For the last week before retirement, it was almost unmemorable.

I think I preferred it that way because the company was nothing like when I started, forty-five years ago.  People said I should have been General Manager by now, but the truth was, I liked my ‘behind the scenes’ role better than taking on the responsibility of management.

Now, my role was obsolete.  We no longer ran our own packing, dispatch and delivery service, each component of the department was slowly stripped away and outsourced, to the point now where we threw stuff into boxes and a couple of ruffians and a dilapidated truck came at the end of the day to take it all away.

Online.  That was the catchword.  There was no one over 21 in the company, except for me and the receptionist, who was also slated for retirement a week after me.

She, too, was obsolete.  As an online store, there was no need to have a human interface, so I had no idea what she did with her day.  I was meaning to ask, and that opportunity might just come sooner than I thought.

She just wandered into the tea room.

When she saw me sitting at the same table I had for the last forty-five years, she smiled.  There was a spot for the dispatch teams, a spot for clerical, and once upon a time, the boys and girls had to sit at separate tables.  Now, well, times have changed.  Once, we all had uniforms, and everyone looked like they belonged.  Now, it was difficult to tell the boys from the girls, and dress sense and decorum had long since disappeared.  I wore mine, and Elsie wore hers, the last acts of defiance before we moved on.

She made her tea, the same as she had for many years, resisted the temptation of a doughnut, and then wandered over.  She nodded to an empty chair opposite me, “May I?”

I nodded.  She had more manners than all the others put together.

“Looking forward to retirement,” she asked.

“No.  I have a big empty house that I’d rather not live in, and no one to share it with.”  Mary, the woman I’d married, a company girl, and I had the privilege of living with had lasted forty-four of those years before succumbing to cancer, a year shy of beginning what we were calling our second life together.  We had such plans, but plans were always destined to go awry.

“A shame,” she said.  “Harry decided he didn’t want to wait to have a good time.  Took off with a younger woman.  A week later, he was dead.  Bad heart, I’ll let you make of that what you will.  Probably dodged a bullet, though.”

Pragmatic?  Certainly practical.

“Do you have anything planned?” I asked.

“I’m going around the world in 80 days.  Steam trains, steamships, hot air balloons, camels, elephants, and maybe even the proverbial slow boat to China.  I saw a TV show, and even though you can probably do it in a day, even two, I like the idea of the longer the better.  You?”

“We were going to Paris, Rome, Capri, but I can’t see the point of it now.”

“Well, there’s room for one more on our tour. You should come.  It’s going to be wildly unpredictable, and at least there would be one familiar face.  Give it some thought.”

I was giving it thought on the way back to my office, so much thought I bumped into Rodney, the boy who was about to take over my space. 

I’d been asked to train him, but he told me quite emphatically there was nothing he could learn from an old fossil like me.  Quite blunt and quite obnoxious.  He was no different from the rest of them.  Old people were simply the object of their scorn.  It was not only me; Elsie also got her share of derision too.  We were the dinosaurs.

I apologised, but that didn’t seem to placate him.

“Thank God you will be gone soon enough.”

“Yes, I will, and I’ll have plenty of time on my hands.”

He looked at me oddly.  “You’re barking mad, you old geezer.”  He gave me a sneer, then walked off.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” I said to his retreating back.

Rodney was typical of that younger generation that took everything for granted.  His life was wrapped up in his cell phone, like many others, and once when he thought he lost it, he almost went to pieces.

Not that I had anything to do with what happened, but it did give me ideas.

I made it back to the loading dock just in time for the boss’s special delivery, a half dozen paintings worth nearly twenty million dollars, paintings that were going to be hung in his new house if it ever got finished.  He had been forced to take delivery of them early and decided to use the walk-in safe the previous owners of the building, a bank, had installed.

Not that it had been used in a long time, other than a place where the younger employees went to ‘play’.  They thought no one saw them, but it was obvious what they were doing.  Not that it was any of my business, it was more or less the same some forty years before, only a little more dignified.

It was a fascinating anachronism from a bygone age, and reputed to never been cracked, although several had tried.  Now, though, it would be a doddle for a master safecracker.  If they knew what was in there, which no one but the boss, and several staff members, namely me and Rodney, did.

But I did warn the boss that he should have made better arrangements, but he was tight with his money, which seemed at odds with the way his wife spent it.  The safe, like me, was also obsolete, and I hoped he understood it was no substitute for having them stored in a proper facility.

