Chapter 49 - The Intersection
Hablibi sat in his room at the hotel and did a web search for June Enterprises. It didn’t have its own website, but up popped a hundred articles written over the last two years that described the two earlier productions, the ballet and the rock opera. The articles had been published in Le Monde and the Los Angeles Times and the Tokyo Chubun and The Dancer and Rolling Stone and dozens of other newspapers, magazines, and websites around the world. He read about Pete Townshends and Mikhail Baryshnikovs and Catherine Deneuve’s involvement in the premier of the lost Stravinsky ballet; and about Paul McCartneys and Renee Flemings and David Gilmours and Christine McVie’s involvement in the rock opera. Most of the articles were glowing critiques of the productions and painted a picture of a series of wild performances at a venue in Charleston called The Hall. There were lots of photos of and interviews with the participants, including a woman named Gwen June and her husband, Roger. Hablibi had struck a gold mine of information, and spent two hours reading through the accounts.
He had a laptop in his room, but the three assassins didn’t. They woke up that morning and got down to assassination basics, which start with a rigorous program of personal fitness, modulate into a mediation period during which the assassin recommits himself to his spiritual mission and cause, and end with a session devoted to exercising his dexterity skills with a variety of weapons, including but not limited to, piano wire, stiletto, bazooka, rattlesnake poison, and extract of cesium 235. The fact that the assassins didn’t have any of these weapons in their possession, as yet, truncated the last part of the daily drill. No matter, The Colonel, The Lieutenant, and The Private got to work in their rooms immediately after ordering breakfast from room service, each polishing off sticky buns, pancakes with maple syrup, and double orders of thick cut Tennessee bacon. The Colonel dropped to the carpet and did ten US Marine Corps style pushups and twenty sit-ups, followed by a lot of jumping jacks, which left him winded. He then lay back down on his king size bed to do his fifteen minute mediation session, which started off with a set of standard prayers to Allah and Iran, and ended with him thinking about the The Aya’s stash, and how much it might amount to.
Lewy The Lieutenant pumped out a much more impressive twenty pushup and forty sit-ups, though he dispensed with the jumping jacks. He then sat on the floor and invoked the same set of prayers to Allah, which likewise was followed by calculations regarding possible amounts of US dollars The Big Guy might have stashed away in the account that the woman Laleh had found and rifled. Priss, that paragon of psychological warrior, dispensed with the physical calisthenics altogether and set his mind to formulating strategies and tactics for raining pain and suffering on this Laleh person for the effrontery to Islam she had perpetrated, and on any and all infidels who had come into her evil orbit and now circled around her corrupt and metastasizing nucleus. He sat on the floor, leaned his back against the bed, closed his eyes, and imagined plot after plot, scene after scene, in which he and his comrades in arms fooled, tricked, duped, and otherwise discombobulated her and her associates, all of which ended with the stolen cash under his control (well, ok, under The Colonel’s control) and Laleh begging him (well, ok, The Colonel) for mercy and forgiveness.
His fantasy at this point leaned towards granting her the mercy and forgiveness if, perhaps, she might find herself inclined to grant him, in return, certain personal favors. He doubted The Colonel would accede to such a scenario, but Priss was made of a different fiber, more noble and spiritual. That is why he was a psychological warrior, and Aliaabaadi and Lewy mere hatchet men. The fantasy continued with Laleh agreeing to the deal, begging him for mercy, him granting it, and her then granting him the personal favors. It was during this part of the fantasy that Priss, his head resting so comfortably against the corner of the goose down covered bed, nodded off. This psychological warfare planning was strenuous work.
A little before noon, after getting the address of The Hall from the concierge, Hablibi rounded up his troops in the lobby and asked them how they were and what they had done that morning. The Colonel reported that Lewy had practiced the assassin’s killing arts till his skills were razor sharp, Priss had formulated a strategy that would break Laleh’s willpower into little shards of glass, and that he had developed methods for returning the stolen funds to the possession of The Aya, who in turn soon after would dispense them throughout the kingdom to benefit all the People of Iran. Hablibi said, “Right, great, all of you, way to go,” thinking, ‘This is the best and brightest our country has to offer?’
He said, “The good news is that now we know all about these June Enterprises people. I found all kinds of stuff about them on the internet, including where they hang out, a place near here called The Hall, just up King Street. They’re a bunch of pansy ass artist types that do dances and sing songs like they did a hundred years ago, ballet and opera stuff. If you’re right and this Laleh bitch is with them, we oughta to be able to snatch her easy, find out where she has the money, and get it. Get it, er, to return to The Big Guy, back home. Ok?” He looked at his Elite Corps guys, ready for battle. They nodded, ready.
Lewy asked, “How ‘bout lunch, for we take on these evils souls?”
