Chapter 31: Gone in the Night
The fundamental idea was that all of the conspiracy and planning, all the talking and risk-taking, and all of the strange friendships and relationships would result in some great action; this action being, of course, the theft; the heist of a lot of grade C artifacts from the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia. This was not a Tom Cruise (Mission Impossible), Sean Connery (James Bond) type of action. Maybe it was a tribute to the brainpower employed by the team in its planning. Maybe it was luck. Maybe it was due to soft security by the Hermitage staff. Or maybe it was due to a legacy of bad karma drifting down through the years from the rampages of Lenin and Stalin. Who knows? The fact is, the heist went off without a hitch.
The team did have to make one very important change to the plan at this point. After much discussion, mostly between Roger and Plouriva, they realized it simply wouldn’t work having Roger describe to Plouriva beforehand the types of artifacts he wanted from the warehouses. He would have to be part of the heist team and choose the goods that were taken.
Gwen didn’t like this conclusion at all. She had planned on sitting comfortably in the Corinthia, playing with Roger and the towels that came off the heated towel rack she loved so much. Now her husband was walking into the line of fire. And it might turn out to be a withering fire. But she kept her mouth shut when it became clear Roger wanted to do this, and that it was necessary. Roger used their telepathy to tell her it was all right.
On D-Day morning Roger went alone to the Hermitage, as usual. Just before lunchtime he left, and met Plouriva outside. She walked him to her office where he spent the remainder of the day, in full view of the grounds staff. Maybe they thought he was the boss’ new squeeze, and if that was the case, the staff knew enough not to stick their noses into it.
Early that morning Plouriva got a call from Constantine (on a secure line) saying eight large flatbed trucks were waiting at a construction site two miles from the museum. With this confirmed, Plouriva went into the main museum building and found her counterpart, the head hoity-toity guy that ran internal operations. She told him that today was the day to move the crates from Vladivostok out of the basement work areas, to the warehouse areas, where she would store them for the duration of the exhibit. He looked at her like she was crazy, and said, “Are you crazy? Why didn’t you give me some notice?”
She said, “Look, today is the day the construction guys I know off-loaded their trucks at their site. Today is the day the trucks are available. And so today is the day I can get the crates out of your way and out of your building. What’s the problem? You want the crates to stay, fine by me.”
The hoity guy was exasperated, and looked it, but from past experience he knew enough to not fuck around with Plouriva. The last time he did that, his parking spaces didn’t get plowed for two weeks from under a late May storm that dumped two feet of snow on the city. So he bit his lip, called down to the basement level and told the guys down there that today all the crates would be going. This stirred up a hive of activity that Plouriva was pleased to witness. The sixteen huge crates were cleared and lined up ready for loading.
Plouriva went back to her office and smiled at Roger, who was looking at a Russian fashion magazine. He couldn’t figure out why Plouriva, of all people, would have a magazine like this in her office, but he enjoyed looking at the Russian models. He was pleased to see the Russian fashion world had not succumbed to the disease the western fashion world has succumbed to, which is a population of emaciated, juvenile, stick-figure models. These Russian babes had substance to them. Plouriva called Constantine and spoke one word: “Go.” At 2pm eight flatbeds entered the Hermitage compound through one of the service gates and rumbled up to the rear of the building that had 1285 rooms, including one heck of a lot of bathrooms.
While the hoitys loaded the crates onto the trucks, Plouriva called the two gay guys and told them to stop by her office when they came on duty that evening at 6pm, because she had the forms they had asked for to apply for jobs in her division. This was the signal that the job was on for that night, as planned. She thought she heard choking at the other end of the phone line, but that could have been her imagination.
She, on the other hand, was Cool Hand Luke. She was amazed she was not nervous, not even a little. Excited, maybe, but she had no premonition of disaster. When the head hoity called her and told her the crates were loaded, she jumped in her jeep and zoomed the quarter mile over to the museum. She parked, waved to the hoity, gave him the figure behind her back, and jumped on the running board of the lead truck. She gave the “convoy ho” signal, and the giant diesel engines chugged the trucks into motion. A massive cloud of smoke drifted towards the snow white walls of one of the great museums on the planet. The hoity guy said good riddance to the crates, and the same to the head grounds yahoo.
