Carter Beats the Devil (60 page)

He stared at her so long she wondered if he might never leave, and she’d have to start reading her magazine again with him still staring at her. “The cheapest ticket, then.”

“Third gallery. It’s fifty cents tonight.”

“Oh, a bargain.” He flicked five dimes at her.

She removed the bundle of 3C tickets and passed one to the man. “Doors open at seven-thirty and the show is promptly at eight. And—you know, no animals are allowed?”

“Pardon?”

For a moment, she thought she’d seen him cradling a tiny dog, but now, clearly, he held nothing. She said, “Um,” and then, in a drone, her line: “Please don’t reveal any details of the third act, when Carter beats the Devil.”

The bald man clicked his heels together. “I am your servant,” he said.

CHAPTER 3

Carlo’s girl had a sleek and well-maintained 1923 Cadillac speedster, or rather, her husband did. Its body was a deep blue that spoke of endless coats of polish, which the servants applied without complaining, for the owner traveled frequently, the odometer was easy to disconnect, and Sunset Beach was an easy destination.

Carter complimented the car’s smooth suspension and handling twice on their way to Arbor Villa. Each time, Carlo said, “Yeah, it’s a good breezer.”

Throughout the trip, Carlo silently wondered what Carter suspected. A magician depended on deception, Carlo reasoned, and so being a snitch was just playing the game. It worked rather the same way he had borrowed the speedster. It was an easygoing philosophy, one that would serve him relatively well in the several hours he had left to live.

They arrived at the top of Fourth Avenue and pulled up on the shoulder of the road. Carter put his leather satchel over his shoulder and patted it, he explained, “for luck.” The rest of their journey would be on foot. Borax’s house, as they walked toward it, was never exactly silent; in addition to the birds and the howling of his many dogs, the mansion seemed to have audible noises of decay.

“This is the man’s home? It’s not that big,” Carlo whispered. He and Carter were a hundred yards away, on an old service road.

“It’s two o’clock. Borax is at church and has taken his household staff with him. We have the place to ourselves for at least the next forty-five minutes but still, we’ll approach without letting the cottages come into view. Someone or other might have stayed behind. Come here for a moment.” Carter leaned against a palm tree and dug through his jacket pocket. “How do these look to you?”

Carlo took the eight pages of onionskin from Carter. They were filled with diagrams and equations heavy with Greek equations. “Hey! It says ‘television.’ You already have the plans.”

“Thank you, excellent.” Carter tucked them into his satchel.

Carlo had but one expression of admiration—it was to turn out his lower lip and frown as if thinking carefully. He put it to use now, as Carter began to walk up the road again. Substituting fake plans. Clever, clever.

Carter took them off the beaten path, over tangled roots of teak trees
that came from Kalimantan. No matter how deep the stack of dry brush he stepped through, the magician made almost no sound, and once, after avoiding a noisy patch of leaves, he turned and smiled when Carlo avoided it, too.

Their bushwhacking took them to an obscure corner of the west wing of Arbor Villa, where the date nut palms threw the house into perpetual shade. Neighborhood children had long ago broken most of the windows here. Carter glanced at likely places to enter and selected the remains of a bay window across which a moldering Navajo blanket was stretched. It was held in place with a few tacks, which popped out of the wood with a single, hard tug.

When they were inside, and their eyes had adjusted to the dimness—Borax was in no position to leave the electric lights on when he left the house—they listened for domestic noises. There were none, save the distant peacocks, whose calls made the atmosphere feel more desolate. They stood in a little-used parlor, floors covered with threadbare Turkish rugs, walls lined with books and paintings of sailing ships at sea. It smelled like mildew.

Carlo shook his head. “A rich man should have better locks.”

“Shhh.”

“Where’s the safe?”

Carter put his finger to his lips, then indicated that Carlo should follow exactly in his footsteps. They left the room—the door stood half open—and went into a musty hallway flanked by alcoves where suits of armor stood, their poleaxes looking ready to fall on passersby. This walk made Carlo nervous, as their path traversed so many similar-looking rooms and hallways he began to wonder if perhaps Carter was in fact looking for a safe at all. Perhaps he had a darker motive, a plan to confound poor Carlo here, perhaps even do away with him. Each time Carter’s hand disappeared into his jacket, Carlo’s throat tightened, relaxing only when he saw it was a pocket watch being consulted.

