The Lock Artist

Twenty-one

Michigan

July 1999

The next day, when I rode out to the Marshes’ house, I saw the car parked in the driveway. The same long black car from the day before. The car was empty, but as I got off the motorcycle, I could hear the car’s engine still ticking in the heat. They hadn’t been here long.

I went to the front door and knocked. A voice from inside told me to come in. As soon as I pushed open the door, I saw the three men in the living room. The same three men. All of them now making themselves at home. The man with the tan fishing hat was standing on one side of the aquarium. The tall man with the mustache that didn’t quite go with his face, he was on the other side.

The third man, the one with the slow, hooded eyes that made him look half asleep, he was just sitting there on the couch.

“You’re late,” he said to me. “They’re waiting for you. In the office.”

The other two men looked up at me. I stood there wondering what the hell was going on. And where Amelia might be.

“Today would be nice,” Sleepy Eyes said.

I took a few steps forward, pausing at the bottom of the steps. I could see that Amelia’s door was closed.

“Hey!” Sleepy Eyes said. “Are you deaf or what? Get your ass in there right now.”

Fishing Hat and Tall Mustache both seemed to think that was funny. Sleepy Eyes pointed one finger at them and was about to say something, but I didn’t hear it. I opened the door to the office and stepped inside.

Mr. Marsh was in his usual chair, and in the guest chair sat a man I’d never seen before. He had a gray suit on. A white shirt. A red tie. He had dark hair and dark eyebrows. There was something a little rough and sand-papery about his skin. He was smoking a long cigarette.

“You’re here,” Mr. Marsh said. “Come on in! Have a seat!”

He jumped up to pull over the other guest chair.

“I’d like you to meet somebody,” he said. “This is, um…”

Everything stopped in its tracks right at that second. The man with the cigarette looked up at Mr. Marsh. Mr. Marsh ran his tongue along his lower lip.

“This is another business associate of mine,” he said. “Please sit down. We’ve got something we want to, um, talk to you about.”

I sat down. Mr. Marsh sat back down in his own chair, wiping sweat from his face.

“So you’re the young Michael,” the man with the cigarette said. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“All good,” Mr. Marsh said. “All good things.”

The man with the cigarette looked over at Mr. Marsh and raised one of his eyebrows. Maybe a quarter inch. Mr. Marsh put up both hands and then kept his mouth shut for the next three minutes.

“I understand that you went to see Mr. G yesterday, and that the results, at least from this preliminary meeting, were not so good.”

I sat there, looking at him.

“Would you agree with that assessment?”

I nodded my head.

He leaned forward in his chair, pinching the cigarette between two fingers and being careful not to spill ashes on his pants. I could smell the cigarette and maybe the cologne he was wearing. It was an expensive and exotic smell that I’d never forget.

“You don’t speak,” he said.

I shook my head.

“You don’t speak ever.”

I shook my head again.

He leaned back in his chair. “Okay then. That is something I can appreciate. In fact, that’s a gift that I wish you could pass on to others.”

He didn’t look over at Mr. Marsh. He didn’t have to.

“Norman here tells me that you broke into this house. Is that true?”

I nodded.

“He tells me that you refused to give up any of your accomplices.”

I nodded again.

“You’re two for two here, Michael. You sound like the kind of man I could trust.”

I looked over at Mr. Marsh. He was smiling and nodding his head. He had his hands clasped together tight.

“But then we get to the business with the locks,” the man said. “Because here I was led to believe that you can open up anything. Hence my disappointment when I heard back from Mr. G.”

I didn’t know how to react to that. I sat there wondering if Amelia was up there in her room, if she was scared out of her mind or pissed off or what.

“Now, I know that Mr. G can be a little abrupt sometimes. So I’m wondering if maybe the two of you just got off on the wrong foot. Is that possible?”

I didn’t move.

“Michael? Is that possible?”

I shrugged. The man kept watching me.