The convoy meandered away from the museum area and disappeared into the surrounding pine forest. Most of the hoitys didn’t know what went on out in “the woods”, and didn’t want to. Warehouses without end, dumpsites, a quarry, maintenance sheds, vehicle garages, water plants, sewage plants, and god knows what else filled these surrounding lands. This was Plouriva’s territory.
Plouriva’s plan was to simulate a breakdown in the lead truck when it got to the warehouse district, when she did by opening the hood of the lead truck. She used an old military forklift to off-load two crates and make it look like they were heading for storage. The eight drivers and eight truck passengers hung around the area looking bored, in case any security patrols happened by, while two guys pretended to work on the lead truck engine. Plouriva had made sure that none of her staff would be working in this area. All was quiet.
Plouriva hoofed it back a mile to her office complex and found Roger still looking at the fashion models. She wondered how long he could do this. It was 6pm, and most of the staff had left for the day. She called the security office and told them of the truck breakdown. They had nothing to say. With that, she turned to Roger and said the Russian version of, “Game on.”
Roger put down the magazine, looked at her, and said, “Now what.” She turned off her computer, took a last look around the space that had been her office for twenty years, and with only a twinge of sentiment, flipped off the lights. They walked outside, hopped into another jeep, and disappeared into the forest.
Plouriva drove to the warehouse complex and parked near the line of trucks. They got out, and Roger looked around. He counted thirty-one large, one-story, wood buildings within sight. He asked, “Is this all?” Plouriva got the American joke, and told him there were four other warehouse complexes similar to this. He said, “Wow.” He looked at her, and she looked at him, and it dawned on them both that from this point forward the job would be shear improvisation. The sixteen guys lounging around showed no emotion; they had been part of heists before, and calmly waited for Plouriva’s orders. All of them had paper bags of food, and all of them carried handguns under their shirts or on the floors of the trucks.
From her jeep Plouriva grabbed a large pair of bolt-cutters and two flashlights. The warehouses were locked with large, heavy padlocks. Plouriva was solid as a rock as she led the way to the first building, cut the lock, and entered. The lights worked, surprisingly, as this may have been the first time in ten years that anyone had turned them on. Roger entered and looked around.
The first thing he saw was a small painting of a Russian factory. The smokestack was billowing and the workers were filing in one doorway and out another. This was Russian realism from the 1950s. The painting was hanging by wires from one of the horizontal ceiling beams. Roger scanned the packed interior, with aisles running in perpendicular directions, and he looked at Plouriva for guidance. Plouriva had no guidance to provide, and shrugged her shoulders. With that as a statement of reality, Roger realized the same thing Jinny had realized a couple of days earlier, when he faced the ta
sk of dealing with the Hermitage perimeter security system. Jinny knew it was time for high performance, and he did what he did with Peter and Pater in the restaurant. Plouriva had faced this when dealing with her counterpart, the hoity dude that ran the museum interior operation, and she had intimidated the guy. Roger now knew it was up to him to pick the objects they would steal; the objects that ultimately would wind up in Charleston, where they would sell them for large sums of money to rich, expatriate, crooked Russians.
Roger asked Plouriva how much time they had before they had to roll the trucks out of the compound. She looked at her watch….7:30pm. Constantine had told her the trucks had to be out of the compound by 1am, because the artifacts had to be reloaded from the museum crates into the giant computer crates before dawn. So Plouriva told Roger all the trucks had to roll together, as a convoy, and the engines had to rumble by 12:30am. Roger had five hours to fill the crates with Hermitage grade C treasures. It was time to perform.
