By H.G. Martin

We got out, my henchman Phil and I, stepped to the wide, tree-lined sidewalk, and began a short hike up a long hill. It was a full moon that night, not the best time to execute a burglary, but Mother Nature was with us, as I’d planned. One of San Francisco’s famous pea-soup fogs had quietly begun seeping in around dusk. By 3:05, as we neared our destination, visibility was less than ten feet in any direction.

We stepped off the sidewalk and through the garden gate of the home directly behind our target. The place was vacant and would make a fine launch point for our caper. We trudged across the overgrown lawn and stopped at the stone wall separating the vacant house from our target, the DeTeresi mansion.

Several obstacles stood between us and the mansion’s service entrance; a concrete wall separating the two homes, a lower, decorative concrete planter box filled with large flowering plants and shrubs, an Olympic-size swimming pool, a patio area with two umbrella-covered, glass-topped tables, some patio chairs, an unwound garden hose, and a croquet set among them.

I knew all of this, despite the curtain-like fog, because I’d done my homework. It’s called professionalism, and it’s what separates the world-class super villains from your average meathead with a costume and a gimmick.

When I plan a job I learn everything I can about the mark. Like the fact that the DeTeresi’s were currently vacationing in St. Croix, en masse, and they’d given the servants time off.

No detail is too trivial to take note of. In this business it’s the stupid things that will land your ass in a cell, like tripping over a garden hose or not noticing the guard dog’s water bowl. I’ve never seen the inside of a prison, if you don’t count the time I did in Juvie or the tour of Alcatraz I took with my girlfriend, and if there’s any single reason why, it’s because this is my job, and I treat it as such.

And in case I seem like just another arrogant criminal mastermind; blowing elitist smoke up your dress, let me illustrate my point with an example.

A couple of years before this, a super bad guy with whom I was casually acquainted--he called himself the Eel but I used to secretly refer to him as the Flounder--was in a similar situation. He was your average, impulsive, screw-loose villain, big on bravado but short on gray matter.

The Eel had been romancing a rich young widow from Burlingame so that he could get access to her home, the better to rob her blind. One night, she set up a party for herself and all of her closest friends. They had great seats for a U2 concert at the Coliseum, after which they’d limo back to a South of Market nightclub that she’d rented for the night and party ‘till dawn.

Of course she wanted her new boy-toy Flounder to attend, and was devastated when he begged off due to a severe stomach flu.

That night, the Eel struck, although “struck out” is a lot closer to the way it went down.

The widow had given the Eel the key to her house, but only the one to the back door. My guess is, she considered him a lot of fun but not close enough to her social level to allow in the main entrance.

Flounder wasn’t dismayed; he’d just put on his mask and costume, sneak around back while the house was empty, clean the place out, and be on his way.

But this was another Bay Area night of pea soup fog, and Flounder hadn’t memorized the lay of the land.

A number of obstacles were innocently laid out before him in the backyard. He couldn’t see any of them through the fog, but he thought, “How tough could this be?”

Pretty tough. He stumbled over sprinklers and garden hoses, fell into the swimming pool--all the time cursing like a stevedore--and generally stirred up such a commotion that he finally alerted a neighbor.

The concerned citizen with the wolf-like hearing proceeded to the nearest phone and dialed 911.

San Francisco’s Finest showed up just in time to save Flounder from drowning (he had gotten wrapped up in the swimming pool’s solar cover when he fell in) and haul him off to jail with much snickering all around. As far as I know, he spent the rest of his pitiful career learning to make license plates.

We, on the other hand, due to my consummate professionalism and scientific genius, didn’t trip over anything and never made a sound.

We simply flipped up the hinged covers in the middle of the elaborate-looking buckles on our utility belts and pressed a red button.

Immediately, our bodies were surrounded by intangibility fields, which rendered us immaterial and allowed us to walk through, over, or past any object. It’s one of my spiffier inventions.

We walked on, like silent demons, through every obstacle. We paused at the rear servant’s entrance.

So far there had been no sign of my nemesis Captain Energetic, but I was betting that the goody-goody bastard was around somewhere. He doesn’t possess any special sight or hearing powers, thank God, so he would have had a tougher time getting through the fog than we did.

I told Phil to shutdown his intangibility field so we could have a listen. I did the same. Hard to admit about my own invention, but here we have one of the problems with the intangibility process. When you’re inside the field you can only hear or talk to others in the same condition. The good side of that coin is that you can’t be heard when you’re sneaking into someplace, or sneaking up on someone.

