It Takes a Thief

by Niels Hammer

  “We return to the same question. It depends. What would you like to do?”

  “So I have to come to a decision?”

  “Only if you want to. You can come to a decision now or you can decide that you don’t want to come to any decision. As long as you’re pleased with what you do I don’t care what you do.”

  “You mean I could just stay at home and make dinner?”

  “You don’t have to do that if you don’t want to. I am used to cook for myself, though I don’t do it every day. And there is a plethora of phenomena waiting to be explored, allopatric speciation of Leopards, Quattrocento paintings, cosmology, Renaissance music – ”

  “Why do you think that would be enough? I want to act, to change things.”

  “And the nature of consciousness, but you’re acting already. We’re fighting at the Hot Gates. The risks are very great that we will fail, and that the environmental disaster will destroy nearly all mammals, birds, reptiles and most plant species and of course the original destroyer as well. But the Sun will continue to shine benevolently for another eight hundred million years so Nature will eventually regenerate, maybe after twenty or forty million years, though even with that perspective it’s a bitter, a very bitter comfort, so we have to stop this escalating mass extinction. What could be more worth while than to fight this battle though with the back against the wall?”

  Taking hold of his hand again she sat looking out over the rippling surface of the water and the swaying leaves of the greenwood trees and out into the future when all this would be covered by concrete – asphalt – factories and industrial waste – and feeling how she reviewed the perspectives he waited patiently to hear what she would say – but she took her time and looked at the Sky above to discover just what her answer should be.

  “I’ll see what I can do, that is, if I can do anything, but I don’t know enough yet to act. It was as much your earnestness, your anger or your despair that made me think about what you said, most of which, of course, I knew already.”

  “Have you thought about any engineering options, or even teaching martial arts?”

  “I decided long ago that engineering was too devoid of life, but the martial arts may be a possibility though I don’t have patience with other people if I don’t really care about them. I must have challenges, and while you will be the greatest challenge, I would like some minor ones as well, but of another and more manageable kind.”

  Smiling to put him in a more sober perspective she accepted the reorientation of her life as a step inherent in her progress – in her female metamorphoses. Resigned to accept – by mutual and mute consent – that the day would die so soon regardless of what they did or did not do – they began – as new-minted lovers and wayward sages – to carry the gear – and the care of having to survive – up into the car to continue on their way. They would now – hand in hand – walk along the edge of death to fulfil what they were destined to do.

  “We have everything. There’s nothing left in the boat but the scaffold.”

  “All right. When we come home we’ll have a hot bath.”

  They drove slowly across the surface of the planet with the humming noise of the motor in their ears. The morning had outgrown its pristine sweetness and feeling too tired to be practical he left everything in the car and opened the door for her.

  “Hurry up and fill the bathtub. I’ll give you a glass of Armagnac. Your teeth are chattering again, more from fatigue now than from cold.”

  He dragged himself upstairs – turned the taps on and shed his humid clothes but like a secondary layer of epidermis they clung to his skin. The sweat of anxiety had a rancid smell. As he heard her steps on the stairs he lay back to absorb the heat and the cleansing power of the water. Sipping the fiery liquid of the oak-tuned grapes he watched her undress. Supple and subtle movements unfolded in four dimensions in front of his eyes with a pardaline or ophidian grace. Here was his space. Pēnelopeia blue – Nausikaa green – Kirkē yellow and Kalypsō red – his white wedded goodwife. The level of the water rose. The equivalent of her weight. Naked through the streets of Syrakousai. He had found her.

  “Would you like some?”

  The heat thawed him up. She wrung the last drops out over the golden rim and placed the empty glass on the floor and turned off the water. The caresses of his eyes were tangible and the way she wallowed in them diagnostic of the way she – so yare and so swift – so lithe and so fierce – leaned forward to kiss smiles into his perineum. It was too true to be good. Nur jenseits. How hard it was to love her like he did – but to love one woman was to love them all. Her knees – Padmau – and all that which that entailed – unfolding above the water in this light or floating Nymphéas rouges – though more pale and pearly –

  “You’re obviously all right now.”

  Her healing touch – the ultimate security she now would take for granted.

  “Yes, and hungry.”

  “Let’s make breakfast before we go to sleep. To-morrow at dawn we can dig up our treasure and bury it at a better place when I have taken the stones out of the settings and melted the gold. Will you help me with the pearls?”

  He drew her closer but she pushed him away and rose.

  “I’ll get rid of the smelly cloth and the smelly piece of meat. There was something in the air just now that made me remember them.”

  As she rose to dry herself he lay back in the water to be weightless. She was pragmatic when it mattered and ethereal when that was what it was all about. As warm now as coral seas within the reefs – across the turquoise liquid crystal with the distant surf – white-frothing teeth – gnawing at the calcium carbonate – but within half an hour or so they would be fast asleep tightly intertwined – and sharing dreams – all through their daylit night.