Earlier, he and Plouriva realized they would not have to do The Great Escape routine of cutting holes in the floors and taking the stuff out that way. It was going to be easier, just haul the items out the doors. The difficulty was plowing through thirty-one buildings in five hours to find the best stuff. But doing that was his job. He spouted orders to Plouriva, and commensurately she spouted orders to the sixteen guys from the trucks. Roger needed one man to stay at his side at all times. This was the marker, whose job was to mark the items Roger identified to be taken and get Roger into the buildings with the lights on. He wanted a second man to be the Little Boss (Plouriva being the big boss), whose job was to direct the others in wrapping and loading the items. And he told Plouriva her job was to range around the entire operation, acting as trouble shooter. No one asked any questions, they just moved into motion. Plouriva picked a guy named Hameed to be Roger’s sidekick. Roger thought about asking Plouriva how the guy got a name like that here in Saint Petersburg, but decided that was something that could wait for a less eventful time. Hameed it was, and a good thing, as Hameed could speak a little English. Roger was tempted again to ask how a guy named Hameed, who was a crook in Saint Petersburg, had learned to speak English, but again he decided that could wait for a more appropriate time.
As he told Hameed to mark the items he chose and tell Little Boss to load them into the crates. Roger realized he had no way to mark the items. Shit. Hameed was cool though, and looked around. He saw that some of the objects were covered in white sheets. Mostly these were fabric furniture. Hameed whipped one of these sheets off a sofa and tore it into three foot long strips. When he had twenty of these in hand, he looked at Roger and gave a thumbs-up. Roger smiled a sigh of relief. Go Hameed. With that, Roger closed his eyes, settled his breathing, and switched on his Divvy Sense.
What is Roger’s Divvy Sense? It’s the thing described in stories by the English author Jonathan Gash that relate the life and times, loves and crimes of the inimitable, slightly crooked but lovable antiques dealer, Lovejoy. Lovejoy had the real deal when it came to the Divvy Sense. Lovejoy had the thing at the highest level. If Lovejoy came within a hundred yards of a genuine, bona fide, valuable work of art or antique, some special organ in his body that only a very few people in the world possess would start bonging and binging and giving off vibrations that told Lovejoy something good was close by. This might happen at an auction, or in someone’s house, or maybe in a store, or even out in a field, because the Divvy Sense worked on archeological objects just as well as paintings or silver or furniture. Long ago Lovejoy had given up going to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London because this special organ would be so stimulated the vibrations just about drove Lovejoy up the wall.
Roger’s Divvy Sense was nothing compared to Lovejoy’s, but it was a formidable and valuable attribute to possess if one loved beautiful things. And now was the time to turn this baby on and let it do its special thing. It took some time for Roger to clear his thoughts and feelings, and let the Divvy Sense settle over him. He stood still, with eyes closed and breathing shallow, for three minutes. Both Hameed and Plouriva realized something strange was going on, so they kept quiet. They kept looking at each other with raised eyebrows and twitching facial expressions, but they didn’t speak or move. Roger got it tuned in, and opened his eyes. He was in Divvy mode, and he remained like that for the next five hours.
He moved down one row and up another. He ripped sheets off of chairs and sofas and tables and desks. His eyes flew from lamp to dresser to chandelier to china set. It took about twenty minutes for him to calibrate the Divvy Sense, which let him differentiate between just average valuable and beautiful stuff to really valuable and beautiful stuff. It had helped this calibration effort that he and Gwen had spent so many hours in the Hermitage looking at the grade A and grade B stuff. Like Lovejoy when he went to the Victoria and Albert Museum, Roger had had to keep his Divvy Sense carefully boxed up and inactive when in the Hermitage, lest it cause some sort of cardiac infarction that he really wanted to avoid.
After twenty minutes he began to sense the great grade C stuff from the average grade C stuff. In the first building, which took him twenty minutes to cover, he motioned to Hameed to mark six items with a strip of white cloth. This was Roger’s initiation into high level, serious, illegal divvying. The sub-conscious knowledge that if he got caught doing this he never again would make love to Gwen, or drink a glass of great French burgundy, or sit on his porch and play with his dog, or eat a plate of langoustines, added to his bloodstream a very large dose of adrenaline, or whatever chemicals were involved in creating the Divvy Sense in the first place. In two words, Roger was on a grand high.
