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

to drill into the steel just above the first lock. A slow process, but patience is a criminal virtue. A quarter of an hour later, when he had drilled the second, they flipped the safe onto its back.
    “Lots o’ brass on the outside. Bound to be a lot on the inside.”
    Brass locks were harder. Compared to steel an alloy like brass was hard to corrode; an ancient formula of copper and zinc, improved in recent times by the addition of tin or antimony or arsenic—all of which strengthened its resistance.
    Abner opened the jar of nitric acid, filled the eyedropper, emptied it into both the drilled holes and the keyholes and said, softly “Leg it!” as noxious yellow fumes and a foaming green slime oozed from the locks.
    When the air had cleared, Wilderness deployed a tool Abner had made himself—a strong L-shaped hexagonal spanner, steel with a wooden handle, not unlike a docker’s hook. He inserted it into the keyholes and twisted it hard three or four times, feeling metal give as he did so. Abner flipped the safe upright, clouted the handle with a club hammer and the door flew open. Thiefproof no more.
    The inside was no less beautiful than the outside.
    It was like looking into a doll’s house. Rows of tiny drawers with pearl handles and inlays of fine marquetry.
    Abner ripped them all out in seconds—wood splintering, hinges snapping and the contents spewing out across the floor. A pearl necklace, a couple of diamond rings and—holy of holies—a roll of Bradburys tied up with red string.
    Abner said, “Must be a monkey here at least,” but did not stop to count. He had little interest in the jewellery. One glance at the necklace and he tossed it back on the carpet, crushed one end with the heel of his boot.
    “Cultured. Rubbish.”
    Wilderness had picked up the rings.
    “Paste?”
    “Dunno. Take ’em anyway.”
    As they left—the diamonds in Wilderness’s pocket, the money in Abner’s—Wilderness looked back, a violation of one of Abner’s un spoken rules.
    The scarred and mammocked safe. Scalped and raped. The pearls crushed to dust. The dribble of acid eating into the kelim rug.
    He had ruined something beautiful. He had by this act reached childhood’s end—a moment which can come at any age, and at which a truth becomes inescapable . . . that what has been done cannot be undone.
    He felt he had tasted sin for the first time. He felt as though he should be punished—for the last time. And he was.
    §14
    Harry made a point of thrashing Wilderness every time he came home on leave, just, as he had put it, to show him who was who. Wilderness could read his mood by the sound of his footsteps in the street, by the rhythm of his knocking at the door. Rage or calm registered in every pace and every tap. He learnt that “there are strange Hells within the minds War made.” Wilderness grew quickly, but never resisted. No gain in height or weight would ever have been enough to let him stand up to his father. There was the possibility Harry might kill him if he did. Wilderness would shield his face with his forearms, take what was coming to him. Abner left the house, and, as a rule, Merle would barricade herself in the bedroom or the scullery until it was all over and Wilderness tapped on the door. She would crack it open enough to see out, look at the boy, assess the bruising with a quick scan of his features and then say simply “Well?”
    “He’s sleeping it off,” Wilderness would say.
    “We could slit the bastard’s throat.”
    “No, we couldn’t, Merle. We could neither of us do that.”
    Then she would burst into floods of tears and be inconsolable until Abner reappeared, awash in the recognition of her own powerlessness.
    “I’d understand him more if he was drunk,” Abner said.
    “What’s to understand?” Wilderness replied. “Drunk he’s as happy or as horrible as any other man. Sober . . . he’ll do what he’s going to do.”
    “He weren’t always like this. Only since