Steve Hamilton - The Lock Artist

He moved around to the back.

“Here, a high-speed disk cutter. Again, a lot of time, a lot of noise. Then over here…”

He went around to the rectangle with the black edges, started to put his hand down, and then pulled back like the thing was still molten hot.

“You can use an oxyacetylene torch to cut right through the metal like this. Of course, that means lugging a big tank of fuel and another tank of oxygen. A thermic lance will get even hotter. Like six thousand degrees. You realize how hot that is? If there was something inside that safe, what do you think the chances are it wouldn’t be ashes by the time you got through? Hell, you can burn the whole building down.”

He stood there shaking his head for a moment, then walked around to the front of the safe.

“Our man drilled through here. Which at least uses a little bit of intelligence. A little finesse. I mean, you have to know exactly where to drill to bypass the whole locking mechanism. It’s different on every safe. Some have special protective plates now that make it a lot harder, so sometimes you have to come at it from a different angle.”

Finally, he let himself touch the safe, putting a finger in one of the holes drilled on the top. Then he knelt down by the dial.

“On some safes you can punch the dial.” He pulled the dial right off and handed it to me. As I held it I noticed the chips along the edge, where it had apparently been pried away.

“Older safes, you can still use explosives,” he said, running his hand along the edge of the door. “Gelignite is a plastic explosive, similar to nitro. Just a little bit in the right place. A jam shot, they call it, and you’re in business, assuming you don’t blow your hands off.”

He pulled the door open and showed me the inside. It was strange to see the green-filtered daylight coming through the various holes, big and small.

“Like I said, newer safes make it a lot harder to do any of this stuff. Besides those plates, there are lock-out mechanisms that get triggered when you try to go through the outer walls. Some have a steel cable running all along the perimeter. You break the wall, you break the cable, and it jams up everything. I mean, it makes the whole thing useless, even for the owner.”

He closed the door, took the dial from me, and tried to replace it. When he moved his hand away, it fell to the ground. He didn’t bother to pick it up.

“Point is… no matter how well made a safe is, you can get it open if you try hard enough. You take it away to a warehouse somewhere, you put enough time into it. Enough sweat, enough heat, enough noise…”

He pushed himself up, back to his feet, wincing as he straightened his back.

“They all open eventually. If you don’t care how much brutality you have to inflict on it. If you don’t care what the safe looks like when you’re done.”

He grabbed the sheet, one corner in each hand. He billowed it open and let it settle on the safe. Hiding it once again, the way you’d draw a sheet over a dead body.

“I told you this would be ugly,” he said. “I hope you agree. If you don’t feel the same way that I do about this, you should leave right now.”

I wasn’t totally sure what he meant, but I wasn’t about to leave.

“These are the methods of crude men. They can’t face the challenge that a safe presents to them. They can’t face the safe on its own terms. So they do what? Same thing men have been doing for thousands of years, right? They resort to violence.”

He grabbed the dolly and tucked it under the safe.

“No patience. No skill. No intelligence. Just brute strength. They have to break something. It’s the only way they know.”

He pushed down on the dolly, tried to tilt the safe back. Then he stopped.

“Here, you do it. Wheel this thing back into the storage room. I can’t stand it being out here another minute.”

He stepped aside so I could take my turn with the dolly. I grabbed it by the handles, tried to tilt the thing back. It was way too heavy.

“Imagine trying to wheel this thing out of a building,” he said, “so you can take it back home with you and break it open. Can you even conceive of doing such a thing?”

I pulled back harder, felt the damned thing move a little bit. On my third try, I finally got it tilting and then had to fight the momentum. One more inch and it would have flipped right over.

“Easy, Hercules. Why don’t you go put this thing away before you kill somebody.”

I got it rolling in the right general direction. My forearms were burning by the time I got it halfway there. The very same forearms I thought were so strong now, after all that digging in the Marshes’ backyard. I clipped the side of the storeroom door, which rocked the whole wall. With one last-gasp effort, I muscled it into the back corner and let the safe drop into position, the handles ripping right out of my hands. I stood there in the near darkness, catching my breath, listening to the blood pounding in my ears.

When I finally stepped back out, the Ghost was sitting in the rolling office chair, directly in the middle of the Garden of Safes.

“Come and look at these magnificent creatures,” he said. “Absolutely fucking magnificent. What do they make you think of?”

I stood just outside the circle, in the gap between two of the safes. I listened hard to what he was saying.

“You touch a safe the way you touch a woman,” he said. “Never forget that. Do you hear me?”

I nodded.

“The greatest puzzle in the world, young man, the greatest challenge a man can face, is solving the riddle of a woman’s heart.”

He rolled his chair, slowly, to one of the safes.

“This,” he said, putting his left hand against the safe’s door, “is a woman. Come closer.”

I took one step into the circle.

“This,” he said, putting his right hand on the dial, “is a woman’s heart.”

Okay, I thought. I’ll go with this.

“You want to open this, what do you do? Hit her over the head with your club, drag her back to your cave? You think that’ll work?”

I didn’t even bother to shake my head.

“Of course not. You want her to open, you start by understanding her. You understand what’s going on inside her. Come here and see.”

I went closer. I got down on one knee.

“This safe’s name is Erato,” he said. “She’s very special. Very open. Because unlike most safes, you can really see what’s going on inside her.”

He gently removed the felt-lined panel from the inside of the open door. Then he removed the little metal plate from behind the locking mechanism. As he turned the dial, I could see that there was a drive cam turning in perfect sync, behind a set of three wheels. He showed me how the notches in each wheel could be made to line up perfectly, using the right combination, of course, so that the fence above the wheels would fall down into this newly formed channel, which in turn would lower the lever and release the bolt. Letting the handle turn free.

“So simple,” he said. His voice was low now. I could hear the distant sound of traffic on the street. I could hear insects buzzing in the tangled weeds beyond the fence. With the right combination dialed, he turned the handle, and all ten bars were retracted into the door itself, three on each side, two on top, and two on the bottom, each bar two inches thick and made of solid steel.

“That’s how you open a safe,” he said. “Every other safe in the world is just some variation on this same idea.”

I stayed down on one knee. This whole business with the safe being a woman, having a name. That might have sent some people running from the room. But not me.

“It’s easy when you know the combination,” he said, closing his right hand like he was holding something. “But what if you don’t?”