Aristocratic Thieves

by Richard Dorrance

  Chapter 19 – Going to The Place of 1285 Rooms

  The next day they returned to Paris. Jinny spent the day on his cell phone making his arrangements, and the Junes spent half the day at a travel agent recommended by the hotel concierge, making their arrangements. Jinny’s arrangements were quite weird while the June’s arrangements were prosaic. Roger booked a direct flight from Paris to Saint Petersburg, and booked rooms at the Corinthia Hotel, Nevsky Prospekt 57. Not too much to it. He bought currency and guide books and maps. Gwen chose the Corinthia because its website said they had heated towel-racks in every bathroom. She said if she was going to get into serious trouble, she wanted her pre-gulag days to be comfortable ones.

  Jinny, on the other hand, was having a hellacious time making his arrangements, and was spending a lot of time on the phone with Plouriva. He hoped she was right when she said her phone was secure. She told him his best bet for getting back into the country and avoiding immigration scrutiny was to stow-away in a shipping container leaving the port of Stockholm, bound for the port of Lomonosov. She said it would only take about three weeks. “Very funny,” he replied. She giggled, as only hardass Russian women of stature and responsibility can giggle.

  Plouriva got serious, and laid out some other options. Blistov could get on an Aeroflot flight for Saint Petersburg, armed with a fake Russian passport. She asked him if he could get a forged passport in France, or elsewhere. “No,” he said. She pressed him, saying there was a good chance that the Russian customs computer database would neither show his true identity nor show his fake identity. He asked her on what did she base this opinion. She said she heard that, “was the situation.” He said he wasn’t going to risk his ass on that.

  Plouriva then said the Kirov Ballet currently was performing a European tour. Jinny could find them, make friends with the female dancers, and insinuate himself into the travelling troupe. When it came time for them to return home, he could lineup with the other male dancers at Russian customs, and squeeze in with them. Never-mind the fact that Blistov was five-foot-four inches tall and built like a bowling ball, while the Kirov dancers all were six foot two and built like Adonis. Plouriva said the Russian customs guys would be ogling the female dancers, and never even would look at the guys. Blistov said he wasn’t going to risk his ass on that one, either.

  Plouriva was having fun with this stuff. She wished she was with him in Paris. So she threw out another albatross. She suggested that his American friend Roger get him a fake American passport, and that Jinny simply walk into Russia along with Roger and his wife. Claim they were a three-way couple, just sight-seeing before officially tying the three-way matrimonial knot in Amsterdam.

  Jinny counted to ten before replying that he might consider a three-way with her and Gwen, but would not consider doing so with Roger and Gwen. He was quite self-contained in the face of Plouriva’s inanity, which was a testament to his self-evolution. This sort of tolerant behavior likely would not have happened back in the days of his Hermitage employment, and his association with Russians ranging in stature and background from ex-military intelligence agents to potato vodka bootleggers.

  Jinny, too, had enjoyed this banter with Plouriva. On the one hand he was under pressure from the Junes to produce, while on the other he was enjoying his new life of classy clothes, high French society, good personal grooming, and an exciting mission with the debonair Roger and the beautiful Gwen. His metabolism had accelerated and his world view had become cleaner. He was developing into a man of the world, a bon vivant, and this included his inter-personal communications. He was becoming fond of humor, so he didn’t just stomp Plouriva’s playful and goofy suggestions. He engaged with them.

  Blistov sat in his hotel room, going over the matter in his mind, again and again, sometimes thinking of his talks with Plouriva, sometimes casting his vision outwards and upwards, seeking a creative solution on his own. His thoughts roamed and roamed, sometimes touching base with his past experience, sometimes looking into new and never before experienced scenarios, and sometimes linking with actions of friends and acquaintances from the past. In one of these trances he hit upon a scheme. It was a modification of one of Plouriva’s goofy ideas. Why not see if Roger could get him a fake American passport and just walk into the Saint Petersburg airport customs area? Risky, sure. But the whole caper was risky. He was planning on stealing state property from the Hermitage. If Customs identified his passport forgery, he went down. So be it. “No guts, no glory.” And he wanted another taste of the glory he had experienced in the presence of Deneuve. Risk, hell yes.

  So that was the plan he took back to Roger and Gwen at dinner that evening. If Roger could get him a good forged American passport, he would board an Aeroflot flight to St. Petes and try to waltz right in.

  Gwen listened to this with ambivalence. She liked Jinny’s guts, but this was placing another burden on them. Where the hell was Roger going to get a high-quality forged American passport in Paris? Where the hell would he get one if they were back in Charleston, where they had resources? And, if Jinny got caught, the caper was over. She looked at Roger.

  Roger asked, “What other options have you come up with?” Jinny thought about Plouriva’s other suggestions: hide in a shipping container for three weeks, waltz in with a fake Russian passport and hope the computers were down, insinuate himself into the Kirov Ballet troupe and pretend he was a dancer, get a fake American passport and pretend he was part of a three-way couple on vacation. He decided to not relate these to Roger and Gwen. He just shrugged.

