave me a pair of her own.”

  The man nodded. “That could be. What else?”

  Lee hesitated. She really didn’t know Maria well at all. “And she helped me get out,” she blurted. Which wasn’t true, but she could see in the man’s face that she had unlocked a door.

  “You are the escaped girl? Maria told me about you.” He put one hand out, gesturing to the bag. When she handed it to him, he dumped it back on the counter, spreading it out in front of him with two fingers. “Where did you get this?”

  Lee shrugged. “My mother.”

  The man stopped what he was doing. “If we are to have a relationship, you are going to have to learn not to bullshit me. It is clear that this is not all the jewelry of one woman. I see three, maybe four women here. Now, where did you get these?”

  “I stole them.”

  “Good.” He pulled out piece after piece, throwing each aside with an epithet in Spanish: “Basura. Bisturia. Barato. Barato. Barato.” He looked at her. “Now, why did you take these?”

  “Because I need money,” she said, meeting his gaze.

  “No. Why these pieces? Why did these look good to you?” When Lee didn’t answer, he continued: “Because they are shiny, they gleam like money. You have the eye of a small child. This,” he said, picking up the brooch, the intricate silver oval with the sad woman’s profile, “is the only thing of any value here.” He handed it to her. “See how dull it is, how tarnished with age? This has history, probably someone’s heirloom. You have stolen a part of their history. You are okay with that?”

  Lee thought about it. “I can’t really return it now, can I?”

  “If you were back there right now, in this woman’s bedroom, knowing what you know now: that this is something that might be the only thing she owns that holds the memory of a loved one. Would you still take it?”

  Lee thought about this too, about how honestly to answer. “Yes,” she said.

  “Good.”

  Before she left, he gave her sixty dollars for the brooch and told her to dump the rest in a storm drain.

  • • •

  Lee came back two days later with a Ziploc bag full of jewelry she’d lifted from three more homes. She’d sifted carefully through the boxes to find the oldest and most tarnished pieces. To prove that she was not saddled with sentimentality, she took an old lighter as well, a brass World War II–era Zippo with a heart etched into the side and PFC JOHNNY CAPP: BORN TO BREAK above it. Mr. Velasquez examined the lighter cursorily before pocketing it, but he barely looked at the other pieces. Instead he wiped off his hands and grabbed keys from a hook on the wall. “Come,” he said, without waiting for her to follow. Whatever test it was, she hadn’t passed, and something in her gut fisted up at the thought of her failure.

  Mr. Velasquez was already halfway down the alley by the time she stepped outside. He rounded the corner and she ran to catch up. When she got to the street, she found him holding open the passenger door of a white-paneled van with OROZCO BROS. PLUMBING stenciled on the side.

  The interior was worn but neat; the seats were torn in several places but had been resewn. She moved a clipboard filled with estimate sheets and sat down. As he started the car, the radio came on to a classic rock station, and Mr. Velasquez was silent as he drove, a half-hour trip that took them onto a freeway and then up into the southern suburbs. Quiet tree-lined blocks of large single-family homes, all of them two or three stories, made from brick or stone, with lots of yard between them.

  Mr. Velasquez pulled over, turned down the radio, then reached across her lap and opened the door. She sat there, growing increasingly uncomfortable as he put on a pair of glasses, took a yellowing paperback from his glove compartment, and began to read. When she didn’t move, he looked up and nodded at the door. Lee considered trying to wait him out, but something about the way he peered at her over his glasses let her know she would lose. She climbed out and shut the door. Inside the van, Mr. Velasquez put the book down and pulled away. She watched him disappear, blue smoke trailing the van out the exhaust pipe.

  Lee stood there for a while, waiting for him to return. He was testing her, or messing with her, but he would come back. He could have driven her anywhere in the city, and yet he drove her here, to this upper-class suburb of old trees and lawns littered with kids’ toys and SUVs in the driveways. Did he think she was some suburban rich kid? Was it a message for her to just go home?

