At one o’clock in the afternoon, her phone rang, and she let it go to voice mail. A few seconds later the ringing started all over again.
“What happened?” April asked, even before McGee had a chance to say hello. She was calling from the bookstore.
“There was this video,” McGee said with a yawn, describing the actors and their perms, and then she told April about the cleaning cart and about how Calice and then Dorothy had yelled at her, and then about the glass elephants and the trophies and about the desk and her shin, which now looked as if there were a mouse hiding under her skin.
“You mean it actually worked?” April said.
Until that moment, the thought had never crossed McGee’s mind. Despite everything Holmes and Myles and Fitch had said, their insistence that she was crazy even to consider it, the plan had actually worked.
Holmes came over with his picks later that afternoon, and he and McGee practiced on an old dented file cabinet. She’d underestimated how difficult it would be to get a feel for pins and tumblers. She’d thought it would be like learning to juggle or to perform a card trick, just a matter of getting down the motions, the sleight of hand. Every dozen or so tries, she got the lock to pop, but she never understood why. It would just happen, the sequence of steps buried somewhere inside the metal casing.
“Try again,” Holmes said each time. “Try again.”
He never lost patience, but he also never took off his coat.
“You understand it’s a felony, right?” he said. “Just getting caught with them.”
“I’m not going to get caught.”
“Just having them on you.”
“You’re worse than Myles,” she said. “When did you guys get to be such pussies?”
Holmes stood up and checked his watch. “I’ve got to go.”
After four hours, it was the first mention he had somewhere to be.
That evening, riding the bus into the downtown twilight, McGee was jittery, her feet pumping the pedal of some imaginary machine. Twice on her way from the bus stop to the building, she nearly stepped directly into oncoming traffic.
In the basement, she got her cart and went through the motions of checking her supplies. She was waiting for the elevator when she heard footsteps behind her.
“Zolska, Zolska.”
Not until the fourth or fifth time did she recognize her name.
It was one of the guards, the black one with the kind face, the mouth that even at rest seemed to settle into a smile. The same expression was there on his ID badge: Darius.
“They told me to help you upstairs,” he said. And then, “to your floor.” There was no meanness in his voice, and yet as he hooked two fingers to the front of her cart, steering it toward the elevator, she felt flattened. Together they stepped inside the car. Darius pushed the button for the twenty-fourth floor. But while his head was tipped back to watch the numbers change, McGee pressed the button for the third floor. And when the doors opened there first, she rushed out, rocketing the cart before her. She was already removing supplies when Darius realized what had happened, sticking his foot out just in time to stop the doors from closing.
McGee’s second confrontation with Calice was even more unpleasant than the first. Calice cursed. Calice waved her arms. Calice made every threat she could think of. McGee felt genuinely sorry to have caused this woman so much trouble. But there was no room for regrets when so much was at stake.
In the end, it was good that Darius had come up with her. He was the one who finally managed to coax Calice and her cart onto the elevator, reassuring her she was right. A simpler task, presumably, than arguing with a woman incapable of understanding what you were saying.
As soon as they were gone, McGee hurried to Ruth Freeman’s office, skipping all the pretenses from the night before. She knew she had only a few minutes before Darius returned to his security cameras in the lobby.
She slid the leather case from her pocket. Inside, the picks looked like dental tools, thin and delicate and all neat in a row, shining and sterile. Holmes had told her the desk would have a wafer lock, like the one in her cabinet at home. So she did what she’d spent hours practicing, inserting the tension wrench and then raking at the wafers with the ball pick. After a couple of tries, she could feel the wafers rising, one at a time, but she couldn’t get the cylinder to turn. Her fingers were getting sweaty.
Holmes had prepared her for this as well. Deep breath. Then another. Remove. Start over. In again with the wrench and the pick. Again she felt the wafers move against the springs, but no matter how much she wiggled and pressed, the wrench wouldn’t turn. She wished she could call Holmes, but it was too risky to bring her phone. The Lucite clock on Ruth Freeman’s desk told her ten minutes had already passed. She had no choice but to get on with the cleaning.
The hours that followed were some of the longest of her life. It wasn’t the cleaning she minded. It turned out she liked vacuuming, enveloping herself in the drone of the machine, how it cut out every other sound, the way being underwater reduced the outside world to a harmlessly diffused suggestion of light. But her mind kept returning to the lock, to what she’d done wrong. She replayed the sequence in her head, and in tandem she replayed Holmes’s lessons, looking for mistakes. But she was sure she’d done exactly the same thing tonight that she’d done with Holmes that afternoon.
She called Holmes as soon as she got home the next morning. It was five A.M., and he was sleeping. So was Myles, just a few feet away from where she stood with her phone.
“I need you to come over.”
Myles snuffled into his pillow.
“Are you kidding me?” Holmes said, the words coming out in a croak.
She told him what had happened, that she needed his help.
“I’ll be over later,” he said.
Through the phone McGee could see him closing his eyes. “No,” she said. “Now.”
Myles was sitting up on the futon, squinting. “What’s going on?” he said.
“Nothing.” She sat down at the computer. “Go back to sleep.”
* * *
“It must be a double wafer,” Holmes said. It had taken him three hours to make the twenty-minute drive. She smelled coffee on his breath, eggs and bacon. Myles had left for the store.
“What does that mean?”
“The things inside that make it lock,” he said. “They move in both directions, not just one.”
“So what do I do?”
Holmes picked up the black leather case from the steamer trunk. He pulled out what she guessed was a wrench, but different from the one she’d tried the night before, a pair of sharp tines poking out from one end. “Two-prong wrench,” he said, and then he pulled out a pick shaped like a snowman. “Double-ball pick.”
He showed her how to rake the pick along the wafers. “It’s not enough just to do the top,” he said. “You have to do both. Top and bottom.”
He sounded confident, but he’d been just as confident the day before. “You’re sure this’ll work?”
He was already walking toward the door. “I’m not sure of anything.”
McGee slumped down on the love seat. “Are there locks that can’t be picked?”
“Everything I know,” Holmes said, “I learned when I was fifteen.”
McGee ran her finger along the contours of the snowman. “What do I do if it doesn’t work?”
“I’ve given you everything I’ve got.”
McGee knew better than to trust the quiet. That night no one stopped her as she collected her cart in the basement. Not Dorothy, not Darius. No one escorted her to the elevator. And no one, not even Calice, was waiting on the third floor when she arrived there.