Gold of the Knights Templar

by Preston W Child

  Olivia gave the address, and he throttled his car, a 176 Gran Torino, towards Wynwood. The sky over Wynwood was pink from far off. White smoke shrouded the sky. She listened for the siren for the fire service but heard nothing.

  Edward was going so fast, he ran two lights as he connected with interstate 95. He broke several more rules to get them to Northwest 20th street. The closer they got, the lower Olivia's hopes sank.

  Olivia was flying out of the car before it completely stopped in front of the house. A small crowd of street folks in the nightdresses had already gathered.

  She sprinted up the stairs, but thick smoke and heat stopped her.

  "Shit!" she screamed.

  She shrieked Tami's name. She ran into Edward on her way back down to the street.

  "We have to get up through the back," Edward suggested.

  "Alright, come, let's go!"

  A couple of bystanders were on their cellphones all at once. She heard the wail of sirens as they rounded the corner. Fire spurted out of a window in an upstairs room. Shit, the painting, Olivia thought wildly. Panic throbbed the side of her head as they went up the ladder there.

  Edward was halfway up already. There was someone up there.

  "Tami!" Olivia called.

  "My mama is trapped," she hollered.

  Tami Capaldi wore white slips and flowered shorts. Her hair was all over her face and wet. Olivia made it to the top floor presently. They went in through a window because the door was hot and melting. Olivia told Edward to see if he can get Tami's grandma. She pulled Tami to the side.

  "The painting, we have to save it."

  The woman looked at her for a moment. She had forgotten about it, it would seem. She looked past Olivia's shoulder down a darkened hallway. Olivia glanced that way too, she recalled going down that way the last time she was here.

  The cops were in the street, a firetruck was there as well. Firemen were roping up already. One helmet appeared at the top of the railing.

  "You guys need to get out now!" the man ordered.

  Olivia shut down the darkening hallway.

  "Hey, ma'am, where you going, get back here!" the man shouted.

  The smoke was so thick that way, and hot. Olivia retreated; someone grabbed her from behind. He looked in the eyes of the fireman.

  "I have to get you out of here, ma'am."

  The fireman was holding a wet blanket. Olivia snatched the blanket. "I'm gonna need to borrow this!"

  She heard crackling as she went back down the hall again. She felt along the warm wall as she went by. Suddenly the smoke seized as she rounded a corner. The light was still on in the small hall. She remembered the place. She went to the door of the bedroom. It was warm when she put her palm on it.

  She covered herself with the wet blanket again. She kicked the door in. Hot and air and smoke gushed out of the room. Her eyes stung. She tried not to breathe. Miraculously, the light was still on in the room, and she could even make out the outline of the bed, but the windows were on fire.

  The carpet was melting along the side of the walls, the wall was burning, canvases were burning off their frames.

  "No, no, no!"

  She stepped over to the bed, she pulled the sheets off and threw them on the carpet where they burned. She pulled the bed, it was heavy, but she strained. The painting that she wanted recently caught fire. The canvas burned slowly through the smoke. She pushed the bed over the burning carpet; Olivia choked on the acrid smell and smoke. She started coughing. She stumbled over to the painting, she pulled it, it cracked in two where the fire had consumed the frame. Half the canvas was crackling up, shriveling in a colorful fold of fire and smoke. She stamped her feet on it, she threw the wet blanket in her back on it and stamped some more.

  "Olivia! Olivia!"

  Through the road of the fire that had now engulfed the doorway, she heard the voice. She opened her mouth to call back, she sucked pungent smoke instead. She keeled over in a faint. Her eyes bulged.

  She grabbed the painting by the crispy side, it scorched her. The blanket had lost most of its wetness in the heat, it was steaming hot. She threw it over herself. She used the tip of the blanket to grab the canvas, still attached to half skeleton of the frame.

  The door was on fire, someone was back there trying to put it out so they can get to her. She was staggering toward the fire.

  "No, Olivia, stay back! Get back!"

  She started coughing so hard, saliva blocked her nose, her throat was on burned and ached her. Her eyes felt like to quarters stuck in her head, numb and sore.

