The Lock Artist

Mike feels powerless to help Amelia. The only way he feels he can help is by learning to open a safe. The Ghost coaches him, first showing him the inelegant ways that the unskilled can use to open a safe—brute force, a disk cutter, drilling, torching, etc. All of these are destructive, dangerous, and time-consuming. He teaches Mike how to unlock a safe without having to “resort to violence” (230). The Ghost talks about safes as though they are living beings—in particular, as though they are women who must be artfully seduced. Mike is quietly enthusiastic about this sexist metaphor. The Ghost sends Mike home with a practice lock to work on. Mike is grateful for the distraction from his worry about Amelia. It takes him a long time to develop this sensitive skill. Mike meets with his probation officer. Mr. Marsh has lied to the PO and said Mike is working at the health club. The PO emphasizes that Mike must return to high school in the fall with perfect attendance.

One day when Mike is practicing on the safes in the Ghost’s junk shop in Detroit, a tall man with dark hair enters the store. He introduces himself as Harrington Banks, or Harry. He asks for the store’s proprietor, but the Ghost is absent. Banks leaves. (Banks is the FBI agent who will eventually rescue Mike.) Mike hears a beeping noise and finds the Ghost’s box of color-coded pagers. The Ghost returns, looking shaken. He says he’s “got company coming over […] [s]o you’d better get the hell out of here” (237).

Mike drives back to the Marshes’ house. He sees Zeke, Amelia’s ex-boyfriend, who leaves a single red rose and a letter on the doorstep. Zeke catches sight of Mike, who escapes on his motorcycle. Zeke chases him down in his red BMW convertible. Mike stops close to Lito’s liquor store and waits for Zeke to catch up with him. They brawl: Zeke punches Mike in the eye but Mike hits him back in the chin, stomach, and head. At this point, Zeke presumably leaves, although this is not stated in the narrative. Mike hears sirens. His head spins. He feels the urge to open a safe. He drives to Detroit to the Ghost’s shop. He imagines there is “somebody inside the safe. Suffocating” (240). He works frantically and finally succeeds. Mike reflects, “Nine years, one month, twenty-eight days. That’s how much time had passed since that day”—the day of his childhood trauma. Amelia returns the next day.

Back in Michigan, Mike relishes “[t]his sudden unexpected chance to see Amelia one more time, even for just a moment” (242). Although it has only been about a year since Mike left Milford, much has apparently changed. Lito’s Liquors has been replaced by a wine shop. Mike picks the lock on the door and walks into his old home, then his old bedroom. Mike sees evidence of his uncle Lito’s declining health and mounting financial problems. He finds a cell phone with no call history and only a single contact: “BANKS” (243). Mike turns the phone off and pockets it. On the table, as a gift for Lito, he leaves the bundle of money that Sleepy Eyes paid him from their last hit.

Mike drives to the Marshes’ house. Mr. Marsh is throwing a party to celebrate the opening of his second health club. He sees Mike and sheepishly thanks and apologizes to him. He tells Mike that Amelia went to London to study art. As Mike leaves, however, he sees a University of Michigan bumper sticker on Mr. Marsh’s car: Adam and Mr. Marsh went to Michigan State, not U. Michigan, so Mike understands this must be where Amelia is; Mr. Marsh simply invented the lie about London to keep Amelia’s true location a secret from Mike. Mike drives to Ann Arbor to find Amelia at school. He tracks her down and presents her with the comic book pages he’s been drawing for her for the past year. Amelia asks why he pursued this life of crime, and Mike responds that he had no choice. She asks, “This is about what happened to you, isn’t it…when you were a kid” (249). She asks him what happened. After much hesitation, he writes “Let’s go” (250) on a pad of paper; they drive on his motorcycle to Detroit.

They arrive at his childhood home on Victoria Street. He picks the lock and breaks into the vacant house. “Nobody would buy this house” (251), he explains. Mike begins to draw on the walls of the house a comic strip narrating his childhood trauma. It was Father’s Day, June 17, 1990. He was raised by his mother and his father was absent. His mother was dating another man—her boss, referred to as Mr. X. Mike was eight years old. Mike’s father, whom he hadn’t seen in two years, barged in through the back door. He attacked Mr. X, beating him to death with a rolling pin, which he then used to mutilate the man’s genitals. He commanded Mike to go to the bedroom. Looking out from the bedroom door, Mike saw his father violently raping his mother. Mike ran to the spare bedroom, where he knew there was a gun in a safe. The door of the safe was open, so he crawled inside and shut the door, locking himself within. He thought to himself, “I know one thing for sure. […] I have to be quiet” (256). When his father finally realized Mike was in the safe, he tried to get him out but forgot the combination. Then he apparently planned a father-son murder-suicide. His father eventually took the whole safe to the river and threw himself and the safe into the water. Mike was suffocating and water was filling the safe. The last panel Mike draws for Amelia is “[a] complete underwater panorama” (259).

