Aristocratic Thieves

by Richard Dorrance

  Chapter 13 – More Travel Prep

  Gwen had given up being surprised by Jinny or anything associated with this caper, so when Jinny made an appointment to come to the June’s house, telling her he needed some sartorial advice, she said OK. She didn’t even blink when he used the word sartorial, and she knew what it meant.

  One of Jinny’s characteristics that Gwen was getting to know and like was his straightforwardness. He simply did not mess around in his communication. He wasn’t brusque; he was simple and direct. Which is not the same as being respectful. Remember the night Gwen met him, in the fancy French restaurant. Blistov treated the waiter as if he were a robot, and took the chair from the neighboring table without so much as a how-dee-do to the occupants of the table. Gwen figured she would have to correct this somehow and at some time, but that time was not now. Blistov’s directness was a plus in Gwen’s world.

  Standing in Gwen’s living room, with her sitting on the sofa, Jinny reached under his sweatshirt and pulled out a handgun. This gave Gwen pause. He turned it butt first towards Gwen and handed it to her. He said, “I took this offa guy a year ago. It’s too big and fat under my shirt, and makes it bulge out too much. Can you get me something that makes me look good in my dressing?” Before thinking about an answer, Gwen did what Jinny had done that night on the street: she pointed the gun at the floor, removed the magazine, and then racked the slide, checking to see if the gun was loaded. A bullet popped out of the ejection port, landed in the open bay of the baby grand piano that sat at the end of the sofa, and made a loud harmonic ping ding as it bounced off the wires. Here again was a new one for Gwen. Never before had a bullet ejected from the gun of a houseguest made a ping ding noise in her family piano. Little Jinny Blistov carried surprises around with him like Linus carried dirt. She thought, Jinny, you got more to worry about with your dressing than whether your piece bulges too much.

  Jinny stuck his stubby fingers into the bay of the piano between the wires and retrieved the bullet, and Gwen set the H&K 1911 down on the coffee table. Nice gun, she thought, but not worth the grand someone had paid for it. Not that Jinny had paid for it, she realized. She recognized the import of Jinny saying he had, “Taken it off a guy.” Jinny at the same time noticed Gwen set the gun on top of a magazine called Connoisseur. He didn’t know a connoisseur from a dinosaur, but he knew a French word when he saw it. It gave him great satisfaction, knowing it was true there were French people all over Charleston whose ancestors had loved a Russian czar.

  They were ready to get down to the business of the day. Jinny thought the problem was in his choice of concealable weapon. Gwen knew the problem was in Jinny’s choice of clothes, and by extension his choice of personal grooming accoutrement. Jinny had nothing on Gwen in the frankness department, so she decided this was the time and place to straighten him out. After all, she was going to be walking around Paris with this guy; he had to be right. She told Jinny to sit down, whereupon she asked him if he knew what a men’s salon was. He said he didn’t, but he detected the hint of another French word, and that made whatever she was going to talk about interesting. He sat back to learn. Gwen told him it was a place where guys go to get their hair cut, and that there is one in Charleston that did other things too.

  “Like what?” he asked.

  She said, “Like they fix your fingers and your toes, and if you want to give them a lot of money, they will let you try on clothes and jewelry and stuff, and if you want to give them more money, they will paint your teeth white.”

  Jinny had noticed that people on TV and in magazines had teeth that looked like they had been painted white. He thought this looked good on the women and ridiculous on the men, and there was a correlation here with southern accents. He thought southern accents on women were incredibly sexy, and that the same accent on men made them seem worse than simpletons. Jinny was pretty sure he didn’t want his teeth painted any color, but he was up for the rest of the drill, being that Gwen had suggested it, so he told her, ok. He was good with learning.

