The Homeless Millionaire

Henry Houghton-Briggs was late that morning. He pranced in at nearly twenty minutes past six, brandishing an envelope with a triumphant smile. He placed it on the reception counter with a flourish, and said:

"Your salary, my dear boy. Had a good night? No trouble, I hope."

I told him that there had been no trouble at all.

"I think I'll be going, if that's all right," I added, pointedly glancing at the clock behind me.

"Is it as late as that? Oh dear! Please forgive me. I must have forgotten to wind up my watch." He made a small show of winding it, and I stole a look at its dial—it indeed showed five past six.

"Go on, go on," HB said. "You must be eager to get home. I'll see you tomorrow evening."

He treated me to another sunny smile, and I took the envelope and fucked off.

I opened that envelope the moment I was out. It contained a small wad of banknotes folded in half, held together by a paper clip. No pay slip—well, I fully expected it to be one of those under-the-table deals, so I wasn't really surprised. But that wad of banknotes was so small, so thin—

I took them out, and transferred them into my wallet. Four tens, one five, three ones. I had made a grand total of six dollars and fifty cents in tips Thursday and Friday night. My total weekly earnings at the Montrose amounted to fifty four dollars and fifty cents. It made me feel so dejected that I decided to walk all the way home. A long, brisk walk always improved my mood.

I got home just before eight o'clock: on the way, I stopped for a coffee in a greasy hole in the wall that called itself a restaurant, and stayed open almost around the clock, starting with six am. They had surprisingly good coffee, and I ended up having three cups. The caffeine got my brain going again, and after I'd taken a few steps I realized that the banknotes in my pay envelope represented a sequence: four tens, one five, three ones—four one three. But the five had been at the end of the wad: I'd become aware of that when I was paying for the coffee. The sequence in which they had been arranged was 4–3–1.

I spent the rest of the way home looking out for that number. I saw it almost right away, on parked car's license plate: the first three digits were 431. By the time I got home twenty minutes later, I noticed those three digits in various combinations at least ten times. It was fucking crazy. I went up the front steps to my house and was about to go in when I realized that Roch's house was numbered 31, and that it was the fourth house down from an intersection of two residential streets.

It was lucky that Roch was sitting in the kitchen and waiting for me, because I'd driven myself into a state approaching panic. However, what he had to say didn't make me happy.

"You've got to come with me today, Mike," he told me. "We're going to have a grand meeting with Michel at the house."

"But that's crazy! He's being watched by cops. They'll find out about you and me."

"He's positive they're not following him around any more. And anyway, we've known each other since we were little kids. We used to get together at least a couple of times a month. It might actually seem suspicious if we stop seeing each other at all."

"Why are you working on the house? It's Sunday, family day, right?"

"I'll be going there in the afternoon. I want to finish the last room on the second floor before I do, so that I can tell the old man the whole floor's done. There's just a bit of touching up left. If you help me out, we'll be done really fast."

"What time is Michel coming?"

"Around noon."

I grimaced. Working on that fucking house was the last thing I wanted to do after being on my feet all night. But Roch had given me so many breaks I couldn't turn him down. I said:

"Okay, I'll come with you. Just let me eat something first, and change."

We were at the house half an hour later. There really wasn't much left to do on the second floor, and we were done inside an hour. That was good, because Michel showed up earlier than expected: around half past eleven.

When he arrived, I was smoking a cigarette in the downstairs kitchen and trying to invent explanations for my teachers at the Ecole, teachers that I hadn't met yet. They were bound to ask why I was late to show up for classes.

There was a cast-iron reason that I had used previously when I'd cut classes at school. 'Urgent family matters'—that was the magic phrase. It had to be delivered in the right tone of voice; if it didn't work right away, I could use 'very sad and urgent family matters'. That usually did the trick: implying a death in the family was a good conversation stopper. People didn't want to know about death. People preferred to think they'd live forever.

Roch answered the door when Michel arrived and I expected them to join me right away, but they didn't. I could hear them in the front room: they were talking in low voices, in French. They stopped talking when they heard me coming. I suspected that meant bad news.