“Here’s the thing. Mr. Marsh and his partner, Mr. Slade, both have certain obligations right now, and I’m afraid that neither one of them have been meeting those obligations. In Mr. Slade’s case, well, he seems to have disappeared completely, so I’m not sure how we’re going to deal with him when he does eventually show his face again.”

He finally looked over at Mr. Marsh. Mr. Marsh was staring at his own hands now. The giant fish loomed over everything.

“Give Mr. Marsh credit for one thing,” the man said. “At least he’s facing up to the situation. He wants to make good on those obligations, which I appreciate. So I’m willing to work with him. The problem is, he’s sort of overextended himself right now. With the one health club and the plans for another, and these plans for a new housing development… well, I’m afraid he’s already leveraged all of those assets about as far as he can go. Do you understand what I’m saying? The poor man doesn’t have anything else of value that he can use in place of actual cash. But what he does have…”

He leaned forward in his chair again.

“Is you.”

I looked over at Mr. Marsh again. He wouldn’t meet my eye.

“Don’t get me wrong. I know you’re not his property, but as I understand it, you were sentenced by the court to perform certain services for him, for the rest of the summer. Whatever he sees fit for you to do. Within reason, of course. Which means that while he doesn’t own you, he does, in fact, own a certain amount of your time. A set number of hours, every day. Every week. And that, Michael, is the closest thing to a real commodity that he’s got right now. So in the grand scheme of things, what else can he offer me to help make things right?”

I watched the smoke from his cigarette curl toward the ceiling.

“So both of us would like you to think about giving it another shot with Mr. G. I’ve already spoken to him. I’ve explained that you sound like a young man with a lot of promise-which now that I’ve met you I can see is most definitely true-and that you deserve another chance.”

“It would really help us out,” Mr. Marsh said, finally finding the courage to speak again.

“It would,” the man said. “It would help me out, because I’m very interested to see just how good you really are. And it would certainly help out Mr. Marsh. And his family, don’t forget. The son, he’s already off to college? Getting an early start on his football career?”

“Yes,” Mr. Marsh said.

“Excellent. And your daughter?”

Mr. Marsh closed his eyes.

“Is there a problem?”

“No, not at all. She’ll be a senior in high school.”

“Very good. What was her name again?”

“Amelia.”

“Amelia. That’s a beautiful name. Don’t you agree, Michael?”

He saw me holding on tight to the sides of my chair. He didn’t say a word about it, but I could tell he was registering my reaction.

“I think we’re all on the same page now,” he said. “Michael, if you’ll excuse us. We have a few more things to talk about. I know Mr. G is waiting, so you might want to go ahead and make your way down there. I’m sure the two of you will have a much more productive time of it today, huh?”

He sat there and waited for me. I stood up.

“It was a pleasure, Michael,” he said to me. “I’m sure I’ll be seeing you again.”

I opened the door and left. I walked past the three men, who were all sitting together in the living room now. They had apparently found their way into the refrigerator, because they were all holding beer bottles.

“How’d it go, lover boy?”

I didn’t know who said it and I didn’t care. I went right up the stairs and knocked on Amelia’s door. She wasn’t there.

“She’s gone,” Sleepy Eyes said. He was standing at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at me. “Daddy sent her away.”

I went back down the stairs and tried to go around him. He grabbed my arm.

“You were already on my list, remember? When I say something to you in the future, you’d better not walk away from me.”

He stared me down for a few seconds, his fingers digging into my arm.

“Go on, get going. You’ve got business to take care of.”

I went outside. I stood there for a while with the hot sun in my face, thinking about what to do next. I played the whole scene back in my head, right up to the part where the man with the cigarette said Amelia’s name. Just the sound of her name on that man’s thin lips…

I got on my bike and headed for Detroit.

I’ve had more than one moment like this in my life. These moments when I could have taken myself right out of the game. Cut my losses. Taken the whole thing to my probation officer, maybe. I can’t help wondering how differently my life might have turned out if I had played it that way. Even once.

