Page 17 of Ruthless Riches
“Absolutely.” He leaned forward to pick up his coffee. “I worked in the town planning department for forty years, you know. We saw and heard it all.”
“What exactly did you hear about Satan’s Penthouse?”
“Quite a few things.” He took a sip of his coffee. “I know for a fact that those tunnels exist because of a man named Rick Gardiner. He worked in the same department as me… and he found them.”
Alexis’s eyes widened. “Seriously?”
Robert nodded. “He found them by accident one weekend. He went inside and poked around, and then he told us all about it the next Monday morning. Of course, we thought it was some sort of joke at first. Everyone in the office had a similar sense of humor, you see. We were always ribbing each other.”
“Did Rick tell you where it was?”
Robert shook his head. “Not exactly. To pay us back for not taking him seriously about it, he decided to lead us all on and turn the whole thing into a running joke. It went on for months. He’d drop a vague hint every few weeks, and then he’d just smile enigmatically whenever we gave him our best guesses. We eventually managed to figure out an approximate location of the entrance he found, though. It was somewhere near Seewald Avenue in the city. Do you know where that is?”
Alexis nodded. “I actually have an apartment right off Seewald.”
“Ah. You know the area, then.” Robert paused to take another sip. “Apparently, the entrance Rick found was somewhere in or around the park on Seewald. It’s a huge park, though, so that left us with several square miles to consider.”
He fell silent for a moment, staring at a clock on the opposite wall. Then he finally returned his attention to us. “Even after Rick had dropped all the hints, a couple of the guys in the office still thought he was having us on. They thought that was the real reason he was refusing to give away the location. But then he walked in one morning and slapped some Polaroids down on a desk. He said he’d gone back to Satan’s Penthouse to get proof for us.”
I leaned forward. “What did it look like?”
Robert smiled. “Exactly how the old stories described it. Extra-wide passages with mosaic tiles and marble columns. Vaulted ceiling. There were also large alcoves carved into the sides to function as rest areas. Some of them had benches and others had velvet seats or daybeds. It was beautiful.”
“What happened when everyone saw the photo?”
“Some of the guys still didn’t believe Rick. They thought he’d taken the Polaroids somewhere else; that maybe they were old vacation pictures.” He paused and thoughtfully tapped a finger on his chin. “The place did look a bit like the interior of a famous subway station in Moscow, and Rick and his family had gone there for a trip a few years back. So their theory wasn’t exactly ridiculous.”
“Did you believe the photo was real?” I asked, cocking my head.
Robert nodded. “Yes. I thought it was similar to the Moscow underground, sure, but not the same. It was incomplete, too. You could see a small part of that in the back of the photo—a dark bit where the floor was still dirt and the ceiling was only held up by wooden beams.”
“It would’ve looked darker than a subway station, too, right?” Alexis asked.
“Yes. There were no lights in the place, apart from the candles and flashlights Rick took down there to light up the place for the photos. So I believed him. He really found Satan’s Penthouse.”
“Does he still work in the town planning department?” I asked.
Robert fell silent for another moment. “No, he doesn’t,” he finally said, looking at the opposite wall again. “One day he told us that he thought we’d finally had enough of being teased about the location, so as a reward for our patience, he was going to reveal it at the next office Christmas party. When he said that, it was August.” He went quiet for another few seconds and looked down at his feet. “A few days later, he was out sick. Never came back.”
Alexis’s eyes widened. “What happened?”
“He had pancreatic cancer,” Robert said, looking back up at us. “That’s one of the worst ones to have, you know. He faded fast. Too fast.”
“Shit,” I muttered. “That’s horrible.”
“Yes, it is. Obviously, the Penthouse tunnels were the last thing on anyone’s mind at that point. All we wanted to do was support him and his family.” He sighed. “He passed in November that year. Never made it to the Christmas party.”
Alexis leaned forward. “I’m so sorry. That’s awful.”
Robert flattened his lips and looked at the floor again. “He was a good man. His passing really shook us all up.”
Alexis and I fell into an awkward silence for a moment. Neither of us had any idea what to say to Robert beyond offering our condolences.
He put his cup down and straightened his shoulders. “Anyway, the past is the past,” he said gruffly. “Nothing we can do about it, as much as we might want to.”
“I suppose so,” Alexis murmured.
He offered her a faint smile. “I was telling you what I know about Satan’s Penthouse, wasn’t I?”
