The Clause

by Brian Wiprud

  I took a slug of bourbon.

  The apartment we targeted was not the kind of place where the super-rich and famous lived, not the kind of place you expected to find Britany-Swindol, probably because the local gentry had never even heard of anything nicer than Bulgari. A pile of Britany-

  Swindol the size of a turkey platter at the Grand Excelsior was almost like finding the Hope Diamond at Zales.

  This was all wrong, but it clicked somehow, because Trudy getting killed was all wrong, too. They shot her without any warning, when she was unarmed.

  The safe and its pile was the reason the goons showed up. That’s where we tripped the alarm. Had we set off an alarm somewhere else in the apartment, they would have been there sooner. And something told me they wouldn’t have been willing to use deadly force if they were a legit security outfit.

  I drained my glass but froze when the glass was halfway to the table.

  The Britany-Swindol heist.

  It was a Macau couture-store smash-and-grab heist back in June by the Serbian mob.

  I suddenly understood.

  Three

  My day job brought me to the Grand Excelsior to fix screens. That’s right, I was “The Screen Man.” It said so on the side of my white van. I made house calls servicing the high-rise buildings along Boulevard East, the ones on top of the cliff called the Palisades across the Hudson from Manhattan. I knew most of the supers of those buildings, and bought them Johnnie Walker Blue for Christmas so I would get called in to fix the tenants’ torn or bent screens. Some of these high-rises were more exclusive than others, and the Excelsior happened to be one with rich slobs on every floor. By slobs I mean new money—self-made men with a string of hardware stores or in construction or car dealerships. They need to show everybody that they’re rich, so they throw their money around on things of value, namely their cars, their suits, their wives, and their wives’ flashy couture jewelry.

  You could give me a ring of keys to Martha’s Vineyard mansions, and I’d hand it right back. The people who are used to being rich buy paintings and art because good taste in their circle is valued over cash and flash. I wouldn’t know what to do with a hot Picasso. Frankly, I think I’d be too afraid to get caught with it and burn it. The great thing about jewelry is that most of it isn’t unique; there’s more than one of a kind and they aren’t numbered or anything, not the Fifth Avenue stuff. It’s also small, easy to fence and re-sell.

  I was talking to the Excelsior’s super, Mikos, back in May. We were in the lobby next to the mailboxes, making chit chat, when this hot brunette with collagen lips and unnaturally high cheekbones walked through the front door. She pointed her tits at Mikos and held out her fluffy, little rat dog. Her accent sounded Slavic, and she said, “Please to hold Brane.”

  Mikos took the dog, his eyes on her cleavage. That’s where my eyes were, too, but not on her tits. My focus was the Tiffany “Jazz” diamond and platinum necklace set. Her finger sported a big rock there, too, but I couldn’t make out the brand. On her ears were Tiffany drop pendant earrings. About fifty grand retail was in just the necklace and earrings.

  The brunette opened a mailbox, pulled out a pile of fliers, took her dog, and went toward the elevators, her butt squeezed tight into a white skirt.

  I jerked a thumb at her. “Whossat?”

  “Idi Raykovic, on eleven, hot stuff.”

  That was her, that was the one Roberto told me about, and that’s why I was snooping around. Roberto came to me with targets now and again.

  “I’d do her screens for free. She mobbed up with the Russians?” That was pertinent. You ripped off the Russians, and you had to be extra careful. Roberto never told me those kinds of details. That stuff I had to figure out for myself.

  “Nah. Macedonian, I think. Her husband is Serbian. One of these Gold Coast developers.”

  I didn’t think anything of that at the time. Sure, Serbians could be rat-bastards, but it didn’t necessarily follow that they were part of a ruthless international gem-theft ring.

  I noted Idi’s mailbox number: 11M.

  From there the operation was pretty simple. Google her name at that address, find out more about her, get the phone number, check out her Facebook page, watch the place to see when she went out, and check on exactly how spark-worthy she was. I spied different baubles, too, not a lot of repeats. Her husband, Tito the real estate developer, took her out every Saturday night like clockwork. So after months of surveillance either by me or Trudy or both of us, we waited by the garage and watched Tito guide his Jag up the boulevard, the silhouette of Idi’s giant teased hair next to him.

