High Stakes

by John F. Dobbyn

  “No lo creo. Mi madre es de Mayajuez—I don’t believe it. My mother is from Mayajuez.”

  By now our eyes were locked in his mirror. Fortunately, we were at a long red light. I pressed on before it changed. “Todavia tienes familia alli?—Do you still have family there?”

  “Si, Senor.”

  I interrupted. “Por favor, llamame ‘Juan.’ Compartimos el nombre—Please, call me ‘Juan.’ We share the name.”

  “Bueno, Juan. Mi padre y mis tres hermanos todavia estan alli. Que hay de ti?—Okay, Juan. My father and three brothers are still there. How about you?”

  “Mas tios y tias y primos ques puedo contar—More uncles and aunts and cousins than I can count.” That brought a larger smile and a laugh.

  I was sailing deeper into the comfort zone with this stranger whose family shared with mine a part of that island that holds a piece of both our hearts. Being a believer in small signs from God, I wondered if life’s fortune was taking a U-turn to higher ground. I glanced behind us. Another small sign. The license number of the car behind us was 3067—an anagram of our home phone number.

  By the time we pulled up to the front entrance to South Station, Juan and I had covered every restaurant, bar, backgammon club, church, and beach in Mayaguez, not to say half of my cousins, a few of whom he had known or heard of. It could have gone on, but I had promises to keep, and miles to go before …

  I asked about the fare, but he had turned off the meter shortly after we left the Parker House. I appreciated the thought, but I insisted on twice my estimate of what the fare should have been. After all, a compadre.

  I opened the cab door in a state if intoxicating euphoria, which shattered like crystal when I caught sight of the license plate 3067 pulled in two cars behind us.

  I pulled the door closed. It was probably presumptuous, but I outlined a request, a plan that could only come off between two compadres from Puerto Rico.

  I started to explain that there could be an element of danger. Juan just held up a hand and smiled. “Amigo, you’re talking to a man who deals with Boston drivers eight hours a day.”

  Juan moved over to the passenger seat. I passed him my suit jacket. He slipped it on and pulled his Red Sox cap low over his face. I took the real violin case out of the cardboard box and handed the empty box to him.

  Juan picked a moment when the foot traffic was heavy. He jumped out of the passenger seat and blended into the crowd going into the station with the box under his arm.

  The brief glimpse the men in the car behind us could catch of him must have been convincing. The driver stayed put. Two others jumped out of the car and plunged into the crowd after Juan.

  I was able to slip into the driver’s seat while the attention of the driver of car 3076 was on the crowd at the station entrance. I drove the cab around to the rear entrance of the station. With traffic and traffic lights, I pulled in just in time to meet Juan coming out empty-handed. I moved over to give the driver’s seat back to Juan.

  He got in panting for breath—half from running and half from laughing himself almost to tears. When he got his breathing back to normal, he poured out what happened in colorful colloquial Puerto Rican Spanish.

  What he said was roughly, “It went just like you said, amigo. I made sure they were behind me. I caught a red-cap porter. I gave him your twenty dollars and handed him the box. I told him what to do. He took off down the tunnel to the streetcar line. Those two ran after the red-cap with the box. The red-cap slipped through the turnstile with his pass and started down the platform. Those two saw him running. They had no time to get the tickets, so they jumped the turnstile.”

  There was another pause while Juan couldn’t stifle a laugh. “They jumped the turnstile right into the hands of the MTA police. They’re still trying to explain it. I don’t think they speak very good English.”

  He had us both laughing. We gave each other a hug like two life long compadres. I rolled up a wad of bills and transferred them in a handshake in spite of his objection.

  I took back my suitcoat from Juan and rolled it around the violin. I ran into the back entrance to South Station to finish the business at hand.

  Once I had the real Strad tucked into its locker, I walked out the front door. The driver of car 3076 was still parked by the curb waiting for his buddies. The driver was getting nowhere in a debate in broken English with two of Boston’s finest over his right to park there.

