The Florentine Deception Read online

  The lightheadedness passed.

  “Bastards. Well anyway, thanks for the attempted rescue,” said Lister sullenly.

  “No problem.”

  Using my good arm, I shifted onto my knees, this time thankfully without any real dizziness, and rose to my feet. Keen not to turn my neck, I shuffled my feet until I faced Lister, then walked over.

  Ronald was a doppelganger of his brother: mid-fifties, about five foot eleven, barrel-chested, tight-curled black hair, and a week’s growth of jet-black stubble on his face and down his neck. The untucked white dress shirt he wore was stained yellow around the armpits and smeared in filth, its unbuttoned collar exposing a tangle of black, sweat-matted chest hair. The skin area around his right wrist was chafed raw, the top layer presumably rubbed off from repeated struggling against the handcuffs that bound him to the water heater’s piping. Khalimmy had yanked out two of his fingernails; I cringed involuntarily at the caked blood that covered the exposed nail beds.

  “They don’t hurt too much anymore,” he said, following my gaze. “Can you get me some water first?” Ronald grabbed an empty cup from atop the water heater and pointed at an old-style washbasin with his free hand. “I’m about to pass out from dehydration.”

  “Thanks,” he said as I handed him the cup. “Mind filling me up once more? And then there’s got to be something over there to cut these things off.” He gestured toward a cluttered workbench covered in boxes.

  I rummaged through them and returned with a metal-cutting hacksaw.

  “Thanks.”

  “If we’re going to get out of here, we’re going to have to hurry up. I’m pretty sure Khalimmy plans to kill you this morning,” I said, turning my body back toward the hatch.

  “Lovely,” he said.

  While Ronald hacked at the steel cuff, I walked over to the stairs, and, using my good arm, climbed until my head was just below the hatch. Then I slowly lifted my left arm up. A half-dozen curse words accompanied the pain.

  “You okay?” He continued hacking behind me.

  “Just dandy,” I said. “I’ll be even better when we get out.”

  I counted to three, gritted my teeth, and shoved the heel of my palm into the hatch. It gave, just a few millimeters, and then stopped dead.

  “Mother Mary of Mercy!” I screamed. I followed up with a good ten seconds of Lamaze-style heavy breathing before gritting my teeth and trying once more with the same result. “It’s locked. I bet he shoved that screwdriver through again.”

  “Sure he didn’t just stack something heavy over it?” asked Ronald.

  “Trust me.”

  I started down. Just a few steps from the floor, my heart jumped—my smartphone was sitting on the concrete between the stairs and an apple crate filled with garden tools. For whatever reason, the Russian had thankfully missed it.

  “Thank God!”

  “What?”

  “I found my phone. The bastard didn’t take my phone.” I’d completely forgotten it in my stupor. Ignoring the pain, I crouched geriatrically next to the box and picked it up. Sadly, the screen was cracked and the battery had jettisoned to parts unknown. I grunted.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Lister, now from behind me.

  “The battery popped out. Help me look for it?”

  Ronald, far more mobile than I and intensely eager given his newly gained freedom, began searching through and between a cluster of boxes adjacent to the stairwell like a four-year-old on his first Easter egg hunt. Less able to dig between the boxes, I scanned farther afield.

  Ultimately, I took the prize—I found the battery sitting eight feet from the stairs under the washbasin. Ronald scooped up the thin white battery, saving me the trouble of a painful squat, inserted it into the back of the smartphone, and placed the phone in my good hand. Then he gave me a “what next?” look.

  “I’ve never used one this complicated,” he admitted sheepishly. I offered the phone back to him.

  “No problem, it’s easy. Make sure the battery doesn’t pop out and push the button on the top left—hold it in for a good second.” He took the phone and pushed the power button. “Okay, in about ten seconds it should ask for my password.”

  Lister stared at the screen hopefully, but after a few seconds it was clear that the cracked touchscreen display had ascended to LCD heaven.

  “Dammit. The screen is shot.” Ronald drooped his shoulders dolefully.

  “No, no. It might still work. These things are built like tanks. Bring the phone up to my mouth and hold in the bottom-middle button until you hear a beep.”

