Dzvinka ignored him. She leaped up and skipped across the road to the door of the house. By the time Yarko caught up with her, the door was open. Inside, on the left a well-worn staircase led down, turned right, and ended in a short hallway with two doors. They descended quickly. Yarko imagined how his grandfather must have run down these same steps a thousand times.
“Which door?” asked Dzvinka.
Yarko thought a moment to remember on which side he had seen the chimney. “On the left,” he said confidently.
They entered a dark and dank room. To one side stood a large stove made of tile and cast iron, which had once served as the coal-fired furnace that heated the home. A sloping pony wall of brick would at one time have hidden a mountain of coal behind it. A bricked-over rectangle replaced the narrow window through which this fuel would have been delivered. Naked joists ran overhead. The brick walls of this furnace room rose as high as the joists, thus serving as internal supports of the home. In front of the stove, well hidden under a layer of dust, was a large rectangular concrete plate that had been sunk into the floor. Kneeling on the ground, Yarko began poking the seam of the plate’s edges with his finger.
Dzvinka shone a flashlight. “So the treasure is under this plate?”
“Either under this plate or under the stove itself. In either case, we’d have to start by digging here under the plate.”
Yarko took out his hotel key and ran the point of it around the edge of this plate. He wondered how on earth anyone could ever raise it. Dzvinka handed him a knife. Yarko briefly admired what was clearly an old Soviet bayonet. Apart from the serial number stamped on the polished twenty-centimetre blade, it was otherwise unremarkable. He dug the tip of it into the seam of the plate. By his estimate, the plate was at least eight centimetres thick. With a surface of at least a square metre, it had to weigh a quarter of a ton. Yarko tried to imagine how he was going to lift this weight.
“Look here, Yarko.” Dzvinka shone her light on a spot of slightly lighter grey in the middle of the plate.
Yarko poked at this spot with the knife. It appeared to be plaster. This plaster plug flaked away, revealing a round hole wide enough for Yarko to fit three fingers in. Oddly, the hole appeared to be threaded. Clearly something had been screwed in there to allow the plate to be handled. Yarko took Dzvinka’s flashlight and began searching around the furnace room.
“Hey, we’ve been here for ages,” exclaimed Dzvinka. “Let me pop outside to check if anyone’s around.”
“Okay,” was Yarko’s laconic reply, although he shuddered when he remembered where he was, and how long he had been there.
Yarko ran the beam of the flashlight along the top of the walls of this room. Since the brick wall ended at the joists, there were gaps in between the joists above the wall. These were too high to inspect with his light. Yarko left the flashlight on the ground. He jumped up and grabbed the top of the wall with his left hand, and poked between the joists with the bayonet in his right. That way he could check two gaps with each jump. Repeating this a half-dozen times, he suddenly felt something heavy and metallic with his knife. He reached for it with the blade and flicked it out. The steel object clanged loudly as it hit the ground. At that moment Yarko heard Dzvinka’s footsteps rapidly descending the stairs. He swiftly grabbed the object and squeezed it into his pocket.
“What fell?” asked Dzvinka excitedly.
“Nothing. Just your damned knife.”
“Haven’t you finished yet?”
“Give me a few more minutes, please. We’ll leave in five.”
Dzvinka walked back up the staircase.
Yarko carefully checked out what he had found. It was a large steel ring fitted through a very fat stubby bolt with a square-cut thread. Yarko tried threading the bolt into the hole in the plate. It fit perfectly! This was how the plate was handled! He slipped this ring back into his pocket. He heard Dzvinka’s quiet steps behind him.
Cholera, he thought, swearing in the native Lviviak jargon. She’s poking around too much. Looks like she’s seen it. Without even turning around, he began to sheepishly excuse himself. “Dzvinka, I was going to show you – ”
Bang! A gunshot rang from just outside the house. Bang! Another one. Instinctively, Yarko dropped to the ground. I’m still alive, he thought. Nothing hurts. He rolled over to check Dzvinka. She was still standing, pale as a ghost, frozen in fear. They could hear voices outside.
“I left the outside door open,” she whispered. “There’s something going on there.”
After a long moment, they worked up the courage to sneak upstairs and look through the crack of the slightly opened door. Two policemen were arresting two other men. They shoved them into their police car and drove off. A second car, a powder-blue Lada, was parked on the street. No one else was around. It was apparently the property of the arrested men. Dzvinka stepped outside and headed towards the car. She motioned for Yarko to follow. Yarko closed the house door and followed Dzvinka, who was already standing beside the blue car. Suddenly she bent down to pick something up.
“What luck! They’ve dropped their car keys! Let’s take the car.”
“But – ” Yarko began to object.
“Who’s going to report it stolen? If those two are arrested they are not likely to miss it today. And after that, how likely are these characters to report to the cops that their car was stolen? Hurry! We can put our bikes into the trunk.”
Things were happening too fast for Yarko. Dzvinka was already sprinting across the street to where their bikes were hidden. Yarko started to follow, but she was halfway back wheeling both by the time he got only a few steps. They stuffed the bikes, or what would fit of them – the rear wheels and frames – into the trunk. Yarko thought it odd to see in there a pair of muddied shovels – fresh wet mud of a distinctively yellow hue.
Dzvinka drove fast. At the Mieckewicz square, she let Yarko out, along with his mountain bike, in front of the hotel Ukrayina.
“I’ll pick you up at six,” she said. “And in the meantime you’d better get washed. You look like shit, Yarko.”
Yarko watched as the powder-blue Lada sped around the corner, Dzvinka’s bike sliding from one side of the open trunk to the other. He caught his reflection in a storefront window. His face was smeared black, as were his hands and clothes.
Damn lucky if the water supply is turned on, he thought, realizing he looked somewhat worse than his Sunday best. He noted that the fountain near the Mieczkiewicz monument was happily spraying its rainbow-hued shower.
Now that bodes well for the water supply, he decided.
3
IT WAS 10 A.M. Yarko took a quick bath in a tub full of cool water. At least he had water. He decided right then that he should fill the tub whenever there was water available. He filled the sink too. Changing into clean clothes, he threw the morning’s dirty laundry into the tub to soak.
Through the opened window he could hear something he was not used to hearing in Vancouver. Church bells from all corners of the city were summoning the faithful to Liturgy. He remembered that this was Sunday. His mind had been full of fragmented thoughts and ideas. An hour’s calm at a church service seemed to be a good place to get his head together. He needed to digest the events of the last twenty-four hours, and to develop a plan of action for the remainder of the week. He stuffed the iron ring into a pocket of his cargo shorts, and walked his mountain bike down the hall to the elevator. The ring was the key to his mission, he thought. Something was telling him not to leave it in his hotel room.
He rode along Hnatiuk Street to the boulevard of The November Uprising, a street named after the declaration of independence of November 1, 1918. This led him straight to Saint George’s Cathedral. An imposing architectural masterpiece of the baroque-rococo style, it was almost impossible to describe: it embodied the intricate beauty of a Fabergé egg applied to the