"Hi," I said, entering the room. Roch glanced at me and plugged his mouth with a cigarette, but Michel grinned from ear to ear.

"I've got something for you," he said. He reached into his jeans pocket and took out a small roll of banknotes held together a by a thin red rubber band.

"One hundred and twenty dollars," he said. "Your share. I managed to sell some of the gold trinkets. Hey, Roch tells me you're working nights as a hotel receptionist, checking people in and taking phone calls and shit."

"Actually, there aren't many phone calls," I said. "And it's not a hotel, it's a fuckhouse. People go there to fuck."

"Interesting."

"You think so?"

"Well, isn't it?"

"No. Actually, most of the time it's depressing."

"Really? Hmm. Yes, I see your point. People are such animals. All that business about them being made in God's image is depressing, I agree. One wonders what God is like. Well, the Old Testament makes it clear He's a bloodthirsty bastard. In Greek mythology—"

He babbled on like that for a while, showing off his education. I could tell he was working hard to prepare me for something unpleasant. Roch must had heard the bad news already, because he was smoking his cigarette in a very glum manner, staring out of the window with unseeing eyes.

After a minute or so of inane prattle, Michel got down to business. He told me that the money he'd just given me was the last payout for a long, long time. There was absolutely no way he'd be able to sell any more of the loot. He'd exhausted all his possibilities: he'd had to drive all the way to Quebec City to unload most of the jewelry and other small stuff, and it had been one of those I-know-someone-who-knows-someone deals. The intermediaries had to earn their cut, too, and the prices he got were truly rock bottom.

But there was hope, Michel said. He was still negotiating with the museum: the people there were interested in reaching an agreement. However, he'd been forced to reduce the ransom for the stuff we still had to $250,000. A quarter of a million dollars! It wasn't more ten, maybe twelve percent of what it was worth.

I complained about it, and Michel reminded me that I was keeping the Rembrandt for myself: it was the most valuable piece of them all. I had no right to complain, Michel said, and when he was saying that Roch glanced at me in a way that told me he agreed with Michel. So I didn't press the point. Instead, I asked:

"All right. Fine. I understand. Thank you for the money, by the way. But what do we do next?"

"The museum director has told me they're talking to the insurance people," Michel said. "That means they've agreed to pay, in principle. But naturally all this is going to take a little time. A couple of weeks, maybe a month. And since you're keeping the Rembrandt, your share of what we'll get won't be bigger than ten–twenty thousand."

"Ten thousand!"

"Mike, ten thousand is still a lot of money."

"Sure," I snarled.

"Calm down, Mike," said Roch. There was a warning in his voice, and I heeded it.

"All right," I said. "I'm sorry. It's just so fucking disappointing. That's all."

"I'm disappointed too," Michel said. "Roch's disappointed as well. We are all disappointed. Life is one major disappointment. All this joy, all this promise and then you die." Roch winced when he heard that, and said:

"Cut it out. He's gonna start quoting philosophers if you don't. If he starts quoting philosophers, I'll have to kill him. Or you. Or you both."

"No killing, please," Michel said. He sighed heavily, and added:

"Do you think it's been easy for me, going to fucking Quebec City and selling that stuff? I was scared shitless. But we've got a bit of extra cash in our pockets today, right? So let's stop griping, and celebrate a little instead. Roch, you told me there's a place with Belgian fries around here, correct? Let's go there and do a proper Sunday lunch, with plenty of beer."

And that was what we went and did. I ate and drank until I was close to bursting, and it worked in the sense that I wasn't capable of thinking any more.

That was good, because on Monday I had to report at the Ecole. I had a class at ten. I had to come in at nine sharp, so that I'd have enough time to lie to all the people who would require an explanation for my absence. When I thought about that, I felt like killing myself with my own fist.

Roch had brought in a fresh supply of wine.. We cracked a couple of bottles, and I was out the moment I lay down on the mattress in my room.