  He placed the phone right in front of my face and carefully placed his finger on the rectangular button. A few seconds later, the phone chirped.

  “Dial Steven,” I enunciated into the phone’s mic. We waited a few moments, but nothing happened.

  “Let’s try once more,” I said. “Hold the same button again until it beeps.”

  Again, he did as instructed.

  “Dial Parents,” I said.

  Nothing.

  “Shit.”

  Ronald laid the phone down on a card table and took a seat on the bottom stair.

  “So much for that,” he said.

  “Well, like I said, my buddy knows we’re here. Plus, Khalimmy doesn’t know there’s two of us.” Of course the disarray I’d created upstairs wasn’t exactly subtle. “We’ve got to find something to use as weapons. Then we kill the light, wait behind the stairs for him to come down, and whack him.”

  My MacGyver-esque plan didn’t seem to motivate as intended. Undeterred, I gritted my teeth against the pain and began rummaging through the boxes for a makeshift weapon.

  “So from what I understand, Khalimmy wanted to buy a rare diamond from your brother?”

  Ronald looked up at me.

  “Your brother passes away from a heart attack, Khalimmy doesn’t know, and thinks your brother decided to renege on the deal.” A few pokes with my good hand revealed a cache of used painting supplies under a decrepit spider web: brushes, a tarp, sandpaper and a few half-full cans of paint. I advanced to the next box. “Apparently he really wants the diamond. So he kidnaps you as collateral.”

  “This is the first I’ve heard of any diamond. The Khalid guy …”

  “Khalimmy,” I corrected him.

  “Khalimmy,” he said deliberately, “kept asking about a floral something or other.”

  “The Florentine. That’s the name of a famous diamond. Your brother was trying to sell it from what I can tell.”

  Ronald stood up and walked over to the workbench. “Well apparently Khalimmy isn’t the only one who wants it. Let him deal with the fucking Russians. Hopefully they’ll all kill each other. How about this?”

  I turned around to see him holding a weighty, three-foot piece of rusted steel rebar.

  “Where’d you find that?” I hadn’t seen it among the jumble of tools on the bench.

  “It was in a box under the counter.”

  “Now we need one more for me.” I rotated and advanced to the next box. “You had no idea at all what your brother was up to? He never mentioned the diamond?”

  “I try, tried rather, to stay ignorant of his antiquities dealing. Once bitten, twice shy. I have no desire to go to prison.” I assumed he was referring to his and Richard’s indictments (and subsequent exoneration) on smuggling charges. The second crate held a few weathered leather gloves, pruning shears, and other gardening paraphernalia, but unfortunately nothing lethal.

  “To be honest, before the funeral I hadn’t talked with him in over a year, and then this Khalimmy guy puts a gun to my head in my garage and drags me here. I figured my brother had cheated him for some antique before he died. I kept trying to tell him that Rich was dead, but he didn’t believe me, thinks he skipped town with this Florentine thing … will this do?” He held up a four-foot length of white PVC piping.

  “Better than nothing, but I’d prefer something heavier.” I returned my attention to the locker and li
fted its latch.

  Without warning, the chorus of Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick filled the air. Ronald spun toward the sound, ominously swinging the crowbar in tight circles above his head.

  “Steven!” I screamed—it was his personalized ringtone. Ignoring a thousand stabbing needles of pain, I spun and ran toward the card table. By the time I reached the table, my phone was vibrating madly across the vinyl surface in time with a second iteration of the chorus. I snatched it up, careful to prevent the battery from falling out of its bay, and placed it by my ear to answer.

  Miraculously, the phone stopped ringing.

  “Hello, Steven. Can you hear me?” I paused. No response. “Steven, my phone’s busted. I can’t hear you.”

  “Listen. If you can hear me, I found Richard Lister’s brother but we’re locked in Khalimmy’s basement. The basement is accessible through a trapdoor from the kitchen pantry. Call the police as soon as you can. 19591 Gilmore. 19591 Gilmore in El Segundo. Call the police.” I repeated the entire plea several times, then put the phone back onto the card table. Lister had dropped the crowbar to his side and looked longingly at the phone.

