High Stakes

by John F. Dobbyn

  “Maybe. What else?”

  “I need you to be fully informed and ready to move in when the time comes. I’ll feed you everything I learn.” “And what will you be doing?”

  “I leave for Romania tonight. I think the key to this whole thing is unraveling the code to the location of that treasure. And that’s tied to that violin. I need to trace it back to whoever owned it before I picked it up. Somewhere up the line, there’s someone who can interpret the code.”

  “If so, why haven’t they taken the treasure themselves?”

  “Mr. Coyne, you have an instinct for the jugular. That’s one of about a hundred questions I need to have answered. I’ll be in touch.”

  * * *

  My next to last cell phone call after boarding the 9:00 p.m. Lufthansa flight before taking off for Otopeni International Airport in Bucharest was to Terry. I owed her an honest outline of what I had ahead of me and why. I could practically hear her heart racing at the prospect, but her voice conveyed love and support.

  Yet one more time, I vowed to myself that I’d never put her in that situation again. I couldn’t speak that vow out loud, because it would echo the vow I’d made before I became ensnared in this mess. How could I promise her that it would never happen again?

  My last call was to George. I chalked his cryptic, clipped tone up to a weak cell phone connection. He gave me two addresses on the outskirts of the city of Bucharest. I copied down both.

  “What are these, George?”

  “The first is the Hotel Cisingiu on Regina Elisabeta Boulevard. You have a reservation.”

  “In what name?”

  “Your own. They’ll need to see your passport.”

  “Okay. What’s the second? Is that the rest home? Is that where I find Mr. Oresciu?”

  His second answer was more clipped and muted than the first. “No.”

  “What do you mean, ‘No’?”

  “Michael, I’m sorry. I have no idea what you’ll be walking into. Mr. Oresciu’s been taken.”

  “What does that mean? By whom?

  “I don’t know.”

  “Taken where?”

  “Damn it. I don’t know. They—whoever they are—sent me a message. You’re to go to that second address tomorrow night. Ten o’clock. It’s about a block from your hotel.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a club, a nightclub. It’s called the Kristal Glam Club. It’s near two universities. It’ll be crowded, noisy.”

  “Who do I look for?”

  “You don’t. Just go there. They’ll approach you.”

  I had to catch my breath. Just once in all this insanity I’d have welcomed a plan that flowed smoothly. For better or worse, clearly this was not going to be it.

  “Do we have anyone on our side there?”

  “I’ll see what I can do. One more time. Be careful.”

  It struck me that the most careful thing I could do would be to run off that plane at a pace that would leave skid marks before the doors were sealed shut, pick up Terry, and transfer my entire practice to Vermont.

  Since that was not in the cards, I settled into seat 5A, buckled my seat belt, and said a deep prayer.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHECK-IN AT THE four-plus-star Hotel Cisingiu on Boulevard Regina Elisabeta in Bucharest was smooth, warm, welcoming, and decidedly unthreatening. I was tempted to take it as a good omen, but I was becoming leery of misreading omens.

  I used the afternoon to scout out the area around the Kristal Glam Club, a few doors down the mid-city boulevard from the hotel. The club was an easy walk from the University of Bucharest and the Academy of Economic Studies. That explained it. I had done enough website research to know that I’d be walking that night into the club with the highest draw of college types in the city.

  I found a shop for the kind of clothes that would damp down the suit-and-tie regimen of a Boston trial lawyer. I wanted to be spotted by the people I was there to contact without looking like a duck in a swan pond to everyone else.

  I left a wake-up call with the hotel desk-clerk for nine p.m. and caught a few hours of make-up sleep. By ten that night, I was up, dressed, and ready to pass as a grad student, Bucharest style.

  Before cruising into a foreign club for a rendezvous with people I only knew as the thugs who would brutally beat and kidnap an elderly violin maker, I needed some down-home fortification for both body and spirit. Two Big Macs and a super-sized order of fries at the McDonald’s across from the hotel filled the bill nicely.

