High Stakes

by John F. Dobbyn

  Full sail unfurled and secured, we came about. Our sheets caught the wind. We hit the top speed our doomed vessel could muster directly into the protective aura of the rescuing Turkish vessel. The cheers poured out of every man on deck, and must have given spirit to the bedded soldiers below.

  My own spirits rose higher the closer we drew to the arc of the range of the Turkish vessel’s cannon. The only pause to my jubilance was the fact that the pirate scourge continued to pursue at full speed. When she was all but within range of the more heavily-armed protector ship, she still pressed on into certain destruction. Why?

  The answer came with dispiriting clarity when we found ourselves locked tightly between the two opposing ships. The vessel that would be our salvation suddenly struck the Turkish flag and hoisted the black flag of piracy. We had been drawn like a fly into the spider’s death trap.

  As fast as we had regained hope, the desperation of our situation enveloped us like a cloud. I rushed below to a scene of near panic. Soldiers who could scarcely stand were forcing themselves upright, strapping on sabers. If it were a near certainty that every merchant crewman and officer aboard would be reddening the sea with their blood before the next watch, the doomed lot of the depleted soldiers was beyond certainty.

  I made my way for one last farewell through the turmoil below to the bedside of Captain Suleman. He saw me. He beckoned me approach with his strong arm. When I reached his side, he fell back on the bunk. He again drew my ear close enough to hear his final words over the din.

  “Listen to me, physician.”

  I tried to settle him. He just pulled me closer. “No time. I say it once. Believe the words of one who will soon be with Allah.”

  He coughed up the phlegm that clogged his throat. I tried to say something, but he forced his words through a rasping throat. “You know of the treasure of Dracula. You must have heard. Say it. Say it.”

  “I’ve heard, of course. But no one …”

  “I found it. I was lost, wandering alone … in retreat … The treasure … It’s beyond anything …” He choked again. Before I could speak, he forced the words. “There was no time … Our army was fleeing. They were on us … I left it all.”

  A coughing fit seized him. I tried to settle him, but he pulled my ear still closer to his lips. His voice was barely audible, but with my hand to Allah, these were his words.

  “I took one item with me … A violin I had seized in a raid … Hear me. It’s in my bag. Here, under the bunk. A harmless violin …”

  He pulled me with even greater strength till my ear touched his lips. “I repay as I said … It’s all I can do … Take it.”

  “But why …”

  “You’re a physician … They may keep you alive. Hear me.”

  He put every ounce of the last drop of strength Allah gave him into his final words. “The key … to locate the treasure … It’s … the violin.”

  His soul passed. I was thankful that he would be spared the slaughter that was coming.

  I found the bag where he said it was. I could feel a box the shape of a violin case inside. I took it and my bag of physician’s instruments and scrambled through the melee of staggering soldiers up to the deck. I forced my way to the mainmast, and just clung to it.

  I tried to close my eyes, but something inside forced me to witness the numbing slaughter all around me. Sabers, cutlasses glinted in the sun, to be bathed in the next instant in human blood. The screams of the dying drowned out the savage curses and war-cries of the pirates, crazed with the intoxication of killing.

  I saw the pirate captain, laying waste all in his path, coming toward me. In one last, almost peaceful surrender, I closed my eyes. I held my physician’s bag in front of me to absorb a first blow that might fall. I said the last words of my lifetime to Allah.

  I waited. It never came. When I opened my eyes, I saw their captain ordering attackers away from me. The screaming and killing went on until I was the only soul of our ship’s company still drawing breath.

  The massacre was followed, as it had probably been on many captive ships, by a stripping and carrying off to their vessel of everything of any imaginable value. In the midst of it, their captain, whom I assumed by his words to be Russian, seized two of his cut-throats and ordered them to take me and secure me in his cabin. I could only assume, as I later learned to be true, that he recognized my physician’s kit as the tools of a trade in desperately short supply among his murderous band.

