Unknown 9 by Layton Green (each kindness read aloud txt) 📕

Expecting the noise to quickly recede, he instead heard voices conversing in English, and was shocked to realize it was Ana and Hans. The sound of his lover’s throaty voice caused him to grit his teeth, both anger and desire coursing through him.

“Look at this photo,” Hans called out.

“My God,” Ana replied after a moment. “Is that Tesla?”

They must have found the ledger and suspect something is in here, but they don’t know for certain.

Dr. Corwin crept silently forward, deeper into the darkness of the vault. As his fingers folded the paper and put it in his pocket, he ran straight into a tangle of sticky strands stretching across the tunnel.

Dr. Corwin reared, clawing at the threads and resisting the urge to cry out. Calm down, man. It’s just a spiderweb. Even the bloody tarantulas won’t kill you.

He knew that Hans—and probably Ana—would have no problem shooting him dead and leaving his body in the storage tunnel. Desperate to stay out of sight, he kept going, leading with his outstretched hands to avoid bumping into a wall. Once the tunnel curved to the right and he was out of sight, he risked a quick flick of the lighter. The illumination revealed a stretch of tunnel that dead-ended a hundred feet ahead. On each side of the tunnel, about halfway down, an alcove could be glimpsed behind the barrels, a cavity of deeper shadow.

“Shine the light down this tunnel,” Hans called out.

“It’s just barrel storage,” Ana replied.

“Look—a stone is missing!” Hans cried.

“And the mortar freshly dug.”

Hans swore. “He beat us here.”

Dr. Corwin couldn’t be sure whether they had realized the full import of the photograph yet. Either way, they knew something was amiss.

After a moment, the German cursed again and said, “Let’s see where this tunnel leads.”

Good Christ, they’re coming this way.

Left with no choice, Dr. Corwin climbed over a dusty barrel and huddled inside the alcove on his left. The space was much smaller than he had realized, more of a cubbyhole than a true alcove. An iron grate in the floor suggested a point of entry to the sewer. He tried to lift the grate, visions of an underground escape dancing in his head, but it was bolted down.

The skitter of rodents came from somewhere beneath him, and the cubby stank. He took deep silent breaths to control his anxiety in tight spaces. Hans and Ana were approaching quickly. Dr. Corwin flattened on the stone floor, his palms pressing into cool, damp lumps that crumbled beneath his fingers. He recoiled as he realized what he was lying in.

Rat shit. The floor is covered in rat shit.

Forcing away his revulsion, he laid his head on his arm and tried not to breathe in the noxious fumes as the footsteps approached. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a light sweeping the tunnel.

“Anything?” Hans called out, from farther back in the passage.

“No,” Ana said slowly. She was standing right beside the alcove, so close he should have been able to smell her perfume, if he hadn’t been lying in rodent droppings. “It’s a dead end.”

She stood in place for so long he was sure she had noticed his footprints on the dusty stone floor. He lay as still as he could, not even daring to breathe.

Her footsteps finally receded. After another few moments, he heard Hans call out in a sharp voice. “He booked a room here. Make sure he doesn’t go back to it, and place a guard at the exits to both hotels. Watch the airport, the rental agencies, and the passenger ships. Dr. Corwin doesn’t leave Cartagena—do you hear me?”

“Understood,” Ana said, and her words were like daggers in the darkness, piercing Dr. Corwin in the back.

Dr. Corwin snuck out of the wine cellar the next time a sommelier entered. As soon as he emerged and took a look at the upper crust lounging in the courtyard, he realized how difficult it would be to leave the hotel unnoticed, especially covered in rat feces. The inescapable fact was that the clientele of the Cloisters was overwhelmingly Caucasian or light-skinned Latino.

The staff, however, was a different story. Apart from workers at the reception desk and the sommelier, every employee he had seen was black. The hotel was a microcosm of the city: the wealthy Colombian elite enjoying the pleasures of life on the backs of the lower classes. The social reality was appalling, but it might also be his way out.

Hans and Ana had not realized how close he was. He might have a small window of time to escape. After washing the rat droppings off his hands, he followed one of the waiters to the kitchen, located the break room, and lifted a dirty uniform off a hook. The place was so busy for the dinner rush that no one paid him any attention. It was also so enormous that, once Dr. Corwin shed his clothes and donned the green-and-white livery, bummed an Embassy filter cigarette, and joined a group of waiters and cooks by a dumpster in an alley outside the hotel, no one seemed to notice he was not a regular employee. One by one, the rest of the staff stubbed out their cigarette butts and returned inside, while Dr. Corwin slunk away into the night and hailed the first cab he saw to take him to Getsemaní, the rough working-class neighborhood just outside the city walls.

Just another hombre negro returning home after work.

He asked the driver to drop him at a good but casual restaurant. The driver obliged, leaving him on a crowded corner throbbing with energy. Teens and young adults danced in the street to the pulse of salsa and Afro drums spilling out of bars and restaurants. Ignoring the patio tables, Dr. Corwin slipped inside the empanada café the driver had chosen, ordered a cold beer and the daily special, and hunkered down to study the cryptic line of