High Stakes

by John F. Dobbyn

  In the back of my mind, I recalled George’s telling me that Dracula had not only spent years draining wealth out of the subjects of his own country, he had also received a steady flow of tribute in magnificent gifts from powerful rulers as far away as Venice and Istanbul. Those were just words when George had spoken them. To see those words take physical form in that cave was to be … The only word that comes close is dumbfounded.

  The only sound in that tomb of everything the world values was a faint ringing in my ears. I knew it was just the overload on strained nerves. Our eyes were drawn beyond our control from one gleaming object molded in solid gold or encrusted with pristine gems to another, and to another, and to another, and to another.

  The next realization was that this eye-blitz of sculpted art was surrounded by chest upon chest of coins, also of the purest gold and imprinted with the crest of the dragon.

  Time was frozen. Whether it was a minute, an hour, who knows how long, we finally recaptured control of our eyes. George and I looked numbly at each other. His face was drained of color, as probably was mine. What I read in his eyes was that he was as much in the grip of the overwhelming reality as I was. We communicated silently with nothing but the incredulous expressions on our faces.

  When I looked back at Mickey, who I assumed had not been as mentally prepared as George and I thought we were, I could see our stunned struggle with disbelief reflected many times over in his eyes.

  George finally broke the silence with a whisper. “Michael, forgive me. I have to ask this. I need the truth as never before. Are you still committed to the plan? It’s one thing to commit yourself when this is just a dream.” He held his hands out. “Now it’s real. Does all of this bring out … a different side in you? It would in most men.”

  I think one would have to see what we were looking at to understand the question. It was perfectly clear to me.

  I spoke back in a whisper, but George caught the depth of my words. “There is no different side, George. Only one side. I told you and the Russians and the Chinese what I want out of this. I want my life back. Nothing more. You and I agreed on something. That doesn’t change.”

  We both looked at Mickey. He knew what we were asking. He just shook his head. “You gave me back my life, Mr. Knight. If you consider us even at the end of this, I came out ahead.”

  I looked at George. He nodded. I knew he meant that we wouldn’t have to be looking over our shoulders for Mickey. I agreed.

  For just that moment, I think the three of us found something in the others and in ourselves that outweighed everything else in that chamber. We shared it silently. It didn’t need saying.

  George broke the silence with a low whisper. “Then we have work to do.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  MY FIRST CALL when we arrived back at the hotel in Ploiesti was to Mr. Lao, the man in the silk suit I met at the large-stakes gambling den in Chinatown. The older man from the Hong Kong triad with whom I’d actually dealt had said that I could reach him at any time through Mr. Lao.

  The older man had apparently left orders. Thirty seconds after I gave my name, I recognized the older man’s voice on the line.

  “I’m fulfilling my promise.”

  “As I fully anticipated. I’m listening.”

  Without belaboring the mind-bending extent of the treasure, I simply announced that it did exist. I’d seen it. As promised, I was contacting him before I touched it myself.

  He pressed me for specifics in a voice that was surprisingly animated by a lust for details of the treasure. I fed him just enough to ensure that his greed would drive him to follow the plan I laid down.

  The instructions I gave him were simple. Fly into the Henri Coanda Airport in Ploiesti the next day. Come alone. Check into a reserved room at the Pik Elegance Hotel in Ploiesti. Be in the lobby at nine o’clock sharp the following morning. One more time for emphasis—Come alone.

  He informed me that, in view of his advanced age, he would be sending his trusted assistant, Mr. Lao, the man in the silk suit. I was to treat him in every respect as I would the older man himself.

  I made him aware that I would be fulfilling a like promise to Mr. Vasily Laskovitch, the head of the Russian gang. He took that with equanimity, if not joy.

  My next call was to Mr. Laskovitch. I gave him the same limited description of the treasure. I could practically hear his saliva dripping into the phone. Again, the propulsion of greed gained agreement to my instructions. I told him to fly to Ploiesti the following day and check into the Vigo Hotel. It seemed the better part of discretion to have them at different hotels until I could chaperone their meeting. He was also to be in the lobby the following day at nine a.m. sharp. And, above all, come alone.

  The one thing on which I would have bet my Boston Bruins season tickets was that neither of them would come alone. All to the good.

  * * *

  The following day, George and I split up the list of hotels within a fifty-mile radius of Ploiesti for a personal visit. At each hotel, we located a concierge whose loyalty could be bought for a hundred dollars’ worth of Romanian lei. We slipped each one of them fifty dollars in lei with the promise of the other fifty for a cell phone call if a contingent of Chinese or Russian thugs checked in.

  At seven that evening, George, Mickey, and I were at dinner in our hotel dining room. The first call came to me from the concierge at one of the hotels I’d visited. In a low voice he reported that six Chinese gentlemen “with whom he would not want to have a disagreement” had checked in.

  Less than half an hour later, George got a call on his cell phone from a concierge at one the hotels he visited. He held up five fingers. It meant that five Russian-speaking thugs had just checked in.

  That made thirteen seasoned warriors to our little band of three. No sweat. Theoretically. My anticipation was that the total predictability of their greed would even the odds.

