Contract with God aka The Moses Expedition

70

NEW YORK

Wednesday, 19 July 2006. 11.22 p.m.

‘You too, pal,’ said the thin blond plumber. ‘It’s all the same to me. I get paid whether I work or not.’

‘Amen to that,’ agreed the fat plumber with the ponytail. The orange uniform fit him so tightly that from behind it looked as if it was going to burst.

‘Maybe it’s better this way,’ said the guard, agreeing with them. ‘You come back tomorrow and that’s it. Don’t complicate my fucking life. I have two men out sick and I can’t assign anyone to babysit the two of you. Those are the rules: without a babysitter no outside personnel after eight p.m.’

‘You don’t know how grateful we are,’ said the blond one. ‘With a bit of luck the next shift will have to take care of the problem. I don’t feel like fixing busted pipes.’

‘What? Wait, wait,’ said the guard. ‘What are you talking about, busted pipes?’

‘Just that. They’re busted. The same thing happened at Saatchi and Saatchi. Who dealt with that one, Bennie?’

‘I think it was Louie Pigtails,’ said the fat one.

‘Great guy, Louie. God bless him.’

‘Amen to that. Well, see you later, Sarge. Have a good night.’

‘Should we go to Spinato’s, buddy?’

‘Do bears shit in the woods?’

The two plumbers picked up their gear and headed towards the exit.

‘Wait,’ the guard said, getting more anxious with each minute. ‘What happened to Louie Pigtails?’

‘You know, he had an emergency like this one. One night he couldn’t get into the building because of an alarm or something. Anyway, the pressure built up in the drain pipes and they started bursting and, you know, there was shit all over the fucking place.’

‘Yeah… like fucking Vietnam.’

‘Dude, you never set foot in Vietnam, right? My father was there.’

‘Your father spent the seventies stoned.’

‘The thing is that Louie Pigtails is now Bald Louie. Think about what a fucked-up scene that was. What I’m hoping is that there’s nothing too valuable up there, because by tomorrow everything’s gonna be shit brown.’

The guard looked again at the central monitor in the lobby. The emergency lights in room 328E were flashing insistently with a yellow light, which meant there was a problem with the water or gas pipes. The building was so smart it could tell you when your shoes were untied.

He checked the directory to verify the location of 328E. When he realised where it was, he went pale.

‘Fuck, it’s the principal board room on the thirty-eighth floor.’

‘Bad deal, huh, buddy?’ said the fat plumber. ‘I’m sure it’s full of leather furniture and Van Gongs.’

‘Van Gongs? What the fuck! You ain’t got no culture at all. It’s Van Gogh. Gogh. You know.’

‘I know who he is. The Italian painter.’

‘Van Gogh was a German and you’re a jerk. Let’s split and go to Spinato’s before they close. I’m starving over here.’

The guard, who was an art lover, didn’t bother maintaining that Van Gogh was actually Dutch because at that moment he remembered that there really was a Cézanne hanging in the board room.

‘Guys, wait a minute,’ he said, coming out from behind the reception desk and running after the plumbers. ‘Let’s talk about this…’

Orville flopped down in the president’s chair in the board room, a chair that the owner hardly ever used. He thought he might take a nap there, surrounded by all the mahogany panelling. Once he’d recovered from the adrenalin of acting in front of the building guard, the tiredness and the pain in his hands washed over him again.

‘Fuck, I thought he’d never leave.’

‘You did a great job convincing the guy, Orville. Congratulations,’ Albert said, pulling out the top level of his tool box from which he extracted a laptop computer.

‘It’s a simple enough procedure to get in here,’ Orville said, pulling up the huge gloves that covered his bandaged hands. ‘It’s a good thing you were able to punch in the code for me.’

‘Let’s get started. I think we have about half an hour before they decide to send someone up to check on us. At that point, if we haven’t managed to get in, we’ll have another five minutes or so before they reach us. Show me the way, Orville.’

The first panel was simple. The system was programmed to recognise only Raymond Kayn’s and Jacob Russell’s palm prints. But it had an error common to all systems that rely on an electronic code using a lot of information. And an entire palm print is definitely a whole lot of information. To expert eyes, the code was easy to detect in the system’s memory.

‘Bim bam here goes the first one,’ Albert said, closing the laptop when the orange light on the black screen lit up and the heavy door opened with a buzz.

‘Albert… they’re going to realise something’s up,’ Orville said, pointing to the area around the plate where the priest had used a screwdriver to pry open the lid in order to get at the system’s circuits. The wood was now cracked and splintered.

‘I’m counting on it.’

‘You’re joking.’

‘Trust me, OK?’ the priest said, going into his pocket.

A mobile phone was ringing.

‘Do you think it’s a good idea to answer a call right now?’ Orville queried.

‘I agree,’ said the priest. ‘Hello, Anthony. We’re inside. Call me in twenty minutes.’ He hung up.

Orville pushed open the door and they entered the narrow, carpeted hallway that led to Kayn’s private lift.

‘I wonder what kind of trauma a man has to suffer to lock himself up behind so many walls,’ Albert said.