The Safe

by Mark Binder

Once upon a time....

There was a terrifying electrical storm. The skies were ablaze with lightning, and it was the greatest fireworks display that the people of Providence had ever seen. The flashes and crashes of heaven deafened their ears, and for once even traffic on Interstate 95 stopped to look at the horrible display.

It was in the midst of this storm that I found the key.

Forty years ago, my Uncle Maurice was known far and wide as Light-Fingers Moe. He was the best darned safe-cracker on the entire Eastern seaboard. He had once robbed every bank in Milford, Connecticut all on the same night. He was wanted by the police in seven states, and when he came to Providence, Rhode Island, he was determined to crack the biggest safe of them all&emdash;the safety deposit vault at the Stone Fleet National bank.

He did it, of course. In seven minutes flat. The only problem was that Uncle Moe didn't know that the bank had equipped this particular vault with a saftey mechanism.

As soon as he stepped inside, the door swung shut behind him.

Except he wasn't quite inside...

They found him, squashed flat the next day.

Now, the reason that I'm telling you all this is that Uncle Moe left a will. Or at least that was the theory. Somewhere, my Aunt Zelda always claimed, he left a will that told exactly where he had buried his treasure&emdash;all the money that he had stolen from all the banks that he had robbed.

Except he had died before he could tell Aunt Zelda, or anyone else, where he had hidden the will.

That day, in the middle of the electrical storm, I was up on the roof, adjusting the cable television, when a sudden flash took me by surprise and I slipped.

That's when I found the key. Wedged in the side of the fire escape.

It was a crazy night. Lightning without rain. Up and down the streets, people walked with dazed looks of madness, as if they were sure the world was about to end.

What was I doing, up on a roof, staring at some rusty old key, and pretending that it would unlock a box or a safe somewhere that would make me rich beyond my wildest dreams?

A flash of light streaked across the sky like a red jackrabbit chased by a pack of orange wolves, and I nearly fell from the fire escape.

I don't know how I knew, but I was sure that the key was real. It was the key to Light-Finger's fortune, and somehow I would find it. If I didn't get killed before I got inside.

Somehow I made it down off the roof. The cable tv was still on the fritz, but I didn't care. I needed to find someone who knew my Uncle Maurice better than I had.

So I went to see the man in the red coat.

He was a strange fellow, selling newspapers on Eddy street, always bundled up in a bright red parka, even in the middle of summertime. But he had known my Uncle Maurice. Aunt Zelda had said that the man in the red coat had even driven the getaway car on a few robberies.

Now he was just an old guy, hawking papers at fifty cents each, and shivering in the cold.

That night, he was out selling his papers at his usual corner, while the sky lit up as if the Allies were still bombing Dresden.

He looked different that night, as if he'd grown older somehow, and perhaps as if a bit of sanity had been restored to his slightly addled mind.

I approached him carefully. I bought a paper, and he made change.

He didn't speak. I looked at him, and asked him if he knew my Uncle, and he just sort of waved. I nodded, and thanked him, and asked if he knew anything about the will my Uncle had written.

He waved again.

I asked him if he could talk.

He waved again.

So much for the man in the red coat.

I thanked him again for the paper, and started to walk down the street, but he reached out and caught my shoulder.

I turned and looked at him. He stared deeply into my eyes, and I imagined that I saw three decades of cigarettes and coffee staring back at me. I must have done something right, because he nodded slowly to himself, as if he was coming to a decision, and then he reached into the pocket of his cherry red parka, and took out a piece of paper, which he pressed into my hand.

It was an ancient scrap, folded a dozen times, and I unwrapped it carefully.

Under the streetlight, and with the help of the bolts of brilliance crashing across the skies, I made out the faint faded tracings of a map.

Not a treasure map, I'm afraid. This looked like an old Esso gas map. Wrinkled and stained, after having been kept pressed to the bottom of the man in the red coat's pocket for twenty or forty years.

I lifted my hand to shake his, but he was gone. His stack of papers sold, the man in the red coat had disappeared into the evil night.

I could hardly contain my glee. I was dizzy with greed. I had the map, I had the key, now all I needed to do was to put the two together, and endless wealth, countless dollars (all of it tax free) would be mine for the spending.

So absorbed was I in the crinkley piece of paper that I paid absolutely no attention to where I was going.

If you've ever walked through downtown Providence late at night, you'll know this is a mistake. It's no worse than a dozen other small cities, but then again you shouldn't walk through them late at night without paying attention either.

As it was, I was oblivious to everything but my approaching good fortune.

That's when I ran into them. Her specifically, him by extension.

I crashed directly into this woman, knocking her flat on the pavement, and before I knew it, a large bear of a man was swinging his fist at me as if I was a target in some amusement arcade. He decked me, of course, sent me flying backwards into the street, where I was almost run flat by a bus.

