On closer inspection, I could see the safe wasn’t actually embedded in concrete. The concrete formed a sort of housing into which the safe had been shoved.
“We got a locksmith on his way,” Chester said. “I couldn’t stand the wait, so I called an emergency number and told ’em to send somebody out. We could have all the answers right behind this dial.” He was probably picturing maps and ciphers, a small wireless radio, a Luger, and transmission schedules written in invisible ink.
“Have you looked for the combination? It’s possible he wrote it down and tucked it someplace close. Most people don’t trust their memories, and if he’d needed to get into it, he wouldn’t want to waste time searching.”
“We thought of that, but we looked every place we could think of. What about you? You searched pretty good yourself. You come across anything might be the combination to that?”
I shrugged. “I never came across any numbers, unless he was using his birthdate or Social Security.”
“Can they do that?” Bucky asked. “Make up a combination to suit any set of numbers you give?”
I shrugged. “As far as I know. I’m not an expert, but I always assumed you could do that.”
“What do you think, should we pull that thing out?” Chester asked.
“Couldn’t hurt. The locksmith will probably have to do it anyway once he gets here,” I said.
I rose to my feet and stepped out of the closet, allowing Bucky and Chester sufficient room to maneuver the safe from its resting place. It took a fair amount of huffing and puffing before they managed to set it down on the floor in the middle of the room. Once they’d eased the safe out of its concrete housing, we could take a better look. The three of us inspected the exterior surfaces as if this were some mysterious object that had appeared from outer space. The safe was maybe sixteen inches deep, with a two-tone beige-and-gray finish and rubber mounting feet. It didn’t look old. The dial was calibrated with numbers from one to a hundred, which meant you could generate close to a million combinations. There wasn’t any point in trying to guess the right one.
Babe had abandoned her packing and was watching the whole procedure. “Maybe it’s open,” she said to no one in particular.
We turned in unison and looked at her.
“Well, it could be,” she said.
“It’s worth a try,” I said. I reached down and pulled the handle without success. I turned the dial a few numbers in one direction and then the other, still pulling the handle, thinking the dial might have been left close to the last digit in the combination. No such luck.
“What do we do now?” Bucky asked.
“I guess we wait,” I said.
Within the hour, the safe technician arrived with a big red metal toolbox. He introduced himself as Bergan Jones from Santa Teresa Locksmiths, shaking hands first with Chester, then with Bucky and me. Babe had gone back to folding clothes, but she nodded at him shyly when he was introduced to her. Jones was tall and bony looking, sandy haired, stoop shouldered, with a high shiny forehead, sandy brows, and big glasses with tortoise-shell frames. I placed him in his middle fifties, but I could have been off five years in either direction.
“Hope you can help us out here,” Chester said, waving at the safe, which Jones had already spotted.
“No problem. I probably open thirty safes a month. I know this model. Shouldn’t take me long.”
The four of us stood and watched in fascination as Jones opened his toolbox. There was something in his manner of an old-fashioned doctor on a house call. He’d made his initial diagnosis, the condition wasn’t fatal, and we all felt relief. Now it was just a matter of the proper treatment. He took out a cone-shaped device that he attached to the dial, screwing it down tightly. Within minutes he’d popped the dial off and set it aside, then removed the two screws holding the dial ring in place, slipped off the ring and set it with the dial. Next he took out an electric drill and began to bore a hole through the metal in the area that had been covered by the dial and ring.
“You just drill right through?” Babe said. She sounded disappointed, perhaps hoping for dynamite caps or nitroglycerin.
Jones smiled. “I wouldn’t put it quite like that. This is a residential fire safe. If this were a burglary safe, we’d run into hardplate: barrier material just behind this steel plating. I got a pressure bar for that, but it’d still take me thirty minutes to drill a quarter-inch hole. Lot of them have auxiliary spring-loaded relocking devices. You hit the wrong spot and you can fire the relockers. If this happens, it gets a lot worse before it gets better again. This is easy.”
We were quiet while he drilled, the low-pitched whine of metal making conversation awkward. The hair on the backs of his hands was a fine gold, his fingers long, wrists narrow. He was smiling to himself, as if he knew something the rest of us hadn’t considered yet. Or maybe he was just a man who enjoyed his work. As soon as a hole had been drilled, he took out another device.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Ophthalmoscope,” he said. “Gadget your doctor uses to peer in your eyes. This shines light on the combination wheels so I can see what we got going.” He began to peer into the newly drilled hole, moving closer while flicking an outer dial on the scope to adjust the focal length. While squinting through his ophthalmoscope, he carefully rotated the protruding spindle stub to the left. “This turns the drive wheel, which in turn picks up the third combination wheel. The third wheel moves the second wheel, which then turns the first wheel,” he said. “It takes four rotations to get the first wheel moving. That’s the one closest to the front of the safe. Here it comes. Perfect. The gate’s exactly under the fence. Now we’ll just keep reversing the direction of our rotation and lessening the number of turns. Soon as I get all three wheels lined up, the fence will be in position to drop when the lever nose hits the gate in the drive wheel. We keep turning and the lever pulls back the lock bolt and it’s all over.”
With that, he gave the handle a pull and the safe door opened. Chester, Bucky, and I gave out a simultaneous “Ooo” like we were watching fireworks.
Babe said, “Heck, it’s empty.”
“They must have got it already. Goddamn,” Chester said.
“Got what?” Babe said, but he ignored the question, shooting her a cross look.
While Bergan Jones wrote down the combination and put his tools away, Bucky peered into the safe, then got down on his back like an auto mechanic and shone a light into the interior. “Something taped up here, Dad.”
I leaned over and peered with him. An item had been secured to the top of the safe: a lumpy-looking ten-inch-by-ten-inch square of beige tape.
Chester stepped over Bucky’s legs and crouched by the safe, squinting at the patch. “What is that? Peel it off and give it here. Let me take a look at that thing.”
Gingerly Bucky loosened one corner, then pulled it away like a Band-Aid from a wound. A big iron key adhered to the tape. It appeared to be an old-fashioned iron skeleton key with simple cuts in the end. He held it up. “Anybody recognize this?”
“Beats me,” I said, and then turned to Chester. “You know what it is?”
“Nope, but Pappy used to fool around with locks now I think of it. He got a kick out of it. He liked to take a lock out of a door and file a key to fit.”
“I never saw him do that,” Bucky said.
“This is when I was a kid. He worked for a locksmith during the Depression. I remember him telling me what a hoot it was. He had this collection of old locks — probably close to a hundred of them — but I haven’t seen them for years.”
I turned the key over in my hand. The design was ornate, the handle scalloped, with a hole in the other end like a skate key. Viewed straight on, the bit was shaped almost like a question mark. “The lock and keyhole would be odd looking, to say the least. You don’t remember anything like it around here?”
Chester’s mouth pulled down. “Not me. What about you guys? You know the place better than I do at this point.”
Bucky shook his head, and Babe gave a little shrug.
I held the key out to Bergan Jones. “Any ideas?”
Jones smiled slightly, snapping down the locks on his toolbox. “Looks like a gate key. One of those big old iron jobs like they have on estates.” He turned to Chester. “You want me to bill you on this?”