Exploitation: First Floor
© 2020 by Walter Reimer


Thumbnail art by Stock Footage


Those pickled carrots were good. I might suffer later for having eaten so many, but that’s okay. Live in the moment.

The elevator doors opened.

The bear that had wanted me to sit in his lap and “discuss what comes up” down in the lobby was standing – well, looming – dressed in a track suit and about two feet away from me. I could tell he was pretty damned drunk, and as soon as he focused on me he grinned and started toward me, paws raised for a hug. “Ey,” he said, and I almost fainted just from smelling his breath.

I recalled my Uncle Dave, and just as he reached me I ducked and pivoted, letting him go right past me to the back of the elevator car. I hit the button for the seventh floor and stepped out as the doors closed. I felt just a little sorry for the ghost I’d encountered up there; she didn’t need that sort of company.

The sable who’d thought my insulting his boss was great fun was laughing so hard he was hugging himself. “Are you going to give me any trouble?” I demanded.

He managed to get himself under control long enough to say, “Hell no, little lady. You’ve got some stones, giving Dmitri the slip like that. Where’d you send him?” I told him what I found upstairs and that managed to set him off again. When he finally stopped laughing he said, “I am Boris.” He seemed to be just slightly less drunk than Dmitri had been. “We knew you were coming, but there’s no harm in having some drinks. The boss isn’t around to stop us, after all.”

“Da, pravilno,” I said. “You do know that this place is being demolished in ten days, yes?”

“Oh yes,” he nodded. “Still, we decided to have a party, because we should see the old girl off in style.” The sable chuckled. “I doubt you’ll find anything valuable around here, and we would have stripped the whole building bare if Oleg Yefimovich’s wife had let us.” He smiled ruefully and rubbed the back of his head. “She packs a wallop.”

The sable was a big guy, but I’d met Lyudmilla.

“Are you sure there’s nothing here?” I asked.

Boris shrugged. “Go ahead and look around,” so off I went.

There wasn’t anything worth my time in the hallways, so I started surveying the rooms. I fished the set of keys from my bag and opened the one closest to me.

And I instantly wished I hadn’t.

“Ey!” the wolverine femme shouted. “You can have him when I’m done!”

I shut the door quickly, and before I opened the other rooms I listened carefully before unlocking the doors to see what was inside.

It was slow going, really, and the décor was definitely starting to depress me. I’ve been in buildings so old they were mainly staying up by the prayers of feral mice that didn’t look this bad. I listened at another door, unlocked it, and eased it open.

Vacant, looked like it hadn’t been used, and I had to blink from the sunlight streaming in through the dirty window. I was about to turn and leave when a stray beam of sunlight caught something that gleamed. I picked my way around a chair and took a look.

The thing was a wall decoration made of glass and metal. Not too worthless, I judged, so I tagged it and started to take it down off the wall. It wouldn’t budge; of course, it was screwed into the wall, but it wouldn’t take too much effort to dismount. While inspecting it to see where it was affixed to the wall . . .

That shiny bit that I had spotted?

It extended through the wall.

Taking note of where it was located, I went to the adjoining room. This room’s closet was in the way. I opened the closet door, looked in, and looked at the doorway. The closet wasn’t as deep as it should be.

My knuckles came into play (my other paw holding my flashlight, which had apparently decided that all was forgiven) and I rapped on the walls of the closet. One bit, about where I judged the wall decoration was in the previous room, sounded hollow. A careful inspection of the wall revealed a small hole, and I recalled a documentary about how this one speakeasy hid its hooch during Prohibition.

Finding a spare wire hanger, I straightened it out and probed the hole. There was a click, and part of the wall moved a fraction of an inch. I got my claws on it (I’ll add a manicure to my expense account), then my fingertips, and finally I swung the panel open.

Ooh.

Sitting on a stand and connected to the wall was a Krasnogorsk K-2 movie camera. Honest-to-God sixteen-millimeter film. I used the hanger to sweep away the worst of the cobwebs, took it off the stand, and discovered that there was a film cassette in the thing.

It made sense. This place was run by Intourist, which was pretty much the KGB back in the day when I was a kit, so why not set up at least one room where incriminating film could be shot? I mentioned earlier that some of the other closets had lines in the plaster where wires had been run for microphones. Most of the other rooms I’d been in hadn’t had that type of wall decoration, and the eighth and ninth floors had been repurposed; there was a high probability that the current tenants had found everything.

Hmm. This camera, while a bit on the rare side, could go for between one and three hundred dollars on an auction site, but where it was found and what it had been used for just might hike the price. I put the camera back in its stand and took pictures of it before taking the film cassette out and putting it in my bag.

It might be interesting to see what develops.

I put tags on the camera, the closet panel, the closet door, and the room before I stepped back out into the hallway.

“THERE you are!” and I turned to see Dmitri, the bear that I’d sent upstairs. Boris was with him, but the bear didn’t look happy. He broke into a run straight at me.

I said a few words that would have had my mother stuffing my mouth with soap, and I took to my heels and raced for the elevator. I had a head start on the bear and he was still drunk and quite a bit heavier, which became apparent when I dodged to the side at a corner and he hit the wall hard enough to knock the plaster off.

Reaching the elevator first, I stabbed the DOWN button and stood there, fretting as he shook off the impact and lumbered toward me. I fished my paw into my shoulder bag as he got closer, and when he got to within about five feet I drew my can of pepper spray and pointed it at him.

Dmitri immediately stopped and put both paws up in front of his face, palms facing him.

I reached out, taking a step closer, and tapped the back of one paw with a finger.

The bear’s paws opened like a pair of saloon doors, framing his face.

Too stupid to breed.

I dumped maybe a quarter of the can dead in his face, adrenalin causing the stream to waggle back and forth so it hit his nose, both eyes and his mouth. He blinked, then suddenly clapped his paws over his face and reeled back, screaming, as I reached for the waistband of his track suit.

Another quarter of a can of pepper spray, where it’d do the most good.

Just then, the elevator opened, and I practically jumped in as Boris ran up. He started coughing, but gave me a smile and a thumbs-up as the doors closed and I descended to the ground floor.

Misha, one of my foremen, was chatting with the guy at the front desk when I stepped out of the elevator. I had used the time to get myself under control, and when I walked over to him he asked, “Everything go all right, Boss?”

I waggled one paw. “Now I know why I prefer assessing deserted buildings. Come on, and I’ll get everyone lunch.”



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