All this happened in a matter of seconds, and the next thing I knew he was standing over me, staring down, and screaming into my face.

I couldn't understand a word he said. Not one single word, but the meaning was clear. He was about to take me apart piece by piece. I would be dismantled, publically, and left to die, a jigsaw puzzle for the coroner to reassemble prior to my closed-casket funeral.

And, ordinarily, that would have been the end of me. I've never been much of a fighter. Ever since the third grade, I was always demolished on the playground in fights.

But it must have been the map, which I'd managed to hold on to, and the key in my pocket that brought back something my Uncle Maurice had once told me.

"Remember, first you kick them in the balls," he had said. "Then you run."

Looking up at the huge ape, I closed my eyes, and booted.

I must have connected, because he stopped screaming at me, and began screaming at the diety.

Without further hesitation, I scrambled to my feet, and ran off like a bandit.

I made it about three blocks before I realized that I was being followed.

I made it another six blocks before she caught up with me.

At first I didn't realize it was her. I assumed it was him. Somehow this ape of a man had been wearing a steel cup, and he'd recovered enough of his limited senses to gather himself up and give chase.

I was dog tired, dead out of breath. I hadn't run ten blocks since I quit track on the first day of try-outs in high school. Uncle Maurice's advice, good as it had been, had run its course.

I turned to place myself at the oaf's mercy.

Which is when I saw it was her. The woman I'd knocked down before the man had knocked me down.

"Don't hit me," I panted. "I'm sorry I ran into you."

She looked over her shoulder, grabbed me by my coat, and said, "Come on. We've got to keep moving, or else Lenny will catch us."

"Lenny," I gasped. "Fine."

And off we ran.

Somehow we made it back to my car. I'd parked it in a lot, and the attendant gave me some strange looks when I paid my bill. Maybe he'd been drinking, or maybe it was the huge black streak of mud and dirt that ran up and down my back and all over my right side.

The woman who was with me didn't help either. She was a buxom woman, wearing a drab sweatshirt. She had on a pair of loose fitting jeans, and she was just as dirty as I was.

We got into the car, I started the engine, and let it warm up a minute, before getting the hell out of there.

It wasn't until we got back to my apartment that she told me who she was, and who Lenny was.

Her name was Mary, and Lenny was her ex.

"Your ex-what?" I asked.

"My ex-everything. My ex-husband, my ex-lover, my ex-friend. You name it."

"Is he always so violent?"

"You caught him on a bad day. Lenny was a good guy to have around when you got overcharged in restaurants." She was drinking the hot chocolate I made, looking a bit more normal, despite the streaks of dirt up and down her side. "Once in a while he acted like a person, and then I didn't mind. He gave me a lot of self-confidence. Enough to leave him, I guess."

I nodded, sympathetically, and wondered how soon I could get rid of her. It wouldn't exactly be polite to dismiss her out of hand. She was having just as hard a time as Lenny, judging by the smeared mascara.

Still, I wanted to look at the map, and I didn't feel as if I wanted to share Uncle Maurice's secret treasure with anyone else.

But she didn't seem inclined to leave. The cocoa was too hot, so she blew on it. We made idle conversation. She asked me if I was married (not recently). I asked her how long ago she'd been divorced. She said that evening. I said, no wonder Lenny was peeved.

"Yeah," she said, smiling, "and he'll think I ran off with the first man who I met. That's going to really piss him off."

"Great," I said. "More hot chocolate?"

I had hoped she'd say no, but she didn't. She seemed to have nowhere to go, and I really didn't think I wanted to be responsible for dumping her out, alone, in the middle of the worst electrical storm the world had ever seen.

So I played along. She'd get tired soon, I thought.

Nope. The caffeine in the chocolate kept us both bolt upright and wide awake.

And somewhere along around two o'clock, I told her about the treasure. I told her about Light-Fingers Moe, the safecracking uncle, and his hidden will.

I even showed her the key, and asked her to help me find the treasure.

"Sure," she said. "I've got nothing else on my schedule."

We opened the old Esso map, and laid it out on the kitchen table. It looked like Providence, but the streets were all wrong. They'd done a lot of construction since then, especially down by the waterfont, and I wasn't sure how it all matched up with today.

"I just hope that wherever Uncle Maurice buried his treasure, the building's still there," I said.

"Why don't you get another map, and we'll see?"

The brilliance of the solution (it was two a.m., after all) struck me like one of the lightning bolts, and I ran out to my car where I had a more recent Exxon map.

We lay the two maps side by side, which was when Mary pointed something else out.

"Those stains," she said, pointing at several dark blue smudges, "they run right through the middle of Kennedy Plaza."

