Chapter Twenty-Eight #2
Ahmed and Gabriela got into Serge’s Range Rover.
Ahmed drove up to the closed gate and pressed the button on the intercom.
Someone answered in Italian and Ahmed answered in Slovak.
More Italian and more Slovak and finally Ahmed changed to very bad, broken Italian, saying that he was delivering a package.
No one said anything for a full thirty seconds.
The person inside the house called Ahmed “stupido balordo” and opened the gate.
“Nicely done,” Gabriela said to Ahmed. “I’m impressed that you can be a stupido balordo speaking Slovak.”
“I’m impressed that you knew it was Slovak,” Ahmed said.
“I took a guess. I knew it was either Slovak or Czech. I spent a month looking for a stolen icon in Bratislava. I picked up some of the language.”
“Did you find the icon?”
“Yes. I’d almost given up when I stumbled across it.”
It had been a good experience, she thought. She liked Slovakia. She was paid handsomely for her success. And it was satisfying to know that the sixteenth-century icon was safely returned to its Byzantine chapel.
They parked in front of the garage, entered through the side door, and walked through a small foyer into the kitchen.
A large woman with badly dyed red hair pulled back into a bun was stirring something in a pot on the stove.
She was wearing poison-green Crocs and a white chef’s apron over a print dress, and she was smoking a hand-rolled joint.
“Hey, Frankie,” she yelled in Italian. “You got visitors.”
Frankie rushed in from another part of the house. He was a five-foot-six-inch fireplug. He was wearing black slacks and a white dress shirt that was open at the neck. Gabriela had him in his late forties.
“Stupido,” Frankie said. “Basta.”
Ahmed said something in Slovak and the man threw his hands into the air. “Idiot!”
“You speak English?” Ahmed said.
“Yes,” he answered. “Everyone speaks English. Where is the package?”
“It’s in the car,” Ahmed said. “It’s very big and heavy. Do you have help here to carry it?”
“It’s me and Mario and Anna. Everyone else is gone for the day.”
Anna stopped her stirring and turned to look at them. “I’m a cook, not a mule,” she said. “Get Mario.”
The man phoned Mario and told him to meet him in the kitchen.
“What is this package that is so heavy?” he asked Ahmed.
“I don’t know,” Ahmed said. “I just deliver. I would help move it, but I have a bad back.”
Anna made a derisive sound from the stove. She wasn’t buying it.
Mario came in through the side door. He was in his twenties. Wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants. He had bodybuilder muscles and his nose looked like he’d also tried his hand at boxing.
“What’s up?” Mario said, looking from Ahmed to Gabriela.
“Heavy package to get moved,” Frankie said. “It’s in the car by the door.”
“I just walked past the car,” Mario said. “There’s no package in it. Just a couple rifles and ammo.”
Frankie and Anna went silent and stared at Ahmed.
“I need some information,” Ahmed said, drawing his gun.
“Screw you,” Anna said, and she heaved the soup pot at Ahmed.
The pot missed Ahmed, crashed onto the floor, and splashed soup on Frankie.
“What the hell,” Frankie said, soaked in minestrone. “What the hell.”
Mario pulled a gun out of his sweatpants pocket and Gabriela swatted it out of his hand with her baton. The gun flew through the air and landed at Ahmed’s feet. Ahmed picked it up and looked at Gabriela.
“Not your first time with a baton,” he said.
Gabriela smiled. “I was very briefly a majorette in high school.”
“You can twirl as well as slap away guns,” Ahmed said.
“Yes, and I can strut.”
“I’d like to see that someday,” Ahmed said. He turned his attention to Frankie and Mario. “Now that we have the soup throwing out of the way, some calm cooperation would be appreciated. And purely as a precautionary measure, my associate is going to cuff you.”
Gabriela removed three zip-tie cuffs from her knapsack and cuffed Anna. She moved on to Mario and Frankie. She stepped away after cuffing everyone and drew her own gun.
“I have a few questions,” Ahmed said. “Question number one is about the two men who were brought to this house yesterday. Where are they?”
No one answered.
Ahmed touched his earbud and told his crew to come to the house. Gabriela went to the keypad by the side door, tapped the button that opened the gate.
“Once again,” Ahmed said. “I would like to know where those two men are being held.”
“Bugger off,” Anna said. “You don’t scare us.”
Ahmed fired a shot at her foot. The bullet ripped off a chunk of her Crocs and a single drop of blood oozed onto the floor.
“You shot my pinky toe!” Anna said. “And you ruined my shoe.”
“I just scratched your toe,” Ahmed said. “Next time you’ll lose the toe. And I wouldn’t categorize a rubber Croc as a shoe.”
“I’ll lose more than my toe if Mr. T. finds out I told secrets,” Anna said. “You might as well go ahead and shoot all of me.”
Gabriela heard the side door open, and Ahmed’s men walked in.
“I’m thirsty,” Gabriela said to Anna. “Where does Mr. Tartoni keep his wine?”
“There’s a wine fridge in the butler’s pantry,” Anna said.
“Yes, but where’s the good wine?”
“There’s a larger wine room attached to the pantry.”
Gabriela walked through the kitchen to the butler’s pantry. “This is a wine closet,” she said to Anna. “Where’s the wine cellar?”
“It’s all I know,” Anna said.
Ahmed gave instructions to his men in Arabic. Gabriela understood enough to know that one would stand guard outside, two would keep watch over the people in the kitchen, and Serge would help search the house.
Gabriela moved through the house with Ahmed and Serge, checking every door. They searched the ground floor, the second floor, the mechanical room in the cellar, and the attic. Ahmed sent Serge to investigate the rooms above the garage.
“This is frustrating,” Gabriela said to Ahmed. “I know they’re here. Every instinct I have tells me they’re here.”
“Tartoni’s wife told you the wine cellar was large. A wine cave. The mechanical room in the basement was small for the size of the house. We must be missing a hidden door or an outside entrance to the rest of the basement.”
They went out the side door and walked around the house to the landscaped backyard. The land sloped down away from the building, exposing part of the foundation and an ornately carved cellar door. There was a patio with bistro tables and chairs in front of the door.
“This looks promising,” Ahmed said, trying the door, finding it locked.
Gabriela took a slim case from an inside pocket in her hoodie, removed a lock pick, and went to work on the door.
She opened the door, and they walked into a teak-paneled wine-tasting room that was the size of a small bedroom.
The room was cool and dimly lit, with bottles of wine stacked in racks lining the walls.
There was a rustic wood table in the middle of the room and a copper sink against one wall.
A wood hutch held a variety of glasses and wine-tasting tools.
A door beside the hutch opened to a powder room.
A second door toward the back of the room was locked.
Gabriela unlocked the door, but it didn’t open.
“There’s a one-sided dead bolt on the other side of this door,” she said. “And it’s locked.”
“We missed the entrance to the wine cellar when we searched the house,” Ahmed said.
They left the wine tasting room, stood on the patio, and looked up at the house. There were two triple windows above the wine room.
“Tartoni’s office,” Gabriela said.
Ahmed nodded.