  * * *

  The Kristal Glam Club was precisely the magnet it was reputed to be. There was a line of late-teens to mid-twenties waiting to be cleared for entry by one gargantuan sentry at the door. Except for the particular language of the chatter, the entire line could have been cast from any urban college in America.

  It took me about twenty minutes in line to reach the checkpoint. I could feel the eyes of the sentry giving this American a scan like an MRI. I was also scanning him for any sign that I was expected. None whatsoever.

  Passing through that door was a jolting reminder of how many years it had been since criminal defense work had left time to check into the fads and fashions of club life in Boston. My first broad scan of the elbow-to-elbow expanse of humanity, grinding and bouncing in synch with the numbing pulsations of electronic sound waves, was like watching a wheat field in a hurricane. Half a football field across the span of heads was a platform on which a slim gent in his own world of gyrations was engrossed in fingering the knobs of a rack of electronic amplification that could equal the studio of Boston’s WBZ.

  Finding an entry point into the wheat field was only the first problem. Once in, where in hell should I head to maximize discoverability by the one person in all of that morass I needed to contact?

  For lack of a plan, I followed my first inclination. When in doubt, start where they serve the drinks. I slid into the first crack in the crowd and ducked elbows and knees in an erratic path toward the wall-length bar to the right. My evasive, defensive movements must have given the impression of dancing, because except for the occasional vague smile, there was not one glimmer of notice, much less recognition or contact. And contact was the sole object of the game.

  I managed to find a stationary landing spot a couple of rows from the bar. Within about ten minutes, I was actually leaning on solid wood and willing eye contact with any of the three flying bartenders. Bottles of unfamiliar brands were being juggled ala the fifteen-year-old American film Coyote Ugly. Orders from my sardine-packed bar-mates were being hurled above the pulsing din of the music. They were somehow being heard and filled by the performing bartenders.

  It took less than thirty seconds to realize two things. First, even if I caught the fleeting glance of a bartender, I would have no notion of what the options were to order. Every bottle I could make out was labeled in Romanian. Secondly, and infinitely larger on the scale of concerns, anyone trying to make actual contact with me in that human boom-box would likely be whistling in the wind.

  I came to a conclusion. I’d give it ten more minutes before gyrating my way back though the wheat maze to the fresh, still, silent air on the other side of that door. I’d call George, whatever the hell time it was in Boston, and tell him to come up with a plan that would touch base with reality—and do it before I executed part three of my plan, which was to book the next thing flying back to Boston.

  My countdown got as far as seven minutes. It finally penetrated my awareness that one aspect of the endless pounding pulsations was a rapping on my shoulder from behind. I twisted around, expecting to see the ice-cold eyes of some Russian mob contact man. I was both disappointed and, truth be told, relieved when I followed the tapping hand, down the arm to a face. It was lit with a smile as warm as an outbreak of spring sunshine. The girl, about nineteen, cute and perky as a commercial for Pepsi, was mouthing something—probably in Romanian—that I couldn’t catch. I smiled back and tapped my ear to signal “No comprendo.
”

  The boy holding her hand beside her smiled and made eye contact. He leaned forward close to my ear. “You look American. First time in club here?”

  “It’s that obvious?”

  His grin broadened. He yelled back, “Yes. Pretty much.”

  The girl tapped my shoulder again and motioned to me to bend down. I did. She yelled close to my ear, “It won’t work that way. You’ll never get a drink.”

  I raised my hands in my best, “Then how?” gesture.

  She gave me a signal I finally interpreted as “push to the side.” I did. It opened a tiny path to the bar. The boy beside her, who obviously understood the plan, took her by the waist and propped her up to be sitting on the bar. That caught the eye of the nearest bartender. Within seconds she was yelling something in his direction. The bartender nodded. The boy lifted her back down beside me.

  She had me laughing now. “I’ll be sure to try that next time.”

