Art of Theft - Chapter Two

The Art of Theft

Chapter Two
by Murray K.

Friday afternoon has taken an eternity. Ever since the financial
crisis the markets have been working in dog years as they lurch from
one disaster to another. Japan seems to have settled down so the
crisis du jour is the middle east again with a dash of soveriegn debt
and the markets have taken another pasting. The clients always need a
bit of love in these conditions and I'm just finishing my ring around.
The last name on the list is Mr Welsh.

"So how are we looking" he asks after we go through the pleasantries.

"Not bad. The portfolio protection we put in place has worked well,
the option straddles are - "

"I don't need the detail Scott, just tell me, are we winning or losing".

"Well, today's a draw but we're a nose ahead for the week."

"Hell, in this market a draw is a win in my book. Great work Scott.
I'm going to feel a lot happier for the next month knowing you're
looking me."

"Thanks for the vote of confidence sir. When are you off, anyway?" I
ask, glad he's bought it up first.

"We fly out Saturday morning, arrive in St Petersburg Sunday morning.
By this time Monday we'll be on our riverboat cruising down the Volga
river."

"You know Henry, I was going to ask you about that. Why Russia? Was
Paris booked out?"

"Gloria and I have been to Paris a hundred times. We figured it's
time to do something a little more adventurous. It's the route the
Vikings took to get all the way to Baghdad you know?"

"Well, you can bring me back a horned hat if you like. By the way, do
you want me to call you or email you anything?"

"And ruin my holiday? I've told everyone, even my kids, the phone is
off. I might check messages once a week or so. Just let me know if
you've lost my entire fortune, I'll look for a goatherder job on the
Russian steppes."

"Oh, you don't want anything to do with goats. Nasty, foul-smelling,
mean-spirited creatures."

"Sounds like your colleagues at Goldman's, Scott."

"Not a bit of it. Folks here wear cologne. Have a good trip Henry."

"Thanks Scott, talk to you in a month."

And with that, motive becomes motive and opportunity.

Saturday morning is spent in my apartment, laying tonight's tools out
on the bed, surrounded by my art collection. Most of what I have on
my walls in prints, but there's the odd minor work that's original.
After our last bonus, when one of my colleagues bought a Masserati, I
bought a beautiful Eugene Boudin seascape of Le Havre. It cost about
the same amount as the car, but where in New York are you going to
park a Masserati?

Next to the Boudin is the product of my first foray into crime, a
small Monet. Actually, that's a bit misleading, it's a lithograph and
the only thing Monet really did was sign it. But it's based on one of
his compositions and that signature is worth something. The motive
was pity as much as desire. The lithograph was one of the many
thousands of pieces in Goldman Sachs' art collection, mostly up and
coming current artists so Goldman can claim to be modern Medicis.
I've no idea how this little piece entered the collection and clearly
neither did Goldman's curator, because he'd relegated it to a small
internal meeting room. With the hundreds of low level management
updates and strategy meetings it had seen, I'm amazed it hadn't
spontaneously combusted. My theft wasn't a particularly bold or quick
affair, first I just took it off the wall and hid it in the computer
cupboard. A month later, after it had been missed by no-one, I
spirited it out in a laptop bag one evening. Easy. Getting the
Matisse, well that would be a very different story.

By the time I leave in the late afternoon I've repacked a dozen times.
An ex of mine used to say that whenever I was stressed I went
borderline OCD, but I prefer to think of it as thoroughness. I leave
my apartment hauling all of my gear in a toolbox and a large plastic
tub that had previously contained 20kg of pool salt. I walk a block
before grabbing a cab uptown to central park and arrive a touch before
half past five. It's awkward lugging everything the three blocks to
the Welsh's apartment, but most of the foot traffic was heading with
me away from the park. I intentionally try to avoid people's eyes,
not that anyone was likely to notice me anyway. I'm dressed in jeans
and the kind of blue button-up shirt one would only wear as a uniform,
emblazoned with the logo of "Skyline Pools". The cap sitting over my
wrap-around shades has the same logo, courtesy of iron on transfers.
I look the regular Joe Tradesman, or so I hope.

Half a block away from the apartment, I get hit by a surge of
adrenaline. It's the same feeling I get standing at the top of a
cliff, about to abseil down. I savour it for a moment and then I'm at
the building, standing in front of the doorman.

"Hey bud," I call to get his attention.

"What's up?"

"I'm Dave from Skyline Pools," I say, pulling out an ID that had been
put together with a colour printer and a laminator. "We got a fault
call from the pool on the roof here. Client by the name of, uh,
Walsh's?"

"Welsh's," replies the doorman absent-mindedly while looking at the
ID. It's amazing what a laser printer and a laminator can knock up
nowadays.

"Yeah, that's them. Can you give them a call, tell them I'm coming up."

"Sorry bud, no can do. They're not in."

"Aw geez, are they gonna be long?"

