The Glass Harmonica

by Russell Wangersky

  Tony and Helen had managed to get past that, he thought, had gotten used to their son Ron quitting school right after grade ten and running around with a girl they hated, a girl named Liz who Tony imagined, for some reason, had a thread of vicious running right straight through her. He didn’t trust Liz and he didn’t really know why, but whenever he saw her, Tony caught himself watching her, watching her hands, trying to figure out just what it was she was up to.

  Fact was, he thought, he and Helen had made it to a point where the days were ticking past themselves in an almost-constant comfortable state. They didn’t even have to talk, because almost every single thing between them had been said at least a dozen times already. Even the arguments were old and familiar, less argument than stage play, both of them anticipating the other’s next line.

  Until the morning when Tony had been home and awake when the mailbox banged shut outside and he’d gone out to get the mail. And it had only been a couple of furniture flyers and one lone envelope with the electric bill. Helen always paid the bills, but Tony opened it simply out of curiosity instead of leaving it on the counter. And it was three months overdue by then, and there was a cut-off notice attached, the cut-off part printed in bright red.

  Tony got a lot of stares from people the next day when he wheeled the big green city tandem dump truck into customer parking at the power company, filling two parking spots. He paid the entire overdue bill with cash, watching carefully as the woman behind the counter stamped the face of the bill with her date stamp and then initialled the payment. Watching until he was sure she had entered the payment into the computer in front of her.

  He didn’t mention to Helen that he’d paid the bill, but looking at her that night in the living room, he felt as if twin weights were conspiring to pull each side of his face downwards and that there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.

  That was only the first late bill. He started catching others when he could, overdue accounts threading their way into the mailbox, where he would quietly pay them too, with any cash he could gather up. He’d take a quick swing down McKay Street on the days he knew she was out, just long enough to climb down from the idling truck, rifle through the mail in the mailbox and climb back into the driver’s seat again. But he didn’t tell Helen, not even when he intercepted a bank statement showing the cash advances on their joint chequing account, and the size of the numbers took his breath away.

  And more.

  He hadn’t even known that they had a line of credit, nor that it was already all spent by the time he discovered its existence. He just knew that it was in her hands, and that whatever it was, he wouldn’t be able to ask. He also knew then that it didn’t matter how many hours of overtime he managed to work. And he knew that he would have to find other ways to put money together.

  First, it was a circular saw from the equipment locker, one of the battered old saws that travelled all over the city rolling around loose in the backs of different city trucks. Surprisingly, it didn’t feel like he was crossing any sort of line by taking it: it didn’t feel like anything at all, except simple, plain necessity—it was there, and he needed it. Tony noticed the saw in the open metal locker when he came off shift, and simply tossed it into the thin space behind the front seat of his pickup. He didn’t think about it, really.

  The guys on the gate were supposed to give personal vehicles a going-over for city supplies on the way out of the yard, but Tony knew they rarely came out of the gatehouse when it was raining. That morning, his old wipers could barely keep up, smearing back and forth across the windshield glass, and the guard on duty had just waved him through, newspaper up in front of him. But Tony checked the rearview mirror for blocks anyway, looking over and over again to see if a police car was pulling up behind him. When he thought about it later, it was the first and only time that he ever felt as if he had done anything even remotely wrong.

  Soon he began to think that, in some ways, it was all their fault, because they really should have caught him then—because he was careless and impulsive, and because it was the very first time. And if he’d thought they would check the truck, he wouldn’t have been able to do it at all.

  But they didn’t, and he did.

  When he got home, Tony slammed the door behind him in the driveway and left the saw in the unlocked truck, and almost wished that someone from the neighbourhood would come along and take it. But no one did, and he got thirty dollars for the battered saw from a neighbour after he peeled off the inventory sticker and wire-brushed the city ID number away.

  It was like he’d crossed a line he hadn’t even really known he was crossing.

  And each time, it got a little simpler. When he thought about it, he thought about the mechanics—not the stealing itself but how to do it. Pressure-treated lumber, steel-toed boots, power tools—he took all of it, and more. He learned things as he went, like the obvious fact that the newer a thing was, the easier it was to sell. Other things too—like the larger something was, the harder it was for anyone to believe it was actually stolen.

  Once, at four in the morning with the guy in the gatehouse sound asleep, Tony had gotten out through the gate with one of the big-wheeled jackhammer compressors, right out in the open and hitched to the back of his pickup. He sold it to a guy who spray-painted it grey and sold it right away again as surplus, no questions asked, in another part of the province, and that was eight hundred dollars in quick cash, even if the compressor was worth thousands.

  That time, Tony had been sweating driving away from the depot, sweating because it was just so obvious, and for the next three days he’d kept expecting one of the supervisors to call him up to the office “for a chat.” But no one noticed, at least not right away.

  The street-repair program hadn’t started for the spring season, and it was three weeks before the police even came to look into the theft, and when they did, they interviewed everyone on shift, including Tony. He feigned a kind of uninterested nonchalance, and it was almost as if that nonchalance rubbed right off on the two police detectives who came and sat and did interviews in the lunchroom.