That’s not how I played it. Not that day. I rode down that same road to that same place. All the way back to West Side Recovery on Grand River Avenue. The clouds gathered in the rising heat, and then the rain came down hard for a few minutes. Then it stopped and the steam rose from the hot pavement.

I rolled my bike right up to the door this time. I knocked on the door and waited. The Ghost, or Mr. G or whatever the hell I was supposed to call him, opened the door and peeked out at me. He was wearing the same worn-out sweater vest. The same glasses hung from the chain around his neck. He didn’t say anything to me, just shook his head and let out this theatrical sigh like I was a huge inconvenience to him. Then he held the door open for me so I could roll in my motorcycle again.

“You’re back,” he said. “I’m so delighted.”

I parked the bike and stood there waiting for whatever was going to happen next.

“They tell me you’re probably the best I’m going to get. God help us all.”

He turned and headed toward the back of the store, tracing his way in the near darkness, around the piles of junk. I followed him. To the back room, the television on again, through the narrow hallway crowded with bicycles. Out the back door to the green-lit shade of the yard. The air even heavier today, with the wet heat and the smell from the rain on the sumac and the poison ivy. The Ghost looked a little older to me today. Somehow older and even more pale to the point of being translucent. His hair was like thin straw, with a dozen age spots showing through and scattered across the top of his head. Yet he was so light of foot, like an old athlete or even a dancer. He walked quickly and never looked back to see if I was behind him. He went right to the safes and stopped in the dead center. He put his glasses on, and only then did he finally look at me.

“I’m losing my eyesight,” he said. “That’s the first problem.”

He held up his right hand, palm facing the ground.

“My hands are starting to shake, too. Which is not good.”

From where I was standing, I didn’t see any shaking. His hand looked rock steady.

“My daughter’s husband ran out on her, too. Left her with a couple of kids. She’s in Florida, you understand, and even though I hate every fucking square inch of that whole state…”

He went behind one of the safes and produced a rolling office chair. There was plywood here on the ground, in the circle created by the safes. He spun the chair a half revolution and sat down on it backward.

“What I’m saying here is… I mean, that’s it. That’s all you need to know about me. Anything else is none of your fucking business. You understand?”

I nodded once.

“Do you want to try again with the safes today, or do you really not know anything at all about opening them?”

There were eight safes, perfectly arranged. One on each point of an imaginary compass, or maybe even on the real compass for all I knew. With another safe positioned exactly halfway between each point. In a building with so much junk in it, here was the one and only place where everything else was pushed aside. A perfect circle carved out of the chaos.

“What exactly can you do?” the Ghost said. “Should we start with that?”

I held imaginary lock picks in my hands and worked them together. That seemed to impress him about as much as me making balloon animals, but nevertheless he took me over to a workbench set up against the outside wall of the building. We had to work our way through a miniature city of paint cans, but when we got there I saw that he had some kind of lock-picking laboratory set up. There was a clear Lucite cylinder attached to the workbench with screws, and set into the cylinder was a key lock. He pulled the lock right out and slid off the top of the plug, exposing the pins. He put on his glasses and examined them, then pulled out one pin. There was a little chest of drawers sitting nearby. He opened up one of the drawers and replaced the pin with another, being careful to load the spring on top of it. He worked his way down the line, setting up his own custom configuration of pins. Hard or easy, or whatever. I had no idea. When he was done, he slid the top of the plug back on and replaced the plug in the clear cylinder. He started rummaging around on the workbench, looking for a set of picks, I was guessing. I took the leather case out of my back pocket and showed it to him.

“You always carry those around?”

I nodded.

“If the police ever stopped you, you wouldn’t want them to have any doubts, huh? Make their life real easy?”

He didn’t wait for me to field that one. Instead, he just gestured to the lock and took a step backward.