He and Hameed moved on to the next warehouse, while Little Boss cracked the whip on the truck guys and got them wrapping and loading the items into the crates. Plouriva, the big boss, jumped in her jeep and made a quick run back to her office complex. There was no one around. She then zoomed back to the warehouses and kept going down the dirt road towards the perimeter fence and the guard checkpoint. Two hundred yards from the checkpoint she stopped the jeep, turned off the engine, and walked. The guard house and gate came into view. From her pocket she took a small pair of binoculars, and looked at the house. There, to her relief, she saw Peter standing outside, and Pater sitting inside. She walked forward, and when Peter saw her, he waved. She came up to him, her senses alert and questing for his demeanor, which told her everything was ok. Peter was cool and positive. Without speaking to him, she went into the small building and did the same with Pater. He, too, was OK. Plouriva had to hand it to Jinny, who sensed something safe in the two gay guys, and who trusted them. Way to go Jinny. One more reason to love the guy.
Plouriva changed from commander mode to friend mode, and put a hand on both their shoulders. She told them everything was going according to plan; everything was cooking; the mission was happening. She told them the trucks would show up here about 12:30am, but they should be ready before that. They nodded and waited for any orders, but Plouriva just smiled again and left.
By the time she got back to the warehouses, Roger and Hameed were on their fourth one, and three crates were full of objects, small and large, all wrapped in thick blankets. The truck guys were working slowly but steadily and carefully. They were pros, and Plouriva was thankful that Henric was able to supply such highly skilled crooks for the job. She could see these same guys inside a vault somewhere, with alarms going off, calmly loading currency and stock certificates into sacks. Plouriva guessed all of them knew how to handle their guns. She wondered how much these guys cost for a job like this, and realized it was a lot. Henric and Constantine, to some significant extent, were subsidizing this operation with their own funds. It made Plouriva realize just how wealthy the two bigwigs really were. And she realized Henric and Constantine were not in this for the money. They were in this because they inherently were crooks who enjoyed their work, and because they were co
mmitted to moving to Charleston and living the good life there. Plouriva really hoped Gwen was going to come through in that department.
Plouriva caught up with Roger and Hameed, and watched them work. It looked like they had been doing this sort of thing together for years. Roger was in a zone, scanning, feeling, sensing, assessing. When he motioned, Hameed jumped, and a white flag appeared attached to the object. Little Boss was right behind, ordering his crew to pick this up this way, pick that up that way, carry this piece to that crate and that piece to this crate. Little Boss watched that each and every item was carefully handled and carefully wrapped. Plouriva wondered if any of these guys might show up one day in Charleston, bidding on some of the items they now were loading onto trucks.
After an hour, the mostly silent movements of the men were interrupted when the gun one of the guys was carrying inside his belt slipped out as he was lifting a large painting, dropped to the floor, and went off. BLAM, the sound echoed inside the building. THUD, the bullet sounded as it entered a heavy wood post not far from the head of another guy. No one moved. The guy who owned the gun stood straining under the weight of his load. The guy who almost took the round in the head looked at the gun first and then at the gun owner. Roger, Hameed, Plouriva, and everyone else held their breath.
Then Little Boss spoke up, walking towards the gun owner, saying, “You dumb fuck, how many times do I have to tell you not to carry your piece with a round in the chamber?”
And then the guy who almost took the round in the head walked towards the guy, saying, “You dumb fuck, can’t you keep your fucking gun in your pants where it’s supposed to be?” The two guys reached the gun owner at the same time, who still was holding the large oil painting of a Romanov borzoi that must have weighed a hundred pounds. The two guys looked at each other, and came to an understanding. They each reached up to the gun owner’s head, grabbed an ear, and began to twist….hard. The gun owner began to squeal, and then the other truck guys began to laugh, and then Plouriva and Hameed smiled. One of the other guys yelled that if the gun owner dropped the painting, they were going to tie him up and leave him for the polizei to find the next day. The two ear twisters kept twisting, and the gun owner kept squealing, but he didn’t drop the painting of the borzoi.
Plouriva had to intercede into the guy's fun, and told them to stop. When the gun owner was allowed to set the painting down, first Little Boss, and then the other ear twister smacked the gun owner on the sides of his head. And then Little Boss picked up the gun and told him he could have it back later, after he bought them all a round of drinks when the job was done. No one seemed to care about the sound of the shot. Roger remained in Divvy mode, Plouriva went outside to reconnoiter, and the guys went back to work. The humiliated gun owner picked up the patiently waiting borzoi, and carried it out to a truck.
