The Goddess Heist

Levontiy Davidovich Klyuchev (Lev) was, by his own calculations, the only child in the history of the New York City public schools ever expelled from the first grade before the end of October. A distinction. And an injustice – he had been entirely innocent, no matter what Mrs. Miller told the police – but the outrage of it, thirty years later, had not faded by so much as one degree.

There were two perpetrators of this injustice:

Mrs. Miller – his first-grade teacher. She had a mustache like Stalin and the disposition to match. She did not like small boys who completed the assignment before she finished explaining it to the class.

Mikhail Fyodorvich Volkov – his cousin who sat in the desk to his right. Two years older and twice as big. Mikhail stole Mrs. Miller’s wallet. He took it from her purse during lunchtime, removed every dollar, and stashed the empty wallet in Lev’s desk.

Lev knew Mikhail did it. Mikhail knew Lev knew he did it. Lev knew Mrs. Miller knew Mikhail did it. But she – like most people – feared Mikhail. Lev seemed harmless by comparison – Mrs. Miller made the biggest mistake of her life by underestimating the wrath of a six-year-old boy.

Lev had an alibi. He and his girlfriend, Zhanochka spent the entire lunch period kissing and giggling in the coat closet. While searching for the missing wallet, Mrs. Miller flung open the closed door and discovered the two of them. The sight of them shocked Mrs. Miller. Zhanochka was one of her favorites (yes, all teachers have favorites, regardless of what they tell you). How could she disappoint Mrs. Miller this much? Zhanochka had pigtails, a gap from a recently lost tooth, and the impish grin of a girl who was not sorry for anything. She was, Lev felt certain, the most beautiful creature ever to attend the first grade – His goddess.

None of this helped Lev’s case. Mrs. Miller found the empty wallet in his desk. She did not want to report Lev for being in the closet with Zhanochka, because that would mean reporting Zhanochka as well. Although not the thief, she reported him for it anyway – to the principal, who reported it to the school board, who reported it to the police, who came to his house and spoke to his mother and father in the living room while Lev sat in the hall and listened.

The police said that the school would not press charges if Lev’s parents returned the money to Mrs. Miller – $292, a sum Lev thought wildly exaggerated. The school principal assigned him to another first-grade class – away from his beloved Zhanochka. A softer boy would have wept, but not Lev. He planned his revenge on Mrs. Miller.

His plot required wax – forty-two balls of wax. None could be larger than one-half an inch in diameter. He worked in his room late at night, after his homework and his parents went to bed. A few he made from candle wax – which he found dissolved quickly in gasoline. Some he made from the carnauba wax his father kept in the garage. Carnauba wax dissolved more slowly in gasoline, so it would function as his delayed fuse. A few he mixed with maple syrup; on the theory that syrup would gum up whatever the wax did not.

One Friday morning in late October, Lev dropped all forty-two balls of wax, one-by-one, into the gas tank of Mrs. Miller’s car. Then that afternoon, at rush hour, Mrs. Miller’s car sputtered and died in the middle lane of the BQE. Behind her, a delivery truck carrying frozen fish could not stop in time.

The fish were not harmed. Mrs. Miller was less fortunate.

Whiplash, the doctors said. She was out for the rest of the school year. They never proved Lev’s guilt – but proof had never been the point, not for Mrs. Miller and not, in the end, for the school. Everyone knew. And after the business with the car, the principal convinced Lev's parents that it would be better for everyone if the boy continued his education elsewhere.

And so, he attended The Pavlov Academy of Absolute Compliance – where he excelled in all subjects.

On the day of his expulsion from public school, his grandfather – also named Levontiy – came to him. His grandfather was a legend among the Bratva [the brotherhood], a man spoken of in the old neighborhood in the lowered voice reserved for the truly dangerous. The ATM Tsar. He arrived at the house in his enormous wool coat, listened to the entire story without once interrupting, and then, rather than scolding the boy, took him by the hand and drove him to his workshop.

There he set a rusty padlock on the bench in front of little Lev, along with a tension wrench and a single pick, and he said the only thing anyone had said to Lev that made any sense.

“If you are going to be a criminal,” he said, “be a good one.”

Locks first. Then safes. Then alarms. Mrs. Miller had taught him that the world was unjust. His grandfather taught him what to do about it. Of the two lessons, Lev would always be more grateful for the second – but he never forgot the first.

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