Finally, they stood in an ill-lit parlor—was it a different room than the one they’d broken into?—and Carter approached a bookcase. He extended his hand, then looked over his shoulder, concerned, “Be a sport, Carlo, and tell me there’s no one at the window.”

Carlo’s head jerked to the window, which was covered by an entirely different design of blanket, and saw nothing. He looked back at his boss. “Naw, there’s a blanket—” In the moment he’d looked away, Carter had sprung the bookcase away from the wall, revealing a small, grey room with portland cement walls.

“Oh . . . I missed that,” Carlo moaned. “You didn’t show me how that happened.”

“That’s a pity, Carlo. Come with me.”

Inside, the tall grey walls were saved from feeling oppressive only by high windows and friendly mementos that Borax had decorated with: photographs of friends, plaques of recognition from the City of Oakland, amateurish-looking oil paintings of birds and flowers and children.

“We have about twenty-five minutes,” Carter said. Inside these thick walls, he spoke in close to a normal voice. “I’m going to concern myself with opening the safe. Your job is to keep your ears open for anyone returning early.”

They pulled the bookshelf on its track to within an inch of closing. Carlo stood braced against it, watching and listening, but also watching Carter, as he’d never seen anyone crack a safe before. He’d heard stories. When would Carter sandpaper down his fingertips?

Carter ran his palms across the embossed metal door, murmuring to himself, “‘Puerorum spectatorum operatque studio,’” adding, “Incantations,” though he had actually been reciting an old Thacher fight song.

Borax’s wall safe, a Schlage 1917 top-of-the-line model, was flush to the wall, sunk into the cement. Carter dragged two stools over in front of it, dropping his work bag down on the first, and himself down on the second. He unzipped the bag and gracefully pulled out not a stethoscope, as Carlo had anticipated, but a wine bottle.

“How do you open a safe with a wine bottle?”

Carter withdrew a corkscrew. He uncorked the bottle, and let it stand on the stool. Next, he took out a small bundle of newspaper, which he tore open to reveal a wineglass. He gently placed the glass next to the bottle and folded his arms. “Red wine needs eight minutes to breathe,” he said, glancing at his fingernails. “Borax showed me this hiding place several times. He was very proud of it.” He reached out with his right hand and twisted the wall safe’s dial freely. Rather than watching this motion—he looked like a child spinning a top—his flat blue eyes locked on Carlo. “He never let me close enough to see what combination he was entering, and I suppose the idea was that without that particular piece of information, he’d be
safe.
” On that word, Carter brought down the lever, and popped the door, which made a hydraulic gasp as it opened. Carlo looked at him with his lower lip flexed outward.

Carter poured himself a glass of wine and frowned at his watch. “I’d hoped that would take six more minutes, but—” He half-saluted with the glass, ready to drink, then his eyes flicked toward the open safe. It
took him a moment to form the words, and when they came out, they were terrible: “You miserable
bastard.
”

“Boss?” Carlo couldn’t have heard that correctly.

Carter stared inside the safe. He put the wine down.

“What?” Carlo left his post. He looked over Carter’s shoulder. “Huh,” he said. “It’s another safe.”

Inside the Schlage was a second safe, smaller in all dimensions, and secured to the larger model with a dry lather of mortar.

“Borax,” Carter whispered, “where did you get an Olson Failsafe?”

“What’s wrong?”

Carter held up his palm. They remained frozen, Carter holding his breath, quite literally, while Carlo’s eyes darted from his boss, whose face was reddening, to the interior of the safe.

It wasn’t much to look at—simply a metal door, a discolored bronze finish with a pattern of bulky oak leaves. To the left was the handle, to the right the familiar spinning knob, and above them, running the width of the door, an archaic-looking crest that read “Failsafe” on a banner flanked by candelabras.

“Okay.” Carter drained his wine glass in a gulp. “We’re in trouble.”

“Can’t you hear the tumblers on this one?”

“That would be the least of our problems.”

“You didn’t bring a stethoscope, eh, Carter?”

