High Stakes

by John F. Dobbyn

  * * *

  It was about six o’clock. I called my secretary, Julie, at home. Before she hit me with a litany of lawyers’ calls that I knew I had no time to return, I asked her to book me a flight the next day to the Henri Coanda Airport just outside of Ploiesti.

  Her response: “Why don’t you just move to Romania and commute back here?”

  “Because I think this is the last one.”

  “Good. You have clients that are—”

  “No problem, Julie. Mr. Devlin said he’d step in for me. I’m sure the clients will think they’ve struck gold when he returns their calls.”

  “And is this one way or round trip?”

  “One way. It depends on a lot of ifs. But I need two tickets.”

  With another dose of optimism, I gave her the name of the other passenger for booking purposes. “One last thing. How’re you and Piper getting along?”

  “Who’s Piper? I don’t know any Piper. I think you’ll have to get yourself another dog. The only Piper I know won’t want to leave me.”

  “You’re a gem, Julie. I won’t forget what you’re doing for us.”

  “Just come back in one piece.”

  * * *

  I was sitting in the parking lot of the Continental Restaurant on Route 1 at quarter of nine. It was apparently a light night for business. There were only a few other cars in the lot.

  I arrived with nerves on edge, but the first drop of perspiration didn’t flow until ten minutes later. By the time my watch said one minute to nine, I was jumping out of my skin.

  Just as the second hand was straight up, I saw a car pull into the lot. There were four people in the car. I walked out to the center of the lot to be clearly visible. The car slowly headed in my direction. It was just twenty feet away when my heart rate shot up. I recognized Harry at the wheel. He had one Chinese man and two young children in the car. When they came closer, I recognized Mr. Tan.

  Harry pulled up beside me and opened the window. I smiled and nodded to the whole crew. Harry stepped out of the car for a quick consult.

  “How’d it go?” I asked.

  “Good on this end. Mr. Tan will go along with anything. He’s only focused on seeing his wife again.”

  “Okay. That’s step one. The next two are the big ones.”

  The next five-minute wait took ten years off of my life. When I saw a black Lincoln pull into the lot, my breath stopped. It slowed to a stop about forty feet away in a dark corner. I said, “You wait here, Harry.”

  I started walking toward the Lincoln. All the lights were off. When I was ten feet from it, the back door opened. A small figure got out and stood by the door. When I got close to the figure, I took my first breath. I saw the fear-filled face of Ming Tan.

  I took her hand. “It’s alright, Mrs. Tan. Your husband’s here. And your children.”

  She didn’t speak, but tears began flowing. I began to lead her away from the car when a voice from the back seat stopped me. I couldn’t see a face in the dark, but I recognized the voice of the fat, pockmarked man I had seen at Mr. Leong’s poultry shop. “First you owe your part of the bargain. You give me violin before you take the woman.”

  I thought of the violin ten miles away in a South Station locker. “I will do exactly what I said I’d do before the sun comes up in the morning. That’s a promise.”

  “You’ll do it now—or the girl does not leave.”

  His words were punctuated by what sounded like a handgun cocking.

  I looked at the terrified face of Mrs. Tan. I could hear Mr. Tan outside of Harry’s car yelling, pleading for his wife to come to him.

  I cannot recall another moment in my life when my heart was so torn in two. I’d played my last card. I was out of tricks. Out of answers. I had no moves left. I was overcome with a feeling of responsibility and uselessness.

  I was in limbo for five of the longest seconds in history. I could only pray—mostly for forgiveness for getting these people into this paralyzing situation.

  I was so deep in borderline panic that I could barely grasp what happened. The literal blackness of that corner was suddenly ablaze with enough light to make a movie. The light was coming from three cars swooping in from three directions. A voice was blaring orders for everyone to freeze. The voice identified the men in the cars as federal marshals. It ordered the three men in the Lincoln, now awash in blinding light, to show their hands and get out of the car.

  I was back in the game. I still had Mrs. Tan’s hand. I pulled her at a dead run in the direction of Harry’s car. We ran until I let her go into the arms of Mr. Tan. Their children ran to the two of them. The four of them looked like one large person.

