‘Put it back,’ Willie hissed.
Daniel thought Willie was kidding and didn’t even pause as he stuffed the sheaf of bills and an ounce baggie of cocaine into his jacket pocket.
‘Daniel,’ Willie roared, ‘did you fail to hear me or fail to understand? Put it back. We’re practicing.’
‘Be serious,’ Daniel pleaded. ‘If we get busted, is that what we tell the cops – it’s okay, officer, we’re just practicing.’
‘We don’t tell the cops shit, ever. And we don’t steal unless it’s necessary. And we harken to Salinius’s observation that “the great enemies of honor are greed and convenience.”’
Daniel returned the drugs and money to the safe. ‘So what is this?’ he sneered. ‘Art for art’s sake?’
‘You flatter yourself. It’s merely practice. After much practice, it might become art.’
Daniel fired at him, ‘Hey! I’ve been living on a hundred dollars a month for almost a year!’
‘That’s plenty,’ Willie said. ‘Besides, you’ve been living on five hundred a month – a hundred for room and board, four hundred for Oriana.’
‘I get it,’ Daniel said wearily, ‘I suppose it’s charged to my account. You guys are merciless.’
‘Not really. We’re just playfully fair.’
‘Playful?’ Daniel repeated. ‘That’s twisted thinking.’ Daniel started to swing the safe door shut.
‘No,’ Willie stopped him. ‘Wait. Not only do we not take anything, we always leave then something for their trouble.’ He handed Daniel a small, elegantly printed card. On it was a quotation from Rilke:
… there is no place
that does not see you.
You must change your life.
Smiling to himself, Daniel dropped the card on the baggie of cocaine, closed the safe, and gave the knob a carefree twirl.
For Daniel, the most illuminating aspect of cracking safes was the things people chose to keep secret. Money and drugs were the most common items, with jewels, documents, and guns close behind, but after those the list got strange:
A quart jar of glass eyes
A flattened typewriter
A pair of black panties tied around a pair of roller skates (Oriana had howled when Daniel told her)
A tree-sloth fetus floating in a jar of formaldehyde
A small twenty-four-carat gold yo-yo with a string of finely braided silver that Daniel had wanted so bad he could taste it
An old coffeepot
A piece of chalk
A petrified loaf of French bread
And Daniel’s favorite, a neatly printed note in an otherwise empty safe: ‘Eat shit, George. I’ve taken it all and I’m on my way to Paris with the pool boy.’ (This was Oriana’s favorite, too.)
Transcription (Partial): Telephone Call Between
Volta and Willie Clinton
VOLTA: A certain large library in our nation’s capital has come into possession of some old documents that rightfully belong to us.
WILLIE: I’m on my way.
VOLTA: What about Daniel?
WILLIE: You know I always work alone on jobs like this. To cite a popular Southern California proverb, ‘Just because everything’s different doesn’t mean anything has changed.’
VOLTA: Fine. I just thought it might make an interesting final exam.
WILLIE: He doesn’t need a final exam. He’s proficient, but that’s all he’ll ever be as a safecracker. Granted, he has some feel for it, but not wholeheartedly. My sense – and I may be wrong – is that Daniel doesn’t want in, he wants out. And it was Schiller, I believe, who said, ‘Blesséd are those whose necessities find their art.’ In my opinion, safecracking isn’t Daniel’s art. It hasn’t helped that his attention has been confounded by a lovely young woman.
VOLTA: I’ve never been a foe of sweet confoundings. After all, who’s to say what the lesson is unless you learn it.
WILLIE: You’re shameless! You stole that from Sophocles!
VOLTA: William, as T. S. Eliot said, ‘A good poet borrows; a great poet steals.’
WILLIE: I don’t have time to listen to you mangle quotes all day. When do I leave?
VOLTA: Twenty hours. Bruce on Castro is making the arrangements. What about Daniel? Any suggestions?
WILLIE: Give him some money and some time off. A hundred a month really is a bit grim. Otherwise, I fear San Francisco will be hit with a spate of B&E’s.
VOLTA: Well, as they say: ‘You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him do the backstroke or suck blood from a turnip.’
When Daniel arrived at Willie’s Friday evening he found the door locked and a note pinned to the silclass="underline" ‘Daniel – Come on in.’ His brain still floating from the previous night’s session with Oriana, Daniel took a moment to comprehend the note.
He picked the lock and went in.
There was a safe on the worktable, a small Sentry combination. It was a snap. Inside was a stack of cards with the Rilke quotation, a handmade set of vanadium picks, and another note from Willie:
I’m sorry I can’t give you my personal farewell and good wishes, but some urgent business has usurped my attention. Please accept the picks as a graduation present. It’s been a privilege to work with you. I could go on, but, as Auden has chided, ‘Sentimentality is the failure of emotion.’
Volta asked that you call him asap through the Six Rivers exchange.
May the doors open on what you need,
Willie
As Daniel finished the note his first thought was now I can fuck Oriana. But the first thing he did was call Volta as requested. Volta, who seemed preoccupied, told Daniel a five-thousand-dollar cashier’s check was waiting for him at the Hibernia Bank, and that in two weeks he should meet Robert Sloane in Room 377 of the Bathsheba Hotel in Tucson.
Daniel cashed the check in the morning and took a cab back to Treat Street, instructing the cabbie to wait. He took only a few minutes to pack his gear. As he passed through the kitchen on his way out, he stopped to count out a thousand dollars in twenties, leaving them on the table. He directed the cab to the Clift Hotel, tipped the driver a hundred-dollar bill, tipped the doorman twenty for dealing with his luggage, and rented a suite for ten days, paying the full $1500 in advance. The suite was elegantly comfortable. He sat at the cherry-wood desk and dialed Oriana’s number. A computer-generated voice informed him the number had been disconnected.
He spent the next three torturous days wondering if she’d gone with Willie and why she hadn’t said good-bye. He tried her number over and over and the same hideous voice gave him the same bad news. He wondered if maybe she’d been hassled by the cops or a john. He thought about asking Volta to find out what was going on. He thought about Oriana’s long body, the curve of her flanks, the warmth of her inner thighs. He hurt.
When he stirred from a fitful sleep early the fourth day, he saw the red message light glowing on the phone. The desk informed him a letter had been left for him. In a few minutes, the concierge himself delivered it.
The note from Oriana was brief:
Now you’ll always have a future.
Daniel started laughing, and right in the middle of laughing he burst into tears. He couldn’t stop until he burned the note.
Six days later, on the night before his flight left for Tucson, Daniel relieved the Marina Safeway’s vault of ten thousand dollars and left it on the kitchen table at the Treat Street house before returning for his last night at the Clift. He believed it had been Willie the Click, quoting Schiller perhaps, who’d noted, ‘If luxury doesn’t inspire generosity, the luxury is undeserved.’