The Same Page: Have Body, Will Guard by Neil Plakcy & Stan Jenson

Author:Neil Plakcy & Stan Jenson [Plakcy, Neil & Jenson, Stan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B082YJXRPN
Published: 2020-08-18T23:00:00+00:00

18 – Professionals

ARSENY WOKE TO THE glow of dawn creeping in through the cave mouth. He yawned and looked around, confused for a moment about where he was. He hadn’t slept on the ground since a trip to a friend’s family dacha as a kid, when he and his friends had decided to camp out—for a single night.

He looked up and saw Giovanni, wearing his skimpy bikini briefs, bending over the pile of excavation tools. Though he was momentarily distracted by the crack of Giovanni’s ass peeking over the waistband, he remembered that beyond those tools, he’d seen no other proof this had been an archaeological dig.

What if those weren’t historical artifacts on Giovanni’s paperwork? What else could they be—drugs? Weapons? He saw the pile of documents beside Giovanni’s sleeping bag and he carefully rolled over until he was facing them.

Giovanni was now squatting beside the pile of tools, and Arseny quickly slipped the pile of papers closer. They were all in Italian, of course, and he had no knowledge of that language. But he had studied Spanish in school, and taken a summer trip to Cuba, so he thought he could work out a few words.

Tazza. He’d drunk enough cappuccinos in Italian cafés to know that meant cup.

Piatto. Close enough to the Spanish plato to mean plate.

Oro. That one was simple enough – it was gold in Italian and in Spanish.

“You can read my language?”

Arseny looked up with a start to see Giovanni standing over him. “Or perhaps you do not trust what I tell you?”

“Sorry, I...” Arseny didn’t know what to say. They had been so intimate the night before—he had trusted Giovanni with his naked body. And now this distrust?

Giovanni sat on the sleeping bag beside Arseny, his legs crossed beneath him. “It is fine,” he said. “I am pleased you are smart enough to check on me. I have nothing to hide from you. Here, let me show you what the men found.”

Arseny was fascinated by Giovanni’s knowledge of the history of the area, though they both struggled over the right words in English sometimes. Giovanni pulled the copper ring off his pinky and showed it to Arseny. “They find this,” he said. “The foreman, he want to take it, so I keep it myself, to hand over when I return to Rome.”

Arseny looked at the ring, tracing the fine ripples that circled it. “How old is this?”

“Maybe five thousand years,” Giovanni told him. “Was not until the end of the period that these people had knowledge to make such a thing.”

“It’s beautiful,” Arseny said. He handed it back to Giovanni, who slipped it on his finger again.

He was pretty certain by then that Giovanni was who he said he was, but there was one more question he’d been holding, and he couldn’t wait any longer. “Did you kill that cop? The one who was driving us?”

Giovanni looked at him and shook his head. “I do not kill. He would wake up a few minutes later, perhaps with a bad headache.

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