“Stethoscopes are the magic wands of the cracking business.” He took a small leather pad from his pocket and flipped through pages of figures printed in his neat engineer’s grid. As he ran his finger down the numbers, he began to explain their predicament: safecracking was a sham perpetuated by safecrackers. If they didn’t physically blow a safe open somehow, it was more a matter of mathematical possibility, and patience.

“Safes are forgiving. If you enter a number within a couple of digits of the right one, you’ll do fine, eventually.” He shook his head. “And, generally speaking, it never even comes to that. Most people buy a very expensive safe, and then never change the factory preset.” He waved his pad. “These are the presets I know of. Olson is of course a Norwegian design. Here we are. From the serial number, you can determine which progressions the Olson factory used, then you look on this table here . . .” He swallowed. “So, for this model, the preset is five, fifteen, twenty.” He made no move. Instead, he continued to stare at the dial. “The Schlage certainly was still at the preset,” he murmured, “so the odds would be . . .”

He looked over at Carlo, who put on the same patient half-smile he wore during rehearsals. He’d been interested for a moment, but when it
came down to details, his mind flew up, around the room, and out the window.

So Carter explained it more directly: “This safe was designed to discourage safecrackers. You only have three chances to enter the right combination.”

“What happens if you just keep guessing?”

Carter didn’t respond. The fact was, if some idiot entered the wrong combination on a Failsafe three times, the door would open on its own accord, and a vial of sulfuric acid would drop directly onto a plate treated with chlorate of potash and sugar. The resulting explosion would at the very least destroy the safe’s contents. They were safes of last resort, designed at first for Russian nobility who lived in fear of ancestral documents falling into the hands of rioting peasants, and now exported mainly to diplomats from nations in which suicide was preferable to capture by the enemy. They were illegal in America; even bootleggers disliked them, for they often had to open their safes while intoxicated.

“Let’s not think about that. Let us think,” Carter leaned forward and turned the dial to five, “positively. And hope that Borax was lazy.” He spun the dial left, to fifteen, then right to twenty. Somewhere out on the great, untended lawns, a peacock cried out twice, then Carter pushed the handle downward.

Nothing happened.

“Damn.” He poured a little more wine and took a sip. “Borax doesn’t know his birthday, so that’s out.”

“Why not some lucky numbers he liked?”

“It could be, but Borax is a sentimental man. He’d choose a date that meant something to him.” A snap of his fingers. “Teel’s Marsh. March 16, 1875, the day God spoke to him.”

“What are you talking about?”

“That isn’t helping me, Carlo.” He spun the dial freely, feeling the reeded edge between thumb and forefinger, stopping at three, then sixteen, then the long trip, more than 180 degrees, to seventy-five. His hand fell on the lever. He brought it down firmly.

There was an unsatisfying
clink
in response. He stood up and stretched and sighed, balling his fists up, and crossing his arms tightly across his chest. He paced, eyes on the mementos hanging from Borax’s walls like he was in a museum. “I’m open to possibilities for a third number,” he murmured.

“His birthday?” Carlo suggested quickly.

Carter stared at him.

“Wife’s birthday?”

“Married twice. Loved them both.”

“Sixteen minutes,” Carlo said.

“That’s no longer an issue. We’ll be out of here one way or another.”

Carlo slumped against the wall and started fishing in his mouth for a corn kernel lodged between his molars. He felt Carter’s focus begin to shift from the safe to him, as if he were doing something wrong. So he stood straight. “Can I do anything?”

“Yes. Here’s an idea. There are two pathways back to the house, front and rear. The rear path is cleared of debris, and that’s how Borax usually comes and goes, but sometimes if the girls carry him, they go out the front.” He gave concise directions for how Carlo should go to the hall, turn right, then go up one flight of stairs—there was a narrow hallway from which one could see both paths, all the way to the main road. “Go quickly, and come back
more
quickly.”

Carlo pushed the bookcase forward on its casters, and graceful as a dancer, bounded from the room. Stairways tended to creak in their centers, so he padded up the edges of the frayed carpeting. The third-floor hall had windows facing the rear access road, which Carlo could see plainly, and Fourth Avenue on the north side. Far behind the loose tapestry of branches and dying leaves, cars and trucks whizzed on the boulevard.