Chapter 10 - How’d They Do It?
“Where are you?” I asked.
“At Domaine Romanee-Conti. In the garden out back of the house. Where we sat when we were here together.”
“Did they give you some wine? The good stuff?”
Roger said, “All their stuff is the good stuff, you know that. Their cheapest bottle is $1500. And yes, they gave us a tasting. Great, as usual.”
“Did they give you a bottle to take away? To bring home to me?”
“No dear. That they didn’t do.”
“Did you drink it with a beautiful woman?”
“No dear. You aren’t here, are you? I drank the one small glass with the cameraman and the director, who aren’t beautiful women.”
“What are you doing now?”
“We’re done for the day, and the guys went back to the hotel, and now I am talking with my wife, wanting to know if she’s still living at home with the dog or living in the state pen with some, uh, girlfriends?”
“Still here, with Gale and Jinny and the pooch. I’m still sleeping on the sofa, and Gale and Jinny asked if they could sleep in the living room too, with the painting, but I said no slumber parties allowed, at least not without you.”
“Been talking with any cops? Any of them in the living room, hanging out, asking questions?”
“No dear. No one’s been asking questions, and no cocktail parties with the Mayor, just me in my lonesomeness.”
“I’m glad no one with a badge has been asking questions. But I have one. Can your husband ask a question?”
“Yes dear, as long as it’s not about Adonis. That’s a little personal, and besides, he has strict rules about that. All those god guys are subject to a lot of rules, which I have to say, crimps their style sometimes.”
“Gwenny, how did you steal the painting? The Charleston Museum is not the Metropolitan in New York, but it’s not a little gallery, either.”
“It wasn’t that hard. It wasn’t like the caper at the Hermitage. You did good that night, dear, remember?”
“I remember being scared shitless and thinking what it was going to be like spending the rest of my life in a Russian gulag. I’ll always remember that, yes. Thank god Jinny was there and got us out alive and with the goods.”
I said, “Well, this was exciting, very, and I’m happy to say not scary like in Saint Petersburg. But it was the same deal: Jinny got us in and out of the Hermitage with his inside stuff, and he got us in and out of the museum here, too. With the painting. And it didn’t take a lot of planning like the Hermitage either. I told him what I wanted to do, and three days later he said we were ready. Voila.”
“So how’d you do it?”
“The place has all the standard structural and electronic stuff, but nothing fancy. Like you said, it’s not the Met. We just turned off all the electronic stuff for half an hour, picked the lock on one door, went it, got out, turned the stuff back on. The only tricky part came at home while we were carrying the painting up the back steps and into the house. Richard was awake at 3am and heard us, came out on his back porch and saw Jinny carrying the thing through the back door. Asked what we were doing.”
“What was he doing up at 3am?”
“The usual. Working on a book about us. Said as he gets older he’s not sleeping as well.”
“What’s he writing about us this time? We haven’t done anything in a while. Well, not until now.”
“I told him if he would tell me what he’s writing about us, I’d tell him what we doing carrying a large painting into our house at 3am. He said no, he’d find out from the dog for free, not have to tell us till the book’s published.”
“The dog is a squeal, you know that. Tells him everything.”
“Yeah, but the pooch also tells us when someone comes into our house in the middle of the night with a gun, the way Anna did that time, so it’s a trade-off. I say we keep him.”
Roger said, “How exactly did you turn off the alarms with no one knowing, and then turn them on again? Alarms aren’t supposed to work that way. And you mean the motion-detectors and cameras, too? All that stuff they have in there?”
“Yes, all of it. It’s all tied together in one software system on their computer. We just went into that computer and turned it off.”
“Who’s we? You’re not a hacker, and neither is Jinny, and Gale can work her cell phone and that’s about it.”
“It was the same thing as at the Hermitage. Not Jinny, but a friend of Jinny’s. When Jinny worked there he cleaned toilets, but he was a very smart toilet cleaner, as we know, and one time he noticed some guys casing the joint, and watched them, and told the head of security, who watched them, and they tried a smash and grab of some Faberge eggs, and the security guy caught them without damaging the eggs, and he was a hero, and since then he’d owed Jinny one. And Jinny called in the marker for me.”
“What’s the rest of the story? How’s the guy do it?”
“Look, the Hermitage is like the Met; super security in the museums, armed guards, satellites looking down and all that. We got what we got during our heist there because it was third-rate stuff out in the warehouses. And I bet after that, the security out there went way up. But in the museums the electronics are incredible, and this Russian security guy is the one who knows all that stuff, and Jinny told him we wanted to get into the Charleston Museum, and this guy sat in his office in the Hermitage and hacked into our museum, and told Jinny it was easy, like grade-school stuff. That night Jinny sent him a text message, the guy turned everything off, including the alarms that are supposed to alert the security monitoring company that someone has hacked the system, the guy said that was a joke, and we went in and up the stairs to the area of the silver collections which is where the painting was hanging on the wall, and Jinny picked it up like it was nothing even though the frame must weigh two hundred pounds, and I stopped Gale from pinching some of the silver, and we loaded it into a rental van and got outta there after relocking the door. Then Jinny sent the guy another text, and he turned it back on. That was it. Now it’s here, and I love it. When are you coming home? Adonis is all talk and no walk. I miss you.”
“So now we owe Jinny big time. Or you do.”
“Gale and I own Jinny, and you know it. You’re just envious that you can’t do to him what we can.”
Roger didn’t answer that one because he knew it was true. He said, “What about Richard? Did he call the cops, tell them his neighbors were doing strange things in the middle of the night?”
“He loves us, and he knows he might get another book out of it when the dog squeals and tells him the story. So no cops from him.”
“What about the insurance company? Any stories in the newspaper about them getting involved?”
“Not that I’ve seen, but then I’m not sure the museum is going to publicize that.”
“Anything else of interest back there?”
I thought, ‘That’s all the excitement I need right now,’ but then said, “Well, one thing, definitely not as interesting as stealing paintings, but remember the car chase in Bullitt? The Mustang vs. the Charger?”
“The best.”
“I saw a guy the other day that looks just like Steve McQueen. He was in the museum cafe when we went back. I almost wrote my phone number on a napkin and gave it to him as we left.”
“Gwenny, you went back to the museum after the heist?”
“Umm, yes.”
“Are you planning on stealing anything else from there?”
“Not seriously, but we did go upstairs and look at George Gershwin’s piano, the one he composed Porgy and Bess on while he was here in Charleston in 1934. If I had that in the living room I’d get rid of the Steinway.”
“Don’t press your luck. I really don’t want to talk with you over an intercom and look at you through a plate glass window, you in an orange jail jumpsuit.”
“Yes,
dear.”
“And don’t go trying to steal a ’68 Mustang 390 GT, either, ok?”
“It was the guy driving that turned me on, dear, not the car.”
“Bye Gwenny.”
Gwenny June's Tommy Crown Affair Page 10