  Roger didn’t look as disconcerted as Gwen felt. He looked at Jinny for a while, then got up and walked to the window. He walked into the bedroom, came back into the sitting room, looked out the window. He looked at Jinny, looked at Gwen, then looked out the window again. Roger said to Gwen, “If he gets caught, we still can tour St. Petes and the Hermitage. We still have the wine deal. We can drink the wine over the next twenty years, or I can sell it to the locals. We can spend a week at Lake Como and a week in London before we head back to Charleston.”

  Gwen just had to ask the question, “Yes dear, that sounds fine, but where, in Paris, are you going to get a forged American passport that will fool a Russian customs inspector?”

  “From Henky,” he replied. Gwen’s mind raced….oh, Harmond Flourcroft Richland IV....Henky. Gwen was amazed at the detritus that lodged in her mind. Henky lived in London, and was a shady antiquarian of the type made so wonderfully famous by the British writer Jonathan Gash. Only, Henky was the real deal. He knew a lot about a lot of old things. He knew watercolor paintings, he knew old wine, he knew Roman ceramics, and he knew manuscripts. Roger knew him from the wine business. Henky had been involved in the international fake Thomas Jefferson Bordeaux bottles scandal that had carved up a bunch of rich and famous people around the world. Henky had stayed out of jail, but his reputation had not. Roger knew him from wine, but now thought of him for manuscripts. Henky could forge just about anything, given the right monetary incentive. He could produce Sixteenth Century Italian invoices, Eighteenth Century wills, and Twentieth Century contracts. Henky loved to forge documents. Gwen didn’t really know Henky, but if her husband thought well of him, let it rip. Gwen and Roger did really well letting each other take the floor. They traded off like a pair of skilled old vaudeville entertainers, whereby one would do his or her thing for a couple of minutes while the partner waited on the side, then with a flawless segue they would change positions.

  Blistov didn’t know Henky from Prince Harry, but he thought the name was cute.

  Roger got on the phone and made a plane reservation for London. Gwen got on the phone to the concierge and asked him to get her a ticket to a Kirov performance. Blistov got on the phone to Plouriva to tell her the news. After they all got off the various phones they were using, Roger packed an overnight bag and headed to the airport. That left Gwen staring at Jinny, and
Jinny staring at Gwen. Gwen thought back to the early relationship days in Charleston, when she had dragged Jinny to the men’s spa and the tailor and the male grooming salon. She remembered how well that had turned out. She also remembered some vague thoughts about food, and how Jinny had moved from eating boiled potatoes to eating handmade Italian pasta. She now thought, 'Let’s keep the ball rolling,' so she again called the concierge and asked him to get her two tickets to the Kirov. Jinny heard this, and smiled. Whatever Gwen wanted him to do in this department, man, that was ok.

  That evening the odd couple headed to the Place Vendome for the performance. Gwen spent two thirds of the afternoon getting Jinny into shape, and the other one third getting herself into shape. The concierge had to contact two clothes outfitters and one groomer to come to the hotel and attend to Gwen’s explicit and detailed directions. You will remember from the tour through Bordeaux with The Deneuve that Gwen spoke decent French. That helped, with Gwen telling the groomer Blistov had to be shaved twice, and why. Gwen watched Blistov react to one of the clothiers, a prissyboy. She was worried Blistov might bite this guy on the back of the neck and shake him like a Jack Russell terrier would a shake a duck it had caught, but Blistov was a paragon of complacency and tolerance.

  The guest prima ballerina that night was Nina Ananiashvili. This woman was forty-one years old, yet looked, acted, and most importantly, danced, like she was twenty-one. She was incredible. Blistov never had seen legs like those on Ananiashvili. Every time the tutu fluttered upwards and her thighs were revealed, Blistov felt like he had while sitting in the back of the giant Mercedes, looking at Deneuve’s jawline. Pure perfection, pure desire, pure aesthetics. Which Greek sculptor had created those legs, he wondered. Which Olympian god had taken the marble and enhanced and perfected the design, and then morphed it into human female flesh. Blistov was spellbound by the performance; his life again elevated to a new place. At the café after the performance, sipping a Pernod and water, he realized he was getting pretty deep into the hole of debt to Gwen. He realized he had better come through when their boots hit the streets of Saint Petersburg, assuming of course that he got past customs, and was not on his way to a deep and dark Russian cave.

  Roger called the next day to say Henky was doing the passport. That was the good news. The bad news was how much it was going to cost….a lot. Henky was getting on in years, and was padding his retirement fund. Who could blame him? Roger asked Gwen for an accounting of the fund that had been created by the team way back in Charleston. Two thirds of the stake was from the Junes, and one third from Blistov. When Gwen gave him the current balance figure, Roger said, “I’m buying the Henky work, but when I get back to Paris, we have to talk money.”

  And that is what they did three days later, when Roger returned. First, he showed Blistov his new passport with his new name. He now was Jenley Hermantine. Blistov never had seen an American passport, so it looked good to him. It also looked good to Gwen. Henky had told Roger it was a work of art, but then Henky said that about all the stuff he produced. Most of the time it was true. Blistov didn’t even blink at the risk inherent in the little bundle of paper. He took it, put it in his pocket, and looked expectantly at the Junes. The look asked, “When do we leave for Russia?”