  In the weeks that followed, I was held prisoner in a small room next to the captain’s quarters. I was allowed out only to treat the battle wounds of that pirate band, incurred in occasional skirmishes with the pitiable crews of ships taken like our own.

  With the exception of the delivery of daily food rations, no one came into the room in which I was held. No one gave eye to the bag of Captain Suleman. I assume that if they gave it any thought at all, they considered it part of my medical equipment.

  I had many hours in that room to examine closely the violin that Captain Suleman said with his dying breath was the key to finding the treasure of Prince Dracula, secreted for over three hundred years.

  My impression of the violin, being no expert in instruments of music, was first, that it was a piece of impeccably fine handiwork. I was equally impressed that the instrument was of considerably more recent origin by the date inscribed inside than the fifteenth century reign of Prince Dracula.

  I had hours—in fact days—to pour over every facet of the grain, the shape, the color of every feature of the instrument. I shone light through the openings in the face of it in search of some clue. Absorption in the puzzle might well have saved my sanity, but it revealed no hint of the treasure’s location.

  It has been, by my count, six months to the day since my abduction. I can sense by the sounds outside my room that anchors are being dropped. My command of the Russian tongue is scant, but from the words I hear, we are in the port of Odessa.

  If I am correct in my assumptions, this plundering voyage is over. If, in fact, we are in the port of Odessa, there are doctors here. My value to these brigands as a physician is over, and I have no other value. I have no reason to believe that my life will not be taken this day.

  I have no alternative but to close this journal with a prayer to Allah that it and the violin might fall into the hands of one more worthy of deciphering the key that has eluded me.

  I hear them coming. I go to Allah.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  GEORGE OPENED THE door, and I jumped. My mind had been completely absorbed in what I had just read. I was stunned by how, after three hundred years and thousands of miles, it had come to touch my life so deeply.

  George held up his hands in a silent asking if I had finished. I nodded.

  Again, my mind was almost paralyzed with a congestion of thoughts and questions. Most stunning of all was my first realization of the actual significance of that violin. It added geometrically to the weight of my being the only one on earth who had access to it.

  George sat down beside me. He took the lead. “I can see it in your eyes. You’re beginning to realize what’s at stake. The story continues. Shall I?”

  “Please.”

  “What you read occurred in around 1700. Let me piece together, as well as I can, the past three hundred years. The ship’s doctor’s personal fate was as he predicted, as far as we know. His bag of physician’s instruments was probably sold in the Odessa medical community.

  “But the violin. Remember that Odessa was on the northern trade route of the Silk Road. The pirates sold the violin to a Russian trading company in Odessa. They, in turn, shipped it to China to be traded for Chinese silk.”

  “How could you know that?”

  “The Russian trading company kept careful records of all of its trades. Fortunately, the company is still in existence. We have a copy of the record of that trade. Shall I go on?”

  “By all means.”

  He drew his chair closer. “We’re dealing
in centuries here. The next time the journal of Doctor Demir surfaces is in Istanbul in the 1800s. The pirates had sold it with the violin to the Odessa trading company. Probably for a pittance, since it was written in Turkish. None of them knew what it said. It gathered dust on the shelves of the trading company for a couple of centuries. It was still untranslated. Finally, at that point, some employee there thought it might have value as an historic document. We know from the trading company’s records that it was sold to a dealer in ancient documents in Constanta on the Romanian coast of the Black Sea. Being written in old Turkish and in the handwriting of a doctor, it was not easily translatable.

  “Again, it collected dust until it was donated in 2017 to the Antiquities Department of the Koc University of Istanbul, where it was finally translated by an expert in ancient Turkish script, Professor Sakim.”

  “But the violin was still in China, I assume.”

  “Patience, Michael. More tuica?”

  “No. More facts.”

  “Alright. Professor Sakim did what academics do. She published an article, with a translation of the doctor’s journal, in an obscure academic linguistics publication. Probably made full professor on it.”

