The Glass Harmonica Read online

  No pushing into chairs or knocking over lights. Slow, hands and feet in short arcs. Hit the high-percentage places. Purse on the counter. Wallet in the pants pocket in the bedroom. Move slow but deliberate.

  Best thing is to take stuff that won’t be missed right away. Little things. Don’t get greedy, eventually there’s always lots, even if it’s not here tonight. Find a purse with eighty dollars, take forty. Chances are they’ll be too busy blaming each other to even think there’s been a break-in.

  Sometimes, with big stuff like cameras, stuff you can carry that’s valuable, you just take the whole lot of it and hope you can wait out the heat. Or else have someone who’s interested ahead of time.

  Old coins? See fifty, take ten. Make it so it’s hard for anyone to put their finger on when something went missing—that can be important later, when someone like a cop is asking you questions.

  Bart moving down the hall, setting his feet down gently, wary of creaks in the floor.

  People are creatures of habit, yes they are, he thinks.

  Sock drawers: there’s stuff in there that no one’s even thinking of—at least, they don’t look for it every day. A few days’ grace before anyone notices anything, and when it’s gone, they start by looking for someone familiar to blame. Interesting treasures in there sometimes. Old watches, sometimes old bills—but don’t even think of trying to unload them right away at a coin shop or something; this is just too small a town. Wait for the buyers who come in once or twice a year, the guys who set up at the hotel and buy the full-page ads in the paper. They’ll rip you off on price, thinking you’re some small-town rube who doesn’t know what you’ve got in your own hands, but it doesn’t matter that they’re always shorting you—they don’t know that you got it for free, and they’ll be moving out of town long before anyone says, “Hey, wait a minute.” They’re not in a big rush to have the cops around their inventory either.

  So everybody wins—you just win more than anybody else, and nobody knows any better, either.

  Bart sees the long lumps of Keith and Evelyn in bed under the blankets, neither of them moving, both breathing with great long breaths, sleeping soundly.

  Don’t rush, pull the drawers open slow, stop if you feel them start to bind at the edges like they might squeak—just leave ’em. Search by touch, fingers like electric current. The lump of the wallet in a pair of pants on a chair—don’t lift ’em, the tang on the belt might fall and ring like a single chime. Wallet out of the pocket if you can, leave it if you can’t—take two of the twenties, slide the wallet back.

  Lots of things to remember—like the fact that older people don’t like banks, so sometimes there’s big money. But it’s not always easy to find. These guys, not that old. Some people like to wake the real oldsters up and threaten ’em, get them to give up whatever they’re hiding, but not my style, Bart thinks, can’t stand the idea of seeing that look in someone’s eyes. Plus it can go bad sometimes, some old guy up out of the bed ready to fight, and people get hurt that way. It’s not always the old people that get hurt, either.

  Back to the dresser, sweep your eyes across the top, looking out of the corners of your eyes, the edges of your vision often better in the dark.

  Jewellery boxes—don’t even open ’em unless you’re sure. Some of them are music boxes, and weigh the risks: in this neighbourhood, chances are the jewellery is cheap stuff, not worth the risk of trying to sell it.

  Better to move quick, already a bit of a score here in the bedroom, move on, always take the fewest chances you can.

  Take tools if you get the chance—they’re always getting misplaced anyway, and they’re easy to turn for cash, even at a yard sale. Bart remembers selling a set of rabbitting bits once at a yard sale, right back to the guy he’d stolen them from.

  “Lost a bunch just like these,” the guy says. “Chances are I’ll probably find them the minute I get these ones back home.”

  “Always seems to happen that way,” Bart answers, folding twenty dollars and sliding it down into his front jeans pocket.

  Back through the kitchen now and out towards the back—careful, though, because there’s the kid’s room somewhere, and kids are unpredictable. Sleep through anything, or wake up at the drop of a hat. Don’t even try the door—not worth the chance. Not likely to be anything in there anyway.

  Through the kitchen door and into the workshop, and Bart looks around, takes the drill bits, a glass cutter, takes another couple of bills from a glass jar on a shelf there in the light from the street light, the orange triangle running down on the floor to a square of loose drywall by the heater.

