Public book. The ink is still wet. Shape the next line.
Stealing Gold from the Devil
I'm in. But we cant just walk in, the devil invented the con, he can smell a hustle from three zip codes away. You don't rob a thief with tricks, he has all the tricks.
So the only thing he cant understand is goodness. Real goodness, the kind that doesn't want anything back. To him it looks like a glitch. My plan: we go in being genuinely nice. Bring him a sandwich. Ask how his day was. While he's standing there confused, trying to figure out the angle, somebody grabs the gold.
I keep thinking about what the gold looks like in there. I imagine its not coins, its moments. Every time somebody traded something real for money the moment turned into a little gold bar. a dad missing a birthday, a friend who sold out a friend. Stacks and stacks, all glowing kind of sad.
So maybe stealing it back isnt about getting rich. Maybe when you carry a bar out into the sunlight it turns back into the moment and somebody somewhere suddenly remembers the birthday. maybe that's the real millionaire, a person with a million moments.
Daniel that was beautiful and also I would still like some of the regular gold please.
Practical note for the heist: one gold bar weighs about 12.4 kilos, which is like carrying a small dog that is very heavy and does not help. A million dollars of gold right now is maybe 7 or 8 bars depending on the price. So we need a wheelbarrow. Who is bringing the wheelbarrow. Also does hell have stairs, I need to know about stairs.
Hell definitely has stairs and they only go down, that's the whole business model.
But listen, I found a loophole. The devil can only take what you trade him. He has never once been GIVEN anything for free. So if we walk in and just give him something, no strings, his whole accounting system crashes. The books won't balance. Every vault door opens at once. Goodness isnt the weakness of the plan, it's the key. Bring the sandwich, Ross. Bring two.
Amara had stayed up by the stairs the whole time, because her abuela made her promise to watch over the others and because somebody had to be the lookout. When the locks gave up she felt it in her teeth, and then she saw the devil come walking back up toward her, holding Liam's sandwich in both hands like it might explode.
He sat down on the bottom step. He looked old. Not scary old, just old, like a man who had been doing the same job for too long. "Nobody ever gives me nothing," he said, almost to himself. Amara sat down next to him. "El diablo sabe más por viejo que por diablo," she said, the thing her abuela always said, the devil knows more because he's old not because he's the devil. He laughed, a real laugh, and for a second the whole cave smelled like rain instead of burnt sugar. "Your grandmother," he said, "was a very annoying woman." Amara smiled. So he knew her.
Down in the vault the others didnt know any of this yet. Elena was the first one to notice that the gold was humming, very low, like a fridge at night. She put her ear on a bar and it was warm. Voilà, she whispered, but nobody was listening because Yusuf was trying to fit eleven bars into the wheelbarrow and the wheelbarrow was making sounds of a wheelbarrow that is about to quit its job.
Then a bar slipped and fell and cracked open on the floor, and it wasnt gold inside at all. It was a kitchen. A tiny kitchen, with a radio playing and a woman humming the same note as the gold, and a boy at the table waiting for somebody who never came home for dinner. It lasted maybe three seconds. Then it was just a broken bar again. Elena stood there with her hand on her mouth. Mon dieu. They are not bars, she said. They are dinners. Somebody sold all these dinners.
Sofia, who was holding the flashlight and also a bag of chips she was not supposed to bring, did the math out loud because that's what she does when she's scared. If every bar is a missed dinner, and there is like a whole warehouse of bars, then the devil isnt rich. The devil is a guy who owns the biggest pile of cold dinners in history. That's not a fortune that's a really sad buffet.
"Okay but legally," she said, "if we bring them back up, who do they belong to?" Nobody knew. Yusuf said finders keepers. Daniel said they belong to the boy at the table. Sofia ate a chip very loudly in the silence and decided, right there, that she was going to be a millionaire of the other kind, and also that she was keeping one bar for herself, just a small one, for emergencys.
Ross came back from upstairs at that exact moment with the second sandwich still in the paper, because he forgot to give it to anybody, which is very Ross. He looked at the cracked bar, and the wheelbarrow, and Sofia with the chips, and he said the thing nobody wanted to say. "Guys. If we carry all this out, we're just the devil with better haircuts."
So the new plan, the real plan, was worse and better at the same time. They wouldnt steal the gold. They would deliver it. One bar at a time, back up the stairs that only go down, back to every kitchen it came from. It would take years. Maybe forever. There was no money in it at all. Ross unwrapped the second sandwich, cut it in seven pieces with a credit card, and said that was the first payroll.
The first delivery was the smallest bar, about the size of a candy bar, and on the bottom somebody had scratched an address in Dayton. Liam carried it because he was the only one with pockets big enough. Here is the strange part. The stairs that only go down went up, the whole way, as long as you were carrying a dinner back instead of taking one. Nobody could explain it so they stopped trying and just climbed. The kitchen in Dayton belonged to a man of about forty eating cereal over the sink at nine at night, standing up, the way you eat when nobody is coming. It was the boy from the table. Older, balder, same eyes. Liam put the bar on the table because he didnt know what else to do and it went soft, and then warm, and then it was a pot roast with carrots and the little potatoes, steaming, with two plates. The man just stared at it. Then he put the cereal down, very slow, like you put down a weapon.
Down in the vault the devil was doing his books, which he does every night with a red pen and a calculator that only goes up, and he noticed one number was smaller. Just a little. A pot roast smaller. He went to the stairs to complain and found Amara sitting there with a plate of rice and beans she had brought from home, because her mother taught her you never go to anybody's house with empty hands, not even this house. "Siéntate," she said, and moved over. The devil said he was the richest man in the world and he did not sit on stairs. Amara said okay and kept eating. After a while he sat. He had not eaten dinner with anybody in maybe ten thousand years, he said, because everybody who comes down here wants something. Amara gave him the fork. "Ay, pobrecito," she said. "All that gold and you eat alone. Thats not a millionaire. Thats a guy with a very expensive basement."
Yusuf, being a business person, said that if they were going to deliver gold for free forever they needed at least a delivery fee, he was not a monster but he was also not a charity. So on the second delivery, a kitchen in Fresno, he tried to give the lady a little paper invoice. She tore it up and said "you're staying for dinner." On the third one an old man in Queens said the same thing. And the fourth, and the fifth. By Friday Yusuf had a notebook with three hundred and twelve dinner invitations in it, with dates, and phone numbers he wasnt allowed to write down, and a grandmother in Tucson who already decided he was going to marry her granddaughter. He did the math on a napkin like always. If one dinner is worth one bar of the devil's gold, then he was, technically, on paper, the first person in history to become a millionaire by getting invited places. "Its not stealing," he told everyone, "its compound interest, but with soup."
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