We heard nothing but the breeze. That could mean that Energetic wasn’t around, or that he was already inside. I guessed the latter.

We ghosted up again and I signaled for Phil to follow me across the freshly manicured backyard lawn, to the left rear corner of the mansion. We stopped in front of a large bay window that looked in on one of the family rooms. There was a lamp lit, probably so potential burglars would think someone was home. The room was empty.

“Where is he, Doc? Where’s Captain Energetic?” said my rather dim-witted lackey.

“How the hell should I know?” I said. “We know he’s around, so just watch your ass.”

In our intangible state, we walked quickly through the wall and into the family room. It was large and right out of the 18th Century. Virtually every piece of furniture in the room was at least two hundred years old and made of polished mahogany.

Antiques being one of my passions, I paused for a better look. I ghost-walked through a tall Queen Anne desk and a Chippendale chair with claw and ball feet as I looked around the room. I took a moment to notice the antique corner chairs, tea tables, sofas, and bookshelves. Then my wandering eyes stopped. Against the far wall, like dog crap on a Persian rug, stood a state-of-the-art entertainment system and home theater with a huge flat screen TV and speakers of all sizes littered around it.

Now don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against modern technology. Where would I be without it? But, seeing that shiny, oversized idiot box in the midst of all of that stately beauty annoyed me. I was going to enjoy stealing from these classless pinheads.

We kept our eyes peeled but, surprisingly; there was still no sign of the big blue bumpkin known to the world as Captain Energetic. I decided that we’d better hurry up and get what we’d come for, no sense pressing our luck. I motioned for Phil to follow me as I passed through the family room wall and into a wide hallway.

Being a well-prepared criminal, I had memorized the floor plan of the mansion from blueprints I had obtained from the City Records office a couple of nights before. At first I’d been worried that the place was too old, that the blueprints had been lost in the 1906 earthquake and fire. Fortunately, the mansion was built after that, during the city’s reconstruction. Nevertheless, the blueprints weren’t easy to find. They’d been transferred to microfiche files, of which there were thousands in the City Records storage room. But, hey, let’s face it, not many things are impossible for a guy who can make himself a ghost.

I knew, from careful analysis of the blueprints, that a wall safe had been installed in the master bedroom on the second floor. I fought and won a battle for my lackey Phil’s attention and we proceeded to climb the main stairs.

One of the little annoying things about intangibility is the process of changing elevation. Try to just walk up a flight of stairs and you end up walking right through them. What you have to do is lean your body backwards and just start placing your feet at an angle that will get you up to wherever you want to go. It’s rather disconcerting the first few times you try it, like you’re walking on air, which you are, and like gravity means nothing to you, which it does. Losing altitude is accomplished in a similar manner.

Fortunately, the intangibility process that I developed-slash-discovered also results in the user becoming weightless, or else the moment you turned intangible you’d sink right into the ground. Your body would eventually come to a stop somewhere near the center of the Earth, where you would lie undisturbed until your intangibility belt ran out of power, at which time you would be crushed by the pressure and, most likely, incinerated by the heat at the Earth’s core. A super villain’s got to think about these things.

Once on the second floor we continued walking through walls, checking for signs of large super do-gooders as we went, until we arrived at the master bedroom. Along one wall was a row of antique paintings in the Baroque style, mostly featuring partially nude plump women in Biblical scenes. Each of these was probably worth well into the six figures.

They were nothing compared to the value of the items we’d come to steal, the DeTeresi Blue Diamonds.

From my memory of the floor plan I was sure that the safe was roughly in the center of the wall, in a spot currently hidden behind a painting of a bunch of hearty-looking peasants dancing in a field. I brought out a small flashlight from a pouch on my belt, flicked it on, and passed it and my head through the painting, into the wall safe behind. Inside the safe were bonds, certificates of deposit, a large stack of bills with a fifty on top, and--in the corner--a blue velvet bag, obviously the home of the soon-to-be-missing diamonds. I retracted my head and arm and turned off my intangibility device.

How was I able to pick up a flashlight or, for that matter, turn off my belt switch, when I was intangible, a virtual ghost? The answer has to do with the nature of the intangibility process. I don’t actually become immaterial so much as my body is shifted to a different plane or dimension. When I activate my intangibility field, I seem to be right where I was before I turned on the device, although a bit faded--like you could almost see through me. In reality, my body is still solid, it just exists elsewhere, or maybe it’s else-when.