About a half hour before I was due to leave, I saw Rodney with two men in the alley behind the loading dock.  There was a white anonymous van parked not far from them, and it must be one of the suppliers dropping off a late delivery.

There were several cartons sitting on the edge of the dock.

The two men had baseball caps pulled down to obscure their faces, to avoid being clearly seen by the CCTV camera facing up the alley.  Of course, it was only my suspicious mind that thought they were deliberately trying to avoid being identified.

Rodney saw me approaching the end of the dock and finished his business with them and they turned and headed towards their van.

“Late delivery,” I asked, as he came up the steps beside the dock.

“None of your business, Richards.  Isn’t it time for you to go home?”

“Another half hour.  Paperwork to be done.”

“I can finish up for the day.  You can go, I’ll cover for you.”

Very generous, but he’d never done it before, why start now?  If there wasn’t twenty million dollars worth of paintings in the safe, I might have taken up the offer.  I just muttered a ‘thankyou’; and went back to the office.

A few minutes after that, I called a friend who worked for the police and told him what I’d seen.  It might be nothing, it might be something.  I just thought someone should know, just in case we were robbed.

At office closing time, I got a phone call from Elsie, a rather strange call, asking me to come to the front reception area.  It was no longer used because we never got visitors, and if there were customer issues, they had to complain ‘online’.  She was insistent, so I went.

I could see Elsie at her desk, and five others, three girls and two boys, all dressed to leave for the day.  Had the time clock failed again?”

When I reached the desk, I saw what the problem was.  Three men in balaclavas holding guns pointed at the group.  They were understandably frightened.

The nearest gunman looked at me.  “You Richards?”

That was Rodney’s surname.  My suspicious mind first identified two of the masked men as possibly the two Rodney had been talking to in the alley, and if they were looking for him, was he going to open the safe?  Or simply help them?

“He’s out back, quite possibly gone for the day.”

A look passed between two of the men.

“You’ll do then.”

“For what?”

“Move,” he motioned for all of us to go back the way I had just come, towards the rear.  “And make it snappy.  We haven’t got all day.”

No one moved.

He aimed his gun at the roof and pulled the trigger.  The sound of the gun was deafening, and part of the roof fell down.

“I won’t ask again.”

Elsie went first, the five others next, and then me, but not with several prods from one of the gunmen.  I was hoping it wasn’t a hair trigger, or I’d get accidentally shot.

When we got to the safe door, he stopped us, put the others to one side with one of the gunmen watching them, and said to me, “I want you to open the safe.”

“It needs a key.”

“It’s in the top drawer over there.  Get and it no funny stuff.”

Rodney, or someone, had told them everything they needed to know.  It was the only reason he could know about the paintings.  Rodney was conspicuous by his absence, though, and has asked me to go early, could not have envisaged I’d still be there to help them.

Had he planned it this way to absolve himself of blame?

“If I refuse.”

“That would be dumb.  We’ll start shooting the hostages.  Make no mistake, we will kill them if we have to,” he turned the gun on one of them, then just a fraction wider and pulled the trigger.  Two girls screamed.

“OK, OK.  I get it.”  I did as I was told.

The door was very heavy and needed two people to move it.  When the lock was open, I turned the wheel to disengage the bolts then stood back so two of the three could pull the door open.  From there it took only five minutes to take the paintings.

When the operation was over, the leader motioned towards the inside of the safe.  “Everyone inside.”

“Not a good idea,” I said.  “Shut the door and lock it, there’s no oxygen.  We won’t last longer than two hours.”

“Then pray someone comes to find you.  In, or die prematurely out here.”

No one wanted to die so we all went into the safe.  As he closed the door, one of his friends yelled out to wait, then a few seconds after that Rodney was pushed in, and the door closed  The lock then made that clunking sound when it was engaged and that was it.   Six juniors and two seniors in a dark space.  The girls were close to hysteria.  The boys were not far behind them.

Then a torch light, from one of the cell phones lit up a small space.  We were all gathered just inside the door, but there was a lot of room inside, about the size of the kitchen.  There were boxes sitting against the wall, too heavy to clear out when I had cleaned and swept the inside in preparation for the paintings.

Janine, one of the girls, said, “Is it true we’re going to run out of air?”

“Eventually.  I suggest none of you goes into hysterics, it will use up the air far quicker than if we just sit still and wait.”