  They looked bored the whole time they talked to him, one of the officers, a tall guy named Ballard, fiddling with his coffee cup as he worked his way down the same list of questions they wound up asking everyone. The two policemen gave off an air like they felt they were being asked to investigate something that was far beneath them, like being asked to chase graffiti artists instead of busting up drug rings.

  The police ended up being more interested in Wally Norman than anyone else, because it turned out that Wally had a record that no one knew anything about, some scheme from his twenties where he and his buddies used to go out to the airport and just grab random baggage off the luggage carousels and head for the door. If someone came up and stopped them, saying, “Hey, that’s my suitcase,” they’d just hand it back and say, “Sorry, I’ve got one that looks just like it.”

  But Wally and his friends had tried the scheme once too often and been spotted by security, because guys in their twenties just weren’t flying every week. While all of Wally’s friends had gotten away, he’d been tackled by a wiry old commissionaire as he tried to get to the car, and was pinned on the rain-wet pavement out next to the crosswalks until the police arrived. The commissionaire’s glasses had been broken in the struggle, so the police tagged Wally with an assault charge too.

  “Guy thought he was back in World War Two or somethin’, ’stead of stoppin’ someone stealin’ fuckin’ suitcases,” Wally said matter-of-factly, like it was a hockey game they’d all been talking about, a sloppy outlet pass or bad penalty killing. “Like he was catchin’ a bank robber or sump-thin.”

  When they finished their interviews and got ready to leave, the police stopped for a moment in the lunchroom to tell Wally in front of everyone else that they would be keeping an eye on him. And Wally shrugged, a big, slow, over-exaggerated shrug that telegraphed “Who gives a shit?” as clearly as if he had said it out
loud, right there and then.

  As soon as the police left, Wally told the guys that they’d taken the suitcases more as a game than anything else, because “most of the time it was just old clothes ’n shit, ’n half the time we’d just flick ’em out the door onto the highway anyway. Big old suitcases, spinning off into the ditch. Burstin’ open. Ya should’ve seen it.” But he didn’t seem to regret any of it, not even the idea that the police were now looking at him as a suspect. “You make a choice and jest go from there,” he said, and went to get more coffee.

  Tony sat with his drink at the bar and stared across at where Helen was sitting, and it seemed to him that he was suddenly aware that he was hearing something urgent being spoken in a different language, a language that he didn’t fully understand but that he needed to hear.

  He was sure that everything important was happening right there in front of him, right then, if only he could figure out what all the various pieces meant, and how they all fit together. Like a chain with one important link missing. He looked around the room, trying to see if there was a secret code written on the walls or hovering over any of the five people up at the bar, huddled close together as if they were freezing cold. Looking for the switch that was just waiting to be thrown.

  And Helen’s purse was open, the lights from the lottery machine playing across the front of her blouse again so that it seemed as if her clothes were magically changing colours, flicking from one shade to another.

  With her hands barely moving, she was threading twenties into the thin slot in the front of the machine, over and over again without even looking, a motion so practised that it seemed to take no effort whatsoever, that it seemed to take neither aim nor concentration. It looked for all the world as if she was just holding her hand in front of the machine while the money magically disappeared from her grasp, and she didn’t even look away from Tony as the money simply vanished.

  He noticed the expression in her eyes didn’t change when she turned to look at him—in fact, her eyes didn’t move at all, her gaze holding his in one simple and straight line. And the whole time, he could feel her eyes on his face, staring straight across at him, and when he looked up and back at her, she smiled that familiar smile, her eyes widening just enough. And Tony fell hard, just like he always did.

  He fell, but he also knew.

  Two days later, he got the keys for a city backhoe from the sign-out locker and two hard men from downtown did all the rest without him, driving the piece of heavy equipment straight out through a chain-link fence without stopping and onto a low-rider flatbed already parked just outside on the street. And even though it must have taken them more than a few minutes to chain the backhoe down, no one admitted to seeing anything. And there was money in a plain white envelope in the mailbox when he got home, his name on the front in pencil in block letters, as if it could just as easily be erased and replaced by someone else’s.

  That same week, he managed a mitre saw and a set of air chisels, and that was despite the fact the city had hired a private firm to beef up security, and there were strange new serious faces in the lunchroom and strolling through the equipment yard at odd times.

  Once they caught him with the plywood, Tony was pretty sure that they would want to blame him for everything. Would want to play the familiar old “one bad apple” game and declare the problem solved, even if there was city equipment in garages and basements all over the place. They just didn’t have enough proof—so Tony knew they’d go to the wall for ten sheets of plywood instead.

  Wally Norman took him aside and quietly said he understood, and by way of condolence admitted that he had four of the city’s five-ton hydraulic screw jacks in his own garage if anyone ever took it into their heads to come looking. “Ya haven’t done nothing that anyone else here hasn’t done,” Wally said, smacking a hand down between Tony’s shoulder blades, but Tony didn’t get any particular comfort from the admission.

