Valley of Thracians (28 page)

Part
Four: Festival of Roses

Chapter
49

At first, Simon hesitated to order the
tarator
soup. The thought of a concoction of yogurt, cucumbers, garlic, and dill didn’t
appeal to him, and he couldn’t imagine that it would soothe his appetite. In
general, he was not a fan of cold soups; it was only out of politeness that he
would partake of the tomato-based gazpacho offered to him at summertime
functions at the university. There was something about the unconsummated
expectation of a soup’s warmth that bothered him when he took a spoonful of
coldish red liquid. Now, sitting in the hotel restaurant for dinner, the white
tarator
that Sophia insisted he try as part of her ongoing introduction to Bulgarian
cuisine surprised him with its coolness. It had a calming effect and helped to
refresh him after the day’s heated excitement. After trying just one spoonful,
he nodded in appreciation to Sophia for her suggestion.

Scott would have preferred to head down
the street for a Big Mac at the yellow-arched restaurant that symbolized
everything American he had lost over the past few years. On the drive back to
Sofia that afternoon, he had demonstrated an insatiable appetite when they
stopped for lunch, ordering a second portion of
kebap
and
finishing—without the slightest trace of embarrassment—Simon’s untouched skewer
of grilled chicken. Following their lunch, as Simon and Sophia drank herbal
tea, they watched Scott fork down two large portions of baklava, and now, at
dinnertime, he was again hungry, finishing his meatball soup quickly and then
attacking a few slices of black bread while he waited for them to finish their
first course.

Scott was quiet as he ate, having
spilled most of his story during the journey from Belogradchik. He had started
by telling of his relations with the host family in Montana, how he had not
gotten along at first with Boris but later joined him on strange—and quite
obviously illegal—delivery jobs. Without the slightest hesitation, Scott
admitted that he accompanied Boris and Vlady, his neighbor, on their smuggling
missions in order to finance a drug habit he couldn’t control, and to keep its
existence under wraps. If Scott was remorseful for his actions, it was hard to tell.

“I’m clean now,” Scott told Simon and
Sophia proudly, leaning forward from the back-seat of the car to rub his
grandfather’s shoulder. “I’m not pleased with what I did, but that’s all behind
me at last.”

Scott spoke of being sent on one final
delivery mission, when he was required to bring a priceless item to a contact
at the Golden Sands hotel.

“I don’t know how to describe it. It was
quite old, probably Greek or Roman. Made of silver and covered with
decorations. And there was a lion’s head at the bottom. I had never seen
anything like it.”

“That sounds like something we saw at
the museum,” Simon said, turning to Sophia to confirm the comment.

 
“Yes, it does sound like a Thracian artifact,”
Sophia responded. Up until that point she had remained silent, concentrating on
every word in Scott’s story and eager for him to reveal more of his ordeal. The
appearance of the four Bulgarians at the fortress—people who obviously knew
Scott and wanted him to accompany them for some reason—troubled her, but she
didn’t voice her suspicions.

Sophia slowed the car, easing into a
lower gear as they fell behind a large truck on the highway.

“You mentioned something with a lion,”
Simon said, trying hard to recall the museum exhibits he had seen in Vratsa.
“There was one item that had been stolen. Didn’t it have a lion’s head?”

“Yes.” Sophia picked up speed to pass
the truck.

Scott continued his story, telling about
the bus trip to Varna and how a woman had accompanied him to the hotel.

“Katya is Boris’s sister, and she was my
guardian on the mission. But I fooled her; I fooled everybody, although with
disastrous results.”

“What do you mean?” Simon asked.

“The hotel manager had my passport,”
Scott said, not that this information explained anything at all.

“What do you mean he had your passport?”
Simon said, turning around to face his grandson.

“I had been there before when I,
unfortunately, allowed that man to hold onto my passport in his office. It was
being held, almost as ransom, until I delivered that old treasure to him.”

