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Maybe. But try this for yourself:
Think about a wall.
Not just a crappy, flimsy metal frame with drywall stuck to it, kind of like the wall you have holding up your cheap imitation Impressionist pictures. No: Think of an old wall, really solid, like they used to make them. Think about a real wall, made with hundreds of big, heavy stones. Think about how all the stones are held together, not just by their weight—and they weigh a lot—but also by concrete that hardened a few hundred years ago and hasn’t budged or cracked or weakened in all that time.
Now think about how that big, heavy, solid, permanent wall is not really just a wall standing around all by itself. Nope; it’s attached to a couple of other walls, just as big, heavy, and solid. And these walls are all attached to a big, heavy foundation that goes deep into the ground. And then on top of them, they have more walls stacked, because there’s more than one floor. And sitting on top of this huge, multilayered stack of heavy shit, kind of tying everything together, there’s a big heavy roof that’s not just stuck on and balancing there. It’s held tight with some gigundo beams—basically just great big trees—and a whole lot of hardware, ratcheted down so tight it hasn’t come off for hundreds of years of earthquakes, big winds, Visigoths, and who the fuck knows what else.
So you can’t really just think about a wall. That doesn’t exist. It’s a piece of that whole fucking building. It’s not a component part. You can’t separate it from the rest, not visually, not conceptually—and definitely not practically. That wall is not going anywhere. Not unless you find a way to detach it from the building. Or maybe just take the whole fucking building— Why not? Just as easy.
Starting to sound impossible, right? Yeah, good call. It is impossible. But you know what? It gets worse. Because guess what—you have to find a way to take the wall, or the whole building if you go that way, without anybody noticing. See, that wall is attached to a building that’s attached to a bunch of other buildings all bunched up together. And that place is guarded just about as tight as anyplace on earth, because it is called “the Vatican,” and it is where this guy called the Pope lives. And for some complicated and mostly stupid reasons, a whole bunch of very serious people might like to hurt this guy. And so a whole bunch of other people, maybe even more serious, spend their lives protecting him—hundreds of guards who use every possible weapon, every high-tech security device, and a budget so huge you might as well call it unlimited.
They spend every waking hour of their entire lives protecting the guy who lives in these buildings, and that means they protect the buildings just as carefully. So if you just sort of casually decide to take something from one of these buildings—even if it’s smaller than a wall—you are absolutely going to end up either locked up or dead and probably both.
And by the way, there are tons of things—and I mean that literally; tons of things—worth taking from the Vatican. They have a collection of art treasures like no place else in the world—a lot of them confiscated, which means stolen—from a bunch of poor jerks who had impure thoughts or some other bullshit. A lot of these hopeless jerks also had real talent, and you could spend a month walking around and drooling at the stolen paintings and you still wouldn’t see ten percent of them. Not even one percent.
And not just paintings, either. They have stuff stashed away, down in a nearly endless vault, that is so scary-weird and precious it never sees the light of day. And there is stuff down there that’s just rumors, legends, things that some people I can think of would pay hundreds of millions of dollars just to hold in their grubby paws and see that they’re real. And I’m talking about mind-blowing things, like a collection of alien skulls, proof that Jesus either did or didn’t really live, and if that’s not enough to whet your appetite—try the Chronovisor! It’s a device that lets you see into the past. And because it’s the Vatican, they’ve supposedly used it to take photographs of the Crucifixion, among other things.
And I mean, you don’t have to believe any of it—but nobody really knows! What would somebody pay to be sure, one way or the other?
So because of all that stuff, to a guy like me the place is an electromagnet with the power cranked up all the way. I would absolutely love to get down into that vault and let my sticky fingers go for a walk—or waltz out of one of the huge galleries with maybe one or two of their amazing paintings rolled up under my coat. And because it’s me, I have to think if I really tried, I could probably get away with one or two small pieces of something beautiful. Truly long odds, but yeah, why not? It’s what I do. I mean, like I said—it’s me. I make a shitload of money taking stuff nobody else can get close to, and I am the very best there is. I can steal just about anything. To me “impossible” just means “I dare you.” It’s just some asshat claiming I can’t, and that means I can and I will. I fucking love a challenge like that.
But a whole wall?
I mean, to steal a whole fucking wall? From the fucking Vatican?
Forget it.
It doesn’t take a genius to add up the columns here. A fresco is actually part of the wall. The wall is a part of a great big building. The building is part of the Vatican. The Vatican is swarming with eager armed guards. One, two, three, four,
equals—forget it. I mean, don’t even think about it. You can’t fucking steal a fucking wall. Not from the fucking Vatican. It can’t be done.
Except—if I don’t do it, I am dead. So is Monique.
It just keeps ending up there.
Well, okay, but wait a sec—so why does it have to be the whole wall? I mean, if you’re not up to speed on the whole fresco thing, that’s a fair question. Nobody really does frescoes anymore, and nobody much talks about them—I mean, it’s not something you learn about in fourth-grade art class.
So here’s the deal: A fresco is a painting, sure. But it lives on a wall—except not just on the wall. It actually lives in the wall. It’s a part of the wall as much as the bricks and mortar. Because when the basic structural wall is up, the artist comes in, and he’s got the whole picture planned out. He’s made a full-size drawing of it, called a cartoon, so he’s ready to dash off the actual picture very freaking fast. I mean, he better be ready. Because what happens next—what makes it a fresco and not a mural—is that they slap on a thick coat of plaster. And while that stuff is still wet, the artist goes to work. Working from the cartoon, he slops on the paint faster than shit. He has to, because it has to be done before the plaster dries. And what that does is that it makes the paint soak into the setting plaster, and then actually dry, set, so it’s a part of the actual coat of plaster.
Which means, an actual part of the wall.
See the problem?
Yeah, me, too. See a solution?
Thought not. I sure as shit didn’t.
And I tried. I beat my brains to death. I went up one side and down the other, turned the fucker inside out, everything. I thought up every dodge, every scam, every disguise or trick, everything I’d ever done or heard about—and I thought up some brand-new shit that was absolutely the True Shit—and none of it would work for this.
And I tried to get revved about it so the extra adrenaline would kick my brain into high gear. Thinking about the who and not just the what. To me, the Vatican is not a sacred place where a bunch of holy men live. To me, it is a place where a bunch of overprivileged, self-entitled, self-deluded crooks have lived for a thousand years, grabbing everything they could get their oily paws on from people who couldn’t afford to lose it.
And that made it ideal turf for me. I mean, this was a perfect example of what I love most in the world—grabbing something impossible from some over-rich asshole—and there is nobody on the face of the earth more over-rich than the Vatican. It would serve the pompous, self-righteous bastards right if I grabbed their precious fucking fresco, and if I trashed a building at the same time—tough shit. They can afford it.
But wait a second, you’re saying. The Vatican—that’s the Catholic Church, right? You can’t steal from them! I mean, it’s a fucking church—they earned that money doing good stuff for people!
Didn’t they?
Uh—no.