  XXIX

  He noticed a light – though gamey – fragrance flow across his face from her shoulder. They must have been very tired but he had remembered to assure Fjodor. In the mild darkness of the Summer night Arcturus was a faintly orange glow in the western Sky – so they had passed twelve hours of their lives in the gentle state of partial awareness – but it was still soothing to let time flow on untrammelled by activity. There were no clouds obscuring the stars and Dawn – the supreme change in each revolution – would be as always ever new. They should leave at three and at least begin to stir within an hour or an hour and a half – but it would be best to let her sleep till she woke up by herself – however – then he could not think about her – at least not with any degree of intensity. They had chanced to dodge the pitfalls and hazards by a little foresight – a certain degree of perseverance and a pot of good solid luck. The transmitter on her car would have given them five or six paltry minutes in which to get away. Imagining the doubt – for a second – about whether the admonition from the receiver could be real – the glance to note the time while scrambling frantically downstairs to reach the door – lock it if her headlights had not yet illuminated the driveway and the wild run down towards the river in the dark to find the boat – sparked zig-zagging shivers up from the tips of his toes to close his mind. However – it would have taken her a couple of minutes to find the dog and another couple of minutes to ascertain that her jewellery was missing. But while he had a tendency to exaggerate the complications Caitlin had an experience that enabled her to evaluate the potential risks with an exactitude that escaped his comprehension – so his spontaneous anxiety had predominantly been a function – as she had said – of his ignorance and fear. They had filled the vacuum of his lack of experience. Nursed by anxiety he had not been able to form a qualified opinion but had formed a wrong opinion at every juncture. Awareness of expanding cyclones in the Caribbean would give a deeper insight into the origin and nature of affective states when they reached the shores of the East Atlantic Ocean as conscious deliberations. Silently he slipped out of the bed – picked up his morning coat and closed the
door to the sleep-drenched room without setting the air in motion. It was almost half past twelve so he had plenty of time in which to make tea and prepare their picnic. It would be another long day – especially for Mis’ess Trevor – for having been deeply attached to her jewellery she would be bound to feel dejected when she realised her loss. They had also robbed her of the keys to her memories. Suddenly he wanted to make amends – but how? By giving her back the jewels? Caitlin would understand him and yet she would not. He was a sentimental wretch who endowed a stranger with his own emotions – a stranger about whom he knew next to nothing. Her picture had given him the impression that she would not have been pleasant company – but even vile people had affections – as she certainly had for her dog. He would have to live with the burden of having done her harm – though probably less harm than he imagined and Caitlin’s soft steps on the stairs dissolved his thoughts about Mis’ess Trevor in the air – as if they had never existed but as an illusion caused by assuming that his sensibility could signify a golden mean.

  “How nice, I’m so hungry. We must have been dead-tired. It’s almost one o‘clock!”

  “We have plenty of time, two hours, and the morning will be fine.”

  Washed clean by the waters of sleep she sat down to kiss him good morning – and her reborn innocence revealed an imperturbable satisfaction with herself – with him and with what they had accomplished – so he had no reason not to be just as satisfied as she was. Anyway – his quest had ended but another one had just begun.

  “You know, we were lucky, really.”

  “Lucky? I thought you had banished that unmanageable factor from your neat equation?”

  Touched by his persuasive pressure she laughed and kissed him again.

  “Oh no, I do not mean that kind of luck, only that she had more jewellery than I had expected.”

  “But how could you possibly have estimated the amount of her jewels?”

  “Her house gave a certain general indication if not of opulence then at least of a well-to-do affluence, and middle aged women are attracted to jewels as their natural attractions vanish; but Barbara had told me a little bit about her as Taffy had stayed last year for a week in the same hotel for dogs as the one Mis’ess Trevor had used when she went away for a fortnight. One of the caretakers there had jokingly referred to her as a veritable Christmas Tree.”

  “Did you ask Barbara any questions about Mis’ess Trevor?”

  “Oh no, but I thought it worth while to investigate and you know the result.”

  “She must have relied on her dog.”

  “Yes, she did, and the dog appeared to be trustworthy, a real dog.”

  “Like the mastiffs in Wākān or Swāt who guard children from approaching the edges of the cliffs and Sheep from being attacked by Wolves?”

  “Yes, and I would have felt pretty awful if we had killed him. It would have spoilt the whole adventure; in fact, I would have abandoned the project if that had been the only option, so your idea of using ketamine was a godsend. Together we would be peerless?”

  He answered her smile with a long slow kiss because he loved her self-assurance but was sceptical about his ability to live up the image she had formed of him in her mind’s eye.

  “I’m not a hero as you know very well, or even a dare devil, but a poor susceptible painter prone to nervous attacks and acute idiosyncratic depressions.”

  “You don’t have to excuse yourself and I have a fairly good idea about what you’re capable of doing and about what you would prefer not to touch, and I would nivver ask you to do anything you would not like to do, but all that remains now is to relocate the jewellery.”

  As she wrenched herself out of his embrace he rose reluctantly to shave and dress.

  “I’ll try not to think about you so much that it will prevent me from getting ready.”