  • • •

  She returned to his shop early the next afternoon, and if he was surprised to see her, he gave no sign, looking up only briefly, then returning to run numbers from a ledger through a bulky adding machine. Lee pushed up against the counter across from him and read from a torn piece of paper she pulled from her pocket:

  “Five-four-five Sherwood Street. Two, um, stories, no alarm, second-floor . . . second-floor window in back, open a crick? A crack. Rain gutter looks climbable. Seven-six-four Sherwood. One story, storm cellar unlocked. Newish BMW in driveway. Fifteen-eighty-two Drexel. Drexer? Drexel. Three stories. Looks well locked, but garage window may be . . . be something, I can’t tell.”

  She went on like this for six more houses, as Mr. Velasquez added numbers. He pushed a tally button, and the machine spit out a final inch of tape. Mr. Velasquez put out his hand. She gave him the paper.

  “This is English?” he said, squinting down at it.

  “I wrote it so no one can read it,” she said. “In case I got questioned.”

  Mr. Velasquez nodded curtly, but Lee thought she caught a smile.

  • • •

  He drove to each of the addresses on her sheet, pointing out which houses she had chosen well and which not. This one has a dog, he pointed out. This one is silent-alarmed. This one hires regular landscaping service. These people look retired, and retired people are always home. This one has potential. When he was finished, only two of the nine houses from her list had passed muster. He drove her around for two more hours, and he showed her which neighborhoods held promise and which did not. The neighborhood should be well off but not obscenely wealthy: too much wealth meant state-of-the-art alarm systems or hired security. He taught her to look for neighborhood watch signs and well-maintained houses and lawns and to avoid these places. In neighborhoods with a lot of older residents, neighbors were always home, snooping out their windows.

  Lee learned to spot homes with dogs by chew toys or water dishes on the porch or scratches on the doors. Mr. Velasquez told her that alarmed homes made good targets, because alarms meant something valuable to be protected. You just had to know how to bypass them. He taught her how to case neighborhoods on foot, rubber-banding menus to doorknobs and peering through windows, or walking around with a clipboard door-to-door, claiming to be selling magazine subscriptions.

  The following week he taught her to pick locks, starting her on a clunky steel padlock, then moving on to a series of deadbolts he’d screwed into a two-by-four. His hands were small and fine, and the picks seemed extensions of his fingers. He made it look as easy as combing his hair. Lee thought briefly of her father, who had taught her a bit of the guitar, even cutting down one of his picks to fit her child hands. She would sit on his lap and he’d finger the chords to “Three Little Birds” or “Sweet Caroline” while she strummed. Mr. Velasquez, fixing or polishing something at t
he counter, would make her stand for hours as she worked her way up the progressively difficult totem until her fingers began to cramp and bleed. It took her sixteen hours over four days to finally defeat the most complicated lock, a bump-resistant double-cylinder deadbolt, and when she did and showed him, she couldn’t remember ever having felt so proud. But he just nodded and made her do it again. And again. Until she could move up the line and open them all within six minutes. When she did, he gave her without ceremony a small leather pouch containing a series of steel lockpicks, some nearly as fine as wires. The pouch was well worn, the leather supple and cracked. He said nothing about it, but Lee imagined it was the set that he himself had once used. That night she slept clutching it in her hand.

  Lee dreamed of a salamander in her belly. In her dream it turned and flopped inside her and she knew that it was hungry, but she walked the aisles of an abandoned supermarket, the shelves empty but for the husks of dead bugs. She woke with a nosebleed.

  Mr. Velasquez taught her how to bypass alarms by using second-floor ingresses, how to identify alarm systems by their manufacturer, and how to disable these alarms using wiring diagrams. He had a big rubber-banded folder bursting with the diagrams, and when he spread them out across his counter, she sat cross-legged beside them and inhaled the oil in his hair as he showed her how to read them. He taught her how to block the modern wireless alarms with a simple cell phone jammer. He taught her how to fool motion detectors with a square of white wood. He taught her to answer a phone if it rang while she was inside a residence, because it might be the security company saying that a silent alarm had been triggered. He taught her to stall them by telling them she was a houseguest and looking for the password the owners had given her; this would buy her time to disappear before they alerted the police. If it wasn’t the security company, she should just tell them wrong number and hang up.

