Lock Artist

by Steve Hamilton

  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 re
tracted 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.”

  Unless you already know how many wheels are in the lock, you spin the dial a few times and park all of the wheels, somewhere far from the contact area. Dial back and count how many times the drive pins pick up another wheel. That’s how many wheels you have. That’s how many numbers are in the combination.

  That much I could probably show you how to do in a few minutes. What happens next is the part that I can describe to you, but I’ll never be able to actually show you how to do it. You either can or you can’t. For most people, on most safes, you just can’t.

  This is the part where you park all the wheels at 0 this time, then you go back to the contact area. You “measure” how big that area is. It’s going to be a little bit different every time you go there. And if any one of the wheels happens to have a notch around that number, the range will be slightly shorter. According to the Ghost, most safecrackers actually write down the number ranges on a little graph, but if you have a good enough memory, you can remember the ranges. Go back and park at 3, measure again. Then at 6, and so on. It takes a while. Most dials go to 100.

  When you’ve worked your way through, those numbers with the shorter contact areas are approximately the numbers in your ultimate combination. You have to go back and narrow those down. If it’s a 33, you measure at 32 and 34, et cetera. Until you’ve got your final numbers.

  The last part is a little bit more grunt work, because while you know your numbers now, you don’t know the order. If you’ve got three numbers, you’ve got 6 possible combinations to try. If you’ve got four numbers, you’ve got 24 combinations to try. Five numbers, 120. Six numbers, 720. Which is a hell of a lot of combinations, but not so bad if you’re fast on the dial. And remember that you only go as far as you have to, until you find the right combination. If you’re lucky, it’ll come early.

  As mad as the Ghost had gotten when he saw me try to grind through the numbers on a little combination lock, the ironic thing is that on a big safe, once you’ve gotten those numbers, you have no choice but to work your way through them one combination at a time.

  That’s the basic idea. Problem is, the better the safe, the quieter the dial is going to be. Feeling your way through those contact points … that takes a special kind of touch, the kind of touch that the Ghost was talking about, caressing the safe like it’s a woman, feeling the slightest tiny movement deep inside her. This was the kind of touch I just didn’t have yet. No matter how much I hushed those singing voices in my head, no matter how close I got to the safe itself, with my cheek resting against the cool metal, my right hand on the dial … I turned it and felt only the general idea of that lever hitting the contact points. He ran through the whole procedure seven or eight times for me, let me try it on my own. He even gave me the numbers so I’d know exactly where to find them. I went to the 17. I felt the first touch. The emptiness in between. The second touch. Yes, I’ve got it. It’s right there. Go to 25 now. It should feel different now. Feel the first point, the second. Is it different? Can you feel it?

  No. I couldn’t feel it. Not that first day.

  He gave me more homework, a safe lock to take home. An actual dial and wheel set. It was no bigger than my fist, and it didn’t weigh more than two or three pounds. I could take it anywhere and practice the general method anytime I wanted. It wasn’t the same as doing it on a real safe, but it was something to get started with.

  That’s what I did. All that day. All that night. Every waking moment. As long as Amelia was still away, what the hell else was I going to do, anyway?

  I still wasn’t feeling it. Not even close.

  When I went back the next day, there was an actual customer in the store. I’d come to learn that the Ghost had intentionally made the place as uninviting as possible. He kept it dark, he kept most of the worst junk up front, and when somebody actually came inside, he was as charming to them as he was to me most of the time. If they actually wanted to buy something, he’d make up a ridiculous price and not budge from it by one penny. Obviously, selling junk to people off the street was not the real reason for this particular junk store’s existence. That was as much as I knew then.

  So when this day’s customer was shooed away, the Ghost took me back to the safes and ran through the procedure again. Not that he had to. I certainly knew how it was supposed to work by then. I just couldn’t do it yet.

  “Did you practice on the lock I gave you?”

  I nodded.

  “Did you open that yet?”

  I shook my head.

  “Sit. Practice.”

  I did. For the next four hours, I did nothing but turn the dials. I moved from safe to safe, hoping to find one that would feel a little easier. I dialed and listened and tried to feel those contact points. By four o’clock I was sweating and my head hurt. The Ghost came in and didn’t even have to ask me how I’d done. He sent me home and told me to practice with the lock set some more. And to come back the next day a little earlier.

  I came back the next day. More of the same. Spinning. Working myself beyond exhaustion, so I could bring Amelia back home.

  Then the next day. More spinning. Going home with the practice lock and spinning some more.

  The next day, I had to take a break and keep an appointment with my probation officer. He looked a little tired and overworked, and I had no idea what he might say when he sat me down in his office.

  “I talked to Mr. Marsh this morning,” he said.

  This could be interesting, I thought.

  “He says you’re still doing a fine job. Around the house. At the health club now? He’s got you working at the health club? He’s really got you doing everything, eh?”

  I nodded. Yeah, everything.

  “How’s that pond coming, anyway?”

  I gave him a little shrug. Not bad.

  “I’m anxious to see it when it’s done.”

  Yeah, me, too.

  “You know, we should talk about what happens when you’re done with your ho
urs over there. You’ll still have about ten months left on your probation, which means I’ll be talking to the faculty at your high school. You know that perfect attendance is part of your compliance, right?”

  I nodded. Yeah, sure.

  “All righty then. I guess we’re good for today, eh?”

  Couldn’t be better, I thought. I shook his hand and left the probation office. Got on my bike and drove down to Detroit for another day of safecracking school.

  I kept working at it. I spent so many hours in the back of that store, it started to feel like home to me. One day, the Ghost left me alone for a few hours. He said he had to go run some errands, and that if anybody came into the store, I should just stay in the back until they gave up and left.

  A couple of hours passed, just me and the safes. Until I looked up and saw a man standing there, watching me. He was tall. He had dark hair that looked slicked back against his head, like he had spent a fair amount of time that morning getting it just right. He was wearing a blue suit, with a white shirt and a wide red tie.

  “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you,” he said. Even though I was sure I had shown no sign of being scared.

  “I’m looking for the owner. Is he around?”

  I shook my head.

  “What’cha got here, anyway? A bunch of safes?”

  I took my hand off the dial. I sat up straight in my chair.

  “These are some beauties.”

  He ran his hand down one of the smooth metal sides.

  “You sell these? You should have them out front.”

  I looked around. I wasn’t exactly sure what to do. Something about this man, the way he had walked all the way back here. Through the darkness, down the hallway … it wasn’t the kind of thing most people would do.

  “My name’s Harrington Banks,” he said. “Most people call me Harry.”

  He stuck out his right hand. I hesitated for one beat and then shook it.

  “You don’t mind me being back here, do you? I figured it was part of the store.”

  I kept looking up at him. He was already tall enough without me being way down here in my rolling chair.