The Homeless Millionaire

"Man," Roch said, and there was both admiration and reproach in his voice. He shook his head and lowered his eyes and smiled mirthlessly at the cigarette smoldering in his hand. He lifted it to his lips and took a puff. He looked at me again, safe behind his smokescreen. He said:

"And I was thinking, gotta get back there, I'll go a day earlier, poor Mike's all alone and biting his fingernails."

I had just finished telling him almost everything about Tracy. I apologized to him profusely for letting her stay, but pointed out she'd shown up in the middle of the night: I could hardly turn her away. He didn't like that. He found her showing up in the middle of the night a little incredible. Maybe this was because I didn't tell him I offered his house as a safe haven to Tracy when I'd found her crying.

He'd found Tracy's subsequent, mysterious disappearance incredible, too. We were in full agreement there.

"I've been biting my finger nails all day today," I told him. "You sure you can't remember anything about the people that own that house? You've been coming here for what, three years and you've really never even seen them?"

"I said I'd never seen that red Mustang, and that I'd never met them. Sure I've seen them, as recently as last summer, they had a big party out on the deck one weekend. Maybe that guy was out there. Maybe she was there, too. How the f.u.c.k should I know? It's too far away to tell who is who and I've never met them. My old man did, a couple of times. You can ask him yourself when the whole crowd comes down on Saturday."

"I don't think I will. It's gonna be awkward."

"Whatever. Listen, Mike. We have just a couple of days to get the place ready and do some serious training. So -"

"Hang on a second. What training? Training what?"

"Climbing a rope. We did it during PE at school, you remember, right? Remember how Brandon's shorts slipped off revealing that birthmark on his ass? Right. But we did that without carrying a load. And it was a toy rope, it was what, ten feet? We gotta be able to climb fifty, and that's while carrying at least forty pounds each."

"What the f.u.c.k for?"

Roch sighed and said:

"We're going in through the skylight, remember? How the f.u.c.k are you going to get down to the floor, and then back up onto the roof?"

"So that's why you brought that huge coil of rope?"

"Correct. We still have to tie knots in the rope, I don't know, maybe every two feet, then pick the right tree and hang it from a strong branch."

"F.u.c.k."

"Correct again. Let's start with the house, get the rooms ready, vacuum and dust, all that shit."

"I've already made a start. You saw that I did the bathroom, I hope? And I've also done one of the rooms." I could see he was about to start sneering that I'd done it for Tracy, so I added quickly:

"I've also weeded that famous vegetable patch."

"No!"

"Yes."

"I have to see it. I can't believe it."

Roch was totally blown away by the work I'd done on the vegetable patch. His attitude to me instantly improved. He even patted me on the back. Then we both got very busy. But all the same, it was after three in the afternoon by the time we finally had the rope ready. We tied the knots every three feet instead of two but even that shrank the rope considerably, it was now barely over forty feet long. Roch also retrieved a backpack from one of the closets, and filled it with stones. Then we tried to find a suitable tree, with a bough that could handle two hundred pounds, and was over ten yards up from the ground.

It proved to be difficult. After an hour of wandering around and occasionally quarreling over possible choices, we had to settle for a maple with a suitable branch maybe twenty feet up. Roch had come well equipped: he'd brought a pair of climbing boots with inward-pointing spikes, like the ones Bell Canada workers used to climb telephone poles. He explained he'd actually done a lot of tree-climbing recently, cutting dead branches off the trees growing in the lots of the inherited houses.

"You saw that gigantic tree in the backyard, right? The one Jules climbed during the party? Man, I spent two whole days up that tree. It blocked all light from the back, you opened a window upstairs and a bent branch would straighten out and pop into the room."

"Impressive."

"F.u.c.k.i.n.g right it was impressive. I nearly fell off a couple of times. The old man got scared and got me those boots and a harness."

"You don't need a harness for this?"

He drew his lips from his teeth as he looked up the tree.

"Nah," he said. "This is going to be easy."

It wasn't. He had to haul up the rope, with one end tied around his waist. The higher he climbed, the heavier the rope got, and it also kept getting snagged in the lower branches. He would have fallen off without those boots, he came close once anyway when he disturbed some bird's nest. It burst from the leaves screeching and going for his face with its beak. He swiped it away with one hand and his other hand slipped and if it wasn't for those boots, things would have gotten gruesome.

It was another half an hour before he climbed down after fastening the rope up there properly, and breaking off some of the small branches and twigs that were in the way. Then we both hung ourselves from the rope, and swung back and forth. There were some protesting creaks coming from above, but everything held fast.

We didn't practice climbing that day, it was getting late and we'd nothing to eat since breakfast. We gorged ourselves on steaks and potatoes and salad. There still were a few beers left in the fridge, but we left them untouched. When we'd finished clearing up after dinner, we were both so tired and sleepy that we went to bed together with the sun.

We got up even before it did the next morning: by the time it had climbed over the horizon, we had eaten breakfast and were sitting and smoking at the picnic table on the deck. I threw a couple of glances at the house across the lake, and Roch noticed. He made a wry mouth and looked away from me to hide it. Then he started talking and I didn't look at the house again. I kept my eyes on Roch as he laid out the plan for the robbery.

"There's a big tree next to the west wall, between the museum and the church next to it. It's so big that the branches overlap the edge of the museum roof," he explained. I nodded; I'd seen and remembered the tree he was talking about.