"So?"

"Maybe that's the trail. Maybe the ink bled. There are a few paths there. Maybe we're meant to follow the trail, and that will take us to your Uncle's treasure."

"Yeah, right," I said. And I looked for some other clue.

But there wasn't anything else. Either the man in the red coat had fed me a false trail, or we'd have to give Mary's idea a try.

Her idea, in full, was to go down to Kennedy Plaza, follow the trail marked in the brown stains, and see where it led. At the very least, we'd be able to cross the map off our list. At the most we'd be multi-millionaires.

I didn't think we had anything to lose. Fifteen minutes later, we were back downtown, wandering through Kennedy Plaza like a couple of drunken kids on a date.

The lightning had let up. It was only cracking and pulsing once every few minutes or so, instead of the constant barrage.

The park was pitch black. All the lights had gone out sometime that evening, and it wasn't easy to see the trail. I wished I'd brought along a flashlight, but I'd checked every drawer in the house and hadn't found any batteries.

Mary told me that she had a photographic memory, and so I had to trust her to lead the way.

I was suspicious. Here I was poised on the edge of becoming fabulously wealthy, and I had this gold digger along. I kept looking over my shoulder for signs of Lenny, but no one else was awake in the park, except us.

She found one of the concrete paths, and dragged me along it. "This way," she said. "Now, turn here."

"All right, all right," I said, impatient. I really wanted to ditch her. I'd probably have to split the money with her. It really wasn't fair.

We followed the trail, or at least the trail she imagined that she remembered. Left and right. Around. Back. This way and that.

I didn't realize the damned park was so big.

Then, all of a sudden, she stopped, and I banged right into her.

"What?" I said, angrily.

"Here," she said. And she pointed.

Straight ahead was a wall. We'd gone out of the park. It was so dark, and I was so angry, I hadn't even noticed. We stood at the edge of a giant building, and in a flash of lightning, I saw the door.

It was a grey door, the same color as the wall, and if it hadn't been for the sharpness of the lightning flash, I doubt I would have ever noticed it.

"Go on," she said. "Try the key."

"Come on," I said. "This is ridiculous. I doubt that there's any money hidden behind this door. I mean, come on. We're in the middle of Providence. It's late. We got carried away."

"Why won't you try it?" she said. "It won't take but a minute. Then you'll know."

That's not what I wanted. I thought to myself, this is certaintly ridiculous, but if there is a million dollars behind that door, I don't want her to find out. I'd rather come back in the daylight, without her around. That sounded like a good plan to me.

I was about to say something stupid and crabby, when the fist connected with my chin.

Flying backwards, my head hit the side of the building, and I saw even more flashes than I'd seen in the sky.

It was Lenny. He'd found us. He was screaming at the top of his lungs, incomprehensible once again, and staring down at me, like I was in the middle of a rerun.

Mary, for her part, was screaming at the top of her lungs at Lenny. She kicked at him, and pulled at his sweatshirt, but he wasn't about to go away.

He accused me of breaking up their marriage. Of coming between a man and a wife. He accused me of destroying his family.

All I'd done was bump into his ex-wife, and tried to find my Uncle's will.

So I sat there, like a sack of potatoes, getting the bejesus kicked out of me.

Until I remembered my Uncle's words again. "First you kick them in the balls.... Then you run."

I didn't think that would work twice, but it gave me enough incentive. The next time Lenny leaned over to give me a thump in the head, I moved.

He was swinging at me, and I grabbed his hair, and gave him just a little tug. He tubmled forward, his head cracked against the side of the building, and he slumped down on the ground, unconscious.

That's when I stood up, shakey as hell. Jeez, the guy was only five foot seven.

"Try the key," Mary said. "Come on." She grabbed Lenny by the feet, and pulled him out of the way. "Look, if you don't do this before the police get here, you may not get another chance."

"Fine," I said, sullen as heck. Who wanted a half-million dollars when you could have a whole seven figures to yourself?

But I tried the key in the lock, and it turned.

The door opened slowly, and both Mary and I looked in.

It wasn't a real door. It was just a sort of panel door. I mean the door itself was normal size, but on the other side was a wall. That's why no one had noticed it for all these years.

My face broke into a wide smile, and I waited for another flash of lightning to show me my Uncle Maurice's bank treasure!

Mary held my hand. It was a nice hand.

And when the lightning flash came, I saw the note.

"To whomever finds this letter,

I know that you were expecting much better
I'm afraid that your journey's at its end
There isn't any more money to spend
So take this paper and go away
You'll have to live on your own today.
- Maurice Lefkowitz, alias, "Light-Fingers Moe."

I stared at the note. Mary held my hand and squeezed.

Maybe the squeeze was worth half a million dollars.

The End.