Treasure of Saint-Lazare

by John Pearce

  Woody was silent a moment, then moaned again. “Is that you, Mr. Grant?”

  “It’s me. What are you doing here?”

  “They found out I talked to you. I didn’t tell anyone. They came to Hemingway’s today and told me Mr. Sommers had some work for me, would I come with them. I couldn’t refuse those guys. They didn’t even take me to Sommers. They drove straight into that garage, opened the trap door and threw me down the steps. That was after they beat me up pretty good. I think they used a piece of garden hose.”

  “Woody, you said you’d been down here before. Do you remember if there’s electricity? Are there lights?”

  “Yeah, the light was on when I landed here, I think. I got knocked out when I hit bottom. But I remember they turned on some lights when they brought me some filthy chicken soup to eat. What time is it now?”

  “About 10.”

  “Must have been three hours ago or so. When they left they made a big deal of unscrewing the light bulb and taking it with them.”

  “Do you remember if they had any tools or supplies down here? Maybe there are some candles or another bulb or something. We have to get moving on this, Woody. Wake up.”

  Woody shook his head groggily. “I don’t remember, but a fallout shelter would have some kind of backup. Feel around under the shelves and see if there’s anything there.”

  “I can’t do that very well. They cuffed my hands behind me. You’ll have to get up and do it. Are you tied up?”

  “No, I can do it. Point me in the right direction.”

  Woody crawled to the wall under the shelves and began to feel his way from the stairway toward the far end where Eddie waited.

  Almost immediately he said, “Here’s something.” But after another minute he moaned, “It’s just a niche, like where you’d put a lantern. There’s an old plate in it that feels like tin, and some candle wax on the bottom, but nothing we can use for the cuffs.”

  “Remember where it is, though. We might think of some use for the plate,” Eddie told him.

  After 10 minutes of feeling the wall carefully and checking the ground under it Woody had found nothing. But then he said, not so optimistically this time, “Here’s something. It’s a little metal box, and it’s pretty heavy.”

  “Look — sorry, feel — in it for anything that might cut them, a razor blade, wire cutters, a pair of pliers. We need to get these cuffs off.”

  Woody grunted. “Feels like a spool of some kind of wire. Here’s a couple of screwdrivers. Something waxy, feels like a candle. Aha! Pliers!”

  “You’re a good man, Woody. Is it the kind with wire cutters near the hinge?”

  “Feels like it. It’s old and loose. Feels rusty. This place is probably wet all the time.”

  “We’ll have to make do. I’m going to turn my back to you and you feel the flexcuffs and find a way to put the pliers on them. These cuffs are tough plastic. It will take some work.”

  He slid back until he could reach and feel Woody’s jacket, then he felt Woody’s fingers probing the cuffs, looking for the best place to cut. His breath smelled strongly of stale beer. Then the fingers went away.

  “I dunno if I ought to do this. If I help you get out Sommers is going to be really pissed.”

  Eddie paused, reaching for the right words. “Woody, if you don’t get me loose we’re both going to be killed. Sonny made that clear to me. Somehow they found out you talked to me, and they’re afraid I talked to other people, and they’re right, I did. So you’ll be a hell of a lot better off taking a chance on my side than with Sommers. I guarantee you he’ll feed your body to the fish ‘way out in the Gulf.”

  The fingers returned. “I guess you’re right. We’re better off sticking together. I never did trust the bastard anyway.”

  Eddie felt the pliers slip between his wrists. Woody grunted as he strained to make the old tool slice through the tough 21st-century plastic, but at last he exhaled and said, “That’s it.” The cuffs fell off and Eddie quickly rubbed his hands together to restore the circulation. A thousand pinpricks rushed to his fingertips.

  He reached out to find Woody and touched his shoulder. “Woody,” he said, trying to sound as serious as possible, “We are in real trouble here. I think we can get out, but we’ll have to work together, and we’ll have to be ready when they come back for us. Are you ready to work on it?”