  Gwen made an appointment, and the next morning she told Roger she was taking Jinny to Pierre’s. Roger did not even go to Pierre’s, so he looked at her kind of funny, but he knew better than to question her about this, and off she went. The details of the event are unimportant. Suffice it to say that the two hour, $200 appointment stretched into a six hour, $4000 appointment that Jinny willingly paid for. This makeover was right up there with the one imposed on Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady. She went in a flower girl and came out a duchess. At least on the outside. Blistov went in a munchkin fuck with whiskers growing behind his ears, polyester jeans sticking to his short legs, and ugly sneakers on his ugly feet. He came out….better.

  When they went into the salon, Gwen took Pierre aside and asked what he could do with the “gentleman.” Pierre cast an eye on Blistov, and asked, “Exactly how much money does he have to spend and how many weeks is he available to work on?” Gwen laughed at the joke, sort of, and then told Pierre that Pierre had six hours and $2000 at his command, and that when she came back she expected to see a more interesting person over there, who currently was chatting it up with the receptionist in the waiting area. She emphasized her direction with a steely look that pretty much withered Pierre right where he stood.

  Gwen introduced Jinny to Pierre by telling Jinny that Pierre’s great-grandfather had been part of the Allied siege of Stalingrad in 1917, and that his grandfather had been part of the Allied siege of Moscow in 1944. This made Pierre practically a kissing cousin in Jinny’s book, and he went willingly to the slaughter. Gwen came back in four hours. Pierre said the gentleman wasn’t “done.” Gwen did some shopping and came back an hour later. Pierre said the gentleman still wasn’t “done.” Gwen wondered if Jinny was being groomed or basted with pan juices, and gave Pierre another steely gaze, but this time he stood up under it better. Evidently he had something up his sleeve, which intrigued Gwen. She went and had a drink, and came back an hour later to find a transformation that wasn’t quite as dramatic as Audrey Hepburn’s, but it was something, just the same.

  Jinny had been shaved twice with a straight razor, by two different barbers. His clothes had been taken out back and burned in a drum. A Polish hairdresser who spoke a little Russian had cut his hair and soothed his consternations when two manicurists had started on his hands and feet. The Pole told Jinny that sitting practically naked in the chair was normal in America. A gay clothier from the men’s shop next store had measured him and gone away with more than one kind of design on his mind. Pierre pirouetted and conducted the makeover the way Bernstein had done the Philharmonic. Either Pierre had been scared shitless by Gwen’s look, or he had seen this as one of the greatest challenges ever to his professional competency. In either case, Pierre had come through. Jinny was happy, and again was chatting it up with the receptionist. The receptionist was amazed at the transformation, and Gwen was amazed at the transformation. Jinny wasn’t exactly Jinny anymore. He was, Charleston acceptable.

  Gwen told Jinny to give Pierre $4000. Jinny looked at Gwen like she was kidding, but her stare told him she wasn’t. He figured, “When in Rome.” Pierre watched Jinny count out forty hundred dollar bills. He hadn’t been paid in cash in a very long time, and this was his first two thousand dollar tip. He told Jinny and Gwen to come back anytime.

  When they arrived back at the June’s house Gwen asked Jinny to go into the living room. She went into the kitchen, then to the sunroom, and then called up the stairs. Roger answered from the upstairs study, and came down. She said, “I want to show you something," and led the way into the living room, standing with hands on hips. Roger saw and heard Jinny sitting on the sofa, gently stroking the muzzle of Roger’s dog and talking to it in Russian. At first Roger watched the dog-petting and listened to the strange language. Then he became aware of Jinny’s transformation. Jinny looked positively handsome. The hair was coiffed,
the clothes were matched and creased, the $300 shoes were on display, and the man’s persona exuded relaxation and self-confidence. Jinny looked happy, and the dog looked happy, as if it understood perfectly the soothing cadence of Russian words. Roger looked at Gwen the way he does whenever she does something remarkable, which is often. It is a subdued look, with just a hint of smile in the mouth and an expression of deep satisfaction radiating from around the eyes. Roger again looked at Jinny, and again looked back at Gwen, and said, “Well done, love.” Gwen walked over to the pile of large paper bags with handles that Jinny had schlepped home and into the house. She dragged these over to the piano, lowered the top of the piano, and emptied the contents of the bags onto it: five pairs of Brooks Brothers slacks, four dress cotton shirts and four casual silk shirts, two more pairs of shoes, one dressy and one casual, one three-season wool suit, two sport coats, and an assortment of socks, underwear, and other miscellaneous items. Jinny watched this display with a satisfied sense of amusement and contentment. Remember, Jinny was without the bad sort of pride that leads people so often into counterproductive defensive resentment. Jinny liked his new clothes and his new look, and he knew he owed these to Gwen.