  Lee had been at it for over two weeks now. Some nights she’d go out on her own and slip into empty homes and come away with her pockets stuffed with jewelry. She’d take it back and lay it out and try to guess what had value and what didn’t. But Mr. Velasquez refused to even look at any of it. Without his help none of it was worth anything anyway, and she wasn’t going anywhere.

  He taught her to look for access through second-story windows, or through the garage, which allowed more cover than the front of the house. He taught her to break windows by duct-taping them first to muffle the sound, and he taught her that one sharp noise rarely aroused any lasting suspicion, whereas multiple noises always did. He taught her to be in and out of a place in no more than twelve minutes, to always have an exit strategy in place, and to avoid rooms without window egress when possible. He taught her to go through a house in this order: master bedroom (dresser drawers, bedside table, mattress, and bathroom medicine cabinet), then the kitchen, then the living room if there was time. He told her to never take anything bigger than a fist—“in your case, two fists,” he said, with a rare smile—unless it was a gun or drugs. Guns and drugs were the easiest things to sell. Otherwise, he told her, stick to jewelry and cash. He taught her never to steal cell phones or laptops, because you might as well be carrying a tracking device. He taught her which prescription drugs to look for in the medicine cabinets. He taught her to skip the kids’ rooms. Nobody ever hid anything of value in a kid’s room.

  Mr. Velasquez gave her a small magnet and taught her that precious metals had no magnetism. He taught her about the different precious-metal stamps and what they meant, and the kind of patina to look for in gold versus silver, and that platinum had none. He taught her how to spot a fake diamond using a glass of water and a flashlight, and that if one piece of jewelry was fake, then the rest likely were, too. He taught her about dummy jewelry boxes, and that a house with nice things will have the real stuff hidden somewhere; you just had to know where to look. He taught her how to search a kitchen: for a plastic bag at the bottom of a flour bin, for a can of tomatoes that had been opened from the bottom, for foil-wrapped packages in the back of the freezer. For secret doors built into the bulkheads of cabinets. He taught her how to feel for hard lumps in the cushions of sofas, to shake paintings and listen for something hidden inside the frames.

  He taught her to open a simple safe using a small amplifier and a pair of earbuds. Lee practiced at her squatted homes, using the amp on a series of combination locks. One home she squatted, the home of a married couple, had a small safe hidden in a compartment in the closet, and she spent hours on it, finally getting it open to reveal a digital camera, on which Lee found photos and videos of a series of different young women, all wearing the same blond wig and pale blue fairy outfit, which was also in the safe. It made her think of the kids upstairs at the Crystal Castle. Lee couldn’t help herself, and broke her cardinal rule of leaving no trace behind. Before heading out, she took the camera and the outfit and laid them on the couple’s bed.

  Over the following two weeks Lee blossomed under Mr. Velasquez’s mentorship. He was a man of very few words and even fewer facial expressions, but she was always watching him for signs of approval. His children were the only ones who ever got a true smile out of him. Lee would watch the twin boys harass their dad, grabbing hold of either leg and making him walk them around his shop, or the daughter show off her grades from school, and he always put down what he was doing to indulge them. Lee wished she had the power to make him smile like that. Once she began to tell Mr. Velasquez how she lived, squatting from one empty home to the next, but he stopped her. He didn’t want to know. It was as though he knew she was only confiding in him as a way to get closer, and the implied rebuke stabbed her a little.

  One day as she was sweeping the space, she asked if she could ask him a question. He didn’t say no, so she went on. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Doing what?”

  “Helping me. Teaching me.”

  “You are a friend of Maria’s, are you not?”

  “Sure. But we weren’t even that close.”