Why it is that I see everything in this dimension when my body’s really somewhere else, I haven’t figured out yet. The bottom line is, when I hit the switch on my belt, everything touching my body, with the exception of immense objects like the Earth under my feet, becomes intangible along with me, but not to me. I am still able to touch my body, my clothes, and my utility belt. From my perspective, I am still solid and the rest of the world is intangible. To the rest of the world, the reverse is true.

Once I verified that the goods were there, as my research had indicated, and became tangible again, I signaled for Phil to do the same. As usual, Phil misunderstood my hand signals; holding his hands out, palms up, and shaking his head like the bean-filled maraca that it was.

After several attempts to get my message across silently, during which I began to remind myself distinctly of one of those frigging annoying street mimes that are always hanging around at the Wharf, I finally just broke down, became intangible again so he could hear me, and told him to shut the damn thing off.

I growled for Phil to hold still while I opened up the well-stocked backpack that it was his duty to wear to each of our capers. I unzipped the thing and removed my safe-cracking equipment, a pretty ingenious set of devices that can open almost any safe. They’re great tools, and I highly recommend them, although not my design, unfortunately. I bought them from their developer, a fellow Bay area super criminal who went by the ridiculous name “The Doorman.” He was a nice guy, but no better at picking villain names than my lackey, Phil. “Phil” actually WAS his secret identity. His real name was Bart.

Trying not to waste any more time, I quickly attached old Doorknob’s little beauties to the wall safe door, after first carefully removing the Rubens from the wall and setting it on an 18th Century chaise-longue. I connected the three devices together, activated them with the push of a button, and stood back marveling as they quietly began doing their job. Slowly and magically, the safe’s combination dial began to turn. After three stops and two changes of direction, I heard an audible click from the safe. A digital readout on one of the devices displayed the words; “You’re in the money!”

The device also included the option of an audible alarm that would play the first bar of that famous song, in time to the flashing readout, but most bad guys chose to deactivate it.

To be honest; there aren’t many things in life more exciting to me than the prospect of a whole truckload of money that I don’t have to earn by honest labor. Almost nothing else comes close. Well, there’s my postage stamp collection, but that’s about it.

Not surprisingly then, I was licking my lips and grinning like an idiot as I carefully pulled down the handle and opened the safe door. Slowly I reached my hand into the little vault and picked up the blue velvet bag, feeling the perfect hardness of the large, expensive diamonds within.

It wasn’t until I had completely removed the bag from the safe that I realized it had been sitting on a pressure switch. A silent alarm was probably already lighting up the local SFPD precinct house. Every cop in the area would be descending on the place like it was a doughnut shop with a half-off sale within minutes.

Don’t panic, I told myself. Stow the gear, secure the diamonds, hit the intangibility button, and we’ll be out of here before the cops arrive.

I had just finished disassembling my safecracking devices and putting them back in Phil’s pack, and was about to stash the bag of sparklers in a pouch within my utility-slash-intangibility belt, when a familiar baritone just about scared me stupid.

“Doctor Diablo,” said Captain Energetic, standing calmly, arms folded across his huge chest, in the middle of a doorway that was the only exit from the master bedroom. “I’d like to say this is a pleasant surprise, but it’s neither. The Chief bet me twenty bucks that you wouldn’t show up after my warning. I figured you were too arrogant to let that stop you. Looks like he owes me money.”

My thoughts involuntarily flashed back for a second. It was earlier that morning. I was monitoring the DeTeresi mansion, including the grounds, the exterior of the building, the driveway, and all approaches to the place, from the comfort of my basement office, using several mini-surveillance cameras of my own design. Phil and I had planted them there two weeks before while pretending to be landscapers. They allowed me to see and hear everything the cameras did from my desktop PC.

I noticed that one of the mini-cams was malfunctioning. The only image I was getting from it was a large blue blob. I was about to run a diagnostic on the device when the camera angle suddenly shifted and I found myself staring into the disgustingly perfect face of Captain Energetic. Obviously he had been snooping around, spotted it somehow, picked it out of its hiding place, and was now holding it in his giant paw.

I quickly activated the audio feed from that particular camera, cursing something about muscle-bound idiots in blue tights as I did. I turned up the volume just in time to hear the big blue buffoon’s pearls of wisdom.