  “I’m seeing the connections.”

  “Not quite yet. The reference to the violin being the key to Dracula’s treasure was catchy enough to be picked up as a short blurb by some popular media. It was still only a tiny blip on world news for that one day. No one took much interest because no one could easily connect the doctor’s journal with a particular violin. Plus, almost no one knew anything about the real Dracula as opposed to the fictional vampire. The stories about his treasure were even more like folk legends.”

  “But you knew about it.”

  “Yes. I did. I’d been hearing about it as factual history from my parents since childhood.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I began an odyssey. I traced the doctor’s journal back from the university to the manuscript dealer in Constanta, then to the trading company in Odessa. It cost a few coins, but I got to see the trading company’s records going back centuries. I was able to match the entry regarding the purchase of the journal with the purchase of the violin, since they were part of the same deal with the pirates.”

  “What about the violin?”

  “The trading company’s record showed that it had been traded to a Chinese dealer on the Silk Road in Guangzhou. I followed it there. I found that it had sat for centuries, probably because the name of Stradivari was still unknown there in the 1700s. It finally moved again when someone in Guangzhou dug it out of a storeroom and recognized the Stradivari seal. It was sold for about half a million dollars to a dealer in Hong Kong.”

  “And you found it there?”

  “If I had, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. It was one of those things. I located the dealer just three weeks after he’d resold it.”

  “To whom?”

  “I couldn’t find out. Hong Kong had reverted to communist China. To keep it from the communists, the deal was done on the black market.”

  “Dead end.”

  “Almost. What happened in between, I have no idea. But I have ears all over Romania. About two weeks ago, I heard a rumor that a deal was being done for a Stradivarius by a small violin maker in the tiny town of Tesila outside of Bucharest. Mr. Oresciu. It was supposed to be a secret deal, but it was more than this little violin maker could keep to himself. I also heard that there was a Chinese connection with the deal, as you know. That was enough to get me curious. But by the time I got back to Romania, his shop had been ransacked. The violin maker was in the hospital barely clinging to life. The Stradivarius was gone.”

  “Another dead end.”

  “Perhaps. But then I heard your name. Your visit to that part of Romania. I heard about the interest the Russian mafia had suddenly taken in you. The man who runs the gondola on the ski mountain in Sinaia is Romanian. He shared an interesting story about your adventure on the mountain with your wife—and a violin.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Yes, very. I asked myself, could my quest at last be close to fruition?”

  He sat back in silence. His eyes were looking into mine. The clear message was that the ball was in my court, and the “ball,” so to speak, was clearly whatever I would choose to do with the violin.

  I had no immediate response. There were too many loose ends flying. On the other hand, his open recitation of the violin’s history entitled him to an answer. All I could do was to lay out the conundrum.

  “The best thing I can give you is honesty, George. I’m like a mouse surrounded by three hungry cats. The Chinese—I assume the tong—have paid something over a million dollars for this item. I’m the delivery boy. Their response to my deliberately misdelivering it to you could take on disastrous results—for my wife, Terry, as well. You’ll concede this?”

  “Please continue.”

  “In the second corner, we have the Russian mafia making no secret of the worth of our lives if their wishes are not met.”

  George nodded.

  “And here in the third corner we have my host, more gracious than the other two, but with the same objective. My handing over the violin. Would that there were three violins. But, alas … Anything I’m missing here?”

  “Yes. A great deal.”

  He leaned back in the silence of his own thoughts. I let the seconds go by. The easy smile was gone. I thought I saw a tinge of anger. He seemed to be in self-debate about sharing his thoughts. I gave him more seconds until he resolved the debate. He leaned forward with more steel in his voice.

  “Michael. I’m sorry the weight of this is on you and your wife. But it is. And therefore, you’d better know the stakes. If that Russian mob of gangsters you refer to as ‘mafia’ get their hands on that treasure, God help Romania and every other part of the world. They’ll flood the globe with their drugs, their human trafficking, every other despicable evil this treasure will finance. Don’t for a moment think that your country will be spared.”

