Bigelow took this in. “And you say you’re hiring us for that?”
“That’s right.” Harper thought for a second and came up with a figure he felt Bigelow would go for and Lois could afford without pitching too much of a fit.
Bigelow scratched at his jaw with a rough hand. “I dunno, Harper. That ain’t much.”
“It’s just for your time and efforts this evening,” Harper said. “The main thing is, if it looks good after tonight, you’ll be in on whatever we do here in the near future.”
Upon hearing this, Bigelow pursed his lips and looked up, as if he were an orangutan attempting differential equations. Finally, he looked back down at the other two men. “Well, Harper,” he said, smiling, “when you put it that way…” He offered a broad shrug. “How can I refuse?”
“Good,” Harper said. He pointed toward the back stairway. “Keep people out of the basement for as long as you can. But maintain appearances. Don’t blow your cover.”
“Not a problem,” the big man said. “We’re professionals.” He grinned. “I’ll clue in the others and we’ll run this thing smooth.”
Harper nodded. He turned to his partner but Salsa was already heading down the stairs.
Bigelow started out of the room but then called back, “How long do you think you’ll be down there?”
“Half an hour,” Harper said from the top steps. “No more.”
“Got it,” the big man replied. “Happy hunting.”
4
“This is ridiculous,” Salsa complained. “There’s nothing down here but old furniture and stupid bricks and bugs.”
Harper said nothing. He wasn’t particularly happy, either, but preferred to work off the frustration by redoubling his efforts at searching.
The basement was cool and clammy, dark and spider-webby. It ran a fair distance in what Harper guessed was a north-south direction under the mansion, but was relatively narrow on the east-west axis. The walls were cinderblock on three sides and brickwork on the fourth, all painted-over a dull gray; the ceiling was high and punctuated by occasional bare bulbs dangling from yellow electrical wires strung into the cross beams.
The bunch of stupid bricks to which Salsa was referring had given them both a few moments of false hope. Stacked in a semi-neat rectangular pile against one of the basement’s longer walls, they had evoked the possibility of not-so-cleverly disguised gold bars. Salsa’s eyes had sparkled in the dim light as he’d seen the stack and pointed it out to his partner. Of course, when Harper had actually picked one up and scraped at it, then banged it on the concrete floor until it shattered, it had turned out to be exactly what it looked like all along: a brick. A quick and random check of several more in the pile yielded the same results. Salsa’s disappointment had been palpable.
Harper moved on from the bricks and started dragging sections of an old table out into the open so he could see behind it. A couple of spiders and a green lizard scrambled away and disappeared into cracks. Beyond that, there was nothing to see but more of the dull gray painted wall and the concrete floor coated in dust. Hands on hips, Harper turned in a slow circle, peering into the shadows.
Salsa was wrestling with a tasseled lamp on a long, curving metal neck that was taller than he was. Fighting it out of his way, he inspected the area behind it and found nothing of interest there. He shook his head slowly, defeatedly.
“It doesn’t have to be down here, whatever it is,” Harper told him, turning his attention to another piece of furniture. This one was a wide chest of drawers that lay on its back. The drawers themselves had been removed and piled off to one side.
Salsa looked at him, frowning. “Where else, though? They’re not going to keep anything that valuable just lying around in a closet or guest bedroom upstairs.”
“Or maybe lying around in the basement, either,” Harper countered. “That’s why I’m looking for some kind of safe or vault door, or a hidden compartment maybe.”
Salsa nodded. “Right, right,” he grumbled. “I didn’t think it would just be sitting here in the open.”
“But you hoped.”
Salsa shrugged. “Sure. I hoped. Why can’t things be easy for once?”
Harper nodded at that. “Fair point.”
They continued searching for another ten minutes in relative silence. Salsa checked his watch and cursed. “We need to wrap this up,” he said.
