It suddenly struck me. I held my hands out to him. I saw a smile light his face just a second before he disappeared through the door.
When I sat down, I could feel moisture running down both cheeks. I wanted to explain it to Terry, but my throat was too clogged to speak.
* * *
On the way home, we stopped at a late-night coffeehouse in Harvard Square. I needed time to explain something I had never mentioned to Terry in my determination to move ahead into a normal life. I thought I’d talk about it this once—tonight—and never again.
I forget the words I used, but what I told her was that at some point in that odyssey, I had sided completely with George and his Romanians over the other two gangs. He wanted the treasure as much as the others did, but for completely different reasons. His Romanian people had been plundered by one conqueror after another throughout history and by corrupt politicians ever since the fall of communism. His quest was to find the treasure to give it back to the descendants of the people who had been impoverished in the amassing of it.
The question was how it could be done in a way that would keep it out of the grasping hands of gangsters and politicians. That’s when the plan evolved.
The day that George and Mickey and I first cleared our entrance to the monastery catacombs, we found more than the treasure. We were certain that the Christians who made the catacombs for protection would have made more than one entrance. We found the second tunnel leading from the treasure chamber to an exit in the opposite direction from the one we entered.
Before we left the treasure chamber on that first day, we covered that second exit from the chamber with a pile of rocks. We also freed the second exit where it led to the outside of the caves from the rocks and thick bushes and brambles hiding it from sight. We finally hid the exit to the outside with a light covering of branches.
We then used the supplies that George had gathered before Mickey and I arrived. We planted small explosives in the walls of the first tunnel we knew we’d be using when the Chinese and Russians arrived. The stage was set for one performance.
I was sure that when we brought that collection of Russian and Chinese thugs into the treasure chamber, their innate greed would stir up enough of a ruckus to start rocks and pebbles falling off the walls. I made my little speech when we arrived at the cave to prepare them to panic in fear of a landslide.
True to my prediction, within five minutes of the time the nine of us were all in the treasure chamber, their yelling and cursing at each other caused enough stone to fall to make it look like there’d be a cave-in any second. They stampeded out of the cave like the running of the bulls.
Once we had the gangsters outside the entrance, the playacting began.
Before Mickey came out, he detonated a string of small charges that sounded like a major cave-in and ran outside. That was when George yelled from deep inside about being trapped with a crushed leg. Actually, he was running safely back to the treasure chamber and out the second exit. He removed the branches we’d placed in front of the second exit and made his escape.
When they all heard George yell, Mickey played his part. He ran back into the cave as if to rescue George. What he was really doing was setting off the rest of the detonations in the front part of the cave. He made it sound as if the whole hill were caving in. Actually, the treasure room and the path leading to the second exit were still completely intact. Before leaving the area, George covered over that second entrance to the cave with bushes.
As far as the Russians and Chinese gangs knew, George and the treasure were now buried under a hundred feet of solid rock.
Terry took my hand and looked at the gold ring with the cross and the dragon. “And what about George?”
I thought for a few seconds before saying something I would never entrust to another human being. “You’ll see. We’ll be hearing news reports about things happening in Romania. There’ll be hospitals built. There’ll be orphanages. There’ll be shelters and homes for homeless people. There’ll be special schools. Parks and homes for elderly people. More than we can even imagine right now.”
“And George?”
“All of these things will be done by an anonymous donor—one who seems to have unlimited resources. And no one will ever know who.”
“Michael, that man you saw in the box at the orchestra tonight … I guess I don’t need to ask.”
* * *
The following April around Easter, Kimberly Anne Knight made her entrance into our lives and raised the fullness and happiness of every moment beyond anything Terry and I could ever have imagined possible. My life and practice of law with the other partner in my life, Lex Devlin, remained within the parameters of a normal lawyer—and happily so.
Do I ever for the tiniest moment miss the nerve-clenching adventures that had seemed to seek me out before? … Mmmm.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I have always been fascinated by the history behind the immortalization of Dracula as a fictional vampire. It’s my hope that this work of fiction will shed light on the unforgettable, and yet almost totally forgotten, actual character out of the history of Eastern Europe.
When Bram Stoker seized on the folk legends of seventeenth-century villagers in the area of Transylvania to present Dracula as a fictional vampire, his classic novel totally overshadowed, to the point of nearly erasing from history, the existence of the actual, flesh-and-blood, famous or infamous, fifteenth-century ruler of a major province of Romania, Vlad Dracula.
The impact of the actual Dracula’s rule by terror on the ebb and flow of the line of conquest between the Christian and Muslim kingdoms of Eastern Europe was immense. When, for example, Sultan Mehmed II’s Ottoman army of Turkish Muslims drove the Christian forces under Dracula in retreat past the Transylvania border, the Sultan entered a narrow valley just beyond Dracula’s capital city of Tirgoviste. The Sultan’s advance was stopped cold. He and his army were totally dispirited by the sight of rows of corpses, executed on Dracula’s command by his signature method of impalement of his enemies on high stakes—the bodies numbering in excess of twenty thousand.
Facts regarding the real Dracula that form this novel’s background, which I found to be more fascinating than any that could be fictionalized, are as accurately incorporated in this novel as historical reporting over four centuries permits.
On the other hand, the legend of Dracula’s amassing and secreting of a monumental treasure is of my own fictionalizing—although I would be astonished if such a fortune did not actually result from his demands on terrified subjects and tribute paid by rulers from Vienna to Istanbul.
Factual data regarding the other historical phenomenon that gives this novel its background, a violin produced in Cremona, Italy, around 1700 by Antonio Stradivari, is also founded in truth. The impact of the unique skill of Stradivari, using the wood of spruce trees available in Europe during that particular period, on the ability of musicians to bring an extraordinary tone, purity, and volume of sound to the performance of the works of master composers, will likely never be equaled. That part of the novel is also factually correct.
The code embedded in the particular violin for which people lose their lives in this novel, on the other hand, is as fictional as Michael and Lex themselves—although, at times, I do find myself in conversation with both of them. Just one of the pitfalls of writing fiction.
High Stakes Page 28