No one picked up.
After a few minutes I saw a young woman coming through the lobby. When she opened the door I smiled, stood to one side and allowed her to exit. Then I walked through the main entrance, past the comatose man on the front desk, and directly into a lift. I pressed for the tenth floor, stepped out into the same air-conditioned corridor as before and went directly to 1003. Cartwright’s flat. I knocked, rang the bell and waited.
Nothing.
I put my index finger to the lock and applied some pressure. The loose pin-and-tumbler rattle was like music to my ears. I took the case from my pocket and unzipped it, revealing an abbreviated locksmith set inside. As a boy I’d been able to break front doors using nothing but found pieces of wire. I’d scrambled on to the roofs of buildings looking for weak spots, or spent minutes painstakingly pressing myself through narrowly open windows. Now I’d need the tools.
I selected a small torsion wrench and raker and got to work.
A pin-and-tumbler’s simple. A series of brass pins which occupy a locking cylinder, preventing its movement. A correctly inserted key raises these pins so the cylinder can turn sideways and click open. Picking’s an attempt to appropriate that same motion. The process took a little over a minute.
There was no sound from inside.
I entered the flat, moving quietly from room to room until I was sure it was empty. Then I approached the hardshell flightcase that I’d seen in the lounge on my first visit. I lifted it, testing the weight.
Packed and ready to go.
I laid the case sideways and unzipped it. Cartwright was leaving for Dubai that evening. His clothes, his monogrammed dressing gown and flip-flops, were strapped down and I carefully removed the clasps. Moving them aside, I found flavoured condoms and lubrication. Thoughtful.
I lifted the clothes out of the case and felt around inside the lining. Once I found a gap in the material I took the bag of cocaine from my pocket and eased it into a space where it wouldn’t look incongruous, even if he decided to remove his things before travelling. Then I carefully replaced the clothes as I’d found them, re-clasped the straps and closed the case, returning it to its upright position. I backed out of the room, drew the door closed and went to the lift.
It was one of those everything-on-red moments that I always swore off until I was suddenly in the middle of them. As the lift sank down to the ground floor I felt weightless, light, after months of docile suffocation.
I walked back outside into the thousand-degree summer, staring the sun full in the face. I thought about all the things I’d done that I didn’t believe in. This one was different. Something I could live with. Crossing the road, I saw that someone had parked right behind me. As I got closer, the other driver started the engine, abruptly backing off before making a hard U-turn and taking the corner. I stood in the road looking after them, breathing hard. It was the same car I’d seen waiting outside my flat two nights before. I was wondering what it meant when my phone started to vibrate and I looked at the screen.
Unknown number.
I picked up the call to the sound of someone breathing.
* * *
The boy backed off from his reflection, moved round the car and walked towards the farmhouse. There were no lights on inside and all he could hear was the wind coming through the trees. The cold air went in and out of his lungs like a narcotic, and it felt like the moonlight at his back was pushing him forwards. With each step he became less afraid, less like himself.
He started to walk faster, feeling it more certainly, this thing he’d come to think of as the rising. His transition from a small child into thin air, into the self-preservation of an out-of-body experience. First he focused on one object, like the front door of the farmhouse, then he thought about Bateman. His mouth would start to water. He’d see a haze of sunspots and gradually begin to lift above the fear, until he was watching himself from a distance. It was in this way that he could float upward when his mother gave him the belt, or drift towards the centre of the ceiling when she held his hands under boiling water. He could rise and rise when Bateman put out cigarettes on his little sister, soaring into the stratosphere until he couldn’t see the look on her face.
He rose now.
It felt like being perched on his own shoulder, and from up there he could see the building more clearly. A grey-brick farmhouse, ageless and meandering, like a thing grown out of the ground. He approached the front door and craned his neck. Took two wires from his back pocket and began picking the lock, automatically going through the motions, just like all the other times. He’d gone through high windows into department stores at 3 a.m. He’d broken into chemists and emptied prescriptions into bags for Bateman. He’d crawled along the floors of old people’s homes, pocketing keepsakes and cash.
But this wasn’t just like all the other times and it never would be again. This time, when the boy’s hand brushed against the door, he almost lost his balance. This time he had the strangest sensation, like he was watching all of this from another life, like he was remembering things that hadn’t happened yet. He had the sudden fear that he’d risen too high out of his body, that he could see as far as the future. In a flash he saw the impossible, open-throated woman sitting inside this house. The slender man, bleeding from the mouth, who he knew would follow him outside. And somewhere else, even further in the future, he saw a figure sitting in a chair, staring out of a window, smiling.
With that the boy felt a fear that he couldn’t rise up above. He started to plummet, crashing back down to earth, back into his own body, hearing the frantic, panic-attack breaths that were always on the other side of the rising. He collapsed into the farmhouse door and laughed at his own stupidity. Because those things hadn’t happened yet. They hadn’t happened yet.
They hadn’t happened yet.
Inside, he felt the darkness like a living thing, enveloping him, until he was indistinguishable from it. He breathed quietly through his mouth and stood still for a few seconds, letting his eyes adjust. It was in these moments that the boy wondered if he was really alive, and he found himself thinking of the night his mother caught him praying.
‘You’re wasting your time,’ she’d said when their eyes met. ‘There’s no heaven or God or anything like that. When you die the lights go off and never come back on. You’re just talking to yourself.’ She turned to leave but he followed her to the door, pressing her on this point, the lights. ‘Before you were born,’ she said wearily. ‘Do you remember?’ The boy didn’t move. ‘Well, death’s like that. One minute you are and the next minute you’re not. Everything goes black.’