Disappearing off the Face of the Earth

by David Cohen

  ‘I know it sounds kind of airy-fairy, but I do believe that the universe pays attention to us. It sees that we’re struggling; that business is bad. And it’s been trying to balance things out a bit by laying these things, these riches, in our path.’ Bruce closed his hand around the padlock. ‘I don’t know about you, Ken, but I think if the universe offers you a gift, it’s impolite to refuse.’

  Thirteen

  After our initial meeting at Pharaoh’s Tomb in Box Hill North, Bruce and I often crossed paths at the facility. Before too long he showed me what he meant by ‘augmenting your income’. Essentially it meant helping oneself to the contents of storage units.

  ‘Aren’t you worried about Ron seeing you?’ I said.

  ‘I do it after-hours,’ Bruce explained. ‘In my leisure time.’

  Bruce didn’t do this entirely at random. The thing about storage facilities is, while most of the tenants respect law and order, there are always a few dodgy ones, and a self-storage facility can be an excellent hiding place for stolen goods. You’ve got twenty-four-hour access. Nobody need know what you’re bringing in and out, especially if you do it after-hours and conceal the gear properly. Tenants are entitled to their privacy, so staff don’t ask many questions. Facility regulations will always list ‘illegal or stolen goods’ among the many items tenants are forbidden to store. But people who break the law by stealing things are unlikely to abide by the rules of a self-storage facility.

  Bruce was on the ball; he knew which units to target, and he had no ethical issues about stealing stolen merchandise.

  ‘I’m offering to give you the benefit of my wisdom,’ he said one morning while we were having a smoke in the car park. ‘Tonight.’

  ‘Don’t know,’ I said. ‘Sounds a bit dangerous.’

  ‘I’ve never been caught,’ he said. ‘I’m very careful: straight in, straight out.’

  ‘What happens when they come and find an empty unit?’

  ‘You don’t take everything. The secret is to take a few small but sellable items from several units – things that don’t leave a conspicuous space behind. But the fact to always bear in mind is this: we’re pinching stuff that’s already been pinched from somewhere else. If some of it goes missing, what are they going to do? Call the police?’

  I’d pretty much had a gutful of Ron Wood’s passive-aggressive management style by that point. Maybe it was time to even the score. Not that he’d know about it, but the point was that I would. It was like stealing stationery from the workplace as compensation for low wages: you do it a little bit at a time, but by the time you quit your job you’ve accumulated enough staplers and adhesive tape to stock a small Officeworks.

  So there we were at eight o’clock one Tuesday evening. I’d suggested that two o’clock in the morning might be safer because there was less likelihood of anyone else being around.

  ‘That’s precisely the time frame when the crims come back to retrieve their booty,’ Bruce said. ‘Besides, if someone does see us, it looks less suspicious being here at eight at night than two in the morning.’

  We used our access code to enter the facility, and then we made our way to Cheops, the pyramid in which, Bruce assured me, there was a unit full of hot merchandise.

  ‘Don’t look up,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing to say we can’t be here after-hours; no point letting the cameras take a picture of our faces, though.’

  We walked in silence across the concrete. The storage pyramids looked imposing in the spotlit landscape. Someone else was making their way back from Khafre, and we exchanged a nod.

  ‘Our destination,’ Bruce said, as we rode the lift up the centre of Cheops, ‘is 34C.’

  When we reached the unit, Bruce bent down to examine the padlock: a run-of-the-mill zinc-plated Fortress.

  ‘Your average thief wouldn’t know a good padlock if it fell out of the sky and smashed his head open,’ he remarked. ‘This is your standard pin-tumbler mechanism. Four pins. Easy. Observe.’

  He reached into his pants pocket and produced a slim little case, containing a small tension wrench and a row of hooked metal implements of varying sizes.

  ‘To master lock picking,’ Bruce said, ‘you must master your senses.’ He selected a pick from the case. ‘Get a feel for the internal mechanisms.’

  He knelt down and turned the padlock so that the keyhole faced out. With his left hand he inserted the tension wrench and, with his right, the hook. He moved the hook around ever so slightly, locating and setting the pins in turn.