“Well, well, one of Doctor Diablo’s famous mini-cams, unless I miss my guess. Hello Diablo, planning a burglary are we? Well, I’m on to you now so you might as well just give it up. Hey, maybe I’ll get lucky and put you behind bars this time, huh? I guess we’ll see. Have a nice day!”

Then he crushed my camera like it was a potato bug, the big, annoying bastard.

Hauling my mind back out of the quagmire of memory and into the desperate events taking place in the present, I realized that there was no time to bandy words with the big lunk, even if I’d wanted to. Which I didn’t, not many things on Earth are more mind-wipingly boring than having a conversation with a super hero.

“Phil, go intangible and let’s make tracks!” I said to my henchman as I hit the button on my belt buckle and felt the familiar dimension-shifting effect.

The way it feels to become intangible is sort of like when your driving through the mountains and radio reception fades in and out, except replace the words “radio reception” with “your body.”

We were halfway across the large bedroom, on our way to the second story bedroom wall. I finished stuffing the little blue bag full of diamonds--also intangible at this point--into a pouch in my belt. I was beginning to get that intoxicating got-away-with-it feeling when suddenly I felt the dimension-shift again and realized that I was solid once more.

I desperately hit my belt button several times, but nothing happened. When I looked up, I noticed that Captain E. was holding some sort of boxy electronic device with an antenna sticking out of the middle of it.

“Doctor, I’m hurt,” said the smirking bastard. “After all the times you’ve escaped me by turning into a ghost, you didn’t think I’d come up with a way to nullify your device?”

“I think your Mother still ties your shoes for you. Get him Phil!”

For all his faults--and the list goes on and on--my henchman Phil is both loyal and courageous. He’s also a world-class boxer, who can outfight just about any normal man--one of the main reasons I hired him. He immediately charged Captain Energetic, giving me time to think.

There was a large bay window in the bedroom wall, but would I have time to open a section and jump out before Captain E. made mincemeat out of Phil? What was the range on that nullifier device? If I did make it out the window would I have to jump from the second floor and risk breaking something important or could I switch on my belt and escape into thin air?

I weighed the risks carefully as Captain Energetic, apparently tired of swatting Phil away like a mosquito each time he rallied for a frontal assault, finally just grabbed him by the belt with his free hand, casually lifted him above his head, and shook him vigorously for several seconds.

After the swatting and the Mixmaster treatment, Phil was on the ropes and of little use to me. His eyes were crossing, a sure sign that Phil is about to either pass out or give up the groceries. It was time to take direct action before the Captain came for me.

Finally deciding, I drew a .44 Magnum semi-auto from beneath my cape; where I had wedged it between my back and my belt before we left my basement office. I dropped into a two-handed police-firing stance; the gun aimed directly at Captain E.

“Drop that stooge!” I said.

I’m not sure what kind of reaction I expected, but the one I got was a complete surprise. The Captain suddenly stopped shaking Phil and simply stared at me, his face drooping noticeably.

“Diablo, I’ve never known you to use a gun,” he said as he absent-mindedly dropped Phil. “As much trouble as you’ve been to me over the years, I’ve always admired the fact that you never carried a gun and never took a life. What do you hope to gain? You know that I’m invulnerable.”

I almost offered him a tissue, the big sap. Instead, I adjusted my aim and fired, blowing the nullifier into small metallic chunks.

“Phil, go intangible!” I said, simultaneously hitting the button on my own belt. Phil, still looking like a dog with something lodged in its throat, managed to activate his belt unit, just as Captain Energetic, apparently momentarily stunned that I would actually shoot at him, finally got the picture and made a desperate lunge for him. The Captain passed right through Phil and landed hard on the floor.

“Through the window, Phil, now!” I said in a ghost voice that only he could hear.

We stumbled to the second story wall and right through one of the few bay windows I’ve seen that really look out onto a bay.

I would have loved to add a parting shot like “Always be prepared, Captain!” or something, just before my head disappeared through the window. You know, to really piss him off but, since he wouldn’t have heard me anyway, I settled for giving Energetic the single finger salute.

I knew we were home free at this point. Before Captain Energetic could get out of the house to go after us, which, being a good guy, he had to do without smashing through any walls or windows, we had made good our escape, diamonds and all.

Little did I know, as Phil and I ran off through the San Francisco night sky on thin air like a couple of Peter Pans, that the events of this day would lead to murder, mayhem, and, eventually, metamorphosis.

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Doctor Diablo is Copyright 2003 by H.G. Martin