The Homeless Millionaire

I spent the next day in a daze. It felt as if I had been transported into a new world, a different reality. Familiar objects - the toilet bowl when I was taking my morning piss, the espresso machine in the kitchen, the picnic table on the deck - all seemed to acquire a new significance, as if I were seeing them for the first time. I don't know what my face looked like. I didn't want to look at myself in the mirror. I was afraid I'd see a scared, helpless kid.

Robbing the Montreal Museum of fine Arts was a big step up from shoplifting. It wasn't just a step up , it was a whole f.u.c.k.i.n.g staircase, several flights of stairs up. Both metaphorically and literally, because we were to break in through a skylight in the Museum's roof.

Roch and Michel claimed to have hit on the whole idea by pure chance. A few days earlier, they had consumed some magic mushrooms, and then went for a walk that took them past the Museum. There was a long builder's ladder propped up against the building. Michel or Roch (they both claimed credit) had the bright idea to smoke a cigarette on the roof. They stole a couple of folding chairs from a pavement cafe nearby and climbed the ladder. Then they unfolded the chairs on the roof and had a smoke, admiring the view.

Their idyll was interrupted by a young guy wearing builders overalls. He poked his head out of a skylight and asked what they thought they were doing. They truthfully told him they were having a smoke, and offered him a cigarette. He declined, and disappeared. Roch and Michel felt somewhat hurt that their offer had been so curtly rejected. As Michel put it, the mood was gone. So they made themselves scarce, replacing the chairs they'd taken from the pavement cafe. They took special care to put them back in their spots at the correct tables.

Michel had a brainwave later that very day. By that time, they were drinking beer while stripping old wallpaper in the house Roch was working on. If they could wander around around the Museum's roof, Michel said, if workmen could unexpectedly poke their heads from skylights, that could mean only one thing: the alarm system in that part of the building had been turned off. Roch agreed, but was sure it would be turned on again at night. They argued about it for a couple of days with Michel being in favor of the robbery and Roch against. On the morning of the third day since their rooftop smoke, Roch's old man informed him that owning a house meant paying insurance and taxes. This had somehow escaped Roch's attention until then, and caused him to reconsider Michel's proposal in a favorable light.

In the meantime, Michel had recruited a third guy, a guy that thrived on danger in all its shapes and forms. The two of them ganged up on Roch and persuaded him to join them. At least that's the way Roch described it to me at the kitchen table. Michel had laughed at this, and rolled his eyes. He said:

"Just listen to this guy. A moment ago he was saying he was the one that had the idea in the first place."

"To get up on the roof and smoke a cigarette," Roch said.

"Yeah. And I remember what you said when we were sitting there, smoking. You said, it would be so easy to rob this place."

Roch did not say anything to that. He sipped coffee, looking into his mug. I guessed that meant Michel's memory served him right.

Anyway, just a couple of days after The Gang Of Three was officially formed, it turned into a gang of two. The daredevil guy Michel had recruited took a spill on his motorbike, and didn't jump off the bike in time. The footrest crushed his ankle. It would be many months before he could walk properly, and possibly years before he could climb onto roofs. Michel and Roch agreed that their plan required a third guy, and Roch had proposed they get me.

"Did you?" I'd asked Roch, when were sitting at the kitchen table.

" I just said I thought you'd be capable of doing something like that," he said. "Because you are, aren't you?"

"I'm not sure of that."

That was the horrifying truth: I wasn't sure. I should have rejected it outright, told Roch and Michel it was no go on my part. I didn't; maybe the gun on the table played a role in that. But there was no gun around the next day. Roch and Michel had left, I was all alone, and I was still undecided.

Let me make something clear right away: I was scared shitless. But I don't mind being scared shitless, in fact I enjoy it if I know everything's going to turn out all right in the end. Everyone does. That's why horror movies are so popular. People like to feel scared as long as they think there'll be a happy ending. Not stressed, scared. There's a huge difference. Stress doesn't give you an adrenaline rush, it just f.u.c.ks you up.

The Rembrandt Michel had promised me as my reward was also a huge consideration. I knew that the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts owned a Rembrandt. It was a small oil painting on a wooden panel, called Landscape With Cottages. For me, it captured an essential truth about human existence. I was biased though, because I adored Rembrandt. I thought he was the greatest painter ever. Van Gogh and a couple of others came close, but still came second.