  ‘You must be very gentle. Imagine, if you like, that the padlock is a woman, and that the pick is your finger. You’re pleasuring her, locating and pressing the right buttons, gently, carefully, until she opens herself up to you completely.’

  He felt around a bit more with the pick, applying more pressure on the cylinder with the tension wrench.

  ‘And voila.’ He gave the wrench a twist, and the shackle sprung open with a satisfying click.

  The unit contained a bit of a lucky dip: some watches, some jewellery, some cameras, a laptop. There was also an expensive mountain bike, a couple of snowboards, camping gear. A nice selection, although some of it didn’t appear brand-new.

  ‘Looks like someone’s robbed a Kathmandu,’ Bruce said.

  ‘What about the jewellery and the laptop?’

  ‘This stuff could have come from a number of break-ins. House break-ins is my guess. Now, we’ve got to work fast. It’s unlikely anyone’s going to show up, but why tempt fate?’

  We stuffed a modest portion of the gear into a couple of sports bags and fucked off out of there quickly.

  ‘What do you normally do with this stuff?’ I said, watching Bruce slip the padlock back into place.

  ‘Some things I sell,’ Bruce said. ‘Other things I keep. The point is, Ken, this place is brimming with things – things for the taking. And as far as I’m concerned, you can never have too many things.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Thank fuck for things.’ I was still so nervous I didn’t know what I was saying; I just agreed with him.

  As we loaded the goods into the back of the car, I asked Bruce why he’d left his job at Dooley’s Irish Bar.

  ‘I was sick of the hospitality industry,’ he replied. ‘I wanted out.’

  He said nothing more for a while, but then he added, ‘To be completely honest, they gave me the boot.’

  ‘Why?’

  Bruce clammed up again. Eventually, he said, ‘Because I went too far.’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  But I couldn’t induce him to say any more that night. I found that strange, because most of the time it was difficult to get him to shut his mouth.

  Fourteen

  I sat on my swivel chair, swivelling left and swivelling right. As I swivelled, I thought about Ellen and the times we’d shared right here in this office. The inflatable mattress, still lying there on the floor – I was using it quite a lot these days – felt enormous and lonely without her. I thought of the nights we’d spent at her house watching Doctor Who, which I didn’t particularly like, but with Ellen beside me it didn’t matter. From time to time I’d put on one of my albums, hoping that she’d come to appreciate the genius of Crimson, but she could never stand more than five minutes.

  ‘It’s doing my bloody head in!’ she’d say.

  I couldn’t help thinking that, given more time, she’d change her mind.

  One Friday night after we’d been drinking, she produced from her bedside drawer a poem she’d written, years earlier, to her stepfather. The poem didn’t refer directly to him or his misdeeds, but there was no mistaking what it was all about.

  ‘Did you ever show him that?’ I said.

  ‘I’d always intended to send it to him,’ Ellen said, ‘but I kept putting it off. Pretty lame, really.’ She smiled, just for a moment. ‘And then he died. So. Not much point sending it now, is there?’

  ‘I didn’t know he was dead. What’d he die of?’

  ‘Cance
r. Went on for a long time, too – he suffered, all right. That’s karma for you.’

  Fuck karma. He’d messed Ellen up good and proper and never paid for it, not really. What a fucking bastard. I swivelled in my chair, fantasising that I could go back in time and give him what he deserved.

  I rolled the chair over to the office safe. Years earlier, a defaulter had left behind some handguns and boxes of ammo – stolen, no doubt, or maybe used to steal something else. I gave them all to the police, except for a Heckler & Koch 9-millimetre semiautomatic that took my fancy. I’m not a gun freak or anything like that – far from it – but something about that Heckler & Koch appealed to me: the shape and the weight, or the curves and the indentations, or the matt black skin, or maybe all of those things. I locked it away in the safe, taking it out every now and again, just to hold for a while. Its cold weight felt immensely satisfying and immensely terrifying.

  I swivelled in my chair, holding the Heckler & Koch.