Amelia asks why he has not included a panel depicting his miraculous rescue. Mike wasn’t awake to see his rescue, and he reflects, “In my own mind, the safe was and always would be at the bottom of the river. With me locked inside forever” (259). Mike drives Amelia back to Ann Arbor. As they say goodbye, Amelia shows him her necklace, on which she carries a ring that Mike gave her a year earlier. Mike writes her a note reading, “I will find a way to come back. I promise” (260). Setting out for California, Mike makes the decision to pursue what “might be [his] last chance to be free” (260). The implication is that he intends to connect with Banks, finally accepting Banks’s repeated offers of help.

The scene is Mike’s reunion with Amelia one year earlier. During the days he hones his safe-cracking skills at the Ghost’s shop in Detroit, and in the evenings he sees Amelia. One day the Ghost decides Mike is ready to embark on his career as a boxman. He sits Mike down and gives him a set of rules. “If there’s anything wrong […],” he warns, “you walk away” (263). Furthermore, “You do not so much as touch a gun unless it’s an emergency” (263). He explains that the boxman is a specialist and is only brought in for one important task. Then he gives Mike the pagers. He explains: The green one almost never beeps; the blue one corresponds to a professional gang on the East Coast; the yellow one can be reached by almost anyone, so Mike should always “proceed with caution” (265); the white one (the California crew) is “[n]ever a problem” (265); and the red one must be answered immediately because it is for the man in Detroit—the man who effectively owns Mike now. Mike understands that “the man” on the other end of the red pager is the man he met in Mr. Marsh’s office. Mike does not want to accept the box of pagers, but the Ghost conveys that he no longer has a choice. The Ghost leaves—he is traveling to Florida to help his daughter.

As Mike leaves the store, he sees a man sitting in a car across the street, watching him—it is Banks. Mike assumes he must be a cop. He realizes he could escape now by going to Banks and revealing everything, but instead he drives to Amelia’s house. Amelia has figured out that Mike is not working at the health club as her father has claimed. Mike tells her he is “trying to protect” (268) her and he will explain someday. Mike continues to go to the junk shop in Detroit like a workplace. Mike goes to his first day of his senior year of high school, but that afternoon he finds the red pager beeping.

The man summons him to an address in Detroit that night. There he meets Fishing Hat, Tall Mustache, and Sleepy Eyes. They pile into the black sedan and the three men engage in cartoonish banter. They drive to “a little check-cashing joint” (272). It becomes clear they are planning to rob the place. Sleepy Eyes goes in with Mike, who will crack the safe. He meticulously opens the safe but finds it empty. A man with a gun appears. Sleepy Eyes escapes, leaving Mike alone held up at gunpoint. The man threatens to shoot Mike if he does not give up the names of his accomplices. Mike refuses, musing that accepting death in this moment could be a welcome escape from an intolerable lifestyle. Then suddenly he realizes the man is hugging him—this was all a staged test. Fishing Hat, Tall Mustache, Sleepy Eyes, and the Ghost emerge, amused and reassured at Mike’s display of loyalty.

They drive back to a restaurant where “the man in Detroit” is presiding over a dinner. Mike is greeted, paid, then dismissed. Sleepy Eyes shows him out to the car. “The boss wanted me to show you something,” he says, and pops the trunk, revealing the lifeless body of Mr. Slade, Mr. Marsh’s former business partner. “Welcome to real life, kid,” Sleepy Eyes says (278). Mike returns to school for two more days before leaving to respond to a call on the blue pager. It is the crew in Philadelphia, where Mike is to take on his first professional gig, and where his retelling began at the start of the novel. Mike packs his things, says goodbye to a confused uncle Lito, and pays a final visit to the antique store where he bought his first practice locks. There he buys a ring for $100. He drives to Amelia’s house, breaks in, and places the ring on her pillow. She is absent—at school. He leaves, thinking to himself, “I did all of this for you, Amelia” (280).

Chapter 22 recounts the first crime Mike has performed with the man from Detroit’s men—Sleepy Eyes, Fishing Hat, and Tall Mustache—since completing his training with them one year earlier. The job he performs with them, which involves Sleepy Eyes torturing the victim and then executing his two compatriots, Fishing Hat and Tall Mustache, marks a turning point in Mike’s professional criminal career: It is the first time he has committed a crime that brought him no emotional satisfaction—no feeling of calm or clarity; instead it is simply harrowing, and it inspires him to seek emotional support from Amelia and help from Banks.

Mike’s reunion with Amelia in Chapter 24 after the crime with Sleepy Eyes is a significant episode in the novel: He takes her back to his hometown of Detroit, shows her the house where his childhood trauma occurred, and tells the story. The narrative has been building to this revelation since its first sentence. The incident, which involves rape, murder, and genital mutilation, is extremely gruesome, and the connections to Mike’s eventual obsession with safes and his muteness are simple and obvious.

The most significant shift that occurs in these chapters is Mike’s sudden willingness to accept help. The crime with Sleepy Eyes seems to break his obstinacy. Not only does he change his mind and decide to accept the help that Banks offers, but he seeks out emotional support from Amelia. In the revelation of his formative childhood trauma, he finally makes himself vulnerable to her, allowing her to comfort him and help him process his memory of the event.