  There was a functional pay phone across the street, and we used it to ring their apartment. No answer. Nobody home.

  We climbed over a low wall at the edge of the cliff and around the side of the swimming-pool enclosure on a rocky ledge. Just where the ledge gave out, I boosted Trudy to the top of the wall. On the other side there was a dark stairwell that led down into the pool’s pump room. She surveyed the surroundings, then gave me a hand up. We both wore the super-grip gloves, great for climbing walls and ropes. At the bottom of the stairwell, we both pulled pry bars from our packs and in unison levered the lock away from the jamb and pushed in.

  Through a connecting basement room, we made our way to a stairwell. In a high-rise like that, the stairwells were only used as fire exits, except maybe now and again by security or maintenance. Up we went, to the eleventh floor.

  Part of what took us so long to initiate this operation was that Roberto said we had to wait until he gave us the go-ahead. Timing was critical, and he figured July sometime. The other part was that we were waiting for an apartment near 11M to open up—either above, below, next to, something. Tito and Idi had an alarm pad next to their door and a very serious-looking armor-plated lock, so we had no intention of going in that way. Normally we would have just come down onto their terrace from the roof on ropes, but the building was twenty-four floors high. It wasn’t that we were scared; heights stopped bothering me a long time back when I was a window washer in Manhattan. It was just that we would be exposed to too many windows on the way down. We’d be seen.

  A vacancy did come up in July, number 11K, two over at the corner and perfectly positioned across from the stairwell. A real estate agent let us in the first time, and we noted the code the agent poked into the lockbox on the door handle. Inside was the key. After telling the front desk that we were there to see the apartment again, we used the lockbox key to bring two planks, thick and wide, and put them in the closet. Anybody else who visited the apartment would think the planks were spare shelves. Those would be our bridges from one balcony to the next. As it happened, 11L next door was being renovated and so was empty. All we had to do was go from one terrace to the next, over a three-foot gap, to find ourselves on the terrace of 11M.

  Almost nobody ever locks their terrace doors that high up. They think that being high up gives them security, and it does, keeps teenagers and riffraff from stealing their laptops. Even still, I had a lot of experience with sliding terrace doors, and they were dead easy compared to actual locks, which take way too much time to pick even if you had a talent for that sort of thing, which I didn’t.

  So that night we let ourselves into 11K, got our bridges from the closet, and crawled across 11L’s terrace to 11M’s terrace. They had a wide view of Manhattan’s glowing mountain of light, which glittered on the river. Of course, those views were available to most people who live in the high-rises on the Gold Coast, and even some who lived in the jumble of townhouses, apartments, and pier developments down below. The views are part of the point of living there.

  Technically, the Gold Coast is what the realtors call the west bank of the Hudson River—New Jersey—across from Manhattan, from Bayonne in the south to Fort Lee in the north. Developers created a housing market to lure cramped Manhattan dwellers with s
pacious apartments complete with fireplaces, decks, views, and parking. The more dots on the map labeled “gold,” the better for real estate agents.

  Locals, on the other hand, think anything south of the Lincoln Tunnel is a different state. If you live on the Palisades, the Gold Coast is only the towns bracketed by the Lincoln Tunnel and George Washington Bridge: Weehawken, West New York, Guttenberg, North Bergen, Edgewater, and Fort Lee. Six towns straddling the Palisade cliffs.

  All of the Gold Coast was laid out below us and to the horizon north and south as we crawled across our bridges to 11M. The terrace’s sliding doors were locked, with a broom handle lying in the channel. A helpful piece of burglary equipment is a set of spring steel strips bent and curved into various shapes. Different shapes can be slid between windows or through door jambs to manipulate locks. Trudy used her pry bar to lift the sliding door off its track so that I could insert a piece of spring steel and lift the broom handle out of the door channel. Another piece of spring steel at the handle flicked open the latch. I slid the door open.

