Chapter 10 – The Plan, Part One
“Ok, Jinny, what do we have here?” Roger stood at the Saint Petes easel.
Jinny sat in a 19th century armchair with maple arms and embroidered upholstery. He took another sip of coffee and lined it out. First, he said he still was persona non grata in the homeland, and he wasn’t sure how seriously the authorities were about cases like his. He thought these folks had moved on to bigger and better things than his little transgression, but even if they harbored some grudge, Jinny said he still could operate there. Their mission had four parts: (1) find Russian antiques they could get their hands on, (2) find cronies that would help in the purchase or theft of these items, (3) surreptitiously get these items into large shipping containers and onto ships bound for the States, and (4) make contact with newly rich Russians who hated Russian winters as much as he did, and convince them Charleston was the place for them to spend a few months each year. As he delineated the mission, Roger wrote it down in short bullet points on the easel pad, then sat down on the sofa next to Gwen, and the three of them looked at the easel. Roger frowned, Gwen looked perplexed, Jinny looked radiant.
“You can do this?” Gwen said. “And why would Russians want to come to Charleston for the winter? If they’re rich, they can just go to the Caribbean, or to the beaches in Thailand.”
Jinny was ready for this question. It was one he had worked on during the time he was eating small quantities of high-fat, no-taste foods in the South Carolina slammer.
“Not all newly rich Russians are wild and crazy party animals who want to drive around in limos, drink Dom, and do coke,” he said. “Lots of them are, but those are not the ones we want. Many of these people need low profiles, and there are some who know about art and food and nice properties, they just haven’t had the money until recently to have these things. Now they do. They’re not looking for the fast lane, they are looking for the sure lane. They want class, quiet, music, and warm breezes off the water.”
He paused and looked at the Junes.
“Some of these people have a lovehate feeling about America. They hate it because it represents the long-standing enemy of an old Russia they still love and respect. They love America because it represents the future, and they want to be part of the future, now that they have lots of money to spend.
“This type of Russian would like Charleston because it’s small, discrete, it has old world ambience with great restaurants, and because it’s warm in February. I’ll tell them that property values hold strong, that southerners have a tradition of minding their own business, that we will furnish their new ocean front homes with antiques from the homeland, and they will drink the best French wine in the late afternoons while sitting on their second story verandas watching European soccer matches on TV.”
Jinny beamed. “I will tell them a beautiful woman will visit them at luncheon hour and teach them to cook like Julia Child, and afterwards take them to the outdoor gun range on the national forest land nearby and teach their girlfriends or wives to shoot Italian and Swedish handguns. I’ll tell them that if they try to mess with this beautiful woman, she likely will stick her Glock 40 cal. straight down the front of their pants and unload a few rounds at the targets that lay therein.”
Jinny added this last rather dramatic item for Roger’s benefit, him capable of judiciousness when the occasion called for it. He went on, telling the Junes he would tell the Russians about the link between Czar Brettany Prentikof, and the Huguenot king of France, and that Charleston today was full of still loyal Huguenots that in some way or other loved Russians. He thought this would mean something to the potential expatriates, and he was convinced that the type of Russian he would persuade to come to Charleston would like to have an object, or preferably many objects, from their homeland in their new houses.
Roger considered telling his partner there was not exactly a multitude of people running around Charleston identifying themselves strongly and fervently as Russian czar loving Huguenots, but in the scheme of things he decided to let this minor point pass. He and Gwen, looking at each other, didn’t know what to say. They didn’t know squat about newly rich Russians and what they like or don’t like. Telepathically they agreed for the present to accept Jinny’s judgment, and move on with the planning. They motioned for Jinny to continue.
He had started with item (4) on the easel pad, so now he backtracked to item (1), which was procuring the antiques, and he told them how he came up with his idea for the job. At one point during the two years he lived in Pittsburgh he got so sick of the place he got in a car and drove to Washington DC. He had seen a picture of the Museum of Industry that was part of the Smithsonian, and the architecture reminded him of a small secondary building that was a dot on the landscape of the Hermitage Museum. Seeing the photo of the Smithsonian building served as an excuse to get out of January Pittsburg. When he got to DC and to the building, he found it was considerably smaller than its cousin in Saint Petersburg, which was disappointing. It was about half the size of the Russian building, and remember, the Russian building was a minor structure in the hierarchy of the Hermitage. While he was inside he found a guard that was a Russian émigré. The guard told him all about the Smithsonian, including the fact that only a small percentage of the entire holdings of the museum was on display at any one time. The majority of stuff was stored in vast warehouses in Virginia and only saw the light of day once every twenty-five years.
Jinny found this interesting, because he knew the same was true of his old digs, the Hermitage. There too, most of the stuff was in storage. In fact, during his tenure as toilet cleaner and general flunky, he was sent a few times to various warehouses as part of a group of workmen whose task was to get something or return something.
Jinny related this story hoping it would pique the June’s interest, and made it the crux of his plan. The source of the antiques would be the storage warehouses of the Hermitage itself.
