by Chris Ewan
Closer to us (and by closer I mean within driving distance), were a pair of curved, cherrywood desks that had been arranged beside one another to form a horseshoe. They were free of all clutter, aside from matching pen-sets with tiny American flags poking out of them.
A circular mosaic was located on the floor just in front of the desks. Unlike your average mosaic, this one had been created with casino chips. The outer rim was made up of white chips, with a black concentric border, and the centrepiece was a 50-cent coin fashioned from neatly arranged silver markers. If I could have prised the chips out of the mixture of mortar and resin that contained them, and somehow replaced them with worthless replicas, I could have made myself very rich indeed. Sadly for me, the best I could do was to drop to my knees, run my fingers over the pattern and emit a low whimper, before at last turning my attention to the thin, dark crevice that ran around the perimeter of the coin.
Now that I knew there was a good chance that Maurice’s information had been accurate, I found my feet and walked around to the opposite side of the desks. I’d been led to understand that it didn’t matter which desk I started with – they were both as identical as the men who owned them – and from what I could see, that certainly appeared to be the case.
The desks were very fine pieces of furniture, made with obvious skill. The aged cherry timber had been turned and finished with great care, so that every join appeared utterly flawless. Each desk contained a number of locked drawers arranged on either side of the central knee-hole, and the locking furniture and handles had been manufactured in a becoming shade of brushed steel.
I wheeled aside the leather swivel chair from the desk on the right, ducked down into the knee-hole and clicked my fingers at Sal. Sal had tipped his mask up onto the top of his head, so I could see just how much he relished my snapping my fingers at him.
‘Go and wait by the door,’ I whispered. ‘See if anyone is moving around out there.’
As Sal muttered and mumbled across to the door, I delved inside my record bag for my penlight and cast the beam around the underside of the desk-top. After some searching, I spied a tiny keyhole, about half the size of the nail on my little finger. I ran my fingertip over the opening and screwed up my face in disgust, and then I reached for my spectacles case and hunted for one of the smallest picks I carried.
It wasn’t that the lock was especially difficult to open – desk locks rarely are – it was just that it was so damn fiddly. I guess a guy in my line of work should learn to get used to these things, but miniature locks are one of my bugbears. True, they tend to offer up less resistance to being forced, but if you want to do things right, it can be frustrating as hell trying to hold your hand steady enough to defeat one of the little buggers, and this particular example was truly dinky. If my first impressions were correct, none of the pins would be any bigger than the mechanics in the stolen watch that was struggling to keep time on my wrist, and I could already tell it was going to vex me.
Imagine facing up to an average-sized doll’s house and trying to poke a scaled-down key into the lock on the front door. Tricky, right? Well, maybe not so tough if you happen to be the same size as Sal, but teeth-grindingly, stomach-clenchingly, hair-pullingly infuriating for me.
Then again, if it had been simple, I don’t suppose I would have experienced the warm, fuzzy feeling that coursed through my veins when the itsy-bitsy pins eventually succumbed to my charms and the teeny tumblers turned and the little cherrywood hatch dropped down from above.
I have to admit it felt good. Mind you, that was nothing compared to the sweet sensation I experienced when I repeated the entire process beneath the second desk and a matching hatch eased down. I called Sal back from the door and waited for him to join me (without, I noticed, any need to bow his head), and then I guided his hand up inside the hatch and rested his teeny finger on the plastic button I found there. That done, I scrambled back to the first desk and located my own button. On the count of three, we pressed down, and I watched from below the three-quarter height kickboard as the floor mosaic popped up on a soundless, concealed hinge to reveal a circular orifice.
I squirmed beneath the kickboard on my belly and crawled on my hands and knees as far as the edge of the hole. I peered over the rim and a classic Schmidt & Co combination-lock safe stared back.
