Strangers

The industrialist was so certain of the vault door's inviolability that he'd made no effort to conceal it with a sliding partition or tapestry; it was in one wall of the immense game room, a massive stainless-steel portal as big as anything in a first-class bank. The listening device Jack had brought was not sensitive enough to detect the movement of tumblers through twenty inches of stainless steel. The plastic explosive would have peeled any safe, but the vault was blast-proof. The set of safecracker's tools was a joke.
        They left the estate with no stamps or coins, but with sterling silver, a complete collection of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett first editions, a few jewels that Mrs. McAllister carelessly left out of the vault, and a handful of other items, which they fenced for only sixty thousand dollars, split three ways. The take was by no means a pittance, but it was far less than anticipated, insufficient to cover their expenses and to make their time, planning, and risks worthwhile.
        In spite of this debacle, Jack had gotten a kick out of the job. Once they had safely fled the McAllister estate, he and Branch had seen the humor in the catastrophe and had been able to laugh about it. They spent two days relaxing in the California sun; then, on a whim, Jack took his twenty thousand to Reno to see if he could do better at craps and blackjack than he had done at burglary. Twenty-four hours after checking into Harrah's, he checked out, the twenty thousand having grown to an amazing $107,455. The exquisite symmetry of bad-luck money bringing good luck was enormously appealing. Deciding to extend his vacation, he rented a car and drove back to New York, all the way across the country, in a splendid mood, eager to see Jenny.
        Now, more than eighteen months later, as he entered Manhattan on his return trip from Connecticut, Jack realized that, curiously, the fiasco at the McAllister estate had been the last enterprise to provide untainted satisfaction. At that point he had begun a long journey from dead-end amorality all the way across the moral spectrum until he had become, once more, capable of guilt.
        But why? What had initiated the change in him? What continued to power it? He had no answers.
        All he knew was that he was no longer able to think of himself as a melancholy and romantic bandit with a just mission to redress the wrongs done to him and to his beloved wife. He was merely a thief. For eight years he had been deluding himself. Now he saw himself for what he really was, and the sudden insight was devastating.
        He had not merely become a man without purpose. Worse, without realizing it, he had been lacking a worthwhile purpose for eight years.
        He drove aimlessly through the streets of Manhattan, going nowhere in particular, unwilling to return straightaway to the apartment.
        He soon found himself on Fifth Avenue, approaching St. Patrick's, and on impulse he pulled to the curb, parked illegally before the main doors of the immense cathedral. He got out of the car, went around to the trunk, opened it, and pulled half a dozen banded stacks of twenty-dollar bills from the plastic garbage bag.
        It was foolhardy to leave the car illegally parked in so prominent a location when its trunk contained more than a third of a million dollars in stolen money, an illegally obtained device like SLICKS, and guns. If a cop stopped to give him a ticket and became suspicious and demanded to search the car, Jack would be finished. But he had ceased to care. In some ways, he was a dead man who still walked, just as Jenny had been a dead woman who still breathed.
        Though not a Catholic, he pulled open one of the sculpted bronze doors of St. Patrick's, went inside, into the nave, where a handful of people knelt in the front pews, praying or saying the rosary, and where an old man was lighting a votive candle even at this hour. Jack stood for a moment looking up at the elegant baldachin above the main altar. Then he located the poor-boxes, removed the bundles of twenty-dollar bills from inside his winter jacket, broke the paper bands that bound them, and stuffed the money into the containers as if he were jamming garbage into trash receptacles.
        Outside again, as he was descending the granite steps, he stopped abruptly and blinked at the night-draped cityscape, for something was different about Fifth Avenue. As a few huge snowflakes