Steve Hamilton - The Lock Artist

It was getting colder every week. I stayed inside and I drew and I practiced on my portable safe lock. I ate the food from the restaurant that the Chinese family gave me. I paid them two hundred dollars a month cash to stay in the upstairs room they didn’t own, and to use the bathroom and shower in the back of the kitchen. I had one lamp that I had plugged into the extension cord. I had paper and art supplies. I still had my motorcycle bags with all of my clothes in them. I had my safe lock and my lock picks.

I had the pagers.

There were five of them, all in a beat-up shoebox. One pager with white tape on it, one with yellow, one with green, one with blue. Then the last with red tape. The Ghost had told me, if any of the first four pagers go off, you call the number on the little screen, you listen to what they say. They’ll know that you can’t speak in return. If they don’t seem to understand that, it’s a good sign that the wrong person is on the phone and that you should hang up. Assuming they’re on the level, you listen to what they say, and then you go to meet them at the location they indicate. If everything still feels right, you go do the job with them. You handle your business the right way and everybody wins. They’ll take care of you because they know if they don’t, you won’t be picking up that pager the next time they call.

They’ll also take care of sending the ten percent “usage fee” to the man in Detroit. Because they want to keep living.

That’s for the first four pagers. The last pager, the one with the red tape… that’s the man himself. The man in Detroit. You call the number right away. You do what the man says. You show up exactly where and when the man says to show up.

“This is the one man you do not fuck with.” The Ghost’s exact words. “You fuck with this man, you might as well go ahead and kill yourself. Save everybody the trouble.”

I knew the Ghost had been telling the truth. I had seen enough myself to know that this was the one piece of advice I should never forget. But what was I supposed to do while I was waiting for the next job? How long would I have to stay here, hiding out in this abandoned room above the Chinese restaurant on 128th Street, before somebody paged me and I got to make some money again?

Would I starve first? Would I freeze to death?

The Ghost never covered that part.

____________________

By the time Christmas rolled around, I was finally leaving the building once in a while. I’d go to a park a few blocks to the south and sit on one of the benches. I finally had to buy some new clothes. I wasn’t broke yet, mind you. I had been well paid for the job in Pennsylvania. Still, I could do the math and see where it was all headed.

To make matters a little worse, one of the men who worked in the restaurant told me I needed to help him if I wanted him to keep giving me food. He gave me a big stack of menus and told me to go to all of the buildings in the neighborhood, to get inside somehow, and to put one menu under each door. I knew that some of the buildings had a doorman at the entrance, and that at the other buildings you had to have somebody who lived there buzz you in. So I wasn’t sure how I’d be able to deliver the menus. I mean, I could have found the back doors on most of these buildings and picked the lock, but was that really worth it?

“You have nice fine face,” the man said. His English wasn’t quite up to speed yet. “People let you in.”

So I took my nice fine face and my stack of menus and I went to the buildings, one by one. I figured instead of hiding it, I’d come right out and let everybody know exactly what I was doing. Show them the menus, make like I was slipping one under a door. I’d throw in a little sign language once in a while, too. That seemed to help. I got into more buildings than not.

One day, when I was working my way down a long hallway, a door opened just as I was about to slide a menu under it. Before I could even stand up, I felt two hands on my shoulders. I was pushed backward against the far wall, so hard I lost my breath.

I looked up and saw the man’s face. It took me all the way back to that man who held up my uncle’s liquor store when I was nine years old. It was that same animal fear in his eyes. A horrible smell of unwashed clothes, urine, maybe that fear itself, it all washed over me. I kicked at his knees and he fell back away from me. Then he ran down the hallway. He slammed open the door and disappeared down the stairs.

I got up, rubbing my shoulders. When I looked through the open doorway, I saw the wreckage inside. The man had trashed the place, looking for anything of value. So he could buy more drugs. Or whatever it was he needed in his life so bad. I could see the refrigerator still open, even the food inside ransacked and ruined now. I closed the door to the apartment and left.

When I got back down to the street, I wrote the apartment number on the back of a menu and gave it to the doorman. Then I went back to the restaurant.

I went up to my room. I counted what was left of my money. I’m living on borrowed time here, I thought. How long until you turn into that man breaking into apartments?

It got colder and colder. The snow came down that night. White at first, but dirty by morning.

I woke up to hear one of the pagers beeping.

I met the men in a diner in the Bronx. A simple cab ride over the Hudson River. It was the yellow pager they had called me on. Now, I knew what the Ghost had said about the yellow pager. This was the general number that just about any knucklehead could use to reach me. Therefore proceed with extreme caution. But I was feeling especially motivated, shall we say. So on that cold afternoon I went into the diner and stood there for a few minutes until I got waved over to a booth in the back, right next to the kitchen doors. There were three men sitting there. One of them stood up, grabbed my right hand, and pulled me close to him for a halfway hug.

“You must be the kid,” he said to me. He was wearing a bright green New York Jets jacket and a gold chain. He had a close-cropped Caesar haircut that he probably spent too much time on. He had one of those razor-thin lines of stubble that ran perfectly along each side of his jaw, meeting in a little soul patch on his chin. You know, a white boy trying to look anything but white.

“These are my boys,” he said, gesturing to the other two. “Heckle and Jeckle.”

So at least he was saving me the trouble of thinking up nicknames. He slid back into the booth and made room for me.

“You want something to eat? We just ordered.” The thin little beard thing seemed to make his mouth look bigger somehow, and I’d come to find out he could never let a minute pass without saying something. Or many somethings. So right off the bat I nicknamed him Bigmouth. He called over the waitress, and she got a menu for me. I pointed to a hamburger.

“What, you don’t talk?” she said.

“That’s right,” Bigmouth said. “He don’t talk. You got a problem with that?”

She took my menu from me and walked away without another word.

“I heard about you,” he said when she was safely out of earshot. “You just did a little something with a friend of a friend of mine.”

That answered my first question, about how on the phone he had seemed to know I was in the city somewhere. I couldn’t help imagining a thousand more shady characters out there, all of them knowing my general location at all times.

“I mean, damn,” he said. “I heard you were young-looking, but God damn.”

Heckle and Jeckle weren’t saying anything. They had milkshakes in front of them, one chocolate and one vanilla it looked like, and they were content to suck on their straws and nod their heads at everything Bigmouth said.