The safe was buried in hard-set concrete to a depth of approximately three feet. It was round in shape, with a green metal fascia, a reinforced steel door and an eighty-digit combination dial. The cylindrical space that led down to it was just large enough for a grown man to poke his head and shoulders inside, and I did just that.
‘Pass me my bag,’ I said, into the hole.
My bag thumped onto my back. I wriggled out and turned to see Sal dusting his hands off.
‘Thanks.’
‘Hey, no problem.’
I removed a pad of graph paper and a pencil. Since I’d been forewarned about the type of safe I’d be dealing with, I’d already gone to the trouble of drawing some hasty graphs on the opening pages. Normally, completing the graph was something I liked to do myself, but since I was going to have my head stuck down inside a cramped hole, it seemed that I would have to entrust Sal with the job.
‘Take these,’ I told him. ‘I want you to put a pencil mark on the graph for every number I call out.’
I beckoned to him and demonstrated what I meant. He snatched the pad away with an attitude that suggested I was vastly underestimating him.
‘Pass me the pencil already. You can trust me.’
I hate it when someone says that, but I handed the pencil across anyway before returning to my bag for a physician’s stethoscope. As a general rule, I don’t like to use a stethoscope. In theory, it’s supposed to make it easier to hear the click of the contact dials on the wheelpack engaging, but I find that it just makes me aware of other noises coming from the inner workings of the safe, or even my arthritic finger-joints. I much prefer to use my naked ear and my gut instinct, but the location of this particular safe made that impossible. So the stethoscope was a necessary evil, as was the pen-light I gripped in my teeth. I flashed Sal a smile, along with a beam of light, and then I dived down into the hole and set to work.
Safe manipulation is the purest and neatest way to defeat a locked safe, but the downside is that the technique requires a good deal of time and patience. It relies on the application of practical maths, a keen ear and a sound understanding of safe mechanics. And on top of all that, it involves a dose of good fortune, because while it’s usually possible to identify the numbers that make up a particular combination, there’s no way of knowing what order those numbers should be entered in.
Just to add to the challenge, the wily technicians at Schmidt & Co had constructed nearly all of their moving parts from plastics and nylons. That made it about as hard as it could get to hear any tell-tale clicks and clunks, and next to impossible to feel any resistance through the combination dial, especially when I was hanging upside down with my head and upper body in a space a little smaller than the drum of a tumble-dryer.
Twenty minutes in, and all the blood in my system seemed to have collected in my head. My temples were buzzing and my face felt hot and prickly, as if it had been jammed inside a vegetable steamer. I backed up out of the hole and lay flat on my back, yanked the stethoscope from my ears and held my hand out for the pad. The graph that Sal had produced was made up of a series of jagged peaks and troughs, representing the possible ranges of just two numbers. I wafted the pad above my face and tried my best not to groan.
‘How much longer you think this will take?’ Sal asked.
‘An hour. Maybe more.’
‘Are you kidding me?’
‘It could be less. But then we have to run the combinations.’
‘And how long will that take?’ If anything, his voice had become even higher than usual.
‘At a minute per combination? You don’t want to know.’
Sal put his face in his hands
, and I was left to consider Dean Martin’s inappropriately smug demeanour.
‘We have, like, an hour and forty-five minutes, max.’
‘In that case, we’d best crack on.’
If he picked up on the pun, he didn’t show it. Instead, he gripped onto the pencil with both hands and sat quite rigidly at the edge of the hole.
I worked as swiftly as possible for the next half-hour, not even pausing when my head began to pound. It felt like I’d called out a good many numbers, and so far as I could tell, most of them were accurate. A couple of times, Sal tapped me on the back and told me to cool it while he investigated a suspect noise on the other side of the door. The reception staff had returned soon after I’d begun manipulating the safe, and usually he reported back to say that he’d heard a telephone ring, or the whirr of a document shredder. I can’t say I was staggered by his revelations, though I was always relieved to be able to continue. With each number I called out, we were moving steadily towards the next stage of the process and, just maybe, an improbable triumph.