I'd formed that belief at a very early age. I was visiting the Louvre with my parents and they had a traveling exposition of Rembrandt's drawings on display . They were all small pieces, many weren't larger than the palm of your hand. Each of those small pieces of paper was covered by hundreds, thousands of very fine lines drawn with utmost precision. He must have used a magnifying glass, there was just no way he could have done it without a magnifying glass. Each shadow, each semi-dark area was created by a web of fine lines that merged with each other when viewed from a distance greater than a couple of inches. My eight-year-old brain somehow instinctively understood that this was how the whole world was put together: gazillions of tiny lines and specks interwoven into one magnificent whole.

Had someone walked up to me and offered me this deal: a genuine Rembrandt painting or drawing or even etching in exchange for, say, my little finger, I would have gone for it. That's how much I admired his work.

I had three days to make up my mind: Roch had told me they would return on Thursday. It was Sunday; I would have preferred them to return the very next day, on Monday. That would make me all f.u.c.k.e.d up for just for a single day instead of four.

I decided to weed Roch's parents famous vegetable patch sometime in the afternoon. I think I simply needed a constructive physical activity. I spent half an hour looking for the gardening tools, and when I found them I was also rewarded with a pair of worn but workable canvas gloves. Equipped properly and mentally prepared for surprises hidden in the overgrown vegetable patch, I proceeded outside. I had this intense feeling that I'm being watched. I probably was, after all I was surrounded by all sorts of birds and beasts and had interrupted their humping, killing, eating, or maybe just lazing around. They all had good reasons to be fearful of having a human being in their midst.

A small insect started buzzing around my face when I stopped by the patch. The little thing had a lifespan of maybe three weeks, and it was stupid enough to land on my cheek. Swat! It must have been a mosquito, the canvas glove was spotted red between the soil stains. Maybe half a lifetime extinguished with a single slap. That was one hell of an unlucky mosquito, I thought. Then I thought: maybe it was lucky, maybe most eggs didn't even get to hatch and when they did, ninety per cent of those guys perished within a single day. Eaten by ants, birds, whatever. Maybe it was actually a kind of distinction to be killed by a human. It always feels better to lose against a superior intelligence, there's nothing worse than losing to a fool. What a pity mosquitoes weren't aware of that.

The weeds were heavy going, and I felt like a murderer when I was uprooting them from the sacred soil of the vegetable patch. Nothing of this was their fault, was it? A seed happened to end up there and developed into a plant. Now I was killing it just because it happened to be there. Wrong place, wrong time. I got all heavy and philosophical over that vegetable patch, because dirty and tiring work tends to do that to me. I kept getting advance warnings of a cramp in my left calf while I crouched - what the f.u.c.k was the matter with that calf, it needed a lesson, I put extra stress on it and yes, it worked, the pain stopped.

I did an excellent job on that vegetable patch. It was completely free of weeds and stones when I finished. I took off the gloves and pissed on the freshly raked soil to complete the ceremony. I could see part of the house across the lake from where I stood, and suddenly it occurred to me that she could see me, too.

I quickly went back inside the house and cleaned up a little. Then I got the binoculars and took a roundabout route to a spot on the shore, maybe a hundred yards from the cottage.

I crouched behind a bush and pushed the binoculars through its top. I could see her house as clearly as if it was within shouting distance. She was standing on the deck in her shiny red raincoat, leaning against the wall next to the door. She was holding a pair of binoculars, and she was looking through them at the lake, or maybe across the lake.

There was a gaggle of ducks fooling around it the water not very far from the end of the pier I had tried fishing from, a couple of days earlier. She could have been looking at those ducks, or she could have been looking at the cottage. Either way, she had a pair of binoculars she could use. It changed my situation, changed it a lot.

I backed off a good hundred yards from the shore before turning to walk back to the house. I entered it from the driveway side, and spent some time figuring all the angles at which she could look into the living room with her binoculars. Those glass doors were huge, basically a third of the wall was glass. And there were no blinds or curtains. Roch's old man simply hadn't gotten around to installing some.

I wondered if she had been watching the three of us - Roch, Michel, myself - partying and talking on the deck. Then I wondered how it could have struck her, and what she thought about us. We'd basically acted like a bunch of drunk, stoned kids. That definitely wasn't an image I wanted her to have, of me. I wanted to correct it even though I had a ton of other stuff on my mind.

By the time night fell, I decided I would finally go and visit her the next day.