  ‘Hello, Ellen’s stepfather.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Me? I’m here to give you a message.’

  ‘What message?’

  ‘This.’

  Then I’d produce the Heckler & Koch from my coat, because I’d be wearing a coat, and jam the barrel against his heart, or maybe his head. Bang!

  If only he wasn’t already dead. I could have proved my love to Ellen with that single heroic act. But supposing he were still alive – would I really have the balls to do it? I’d never loaded a gun, let alone fired one, let alone fired one at a person. You just never knew, though. Maybe I had it in me. Maybe we all do. Maybe it’s just a matter of finding the right situation.

  Gun in hand, I rolled back over to my desk. I picked up the phone and dialled Ellen’s number. It was disconnected; I’d forgotten about that. Maybe I’d send her an email. No, I didn’t like email: too impersonal. I considered taking the lift up to Unit 40 to have a look at the scooters. That unit contained Ellen’s spirit, if not Ellen herself; that was something, something to keep me going. But I was pretty sure that the scooters, those motorised emblems of physical decay, would leave me feeling even gloomier.

  I surveyed the office, noticing how shabby it looked. Old and now slightly damp cardboard boxes were arranged in uneven rows along the rear wall, all the way up to the ceiling. We’d once done a reasonable trade selling storage boxes to renters, but these days we hardly sold any, mainly because there weren’t many renters to sell them to. All those boxes did now was form a pointless inner wall, making the office that much smaller. Little mounds of thermoplastic starch noodles, the kind used as packing material, had spilled out of some of the boxes and onto the carpet. For some reason Bruce’s OCD tendencies didn’t extend to the office itself, so the whole mess had been sitting there for Christ knows how long.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Bruce!’ I called. ‘Where are you?’ Typical Bruce: never around when you wanted him, always around when you didn’t want him.

  I heard a rustling sound. A moment later, a mouse emerged from behind the lowest layer of boxes. He had a packing noodle in his mouth and was nibbling away as casual as you like. Hardly surprising: we’d encountered each other in here a number of times before.

  I pointed the unloaded gun at the mouse and went, ‘Bang! Bang!’ He paused, glanced up for a moment, then carried on with his meal. I placed the Heckler & Koch on the table, trying to remember what I’d been thinking about before the mouse had interrupted my train of thought. It was no use: I couldn’t remember.

  On impulse, I gripped the sides of the swivel chair and jumped, launching myself and the chair an inch or so into the air. As I landed, the wheels struck the threadbare carpet, sending vibrations across the cement floor and causing the mouse to scurry back to his hide-out behind the boxes. I watched and waited. Thirty seconds later he re-emerged. I gripped the chair and jumped again. He ran off, but returned again. I repeated the procedure, becoming immersed in this little game. Inevitably, that’s when Bruce decided to show his face.

  ‘What’s that you’re doing there, Ken? Looks pretty strenuous, whatever it is.’

  I stopped doing what I was doing. The mouse seemed to have fucked off completely by this point anyway.

  ‘Why don’t you clean this place up for once?’ I said. ‘It’s a fucking mess. Did you know we have mice?’

  ‘You told me not to clean the office, remember? You said you like it this way because you know where everything is.’

  ‘Did I? When did —’

  ‘Ah. Is that the Heckler & Koch?’

  I’d left the gun sitting on the desk.

  ‘How do you know about that? I said.

  ‘What do you mean, Ken? You showed it to me. You were like: “Man, I love this gun” – as a piece of craftsmanship, that is, not for actual firing purposes.’

  ‘That goes without saying. But … when was this?’

  ‘Ages ago, when it was left behind.’

  I studied the gun, trying to remember.

  ‘And sometimes,’ Bruce went on, ‘you take it out and look at it, don’t you? That’s what you’re doing now, isn’t it? You see, I remember these things; I’ve got an excellent memory.’

  ‘Good for you,’ I said.

  We both contemplated the Heckler & Koch for a little while. Then Bruce spoke up again.

  ‘Can I make a confession, Ken?’