  * * *

  George, Mickey, and I were up at six the next morning after a fitful sleep. At breakfast, we fed off of each other’s tension. There was no discussion. And no jokes.

  I took one rental car and picked up the Russian, Vasily Laskovitch, at his hotel at nine on the dot. At the same time, according to plan, Mickey took a second rental car and picked up Mr. Lao at his hotel. George drove a third car directly to the catacomb to wait. He covered the entrance we had carved through the bushes with a thin layer of branches.

  Mickey and I each drove our passengers by a direct route and at a slow pace. As I hoped, the six Russians and five Chinese predictably followed their leaders from behind in separate cars.

  The challenge of assembling that bucket of monkeys without open warfare would call for some fine-tuned diplomacy. Both Mr. Lao and Mr. Laskovitch knew that the other would be there. On the other hand, whatever tenuous agreement between their respective crime gangs had kept them off of each other’s throats to that point would likely dissolve in the acid of greed when the actual treasure was within reach.

  Lao and Laskovitch greeted each other and George at the entrance to the cave with all of the warmth of crabs in ice water. The real fun began when the two cars carrying the backup thugs of each gang pulled up. Every one of them displayed barely concealed bulges that signaled an arsenal on both sides.

  It was an absolute certainly that if I left that little play-group to make friends on their own, all hell would break out within minutes. I took a quick lead, with Mickey translating for the Chinese.

  “Gentlemen, here are the rules. George here and I will take Mr. Lao and Mr. Laskovitch into the cave. Alone. Unarmed. I’ll show you what you’ve come here to see. Then George, Mickey, and I leave. How you settle things among yourselves after that is up to you. Then I’m out of it. Is that understood?”

  At that point, the hell I predicted broke loose. Laskovitch demanded that he have his troops with him. The idea of being unarmed in any situation went against his nature. Lao spoke English well enough to say, roughly, “To hell with that. If
his men go, my men go.”

  Voices began to rise. Some Russian and Chinese terms were thrown around that could have ignited gunfire if either side understood the other. The armed troops on both sides were moving in closer to a combat line. Weapons previously semi-concealed were making an appearance.

  I climbed onto the roof of the car closest. I began pounding on the roof of the car with a heavy stick until I caught their attention. I grabbed a small break in the increasing hostilities to yell at the top of my lungs, “Do any of you bozos know where the entrance to the cave is?”

  I yelled it three times for effect. It was a rhetorical question. George had effectively hidden the entrance with branches. They had no answer. I continued. “Well I do. Here’s the deal. That tunnel is ready to cave in if anyone even raises his voice. So here’s how we do it. Or not at all.”

  I checked their faces. I had their attention. “Mr. Lao. You and three of your men. Stand over here. Mr. Laskovitch. You and three of your men stand over there beside them. The rest of you people get the hell back in the cars. Nothing happens till you do it.”

  It took some grumbling and ethnic cursing, but as I’d hoped, the threat of a cave-in, plus the equality of guns on each side, made the arrangement borderline tolerable.

  When the troops were finally lined up and the auxiliaries were back in their cars, I helped George pull away the branches from the entrance. George and I led the way in with lanterns. After an exchange of threatening glares, Lao and Laskovitch managed to squeeze though, Laskovitch winning the lead by virtue of size.

  When the three thugs on each side came up to the small opening, the muscling for position escalated. I worked my way back to where I could be heard at the entrance. I said it in a whisper for fear of loose rocks, but it had all the steam I could put into it. “Listen to me, you boneheads! One loud noise in here and we all become part of this rock-heap. Pretend you’ve got half a brain. One at a time. You first.”

  I pointed to one of the Chinese. Then one of the Russians, then a Chinese, and so forth, until they were all inside and in line, and in silence. Mickey was the last in line.

  George and I squeezed into the lead. No one spoke, but I could see rivulets of dirt and pebbles starting down the walls just from the footsteps of ten walkers. The more rapid the flow, the more insane that trek seemed for any amount of gold.

  George and I were the first to round the final bend. When our lanterns filled that chamber with reflections off of a million gem facets, it was nearly as overwhelming as the first time.

  I watched the faces of each man as he was struck full on for the first time by a brilliance more spectacular than anything he could have imagined. For the first few minutes, it was more than they could comprehend. They were stunned into silence.

  When the stunning subsided, even just a little, their minds turned to the possibility of possessing it all. I could see the flame of greed ignite and burn in their eyes.

  The Russian, Laskovitch, broke first. He yelled something to one of his troops. A gun was drawn, then another. That set off a show of weapons by the Chinese. In a fraction of a second, it could have been Dodge City, except that there was no stone cave to collapse in Dodge.

  I jumped in between the two lines of handguns with my hands out. I tried to keep it to a whisper. “Easy. Easy. Settle down. The first shot any of you fires buries us all alive.”

  As if the hill were pressing my point, there was a loud rumble of rocks sliding down one side of the chamber. The panic that instantly wiped out the fixation with the cold treasure froze ten bodies in place. Guns were lowered. In the next instant, one of the Russians bolted for the exit. Another was on his heels. Two of the Chinese were at their backs.

