High Stakes by John F Dobbyn

Author:John F Dobbyn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oceanview Publishing
Published: 2019-11-19T16:00:00+00:00

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.

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