  “I know this. She protected you because she was paid to do so. You, on the other hand, you sacrificed yourself for her, for what? For—”

  “Paid? Who paid her to protect me?”

  “I thought you knew. Someone wanted you kept safe. I assumed someone close to you.”

  Lee shook her head, too stunned to speak. The information numbed her. Could it have been her mother? Lee knew it wasn’t. Or had Edie actually gotten her father to help after all? Lee’s heart fluttered a moment, but she knew that wasn’t the truth, either. It had to have been the Société Anonyme. Even in the detention center they had been watching her. It also meant they had been trying, at least back then, to protect her. Why?

  “When I was a younger man, I was aimless,” he told her. “A kid hustling drugs like the rest. I had no skills, no ambition, no future. But a man, a man I had actually tried to rip off, he took me in, taught me things. The things I am now teaching you. He had no reason to trust me, but he saw something in me. And he is the reason I am the man I am today. You understand?”

  “I guess.”

  “I have no one else to pass this on to. Maria is incarcerated, and besides, she is too . . .”

  “Hotheaded?”

  “Yes. You know, if you had not taken the fall for her, they would have sent her to the block for violent offenders. It would have changed her forever. You saved her from that.”

  “What about your own children?”

  “My daughter, my sons . . . I don’t mean to offend, but I have other wishes for them. Other things to give them. You understand?”

  Lee felt herself grow warm and embarrassed with the pleasure of his trust. She took the broom from where it leaned against the wall and began to sweep what had already been swept.

  One day Mr. Velasquez put a box of jewelry in front of her and brought out a stopwatch. Without a word he started the clock. Lee knew what he expected. She began sifting through the box, fee
ling the weight of each piece, examining maker marks, testing strings of pearls against her teeth. When she had set aside five pieces and closed the box, he stopped the clock, picked up one of the pieces, and put it back in the box. But she got her nod, and she carried it around with her the rest of the day.

  There were down times. She’d spend hours in his shop, sweeping up or running chores or errands around the neighborhood. The neighbors all came to know her, the corner boys and the grocers, and they called her Ladroncita when she passed by or came into a shop on an errand. Mr. Velasquez laughed at the name when she asked him what it meant, but he never translated it for her. When there was nothing to do, he let her hang out in the storeroom, a place even his children were not allowed. It was just down the alley, through a steel door that took three keys to open. The room had a narrow hallway lined with shelves holding boxes of jewelry, cameras, iPhones, old coins. In a box of gold jewelry she saw a necklace that she recognized as one she’d stolen herself. Everything was neatly arranged and catalogued. The far end of the room opened up to accommodate a table with four chairs, a small refrigerator, and a sofa. There was a blocky old television on a crate in the corner, but it didn’t turn on. A TV mounted on the wall, a new flat-screen hooked up to cable, turned on fine.

  Often one of his children or sometimes his wife would come in with food, usually a plate of tortillas and meat and beans, that he would share with her. Mr. Velasquez’s wife was a stout woman with bright, intense eyes under heavy mascara. She had nearly as many tattoos as her husband, and Lee could tell she had seen things that had hardened her, but still there was warmth in her eyes. She never paid Lee any mind, except to bring a second plate when Lee was there.

  Often she and Mr. Velasquez would eat in silence, but sometimes he would talk, and when he did, he would tell her about his dreams, not for himself but for his children. Every dollar he could spare he put away for them so that they could go to a college or trade school and make something of their lives. Lee once started to tell him about her own college aspirations, but he had to take a phone call and she never brought up the topic again. His daughter was nine and wanted to be a veterinarian, and his twin boys, only four, were already reading. Sometimes the boys would sit together in her lap and Lee would help them get through a book, each one vying for her attention. Other times they would bring in a book in Spanish and teach her the simple words, laughing at her pronunciation. Lee liked listening to Mr. Velasquez’s dreams for his children, and she liked that she could be the beneficiary of the teachings he would never bestow upon them.