The Clause Read Free Page B

waiting for an apartment near 11M to open up—either above, below, next to, something. Tito and Idi had an alarm pad next to their door and a very serious-looking armor-plated lock, so we had no intention of going in that way. Normally we would have just come down onto their terrace from the roof on ropes, but the building was twenty-four floors high. It wasn’t that we were scared; heights stopped bothering me a long time back when I was a window washer in Manhattan. It was just that we would be exposed to too many windows on the way down. We’d be seen.
    A vacancy did come up in July, number 11K, two over at the corner and perfectly positioned across from the stairwell. A real estate agent let us in the first time, and we noted the code the agent poked into the lockbox on the door handle. Inside was the key. After telling the front desk that we were there to see the apartment again, we used the lockbox key to bring two planks, thick and wide, and put them in the closet. Anybody else who visited the apartment would think the planks were spare shelves. Those would be our bridges from one balcony to the next. As it happened, 11L next door was being renovated and so was empty. All we had to do was go from one terrace to the next, over a three-foot gap, to find ourselves on the terrace of 11M.
    Almost nobody ever locks their terrace doors that high up. They think that being high up gives them security, and it does, keeps teenagers and riffraff from stealing their laptops. Even still, I had a lot of experience with sliding terrace doors, and they were dead easy compared to actual locks, which take way too much time to pick even if you had a talent for that sort of thing, which I didn’t.
    So that night we let ourselves into 11K, got our bridges from the closet, and crawled across 11L’s terrace to 11M’s terrace. They had a wide view of Manhattan’s glowing mountain of light, which glittered on the river. Of course, those views were available to most people who live in the high-rises on the Gold Coast, and even some who lived in the jumble of townhouses, apartments, and pier developments down below. The views are part of the point of living there.
    Technically, the Gold Coast is what the realtors call the west bank of the Hudson River—New Jersey—across from Manhattan, from Bayonne in the south to Fort Lee in the north. Developers created a housing market to lure cramped Manhattan dwellers with spacious apartments complete with fireplaces, decks, views, and parking. The more dots on the map labeled “gold,” the better for real estate agents.
    Locals, on the other hand, think anything south of the Lincoln Tunnel is a different state. If you live on the Palisades, the Gold Coast is only the towns bracketed by the Lincoln Tunnel and George Washington Bridge: Weehawken, West New York, Guttenberg, North Bergen, Edgewater, and Fort Lee. Six towns straddling the Palisade cliffs.
    All of the Gold Coast was laid out below us and to the horizon north and south as we crawled across our bridges to 11M. The terrace’s sliding doors were locked, with a broom handle lying in the channel. A helpful piece of burglary equipment is a set of spring steel strips bent and curved into various shapes. Different shapes can be slid between windows or through door jambs to manipulate locks. Trudy used her pry bar to lift the sliding door off its track so that I could insert a piece of spring steel and lift the broom handle out of the door channel. Another piece of spring steel at the handle flicked open the latch. I slid the door open.
    Brane the dog came trotting into the living room, growling, about to make a huge fuss. We made nice sounds, tossed him a slumburger, and retreated back to the balcony for fifteen long minutes. When we peeked back in, the burger laced with sleep-aid capsules had done its magic—Brane was curled up on the couch. His eyes were half open, but he clearly was in no mood to make a fuss.
    Almost nobody with alarms