Harper had his hands on his hips again, frustrated. “So—do we try to come back the next time Lansdale has a bridge tourney, or do we write this thing off?”
Salsa tossed aside an old brass bookend. He cursed again, more colorfully this time, and at length.
They had methodically worked their way from one end of the narrow basement to the other and back, and now Harper stood in the center, looking around one last time. “I think we gotta write it off, you ask me.” He pursed his lips. “Unless you want to go with Bigelow’s plan and just rob the people upstairs and be done with it.”
“I’m not here to steal wallets and earrings, dammit!” Salsa almost shouted.
Harper motioned for him to lower his volume a little. The house was far from deserted.
Salsa now stood closer to the narrow end of the room, where the wall was small bricks instead of cinder blocks. The stairway was to his left. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s just…” He raised his hands in the air and shook his head in frustration. “…That’s not the score I came here to make,” he hissed, quieter but still angry.
“Oh, I’m with you on that,” Harper said. “We don’t need just a little bit more money. You got me in on this originally because you said it would be the mother of all payoffs.”
Salsa got loud again: “That’s what it was supposed to be, dammit!”
His face drew up into as angry an expression as his partner had ever seen. Then he turned around blindly, his hands flailing out, and grasped the first thing his fingertips touched: one of the ordinary red bricks from the pile. Grasping it firmly, he spun around and hurled it with all his strength at the wall closest to him. It struck with a whack and broke into several fragments, which then rained down on the concrete floor. Having relieved some of his frustration, he turned around, facing Harper, plopped himself down on the pile and crossed his arms, fuming.
It was a couple of seconds before he realized that, while Harper was facing him, he wasn’t looking back at Salsa. Eyes wide, the usually unflappable man was gaping at something past him.
Salsa moved like a startled rabbit, assuming the owners or the cops were descending the stairs and were about to start asking a bunch of unwelcome questions about why the two of them were down in the basement moving furniture around and throwing bricks instead of upstairs playing cards. Cringing, his heart racing, he turned and looked—but no one was there. Even more puzzled now, he glanced back at Harper.
Harper continued to stare past him, at something.
At what?
“What?” Salsa asked as he turned again to try to figure out what his partner was seeing.
This time, without the preoccupation of looking for the Law or the owners, he focused his vision on the wall. And on something that hadn’t been there before.
It was the spot where the brick he’d thrown had hit, he realized, about two feet above the floor. He could see the spot because it had left a mark on the gray wall.
A shiny mark. A metallic gold mark.
But this made no sense. The brick he had thrown had been perfectly ordinary. It wouldn’t have left a metallic streak.
Not the brick, then.
The wall.
The wall?
Now Salsa could not frown any deeper if he tried. He started forward just as Harper was moving past him, and together they crowded up against the narrow wall and stared close-up at that golden mark.
It wasn’t a streak. It was the opposite. The brick he’d thrown had gouged out a couple of layers of gray paint and revealed the true surface of the bricks underneath.
Except, there weren’t bri
cks underneath. Not regular bricks, anyway.
There was gold.
Harper met Salsa’s surprised eyes momentarily, then drew a folding knife from his pocket and opened out a small blade. Carefully he scratched at more of the gray paint a few inches below the gouged-out metallic spot. This revealed more gold.
Was every brick in this wall made of gold? Was that possible?
His breathing a little funny now, Harper moved further down toward the floor and off to the right and, as Salsa squatted down and leaned in to watch, scraped at the paint again.
Yes. More gold.
He scratched at the gold itself, just to be sure.
Yes. It was actual gold. The whole basement wall must be made of gold.
And something else: as Salsa leaned forward and scratched at a bit of paint himself, his fingernail scraped over a line. Not a seam between bricks, but more like an engraving mark in the gold surface.
“Lemme borrow that knife,” he said, and Harper handed it to him. He moved the blade back and forth over the spot he’d found.
“What are you doing?” Harper asked, antsy.
“Look.”