Roger and Gwen quickly understood his idea. The really valuable stuff, the Fabergé eggs and so forth, were kept in the Hermitage itself, under serious security. But the lesser stuff, the stuff that wouldn’t fit into the 1285 rooms of the palace, was kept in storage. This might not be the greatest stuff in the Russian realm, but even at a lesser level of quality, it still would be valuable on the world market. Roger preferred the greatness of Château Latour, but that doesn’t mean he couldn’t enjoy a bottle of Château Grand-Puy-Lacoste, at one tenth the price. And this stuff would have special allure to native Russians as pieces of their heritage. They'd love to have pieces from the homeland in their new winter houses on Sullivan’s Island in sunny South Carolina, which occasionally would be filled with French Huguenot guests whose ancestors once loved a Russian czar.
From his years of working at the Hermitage, Jinny knew quite a bit about how the place worked. He may have been cleaning toilets for some of that time, but he was a very smart and observant toilet cleaner, and he had a gift for gab and a way with people. He liked to talk to people who liked to talk. He figured out that some of the Hermitage inventory hadn’t seen the light of day for a hundred years, stuff like chairs and mirrors and side tables and kitchenware and bedroom linen and small paintings. These would be the targets, not the Fabergé eggs. This is what he told the Junes, and after Roger had a minute to think about it, Roger realized this all could be true. He knew how antique dealers operate, and he knew something about art museums. Art museums, both large and small, sometimes had stuff in their inventories that was not known to, or at least not remembered by, the museum keepers. Jinny’s thinking about the target antiques could be accurate, and Roger made these points to Gwen.
Jinny smiled.
Gwen and Roger looked at each other. It seems they had been looking at each other, in perplexity, a lot since running into Little Jinny Blistov. Gwen shrugged. She was buying it. Roger trusted her intuition, so he got up and pointed to (2) on the easel and sai
d to Jinny, “Keep rolling.” (2) was finding people who could help with the theft from the warehouses.
In Jinny’s mind, (2) was the easy part of the job because he knew the person who controlled these warehouses. In fact, they once had played house together, and he knew she was vulnerable to pressure of the kind Jinny could exert on her. They would need some other people to assist with the actual theft, but Jinny said, “I can work this out when we get to Saint Petersburg.”
While Roger pondered this abstruse point, his wife pondered another abstruse point. She thought of a scene in the movie The Hunt for Red October, in which Russian sub commander is trying to defect and give the US a Russian nuclear sub. In the movie, someone recommends to the President’s Chief of Staff that they go ahead and try to get the sub, the Chief of Staff wryly notes that the Russian government probably would object to the US taking possession of several billion dollars' worth of Russian state property. Gwen’s active little mind drew a parallel here. Was it wise to get involved with the theft of Russian heritage property? She asked her partners.
Roger looked at Jinny, who looked back at Roger, and almost in unison they said, “No guts, no glory.” That was weird, but the three of them were getting used to weird.
Roger stepped to the St. Petes easel and made checkmarks on (1), (2) and (4). He looked at Jinny, wordlessly, though obviously, indicating the remaining item (3), and saw the smile on Jinny’s face turn to doubt. Roger sat down and waited. (3) consisted of how to get the goods out of mother Russia’s arms, across the big wide ocean, and safely nestled in the bosom of step-mother Charleston.
Jinny took this opportunity to pour himself another cup of coffee and pick up another, his fifth, donut. At this, the ever devilish Gwen reached over and poked Jinny in the stomach, thinking she would jibe him about getting fat from eating so much crap. She was astounded to feel, not fat on this short, wide, stocky guy, but hard muscle right there in the mid-drift. She nodded an apology.
Jinny ate the donut in three bites and drained the hot coffee in three swallows. He turned to the Junes and said, “On this point I ain’t got it figured out.”
The June’s dog and cat simultaneously walked into the living room as if they had been invited to the business meeting and were arriving late. Both animals sat. Blistov looked at them, and they looked at Blistov, neither giving an inch in their demeanor. The demeanors were neither affection nor distain, neither friendliness nor contempt. These were just three animals co-existing in time and place. The four-leggers’ heads swiveled to Roger and Gwen. With that both Roger and Gwen got up, and Roger said, “Let’s take a break." Gwen opened the front door for an animal exit.
During the break Roger and Gwen allowed point (3) to float in their minds. They gave Jinny a certain amount of credit, because on the previous points he had performed well. Neither was under any delusion this scam was going to be easy. Sizable rewards require sizable risk and sizable effort. And while the Junes were listening to Jinny explicate the St. Petes easel, they also were multi-tasking on the other easels: the Paris easel and the Charleston easel and the antiques, wine, and real estate easel. They pretty much could figure out the messages of these, and they were content with those ideas. Paris and French wine, Charleston and real estate, and Charleston as the nexus of everything. But the partnership faced a key challenge: how to get the Hermitage grade C antiques to Charleston.
Blistov sat back, closed his eyes, and let the coffee and fifth donut work their magic. The Junes recognized a mind at work, and left him alone. Roger went to check his email and Gwen went outside to play with the dog and the cat. When they came back in half an hour later, Jinny was in the exact same position as when they had left. He opened his eyes and said, “I got good at this while I was in prison. Not much else to do.” With that he closed his eyes again, and Roger and Gwen left him to his thinking.
Aristocratic Thieves Page 10