  I looked back at the scene in the corner of the lot. I recognized the pockmarked man and two other tong thugs in handcuffs. They were being led to the flashing cars by men I recognized as U.S. marshals.

  By the time I looked back, another car, a black SUV, had pulled up beside Harry’s car. I recognized Ben Styles, the Massachusetts U. S. Attorney. Two U. S. marshals were escorting the Tan family back to the SUV. I noticed Billy Coyne in his own car off to the right watching the whole show from the side.

  I ran to his car. “Mr. Coyne. You came through. Come over here. Quick.”

  I half pulled him to the side of the SUV where Mrs. Tan was sitting. I called Harry over to translate.

  “Harry, tell Mrs. Tan that she’s completely safe from the tong. They’ll never hurt her or her family again. Go ahead.”

  There was an exchange between Harry and Mrs. Tan in Chinese. She was nodding in tears. I took hold of Harry’s arm. I said, “Now, Harry. Ask Mrs. Tan if the one who killed Mr. Liu was Mickey Chan. Ask her right now. Mr. Coyne, listen to this.”

  Harry asked a question in Chinese. Mrs. Tan was sobbing in gasps, but she was also strongly shaking her head. Words were pouring out in Chinese.

  Harry turned to Mr. Coyne and me. “She said the tong forced her to say it. They threatened to kill her husband and children. It was not Mickey Chan.”

  “Harry, ask her if she knows who did commit the murder. Can she identify him?”

  He asked, and the words poured out again. Harry translated. “She says she can. She heard them talking about it while they held her captive. She can identify the man who did it and the ones who ordered the murder.”

  I turned to Mr. Coyne. “You can take it from here. I’ll bet the feds will cooperate. You’ll both have a star witness.”

  “I’ll admit it. You were right … Knight. The U.S. Attorney bought into it. The feds are taking the Tan family into witness protection right now.”

  “You did well yourself, Mr. Coyne. But before you move. I need a promise. Tomorrow morning, I want to meet you in the judge’s chambers. I need a fast motion to dismiss the indictment against Mickey Chan.”

  “I’ll take care of it tomorrow.”

  “It has to be first thing tomorrow morning. Nine o’clock. When the judge gets in. I have a reason. I’ll have Mickey Chan in the courtroom.”

  He looked at me. “So now am I taking orders from you?”

  “Yes. Just this once. And thanks for calling me ‘Knight.’”

  “You earned it … kid.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  I WAS CLOSE to total depletion when I drove out of the Continental Restaurant lot, but I had one last mile to go before I slept. I’d promised Mr. Chang, the banker, that if he delivered Mrs. Tan, I’d put the Strad violin within his reach. I took the promise literally.

  I left Harry with one last request—have Mickey Chan outside the judge’s courtroom by nine in the morning.

  * * *

  My first stop was the South Station locker for the Strad. I drove from there to Boston Sympathy Hall. The old gentleman at the musicians’ entrance let me in when I showed him what I was delivering.

  The orchestra under Andris Nelsons was into the second movement of Beethoven’s Eroica. I stayed to its completion and joined in the standing and prolonged ovation. The orc
hestra took a break to reset the stage between works. I caught the eye of the concert master, Lee Tang, from the left wing of the stage. I held up the Strad. He was at my side in four seconds.

  I handed it to him gently. He received it as if the Mona Lisa were passing between us. The awesome joy in his face matched the sense of unburdening relief in my heart. It felt as if, after a six-century journey, the Stradivarius had finally found its true home.

  Before leaving, I bought a ticket to the next evening’s performance of the orchestra. I put it in an envelope with a written message addressed to Mr. Chang at his bank. I dropped it off at a twenty-four-hour service to be delivered first thing in the morning. The note said: “Mr. Chang; I promised to put the violin within your reach. This ticket will put you in the front row center for tonight’s performance. You will be twenty feet from the Stradivarius in the hands of Concert Master Tang. I assume this makes us square. A distinct pleasure doing business with you. Your most humble and obedient, Michael Knight.”