  The leaders, Lao and Laskovitch, who put up a fight to have their gunmen beside them, now found those bodies jamming the tiny way out of a rockslide entombment.

  Mickey and I ran to the mass of shoving bodies. One by one, we grabbed bodies by the neck and threw them back from the return tunnel. Once it was cleared, we pushed each one of them in turn into the passageway. As soon as we let go of them, each one ran at the best speed they could make in a hunched-over position toward the entrance.

  The clattering of footsteps brought more rivers of stone and dirt flowing down the walls. The debris was building up in the pathway. Rumbles of more seismic crumbling echoed in greater volume through the entire passage.

  When all of the Russians and Chinese had cleared the treasure chamber, I started down the path, with Mickey at my heels and George behind. It was too late to worry about the sound of footsteps. We hit the best speed we could.

  I was the first one out. The Russians and Chinese were huddled around looking back into the entrance. Mickey appeared briefly, but just as he was about to run out, we heard what sounded like an explosion, followed by rolling thunder from the inside. George’s scream rose over the roar. “My leg! It’s crushed! It’s coming down!”

  Mickey turned and ran back into the cave. Every eye was on the entrance. There was what sounded like another explosion deep inside the cave. What started as an earth-like groaning that came from the very belly of the stone hill became a thunderous pounding of rocks on rocks from deep inside the cave. The roar came toward us until as far back as we could see, the massive rock hill was collapsing in on itself.

  By barely an instant, I saw a hunched figure covered in rock dust stagger out of the entrance. I ran to where Mickey collapsed on the ground.

  “Mickey, are you hurt?”

  “I’m alright. But George …”

  * * *

  For a long period—I don’t know how long—the entire group of us stayed there, just gaping at what was formerly a cave, and was now a massive, hundred-foot high pile of rocks.

  What was going through each of our minds depended on who we were and what we came there for in the first place. I suspect most of the mourning was for the loss of a treasure that may never be equaled.

  I know that I was replaying in my mind every instant that I had spent in the company of a man the likes of whom I had never known before—and would probably never know again.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  FOR THE NEXT three solid weeks, the most dangerous thing I did was to joust for position with other aggressive Boston drivers at the entrance to the Callahan Tunnel. I did it with a smile on my face a yard wide—which drove the other drivers to distraction.

  I settled into trying my own cases, which took a burden off of the strong but aging shoulders of my senior partner. I answered phone calls and emails the day they came in, which made the life of my faithful secretary, Julie, livable again.

  But at the top of the list, Terry and I picked up our life from where we had put it on hold. I was home every night to the scrambling, yipping greeting of our Sheltie and to the arms of the girl of my life. And both of us were consumed with plans for the arrival of one we loved even before he or she was born.

  Three weeks to the day from the time I got off the plane from Romania for the last time, a letter came in the office mail. It held two tickets, third row center, to a concert of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The soloist for Haydn’s Violin Concerto in A major was to be Concert Master Lee Tang.

  The note with it gave me the first jangle of nerves I’d felt in three weeks. It simply said, “Check under your seat.”

  My initial thought was, “Smoking crap! Another damn dose of intrigue.” I was sorely tempted to turn the tickets back into the box office. When I told Terry about the tickets, I also told her about the note. In line with my commitment to her and the baby we were both determined to raise in peace, I also told her about my temptation to turn in the tickets.

  When she asked who sent the tickets, I could only say, “I haven’t the foggiest idea.” She gave it a few seconds, and, as usual, she applied more logic than I did. “Michael, the concert is a beautiful gift. And you’ll wonder for the rest of your life who sent them. Maybe you’ll get an answer. If you don’t like what’s under the seat, we c
an just walk away from it. After we enjoy the concert. They’re not going to catch you again.”

  So we went. We went early so I’d have time to check under the seat without an audience. What was really perplexing was that there was absolutely nothing under the seat. I finally figured that it was just a joke—quite possibly by Lex Devlin or Billy Coyne.

  On that note, no pun intended, we settled into enjoyment of the violin concerto played superbly by Concert Master Tang on the Stradivarius that had had three criminal gangs dispatching victims with a reckless abandon.

  We returned to our seats after an intermission of sparkling water for Terry and Famous Grouse for me. I happened to drop my program under the seat. When I bent down to pick it up, my hand hit something. I felt further and found a small box taped to the seat.

  I showed it to Terry with a questioning look.

  “Open it. Before they begin playing. You won’t hear a single note if you don’t.”

  I took off the wrapping paper slowly. There was a small felt box inside. I could feel the muscles in my stomach clench as I lifted the top of the box. What I saw flooded my mind with emotions I thought I had put to rest.

  The box held a gleaming solid gold ring with a Christian cross raised on the top. Along both sides there was molded the twisting form of a dragon.

  I knew I had seen it before. It had caught my attention while George and I were in that treasure chamber for the first time.

  It just held me in a trance for four or five seconds until a thought drove me to my feet. I stood up and scanned the audience. I searched every face until I looked up to the first elevated box on our right. There was a man standing in the doorway to the box. He was looking in our direction. I couldn’t make out his features, but he held out his hands as if he were holding them out to me.