  As I walked by car 3076, I couldn’t resist rapping on the front passenger window. His face went from flushed to a lively shade of red when he saw me. I motioned to him to roll down the window. He did. I said, “Your friends want you inside. I think they need bail money. Have a terrific day. Dosvedanya.”

  The afternoon was getting on, and a cool wind was blowing off Boston Harbor. I decided to walk among the afternoon pedestrian crowd to the Boston Common garage for my rental car. I slipped on my suitcoat. When I reached into my pocket for my keys, I found the roll of bills I had tried to give to my new amigo, Juan. If I ever needed a long taxi ride, I’d be sure to remember the name Juan Ramos.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  IT WAS ABOUT four o’clock when I reached the Boston Common underground garage to pick up my rental car. I sat in the car in the bowels of the garage long enough to make a few calls.

  The first was to Julie. She seemed more at ease since I’d spent that morning making peace with all the lawyers who had been making demands she couldn’t fulfill.

  It was short-lived. I asked her to make an airline reservation for a flight to Bucharest, Romania, that night—and to make it one-way, since I had no idea when I could use a return ticket.

  “Michael, are you off on another vacation? Those lawyers will be back taking bites out of my neck if they can’t reach you. How about a phone number I can give them?”

  I couldn’t imagine a worse idea than to let it be generally known that Julie knew where I’d be and how to reach me. I couldn’t tell Julie what might be waiting for me in Romania. Her motherly instincts would go into overdrive.

  “No need, Julie. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Is Mr. Devlin back from court yet?”

  “He just went to his office.”

  “Good. Would you transfer me?”

  “Right away. He’s even more worried about you than I am. Are you in some kind of danger, Michael?”

  “Danger? Julie, I’m a lawyer. We avoid danger like the plague.”

  * * *

  Mr. D. picked up the phone on the first half-ring. I brought him up to date on everything. Once more, I needed to have him and Billy Coyne in the same room with privacy. I asked him to contact Mr. Coyne and invite him to join us for a six-p.m. dinner. I’d make it an offer he couldn’t refuse.

  I called an old friend who managed a restaurant that is one of the most difficult reservations in Boston. My pal Ed Goodavage came through with a private table at what is now one of Boston’s most elite dining spots. It fills the building that was formerly the dour, vermin-infested dungeon known as the Charles Street jail. In its previous life, I’d had the displeasure on many occasions of interviewing clients there while they were waiting to be tried. I always thought that the sweetest sound on God’s earth was the sound of that metal door clanging behind me when I walked out of that pit of misery. Now it’s almost impossible to get a reservation to get into it. Appropriately enough, the name of the restaurant is “Clink.”

  On the way to the garage, I had walked up Summer Street for a quick dip into Macy’s—formerly Jordan Marsh—across the street from the never-to-be-forgotten Filene’s Basement. I needed to restock on items from socks to toothpaste and something to carry them in for the trip to Romania. Packing at home in Winthrop would clearly have invited whatever the Chinese and Russians would like to have planned for my evening.

  * * *

  At 6:00 p.m. on the button, Mr. Devlin, Billy Coyne, and I walked into Clink. I still got the shivers from memories of the old days, but they were short-lived. Manager Ed Goo
davage gave us a warm personal greeting and brought us up to what was formerly the third tier of jail cells overlooking the large prisoners’ common area of yesteryear. Our table inside one of the original cells set the stage appropriately.

  I knew that what I had to share with Mr. Coyne would be likely to derail his digestion, and therefore, probably mine as well. I decided to table the business agenda until Chef Daniel had a full opportunity to perform his leger-de-main in the open kitchen below.

  I needed to get Mr. Coyne on my side through a few disturbing disclosures. To maximize the odds, I had preordered his and Mr. Devlin’s choice of Jameson’s Irish Whiskey and my choice of Famous Grouse Scotch, to be at the table when we arrived. I also set up a running flow of Villa Maria Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Noir through the dinner. The East Coast oysters and lobster chowder, as a prelude to a monkfish osso bucco doused in veal broth, could have braced King Louis XVI for breaking news of the French Revolution.

