Michelangelo_s Notebook

48

They stepped into the dark house. Ahead of them and to the right was the ADT panel. A small, angry red light pulsed. Valentine punched in a set of numbers. The red light reverted to green.

“That was easy enough,” Finn whispered.

“This isn’t some high-tech heist movie,” Valentine answered. “After a while people get careless and they don’t bother with the basics.” He shrugged. “Besides, why would anyone break into a place like this? As far as anyone knows they’re just a bunch of paper pushers.”

“Maybe that’s all they are,” said Finn. “Maybe we’re wrong.”

“You said you thought your receptionist in the expensive suit was wearing a gun.”

“I’m sure of it.”

“Then we’re not wrong. You don’t need a gun to guard papers.”

Valentine paused for a moment to examine the painting behind the desk. “You do need a gun to guard something like that, however.”

They moved quickly through the reception room and down the hallway into the open area at the center of the house. Finn dropped the equipment bag on one of the desks and slid open the zipper. Valentine took out a heavy flashlight and switched it on, panning the beam around the room. He saw nothing any different from what the camera had shown him: a large rectangular windowless room with a flight of stairs against the right-hand wall. There were three desks and a row of filing cabinets. A doorway at the end of the room led into a comfortable conference area with a long table and a half dozen chairs. There was a painting over the mantel of an old-fashioned fireplace to the left. It was too dark to see clearly; a muted landscape of some sort. Another door led to the rear of the house. It was locked. Finn stepped forward with her set of keys and tried them until she found one that fit. She turned it and the door popped open. They stepped through.

“Now this is interesting,” Valentine murmured.

The room was completely empty. A window on the far wall had been bricked up and the original rear door had been replaced by something that looked vaguely like the sliding mechanism usually seen on garages. Instead of the cherry in the other rooms here it was wide oak planks, dark with age. It was the original floor.

“A loading bay,” said Valentine. “The insurance plat books show an old court-style alley in the back with an entrance on the Varick Street end. That’s where this must go.”

“That doesn’t make sense unless they’ve got something to load,” said Finn.

“Look.” Valentine pointed. In the center of the floor there was a square seam in the planks. He swung the light around the walls. Beside the operating mechanism for the heavy rear door there was a single large button, much like the elevator call at Ex Libris. “Hit it.”

Finn crossed the room and slapped her palm down on it. There was a humming sound and a section of the floor six feet on a side pushed upward slowly. A large open cage appeared, finally thumping to a stop.

“What the hell is that?” said Finn.

Valentine played the beam of his light over the open cage. A stamped metal plate across the top beam read: OTIS BROTHERS YONKERS NY 1867.

“I couldn’t find anything out about the original owners of the building but it could easily have been some kind of tavern or small hotel. This would be the freight elevator they used to bring up beer barrels and food from storage down below.” Valentine stepped into the cage and swung the flashlight around. He spotted a switch on one of the cage uprights. “Looks safe enough.”

Finn stared, horrified. “We’re going down in that thing?”

“I don’t see any other way.” He waved her forward. Tentatively she stepped onto the old steel floor of the cage and Valentine tapped the button. The cage descended ponderously. By the time they reached the bottom they were smothered in darkness. They stepped off the elevator and Valentine swept the beam around. They appeared to be in a modern, concrete-walled basement filled with boxes and crates. Valentine found a light switch and flipped it on. Overhead fluorescents crackled into life.

The basement was as large as the entire house, a long narrow room with a well-outfitted packing facility complete with storage bins for lumber, saws, worktables and a large overhead setup for blowing in foam popcorn, and an area devoted to metal strapping. All very efficient. A dehumidifier hummed against one wall and the room was cool and dry. A half dozen medium-sized crates had been arranged close to the freight elevator, neatly labeled and bar-coded. They were all designated for various outlets of the Hoffman Gallery around the world and they each had a plastic pouch stapled to one side already packed with customs clearance papers. Off in one corner of the room was a metal desk with a computer and heavy-duty label printer. Valentine took a box cutter out of his bag and slashed one of the pouches open.

“Form 4457, Declaration of Goods only. One of the great assets of dealing in fine art and antiquities: no duty. It’s like transporting millions of dollars across international borders without raising an eyebrow.”

Valentine found a pry bar on one of the worktables and began pulling open one of the small crates. The top finally pulled free and he carefully lifted out the contents.

“Rembrandt. The Raising of Lazarus. It’s been missing since 1942. It was stolen from a Jewish art dealer in Amsterdam.”

“Is that enough evidence?”

“No. We have to find the rest.”

“It’s not here.”

Valentine looked around the room. “First we have to establish exactly what the extent of ‘here’ is.” He walked to the far end of the basement and stared at the wall. Like the rest of the long, narrow room it appeared to be made out of solid brick. There was nothing against the wall that might have disguised some sort of hidden entrance.

