The Florentine Deception (20 page)

I worked my way down the stairs, through the entryway and back to the kitchen.

“Dammit!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. “Am I fucking crazy? Where … the … fuck … are … you … Ronald … Lister?”

The faint whistle of the air conditioning filled the void left by my outburst.

“Dammit!” I repeated, and looked around helplessly.

An instant later, a faint noise rose above the whistle, hopefully not from Khalimmy or the police, hopefully from some neighborhood kids playing hooky, or a dog. I dove into the pantry, closed the door to a crack, and tried to stifle my breathing so I could better hear.

The noise—maybe a muted voice—repeated, this time louder yet still unintelligible.

Then again: “… need water, plee …”

My heart jackhammered. Lister was in the house.

“Hello? Ronald?” I bellowed. “I've come to rescue you. Where are you?”

“Water, please,” came the reply, this time less muffled and from directly underfoot. I pushed the door open an inch and fumbled for the light switch on the outside wall, then scanned the floorboards for a vent—the voice was obviously carrying through the vents, but there were none to be seen in the pantry.

I stepped from the small room, and, after making my way to a dusty floor vent, yelled again. “Hello Ronald? Where are you?”

Nothing.

I spun around and ran back into the pantry, nearly tripping on the head of a mop, and yelled again. “Hello Mr. Lister?”

“Please …” Lister's voice was muffled, but definitely discernable. Fifty bucks there was a trapdoor to the basement in the pantry.

Crazed, I dropped to my knees and began indiscriminately hurling the junk from the pantry into the kitchen until I'd cleared the floor. In retrospect, the three-by-three trapdoor should have been easy to pick out without my maniacal evacuation—the seams around it, while flush with the surrounding floor, were wide enough so as to be clearly visible. Only the door's latch, now exposed, had been concealed behind a stack of phone books. A Phillips screwdriver, serving as a poor-man's lock, had been inserted through the latch and a matching heavy-gauge steel bracket bolted onto the floor, effectively turning the basement into a cage. I withdrew the screwdriver, then grabbed hold of the latch and yanked open the door. A fetid combination of sour body odor and mustiness blasted up through the opening, nearly causing me to gag.

“Hello, Mr. Lister?” I yelled down into the gloom. “My name is Alex Fife. I'm here to help you.”

“Thank you lord,” he said, his voice parched.

“I've opened the door. Can you make it up the stairs?”

“No, I'm cuffed.… He cuffed me to a pipe.”

“One second, I'm going to call the police and I'll be right down.”

I extracted my cell from my pocket and punched in 911; after a brief recorded message telling me not to panic, they promptly put me on hold. I turned the speakerphone on.

“I'm coming,” I said.

A steep set of wooden stairs led down into the darkness. Unable to locate a light switch in the pantry, I used the phone's screen to illuminate the stairs and took them down one at a time until my head was just below the floorboards. I then swept the screen to either side of the stairwell and up along the basement's ceiling, but the switch was still AWOL.

“Where's the light switch?” I asked.

“Oh God, I don't know. He turns on the light before he comes in. Just hurry.”

It must have been behind something in the pantry.

“One second. I'll be right back. I'm going to find the light.” The phone, still on hold, was now droning instructions on how to conduct CPR until an ambulance came.

Carefully, I rotated in place until I faced the stairs, then climbed back up until my head reached the floor level.

Two black shoes stood in front of me. My body went into shock—not fear but uncomprehending shock. I looked up.

Then everything went dark.

Chapter 32

“Oh God, please wake up.”

Groggily, I opened my eyes and tried to turn toward the voice, only to be rewarded with a sharp twinge in my neck. I aborted the twist and instead squinted at the blurry bulb dangling from the ceiling.

“What happened?” I said, closing my eyes against the harsh light.

“Thank God. Are you okay?” asked Ronald. “I thought you were dead.”

“I think so. I feel like I've been hit by a car. What happened?”

“I couldn't see in the dark, but from the looks of your face, that guy put a steel-toed boot in your cheek and sent you flying down the stairs.”

“Where is he?” Given the shock of the event, I'd totally forgotten about the black shoes or the thug wearing them.

“I don't know. He took off about five minutes ago.” That was at least an immediate relief.

“At least he had the decency to leave the lights on,” I said.

I raised my right hand—fortunately it still worked—and gingerly touched my face.

“
Augh
,” I screamed reflexively. I'd expected soreness but not daggers. Now lucid thanks to the sharp pain, I took inventory. Based on the throbbing, my left arm was going to be purple for a while, and both legs were bruised to hell—insult to injury after the morning's fall—but otherwise, I'd live.

“How long have I been out?”

“Around ten minutes. I've been trying to wake you since he took off. Listen, I want to get out of here now. Right now. Can you find something to get me out of these cuffs?”

“Dammit. I'm so damn stupid,” I responded, dejected.

“Just find something to cut these cuffs, and please tell me someone else knows you're here.”

“Yeah, I think so.” I'd told Steven the address, hadn't I? The last few hours were a blur. I thought about it for a few seconds. “Yeah, I'm almost sure. Let me get my bearings and I'll find something to cut you out. Give me a second.”

“Okay, but please hurry. I don't know when that Arab bastard will be back, but I do know I want to be long gone by then,” he said, then took a deep breath.

I tried to sit up. “Oh boy.” A wave of dizziness hit me. I capitulated and lay back down.

“Here I thought I was saved,” he wailed, “and then some fucking Russian thug out of nowhere fucks everything up.”

“Russian thug?” What the hell? “What Russian thug? That wasn't Khalimmy?”

“Who?”

“The guy who abducted you. The Arab. Khalimmy. The guy who owns this house.”

“No. This guy was new. I've never seen him before.”

“So he wasn't the guy that abducted you?”

“No. At first I figured he was his partner or something. But he asked a lot of questions the Khalid guy already asked. I don't think they're working together. By the way, who are you anyway—a cop?”

“No. It's a long story. But I did come here to rescue you.”

“What's your name again?”

“I'm Alex.”

“Ronald Lister,” he replied, then after a pause, “would you mind trying to get up again? I really want to get the hell out of here. The fucking bastard tortured me.”

Summoning all my strength, I powered through the dizziness and sat up.

“Why didn't you just call the police when you heard I was kidnapped?” he asked.

“Whoa. One second.” My head was spinning. Holding myself upright, I closed my eyes and responded. “I did, they said they couldn't help unless I had proof. The cop thought I was imagining it all.”

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.”