“Whenever you’re ready, hotshot.”

I took out a tension bar and diamond pick and got to work. It felt good to finally do something I knew how to do. I set the tension and felt for the first pin. As I did, I could sense him standing right behind me, looking over my shoulder. I could practically feel his breath.

“I’m not bothering you, am I?”

I kept going. Second pin, third pin, fourth pin, fifth pin, sixth pin. The lock sprung open, without me even having to go over them again. Apparently, these were straight block pins.

“Okay, then. You can do an easy one. Hooray for you. Let’s make them a little harder.”

I stepped aside as he slid the top off the plug and swapped out all of the pins. I could see the little notches on the new pins he was putting in. He struggled with the springs this time, bending down to his work until his face was just a few inches away.

“If I could just see one goddamned thing…” he said under his breath. When he was done, he took his glasses off, rubbed his eyes, and then stepped back. I took his place in front of the lock and went to work.

This time, he held up his left arm and looked at his watch. “Ten seconds,” he said, “and counting. You’d better hurry.”

I set the tension and felt for the pins.

“Twenty seconds.”

Ignore him, I told myself. Shut him right out of your head.

“Thirty. We’re getting impatient here.”

Set the pin, feel it catch. Just enough. Move on.

“Forty seconds! You need to hurry!”

All the way down the line. Keep that tension just right. Not too much. Don’t let him throw you. Don’t tense up. Just like that…

“Fifty seconds! Are you kidding me?”

Work my way down again, feel for that pin, feel for that little give, ever so slight.

“One minute! This whole building will be crawling with cops soon!”

I felt a line of sweat dripping down my back. An angry insect was buzzing away, somewhere in the weeds behind us.

“They’re beating down the door! You idiot!”

Another pin. Hold the tension. Not too hard.

“Bam! Hear that? Bam!”

I closed my eyes. I held myself completely still. I let up on the tension bar, one millionth of a millionth of an inch.

“We’re totally fucked now! They’re all over the place!”

Three more pins. Two more.

“It’s too late! Run, you fool! Run!”

One more. I felt it give. The whole thing turning. I pulled the tools out, and it took everything I had not to smack the Ghost right in his pale stupid fucking face.

“That took a while,” he said, eyeing me coolly like he hadn’t spent the last minute and a half screaming at me. “I’ve never seen somebody hold a pick quite the way you do, either. I don’t know who the hell taught you to do it like that.”

He was back to rummaging around on the workbench. He started a small avalanche of washers and nuts and bolts.

“Of course, lock pickers are a dime a dozen these days. You can find them anywhere.”

When he finally found what he was looking for, he picked it up and tossed it to me. It was a combination padlock, but not a cheap one.

“Simple three-cam lock, right? What do you do with it?”

I pulled the shackle out and started turning the dial, feeling for the sticking points. The usual routine, finding the last number and then using the number families to narrow down the possible combinations.

The Ghost watched me as I did this. Last number 25, so start with 1, super-set the second numbers and start cranking them out.

“What the hell are you doing?”

I looked up at him. What do you think I’m doing?

“You’re not seriously going to cheat the numbers, are you? You think you can get away with that on a good lock? They don’t use those patterns like they do on cheap pieces of shit, for one thing. For another thing… I mean, God damn, how much of an amateur are you, anyway? Don’t you have any sense of touch at all?”

He didn’t wait for me to respond to that. Not that I had any answer. He grabbed the lock from my hand and started to spin the dial.

“You have to feel it, okay? There’s no other way to do this. I mean, shit, if you can’t do that on a fucking padlock…”

He took one quick glance at the dial. Then he put the lock near his left ear for a moment and kept turning. He closed his eyes.

“Either you can feel it or you can’t. Okay? It’s that simple.”

He opened his eyes and started spinning the dial in the opposite direction.

“I can do this in my sleep, hotshot. I mean, literally. I can do this while I’m driving a car. While I’m talking on the phone. While I’m having sex.”

