“Hey, what are you doing here, mister?” A head in a pot of hair was staring at me.

“I’m your director. Where are your forklifts?” I critically eyed the mess.

“You looking for the tall ones?” I nodded. “There’s one unoccupied over there. Why?”

“Thanks.” I hopped into the forklift. The office was on the opposite corner of the block. I needed to cut through the courtyard, to the middle of the side where the office building stood. To the next house, the one with the shop. I rolled out of the warehouse, rattling across the yard. This giant, tiny-wheeled contraption, meant for perfectly smooth surfaces, filled me with dread with its erratic behavior. Every now and then it would lose control, then snap back to my command.

Finally, I jumped off, stepped on solid ground and rested for a minute, surveying those hundred meters—the hardest hundred meters of my life, honest to God. A building, looking like another warehouse, separated me from the main one. I was out of sight.

Right in front of me was a squat, green house. The back wall had almost no windows, and the other buildings in the courtyard were industrial, so I could do my thing without a hitch. I’d finally made it to the address I found online yesterday. The back wall had square indentations, like the house was built from cardboard. I know everything about toilets, so it wasn’t hard to figure out that these indentations were the back walls of two apartment bathrooms and the stairwell wall on each floor. My focus was on the third floor, specifically two apartments in the middle section. I climbed back into the driver’s seat of my hell-machine and drove it straight into that fjord. Tapping the walls, I confirmed what was already obvious: the walls weren’t super thick, but they were solid. This wasn't going to be easy.

Back at the warehouse, I grabbed a cable, plugged it in, and unspooled it all the way to the work site. Entering the office building from the back staircase, from the courtyard, I went down to the basement entrance and picked up a modest, pre-prepared jackhammer lying there. 550 volts. BANG!—the tool was ready for a job it had never performed before. I ascended with the jackhammer on the forklift, having armed myself with a rope to control the lift mechanism. Bracing my shoulder blades against one wall, I plunged it into the other, and things got going. After collapsing a few kilograms of plaster, I still got what I wanted: an opening in the wall, like for a giant screw, with a chamfer for its slot, all as it should be. Maybe not the neatest. Symmetrically, with a thirty-centimeter acceptable deviation, I punched through the opposite wall. This time it was cleaner. Hurrying to switch off the terrifying tool, I yanked the cord, and the hammer dropped onto the asphalt, scraping off a handful of paint from the central wall of the indentation as it fell. Putting it back on the stairs and coiling the cable, I continued working on the holes. They were exactly the width of two exhaust pipes from my old Mustang. Since there was a cubbyhole between the wall and the bathroom in each of the apartments, storing skis, putty, and laundry detergent, I could insert the pipes without disguising them at all. Just hide them behind the waste pipe. Unfortunately, I only guessed its location correctly in one of the two cases. After inserting the pipes, I went to the warehouse for plaster and patched up the damaged walls. The people who walk through this courtyard probably couldn’t care less what happens to these two walls, but I personally prefer leaving things tidy. Two exhaust pipes notwithstanding.

Now all I had to do was wait. Wednesday, I could be sure of the operation’s success. Dormshiganger promised to be there at seven. I went to get lunch. As I was finishing my noodles with meat and soy, my friend called and asked: if there’s resistance and aggressive reactions, how dangerous could they be?

“Dormshiganger, you’ll be standing out in the open, with two bent-down metal pipes in front of you. You’ll need to play directly into them. Fierce resistance is simply out of the question.”

“And where will you be?” Dormshiganger’s voice sounded like a chess player who needed one more move for a counterattack. “Am I going to be alone?”

“I’ll be across the street from you; we’ll talk on walkie-talkies.” I had to have some way to track people’s movements in the apartments. If the Internet and the girl were to be believed, the neighbor lived alone across the landing.

“That’s not what we agreed on. I’ll go crazy out there.” I could hear him, like a restless sleeping child, snorting more frequently into his mouthpiece on the other end.

“Listen, it’s only the third floor. It’s empty all around. No one’s looking out the windows. Dormshiganger, you’re letting me down.” The wide, flat noodles, brown with soy sauce, slid quietly and quickly from my chopsticks, like snakes.

“Four thousand, my dear. Four thousand—or I’m out! I’ve got other things to do.”

“Fine, four thousand. Please, don’t disappoint me; everything’s ready.”

“I’ll be there at seven,” the phone clicked on the other end. He was calling from someone’s landline. He must be nervous, I thought. The noodles—they kept sliding.