  By the time Mr. Coyne sat back, after the chef’s signature desert of blood orange crème brulee, I thought he could handle anything I dropped on him.

  I started by laying out the conclusion that even I had trouble accepting. I had his full attention when I said, “I know that the Russian mafia and the Chinese tong are each separately enough to give you and Boston’s finest a plateful of trouble, but I can’t escape the conclusion that those two have joined forces. I’m certain they’re working together in going after that Stradivarius I told you about.”

  “The hell you say. Could never happen.”

  “I know. But it did happen. And the treasure it could lead to is so vast that, if they find it, the problems they’re creating now in this city will look like inconveniences.”

  I laid out the chain of events that had led me to that result. I refilled my wine glass in silence to let him digest the facts and come to his own conclusion.

  The more he wrestled to reach a different result, the more he settled into a solemn grouch deeper than I’d ever seen, even for Mr. Coyne.

  “So where does this leave you in all this, kid?”

  “Dead center between the two gangs. That’s why I need to be on the same page with the district attorney’s office. It’s become more complicated.”

  “Spell it out.”

  “First of all, that violin that’s somehow the key to finding the treasure—I have it. I’m the only one who knows where it is. That makes me the target of both gangs.”

  “So where is it?”

  “I knew you’d ask that. I can’t tell you.”

  He looked at Mr. Devlin. “Why the hell not?”

  I answered. “I know it goes against your nature, but you just have to trust me on this. It’s best for the both of you if I’m the only one who knows where that damn thing is.”

  “Not to be morbid, kid, but you don’t exactly lead a contemplative life. How many times have they come at you already? God forbid, suppose they get lucky the next time. Might it be wise to share the secret?”

  “I’ve taken care of that. I left a letter with Mr. Devlin. He’ll open it only if … it becomes necessary.”

  Mr. D. nodded. I had made that arrangement with him the first time I came back from Romania.

  Mr. Coyne just looked at me. At least he was not pressing that argument. I picked it up before he did. “There’s another complication. You told us that your office was getting a murder indictment against Mickey Chan.”

  “Which information was not to leave that table at the Marliave.”

  “It hasn’t. Except for his. I met with Mickey Chan. We’ve taken on his representation.”

  His sour expression deepened. He looked somewhere between shocked and angry. “How the hell can you do that? I told you about that indictment in confidence.”

  Mr. D. stepped in. “You told us there would be an indictment. You told us there was a witness. That’s all going to be known by the whole world after the arraignment. No harm, no foul.”

  “The hell, no harm. That was private information given in trust. You’ll get the three of us disbarred.”

  “Billy, calm down. It’s bad for your blood pressure.”

  “To hell with my blood pressure. I had your word.”

  “And you still have it. Michael, will you explain it before he self-ignites?”

  “Mr. Coyne, I had no intention of breaching our trust. The situation went from a simple problem to a disaster of major proportions in an instant. There was no time to contact you. I did nothing, said nothing, that you wouldn’t have authorized if we had had time to talk about it.”

  He settled a bit. His color went from scarlet to merely deep red. “I’m listening.”

  “When we talked the last time, you told me—in confidence, I agree—that you were going for an indictment against Mickey Chan. I might add, you were doing it against your professional judgment to satisfy the D. A.’s misguided political ambitions.”

  “That’s beside the point. It was said in confidence.”

  “Granted. At that time, we were talking about a Chinese tong murder of a member of their own gang. They eliminate one of their own. It happens. Not earth-shaking in terms of the city’s big picture. Do you remember that?”

  “I remember the whole damn conversation.”

  “Alright. After our conversation, I had a meeting with Mickey Chan in the poultry shop of Mr. Wan Leong on Tyler Street. Mickey Chan was there and Danny Liu, the son of the murdered man. They added pieces to the puzzle that pushed this thing to a level that could turn into an international crisis.”