  Nodding with her mouth full of bread and honey she did and did not want him to succeed. There was no progress – only change – only processes – so the future would not necessarily be an improvement – it would be different. What happened now might be the zenith of what would ever happen but hope – that forced life to go on living – kept the possibility of a potential enhancement open. It was lethal not to live in the present instinctively. Rational considerations were a bitter blight on the bread and butter of life. Clean and refreshed he made tea and sandwiches while Caitlin took a large bucket – a trowel – the telescope – binoculars and plastic bags. The approaching light of their morning was dreamy and diffuse – the dew drenched the long grass and the Blackbird sitting on the clothesline felt pleased with the sleeping wind as stillness furthered his singing.

  “We should have hung the mattress and the blanket out before we went to sleep.”

  At the jetty the Nightingales surpassed one another as he bailed the bilge water out and wiped the boards dry. A Summer morning without compare. The faint touch of dove grey in the Sky had begun to get a Tea-rose tint that evoked memories of the spicy and fragrant odour when the flowers still were heavy with dew.

  “Come on! What are you waiting for?”

  “I’m watching the pearly grey of the Sky as it begins to get a Tea-rose or a Tiepolo pink tint. There is a continuous shortening of the frequencies and a concomitant increase in intensity but the change becomes more distinct if you close your eyes for twenty or thirty seconds; then the increasing sense of rose-red shifting to orange and deep yellow becomes far more pronounced. While lines give distinctness colours give depth, emotional depth, so they have something of the same function in a painting as melody has in music.”

  He spread the blanket out over the mattress and started the motor.

  “We’ll be there in less than twenty-five minutes while it’s still civil twilight; and I have never seen anyone sail up in that rill as it’s far too overgrown and shallow.”

  Five Mute Swans came at tree-top height to land as if skiing across the slate-dark water.

  “How loud the sound of their wings is at such close quarters.”

  “They are heavy, ten to twelve kilogrammes, and that’s twice the weight of a Golden Eagle, but their wingspan is only half a foot larger than a Golden Eagle’s.”

  “It’s the forceful displacement of air that makes the difference. Are there any eagles here?”

  “In cold winters one or two White-tailed Sea-Eagles who have come down from the North.”

  “Will it be hard to find the place where you hid it?”

  “No, and to avoid any mistake I measured the distance from the low-hanging Rowan by making a knot on the marline here so we will not be able to miss it even if I should have an attack of amnesia; but look! Three Oyster Catchers and an Avocet. There, at the edge of the water.”

  “The black and white of the body contrast with the pink of the legs and the red of the bill. They are all eating something they dig out of the sand or the soil.”

  “Snails, crabs, or molluscs.”

  “The avocet seems to sweep the bill over the surface of the water, and he looks so frail.”

  “He or she catches insects on the water surface, and Avocets migrate to West Africa, along the coast. There are no yachts or even motor-boats around here this early apart from the old ketch over there at anchor, but with such a keel she is not even going to approach the rill.”

  What could they have been doing there for at least twenty-four hours?

  “But there might be ornithologists coming to watch the birds?”

  “Of course, but they usually appear during the weekends and they prefer to stay in a hide or a machān; nevertheless, we will watch out for signs of our conspecifics.”

  He fastened the end of the marline to a twig of the Rowan while Caitlin lifted the overhanging branches up over the scaffold.

  “It has to be here at the end of the line, and you said it was between an alder tree and a goat willow, so it’s in
there, a little to the right.”

  They went ashore armed with the plastic bags – the trowel and the bucket.

  “If you know what to look for the traces are still clearly visible.”

  Wriggling the greensward with the Common Comfrey up he placed it carefully on the plastic bag and began removing the earth which still was rather loose.

  “It’s much easier now. Yesterday I had to dig it up with the fingers.”

  “We didn’t imagine that we would need a trowel like we didn’t imagine that we might have needed masks and spare keys, but here’s the plastic bag with the transmitters and the receivers.”

  “Let me take it.”

  “And here’s the water-tight container.”

  He shovelled the earth down into the hole again – took some mulch from the brink – replaced the greensward and swept the broken-off branch to and fro over their tracks before filling the bucket with water and emptying it out over the hole to let the loose earth settle.

  “It will take an hour to drive to and fro to Lowestoft. Then we can melt the gold in the garage.”

  “I’ll cover the windows with cardboard just in case of a surprise visit.”

  Balancing on the gunwale Caitlin lifted the branches up over the scaffold while he loosened the knot. The riparian thickets along the brinks always gave him the same sense of privacy or even of intimacy for they appeared to be enclosed in their own world – and this feeling of being alone or undisturbed was strengthened when considering the relative inaccessibility of the rill if trying to approach it through the sedge beds.

  “Give me the binoculars. There’s a large bird of prey up there hovering in the air. An Osprey!”

  “Let’s wait awhile to see if he or she should dive down to catch a fish.”

  Hovering like a Merlin the Osprey watched the still surface for a fishy ripple from a distance of thirty meters. Turning aside she folded her wings and swooped down at an angle of seventy degrees to hit the water with her talons – while Caitlin expressed her surprise in a low hiss – and a large splash hid her for an instant before she emerged with empty claws and sinewy wingbeats – just as tenacious as before.