THE VAN WAS BENIGN, inhaling and exhaling like any structure in the coolness of evening as Grace stepped over the threshold. It took her only a few seconds to check the dark corners.
She almost packed everything and left, but was racked with tiredness and convinced herself that she could last until dawn. She didn’t need food, only sleep. Someone might yet come for her in the night, so she should pack a bag, and she should get some shut-eye.
Clothing basics and toiletries first, stowed into two small wheeled cases. Then her dwindling supply of cash, a gold bar and some alternative ID, including vehicle numberplates. Finally, her treasures: a Jaeger-LeCoultre watch, a religious icon and a small Paul Klee oil. The icon, O All-Hymned Mother, dated from the late 1700s in the Old Believers’ workshop of Holui village on the Volga River. It showed mother and child posing in vivid colours, with a rich play in the folds of drapery and a tender melancholy in the Virgin’s face. Decorated with gold leaf and a thin film of tempera, it glowed as if lit from within. The Klee painting, titled Felsen in der Blumenbeet and signed and dated 1932, showed pastelly grey-blue shapes choked by exuberant blue, yellow, red and green cones, triangles, crosses and rhomboids. It was similar in size to the icon, about 25cm x 30 cm. The watch, the icon and the painting went everywhere with her.
Then she prepared for sleep. First, a crude intruder alarm: a saucepan balanced on a chair leaned against the door. Then a Pilates mat to sleep on under the table. She checked that the knife was still taped to the underside of the table. Her old pistol would have been better, but she’d turfed it after shooting Galt. Anyway, this was supposed to be her new life.
Sleep was slow to come inside her meagre shelter, not helped by the knowledge that she’d been forced to move on yet again. She’d thought she might settle this time, putting out feelers for local jobs and babysitting for a couple of the single mums in the park. Feeling frustrated and nervy, she tried to assess the evening and her decisions. This kind of thinking always brought her back to the rules. Galt’s and her own. Know when to walk away from a job was the big one, but you also needed to know how. What were the escape routes? Keep the job itself simple, quiet and unobtrusive—not that Galt had been above setting off smoke bombs or sirens to distract police and emergency services—and always have a plan B, which was a way of saying always plan for and expect the worst.
Like Adam Garrett showing up.
Adam…
Before Galt, they’d worked as a team. Shared the thinking, the burdens, the rewards. Then came Galt, who wasn’t into sharing. These days Grace worked solo. No experts, no insiders. They might make her very rich, but she’d always be wondering about private agendas, or drugs or gambling or just plain inability to keep a secret.
Keep your cool: that went without saying. Galt the thief-catcher always poured scorn on the other burglars he arrested. The risk addicts, the dills who couldn’t distinguish between hallmark and fake silver, the grab-everything merchants, the idiots who didn’t move the gear straight away, the fuck-ups who needed meth for their nerves. ‘You’re not like that, Neet,’ he’d say. But she had been like that. The times she’d needed a little bump before a job, or left behind the prize piece because it looked unassuming, or ditched everything when she ran into a Neighbourhood Watch patrol. She had been addicted to the rush.
And she’d hung on to her three treasures all this time, even knowing they could put her away for years.
Be honest: the watch had been Adam’s, not hers…
It was one of Galt’s jobs, put together from an insurance clerk’s tip-off, and involved a 1952 Rolex—one of the few designs with a moon-phase calendar—that had been left for cleaning with a side-street watchmaker. The business had been there for three decades and was currently separated by a common side wall from New Age Crystals, which had been there for three months before folding, leaving behind bare shelves. No power, no alarm system.
She’d gone in through the empty shop’s back door, up through the ceiling manhole, and then along dusty beams to a point above the watchmaker’s little bathroom. Removing a couple of ceiling tiles, she had lowered herself onto the rim of the toilet bowl, then crept into the room facing the street. The watchmaker’s external security was sound enough, alarms on the main windows and the front and rear doors, but there were no motion sensors and the display cabinets and drawers had not been secured. She opened the ancient safe first (Galt had taken her to one of his guys for a crash-course in safecracking), but it contained only property deeds. She found the Rolex in a drawer under the cash register.
A Rolex worth a hundred grand, according to Galt. If he couldn’t fence or sell it, he was going to ransom it back to the owner, a stockbroker in Woollahra.
It was even possible Grace had burgled that stockbroker at some stage in her life. She wouldn’t necessarily have remembered. People like that were not real to her in the way Children’s Services bureaucrats, teachers, policemen and foster carers were real. Even the messes she found in some of those Woollahra houses, the frayed lives she glimpsed here and there, didn’t persuade her that the rich were like her, except richer. They were utterly foreign. But there was no reason she couldn’t own the sorts of things they owned, particularly the beautiful ones. In her hands, they would have true value, cleansed of the imprint of people who didn’t deserve them.
Not that she had owned anything back then. Galt expected her to give him everything.
That night, in the watchmaker’s, she’d just pocketed the Rolex when she spotted a pink and gold Jaeger-LeCoultre among the other watches left for cleaning. A rare bird, although she didn’t know it then—only five hundred ever made. She knew beauty, though. The Jaeger took her breath away, and she’d hidden it in her hair, twisted into a knot beneath her beanie.
Two minutes later she’d collided with Adam in the alleyway that ran behind the watchmaker’s.
They each took a step back, poised to fight or run. Stared at each other. She couldn’t read him, but he was so dangerously beautiful, like an angel about to change sides, that her hand floated automatically across the gap that separated them and came to rest lightly on his upper arm.
He recovered first. Knocked her arm aside, shoved his upturned palm against her breastbone and hissed, ‘If you came for the Jaeger, it’s mine. My info.’
My info—a law of the streets where they came from. She didn’t ask how he’d known about that particular watch. Like Galt, he would’ve had his own tipsters. Some insurance company or security firm clerk. She felt a kind of shame: he’d made his own life, he was independent, while she was owned by a middle-aged man, and did what he told her.
But then, to her greater shame, she fished the Rolex from her pocket. ‘Jaeger? Don’t know what that is. I came for this.’
She reached out to touch him again. He curled his lip and ducked away, huddled with his lockpicks at the door to the vacant shop. Again, she had a sense of his independent, parallel life. Unlike her, he’d arrived there knowing how he was going to get in. Her instructions had come from Galt.
‘See you,’ she said.
Nothing from him—not even a grunt.
Now, as she tossed and turned on the Pilates mat under the table, Grace found herself recalling his claim: ‘The Jaeger—it’s mine.’
Had he been at the expo because he expected her to be there? Because he knew how she operated? Because he still wanted the watch back—after all this time?