He sounded a note of laughter, without joy. “The rest you don’t need a blueprint for. You can take it from there yourself. I rang the bell one last time, for the look of it. I knew there was no one in there now any more. Then I stepped inside the vestibule and got busy on the inner door with the key. It opened right up at touch; they’d never even changed the lock, the dopes. Maybe they’d never even missed the key, I don’t know.
“I didn’t need the lights to find my way around. I went right up the stairs, like my boss and I had so many times before, and into that study or whatever it was at the back of the second floor. I lit up the bathroom, because it was safe there, it had no outside window that could give the light away. I took out the couple of little things I’d brought with me, and I went at the safe from behind. I reopened the hole we’d made in the bathroom wall, only this time I aimed it straight at the back of the safe, instead of over to the side. And I made it bigger than the first time too, big enough to pry away one of the wooden panels the safe was imbedded in.
“It was the jerkiest kind of safe I ever saw. Only the lid and the frame were steel; the rest of it was just a wooden lining. And when you ripped out the back panel, it was all open; you could reach in and pull the drawers out backward into the bathroom. I guess it was tough enough to crack from the front, but you weren’t supposed to get at it from behind like that.
“It was cluttered up with papers and stuff, but I didn’t bother with anything but the cash. I cleaned that out, and left all the jewelry and heirlooms and securities they had in it just the way they were. Then I slipped the cash-drawers back in again, and tidied up. I cleaned all the chipped plaster and mortar up off the floor, and I swung the shower-curtain around on its rod a little, so that it covered up the great big gaping hole I’d made. If he — I guess it’s he that lives there — goes in there when he comes back late tonight, he probably won’t notice anything wrong. He won’t find out about it until tomorrow, when he swings the curtain around him to take his morning bath.
“Well, that was all there was to it. To that part of it, anyway. I put out the light, and I came down to the door again, and I watched from behind it for a minute or two until I was sure there was no one around to spot me. Then I came out, closed it behind me, and walked quickly away from there.
“And right away, I started to pay for it; boy, how I paid for it. Before I spent a nickel of it or got a block away, I was already paying for it through the nose. Until now, I’d owned the streets. That was about all I’d had, but I’d had them, at least. I was hungry and broke and jobless, but I looked everyone square in the face, I went anywhere I damn pleased on them, the streets were mine. Now all of a sudden, the streets were taken away from me, to stay on them too long became dangerous. Faces coming toward me, if they seemed to look at me too closely, became something to watch out for. And people walking behind me — my shoulder would twitch, as if I expected a hand to drop on it.
“But the worst part of it all was, now that I had it, I didn’t know what I wanted to do with it any more. Half an hour before I’d known a hundred things I’d wanted so bad I would have given my right arm for them. And now I couldn’t remember one of them any more.
“I’d thought that I’d been hungry, and matter of fact I hadn’t been eating right for a week or more past, but now I found that I wasn’t even that any more. I went into the swellest restaurant I could find, a real swell one, and I ordered everything straight down the list, like I’d always dreamed of doing some day. While I was still ordering, it sounded great, but when the stuff started to show up — something went wrong. I couldn’t seem to swallow right. Every time they brought something and put it down in front of me and I tried to dig in, somehow I’d find myself thinking ‘This is your own future you’re eating, years and years of it,’ and it would gang up and stick in my throat.
“After awhile I couldn’t stand it any more; I peeled off a five-dollar bill and I left it on the table, and I got up and I got out, without waiting for the rest of it. And when I came out, I couldn’t help remembering that when I only had a dime of my own to spend, a dime that really belonged to me, I didn’t have any trouble swallowing the coffee and the cruller that
“I don’t know, I guess you’re either honest or you’re crooked by nature, and you can’t change yourself over that suddenly from the one thing to the other without a lot of growing pains. I guess you have to do it slowly, it takes years, maybe.
