The Homeless Millionaire

I slept for just over twelve hours, and woke up ravenously hungry. Roch kept eyeing me suspiciously over breakfast: it was obvious he'd discovered the newly neat and tidy former storeroom, now restored to its original bedroom role. He was waiting for an explanation.

I gave it to him the moment I was done eating. I left nothing out except for intimate details of sex with Tracy. Well, I left out one thing. I didn't tell Roch that I'd invited her to stay.

When I'd finished, Roch was silent for a while.

"Man," he said, and there was both admiration and reproach in his voice. He shook his head and lowered his eyes and pulled on his cigarette. Safe behind his smokescreen, he looked at me again and said:

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

As I expected, he found Tracy's sudden appearance on the doorstep in the middle of the night a little incredible. He 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 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 fuck should I know? It's too far away to tell who is who and I've never met any of these people. 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 going to 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? 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 fuck for?"

Roch sighed and said:

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

"So that's why you brought that 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."

"Fuck."

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

"I've weeded that famous vegetable patch," I said.

"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. I was instantly forgiven for letting people stay at the cottage without his consent. We threw ourselves into housework next, and were done in a couple of hours. Then we got busy on the rope.

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 retrieved a backpack from one of the closets, and filled it with stones. Then we tried to find a suitable tree. It had to have a bough that could handle two hundred pounds, and at least ten yards up from the ground.

It proved to be difficult. After an hour of wandering around and arguing over possible choices, we had to settle for a maple with a suitable branch maybe thirty feet up. Roch had come well equipped: he'd brought a pair of professional tree-climbing boots with inward-pointing spikes. Roch told me 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."

"Impressive."

"Fucking 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 back 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 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 could 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 heroically 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 the sun 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 said:

"Hey, Mike. Can you focus? I want to talk to you about the plan."

I kept my eyes on Roch as he laid out the plan for the robbery. It was so simple it could be executed by retarded children, as long as they were fit and quick on their feet.

"There's a big tree next to the west wall, between the museum and the church next to it," Roch told me. "It's so big that the branches overlap the edge of the museum roof. I'm going to climb that tree. Then I'll lower a ladder from the roof."

"We're taking a ladder?"

"No. The guys that are working on the roof use one. They just leave it lying there when they are done for the day. I'll lower it down to the ground for you and Michel to climb up. Then we raise the ladder—it could attract attention, standing there at night—and put it down on the roof and open up the skylight. They cover it with plastic and tape it up every evening."

"You've been watching those guys work?"

"Of course we've been watching them work. Now listen. There's a metal handhold right next to the skylight. 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, various golden knick-knacks. 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 in a couple of hours, at most. We'll start around midnight on Sunday. Every cop on duty will be busy with drunks, by then. And the ones off duty will be drunk as well."

"I think there may be a few sober cops around," I said. "And what about the museum's security 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. It's a big museum."

"What if we run into them?"

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 local insects. 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 like guns, please show me a guy who doesn't. But I didn't like the idea of taking guns along. That was really heavy-duty stuff. I said:

"Fuck! 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 fucking 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 fucking vertical brick wall twenty 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 a serious talk, and if it went wrong I would just back out of the whole thing. What would Michel do, shoot me dead? After all those promises about not harming the guards?

We went to our chosen tree with Roch wearing his climbing boots and me wearing high tops. We quickly found out it was a good idea to have some hand protection, and for Roch to change into sports shoes. Roch fetched a roll of bandage from the house and we bandaged the palms of our hands; it really helped a lot, giving a better grip on the rope.

Roch climbed up and down the rope 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 wasn't bursting with confidence when my turn came.

It really wasn't that hard going up. Going down was another matter because I had to look down, and that was unsettling. Each of us went up and down that rope several times. The backpack was a pain in the ass because it kept getting caught on the branches.

We practiced going up and down that rope 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 for a bit, Roch changed back 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 difficult 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 things and carried them out to the car except for the knapsack with a change of underwear and socks a a clean T-shirt.

We had dinner and drank the remaining beers out on the deck. It was a warm evening, and the orange sun promised more of the same the next day. I really hoped it wouldn't rain on the night of the robbery. A slip while up on that roof could be fatal.

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.

"Good night, Roch," I said, stubbing out my cigarette.

"Yes," he said, and I knew he was thinking about the night of the robbery, just like me.