  The boy leaned over, laughing too. “It won’t work so well for you. It only works for Irina. She’s prettier than both of us.”

  Within a few seconds, the bartender was handing me a glass with a good four fingers of amber liquid over ice.

  My two interpreters were each grinning with the light of good-deed doers. They both nodded and said with gusto, “Sanatate buna!”

  I gave a questioning look. The girl, Irina, cupped her hand to her mouth and said, “It means ‘Good health.’”

  That brought a warm smile on my part. I replied with a grateful nod to them both and a hearty Irish, “Slante!”

  The emptiness I had felt at the obvious failure of my primary mission was suddenly all but drowned in a warm feeling of actual contact with two friendly members of the human race at the opposite side of the earth. I toasted the commonality between us with a deep sip of the amber liquid.

  In that one instant, the warmth of the moment turned as cold as the ice in my glass. It was replaced by the jolting realization that, like it or not, my mission was about to be accomplished. Unlikely as it seemed, that first taste told me that those two warm, smiling young faces were my contact with the world of Russian thugs. The liquid in my glass was unmistakably a message—my personal favorite—Famous Grouse Scotch.

  I let the familiar slight burn of the Grouse work its way into every corner of my throat. When I looked back at my teenage benefactors, the warm smiles were gone. Only the direct eye contact remained. Irina spoke first in words I could read on her lips. “Follow me.”

  She took the path of least resistance around the three layers of students in front of the bar and then walked close to the wall. We were moving away from the entrance door and around the hall toward the music platform. I could feel myself being sucked further and further away from an escape route and deeper into God only knew what. At least the mission was back on track.

  There was a door behind the stage. The boy was gone, but Irina led me through it. As soon as I passed to the outside, I felt the grip of powerful arms around my chest. The hands moved over every inch of my upper body. I felt a shoe kick out on the inside of my left foot. I nearly toppled, but I caught myself in a spread position that allowed the search to be completed.

  There was a black automobile in the alleyway in front of me. Its back door stood open. When the hands finished the full tour of my body, there was a solid nudge in my back to start me toward the open door. With little choice, I started to walk. Just before I got into the car, Irina ran up beside me. She looked very young and vulnerable. Her voice was soft.

  “I’m sorry. I had to. I hope you’ll be alright.”

  I had no anger. I had no answer either. She gave me a brief hug. The goon behind us grabbed her arm and flung her like a twig back against the wall. In almost the same motion he gave me a stabbing jolt in the back that sent me moving quickly into the open door of the car.

  I was alone in the back seat. I heard the click of the lock on the doors. The car picked up speed down the alley.

  The darkened glass of the back-seat windows together with the black of night made it impossible to see anything but random lights flying by. When the lights diminished, we picked up more speed. I knew we were out of city limits. Another half hour and we made a sharp turn to the right onto a long gravel road.

  Then the car stopped in a skid. The door was yanked open. A hand like a bear claw reached in to grab me by the arm. I figured I had two choices: surrender myself up to whatever these clowns had in mind, or fight the whole process.

  I chose a middle ground. I smacked the back of the hand with every ounce of leverage I could muster. The hand pulled back out of instinct. I used the moment of surprise to get myself out of the car as if it were my choice. I reacted to the brief moment of shock on the face of the goon in front of me. “Keep your damn hands off of me!”

  We were standing in front of the front door of what looked like an old farmhouse. There were lights inside. I chose to act as if I had been the beneficiary of an invitation—crude as it was. I started to march up to the front door.

  Then the charade ended. I felt a smack on the back of my head that erased any notion that I was in charge of my fate. The bear claw grabbed my shoulder with a grip that repaid the smack I’d given his hand. My feet hardly touched the ground as I was marched up to the front door.

  I was frozen in the pain of the goon’s grip, when the door opened. We were caught in the light from the inside. A voice from a figure in the doorway in front of me cut through the pain.

  “Leonid! Gently! This man is our guest.”