  Old-timer’s trick, Bart thinks.

  Easy and slow, his eyes working real good to pick it out.

  No one ever learns, Bart’s thinking, moving over towards it, letting his fingers slide along the edges. Like no one’s ever done this before.

  Probably a couple of pornos back there, he thinks, or maybe a flask. Maybe the mad money he doesn’t want her to know he has, and if it’s gone, he’s not even going to be able to complain about it.

  Shifting the small square, jiggling it out of place, it moves easily enough, someone’s done this a few times before, Bart thinks. The drywall no longer crisp on the edges, it’s been pushed in and taken out so often. Behind it, there’s pink fibreglass insulation, the nasty stuff that gets into your skin and itches like the devil, Bart thinks, and it’s all tufted in and under the edges of the wall, so it’s not like he has to pull it out and look behind it too.

  Then he sees there’s a little hollow in the insulation at the bottom, and tucked into it, a small, dark purse, and Bart thinks, Now this is interesting, I’ll just be taking this and we’ll have a little look inside later, won’t we?

  Not a bad little haul at all, he’s thinking, at least sixty dollars now with the purse and the wallet and some tools, and no one’s going to be the wiser, at least not at first.

  And just then, someone else comes in the front door, not even trying to be quiet, the door slamming back into place behind him, and it’s got to be a him because the guy’s just moving so goddamn big, Bart thinks, and Bart’s looking for a place to hide that just plain isn’t there.

  A big guy finding you in a house is bad.

  Calling the cops on you is bad enough, but big guys finding you can end very badly, because they’re either scared or angry, and either way they tend to overdo it, even if you’re not fighting back at all.

  Bart doesn’t know Glenn Coughlin, but it’s Glenn heading to the fridge for a beer because he’s run out, his feet heavy and clomping across the kitchen. So Bart takes advantage of the noise to slip over and slide the little half door open, heads out and under and across the yard, and he doesn’t start breathing again until he’s hopped over the fence and is back on the sidewalk. Puts the purse safe inside his jacket, zips it up, wonders what makes it so important that it’s got its own special hidey-hole.

  Remembers that he’s left the drywall out of place, the hole open. Much too late to be going back now, he thinks.

  Maybe it’ll be a few days before anyone notices anything wrong. Maybe longer. Maybe not.

  Keeps walking.

  And no one shouts.

  Back at home, and he’s got the purse out on his bed, and there’s nothing there worth anything at all, just really old ID for a teenaged girl with a familiar-sounding name, and Bart Dolimont can’t remember just where he’s heard that name before, and he sure doesn’t recognize the face on the student ID card.

  But wait.

  Then he does.

  This is an ace in the hole, Bart thinks. Just something to keep in hand, something that might be useful someday. And he wonders: how did this guy get a missing girl’s purse?

  This might be something I’d have to be paid to forget, Bart thinks.

  32

  McKay Street

  VINCENT O’REILLY

  JANUARY 5, 1991

  TWO DAY SLATER , and no one even knew Bart had been in the O
’Reillys’ house. Glenn Coughlin, standing in the front doorway, said, “Gonna be just like your dad, aren’tcha?” and he smiled when he said it.

  Nine years old and serious, Vincent O’Reilly stood in the front hall, his arms straight down by his sides as his mother knelt in front of him, doing up the buttons on his coat. Big Glenn Coughlin from the dockyard, standing just outside the door on the front steps, the door wide open, two paper cups of coffee steaming in his hands. Across the street, Coughlin’s fourteen-year-old truck was idling next to the curb, exhaust pillowing out into the early morning air in short, uneven chuffs.

  Fine snow was coming down out of a clear blue sky, almost magically, the individual shards of broken flakes caught glistening in the hard white winter sunlight as they fell. Vincent looked over his own shoulder and stared at the vibrating exhaust pipe, at the ancient dark green truck with the rust holes in the quarter panels and the distinctive light green outline of flames drawn along the sides, the stencilled outline now coming apart with age. It was topped with the ratty white camper back that Glenn had bought somewhere on the cheap, a camper top obviously designed for a different truck and slightly too large for the pickup’s back. It perched, more than fit, on the truck’s box. Vincent had often heard his father say, “Glenn doesn’t care what anyone thinks about how something looks, as long as it does its job.”