  Brane the dog came trotting into the living room, growling, about to make a huge fuss. We made nice sounds, tossed him a slumburger, and retreated back to the balcony for fifteen long minutes. When we peeked back in, the burger laced with sleep-aid capsules had done its magic—Brane was curled up on the couch. His eyes were half open, but he clearly was in no mood to make a fuss.

  Almost nobody with alarms actually sets them. Why? Probably because they’re lazy, or because the alarms keep going off by accident—the sensors can freak when the wind blows hard or when the window frames expand in summer. Motion detectors were not an option for Tito and Idi because the dog would set them off. Anybody with cats or dogs is an easier target for that reason.

  Almost nobody hides their jewelry, unless you think a jewelry box on a dressing table is a good hiding spot. Diode lamp in my teeth, I looted Idi’s box while Trudy went in to check the walk-in closet.

  Trudy sang: “Found it.”

  If there is a combination safe, it is usually in the closet with the rest of the woman’s clothes. This time it was pretty clever. You lifted a shelf and it was hinged, folding up a panel that covered the safe.

  We’re not safe-crackers, but you don’t have to be one, because safes are left mostly unlocked. If it is locked, just take the whole thing. We’re not talking about a half-ton safe here. Wall safes are about the size of a toaster oven, and a lot of times you can just pry the whole thing out of the wall or out of the floor. Then it’s just a matter of hauling it back to the garage and power-sawing it in half like a melon.

  This safe was locked.

  Here comes another “almost never.” Even when people do lock their safe, they usually don’t spin the dial beyond the last click, which is what you have to do to scramble the combination. I think people are afraid that they will forget the combination and so just turn the dial partway away from the last number. Either that or they are too lazy to spin the dial a couple times. And those that do lock the safe often write the combination on the wall somewhere nearby. Laughable.

  Trudy gently turned the dial counterclockwise with one hand, the other vibrating the tumbler bolt.

  “Bingo,” she sang, and the safe door opened.

  I know, this all sounds easy, but Tito’s place was actually a difficult job. The fact of the matter is that people usually don’t think anybody is going to rob them because nobody ever has, even though they took the trouble to install security devices, and unless they’re paranoid or obsessive-compulsive, people generally make the least effort possible. I think it might be sort of like people who buy gym memberships and never go to the gym.

  Tito and Idi were security geniuses compared to most. Hidden the way it was, the safe’s concealment indicated that some serious thought had been put into the possibility of actual thieves looking for it. Most closet safes are right behind a curtain of clothes on hangers.

  Trudy slung her sack under the safe door and shoveled the contents of the safe into her bag, closed the safe door, turned the knob several times, and lowered the tricky shelf. “You hear all those sparks? The safe was loaded. Let’s scramble.”

  “Not yet. Sock drawer,” I said pointing to the bedroom.

  I always looked forward to this part of an operation. A sock drawer sums up how little people think about where they hide stuff, and how they think exactly the same.

  Top right-hand drawer of the dresser is usually the sock drawer for a man. It is in this place that mankind—after making atomic bombs, moon landings, and artificial hearts—cleverly believes that a crook will never think to look for valuables. Okay, sometimes it’s the underwear drawer.

  Tito had a roll of cash in with his socks, and I shoved that down into my knapsack.

  There was a glint on top of the dresser, and I pointed my diode on it.

  “Patek Philippe. Nice.” I put his watch in my sack.

  “You done already?”

  “After you.”

  We wiped up where the hamburger had been on the carpet, used the spring steel to relock the door and roll the broom handle back into place, and went back across our planks to 11K’s terrace, taking the bridges with us.

  From 11K’s terrace we saw lights come on in 11M. We could hear several people enter, males, and they spoke urgently.

  Trudy looked at me. “Fucket! That safe must’ve been bugged.”

  Back in 11K, we stashed the boards and removed our black T-shirts and gloves, tossing them into the bathroom sink cabinet. We had spares in the front pouch of our sacks, wrinkle-free casual plaid shirts that make a person look a lot less like a burglar.