Elsie had already found a box to sit on, and I sat next to her.  She didn’t have a cell phone, so I gave her mine after I put the torchlight on.  She seemed oddly unfazed by the turn of events.

“We could use the phone and call the police, or someone to come and get us out.”  James, I think.  He was new.  He had his cell phone in his hand.  “Hell, no.  No signal.  What the…”

“The walls are two feet thick, with metal padding, and the door is eight inches thick steel, I’m not surprised there’s no signal,” I said.

“You’ve been here forever; you should be able to get us out of here.”  Janine was probably the brightest of the six.

“That would be normally the case if we used the safe, but we don’t and haven’t, and this is the first time I’ve seen inside it for a long time.  Not unlike some of you.”

They all put on their innocent faces.  I didn’t really care.

Rodney had been trying to get a signal on his cell phone, walking around the inside, constantly checking for a signal.  He would not get one.

“Did you read the induction manual like I asked you, Rodney,“ I asked him as he sidled past me?

“What induction manual?”

“The one that I said had instructions on how to get out of the safe if you got accidentally locked in.  It apparently happened a lot to the previous owners.”

“You didn’t say anything about a safe.”

No, I probably didn’t, but dropping Rodney into the collective dismay would take their minds off their predicament.

“Anyone got a signal,” He yelled out.

No one had. 

Half an hour passed, and it was interesting to watch people who had no practical experience in problem-solving.  Nor did they understand, as a group, they had a better chance of survival, than individually.

The girls cried for a few minutes, the shock of their situation, and what might happen finally dawning on them.  They were certainly critical of the boys who didn’t know what to do, other than twirl the locking wheel one way then the other, a waste of time unless the key had been used.  Two and three of them tried to push the door, though I was not sure what they were hoping to achieve.

By the end of that half hour, they were all sitting, conserving oxygen, and silently analysing how they were unlucky enough to get into this mess.

I looked at Elsie.  She had the right idea, she was asleep, or pretending to be.  It was a good idea if we ran out of air.  It wasn’t going to be pretty when it happened.  I remembered one of two times we had sneaked in here ourselves, all those years ago.

Then, suddenly Janine asked, “How did the thieves know there were paintings here?”

Time was one of those enemies, you were able to think, over and over, on a single topic.

Rodney said, “Someone told them.  It could be any one of us.  I doubt the boss would tell anyone.”

I was not so sure.  He was having liquidity problems and the insurance on those paintings would solve a lot of those problems.

We went through all the ‘it wasn’t me’s’, until it got to Rodney who was quite emphatic it wasn’t him.”

“So, those men out in the alley before, Rodney, the two who looked exactly like two of the thieves, you didn’t tell them everything they needed to know?”

“I can see what you’re doing.  Took the opportunity to top up your retirement plan, and now we’re all going to die because of your greed.”

It sounded plausible, and it got the desired result, the others were not looking at him as the guilty one.

I shrugged.  “Well, we’ll soon find out.”

An hour and a half after being locked in, the air was getting depleted, and breathing was getting more difficult.

I was floating on the edge of consciousness, and Elsie had dozed off which would help her rather than hinder her.

The others were in various stages of panic, but to their credit, there were no histrionics.

Other ten minutes, I heard the key in the lock, and the bolt being moved.  A minute after that the door opened accompanied by a whistling sound as the air was sucked out, and more breathable air replaced it.

Everyone was too weak to move.

My friend, the policeman, came in and surveyed the bodies, all now in various stages of recovery.  Rodney was getting up off the floor when he took him by the arm.  “I have a few questions,” he said, then escorted him outside.

Elsie woke and looked at me, then the open door.  “What happened?”

“A rescue.”

“Good.  Didn’t want to end my days in this room.”

When we exited the safe, the boss was there.  He apologised to each of the five, Elsie, them me.  He said the thieves had been caught, and identified Rodney as the informant, and they were all under arrest.

The paintings were on their way to a more secure location.

He pulled me aside, and asked, “What made you call the police?  No one else noticed anything.”

“It’s an old fossil thing.  We notice things because our noses are not buried in technology.  We don’t trust everybody, and certainly, anyone new hanging around a fortune in paintings.  I guess I’ll never change.”

“Don’t.  And thanks.  I’ve made arrangements for a supplement to your final payment in appreciation.”

“Thank you, sir”

It turned out to be enough to join Elsie on what I discovered was called the ‘obsolete tour’.

…

©  Charles Heath  2023