  A hard gust of water hit her in the abdomen, and she fell backward. Her eyes flew open, and she was wriggling about the floor where the carpet was still smothering. She felt a drop in the temperature in front of her, where the door was on fire. Hands grabbed her.

  "You're okay, you're okay, come on."

  "Tom?" she murmured.

  "Yes, Olivia, come on, you're okay."

  Fresh air assaulted her lungs, and cold air wet her face. Hands held her, and she felt herself suspend through the air. Her feet touched the ground. Her eyes still hurt terribly, her throat was parched.

  "How are you feeling?"

  Her throat seemed stapled together in her neck. She felt faint. She heard sirens, a sting in her arm, and then a general movement. Suffocating smoke was sipping away with the last of her anxieties. Her eyes opened for a moment to see what she clutched in her hand, but it was empty. She panicked and started rising again.

  A gentle hand restrained her.

  "Be easy, Olivia."

  "The painting," she croaked with all he strength.

  She felt the warmth of a face against hers; the hand touched her face. It was cool.

  "I got the painting right here, what's left of it," said the voice.

  She relaxed. She saved it, not all of it, but it wasn't all a loss. She drifted into sleep, thinking that the sound of that voice was that of someone she knew.

  —

  Municipio II, Rome.

  Andrew Gilmore knew the back roads and alleys of the Municipio like he knew the ones in his apartment. He understood every sound, every smell. And Andrew achieved this feat in just a month after moving there. He ran in the morning, and evening, linking the roads with his legs, connecting them in his head. Andrew had locked himself away in the sacrament of the Catholic Church for years. He had heard penitents confess their sins from behind the partition. That had helped him to develop a heightened sense of awareness of his surroundings. It didn't matter that his eyes are closed.

  He stood on the spot where Via Francesco Siacci met Via Antonio Batolini, he inhaled the aroma of Rossini and Livia Clozel drifting on the air from the Ristoranti Taverna Rossini. Through the glass window of the Ristoranti, he saw the shadow of a man across the street talking casually with a woman walking her dog. The woman was giving directions to the lost tourist, it seemed; the thing was, the man in Black leather jackets and booths wasn't a tourist. He had been following Andrew Gilmore since last night.

  He was tall, well built, and foreign. Possibly American.

  Gilmore entered the Ristoranti. He chose a table in the far end of the hall, his back turned to the door. The man quickly turned from the woman and looked at the Ristoranti.

  Gilmore raised his cellphone, got the camera up to get a view of the street without turning around to look. The man looked nothing like anyone Gilmore knew. He didn't look like the sort that was from the Church as well.

  Andrew Gilmore bought cappuccino from the girl at the counter. He asked her if he could use the toilet. She pointed at a door on the left and went back to estimating for the next customer.

  The man on the street came into the Ristoranti minutes after, but Gilmore was long gone by then.

  —

  That night, the former priest walked by his apartment building on Via Ceresio. And sure enough, the man was there on the street pretending to be reading a paper in the light of an antiquity store. He looked a little diff
erent in a grey plaid jacket and dark pants. Still, Gilmore couldn’t have missed the stuff bearing of the man’s posture, the straight shoulders that suggested a man of strict habits, of utter focus on his task.

  By some instinct, Gilmore suspected that the man was after him, and would probably kill him.

  A secretive man knows when another hides in plain sight, so Gilmore walked on.

  He found a payphone two blocks away. He called long-distance Miami.

  The operator said the number was disconnected. He hung up thinking, well, it has been more than six months, Olivia might have switched telephones. On second thought, he didn’t want to alarm Olivia. He’d first make sure his fears were not just imagined.

  But he didn’t get that chance.

  Two men waited for him as he came out of the booth. One sat back in a black sedan. His hands were on the wheels, and the other man was standing behind the ten feet away with commuters waiting for the seven o’clock bus to Municipio III.

  By the time Gilmore noticed he’d been made by the other man who was at the Ristoranti Taverna Rossini, a gun was poking his back. A hot voice that reeked beer said in his ear, “act natural, we’re going for a ride.”