“And I thought, the police thought, that
the manager found your passport at the hotel after you disappeared!”

“No, he had it and refused to release
it.” Scott stopped for a minute, regarded a horse and farmer’s wagon ambling
down the highway as if there were no worries in the world, and then continued.
“I decided to pull a trick on him, anything I could do to get my passport back.
I refused to hand over the package until he gave me back the passport.”

“How could that work? That hotel manager
had a mean-looking security guard working for him,” Simon remembered from his
visit. “Surely they would have just grabbed the package out of your hands?”

“Yeah, for sure.
That’s why I didn’t bring it to his office,” Scott said.

“What?”

Sophia looked up at the rearview mirror.
Scott’s story was filling with details that would be important to recall
afterward. She couldn’t afford to focus her attention on the black asphalt.

“Let’s stop for lunch,” she suggested,
pulling off the highway. “I know a good
mehana
in this village.”

They veered onto a forested side road.
Moments after they disappeared from sight among the trees, two black utility
vehicles raced down the highway they had just left, speeding toward Sofia
farther south.

Seated on the wooden benches inside the
rustic pub with its crude smell of alcohol, they ordered lunch and then Scott
continued his story.

“I had a friend in the Peace Corps,”
Scott began. “His name was Lance. Perhaps I told you about him?” he asked his
grandfather.

“Yes, of course. I wrote to Lance a few
times over these past three years.”

“Yes, Lance,” Scott said, a sorrowful
look in his eyes. “We were working on a community project together, and we hung
out a lot. I didn’t realize at the time how good a friend Lance was, how much
he cared for me. Even though I told him not to, he followed me to Varna when I
undertook that delivery. He came to the resort in Golden Sands. He knew I was
up to something, that I was doing something dangerous. He only came to protect
me, to make sure I was okay.”

“What happened?” This time it was Sophia
who asked the question.

“When I entered the hotel lobby, Lance
was there. It didn’t make sense; it just couldn’t be. But he was there, waiting
for me, willing to do anything to help. Without thinking, I gave him the Adidas
gym bag. I told him that I was going in to see the hotel manager. I said I
would be right out but made him promise one thing.”

“What was that?” Simon asked.

“I made him promise to safeguard that
bag with his life should anything happen to me.”

“And then you went to the manager?”
Simon said, trying to imagine the most likely conclusion of Scott’s story. “And
he got angry you didn’t have the delivery for him?”

“Right.
But I never had a chance to get back to Lance in the lobby. One of Nikolov’s
goons—Nikolov was the manager’s name, by the way—one of his security guards
took me away and beat me up. That’s where I got this,” he said, indicating the
dented wound on his head.

“What happened to Lance and the gym
bag?” Sophia asked, eager for the story to continue.

“What happened to Scott is what I want
to know,” Simon said, regarding her curiously as if she had missed the whole
point of Scott’s revelations.

Their lunch was served, and Scott downed
a whole bottle of frosty Zagorka beer in one go. He wiped the suds from his
lips and attacked his meal with fervor.

It was only over dessert that the rest
of Scott’s ordeal was revealed. He spoke of his loss of memory, of being
transported across the width of Bulgaria by Katya, Boris’s sister, and how she
had cared for him in a remote cabin in the mountains. Scott spoke of the pain
he had suffered but did not mention what Katya had done to prolong his amnesia
and his misery. That was something for another time, when all of this was
behind him.

“I finally built up my strength and,
despite her protests, I made my way from the cabin to Belogradchik,” Scott said
in conclusion.

“And what’s with that gym bag?” Simon
asked.

 
“I’ve tried to imagine where Lance took it,”
Scott said. “It’s clear that Nikolov didn’t get it, nor was it recovered by
Boris and Vlady. Otherwise they wouldn’t have come looking for me.”

“We can just ask Lance!” Simon said.
“We’ll call him the minute we get back to Sofia.”

