“Yeah,” I said appreciatively. “You’d make a great Russian spy.” Ivan gave me one of his pitiful looks and I quickly amended, “I mean, an American spy.”
He grinned. “Let’s call it the Heist!”
I resignedly pasted a rhino horn on my nose to signal our solidarity.
“When do we do it?” Max asked.
It was odd to have Ivan in charge. But since he was the mastermind of the Heist, we let him figure it out. He said that if we were going to pull it off, it needed to be before school started, with homework, early bedtimes, and more adult scrutiny in general. And with the Fabulous Family Fiesta taking place in a few days, we needed to do it now.
“Boys,” Beatriz said, “I might know something that will help our plan. I’ve got ballet now, but I’ll tell you more later, okay?” She stroked Wiesie, the furry rhino, and ran off down the lane.
“Bring us something to eat!” Max called. “I shouldn’t have even told Beatriz about the vinegaroons,” Max said to me. “This is a boy job. She doesn’t care about spiders.”
“She’s great at secret stuff! And she’s the best liar of all of us, if something happens.”
“She is!” Ivan agreed. “Plus, she knows downtown a lot better than any of us.”
“Hmpf,” said Max. “She better not slow us down.”
“She won’t,” I said stubbornly. Beatriz was fast on her bike and was the first of us to ride with no hands, which had made Max bitter.
“Let’s go check out the glass cutter and Brickie’s lock picker,” I said.
Around the back of the Friedmanns’, big wooden barn doors opened to the dirt basement, so we could go right into Mr. Friedmann’s workshop, although it was off-limits to us without permission. The workshop walls were hung neatly with garden tools, saws, hammers, spools of wire in all colors, hoses, and contraptions we didn’t recognize. Buckets and sacks of fertilizer stood around, organized and labeled in German. Farther back in the dim space, there was a large table. Max opened a wide drawer and held a tool up. “Here’s the glass cutter!” It was an eight-inch piece of notched steel, its stem painted orange, with a ball on one end. Max said, “See this little wheel? That’s the cutter—you roll it on glass where you want it to cut, it makes a line, and then you tap it with the ball and the glass breaks.”
Max sneaked it out under his T-shirt. We then went to my house. I said, “You guys wait here.”
I went straight to Brickie’s gadget drawer and stole the Hand Jive lock picker. When I was back with the boys, Ivan said, “Let me see.” It looked like a fat Swiss Army knife with picks opening out like blades, each one having a different crimped, twisted, or bent end. “I love this thing!” Ivan said softly.
There was discussion about which route we’d take for the Heist—we didn’t know exactly how to get to the museum; we only knew from trips to the Mall that basically we’d go straight down Connecticut Avenue, but after that it got confusing, as Washington streets often are.
We made a run to the Esso station down at the shopping center and got a free street map and laid it out on Max’s porch, crouching over it with a red crayon.
“It looks like the easiest way is down Connecticut, where it turns into Seventeenth Street,” Ivan said, tracing the route with the crayon.
I said, “Wow, that’s really far, isn’t it? That’s farther than my dad’s apartment when he lived at DuPont Circle.”
“We’ve ridden through Rock Creek Park that far before, don’t you think?” Ivan said.
“No, I don’t think,” Max said. “That does look far.”
Ivan ignored us both and said, “After that, we’re practically right on the Mall. All we do then is get on Constitution Avenue, go down to Tenth Street, and there it is.”
Max and I weren’t exactly having second thoughts, but it was sinking in that the Heist was now moving swiftly toward reality. Ivan, sensing our misgivings, gave us an odd, steely gaze. “I know we can do it.”
“Are we going to do it at night, or do like the Gaboon-viper guy and wait till it closes?” I asked him.
“If we do it at closing time, it’ll be night anyway,” Ivan said. “They’re open late in summer.”
Beatriz came running hard up the lane, still in her pink leotard, tutu, and tights. Sweaty and excited, she held out a box of Fig Newtons.
Max, surprised, said, “Wow—thanks, Tinkerbell.”
She smiled at Max. “You’re welcome. Guess what? I checked—my parents will be at a wedding in Georgetown tomorrow, so they’ll be drunk and go to bed early, and I can sneak out!”
I was happy to hear it; having Beatriz around gave me courage. Max, his mouth full of Fig Newtons, asked, “So whash thish big idea of yoursh?”
“I’ve heard my dad talk about this old man named Hampton who goes around to the museums every single night and collects all the tinfoil junk in all the trash cans in the buildings. It’s for some crazy thing he’s building. He’s a janitor at one of the museums, and they all know him, so he’s allowed to do it.” She stopped to catch her breath for a second. “So if we can go to our museum at night and wait there, the Hampton guy’ll probably come, and the door will be open and we can get in easy!”
The boys and I looked at each other. “But what if we miss him?” Ivan asked.
“Well, then we might have to pick the lock. But I doubt it, if we just wait.”
“But how do we know what door he uses?” I asked her.
“It must be a back one, because wouldn’t that be the door a janitor would use?”
“Yeah,” Ivan said. “That makes sense. But how do we keep him from seeing us?”
“We just have to be sure he’s looking for trash somewhere else in the building when we get in.”
We showed Beatriz our tools, and the Esso map. She got down on all fours in her tutu, her butt looking like a big pink flower. With her finger she traced the route Ivan had drawn. “This looks right, I think. But I know how to go without a map—I go to all those museums down there with my dad all the time.”
“Okay,” said Ivan. “So tomorrow night?” He looked to Max. “We’ll spend the night at your house, just like the Pond Lady night?”
“Okay. It’ll be Shabbat, so my parents will probably drink a lot of wine and they’ll go to bed early, too.”
“I’m so excited!” Beatriz jumped up and turned a pirouette. “It’ll be like we’re in a movie!”
I fervently hoped that our movie wouldn’t turn out like The Asphalt Jungle, in which most of the thieves died or went to jail.
11
We spent the next morning gathering what we needed for the Heist: Ivan’s green pill bottles because they were bigger and the tops were already fixed with air holes, the glass cutter, the Hand Jive, an ice pick just in case, stocking caps from Max—“It’s what burglars wear, right?”—goggles, a paper bag to wrap the vinegaroon bottle in, and four Kotex pads Beatriz had stolen from La Senhora and fitted with rubber bands so we could keep them on, and four Hostess CupCakes—“In case we need energy”—from me. Max and I just had thick wool mittens, but Ivan had Elena’s red kid gloves, which were lined with fur and fit snugly. All of it was stashed in Max’s book bag—he was the only one who had a book bag, because it was required for Hebrew school. I’d have Brickie’s penlight in my pocket. We checked and oiled our bikes and covered the reflectors with masking tape. Our darkest clothes were selected, and we figured that long pants would be best so our legs wouldn’t stand out. Beatriz would have to wear her Visitation uniform again, because she didn’t have any dark pants, but she’d wear her longest kneesocks. Max then complained that her knees would still show, and she said, “At least my skin is brown. Your big ghost clown paleface is what’s gonna show.” To counter that, we agreed to smudge her knees and our faces with charcoal from Ivan’s grill.