The Tunnel

Generally, there are three ways to steal from a bank. If one is prone to violence and lacks subtlety, he carries a weapon and robs them during working hours. If one is prone to subtlety and lacks a capacity for violence, he carries a ledger and embezzles during working hours.

If one lacks both violence and subtlety, he carries a pickaxe and digs a tunnel into the vault.

Ghain was a burglar.

This story begins where so many other stories end: six feet underground. Ghain had been digging his tunnel for several days, and by his best estimates, was immediately adjacent to the brick wall of the bank vault. Ghain was genetically and ethnically predisposed to this kind of work: short, stocky, and coming from a society of deep earth miners. He even whistled while he worked.

Ghain took a deep breath, hefted his pickaxe, and broke through the brick wall.

But the scent which assailed his nostrils was not the smell of success, but a sharp stench of something else.

As the dust settled, Ghain found himself face-to-face with a recently-deceased cadaver.

“Argh,” he thought, with consternation. “Not again.”

Ghain wasn’t easily deterred, however. Holding his nose, he stepped over the body. This wasn’t like any crypt he had ever been in - but thinking it over, he hadn’t been in any crypts before. The body was wearing a suit, but it was dressed in business casual rather than funeral formal. The brick-enclosed space was tiny, and unadorned, and Ghain’s attention was soon focused on the wall across rather than the decomposing corpse below. He scratched his head with the tip of his pickaxe, and then resolutely went to work breaking through the second wall.

This second effort was much more rewarding.

Bricks tumbled forward into the vault, messily and noisily, and Ghain lifted his torch into the dark and dusty interior. Hundreds of bags were neatly piled around the room, bulging with various denominations and currencies. It was a princely treasure, and it brought a crooked smile to his face. He immediately set to work, grabbing a bag and tossing it through the hole in the wall. The sound of loud voices on the other side of the heavy vault door made him pause, however. Had his clamorous activity attracted attention from the bank employees?

Perhaps he shouldn’t have burgled the bank during working hours. As we indicated before, Ghain lacked subtlety.

But he soon realized that the commotion outside was not directed at him, as he heard various shouted threats and commands.

“Everybody on the floor!”

“Stay where we can see you!”

“Give us the money and nobody gets hurt!”

It appeared that a robbery was in progress. Or two robberies. Technically, one robbery and one burglary.

Ghain hustled back into his tunnel, no longer registering the dead banker that he repeatedly had to step over on his way out. The voices outside had gotten closer, and it seemed that they had discovered the vault door - and were intent on opening it. Ghain didn’t really want to meet the robbers. An introduction would inevitably lead to a conversation about splitting the loot into fair and equitable shares, and since Ghain wasn’t carrying any weapons, his share would probably be zero. That would technically count as a second robbery, in his opinion.

He paused at the mouth of his tunnel. Like any good excavator, he had shored up his tunnel with wooden braces so that it wouldn’t collapse during the burglary. But technically, the burglary was over, and collapsing the tunnel might prevent a robbery.

Sledgehammers started pounding on the vault door outside.

Ghain grabbed his money-bag and crawled with much haste through his tunnel, pausing only to kick out the support braces behind him.

*****

This story ends where so many other stories begin: in a street cafe. The next morning, Ghain was sipping his cup of bitter, black coffee when a paperboy delivered the morning journal. Out of curiosity, Ghain paid the kid for a copy, and opened it up to see if there were any reports about either his unsuccessful burglary or the simultaneously unsuccessful robbery. He unfolded the paper and read the headline:

BODY OF MISSING ACCOUNTANT FOUND UNDER BANK

Police Investigate Embezzlement, Cover-Up

Ghain scowled in recollection of the assorted counterfeits that he had found in his single sack of loot last night. He folded the paper back up and took another sip of his coffee, contemplating a career change.