  “I still can’t believe it, Tony,” Helen said quietly while they were sitting together in the small, overheated courtroom, waiting for his case to come up. It had already been a month without pay, a month when, “suspended pending,” he hadn’t driven a truck or been up early enough in the day to see the wonder of the darkness fading into blue. He wasn’t even allowed on city property, and at home, the money had dried up completely, bills now lying unopened on the counter because they were questions that Tony and Helen couldn’t begin to answer.

  “I just can’t believe it, that you were stealing. What were you thinking, anyway? And what do you think my father would have said about this?” Helen said. “You always said you wanted him to think well of you.” And something about that whole speech rang funny, even though Tony couldn’t put his finger on exactly what it was.

  And she’d been saying that for a month, saying it ever since the court date had been set. He didn’t feel like starting what would have become unstoppable finger pointing, hadn’t once mentioned the gambling machines, didn’t even bother putting words together into something that might seem like an explanation.

  What was he thinking? Her words stuck in his head and nagged at him like a splinter until the moment when he figured it out. When Tony suddenly realized that none of it was about thinking, really. That it was actually a whole bunch of different things, layered in on top of one another. That it was about reacting, about watching and picking up unspoken cues. And he thought that, perhaps, if he’d laid it all out for his father-in-law, Mike Mirren might have understood completely, and smiled, and talked to him for a few minutes about all the things it turns out you really don’t have any choice in after all. And he would have gone back to being dead then, still smiling faintly.

  Eventually, it was Tony’s turn, the whole courtroom waiting and quiet, and there really wasn’t much left to say. And the prosecution lawyer stood up and said they wanted to add extra charges, that since his arrest they’d found the backhoe and the compressor too, and they had three witnesses they wanted to bring forward, and they were talking about charging him as “a career criminal.” Tony smiled a bit when he heard the words, hearing them differently and deciding that it was exactly true, that a career was what had been stolen after all.

  So Tony stood up, leaning over for a moment so his lips were by Helen’s ear, and over her shoulder he could see Ted Greenaway taking important notes in a small notebook for the city’s disciplinary hearing, his arms resting across his large stomach as he wrote, face carefully pulled into a frown.

  “I love you, Helen.” Tony said it simply, like that should explain everything. As if those few words made sense of all the rest.

  Then, when he was asked by the judge, Tony found three more simple words. And they explained everything, and yet only a tiny part, too.

  “Guilty, your honour.”

  It was simple, just like that, and Tony knew exquisitely, exactly, what was slipping away right then, knowing the words Greenaway would be writing so carefully in his notebook.

  That nights and snowplows and wonder were gone, like a chapter slapped closed in a book for good.

  Guilty, Tony thought, guilty like everyone. And stuffed full of things he knew and didn’t dare let out.

  32

  McKay Street

  BART DOLIMONT

  JANUARY 3, 1991

  FOURTEEN YEARS before Tony’s sentencing and there was another thief on McKay Street:

  I could write the book on this stuff, Bart Dolimont thinks. How to Steal and Get Away With It. It would be a bestseller, too—not bad for a nineteen-year-old with no high school, he says to himself.

  He is outside on the sidewalk, walking towards the O’Reilly house, steps away from the short walk to the front door, taking in every piece of information he can from the dark windows.

  Don’t stop and stare at the house, he thinks. Don’t look around to see if anyone’s watching. If they are, if they aren’t, I’m back-on to them, and they’ll know little more than my height. Looking around will just draw attention. Peo
ple don’t look at you if you’re confident, if you look like you belong. It turns you into the expected instead of the unexpected, and their eyes wash over you and go on to something else, catching on nothing.

  You go straight up to the front door like you belong there, arm straight out, palm the doorknob and give it a steady, even turn. If the door’s locked, relax your hand enough to let it slide around the doorknob. Turn around, walk away.

  There are plenty of houses in the neighbourhood where people don’t lock their doors, or forget to lock them some nights. Or just don’t push them all the way closed before they go to bed. Plenty of places where a ground-floor window’s open, and all you have to do is cut away the screen and climb in, look around, take the first few things that are worth grabbing and head out on your way.

  Doors are easier, though. If it’s unlocked, walk straight in. If there’s someone there, you can always say you were coming in to tell them their door was open and you were wondering if they were all right. If you hear something, just leave. If you can lock the door behind you as you go, even better. Walk away down the street. Don’t run, even if they start yelling.

  Inside the O’Reillys’, and Bart stopping to listen. No dog—knew that already, he thinks. That’s a good thing.

  I can hear Mister snoring away in the back like a freight train, he thinks. He’s fifty if he’s a day, but works down to the dockyard, so he might be tougher than he looks, ready to mix it up if he wakes up.

  Let your eyes adjust to the light—no rushing. It’s all about nerve. Wait for the walls to slowly swim into view from the darkness, wait until you can see the shapes of the picture frames against the lighter walls, even if you can’t make out the pictures themselves. Take your time, don’t rush into unfamiliar geography. Always take your time.