The Tile Heist

He woke before the bells, as he had for thirty-one years, and let the dog out into the cold grey morning. He stood in the doorway in his socks and watched it disappear between the cypresses on its usual route, which had not varied in eight years.

He put coffee on. He drank it standing up. He had read somewhere a long time ago that sitting down to drink coffee was the beginning of laziness, and although he did not entirely believe this, he had done it the same way every morning for so many years that it had become a habit he had stopped questioning.

The keys hung on a hook by the door. There were nine of them and he knew each one by its weight. The bishop's office had once sent him a small label-maker, intending he should label them. He had never used it. He had given it to his sister-in-law, who used it to label every container in her kitchen, including the salt.

He took the keys down and walked the path. The dog came back and followed him. The cypresses stood in their old patient rows on either side. The chapel was where it had stood for four hundred years and where, he assumed without thinking about it much, it would continue to stand for four hundred more.

He unlocked the gate, then the courtyard door, and then the side door of the chapel. The side door did not seat right. It had not seated right since 2017. The bishop's man had told him it was the state's job. The state's man had told him it was the bishop's. The letters had gone back and forth for so long he had stopped reading them and had simply learned to push the door the extra inch each morning until it caught, the way a man with a bad knee learns the angle at which the knee will bear his weight.

Inside it was dark and cold and smelled like old stone and faintly of yesterday's candles. He did what he always did. He walked the nave and checked the wicks. He looked into the coin box and thought, as he sometimes did, about the people who had left those coins, and the small private things they must have been asking for.

Then he turned toward the small chapel on the south wall.

He stopped.

For a long moment what he was looking at did not mean anything.

Then it did.

The tiles were gone. Not all of them. The blue and white border above the door was still there, and so were the panels in the lower corners. But the great panel of the Virgin — the woman with her head tilted down and her hand on the child, the panel he had looked at every morning of his working life and on certain difficult days had believed was looking back — was gone.

They had sawn it out of the wall in three large pieces. The cuts were clean. They ran pale across the plaster the way cuts run when someone has done them carefully. On the floor was a fine grey dust and a single small fragment of blue tile near his boot. He bent and picked it up. It was the corner of her sleeve.

He stood a long time with the fragment in his hand. The dog came in and sat down beside him without being told. He did not feel surprise. He had known. He had known for two years in the wordless way a man knows the weather will turn before it turns, and now he knew, and there was no difference between the two. Only that the wall was bare. Only that the dust would have to be swept up. Only that a phone call would have to be made, and that after the phone call, nothing else would happen for a very long time.

He put the fragment of her sleeve into his pocket, where it would remain for the rest of his life, and went to find the phone.