  “I can—”

  “Hear me out. The Chinese tong is no better. You know it in Boston. That’s just one tentacle of the sordid octopus that gives the orders from Hong Kong, and possibly the mainland. Again, if they find the treasure, God help your country and mine. We’ll be awash in drugs … and other things.”

  I hesitated to respond, but if ever there was a time for cards-on-the-table honesty, we were in it.

  “I’m speaking plainly, George. You’ve been a perfect host. But I’ve only heard your … organization described as a ‘Romanian mafia.’ What is there to choose between you and …”

  “Once more, you have no basis for understanding. You would have to live under the heel of Ceausescu and his Russian communist puppeteers for decades to know why we resorted to black market tactics. Other crimes? Yes, of course. When the essentials of living are denied to you and your people at the hands of the most brutally corrupt … I’m sorry. My emotions run very deep.”

  “I’m listening, George.”

  His tone became quiet, but no less intense. “My country … My Romania has been raped by the Turks, by the Huns, the Mongols, the Romans, the Ottomans, the Christians … to name a few. The Nazis did their share, and then there were the Russian communists. They kept us on our knees until that filthy scourge was lifted in 1990 and we could breathe as Romanians.”

  “I understand what you’re saying.”

  “You understand the words, perhaps. Not the emotion. Not the reality. And in the middle of all of these centuries of being plundered, there was the dictator, Vlad Tepes—Dracula. This treasure we speak of—for the most part, it was bled from the Romanian people. The bleeding kept them under the crushing heel of poverty.”

  “And you’re saying?”

  “Forgive my bluntness. If there is any just right to that treasure and all it can do, it belongs to the Romanian people. And to no one else. Your personal well-being in all of this is, of cour
se, a consideration. But there is also a matter of conscience. I’ll say no more.”

  I sensed that our meeting had concluded. I stood up and extended my hand. He rose and took my hand. He held it while he spoke.

  “I’ll only add this. My driver will take you back to where you left your car. You’re free to leave, as I said from the beginning. Ask yourself. If this meeting were with either the Russian or Chinese gangsters, would the same be true?”

  I tested his words by following his driver to the rear exit of the restaurant. As I was being driven back through familiar locales—the Jamaicaway, Copley Square, Tremont Street—it occurred to me that the last question George asked about my likely fate at the hands of the Chinese or Russian gangs was for me the most telling consideration.

  And yet, something bothered me. George gave the impression of laying every card on the table. I wondered if there was one card he still held close to the chest. Given the number of Stradivarius violins in circulation, and three hundred years of loose historical threads connecting the ship doctor’s journal with that particular violin in the South Station locker, did George have some particular reason—beyond mere hope—for his apparent confidence that this violin was the one that held the key to the treasure? If so, and it seemed likely given the efforts he continued to pour into the quest, why not lay that card on the table as well—or even hint at its existence? A small point, but so is a grain of sand in the shoe, and it causes a small but continual discomfort.

  * * *

  It was well after two in the afternoon when George’s driver turned onto Boylston Street close to where I had parked. I was about to call Harry Wong, when a cryptic text message popped up on my cell phone. “Three. Ten Tyler. Dressed goose.”

  Dear Harry. What would I do without him? Those five words were a flashback to the first time I had put his neck beside mine on the chopping block for an entree into the closed circle of Boston’s Chinese tong. My recollection of those days and Harry’s coding methods gave me a clear translation.

  I first needed an update from Deputy District Attorney Billy Coyne. I knew I could only get it with Mr. Devlin’s intercession. I called Mr. D.’s office. I reached his secretary, Bev Sheer, without whom, brilliant as he is, Mr. D. would be as lost as I would be without Julie. Bev told me that “himself” was still in court. I left a message, knowing with certainty that she’d get my message to him wherever he might be.