  I figured that if that form of delivery didn’t suit his complete pleasure, by the time murder, kidnapping, extortion, RICO, and other indictments started pouring out of the federal and state grand juries, based on the testimony of Ming Tan and that of any tong thugs the prosecutor managed to flip, the Boston tong house of cards would be tumbling down, all the way up to Chang’s level. The violin would be the least of his concerns.

  * * *

  At 9:00 a.m. sharp the next morning, the judge’s docket clerk showed the three of us—Billy Coyne, Mickey Chan, and me—into Judge Ev Albert’s chambers off her courtroom. The judge and I had both started our legal careers in the U.S. Attorney’s office as prosecutors. We’d been friends ever since. She granted the favor of scheduling this hearing before the start of her usual courtroom day.

  I let Mr. Coyne make the formal motion to dismiss the indictment and explain the background. I thought it better coming from him.

  Judge Albert looked to me. “Any objection to the motion, Mr. Knight?”

  “Absolutely none, Your Honor.”

  “I’d think not. It’s granted. Let’s do this in open court.”

  With the formalities in order, I started walking Mickey down the steps of the courthouse. I stopped him halfway down.

  “Where do you go from here, Mickey? I get the idea your former employers would be delighted to slice you up for stir-fry.”

  His silence said that his options were severely limited.

  “Let me suggest something. I could use your help. It would involve traveling. This might not be a bad time for you to get out of Chinatown.”

  “So it seems. What did you have in mind?”

  “Have you ever been to Romania?”

  * * *

  The second airline ticket and the second room at the Prahova Hotel in Ploiesti had been for Mickey. My hopeful presumption that he’d go along was not unfounded. He signed on without hesitation and without further explanation of the plan. His travels to his family home in China had caused him to keep his passport up to date. The last hurdle to his leaving the country had been his indictment for murder. That was now cleared in time for an early afternoon flight to Ploiesti, Romania.

  * * *

  The following morning, Mickey and I met at eight a.m. for breakfast in the Piccolo Giardino Restaurant of our hotel in Ploiesti. George was already at the table.

  We fine-tuned the day’s plan over a Romanian breakfast of omelet of telemea—sheep’s milk cheese, and zacusca—eggplant and pepper spread on franzela—Romanian bread. Three or four cups of super-charged Romanian coffee and we were fueled for whatever the day required.

  We drove in one rented pickup truck with all of the supplies George had mustered together the previous day under a blanketing tarp. It was a twenty-minute ride to the ancient town of Targsor. As we approached, George pointed out the outline of the shell that had been the monastery of Targsor, erected and endowed by Vlad, Dracula.

  The closer we came to it, the faster my heart beat, undoubtedly in synch with those of George, and even the newcomer to the adventure, Mickey.

  As we drove close to the empty monastery, I was becoming awed to be in the presence of an actual physical piece of the history of the man who had been nothing more to me than a gripping legend. For the first time, he took on a reality that I could almost touch.

  We had the area to ourselves. As George drove us around the deserted, still imposing structure, the tension continued to climb.

  “Where do we find it, George?”

  “Patience. It’ll wait for us. We’re getting there.”

  Within seconds, George pulled off the road and headed toward a massive stone hill on the south side of the building. He drove in among a stand of trees and stopped in front of an uninviting cluster of thickly grown bushes obscuring a rock face of the hill.

  “Are you sure? There’s nothing here.”

  “And so it’s been for hundreds of years. That’s the spot my guide pointed out to me when I was over here a couple of years ago. It’s through that bramble bush. That’s the entrance to the catacombs of the fifteenth-century monks.”

  “Did you try to get through all this clutter when you were here before?”

  “No. No reason then. By the look of it, no one else has either. Grab some of those cutters on the back of the truck. Let’s get to work.”

  The sun blazed on our heads and backs as the three of us sliced and hacked a pathway through thick bushes. It was nearly eleven when the cleared path opened onto a solid rock wall fronted by a high pile of fragmented stones.

  George handed us each a pair of leather gloves. “Now we work by hand. Let’s go.”