  “Where?” he asked unexcitedly.

  “You’ll know in time.”

  He was shoved in the back of the sedan, and a black cloak was pulled over his head.

  He tried to enjoy the ride.

  —

  Olivia pulled the bedclothes off her body. The nurse taking her vitals started protesting, but she stopped when she saw Olivia’s face.

  “I am not sick,” she snapped, “it was just smoke, for Christ’s sakes!”

  Other than the soreness in her throat, she felt a slight headache. Her eyes did not hurt like the first time. She looked around the hospital room. Her jacket was slung on the back of a chair in the corner. She didn’t remember what she wore to Tami’s place the day before, but she tried to get to it, and the pipes in her hands restrained her.

  She ripped them out of her wrist.

  The nurse gave her a flat stare. She tried to stop Olivia by standing in front of her with her bulk, “you can't do that, ma’am.”

  “Get out of my way!” she said through a hot throat.

  The nurse, wounded, stepped aside.

  The cop Luke was outside the door. He was startled, “what the…”

  “I am not safe here, I gotta go!”

  “You need to get treatment, miss Newton.”

  “Where’s the sheriff, I gotta talk to him.”

  Olivia badgered another lackluster nurse with coiled hair at the reception into letting her use the telephone.

  “Olivia, you were out for thirty minutes straight, you’ve got to let the—”

  “I’m alright now, Tom. Where’s Tami?”

  “Tami is alright, she’s with Betty.”

  Olivia exhaled “and the painting?”

  “She got it, you have nothing to worry about.”

  The nurse gave administered her shots, fixed the tubes back in her wrist, and Olivia slept for another three hours. She woke up feeling like someone parked a garage in her stomach.

  A male nurse appeared beside her. Black hair stuck out from under a blue head covering, dark squinting eyes stared from above his face mask. He was muscular.

  “How’re you feeling now?”

  There was a small gurney like a table beside her bed with a tray on it. Pieces of surgical equipment were on the tray. Weird shaped scissors, knives, a small metal bowl with what looked like blood diluted in water.

  This table wasn’t here the other time, she thought.

  “Where’s Luke?” Olivia asked, her hands trembling.

  “Who’s Luke?”

  Olivia liked at the table again, suspicion written all over her face.

  The dark eyes above the facemask flashed, and the nurse pushed the table out of the way. He lunged forward. Olivia’s feet caught the nurse’s hip, bent out of balance. His palm missed Olivia’s temple and grazed her forehead.

  Olivia put all her might in an elbow jab. She heard a small crunch as the nurse’s windpipe ruptured. Olivia pulled the tubes out her wrist, blood sprinkled on the white sheet and tiled floor. She jumped off the other side of the bed.

  The nurse pulled his mask off. He was clutching at his neck, his eyes two huge eggs. But he recovered fast and was coming around for Olivia again.

  “Hey, what’s going on here?”

  The nurse turned around. Luke was standing at the door, a cup of steaming coffee in his left hand, his right hand over his holster.

  “He’s one of them!” Olivia shouted.

  “One of who?”

  The fake doctor stumbled forward, he rammed into Luke. Luke dropped the coffee, and his gun sprang into his hand, the man knocked it off with one swift blow and pelted down the hallway where other nurses were gathering, and he was gone.

  —

  “They are getting desperate,” Tom said, coming round his desk.

  No, they are getting desperate, Olivia thought, looking at the sketch that the artist had made of the man who attacked Olivia at the hospital. Tom took the drawing and raised it to the light. He squinted at it.

  He gave the sketch to officer Devitt, “take it to the boys downstairs, let them run it through the database, see what they might find. Meanwhile, get a team down to my place, right now.”

  Olivia frowned. Tom Garcia has done so much for her already, she couldn’t ask for more. Yet, she was not going to sit and watch while something grave happened to Tami Capaldi.

  “Where are you going, Olivia?” Tom asked as Olivia picked her jacket off the hook.

  “Your place.”

  “You don’t have to, a team’s on their way there now.”