  “Did it work?”

  “I don’t know, I couldn’t hear him. Who knows if he could hear me.”

  “But you know it’s your friend?”

  “I programmed that ringtone for him. It’s his favorite song. It’s him.”

  Chapter 33

  “All set?” I asked in a whisper.

  “Yeah, I think so,” responded Ronald. After finding a five iron in the locker, I’d unscrewed the basement’s two bulbs and by the beam of my keychain flashlight, both of us had taken positions flanking the staircase.

  “So the Russian is looking for the diamond too,” I said. “It seems your brother was trying to find the highest bidder.”

  “No. He didn’t say anything about a diamond. When I told him I knew nothing about this Florentine thing, he said he was looking for a flash drive that he said Richard had taken, or … rather … stolen.”

  “A flash drive? You mean like a thumb drive?”

  “Yeah, I guess. He kept asking me if my brother ever sent me a flash drive to hold onto. ‘Did your brother ever give you a flash drive? A portable hard drive? Did he ever give you a password to an account?’ Flash drives and account passwords? My brother dealt in antiquities, not computers. I had no clue what the hell he was talking about.”

  Maybe the Florentine wasn’t a diamond after all? Maybe Russian intelligence data? Or maybe it was a diamond and the drive held a digitized map of some sort?

  “So what did you do?” I asked.

  “I told him I had no idea what he was talking about. What else could I do?”

  “And he believed you?”

  “No.” Ronald shuddered. “He pulled out a knife and threatened to remove my fingers if I didn’t tell him. He said he’d work on you next.”

  “Me? He was going to question me about the Florentine?”

  “Yeah. I figured that was it for both of us.”

  Jesus Christ. “Then what happened?”

  “He grabbed my hand and pressed the edge of the blade against my finger. I nearly soiled my pants. And then his mobile rang. God help me, his mobile rang. He answered it, listened for a good thirty seconds, hung up, and began cursing. Then he bolted upstairs and took off. That was it,” he crossed himself. “You woke up a few minutes later.”

  “Unbelievable,” I said, “I wonder …” A noise. “Shhhh. Someone’s upstairs.”

  “What?” he whispered.

  “I heard the floor creak.” The floorboards squeaked again, this time closer, louder.

  “Ahh. I hear it.”

  “Aim for the shins. Hit as hard as you can as soon as you’ve got a good shot.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  After a nerve-racking minute of groans and creaks the hardwood floor’s protestations ceased, plunging the basement into an unnatural silence.

  “I wonder what the bastard’s doing,” commented Ronald in a full-volume whisper.

  “Shhhh.”

  An instant later, the footsteps recommenced, this time from the far edge of the basement ceiling, and worked their way toward the trapdoor. Again, silence. I tensed. Then another groan, this time from shifting weight, followed by the unmistakable scrape of a screwdriver being withdrawn from the latch. I redoubled my grip on the leather-wrapped handle.

  The hatch raised a crack, projecting a dim wedge of light along the stairs and directly in front of my feet.

  “Alex? Tell me you’re down there.”

  Steven!

  “We’re here!”

  “Thank God.” Steven grabbed the underside of the hatch and swung it open with a grunt. I’d never seen him so anxious; a dense film of perspiration covered his face.

  “Did you call the police?” I asked, then gestured Ronald up the stairs. “Hurry.”

  “Yeah. They should be here soon.”

  “Last thing we need is Khalimmy throwing all three of us in the basement, covering the trapdoor with a rug, and telling the cops it’s a false alarm.”

  “I don’t think I want to wait around for the cops to arrive,” replied Ronald uneasily.

  “I don’t blame you, this place is disturbing,” responded Steven. “I say we get out of here and go straight to the police.”

  “Fine.”

  “This way,” I motioned toward the front of the house. Ronald and Steven followed me down the entryway toward the front door. Like the rest of the house, the entryway’s heavy curtains immersed the area in near darkness. With a quick twist, I rotated the deadbolt latch into the vertical position and then yanked the handle. The door stuck.