The dropped gun was the only real excitement during this phase of the operation. Roger was the man now, everything revolving around him. Some of the truck guys could care less about what they were loading, but a few of them were curious about just how Roger was doing this thing. Hameed was the most curious, and he had the ring side seat. Plouriva watched carefully but didn’t understand what was happening. Plouriva was sorry Jinny wasn’t here to see this performance because she thought he would understand more about it than she did. Roger was in a zone, but he was not a zombie. He talked to himself, saying things like “unbelievable,” and “holy shit,” and “oh yes,” and “that is really nice, really nice.” Plouriva wondered what he said when he and Gwen were doing it.
After an hour Hameed understood what was happening. He saw these items were old, and were art things, and he understood they were going to be sold somewhere for lots of money. He asked Roger why take this one, why take that one, what was good about this thing and that thing? Sometimes Roger answered, and sometimes he didn’t. He said things like, “Because this thing is small and won’t take up much room in the crates.” “Because it’s a nice piece of silver, nineteenth century.” “My auntie will like it so much.” “Henric likes velvet.” “The ship motif pattern will fit in with Charleston motifs.” And, “Some idiot refinished this table, but it’s still worth a fortune.”
Hameed asked, “Why not that chandelier?”
“Won’t survive the trip in one piece.”
“Why not that chair?”
“Because it’s a fake.”
“Why not that vase?”
“I don’t like cloisonné.”
It went on like that for five hours, with Hameed learning a lot, and Roger not seeming to mind. He was in the zone; he was having fun. Roger was divvying antiques, and this was wonderful. Wait till he told Gwen about this deal.
The truck guys kept busy, and Plouriva patrolled the grounds, and thermoses of hot coffee were passed around, and Roger and Hameed kept the items flowing. At building number twenty-two Plouriva stepped up and told Roger they had filled fourteen out of sixteen crates, and that he had forty minutes to fill the remaining two. Roger was surprised. Time had passed almost unnoticed. He said, “Ok,” and realized this last forty minutes would have to be prime selection. He shifted into high gear and Hameed shifted with him. They raced to building number twenty-three, cut the lock, and Roger ran down one aisle and up another. Hameed was at his heels, sensing the urgency, and following in the groove. Little Boss kept up, and so the loaders had to keep up. Sweat flowed. Roger no longer spoke to Hameed, he merely gestured at an object, and it was tagged and disappeared from the building. Plouriva grabbed one of the truckers and went back to the first building, where she made sure the lights were out and the doors shut with the cut lock hanging from the hasp. Then building two, then three, then onwards till she had checked all the buildings they had opened.
Roger now chose only small objects of the best quality. He was amazed when one building yielded not a single piece. Hameed said, “Must have been shit from Stalin’s house.”
Plouriva marched with Roger and Hameed, watching them, watching the loaders at the last crate, and watching her watch. Then came the signal from the last truck carrying the last two crates: FULL, DONE. Plouriva ran up to Roger, grabbed him by the shoulders, and said, “Roger, we’re done, time to go.” He turned back to the aisles as if he wanted to get one more artifact, but she grabbed him by the hand and pulled him towards the door. She, Hameed, Little Boss, and Roger left. She pulled the door closed and set the lock in the hasp. They ran towards the trucks, with Plouriva doing the universal “mount em up” signal, arm pointing to the sky and drawing circles. The men policed the area, picking up their tools, their food containers, and their coffee cups. Everything and everybody was loaded into the trucks. Eight big diesel engines roared to life, with Plouriva in the lead truck, like General Patton crossing North Africa.
In ten minutes the trucks reached the guard house and the perimeter fence. It was 12:45am. Peter and Pater had heard them coming, and were ready to roll. They couldn’t believe this really was happening. They were scared shitless. The gate was open, and they piled into the second truck. When all eight trucks were through the fence, a guy in the last truck, at Plouriva’s order, jumped out and closed the gate. The convoy rumbled down the road. Everyone and everything was gone in the night.
Aristocratic Thieves Page 31