  Mr. Coyne still had doubt in his eyes, but I clearly had his attention. I kept the ball rolling. “I found out that Mr. Liu was more than the head of the Chinese Merchants Association. He was a big shot in the tong. That raised the ante. It went higher. I found out that even the Boston tong is just a puppet. This treasure hunt for the violin is directed by one of the major triads in Hong Kong. Then add this. Mr. Liu, it turns out, was double-crossing both the tong and the triad. He was using me as part of it when he sent me to Romania to pick up the violin. This thing jumped from a little treasure-hunting adventure to a shake-up in the international criminal balance of power—a major shake-up, if we believe what I was told about the extent of the treasure. And I do believe it.”

  “I still see a violation of trust …”

  “There’s more. The night I was to meet the murdered man, Mr. Liu, at the swan-boat pond in the Public Garden, he and I were the only ones who knew about the meeting. So I thought. All of a sudden, there’s a big-time assassin sent by the Russian mafia to blow me away. If Mickey Chan hadn’t knocked me out of the way of a bullet, we wouldn’t be having this elegant dinner. I didn’t put it together completely then, but it was clear when I met with Mickey Chan that this was not just a gang eliminating one of its thugs. This was at least two major international criminal organizations, the Russians and the Chinese, working together—for the first time—to capture a stash of treasure that could double, triple their power to make the world suffer. They could finance their drug trade, human trafficking, illegal arms sales, cyber-crime, all of it on a scale we can’t even contemplate.”

  I could see that he was still having trouble reaching the conclusion he least wanted to accept. I drove in the last nail I had. “There was a repeat performance this morning. I had scheduled a secret meeting with the president of the Chinese Bank of Chinatown. Sure enough, the Russian thugs showed up to make another play for the violin—and possibly me with it. I think I’d be playing loose with my life if I didn’t accept the fact that the Russians and the tong are working together.”

  I let him fit the pieces together while I refilled all three glasses with Villa Maria. The glasses sat there ignored while he wrestled with what seemed to me an inescapable conclusion. He finally looked me in the eye and came back to an issue he could work with more easily.

  “What does all this have to do with your representing Mickey Chan?”

  “I offered to represent Mickey Chan when we met t
his morning because I could see he was being framed by the tong. Mr. Devlin agreed. I’m sure now that it’s all connected to this scramble for the violin and the treasure. You know yourself you’ve got a questionable, scared witness in Ming Tan. Here’s another piece of breaking news. Ming Tan has currently gone missing, undoubtedly at the hands of the tong.”

  I could see in his face that that was a jolt. I sensed a shift in his thinking. I fired one more round. “It comes down to this. I think I’m the only one on the side of the good guys who sees most of the total picture here. I may need Mickey Chan alive and free to move to be able to defuse this bombshell before it explodes on all of us.”

  Mr. Coyne looked as if the stakes in the game were beginning to sink in. He looked over at Mr. D. “This kid gives me a new headache every time I see him, Lex.”

  “He’s no kid, Billy. You should be thanking God that he has the courage to play this game out—for us all. I’d pull him out of this whole business in an instant, but he follows his own conscience. Listen to him.”

  Mr. Coyne was beginning to settle back to cool rationality, judging by his color. He looked back at me without the fire in his eyes. “What do you want from me?”

  “First, I’ll tell you what I can do for you. The time will come when I’ll walk Mickey Chan right into your office to turn himself in.”

  “When?”

  “When it’s safe. If I did it today, you’d run him through an arraignment and lock him up on a murder charge. There’d be no bail. He’d be a sitting duck. There isn’t a lockup in this state where the tong or the Russians couldn’t get at him to kill him. I need him alive, where I can reach him when I need him.”

  “Then you do know where he is?”

  “No, I don’t. I have no idea.”

  “But you can get word to him.”

  “When I need to.”

  He gave it a minute to let the pieces fall further together. “So what do you want from me? I assume this dinner is not totally free of charge.”

  I leaned in and spoke softly. “Two things. First, let up on the manhunt for Mickey Chan. For the time being. He and I both have enough wolves on our tails. You can stall the madam prosecutor for a few days.”