"I'm going to climb that tree," Roch said. "The guys that are working on it always haul up the ladder they're using onto the roof when they are done for the day. I'll lower it and you and Michel climb up. There's a metal handhold right next to the skylight, I remember the guy that chased me and Michel off the roof grabbed it to haul himself up. We tie the rope to it, lower it through the skylight, and slide down to the floor. Michel's made a list of stuff to take: small pictures, antique jewelry, a few statuettes that are gold with precious stones. He's also drawn a plan showing where all that stuff is located, so that we don't waste any time when we're inside. We have to be done inside a couple of hours at most. Start about midnight Sunday, every cop in the city will be drunk or hung over by then."

"I think there might be a few sober cops around," I said. "What about the museum guards? There will be at least a couple of them, you can be sure. How do we deal with them?"

"Michel's got it all worked out. There are three guards throughout the night. They're lazy bastards, most of the time they drink tea and smoke and talk in the kitchen next to the staff room. Once in a while they might walk round for a bit, but it should be easy to avoid them."

"What if we can't?"

Roch shrugged. He said:

"They're unarmed. There's nothing to be afraid of."

I didn't like the sound of this. I said:

"Michel's taking his gun?"

"Of course. I'm taking my shotgun, too."

I remembered Roch's shotgun very well. He got it for his sixteenth birthday, all the guys at school envied him a lot and thought his old man was great to have bought him a present like that. Truth was, Roch's old man liked to go duck-hunting in the fall, and he wanted to bribe Roch into going along with him on those hunts. Roch liked the shotgun a lot, but he didn't like the idea of walking for miles on mostly wet ground while serving as the main attraction of the day for mosquitoes. He did have to go along a couple of times to show his appreciation for the present, but managed to get on his father's nerves so much that his old man swore to never take him along again. He still had the shotgun, though.

I liked guns, show me a guy who doesn't. But I didn't like the idea of taking guns along on the robbery. That was serious business, that was really heavy duty stuff. I said:

"F.u.c.k! I didn't know we were taking guns."

"Take it easy, Mike. No one's going to get hurt. We'll just wave them around bit if we run into any of the guards, so that they behave themselves."

I laughed bitterly. I said:

"You know, ninety per cent of those guys that are convicted of murder say, but I never intended to kill anyone. It was an accident."

"Mike," Roch said, grabbing my wrist and looking right into my eyes, "If we shoot anyone you can shoot me next. Right in the f.u.c.k.i.n.g head. Michel is clear on that, too. We don't shoot anyone, we just need a couple of frighteners in case something goes wrong."

"Something always goes wrong," I said.

"Well, if it does, we'll wave the guns around and tie the guards up and lock them up in the staff room. We're not going to hurt anybody. And now let's go and climb that rope a few times."

I still needed to make a protest of some sort. So I said:

"How come Michel isn't here with us, training? Isn't he coming inside the museum with us?"

"Of course he's coming. Michel goes rock-climbing in his spare time, he can scale a f.u.c.k.i.n.g vertical brick wall ten feet high, I've seen him do it. Don't you worry about Michel, he's the original spiderman."

And that's where we left it for the time being. I was determined to have a serious talk with Michel when Roch and I got back to Montreal. We were to leave the cottage on Sunday, and meet up with Michel Sunday afternoon. There would be enough time for having a serious talk, and if it went wrong I would just back out of the whole thing, telling Michel to shoot me if he wanted to. I was pretty sure he wouldn't.

We went to the tree with Roch wearing his climbing boots and me wearing my high tops. We quickly found out it was a good idea to have some hand protection and for Roch to exchange the boots for sports shoes. Roch fetched a roll of bandage from the house and we bandaged the palms of our hands; it really helped a lot. Then Roch made it up the rope and down again a couple of times, carrying the backpack filled with stones the second time around. He told me it was a piece of cake and it did indeed look fairly easy, but I still had my heart in my mouth when it was my turn.

I found that it really wasn't that hard, at least going up. Going down was another matter because I had to look down a few times and that was scary. Each of us went up and down that rope several times, the backpack was a pain in the a.s.s because it kept getting caught on the branches. We rested for a while, and after a serious discussion went to the house and drank a beer each; that much was okay. Then we went back to the rope and practiced some more, until we both ached all over. I was actually doing better than Roch towards the end. He was heavier than me, that was the one time being skinny worked to my advantage.

After we'd rested a bit, Roch changed into his climbing boots and went up once more to undo the rope. He had a hell of time getting down; when he did, he said that was the most scary part of it all. We cleaned the rope and coiled it and put it in the trunk of the car. Then I went back to my room and packed all my thing,s and carried them out to the car except for the knapsack with a change of u.n.d.e.r.w.e.a.r and socks a a clean T-shirt.

We did the dinner routine and drank the remaining beers out on the deck. It was a warm evening and the orange setting sun promised more of the same the next day. It improved our mood, we both dreaded rain on the night of the robbery. A slip up on that roof would be fatal.

While we talked I returned to the subject of guns like a moth keeps returning to a light, and with about the same effect. Roch ended it by snapping at me to shut up about it, and we were both quiet while we smoked our last cigarettes. I kept looking at the house across the lake, I couldn't help it; Roch paid no attention. We were both deep in thought and tired from all the physical effort and barely managed to say good night to each other before going to bed.