  ‘A confession?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  What sort of confession? Did I really want to hear it?

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘Sometimes I take it out and look at it too.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘I take it out. I like to hold it in my hand. It’s so … satisfying, isn’t it?’

  I looked at the gun. I looked at Bruce. I looked at the safe.

  ‘How do you – who gave you the combination? I’m the only one who knows the combination.’

  ‘You were, but then you told me, too – just in case of an emergency. Shit, Ken, what’s happening to your memory? You’re too young to be getting dementia.’

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t take the gun out,’ I said.

  ‘Come on, Ken, it’s just a gun,’ Bruce said. ‘Technically not your gun, either.’

  Now Bruce was holding the Heckler & Koch. When did he pick it up off the desk?

  ‘Careful with that,’ I said.

  Bruce clutched the weapon, appreciating its weight, enjoying its blackness. Then he raised it to his eye and fired off an imaginary round at the wall of boxes.

  ‘Don’t worry, Ken, I’m always careful. Anyway, you know what they say: guns don’t kill people; people do.’

  Fifteen

  I felt kind of guilty after Bruce and I stole the things from Unit 34C at Pharaoh’s Tomb, even though I kept reminding myself that the things had already fallen off the back of a proverbial truck. But as Bruce pointed out, we’re conditioned to feel guilty about stealing anything, even if the theft is justified, or at least neutral. Maybe I was more concerned about getting caught.

  On the other hand, I was getting revenge on Ron Wood and augmenting my income at the same time, and that made me feel quite good. So did the thrill I got from the very act of breaking into those units, taking some of the things inside, and getting away with it.

  Over the next couple of months, we broke into at least five more units. Bruce would discreetly notify me of an upcoming ‘visit’ so I could be prepared. He had this habit of appearing just after I’d had some sort of altercation with Ron Wood, and coming out with this stock expression: ‘I’ve got one ripe for the picking.’ I would reply, ‘Where and when is harvest time?’ Then he would tell me which unit we would be visiting and when the visit would take place.

  We selected a bunch of different things: a computer here, a flat-screen TV there, a tennis racquet somewhere else – bits and pieces across a series of units. I was surprised at just how much stolen gear was being stored at Pharaoh’s Tomb Box Hill North, but Bruce claimed that every sel
f-storage facility was bristling with the stuff.

  In between times, he gave me little tutorials in the art of lock picking. The man was an expert. He could pick pretty much any lock that you put in front of him, unless it was some exceptionally high-security model (like a Sargent and Greenleaf), but they were rare in self-storage facilities.

  ‘How did you get so proficient?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve been a padlock enthusiast for years,’ Bruce said. ‘Big collector.’

  ‘Surprised you haven’t mentioned that.’

  ‘Well, I don’t like to blow my own trumpet – although I did steal a trumpet once. Good one, too.’ Bruce paused for a moment. ‘Where was I? Yeah, so I had all these locks – heaps of the things – but not of all of them had keys. One day I was bored, so I decided to challenge myself: can I open a locked padlock without the benefit of a key? I made my own pick and tension wrench out of two paperclips and spent about an hour trying to open one padlock. Once I finally worked out how to do it, the next one was easier. I systematically made my way through all of the keyless locks. After that it became a bit of a hobby. Sharpens the brain, Ken. Plus, it’s very therapeutic, like woodwork or whatever. A useful activity if you have a lot of time on your hands and spend a lot of that time alone. You strike me as such a person.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’ I asked.

  ‘Because we’re two of a kind, Ken. Nothing wrong with it, either.’

  During breaks at work, we sat in his car and he would produce a padlock from his private collection and demonstrate how to disable the mechanism: pin tumbler locks, warded locks, combination locks. I’d already become familiar with padlocks in the course of my work at Pharaoh’s Tomb, and now I came to know them far more intimately: which ones were easy, which ones not so easy. Most were pickable if you had patience and learned to use your senses. And eight out of ten of the padlocks we came across were the cheapest and flimsiest types. Lots were the generic brand we sold at Pharaoh’s Tomb.