Hablibi looked at his watch, seeing it was 11:15am, and said, “Why not. An army marches on its stomach,” and led the way into the hotel dining room. They emerged an hour and a half later and Hablibi led the way up King Street to John Street, where he turned right, walked a block and crossed the street to stand staring at the front of The Hall. Just then the June’s white Mercedes pulled up in front of The Hall, with Jinny driving, Monique next to him, and Clooney, Gale, and Soderberg in the back. Jinny said, “Here we are, your creative haunt for the next month. This is where you’ll make a masterpiece, or Gwen will kick your asses.” Gale giggled, loving the way Jinny tells it like it is, a little goofy after having actually stood in George Clooney’s hotel room. An hour earlier, following Gwen’s directions to have the star on stage at noon, Gale had rousted George out of his bed, into the shower, and into some decent clothes that made him look like a movie star rather than like he was on his way to the hardware store. Gwen had known better than to send Gale on this mission alone, knowing what kinds of havoc she could wreck on the hunt for a piece of Big George, and had sent Jinny along as chaperon cum bodyguard. Jinny had knocked on Monique’s door and asked her to be ready in half an hour, then had done the same on Soderberg’s door, and then had accompanied Gale to Clooney’s door. George had answered, smiled at Gale, and said like Humphrey Bogart did to Lauren Bacall, “Come into my boudoir.” Gale had fainted, being lucky Jinny was behind her to catch her. Jinny picked her up under one arm and carried her into the suite like a newspaper, setting her in a chair.
Both he and George stood staring at her long legs, them having emerged to a great extent from her short yellow skirt trimmed with burgundy hems. Jinny said, “She’ll be ok, just give her a minute.”
George said, “Not the first time for me. They always come out of it.”
“Must be fun, huh, being you?”
“Not bad. Has its ups and downs, but more ups than downs, I gotta say. How are you this morning? I love Saint Petersburg. Great place. Love the Hermitage, all that gold, all those little decorated eggs that guy Fabion made.”
“Faberge, I think his name was. I used to work there, long time ago, at The Hermitage.” Jinny didn’t tell George that was how he’d become friends with the Junes, three years before. He’d met them in Charleston, become their enemy, then become less of an enemy, then had proposed a caper to them, stealing stuff from The Hermitage warehouses, with him as inside man. They had pulled off the caper, smuggling the stuff back to Charleston, which in turn had led to a war with a Russian guy named Stirg who thought stealing historic stuff from his homeland was a travesty. Jinny didn’t tell George he was the inside man on the heist due to his position at the Hermitage as janitor, whose principle j
ob was cleaning most of the three hundred bathrooms in that huge complex of old buildings. He skipped that part. After that caper Jinny had moved to Charleston permanently, had modulated from business associate to trusted friend, and now was part of the production team. Still standing and looking at Gale’s legs, he said, “I’m your bodyguard.”
George said, “Who do I need protection from?”
Jinny nodded at Gale, said, “First, from her. She’s a wild one. You know much about southern women?”
“A little. I learned some stuff while I was making Oh Brother Where Art Thou.”
“That’s good. You’ll like Gale, she’s the bomb, but we gotta watch her. Then after her, I got to protect you from anything else that might arise during the show.”
“Like what?”
“Don’t know anything specific, I just know that whenever the Junes do one of these productions, something comes up. It just happens with them.”
“Is that what you meant when you said they weren’t benevolent when someone tried to fuck with their productions?”
Jinny nodded but didn’t say anything.
“What happened before,” George asked.
“I better let Gwen or Roger tell you about that, if they want to. All I’ll say is there were more guns around The Hall those days than around CIA Headquarters.”
“Who had the guns?”
“Who didn’t have a gun.”
“You?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Roger?”
Jinny nodded.
“Gwen?”
Jinny nodded.
“Gale?”
Jinny said, “She refused to carry it on her belt behind her hip, under a jacket, like Gwen does. She kept trying to carry it in a thigh holster, said it felt good there, but it made her walk funny, and none of the guys liked seeing that, so we took it away from her. We don’t want nothing interfering with Gale’s walk.”
“These were productions of a ballet and an opera, and people were carrying guns around?”
“A rock opera. But yeah, some guys didn’t like what was going on, starting interfering. We had to, um, take ‘em out. But that’s all I’ll say. How ‘bout getting dressed, and I’ll get sleeping beauty up and looking fresh again, and then we’ll head down to The Hall.”
Here they were now, entering The Hall, with the four Iranians, the one a diplomat and the other three assassins, watching them. Hablibi said, “This is the place. This is the June Enterprises place, and that’s the group you said the Laleh woman was hanging out with.” He paused. “I think it’s time to turn things over to you. I found them, now it’s up to the field operatives to take over and do your thing. I’m here to support you. What are you gonna do?”
The Colonel said, “Now we watch. Reconnoiter. Learn more about our enemies the infidels than they know about themselves. Insinuate ourselves into their lives the way a cobra does into a field of gophers. Then, when the time is right, when they are at their most vulnerable, we strike with the speed of the snake and the force of Allah’s red scimitars. Laleh and The Aya’s, er, the People’s money will be ours, and our honor will be restored.”
And all four of them thought, “And we’ll be rich.”
The Ayatollah's Money Page 49