  Keith O’Reilly and Glenn would load up the truck in the fall to hunt moose, cases of beer tucked inside the back, against the tailgate, then take a whole weekend and come back smelling of dirt and cigarette smoke and stale beer. “Went up to the cabin on the Northeast,” Keith would say when they got back, but if they were ever successful on their hunting trips, Vincent hadn’t seen any sign of it. They never brought a moose home, head on the roof of the pickup, and rabbits never made their way into stew. Vincent knew his dad came back from the weekends almost deflated, and in its own way that was a good thing, like pressure letting go before it was too much to contain. He came back rumpled, Vincent thought, and smelling somehow like overripe plums, as if he’d gone bad a little out there in the country, something spoiled taking root somewhere around his neck and shoulders and breath. He also came back with something Vincent would only be able to describe later as blunted menace, an important slowing of unreasonable anger: whatever else there was in the small house, there was an undercurrent that if things didn’t go Vincent’s father’s way, there could easily be serious trouble. It wasn’t something Vincent could put his finger on. It was simply there—and Glenn Coughlin was right in the middle of it.

  “Keith’s on his way now, Glenn,” Evelyn O’Reilly said, looking back into the house over her shoulder, hearing her husband’s footsteps. Vincent looked at the man he was always told to call Mr. Coughlin and wondered what it was that he didn’t understand about the man.

  Glenn Coughlin, Vincent had realized, was the only person who walked into the O’Reilly house whenever he wanted to. Glenn didn’t ring the doorbell, he didn’t knock—he just parked his truck, hitched his pants, strode up the sidewalk, put his hand on the knob and walked right in like he owned the place, as if he had every right to be there. Like it was his own house. He actually lived ten blocks over, on Bond Street, in a small, detached two-storey house with white vinyl siding and new windows that were so small the house looked as if it had been designed as a fort with narrow gun emplacements instead of real windows. Vincent had never been inside, had never done anything more than drive by the place, and it sometimes seemed to him that he could say the same thing about Glenn. Coughlin spent more time at their house than he spent anywhere else.

  It might be five in the morning or nine at night, but Glenn almost always had two cups of coffee with him in a takeout tray, one for himself, the other for Vincent’s dad. Glenn even called Vincent’s mother Ev, and no one did that, not even Vincent’s father. But nobody seemed to mind Glenn doing anything—at least, no one said anything if they did. And it didn’t stop there. Glenn could walk back into the workshop and grab tools—the precious chainsaw that no one else touched, the Vise-Grips, anything—and walk right straight out of the house again, and Vincent’s father wouldn’t get angry, wouldn’t do anything but laugh that hollow little laugh that seemed completely connected to Glenn Coughlin and absolutely no one else. More than once Vincent had heard his father pleading with Glenn to return one tool or another, his father caught in the middle of a project that needed something that had gone missing. Other times Vincent had gotten up in the middle of the night, everyone else asleep, only to find Glenn in the kitchen, silhouetted by the light from the fridge as he searched for something to eat. “Hi bud,” Glenn would say, his mouth half full, leftovers in his hands and sometimes on the side of his face.

  Glenn worked in the dockyard with Vincent’s dad. They’d gone to school together from boyhood, Glenn always the bigger of the two, always willing to step in when Keith was in trouble with someone else—Keith, small and ready to fight but always outweighed, Glenn slower to action but always ready to turn on whoever was tormenting the smaller boy and settle matters with quick, heavy fists.

  They’d finished high school together, sporting identical low-average marks, started work at the dockyard together, and stayed together on the same shifts for years, Glenn backing up Keith with his size, Keith talking Glenn out of corners, like the time Glenn decided he was going to beat up a supervisor—a supervisor who was later fired when his locker somehow ended up full of gear stolen from the skipper’s cabin on a provincial ferry that was in the yard for a refit.