“There’s a problem,” Scott said. “One of
the first things I did when I went online after leaving the cabin was to check
my email. I had hundreds, no, literally thousands of unread messages. I guess
my disappearance really caused people to take an interest in me because some of
them kept writing to my account. Anyway, I sorted the messages by name and
looked for the ones written by Lance. There were a number of emails, but only
the first and the last are of interest to us now.”

“What are you talking about?” Simon
asked.

“The first one was written just a few
days after the incident in Varna,” Scott explained. “Lance had returned to
Sofia, and he didn’t have a clue where I had gone. I guess that along with
everyone else in the Peace Corps, he assumed that after ditching him at that
resort hotel, I had just taken a few days off from my assignments. He was sure
I would turn up. No one knew, no one could even imagine, that I had been beaten
and nearly killed, and that I had lost my memory and didn’t have a clue where
or who I was. I still don’t fully understand the meaning of Lance’s email.
Maybe he was pulling my leg, giving me clues as if this were just a game to
him.”

I have taken the item and hidden it
well. It is safe at one of our favorite places. You know where that is.

“What does that mean?” Simon asked,
turning to Sophia, but she just shrugged her shoulders.

“I’ve thought about that a lot over
these past few days.
One of our favorite places.
I can only imagine that Lance was referring to a place we went to together in
Bulgaria. We toured the country quite a bit, Lance and me. We visited the
mountains, the monasteries, and the seacoast. We had quite a number of favorite
places, and the first place that came to mind was Belogradchik. One weekend
while training in Vratsa, Lance and I visited the fortress. We were accompanied
by two young Bulgarians from the town. I fell in love with the place, with its
rustic scenery and medieval fortifications. I know Lance enjoyed the fort as
well. That was why I assumed he had hidden the gym bag at Belogradchik
Fortress.”

“So, that’s why you went to the fort,”
Sophia spoke up. “You were looking for the artifact.”

“Yes,” Scott replied. “But I couldn’t
find it anywhere. I mean, come on, where in the hell would he hide it? I didn’t
have a clue where to look.”

“So, we’ll just ask Lance,” Simon
suggested for the second time. “Why should this remain a mystery? We’ll call
him and solve this once and for all, and then we can get you back to the
States.”

“There was another email,” Scott
continued quietly. “It was sent only a short while ago. It came from Lance’s
account, but it wasn’t written by him. It was from Lance’s mother, writing to
all of his friends. She informed us that Lance had been in an automobile
accident in Denver. He never had a chance, she wrote. He was driving, and
another car, with a drunk driver at its wheel, plowed into him at an
intersection. It happened so fast that Lance didn’t feel any pain. At least,
that was what his mother wrote. I quickly responded with a few words of
sympathy. I didn’t know what else to write. What can one say in such a case?”

“Lance is dead?” Sophia asked.

“Maybe he took the bag back to the
States,” Simon said. “We could ask his mother.”

“His earlier email, written three years
ago while he was in Bulgaria, said that he had hidden it well, and I can only
assume that means it’s still in the country.”

“Well, as interesting as
this sounds
, we have to get you back to your parents. You’ve
been through quite enough,” Simon said.

“No, Grandpa. You don’t understand. I’m
not going back to the States until I get to the bottom of this. I need to know
where Lance hid that bag.”

“We’ll talk about that later. Let’s
finish our lunch and get back on the road.”

At dinner that evening, Sophia excused
herself to go the ladies room to freshen up. Scott gulped down the last of his
meal, and Simon sat back to consider his options. There was no question in his
mind what he had to do. On the phone earlier, Daniel was thrilled at speaking
to his son but insistent that they get on the next flight out of Sofia. Susan
was tearful, so emotional that her words were hard to understand, but their
meaning was crystal clear. She was overjoyed at reconnecting with Scott in the
trans-Atlantic call but could hardly wait to see him in person. “It’s a
miracle,” she kept repeating. Neither Scott nor Simon mentioned the missing
artifact or Scott’s plans to recover it before he left Bulgaria.