  There was one small paper bag on the floor still unopened, and Gwen picked it up. She looked at Jinny and Roger and said, “Follow me.” She led the boys through the house to the back door that led outside to the garden, stopping only to pick up her purse. The June’s house was in the historic district, on a very old street, in a very old and quiet neighborhood. Houses here were close together, separated by brick walls, some of them stuccoed and some not. The garden also was old, meaning the plants were old and mature and enveloping, which gave a sense of privacy and enclosure. But the fact is that other houses were very close. Gwen went to the back wall behind the garage, dragged the rolling trash container into the garden, took hold of the paper bag, and turned it upside down. Out tumbled Jinny’s old sneakers. Gwen had ordered Pierre to save these detested objects, though Pierre could not fathom why. Anyway, there they were, in the June’s garden, on the ground, radiating ugliness and malaise. Jinny looked at them, and Roger looked at them, and then they looked, expectantly, at Gwen. Roger knew from experience that something was up. With Gwen, something always was up, usually something good. Jinny didn’t have this experience, of course, but his intuition told him to keep watching. He was learning about Gwen.

  Gwen looked at Jinny and said, "Do you know what a symbol is?” He thought for a moment and answered, “Yeah, I do, it is like the halos around the heads of the saints painted using pure gold gild that are on many of the hundreds of Renaissance religious painting in the Hermitage that I looked at continuously for five years as I passed from bathroom to bathroom to bathroom, cleaning. The halos are symbolic of the saint’s virtue.” Roger took a moment to calculate in rough numbers both the artistic value and the dollar value of hundreds of 16th and 17th and 18th century paintings that included pure gold paint. This calculation boggled his mind.

  Gwen was more focused on the symbolism part of her demonstration, and was happy that Jinny knew what a symbolic gesture was. She said, “Jinny, here is a symbol of your old life, your new life, and our in-progress partnership project.” She opened her purse, pulled her Glock, assumed the target shooter’s stance of left foot slightly forward of the right, weight slightly forward, two hands on the gun….and at forty feet, fired two rounds through Jinny’s left sneaker and then two rounds through the other sneaker. BLAM, blam….blam, blam.

  Neither Roger nor Jinny moved. They listened to the sound of the firing echo off the brick walls, and wondered about the neighbors. Jinny really didn’t care about the neighbors, but Roger was a tiny bit concerned. Jinny just processed the fact that Gwen would fire her gun in the middle of the day, in the middle of her back yard, in the middle of town. The result of this processing was the thought: cool chick. Jinny went over to the sneakers, picked them up, looked at the four holes, and smiled at Gwen. Gwen responded by pointing towards the trashcan. Jinny understood and dumped them. Gwen said, “That’s the end of the old life. And Jinny, when the other Russians come and I have to do this kind of thing with them, I’m going to need your help and support. It has to be done to achieve our goals. Got it?”

  Jinny replied, “Yes, boss. What has to be, has to be.”

  Roger was looking around the perimeter of the garden, trying to see if any of the neighbors had come to their windows. He saw no terrified faces, which was good. He decided that if the cops showed up at the door to investigate, he would leave that to Gwen. He would go to the study and, if summoned, fain ignorance: “Sorry, Officers, I was listening to Mahler’s 5th, and had my headphones on, didn’t hear a thing.”