He turned the dial a little more, stopped, changed direction one more time.

“Do you understand what I’m saying? I can do this while I’m not even thinking about it one little bit.”

He pulled the shackle out and tossed the now open lock back to me.

“Sit down here and work on it. When you can open it like a real boxman, let me know. In the meantime, I’m going to lunch.”

Boxman. That was the first time I heard the term. It rang in my ears as he left me there alone in that green-shaded back lot, in the middle of those great iron safes.

A real boxman.

The sun was going down when I finally left that place. I had the lock in my pocket. My first piece of homework was to keep spinning the dials until I could feel the cams lining up the right way. Until I could open the damned thing purely by touch, without cheating.

I should have gone straight home to practice, but instead I rode back to the Marshes’ house. Every window was dark when I pulled into the driveway, but I could hear music coming from somewhere inside. I opened the front door and peeked inside. The stereo was blasting “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” by the Beach Boys. Mr. Marsh’s favorite band, I remembered. It was loud enough for a party, but the lights were all off, and I didn’t see anybody.

I went into the living room. The big aquarium cast an eerie glow. Then I saw a thin line of light under the door to Mr. Marsh’s office. I went upstairs first. I opened Amelia’s door and flipped on the light. She still wasn’t there.

I turned her light off and left. I went downstairs. There were a few seconds of silence as the song ended. Then another Beach Boys song came on. “You Still Believe in Me.” I went to the office door and pushed it open. The music got louder.

The first thing I noticed was that the giant stuffed fish was gone. The second thing I noticed was that it wasn’t so much gone as just taken down from the wall and rammed through the window. The back half was still inside, the front half outside.

The third thing I noticed was the desk chair, facing away from me. I saw an arm hanging down one side. I stood there for a few seconds, waiting for some sign of life.

Then the chair turned. Mr. Marsh was slumped down with a drink in his other hand. He looked up at me without the slightest hint of surprise.

“Good to see you,” he said. “Make yourself a drink.”

I saw a legal pad on his desk. I grabbed it, along with a pen, and started writing. Where is Amelia?

When I gave it to him, he held the pad out in front of him and then started tromboning it back and forth to make it come into focus.

“She’s gone.”

I took the pad back one more time. Where did she go?

That one seemed to deflate him. He closed his eyes for a while. So long I thought he might have drifted off on me. Then he cleared his throat.

“I sent her away. Somewhere safe. I think she wanted to call you, but… well, it’s kind of hard to do that, you know?”

He drained the rest of his drink and then put his glass down on the desk. He did it carefully, like it was something that took every ounce of his strength and skill. I couldn’t help but remember the very first time I saw him sitting in that chair. The overtanned man in his tank top and shorts, with the perfect teeth, the flashy wristwatch, the fifty-dollar haircut. Lots of attitude and big words then, but today he was so scared he could barely keep his hands from shaking.

“If I talk to her, I’ll send her your, you know… I mean, I’ll put in a good word for you. I’ll tell her you’re helping me. And that she’ll be able to come home soon.”

I walked over to the great tail fin of the fish. The way it was stuck there in the shattered window, it looked like it was trying to escape this place. A completely understandable feeling.

“Besides, you need to focus right now,” Mr. Marsh said. “I need your absolute best effort here. Are you with me?”

I didn’t even look at him. I turned away and walked to the door.

“They will kill me.”

I stopped.

“I need you to believe that, Michael. They will kill me for sure. Or if they think I’m more useful to them alive… they may hurt Adam. End his football career.”

His voice was flat, devoid of all emotion.

“Or Amelia…”

No. Don’t even say it.

“I don’t even want to think about what they might do to her.”

This is not happening, I thought. This is worse than a bad dream.

“It’s a terrible thing to put on you,” he said, “but I don’t have a choice.”

He didn’t say anything else to me.

He didn’t have to.