“Harold, you’re a gem. A pristine gem honed over years of trial and fire.”
“That’s how I would describe my job, too,” Harold replied.
“Thanks, Harold,” I whispered as we hurried past. “Really.”
He never even looked in my direction.
“Not the elevators,” I said as Jesse reached to press the button. “Never the elevator. Always stairs.”
“It’s the eleventh floor,” Roux protested. “I’ll have a heart attack by the fifth floor.”
“You’ll just have to revive yourself,” I told her. “And good work on the doorman.”
“Well, shucks,” she said, but her grin was a mile wide.
After huffing and puffing our way up eleven flights of stairs, Roux trailing behind Jesse and me, we arrived at 11N. The hallways were narrow and cramped, almost like an architectural version of intense pressure, and when we got to the door, the three of us stood and looked at it.
“It’s all you, Mags,” Roux said. “Take it away!”
“This is how you got into Gramercy Park,” Jesse added. “You really know what you’re doing.”
“I appreciate the cheerleading,” I whispered as I knelt down to examine the lock, “but you might want to save it for whatever’s inside.”
We knocked first, just in case Colton was home, but thankfully no one came to the door. I didn’t know what we would do if he was home, but I suspected that Roux would start pretending to sell Girl Scout cookies, and I wanted to avoid that sort of scene at all costs. “Okay,” I said. “Here we go.”
I could feel Jesse and Roux breathing over my shoulders as I worked, sticking the tension wrench (otherwise known as a Bic pen cap) in the lock while using my bent paper clip to scrub at the pins inside. It wasn’t very loud, but in the quiet hallway, every move sounded like a gun blast.
After two minutes, I got it. “Finally,” I muttered. “Took long enough.”
“Will you show me how to do that?” Roux whispered.
“Absolutely not.”
“That’s cool.”
We waited a few seconds, just in case Colton came bursting out, demanding to know who was breaking into his apartment, but all we heard was silence. An eerie, terrible silence, but silence just the same.
Jesse, Roux, and I crept in on our tiptoes. It looked messy, like someone had been coming and going and not cleaning up after themselves: dust gathered on top of file cabinets, the parquet wood floors had a few layers of grime on top of them, and there were some copies of the New York Times that were from several weeks earlier. “Come on,” I said, “the coast is clear.”
Jesse followed me as I started to poke around the apartment, looking at antique oil paintings on the wall and crumbs on a plate that sat on top of a stack of old New Yorkers. “There’s a safe here somewhere,” I told him. “We just need to find it.”
“How do you know that it’s not somewhere in the filing cabinets?” Jesse said.
“Too easy to access,” I replied. “These are important files, and without them, he has nothing to sell. No one will buy a PDF file without the source material to back it up.”
“Right,” Jesse said. “Okay. So once we find this safe …?”
“I’m going to open it.”
“Hey, I’m making eye contact with a gargoyle!” Roux said, looking out one of the grimy windows. “I shall name him George.”
“Make eye contact with a safe instead. Name it whatever you want.”
“Aye-aye,” she said. “Later, George.”
The three of us poked around the apartment for a few minutes. I couldn’t believe no one else could hear my heartbeat, it felt so loud in my ears. If my parents knew I was doing this, they would murder me, bring me back to life, and murder me again. I was going against the Collective, which no one did. Where that put me on the morality scale, I didn’t want to know.
“Hey, Mags?” Jesse called from the bedroom. “I think this is it.”
Roux and I followed his voice until we arrived in a barren room that held boxes; manila files; and a squat, stout safe. I let out a breath I didn’t know I had been holding. “Is this it?” Jesse asked. “It looks old.”
“That’s it,” I said. It was the exact safe Angelo had let me play with when I was younger, before the kidnapping attempt. There was a brass fleur-de-lis etched into the side, and I put my finger in the groove and traced the pattern, just as I had done when I was little.
“Nice to see you again,” I whispered. “Let’s play.”
I unzipped my duffel bag and started to rifle through it. “What the hell is all that?” Jesse asked.
“A diamond core drill,” I replied. “It can go through cobalt and it lets me use this.” I pulled out a tiny scope camera that had a monitor attached to it. “This lets me see where the grooves are in the lock. Each groove corresponds to a number on the combination and I just have to line them up.”
Jesse and Roux looked at me like I was speaking Martian. “Where do you even get this stuff?”
“Sweet Sixteen present from my parents.”
Roux shook her head. “I got a Fabergé egg. What a ripoff.”
I knelt down in front of the safe and looked at the combination lock. All the blueprints that I had memorized over the years were flooding back into my mind at a terrible speed. “It’s a Sargent and Greenleaf,” I murmured. “Model 6643. No drilling allowed.”