“It’s got to be here. We’re facing the park.” He looked left and right. “These are adjoining walls to the buildings next door and the back wall is facing in the wrong direction.” He checked the floor carefully, looking for signs that something had recently been brought out from behind the wall but there was nothing.

Valentine dropped down on his knees, carefully checking the join between the front wall and the floor. Finn turned and looked back the way they had come, remembering the office at Ex Libris and Sherlock Holmes. When the possible has been eliminated…

The whole back wall was taken up by a series of metal shelving units full of packing supplies. Leaving Valentine to his study of the floor she walked back to the north facing wall and stared. Six shelving units filling up the whole wall and rising to within an inch of the ceiling. They were lifted half an inch off the floor by stumpy little angle iron feet. The units were painted an institutional green and looked old. Finn turned again. The old-fashioned freight elevator was twelve or fifteen feet away. There were more shelving units against the left adjoining wall but none against the right, which was hung with a large piece of pegboard for holding tools instead. She continued to stare, frowning, knowing that something was wrong. Then she saw.

“Michael,” she called. He stood and turned in her direction.

“What?”

“I think I’ve found something.”

“Where?” He headed down the low-ceilinged basement room toward her.

“Look,” she said, pointing as he joined her. “The pegboard.”

“What about it? That’s an adjoining wall.”

“There’s nothing on it.”

“I don’t get it.”

“All the tools are on shelves over there, none of them are hanging up so what do you need the pegboard for?”

Valentine was silent for a moment. He stepped forward and checked the pegboard, tapping at it with his knuckles, then checked the place where the adjoining wall and the rear wall formed a junction. After a moment he grabbed the center shelf of the nearest wall unit and tugged hard. At first nothing happened and then, smoothly and almost silently two of the units closest to the adjoining wall rumbled forward until the double-wide shelves stood two feet out from the back wall. They clicked decisively to a stop like a cork in a bottle. Changing his grip slightly Valentine pulled the shelf unit to the left, away from the adjoining wall finally revealing the dark, hidden entrance.

He grabbed his flashlight and headed down a wide concrete ramp that led down to a circular antechamber. The walls of the chamber were quarried, Pound Ridge granite, the ancient bedrock on which the skyscrapers of New York had been built. Valentine put his hand out and let it rest on the rough-hewn rock. Cool and dry, a perfect place to bury the city’s favorite sons of history and keep her later secrets from prying eyes. Edgar Allan Poe.

“Lo! Death has reared himself a throne

In a strange city lying alone

Far down within the dim West

Where the good and the bad and the worst

and the best

Have gone to their eternal rest.”

“Sometimes you can be downright spooky, Michael,” Finn muttered. She followed the beam of the flashlight. Two metal rails like a miniature railway line led through a narrow, pitch-black cavern to the left. There was a switch box bolted onto the near wall and a line of heavy insulated conduit led into the hole. Valentine flicked the switch and a line of industrial bulbs came on, dimly illuminating the tunnel ahead. He switched off the flashlight. The opening was seven or eight feet high and little more than that across. The walls had been constructed on the same stone as the round antechamber and the floor was overlaid with a thick absorbent pea gravel.

“I wonder where this goes?” Valentine said quietly. He headed into the tunnel.

“I’m not so sure I want to find out,” said Finn, but she followed him anyway.

The tunnel turned and twisted half a dozen times as they moved forward. Here and there narrow niches had been cut into the walls, bodies interred and then bricked over, but the crumbling brick had long since vanished and the old interment sites were empty. The rails at their feet seemed strangely out of place in this dead place, the low lightbulbs overhead in their metal screen safety baskets even more so. Finn tried not to think of the weight of the earth directly above her head; tried to breathe evenly in the oppressive, gloomy passage. She’d never been particularly claustrophobic but this was something on a completely different order of magnitude. Hell wasn’t hot, it was just like this-empty and buried underground. Buried alive.

They moved through the passage for a lifetime and then finally came to another widened antechamber. The rails ran across it to a heavy iron door set on massive hinges bolted into the wall. The door was some kind of dark heavy wood, the strap hinges as old as the stone walls they were attached to. A pair of obelisks had been neatly carved in half relief into the stone on either side of the door, then picked out in whitewash and some dark, ancient stain. Words had been neatly hammered into the rock over the entrance, picked out in black and white the same way as the obelisks.

“Silence, Mortals, you are entering the Empire of the Dead,” Finn read out aloud. “Nice.” She looked at the door and then at Valentine. “Are we going in?”

“I think we’ve come too far to back out now,” he answered. He tapped the rail with the toe of his boot. “They’re not using these to transport old bodies. This is a warehouse, not a crypt.” He stepped forward and grabbed the wrought iron handle. He pulled open the door and stepped through.

There was a deep, guttural moan like the sound of some wounded animal, and then the lights went out. Finn screamed, the terrible scent of fresh-spilled blood suddenly in the air around her. She screamed again, feeling the air rush from her lungs as the stony floor of the tunnel rushed up to greet her. In the distance, echoing, came the flat hard sound of a shot being fired.