  “Ready as I’ll ever be, I guess. I never trusted Al but I didn’t think he was this bad. Or do you think it’s those two fairies pulling the strings?”

  “Don’t kid yourself. Sommers is the key to this whole thing. Sonny and Dmitri will do what he says as long as it makes sense. In a way they’re like well-trained dogs. They know what their job is and they rebel if they’re asked to do something else. So don’t kid yourself that all three of them aren’t working together.”

  “Do you think we can take one of them if he comes back for us?”

  “That has to be the play,” Eddie said. “But we have to figure out the means. We’re pretty sure there’s electricity down here, because they took the light bulb when they left you. We know we have a screwdriver or two in the tool kit.”

  “Two,” Woody said. “They felt as rusty as the pliers, though.”

  “OK. They could be makeshift daggers if it gets to that, but I’d rather trust to the electricity. You’re not an electrician, are you?”

  “Me,” Woody answered with a short laugh. “One of the reasons my wife kicked me out was I never could do anything around the house. Electricity scares the shit out of me.”

  “Well, let’s see what’s in the toolbox. Push it over here to me.”

  Eddie felt carefully through the old metal box and found just what Woody had found. The spool of wire seemed more of a cable, a single solid wire inside insulation. He pulled some of it off the spool and figured there must be more than twenty feet.

  “What kind of light bulb was in here?” he asked Woody.

  “Just a wire hanging from the ceiling. I’m surprised you didn’t hit it when you stood up. It’s pretty low.”

  Eddie stood again and waved his arms around until he found the hanging cable. It was an old cotton-covered wire attached to a socket that would hold a single bare bulb. A short string served as a switch. Very gingerly he passed his finger over the edge of the empty socket and bent it slowly toward the central contact.

  “Shit,” he said, pulling back quickly. “That circuit is definitely hot.”

  His next urgent need was for light, so he set Woody to feeling every inch of the shelves carefully, looking for matches to go with the candle stub he’d found in the toolbox. “It makes sense they’d have some way to light the candle if they were concerned about backup,” he said, and Woody agreed. “Think of where you’d put matches if you didn’t want anyone to knock them off, and start there. Maybe the top shelf.”

  Woody began to run his hands along the top shelf, which was only a few inches above his head. “Watch out!” he shouted as one of the stolen cups clattered to the floor and rolled away. “Sorry.” In less than five minutes he found a large box of matches. He passed it to Eddie, who hefted it and felt along the edge and decided they were wooden strike-anywhere matches. “Every kitchen in America used to have those,” Woody said.

  The box held a dozen. He struck one on the sandpaper striker, but it fizzled. The second caught and burned, and Eddie held it over his head. He looked first at Woody, who had been beaten badly. His lip was cut and had bled down his chin onto his shirt, and one eye was black and almost closed. One sleeve was half ripped from his shirt, which appeared to be the same one he’d worn when Eddie interviewed him at Hemingway’s.

  Then he looked at the hanging light fixture and saw that the socket was attached to the cord with a single screw. Everything in the shelter seemed to date from the fifties or sixties, before Sommers’s time, except the staircase he’d built from the barn. That might have been there all along, too, Eddie thought. Maybe Sommers is just taking advantage of a pr
evious owner’s paranoia.

  Woody handed him the candle and Eddie touched the dying match to its wick. It gave a dimmer but steadier light that he figured would last long enough to get the electrical work done. Then they’d have to snuff it out and wait for Dmitri or Sonny to come for them. The wait would be tense.

  “Woody, go get that tin plate and let’s put the candle on it. Then you hold it while I work on this cord and try not to electrocute myself.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to make an electric chair for whichever one comes down those stairs. We should be able to at least stun him and take the gun, and then maybe we can work our way out and over the back fence.”

  “That fits,” Woody said. “In Florida they call the electric chair Old Sparky.”

  Eddie pulled his shirttail out and tore off two long strips. “We’ll need some insulation up there to keep the wires from crossing. If they do that it will trip the circuit breaker and kill our power, and it might tip off our friends as well.”