Harper peered down at the spot Salsa had revealed.
The line in the gold surface was only about an inch long, and bent off at opposite right angles on either end. Another line bisected it, though that one's ends were still obscured by paint. But they could see enough to know what it was.
A swastika.
Harper and Salsa slowly looked up from the shiny spot and at each other. They each blinked. In unison, they stood. Neither said another word. Instead, very quickly and deliberately, they began to drag pieces of furniture over until the spots they had uncovered were completely concealed. Once that was done, they hurried back upstairs.
No, this was definitely not going to be their only visit to the mansion on Ruby Island.
5
“You’re tryin’ to tell me you found the Nazi gold?” Bigelow asked, half-laughing, looking at Harper as if he were entirely crazy. “What do you take me for?”
Harper and Salsa had returned to the main floor of the mansion and melted back into the crowd of attendees as quickly as possible. It had taken a couple more minutes to locate their ladies, whereupon they had discovered they were up next in the bridge tournament. Harper had hoped to be done and gone by then. Connie’s lingering seasickness gave him an excuse to beg off.
“We have to keep up appearances,” Salsa pointed out quietly, “especially since we’ll be coming back here soon. So Lois and I will stay and play.”
“That’s fine,” Harper said. “Just don’t do anything to keep us from getting invited back.”
Salsa put his hand to his chest in a “you wound me” gesture. “I will be the picture of decorum, my friend. Now, before our game starts, let us go and square things with the help.”
And so Lois and Connie stood to the side of the table, as the previous players were finishing up, while Harper and Salsa headed back toward the kitchens, looking for Bigelow. Locating him where he was still going through the motions of actually being a caterer, Harper pulled him to one side and spoke in a very low voice.
“We found it,” he hissed, his facial expression utterly flat, his dark eyes sparkling in the dim lighting of the hallway. Next to him Salsa flashed a knowing grin and gave a quick nod.
Bigelow’s expression remained skeptical.
“If you don’t believe it,” Harper said, “we’ll find another crew to help us—guys who’re interested in making a few million for a couple hours of work.”
Bigelow took this in and his own pasty expression slowly changed from one of cynical derision to growing incredulity.
“The gold,” he said, a little too loudly and as if he just needed to hear the word out loud to believe it. “Seriously.”
“Yes,” Harper whispered, frowning, his opinion of Bigelow dropping incrementally by the second.
Bigelow’s expression morphed again, finally settling on something approaching pure greed. The derision, the incredulity were gone. He believed. Harper could tell. He was hooked.
“So we’re taking it tonight?”
Harper shook his head. “Tonight’s no good.”
Salsa fished a folded piece of paper out of his pocket, flipped it over and tapped something on it with his right index finger. “They’re doing another one of these bridge tournaments the same time next week. That’s when.”
“Salsa is going to make sure we’re on the guest list again,” Harper said. “You fellas make sure you’re catering again.”
Bigelow shook his head at this. “I don’t get it. We’re all here right now. Why not tonight?”
“We aren’t prepared,” Harper replied. “We’ll have to set up a distraction or two, at minimum, plus we need a way to transport the goods off the island.”
“But we’re all set on that,” Bigelow shot back, very quickly and insistently. “We’ve got transportation ready. We can do it.”
“Yeah? The same thing you were planning to use to move a few furs and a couple bags of jewelry tonight?” Harper asked, trying to snap him back to reality.
“That’s right. We have a boat hidden in some bushes along the shore,” the big man answered, frowning, growing increasingly agitated, and clearly not seeing what Harper was trying to get him to see. Then he gathered himself and added, “What’s wrong with that?”
“Like a little rowboat?”
The frown deepened. Bigelow scrunched up his mouth, looked around, exhaled slowly and said, “Something like that.”
“Room enough for the four of you, plus some money, some jewelry?”
“And a couple of fur coats from women who don’t mind running the risk of heatstroke to show them off,” Salsa added.