  “No, Tom, I’m not gonna sit here while Tami Capaldi does because of some worthless piece of painting.”

  The sheriff looked at her sympathetically. He shook his head, he picked his service pistol from the desk.

  “That painting is worth more than you think.”

  Two squad cars were parked in the street when they arrived. Tami was on the porch. Her arms were around her grandma, who was covered in bright red cloth and slouched in a hammock. Betty Garcia was coming out of the house with a square tray of cookies.

  Tom Garcia spoke with the cops in the car. Their eyes were peeled for any strange persons, and no, they hadn’t seen anything. Next, Tom called the precinct again to ask that copies of the sketch be made and an APB be sent out.

  Olivia said, “hola, buenos dias.”

  The old woman stared into a spot in the street. She had Inca features, pretty underneath her severely wrinkled face.

  Olivia embraced Betty. The sheriff’s wife impressed some cookies on her. Olivia took one and went out into the street; she looked up and down. It was quiet. If it weren’t Miami, she would have called it provincial. Development houses on both sides of the road, the shriek of children trashing about lawns and pools reached on the wind. A creepy wind crept along the street, like a sly fox, rustling the trees and hedges.

  Tami joined Olivia while Betty bustled around the cops serving beer and hit cookies. Tami sighed, and Olivia felt her anxiety seep out of her.

  “You know, my mother, she is not Italian,” said Tami. “I made Gabby bring her from Peru two months ago, through some opening in the border with Mexicans. It took a lot for me to get her to do it.”

  Olivia looked at the grandma on the porch again. She looked like a ladybug.

  “We are gonna get out of this, it’s gonna end soon,” Olivia said soothingly.

  “No, it won’t.”

  Olivia glanced at the cloudy forehead, dark eyes that looked like they knew too much. Olivia shivered at the thought that this woman might just be right. A storm was coming, and she could see the portentous clouds adrift on her face.

  “Grandma has seen it too—”

  “What did she see?”

  “This thing that began with Gabby’s death, it is g
oing to spread, like a disease, infecting us all. They will come here for the painting, and they will do anything to get it. It’s a disease.”

  Shaken, Olivia asked her what she meant.

  “The gold,” Tami said and faced Olivia.

  “You know about the Templars gold?”

  “I only know what happens when men become infected with greed,” she said with such fierceness Olivia stepped back, “they’d kill and kill, and destroy everything. These people, we are so different from them, are we?”

  Olivia swallowed.

  “No, we are not, not one bit,” Tami said through gritted teeth, “why do we keep it, huh? Why do we still hold on to something like that, something that can make nation’s go to war? Why did Gabby keep it, if he wasn’t as greedy as you, or me and the people who want to take it now?”

  Olivia smiled, she touched her shoulder, but the woman brushed her hands off.

  “No, let’s destroy it! Let’s do us all a favor and burn it now!”

  Olivia gasped, “no, we can’t that painting is—”

  “Nothing!” she hissed, “it is what we say it is! We burn it, and it becomes nothing, nada!”

  “Where did you keep it, Tami?”

  She shook her head slowly and stomped up the porch. Olivia’s eyes followed her. Tami looked at the cops staring at her savagely just before disappearing into the house.

  Grandma, in red covering, was staring at Olivia with vacant eyes.

  “What was that about?”

  It's Tom Garcia.

  “I don’t…,” she said, “know yet.”

  —

  There was no sleeping tonight, Olivia told herself. The foreboding she felt was so strong she had pulled Tom Garcia aside earlier that evening, “I need a gun.”

  Upon her insistence, Tom gave her a 9mm Browning. She could handle, she practiced Miami Guns and Range, on some weekends. She was a fairly good shot with pistols.

  She lay on the couch that night while Tami and her grandma slept in the extra room. Sheriff Garcia drove in from the precinct much later, had a few words again with Olivia before joining his wife, Betty.

  Two teams remained in the street. That was eight cops.

  Tami’s words rang in her head. And even though her eyes were heavy and she was exhausted from the previous day’s fire incident, she could not sleep.