  “Dammit.” It was already unlocked, undoubtedly by the Russian. Exasperated, I grabbed the latch again, but before I could turn it, I heard a scratching noise and the latch began to rotate, of its own volition, between my fingers.

  “Oh shit,” I mouthed. “He’s back.” I tightened my grip to prevent the latch from turning. Khalimmy fought briefly with his key, then retracted it.

  “Hold it,” whispered Steven into my ear. “Don’t let go.” I reinforced my grip with my left hand.

  A second later, Khalimmy reinserted the key, tried one more light turn, and then, failing, torqued it hard. Fortunately, my years of rock-climbing had developed cable-strength tendons and I had no problem immobilizing the latch; the key, however, was less fortunate and snapped immediately.

  “Ibn himar! Goddamn lock.”

  I gently released the bolt and backed several feet from the door, followed by my companions.

  “What now?” I whispered.

  “Where are the fucking police?” whispered Ronald.

  “They’ve got to be here soon. I called almost ten minutes ago,” said Steven.

  “Are you suggesting we just wait until they arrive?”

  “I don’t know. How should I know?”

  “All right, calm down,” I said. I tiptoed back to the door and peered through the peephole. Khalimmy had disappeared. “Shit, he’s gone.”

  “What should we do?” asked Steven, panicked.

  “I guess we could bolt out the front door.”

  “What if he’s out in front of the garage or something? He’ll kill us. What about the back? We could jump into a neighbor’s yard.”

  “That could work—if he hasn’t already gone back there. Shit.”

  “What?”

  “Did you leave the back door open?”

  “Crap. You think he’d go arou—”

  Phut. Smoke emerged from a newly punctured, dime-sized hole in the doorjamb just left of Ronald’s head. For a second, I stared dumbfounded at the wall, then at Ronald, wondering where such a smoking hole could have come from. I began to turn around, then heard a second phut and a sickening, organic crunching sound—the sound of splintering bone—and it clicked. I dove headfirst into a maze of waist-high-stacked newspapers in the adjoining study, landing hard on my bad arm. Teeth gritted,
I shimmied behind a heavy wood desk and out of sight of the hallway.

  “Oh fuck!” screamed Steven.

  Phut. A door slammed. Phut. A half-second delay. Phut.

  I shifted onto the balls of my feet and surveyed what little of the room I could see from behind the desk’s stacks of yellowing paper. Only one door: back to the entryway. A fireplace to my left—was there an iron poker? Something I could use as a weapon? I couldn’t tell. A blacked-out window to my right.

  My eyes returned to the desk. A grapefruit-sized glass paperweight sat partially hidden behind the piles at the edge. I grabbed it and ducked back.

  “Please, my friends, it’s time to stop playing.” The hallway lights flicked on.

  I said nothing. Neither did anyone else.

  “All I want is what I’ve been promised. Give me … for God’s sake, sell me the Florentine, and everyone lives.”

  He paused and again the house went silent, save for the subtle background whistle of the vent. I heard the stomp of a foot, then Ronald screamed.

  “No more games or your brother dies. Right now. Your friend is next.”

  “Wait!” I yelled, still crouching behind the desk. “Don’t shoot him. I’ll get it for you.”

  The study’s floorboards squeaked from several tentative steps, and a moment later the dim form of Khalimmy’s shoes filled the gap beneath the desk’s back paneling.

  “Stand up, please. Hands above your head.”

  I rose to my feet, leaving the paperweight on the floor, palms out-facing above my head.

  Khalimmy stared at me, clearly confused, and motioned me from behind the desk.

  “Who the hell are … what?” Then, recognition. His eyes showed surprise, but recognition. “What the hell are you doing here? Where the hell is Richard?” He pointed the barrel of the pistol at the bridge of my nose. “Who the fuck are you?”

  “I … we’re …” I paused, befuddled by the prospect of my impending death. Then I heard it. The ever so faint, far-off wail of a police siren.

  Undeterred by the siren, or perhaps still unperceiving, Khalimmy pressed the warm mouth of the silencer against my forehead and reiterated, “Let me repeat again, who the fuck are you?”