Bigelow nodded. “Yeah. So what about it?”
“We’re talking gold bars,” Harper told him. “Gold bricks. A bunch of them.”
“It’s simple, my friend,” Salsa said. “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”
6
Tuesday, four days before the heist:
Fred Gaubash had been selling boats in south Florida for nearly a decade, and in all that time he’d never encountered a customer quite like this one.
Nearly all his customers were men. They would saunter in, flash some cash around, and eventually buy the most expensive thing Fred could interest them in. He prided himself on his skills at convincing the paying public that he knew best what sort of watercraft best suited them and their needs—plus a little extra, of course. After all, he worked largely on commission.
But then had come Mrs. Lois Gold to his dealership, and all that had gone out the window. She was something else—a real knockout—and that was distracting enough. But on top of that, she wasn’t paying Fred or his sage advice any attention.
“Mrs. Gold,” he was saying, “are you sure this is the kind of boat you’re looking for? We have a wide array of watercraft, including what some might almost describe as ‘luxury yachts.’ I’m sure a woman of your obvious station and means would enjoy something like that much more than—” He trailed off as the tall, slender blonde turned away from him and began to stride in the other direction across the cracked concrete lot.
“Mrs. Gold,” Fred said quickly as he ran around in front of her again. “If you’d come this way—”
The blonde met Fred’s earnest eyes with her own frosty ones and shook her head. “No, no,” she said, offering him a sweet and innocent smile. “A houseboat is what I want.” She held up a picture that had been apparently torn from a magazine. It showed a typical example of a low, boxy, clearly very slow craft lumbering along across a random lake.
Fred felt his heart sink, along with his hopes of making a big-ticket sale today. He frowned around his smoldering Lucky Strike and shook his head slowly. He couldn’t figure out what to make of this lady. When she’d rolled up in her late-model black Cadillac he’d taken notice, of course, and seeing her very flashy and expensive jewelry had only amped up
his sense that he was about to cash in. She’d given her name and that had rung a bell or two for him as well. He’d heard along the grapevine about a Mr. and Mrs. Gold, relatively new to the area and said to be throwing around serious money. But the Mrs. had shown no interest whatsoever in any of the more deluxe boats he’d attempted to steer her toward thus far. Instead, all she wanted to look at was ratty old houseboats, of the type a middle-class family might take out on the lake on the Fourth of July or a bunch of college kids might rent to party on during spring break.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Fred stammered, his eyes moving from the magazine photograph to the blonde and back. “I don’t think we have anything like that available here in—”
“There,” she said, pointing excitedly. As they had been speaking she had walked to one side of the sales office building and now she could see around and behind it. Immediately she took off in that direction, to where two old houseboats sat on rotting wooden platforms. One of them was faded light blue, the other faded light green. Neither the south Florida sun nor all the salt had been kind to either of them.
Fred hurried along behind her, panting in the Miami heat, mopping his brow with his handkerchief. “These old things?” he wheezed. “Oh—I don’t think—”
“They’re perfect,” she was saying, as much to herself as to him. Her eyes flicked from one to the other. Then she looked at Fred for perhaps only the second or third time since she’d arrived. “They both work okay, right?”
Fred could feel the puzzled expression forming on his features, though he tried to keep it at bay so as not to make the lady feel as if she’d asked a dumb question.
“They’re decent enough, for what they are,” he said by way of answer. “But—”
She nodded, then, “I’m sorry,” she said, “just one moment, please.” She opened her purse, fished around inside it, and pulled out a folded slip of paper. She read over it once or twice, then looked up and said, “It needs to be very buoyant.”
Fred’s eyes widened slightly. “Buoyant?” He pursed his lips. “Well—sure, yeah—yes ma’am, of course you’d want to be sure it floats. That it’s safe.” He grinned. “They’re both very safe. You could hardly sink either one of these two.”
Miami Heist Page 3