Of course, as soon as a thought of that nature entered my head, things were bound to fall apart, and it wasn’t long before Sal tapped me on the shoulder for perhaps the fifth time and I hauled my head out of the hole to give him a piece of my mind. It was bad enough to be interrupted, I was about to tell him, but to be interrupted just to hear that somebody was using a photocopier was really beginning to wear on my nerves.
As it happened, I didn’t say anything, because it was immediately apparent from the haunted expression on Sal’s face that something was about to go very wrong indeed. He pointed towards the bottom of the door, where the bar of light had darkened in the middle. I heard a throaty chuckle, followed by the noise of a key being fitted into the lock.
I’ve heard it said that some people find themselves paralysed in dangerous situations, but I’m most certainly not one of them. In the seconds that followed, my brain considered and discounted a number of possible hiding spots, and before the door was even halfway open, I’d selected the right-hand desk and dived for its cover. I even had the presence of mind to toss my equipment and my record bag into the crawl-space ahead of me, but as I dragged my legs and my feet under the kickboard and grunted with the final, heroic effort of snatching my toes out of harm’s way, I realised with a sudden dread that I’d overlooked one trifling detail. The mosaic hatch was still open.
THIRTY-THREE
Listening to people enter a room without being able to see them was fast becoming a nasty habit for me. These particular individuals paced directly to the hole in the floor.
‘Christ, get Stacey,’ said a man’s voice. ‘And call security too.’
‘Has the safe been compromised?’ asked a second man.
‘I can’t tell yet. Just go get Stacey.’
Feet pounded towards the door and I risked peering out from beneath the kickboard until I could glimpse the legs and back of a man with his head buried inside the hole in the mosaic. His khaki trousers and blue knit sweater gave me a fair idea of who I was looking at, but when he pulled his ginger head out of the hole I knew for certain. The Fisher Twins were back from their golf game much sooner than I’d been led to expect.
The twin I could see looked even paler than normal and his many freckles stood out distinctly against his whitish skin. He seemed low on patience as well as iron, and he plunged his arm into the hole and yanked fruitlessly on the door to the safe.
He was still tugging away when two sets of legs appeared alongside him. I guessed the tan chinos and brown loafers belonged to the second twin. The nylon stockings and black, medium heels seemed likely to be Stacey’s.
‘Anything missing?’ asked the twin who was standing.
‘I don’t know. You have today’s code?’
‘On my PDA.’
The second twin crouched down beside his brother and reached inside his trouser pocket. He removed a compact electronic device and began to poke at it with a metal pointer.
‘Stacey, what’s going on?’ asked the first twin. ‘Has anyone been in here?’
Stacey shifted her weight between her feet. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Anything unusual happen?’
Her feet quick-stepped some more. ‘We had another fire drill.’
‘A scheduled fire drill?’
‘Gosh, I don’t know. I don’t think so.’
The twins shared a look.
‘Get Ricks up here. Now.’
Stacey scurried away, and the twins shook their identical heads at one another.
Watching them from beneath the desk, I was conscious that I’d made a couple of errors. In my hurry to dive for cover, I hadn’t seen where Sal had ended up, so I had no way of knowing if he was likely to be found anytime soon. On top of that, my own hiding spot was far from ideal. Yes, there was a danger I might be seen beneath the kickboard, but more to the point, I’d sought refuge in the exact spot where one of the buttons that opened the mosaic was to be found.
On the plus side, I hadn’t managed to crack the safe. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have been too thrilled by my professional shortcomings, but as the twins were about to discover that their safe hadn’t been compromised, I really hoped they might not feel the need to activate a full-blown security procedure.
‘I have the code,’ said the twin with the PDA.
‘Give it to me.’
He read the sequence aloud, and I felt a smile tug at my lips as I committed it to memory. Could it be that I might find myself with an opportunity to access the safe, after all?