  The grip fell away. Anger and residual pain brought the words out of me. “Yeah, Leonid. Get your damn hands off of me! You touch me one more time, and I’ll take you apart.”

  I actually said that, just that way. Of course, it was with the sincere prayer that Leonid did not speak that much English.

  In the presence of the rather short man at the door, probably in his fifties, Leonid backed off. The man smiled benignly and reached out a hand as if to welcome me in. As I passed him, he said in a whisper, “A word of caution, Mr. Knight. I wouldn’t push Leonid any further. He has a certain flash temper. Occasionally he does something rash in spite of my orders.”

  My host was putting a velvet glove on a clear threat. The decision to follow his advice seemed wise.

  He led me into what would be called a parlor in that setting. I noticed that the furniture and pieces of rustic art in the room were probably of the same vintage as the farmhouse, but well kept, and possibly, to my untrained eye, the kind that pop eyes on Antiques Roadshow. For some reason I made note of that. I also noted that three more goons out of the same mold as Leonid were stationed around the room.

  “Please sit down, Mr. Knight. I hope you’ll forgive the … drama with which Leonid … invited you here. He’s impetuous. And we have serious business here, you and I.”

  “Leonid is a goon, Mr….?”

  “I think names don’t matter for our business.”

  “And yet you know mine.”

  He smiled and nodded. “You may call me ‘Boris.’ You were saying … Michael, if I may be familiar.”

  “You may. And if I may, your Leonid is a goon. I was basically kidnapped. I’d like to be clear. Am I here to do business? You know, I do for you, you do for me. Or am I your prisoner?”

  He shrugged. “Does it matter?”

  “It does to me. You’ll find I react differently to the two situations.”

  He smiled again, which meant nothing. “Let me explain why you’re here. No pretenses. Cards on the table, as you like to say.”

  That was the second subtle hint that forced me to wonder how much they actually knew about me, and of more concern, about Terry. The Famous Grouse at the Kristal Glam was the first eye-opener. He was also right about a phrase I tend to use. I tried not to react.

  “Definitely … Boris. Cards on the table.”

  He indicated a seat in front of the crackling fireplace. I sat while he walked to a small wagon of bottles. “Would
you prefer vodka, or perhaps tuica. I believe you’ve tried it.” Another jab of familiarity to make it clear that he knew about my meetings with George. “Perhaps your Famous Grouse?”

  “I’ll settle for an honest discussion. Let’s talk about why I’m here?”

  He sat opposite me. His tone became less casual. “I think you know why you’re here. I won’t underestimate your understanding of these matters. You’d do well not to underestimate mine. To be brief. You have an object. You’ve so far eluded our efforts to relieve you of it. Never mind. There’s yet another piece to the puzzle. Yes?”

  “And that would be?”

  He smiled without warmth. “Is there a need to be coy, Mr. Knight? There is very little that you’ve said or done in the last week that I couldn’t relate to you. Shall we not waste each other’s time?”

  Again, the first stab of concern was whether his knowledge included Terry’s relocation. I needed to gain some foothold of control.

  “Agreed. But let me be clear about something you may not know. Cards on the table, right? We’re talking about some treasure that goes back five or six hundred years, that may not even exist. I was sent blind on a goose chase for a violin that may or may not have some kind of code. This business has consumed my life since I was sucked into it. Hear this. I want just one thing. I want out. Frankly, I don’t give a damn which of you three blights on the earth go after it, or get it.”

  He ignored my reference to “blights.”

  “Yes. It would seem so simple. You give us the violin and walk away. And yet, it’s not quite that simple, is it? When you first came to Romania, you met a violin maker, Mr. Oresciu. He holds the key to the code in the violin. Or he knows who does.”

  “And he, like me, is your prisoner. Correct?”

  “Mmm. I dislike the word ‘prisoner.’”

  “So do I. But if I headed for that door, I assume I’d be reacquainted with Leonid.”