  Keith would move to sandblasting for a change, then Glenn would catch up, moving over to the same crew within a week or so, like an old couple who argued publicly but really couldn’t stand being away from each other. They had stayed on the paint crew for all of three weeks before deciding that they hated painting more than anything they’d ever done, and both promised they would never, ever go back. They had top welding tickets, and either one of them could fire up the big D9 Caterpillar bulldozer and use it to haul a ship up onto the synchro-lift, black raw diesel smoke belching from the short stack on the tractor as it hauled the ship along, the tractor in the lowest possible gear. Both men had enough seniority to bump just about anyone else off a job, and they weren’t afraid to use it, either. Keith always led: every time Keith tried something new, it was like Glenn decided he wanted to try it too, and it seemed they would leapfrog around the yard into any job they wanted to. “Ya gotta like the union, Keith,” Glenn said, and he said it often, especially when the shop steward was in earshot, and then Glenn would wink.

  It was quiet in the front hall where the three of them were waiting, and then Vincent’s father was coming down the hallway towards them fast, his arms in tight next to his sides, hands up high so that it looked like he was racing down the narrow hallway towards a fight. He had his coat on already, hands pushed angrily down through the sleeves so that, inside, the sleeves of his sweater were pulled up in bunches on his forearms. It didn’t matter: five minutes after they got to work, everyone would be in the dark blue insulated coveralls and steel-toed work-boots anyway, hard hats perched on their heads like yellow cherries on sundaes, the dockyard logo on a rectangular patch right in the middle of their backs like they were small blue billboards swarming all over the latest ship.

  “Come on then, Vincent, time to get going,” Keith O’Reilly said gruffly, as if Vincent had been the one holding them all up.

  Vincent didn’t say anything, knew better than to say anything, but he picked up his bookbag quickly, accepting a kiss on the cheek from his mother as he turned for the door.

  “The three men, all heading out together for their shifts, hey, Vincy?” Glenn said, laughing.

  Glenn was always laughing, Vincent thought, even when there wasn’t anything funny to be laughing about. Vincent swung his school bag up over his shoulder, walking between the two men as they crossed the street. Vincent looked both ways, just the way he had been told, before he stepped off the curb. He noticed
that Glenn didn’t bother, as if a car hadn’t been made yet that would dare to hit him.

  On the other side of the truck, Vincent’s father held the passenger door open, stood there as if trying to make up his mind, and then climbed into the cab of the truck himself, sliding into the middle of the bench seat next to Coughlin.

  “You take the outside, Vincent. You’re going to be getting out first anyway.”

  “First in, last out, just like the contract says, hey, Keith?” Glenn said, slipping the truck into gear and pulling it away from the curb. As they drove, Vincent looked out the window and into the side mirror. It was starred and broken, several shards simply gone, as if someone had driven a fist into it as Glenn had pulled away. The truck mirror had always been like that. Vincent liked looking in it, liked looking at the way the different pieces broke up the view behind the truck, so that every single shard showed the world in a slightly different way, each one highlighting its own particular facet of the things they passed. His father noticed him staring at the mirror.

  “Why don’t you get that damned thing fixed, Glenn? Been broken forever,” Keith said. “Don’t know how this thing passes inspection anyway.”

  “Don’t need it, do I? Besides, a new one’s close on sixty dollars,” Glenn said. Then he laughed again, a dry little shallow laugh, like he was making a point. “Some people can get around just fine without it, and without hitting stuff.”

  Vincent’s father crossed his arms stiffly across his chest at that, glowered, and didn’t say anything else.

  “Lighten up, would ya?” Glenn said.

  They drove in silence for a few minutes down the snow tunnel that was McKay Street. The city plows had been out overnight, turning big curved berms of slush and snow up against the sides of the parked cars on the road, the corridor so precise that it seemed like they were on a private road, a road built just for them. Vincent was watching the sun play off the rounded slush, the backwards curve made by the plow’s blade now hardening into ice. He watched the way one line of bright sun seemed to run along ahead of the truck on the freezing bank, the reflection never getting any closer to them nor any farther away, the way the light made longer points on the top and bottom, so it was like they were following some simple, always-moving schoolbook drawing of the Star of Bethlehem.