  We listened at the front door. No voices. It would take them a while to open the safe because we scrambled the combination. We stepped out into the hallway.

  To our left was a very serious-looking young man in a shiny suit and spiked hair, standing guard in front of 11M.

  I smiled at him. Trudy smiled at him.

  “You got your glasses, sugar?”

  Trudy was holding her sack like it was a purse, in the crook of her elbow. “I didn’t forget this time.”

  We walked the hallway, hearts in our ears. Going down the same stairs we came up was impossible because that goon would have seen us, and using anything but the elevator would seem suspicious. At the same time, using the elevators was dangerous—they all have cameras in them and it was too easy to get trapped. Not that I hadn’t used elevators in a jam, and walked right out the front lobby, but it was better to exit in a way that maximized the escape alternatives, especially with goons in tow. So we walked past the elevators and into the other stairwell at the opposite side of the building. Faster than any elevator, we bounded down to the first floor and then to the basement.

  Just outside the door to the basement was a sign pointing right that said POOL.

  Around we went. Walking fast. Didn’t see anybody. We could smell the chlorine.

  Nobody was poolside because the lifeguard was off duty and the pool was officially closed, submersed lights off.

  We crept next to the building, under the cameras, until we reached the wall that separated us from the sidewalk. I boosted Trudy halfway up, and she took a peek around the corner toward the lobby.

  “Clear.”

  Moments later we were walking north along the sidewalk toward our mountain bikes chained to a lamppost.

  I know, sounds stupid, but bicycles are tactically ideal for making a transition from the operation to the getaway car. No license plates, for one. For two, mountain bikes go places cop cars can’t and where people on foot can’t keep up.

  We had them unlocked and were about to pedal away when we heard a shout behind us. There was no looking back, just moving forward: escape.

  There was a pop.

  Even Trudy didn’t realize she was compromised until we
got to the SUV.

  I’ve already been through what happened next.

  A jillion times.

  ALL WARFARE IS BASED ON DECEPTION. WHEN ABLE TO ATTACK, WE MUST SEEM UNABLE. WHEN USING OUR FORCES, WE MUST SEEM INACTIVE. WHEN WE ARE NEAR, WE MUST SEEM FAR. WHEN FAR, WE MUST SEEM NEAR. BAIT THE ENEMY, PRETEND YOU ARE WEAK, THEN CRUSH HIM. IF THE ENEMY IS READY, BE READY FOR HIM. IF YOUR ENEMY IS IN SUPERIOR STRENGTH, EVADE HIM. IF THE OPPONENT IS IRRITABLE, IRRITATE HIM. FAKE WEAKNESS TO MAKE HIM RECKLESS. IF HE RESTS, GIVE HIM NO REST. IF HIS FORCES ARE UNIFIED, DIVIDE THEM. ATTACK YOUR OPPONENT WHEN HE IS UNPREPARED, AND APPEAR WHERE YOU ARE LEAST EXPECTED.

  —Sun Tzu, The Art of War

  Four

  In the barn that night, I realized that I’d stolen from a syndicate.

  And not just any syndicate.

  The Serbians.

  The Britany-Swindol heist? They drove a stolen dump truck into the front of the Britany-Swindol store, machine-gunned the staff and display cases, looted, and left in a getaway car. They’d done likewise in other cities like London, Tokyo, Milan, and Monaco. Now and again the heat caught up with them, put one or two in jail. Those captured never fingered anybody, and often as not these guys were such hard cases that they escaped in a burst of unexpected violence. Some fugitives were killed in their escapes, though largely due to their thinking they could survive a swim across the English Channel, a thousand-foot dive off a cliff into the Mediterranean, or win at chicken between a Fiat and a bullet train.

  I’ll try to put this as politely as I can: there were no greater scumbags in organized crime than these Serbs, known to many as The Kurac. Or simply Kurac, which always sounded to me like some sort of skin disease. Kurac was a common Serbian expletive. It translated to cock, and even though I think this gang of thieves was labeled Kurac by others as an insult, they seemed to like the name. Kurac was swagger and badass.