  The first screwdriver he tried was too large, the second fit the setscrew holding the light socket together. He took off its cap and unscrewed one of the wires, which he turned back to keep its uninsulated tip out of the way. Then he unscrewed the second wire. Both were now bare.

  “Put the candle on the shelf and let’s see how much wire is on that spool. I want to use half of it for each side of our little trap.”

  They estimated that they could use two twelve-foot lengths. Woody used the pliers to cut it at about the center, and then to strip an inch of insulation of each end. When he had one wire stripped at both ends he handed it to Eddie, who tested the cut ends. “Good and sharp. That’s what we need.”

  Eddie took the pliers and twisted the new cable firmly to the end of the existing drop. Then he wrapped the joint in one of the cloth strips he’d torn from his shirt and tied it tightly. “Merde,” he muttered as he brushed the other hot wire. A minute later he said it again.

  “Rinse and repeat,” he said as he twisted the second wire onto its power source. “Be sure we keep the far ends of those wires away from each other, and off the floor. It might be wet enough to short them.”

  “The candle is just about gone,” Woody said with alarm just as Eddie stood back to admire his handiwork. “OK. You can put it out now. We may need it later. Sit down on the floor and act confused when they come in.”

  Paul’s phone vibrated in his shirt pocket, interrupting his fruitless effort to keep the bugs away from his sweating face.

  Thom said softly, “We’re around the corner next to your car. Can you come brief us on what you’ve seen?”

  “Sure.” With a great sense of relief he stood up and walked as silently as he could down the edge of the road.

  At the parking lot he found a half-dozen cars parked around his rental. Three of them were marked deputies’ cars from the Sarasota County Sheriff, another was Thom’s black Crown Victoria, plus two nondescript sedans. He walked up to the closest deputy, a five-foot-six black woman carrying a lethal-looking pump shotgun in her right hand and a bulletproof vest in the left. The nametag on her shirt said Ginepri. The stripes on her sleeve said sergeant.

  “I’m Paul Fitzhugh and I’m looking for Thom Anderson. Can you point him out to me?”

  She looked at him sourly. “He’s city. This is a county and federal operation. But that’s him over there with the FBI guys.”

  He walked over and introduced himself. Thom said, “We need to wait just another minute or two while the judge signs the warrant. These two men are FBI agents, and we have six uniformed sheriff’s deputies, which should be enough. What did you see?”

  Paul explained that he’d seen the barn door open and a man come out, leaving the light on inside. “From that, I think there’s one more man in there, and Eddie.”

  One of the agents said, “We knew about this Eddie fellow, but who are you?”

  “I work for him. I was his company sergeant in Desert Storm. He helped get me through a bad wound and we’ve been working together since.”

  Ginepri appeared to be the senior deputy. She walked over and told them the judge had signed the warrant. Her plan was to go in over the back fence separating Sommers’s property from a vacant lot. A truck was already in place there with ladders and other tools they might need.

  Thom asked Paul to ride with him. When they were in the Crown Vic he said, “We’re pretty much guests here. My authority doesn’t extend beyond the city limits, and we’re out in the county now. The FBI is involved because of the federal angle — the stolen stuff they think Sommers has. But they sure wouldn’t come out in the middle of the night like that if somebody in Washington weren’t really interested in this case.”

  “Eddie was in Washington yesterday talking to an Army buddy of ours who’s in charge of recovering old treasure. That’s probably where the pressure comes from.”

  “I know. A CIA bigwig named Icky Crane. He told my chief his real name is Thomas Jefferson Crane but people call him Icky after Ichabod, and if we saw him we’d understand.”

  The little convoy drove through a subdivision with more vacant lots than houses until it pulled up near a pickup with the sheriff’s logo on the doors.

