Book of Night(108)

Pushing the bookshelf door closed, she checked for any additional wiring that might indicate an unexpected surprise.

Charlie didn’t find anything that seemed worrisome, and turned toward the back of the hidden room.

A trompe l’oeil of a dead goat, entrails spilling out and mingling with split pomegranates, hung above a club chair, the only piece of furniture.

Gingerly, she felt around the edge of the hideous painting. She found hinges, with no lock on the other side.

She swung it open to reveal the wall safe she remembered.

Made by Stockinger, who were known for offering solid, bespoke models with the bells and whistles of all the custom luxury safe makers like Buben & Zorweg or Agresti. There would be winders for watches, cloth-lined wooden drawers, but none of the ridiculous golden and bejeweled neo-Victorian extravagances of Boca do Lobo pieces. Stockinger made serious safes for serious people.

A dial rested on the front, beside a gleaming handle engraved with Lionel Salt’s initials. And beside it, a keypad.

Most modern safes were digital, offering none of the romance of breaking into the old ones. None of the listening for when the spin changed, the infinitesimal slotting into place, the softer click-click as satisfying as the crack of knuckles. If she could ignore the keypad entirely, she would. Digital safes weren’t just unromantic, they were nearly impossible to open without the code.

Taking a deep breath, she reset the lock by spinning clockwise, then started going counterclockwise. She heard the first notch at five. Then she reset and spun again and again until she had five numbers: 2–4–5–63–7. She was certain of them. She was as sure as sure could be.

But what there was no way to know was the order. And five numbers meant five tumblers, five interior wheels, and one-hundred-twenty possible combinations.

All she could do then was grind through them, while sweat beaded up at her forehead and in the hollow of her throat. She was conscious of the party going on, of time slipping away, of the possibility that someone might find her.

Charlie could hear the moment the fence fell and released the locking mechanism. She let out a long, unsteady breath and turned the lever.

It only moved halfway.

Then the digital keypad lit, green and bright and blinking.

Charlie stared at it in disbelief. This safe wasn’t digital or dial; it was both. Her heart rate kicked up and her mouth tasted sour with panic. She had no way to know if there was a timer on entering the code, and she’d be limited in the number of tries. Safes like this offered three, usually, before locking up and setting off an alarm.

Fishing a UV penlight out of the bottom of her backpack, Charlie turned off the lights of her glasses, pushing them up onto her head. Then she shone the penlight onto the keypad.

Very few people wiped down their keys after use. The light revealed the grease of fingertips, limiting the number of options for the combination.

2–3–4–5–6–7.

The same numbers as the other side. Relieved, she moved to type in the order that had worked on the dial. She stopped herself a moment later, finger hovering over the keypad. There were more markings on the two and the six than on the other numbers, suggesting they repeated. If that was true, then this was a seven-digit code, at minimum.

If cracking a mechanical safe was about understanding the machine, cracking a digital safe was about understanding the person who set it. Would they choose a random number and then hide the combination somewhere they could find it? Or would they pick something less random and therefore more memorable?

Lionel Salt was the kind of person who needed to be better than everyone else. With his carved stairs, his awful paintings, and his willingness to murder for his own amusement.

Not his birthday, since it would be a reminder of his age and mortality. Not his name in numbers, because even he would know that was too obvious. Perhaps a word, then? Blight? Shadow? Gloaming?

She stopped.

The key is abandon all hope.

Abandon all hope. It used all of the numerically converted letters and used the six and two four times each. And Salt would like the idea of giving a clue in the form of the book that opened the secret door, referencing the most famous quote from Dante’s Inferno, the one that even Charlie, who’d never read it, knew: “abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” She bet he felt rather smug about his cleverness.

Charlie ignored her racing heart, her sweaty hands and panicked thoughts. She went over the word again, writing it out in numbers in the dust of the onyx floor: 22263662554673.

Carefully, she punched the code into the still-blinking pad. There was a sharp beep, as though an alarm was about to sound. Then she heard the second locking mechanism opening.

She turned the lever again.

A soft glow came from inside, showing off felt-lined drawers and several shelves of items. Charlie opened one. A small bag of diamonds rested inside. In another, she found an antique pistol chased in gold. And at the bottom, wrapped in cloth, the thing she’d come looking for.

Quickly, she made the exchange, shoving the item deep into the bottom of her backpack, hoping like hell that she knew what she was doing.

Then, in the privacy of Salt’s hidden room, she got out her party outfit. Suzie Lambton, the only person whose closet she had access to at the moment, wasn’t even remotely her size. She still had her key to Rapture, though, and there was no better time to borrow that red satin suit abandoned in the back. With a little stretch to the fabric, it fit her like a second skin. Add to that some notice-me red lipstick, and Charlie would seem like she’d just arrived at the party, instead of robbing it for the better part of an hour.