I was still feeling dazed by the possibility when I glanced down at the graph on the pad in my hands. At least two of my numbers had been wrong. I couldn’t remember if that was my fault or if Sal had been careless with his record-keeping, but I felt mighty peeved all the same.
I guess I would have beaten myself up a little more if I hadn’t been distracted by the metallic clang of the safe door being thrown back against the sides of the concrete hole. Any second now, and the twins would be a lot more relaxed.
‘Goddammit!’ one of them screamed. ‘They got it. They took the damn list.’
Huh?
‘Are you shitting me?’
Oh, thank God. He had to be messing with his brother.
‘Do I look like I’m shitting you?’
Actually, he looked a lot like a man on the far side of angry. His jaw was clenched, his eyes were dark swirls and he slapped his palm down hard against the floor, like a wrestling judge counting off a bout. He stood and lashed out with his foot at the mosaic hatch. A half-second later, he let go of a howl of pain, clutched at his toes and hopped around in a circle.
Meanwhile, his brother stuck his own head into the hole. His arm moved feverishly in and out, until he’d placed several stacks of dollar notes beside the opening.
‘That’s all they took?’
‘It’s all they wanted.’
His brother dropped heavily into a club chair and hauled off his shoe to consider his foot. His mouth puckered with discomfort and I found myself wincing in a similar manner. It wasn’t sympathy pains – as he’d fallen into the chair, it had skidded sideways and I’d glimpsed the fingers of Sal’s hand.
The twin in the chair gingerly flexed his toes, sucking air through his teeth.
‘So what do we do?’ his brother asked.
‘I’m thinking.’
‘You have a back-up, right?’
‘Sure, but that’s not the issue. The list is out there now.’ He nodded towards the picture windows overlooking the Strip.
‘But it can’t bite us, yeah?’
The twin with the busted toes stared at his brother. ‘You think these people know how to apply that kind of information? They push too hard and the whole thing comes down.’
‘Maybe they’re smart. They were smart enough to get the list.’
The twin in the chair shook his head ruefully. ‘We need to close down on this fast. Where in hell is Ricks?’
‘Relax. He’ll be here.’
If anyone could relax, it certainly wasn’t me. I was struggling to understand the implications of what I was hearing. If the juice list had already been snatched, then I’d never had any chance of claiming my fee from Maurice. What’s more, I was stuck at the scene of the crime, my hiding-place was about as stupid as you could possibly imagine (unless you could conceive of a teeny man cowering behind a club chair where a seriously hacked-off casino impresario happened to be sitting), and if I didn’t somehow escape and pull together a serious amount of money in a handful of hours, I was destined to die a quite horrible death. Was that everything? Did I even want to turn my mind to what else could go wrong?
‘What’s happening?’
Ricks strolled into the room behind his question, flipping open a pocket notepad. The twins brought him up to speed while I peeked out from my hiding-space and watched him squat down beside the hole in the mosaic. He’d changed his clothes since I’d last seen him – he had on a dark blue blazer over a white shirt and pressed grey trousers – but his eyes retained the glazed look of a man low on sleep, and when he raised a hand to his silver-thread beard, he stifled a yawn.
‘No cops, right?’ he muttered.
‘No cops.’
Ricks nodded once, as though recalibrating his approach. ‘I’m going to need names for the people who might want the list.’
The twin in the club chair made a gargling noise that suggested he didn’t rate the idea. ‘You want that I pass you the damn telephone directory? Come on, Ricks, you know what was on that document.’
‘Some of it,’ Ricks said, and I thought I could almost detect a hint of regret in his voice.
‘So you know what we’re dealing with. I want this thing shut down. I want it stomped on.’
Ricks turned sideways and held the twin’s eye. ‘I’ll have to speak with your staff. All of your staff. One of my team will review the fire alarm. Another guy will run the security tapes.’
‘That’s going to take time.’
‘Sure is.’ He pointed his pen at the lid of the mosaic. ‘You touch anything?’
