The Lock Artist

Water appears as a curious motif in the middle of the novel when Mike begins his comic-strip correspondence with Amelia. As he is preparing a drawing for her, he slips into a dream about “water pouring into the room, running down the walls, coming through the window. Pooling on the floor and then rising. […] Until [he is] submerged in it” (154). This seems at first like a nightmare, expressive of a phobia. However, it takes a romantic turn when he wakes up and begins drawing. He draws a portrait of Amelia as a mermaid, “exactly how I see her, late at night, in my underwater dreams” (155). In this nebulous context, water appears to be a romantic escape from the world above. Later in the novel, however, when Mike is on his second major job with the white pager crew, he experiences sheer terror when he and Griffin must scale steep bluffs over the ocean to get to the target’s house. Mike slips and falls into the water, and he immediately feels that he is drowning: “The waves turning me over and dragging me to the bottom” (179). Here it becomes clearer that Mike holds a deep fear of water.

The origins of Mike’s phobia become clear in the revelation of his childhood trauma. His father took the safe in which Mike was hiding and tried to drown himself and Mike in the river together. Mike remembers the water “seeping in through the crack […] fill[ing] up the safe” (258). He was ultimately miraculously rescued from the river and from the safe, but the experience scarred him. In the climactic robbery of the poker yacht, Mike and Gunnar escape by jumping overboard, and Mike must face his phobia head-on. In the conclusion of the novel, Amelia draws him locked in a safe at the bottom of the river, in danger of suffocating, and she—transfigured into a mermaid—swims down and rescues him. The water motif is unusual in that it appears relatively late in the novel and its significance is mysterious until nearly the end of the novel.

A structurally crucial motif in the novel is the paradoxical nature of the safe. The purpose of a safe is to keep things secure, but Mike possesses the skill to compromise that security. Mike occasionally meditates on the idea of security. The first time he breaks into Amelia’s house and bedroom to deliver his drawings to her, he realizes how vulnerable she—and everyone—is. He reflects, “Nobody is safe. Ever. Anywhere” (147). Ironically, because of his childhood trauma, in which he nearly died while locked inside a safe, Mike associates an open safe—rather than a locked safe—with safety: The first time he cracks a safe, demonstrating for the Ghost, Mike imagines he is saving a boy locked inside the safe.

As early as Chapter 2, which details Mike’s first professional criminal operation, Mike emphasizes the importance of sensitive touch when opening a safe. He describes it as “something beyond feeling” (10). Nearly every safe-cracking scene in the novel features this emphasis. The motif is linked to the Ghost’s analogy of cracking a safe to seducing a woman; Mike recalls this as early as Chapter 2, saying it is like “[t]ouching her in just the right way. Knowing what is going on inside of her” (9). The narration also focuses on physical touch in romantic scenes, using similar language and evoking similar emotions. When Mike is attempting to crack the floor safe in the Connecticut mansion during his hit with the yellow pager crew, he muses, “a safe should stand free, so you can see the whole thing, run your hand along every inch of its skin” (42).

In a similar way, Mike emphasizes skin-to-skin contact in romantic scenes with both Lucy and Amelia. When Lucy is flirting with him in the Los Angeles nightclub, he recalls, “it felt good to be close to her. I reached out and touched her. One hand on each hip” (160). Likewise, in his first sexual encounter with Amelia, he describes in detail, “Her skin was glowing in the window’s faint light. I swallowed, reached forward to touch her. I put both of my hands against her collar bones” (164). The meticulous sensual detail of these seduction scenes bears a striking resemblance to the safe-cracking sequences in the novel. The Ghost’s safe-as-woman analogy crystallizes the connection between these two types of scenes.