loud music. When he found a party, he would join the crowd on the lawn or drift in the front door, left open for ventilation. He would pretend to be a college student from out of town who was passing through. He would meet people and talk them into letting him sleep on their floors. If he couldn’t charm anyone, he would help clean up the litter and mess from the party and then appear to fall asleep in the yard. But after a few weeks the parties had become too exhausting. He rented a cheap studio apartment.
After he quit the burger job he hitchhiked to the community college, showed them his taped-together diploma, and registered. The tuition was free, so he was able to give reasonable attention to his studies for almost a month. Then he needed to turn his attention to supporting himself.
Stealing from college students was unbelievably easy, and he found that he had a talent for it. He would watch students in his classes, and at the various lunch counters and coffee places around the campus. When he found a girl who had money and salable belongings, he would follow her to learn where she lived. One night he would watch her apartment until she went out, then slip inside and take what he could find. Slowly, by increments, he became an expert.
He began by prying doors with a crowbar he carried in his backpack, or breaking a window. But as he broke into more and more apartments, he became adept at coaxing door plungers and window latches out of their receptacles without doing much damage or taking too long. He became quieter, more familiar with the shapes and proportions of apartments. He learned where obstacles would be placed, where prizes would be hidden, and the way an open space sounded in the dark.
During this period he paid more and more attention to his physical training. He was now a black belt in Tae Kwon Do. He made a deal with the master of the dojo. He taught two classes of white and yellow belts in exchange for his own lessons. That gave him more practice and more training. He made a trip every other day to the college gym, where he lifted weights and used the machines, ran on the track, and showered in the locker room.
It was at the gym that he learned about the gun club. He was getting dressed one night when he noticed a small xeroxed announcement tacked to the bulletin board. It said SHOOTING CLUB, then, underneath, THE CLUB IS NOT SANCTIONED BY THE COLLEGE, clearly a condition for posting it on campus. It said the club was made up of college students who were interested in shooting and had discovered they could get price breaks on all sorts of things if they banded together. They had reserved a part of a local firing range for Monday and Wednesday nights at eleven, when older, preferred customers had gone home. Along the bottom of the announcement were tear-off tags with a phone number. He took one and put it in his jacket pocket.
He showed up at the firing range the following Monday to look things over. The club consisted of a dozen young men who seemed to belong to several factions. There were a few farm boys who were bemused by the distaste and dread other students felt for a simple household contraption no more mysterious than a pencil sharpener. There were a couple of fanatical marksmen who had become enraptured by firearms at an early age and spent much of their free time trying to compress a pattern of shots into a one-inch space. A couple of tinkerers seemed most interested in replacing things on their weapons with custom pieces that, to the naked eye, were identical to the original parts but were claimed to be vastly superior. There were two ROTC officer candidates who seemed to be under the impression that some day they would be called upon to fight a war with pistols. Varney had never held a firearm in his life, but that made him more welcome. He was seized upon with missionary zeal, as each of the factions interpreted his ignorance as an opportunity to create a convert. He could not afford a weapon, but each of the members of the club was eager to let him try one of theirs, to instruct him in its use and features and quirks.
After three meetings, Varney realized that he would have to get money to pay for the ammunition he was using. He stepped up his burglaries and moved his hunting ground to neighborhoods far from his college. Now he would go to a neighborhood at dusk and spend an hour or two walking and looking. Then he would select the best house to rob.
That was how he started his own gun collection. He always began by looking for money and jewelry, and now that he was in houses where middle-aged men lived instead of tiny apartments where students lived, he began to find guns. He was good enough with a pocketknife and screwdriver to open some doors and many windows, so he often had time to hit three or four houses in a single night. He had trained himself in years of exercise and martial arts so he could easily use a tree or a drainpipe to climb to a vulnerable upper window.
Using his stolen guns, he sharpened his shooting skills with the same determination he applied to everything else he chose to do. He slyly courted the attention of the club members. He let the accuracy purists believe he was a natural ally in their debates about bullet shape, muzzle velocity, and barrels. He listened with sincere attention to the tinkerers and let them teach him to dismantle, clean, lubricate, adjust, and modify his weapons. He also assented to the ROTC cadets’ belief that all target shooting was preparation for the future moment when the bullet must burrow its way through living flesh.
He joined them in separate outings to a combat range, firing rapidly at flat comic-book villains with bristly jowls and sneering lips who mechanically popped up or lurched forward at him. Combat shooting became his strongest event; he outdid his two companions on his first day. He had been training his reflexes to be quicker, his coordination more finely tuned, and his muscles stronger in eight years of martial arts. By breaking into houses while people slept, he had been training his eyes and ears to an acuity that had gone beyond response and become intuition.
Varney had been slowly, doggedly making himself into the vision of perfection he had invented when he was a child. He was an adventurer. He still had to show up at classes at the community college, but the work remained easy. He had enrolled with the intention of going on to a university at the end of two years, so he took a standard liberal arts curriculum. But the college served a clientele of students who had finished high school without being able to read comfortably or to make much sense of algebra, so keeping up with them did not distract Varney much from pursuing his other activities.
After a year, he was burglarizing difficult houses, bigger buildings with broad, open lawns, high fences, and alarm systems. He got more cash and better jewelry. He also found some merchandise he had never seen in smaller houses. They were certificates—stocks and bonds with elaborate scrollwork and filigree borders like his diploma. He took them because they looked valuable and weren’t heavy, but after a few months, he had too many of them in his apartment to ignore. One day when he went to Wally’s Pawnshop, one of the places where he sometimes sold his loot, he brought a few and asked Wally about them.
Wally shrugged and shook his head. “That’s not a business I can get into.” He lifted his hands to keep them far from the stock certificates, in an exaggerated gesture.
Varney asked, “Then where do I go?”
Wally winced as though something in his belly had begun to hurt him. “I’d forget it.”
The boy persisted. “You said it’s not business you do. But if it’s a business, somebody must do it. Who?”
Wally’s resistance did not weaken. He said quietly, “A little guy can’t do anything with securities. The only ones who can are big—people you don’t want to know.” He could see he was making no impression. “People you don’t want to know you.”
Varney let the subject drop, but he did not forget it. He was not a petty businessman like Wally, he was an adventurer. A week later, he tried asking another of his buyers. This was Dave, proprietor of Genuine Gems. Dave was not as cautious as Wally. He muttered, “I could get you in touch with some people.”
The fences were all nominally independent, but nearly all of them did some business with a group they called the wholesalers. When they bought merchandise of suspicious provenance from people like Varney, they would keep it out of sight. About once a month they would be visited by a pair of men who would look the stuff over and make an offer. The wholesalers would also offer the local shopkeeper a variety of merchandise picked up the same way in other cities. By a combination of barter, haggling, and cash payment, a deal would be struck. They would take the local valuables, leave the valuables from elsewhere, and move on to the next city.
Dave agreed to offer these men the securities at the standard price—2 percent of face value. He explained to Varney the realities of the business: a good diamond ring of a carat or less from across the country would go quickly, with little risk. Anybody could sell it. A thousand shares of Microsoft had to be handled in special ways, and only certain people could move them. As he put it, “You have to be huge.” Selling stolen securities involved big, dangerous maneuvers, like forming a corporation, having the corporation obtain a business loan and letting the bank hold the securities as collateral, then converting the loan to clean, untraceable cash and the corporation to thin air. Another way was to actually pretend to be the man whose name appeared on the securities, use them to obtain credit, and buy pieces of merchandise—jewelry, cars, even houses—then resell the merchandise and leave the