  Deputy Ginepri told Thom, “We’re going to put three ladders on this side, then pull up three more and put them on the other side to give us a stairway down. We’ll have to be really quiet, but if you and Thom want to come over after we and the FBI agents are in, feel free. Just be careful.”

  Paul grinned. She was a stocky 35-year-old with hair in a businesslike bun and the no-nonsense demeanor that spoke of deep experience. He was a grizzled veteran who’d survived being shot in the head. They’d both been around and knew he would be careful. Very careful.

  Each of the deputies carried a ladder to the fence but held it a foot off the wood in case Sommers had installed an alarm system. To the left of each stood another deputy carrying an identical ladder, ready to pass it to his partner as soon as he reached the top. The FBI agents stood behind the deputies, waiting.

  All eyes were on Ginepri as she surveyed the little line to make sure everyone was ready, holding her hand in the air. When she was satisfied, she dropped her hand and three ladders landed almost inaudibly atop the fence. Three men scampered up them until the fence was waist high, then turned to receive a second ladder from the deputy below below. They placed them gently on the ground inside the compound, then stepped over the fence and climbed quickly down to ground level. They drew their guns and turned toward the barn twenty feet away, watching until everyone was in place.

  Ginepri had divided her group into two squads, one for the barn and the other for the house. She waved the house group on its way and led the remaining deputies around the barn. Paul followed her closely. His goal was Eddie and he figured four big men should be able to handle Sommers in his wheelchair and his one scrawny assistant.

  The three deputies, Paul, and Thom walked carefully on the grass around the barn. They stopped under a window and Ginepri looked carefully inside, then ducked quickly. She turned to the men following her and held up one finger of her left hand, then stuck up her thumb and held her hand out to simulate a handgun.

  She called Thom to her side and asked him to stay, and when the others had reached the front of the barn to make a noise at the side in an effort to bring out the man inside. “It’ll be easier to get him if he opens the door himself,” she said. He nodded.

  They took up their positions on each side of the door. Across the yard, they could see the other team looking carefully in the windows of the main house. She reconsidered and signaled to Thom he should wait. The sound of the break-in at the house might flush out their man.

  Paul stationed himself under the window so he could look inside and learn the layout after the action started. He still had no idea how the barn was laid out and until he knew that it would be too dangerous to enter.

  The deputies and FBI agents at the back door of
the house could see through the kitchen into the living room, where Sonny sat watching television. They could not see Sommers and hoped he had gone to bed. The largest of them first tested the door but found it locked, then without ceremony kicked it in and charged through.

  Sonny jumped up from the sofa in front of the television and reached quickly for a drawer in the table at its end. One of the FBI agents put a hand on his wrist. Don’t make a sound, he whispered. Sonny didn’t.

  “What’s going on out there?” Sommers called from his bedroom. The other FBI agent and a deputy followed the sound and quickly arrested him.

  The deputy who kicked down the back door was six-foot-four and weighed 230 pounds. The door split at its lock like a ripe melon and separated easily from its frame, and the glass in two of its four panes splintered and fell inside the room. Dmitri heard the noise and knew immediately what it was. He had no thought of leaving the barn.

  As soon as he heard the attack on the house, Paul stuck his head above the window frame to see Dmitri stand up directly in front of him, fortunately looking the other way. Dmitri glanced at the barn door, then ran around the white car to look out the window on the other side, where he could see that every light in Sommers’s house was on. He ran quickly toward the door at the front of the car, heading for the entrance to the fallout shelter. Paul knew now where Eddie was held, and that he’d reached the moment of greatest risk to his friend.

  He tested the window and found he could raise it. He turned to Thom and made a stirrup sign, then pointed up at the window to indicate he would go through. Thom hesitated, then laced his fingers together. Paul rolled over the windowsill, dropped to the floor and crept to the door Dmitri had used. Then he stopped and listened.

  The padlock clattered as Dmitri dropped it on the steel door, then Paul heard him grunt as he lifted the heavy door. Then a shout and a single gunshot. Dreading what he’d find, Paul dashed to the open cellar door.