"Can't say."

"Well, the systems reporting a major fault. Any way you can get me up
there to check it out?" This was the moment of truth. I reckoned I'd
figured the logistics out, but the one variable, the one human factor,
was this doorman letting me up to the roof. He was clearly in two
minds, turning my ID over in his hands. "Have you got any calls of
sudden wet floors from the apartments? Flooding, water leaking from
the light fittings, coming down the walls."

"No, nothing."

"Well, I guess I can come back when they do..."

"Ah, come on, we'll check it out."

A quick trip up the elevator gets us to the top floor and we head into
the fire escape, up the stairs and onto the roof.

"I think the pool's over, uh, there it is," he says, pointing back to the west.

"Yeah, I know, I've been up here before," I say, the first truthful
thing I've said so far. "I'll check the equipment shed, can you have
a quick look at the pool?"

I set my gear down next to the small shed and open it up, reaching for
a couple of things from my jeans pocket as I do. I smear a couple of
the pristine pipes and a patch of floor with a tube of grease and
stick a small box of angry red blinking LEDs underneath one of the
large control boxes. Then I open up the toolbox and grab a spanner
and screwdriver from the top. By the time the guard comes back, I'm
industriously unscrewing what I think is the main filter control.

"Hey, you'd better see this," says the doorman with genuine concern,
"there's water spilling over the edge."

I follow him to the pool and it takes me a second to realise that the
guy has never seen an infinity pool before. On one side the wall is
lower and there's a steady stream of water cascading over the top, so
that anyone inside has the sensation that the pool never ends, just
goes off into the horizon. The doorman is looking at it with quiet
alarm, and I say a small prayer of thanks to whatever gods look after
thieves.

"Yeah, thought so. Problem with the pump, it's overflowing."

"Is it flooding the apartment?"

"No, don't worry, there's a secondary containment for just this sort
of thing," and I point out the small area where the water is meant to
collect. "Give me a second."

I head back to the equipment shed and spend a couple of seconds trying
to work out which machine is the pump. Then I just turn everything
off at the wall switches and the steady hum goes silent. Sure enough,
by the time I head back to the pool edge there's a lot less water
coming over, and after a minute there's just a tiny trickle.

"Good thing we got here when we did, that would have filled up
quickly," I lie to the much relieved doorman, and head back to the
pool shed with him in tow. "I can see what's wrong with the pump and
I reckon I can fix it, it'll take about half an hour."

"Oh," says the doorman, looking at his watch. "My shift ends in 15
minutes." And I was relying on that as well, 6pm on the dot. Try
getting a New York doorman to work 5 minutes more than he has to.
"I've got to get down and tell Charlie what's going on."

"That's fine," I reply. "Look, this shouldn't be a problem. You can
tell Charlie to come up or I'll just head down when I'm finished."

"Yeah, ok," he says, looking at his watch again. "Charlie'll be up in
15 or 20." And with that he walks back to the fire escape.

The moment the door clicks shut I'm up and moving. I strip off my
shirt and clean off the grease, then pull everything out of the tub.
I've got a 3 mil wetsuit top in their that I throw on, then strip off
my jeans to reveal the wetsuit bottoms. Surprisingly comfortable,
they stop chaffing, but they don't breath well, probably won't wear
them the next time I'm clubbing. I put together the rebreather tank
and fit two 5 litre oxygen canisters and my weight belt, that's half
the weight of the tub right there. I get a large piece of blue
plastic and a roll of roofing tape out of the tub and then stow the
toolkit and my clothes in it, then put it at the back of the pool
shed. It looks like it belongs there. Then it's goggles on,
mouthpiece in, and into the water.

As I hit the water I'm glad it's been sunny the last couple of days,
even so it's unpleasantly chilly. But I haven't got time to think of
that as I spread out the blue plastic on the water's surface. This
was a test of my colour sense, but the plastic is pretty close to the
colour of the pool. I bring it down to the bottom and have to
straighten it out underwater, the hardest part of the whole deal. A
series of steps come down into the pool, and I tape the plastic so
that it sticks out from the last of these. Then I tape it one side to
form a new step. The pool is about as wide as I am tall, and when I
get in under this plastic I'm able to rest my feet against the side
and tape the other end of the plastic.

So now I'm sitting, cocooned in a piece of plastic pretending to be a
pool step, trying to slow my breath in the respirator. The rebreather
puts out only a fraction of the bubbles of a normal scuba tank, and
I'm hoping that to the casual observer I'm invisible. After an hour
has passed I figure that Charlie the doorman must have come up to
check. Will they just check the roof, or will they open up the
aparment? Will they even search through the building? I've got no
idea, but since there's no sudden splashing and tearing back of my
plastic sheet, I at least know they haven't spotted me yet. I figure
6 hours more than long enough for any heat to do down, the hardest
thing now is that my hands are starting to freeze. I hope they're not
too numb to get past the locks.