  “Shall we take a break? We want to live to see what’s in there.”

  “Break if you wish. I couldn’t rest now if my arms were falling off.”

  If George in his fifties could press on, there’d be no rest for any of us. The two of us followed George in lifting and throwing rocks off to both sides.

  It was another half hour of sweat before George removed a large stone that opened up a small hole into the black void that lay behind it. With the breath we had left, we gasped.

  I brought us a round of water from the truck to fuel us for the final lap. We doubled our pace of lifting and throwing rocks. It was another half hour before we had opened a hole large enough for a man to slip through.

  We stood back as if we were mentally drawing straws for the first man in.

  “The honor should be yours, George. I’m right behind you.”

  We took battery lanterns from the truck and squeezed through the entrance in that order, with Mickey in third place. In spite of the opening to the outside, there was a stale, musty smell of unmoving air. My first relief was that the arid emptiness was unlikely to sustain the life of spiders, snakes, scorpions, or any Indiana Jones types of surprises.

  The top of the narrow cave was just high enough to allow us to walk semi-upright with a fair bend of the back. I called to George in the lead. “Those monks must have been little, short guys.”

  I got a quick response in a whisper. “Keep it quiet. Look at the loose gravel falling on the sides here. This tunnel could cave in in a second.”

  I noticed that just my words had shaken loose rivers of dry dust and small stones on the sides of the tunnel. Even a mild case of claustrophobia was enough to suggest the possibility of an entombing cave-in. That ended the conversation.

  George was careful to walk like he was on eggshells. The thought crossed my mind that if we came to the end of a dry, dusty, and totally empty cave, after the travails of the past three weeks, Prince Dracula would be somewhere laughing his butt off.

  The air was becoming increasingly stale-smelling as we rounded one bend after another. Every time we rounded a bend, and our lantern light filled an empty chamber, there was a collective groan from the three of us.

  After the fourth heart-dropping disappointment, the adrenalin that propelled our spirits into the cave was running low. George s
topped for a breath. He looked back at me. His voice was a whisper. “Keep heart, Michael. There’s more tunnel. Yogi Berra was right.”

  “You mean, ‘It isn’t over till it’s over.’”

  “Wisely spoken. Onward?”

  My heart was saying, “No. I don’t want to see the end of this thing with no pot of gold.” I forced my mouth to whisper, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing important. Let’s do it.”

  George picked up the slow, agonizing pace. My mind was morphing from the expectation of an instantaneous “Eureka!” to an increasing desire just to ease the pain of keeping an arched back. Yet another heart-dropping turn of a corner left me with a full mind-consuming desire to just stretch out flat on the ground—if only for a minute.

  I must have drifted into a semi-hypnotic focus on that last thought. I was looking straight down at the next step I was forcing my foot to take. The first shock was bumping headlong into the unyielding back of George. The second was the slow realization that George was frozen in position, just halfway around the next right-angle bend in the narrow path.

  “What the hell, George? … What? … Damn it, speak!”

  His low whisper was not to me. “My God in heaven. My dear God in heaven.”

  “George, I hate to interrupt a prayer, but I’m dying back here. Is it good or bad? Can you move?”

  I doubt that he even heard my words. He never answered, but his body began slowly moving around the bend. He must have raised his lantern. The chamber ahead became filled with light.

  I took a deep breath and rounded the bend. The stabbing pain in my back and the constant dread of being buried alive were suddenly blown totally out of my consciousness. I’m sure my jaw hung agape. Words flowed through my mind, but I couldn’t get them past my tongue.

  The first impression I can recall was of being nearly blinded by a million tiny reflected beams of light in colors ranging from ruby-red to cobalt blue and every shade in between. When my eyes adjusted, I realized that I was looking into a chamber filled with enough precious gems to coat the walls of a house. When my mind got around that reality, I was able to distinguish uncountable sculptures, candelabra, art objects of every shape and design that could only be of the very purest solid gold. When Shakespeare wrote, “All that glitters is not gold,” he was clearly not standing where we were.