Read Online Then We Take Berlin by John Lawton - Free Book Online

anhydrous nitric acid, commonly known as aqua fortis—and an eyedropper.
    “Who needs gelignite eh, son?”
    Wilderness had been looking forward to gelignite, but had little expectation of it.
    “I used it a few times during the Blitz, when I was trying to crack some big bugger that just wouldn’t budge. But without the Jerries providing cover half London’d hear me.”
    Thus began Wilderness’s education in cracksmanship.
    He learnt rapidly how to open most makes of safe, both British and imported. The most common safe in the world was the Herring—made by the millions in the USA, but hardly much exported. The British competed with Withers and with Gores, with Milners and with Cartwrights—all of which could be found dotted around the far reaches of the Empire—while Europe’s safes—Richter and Heinz or Julius Schuler, both of Hamburg, whilst much favoured by the jewellers and diamond merchants of Hatton Garden, were not often to be found in private homes.
    His favourite was the Green Crocodile made by the Tiger Company. The words alone delighted him.
    They came across it six weeks later. An apartment on the top floor of a building next door to Baker Street Station. They had gone in wearing overalls looking like workmen about their work. Abner’s trick, his alibi, was to have a grubby piece of paper in the breast pocket of his overalls with the apartment number, a fake name and the address of the building next door written on it. If challenged, he would simply say, “Silly me. Wrong block of flats,” pick up his cracksman’s kit and saunter out much as he had sauntered in. They were not challenged. Most London blocks had had porters before the war, far fewer now when wages in factories paid better and most able-bodied men were in the forces.
    It was beautiful.
    Wilderness said so.
    Out loud.
    “Do I give a monkey’s?” Abner replied. “What’s it matter what it looks like? It’s what’s inside.”
    It was a small safe, probably custom-made for jewellery, but with luck there might be a pile of white five-pound notes inside—still referred to by Abner as “Bradburys” even though Sir John Bradbury had not put his signature to a Bank of England note these twenty years or more. Abner when flush, when cash-happy, would often refer to himself as being “out of the shit and into the Bradbury.”
    It was finished in deep green crocodile skin, so deep as to be almost black, fastened to the steel body with brass studs. The door had a decorative (it could hardly be functional) border in a yellow hardwood, which Wilderness, a boy for whom taxonomy was a private paradise, took to be yew or myrtle. Less than twenty inches high, it stood atop a long-legged table, ending in a burr-walnut pedestal and two carved tigers’ feet in lacquered gold.
    “It’s beautiful.”
    “Shaddup and gimme the drill.”
    “We can’t. Grandad, we can’t.”
    They did.
    Thieves there were who might have carted a safe so small back home with them and cracked it at their leisure. Abner was not one of those.
    “We’d look a right pair of twats pushing this back to Whitechapel in a wheelbarrow, wouldn’t we?”
    A chisel ripped the lock covers from their housing, and a razor blade edged with insulating tape sliced through the green leather down to the steel.
    Part of the deterrent power of a safe is the illusion of thickness and strength. The Crocodile bore the inscription “Fire and Thief Proof,” which of itself might be considered an oxymoron—a word Wilderness knew and Abner didn’t. A safe that appeared to be three inches of solid steel might only be half an inch thick—the lining being made up of a mix of gypsum and alum or a layer of acid-washed chalk, which, so compressed, was just about the most fire-resistant material man had invented. The purchaser of a safe had, knowingly or not, a choice—was it to be fireproof or thiefproof? For as Abner said:
    “Can’t be fuckin’ both now can it?”
    And so saying he began