“I don’t know. I haven’t figured that out, yet. What’s for dinner?”
Chapter 19 – The Junes Agree
Jinny knew if he had a fourth bowl of shrimp and grits, someone in the room would give him shit. Gale, probably, who had a fashionista figure that would make Sharon Stone cry. But it sure was tempting. The team had been sitting around the kitchen for an hour now, trying to figure out how to chase the kidnappers. Some people think best in the shower, and some while they’re walking, but Jinny thought best, or thought he thought best, while eating, so he went over to the stove with his empty bowl. He wanted to make a contribution to the group thinking effort. Just then the cell phone in Richard’s pocket buzzed. “Hello.”
A woman’s voice on the other end said, “Richard, you sniveling little shit. Have you ever opened a FEDEX box and found a head in it? A human head? Blood in the bottom of the box? Bad smell?”
“Um, no.”
Now the voice shrieked, “Well, that’s what’s going to happen if the Junes don’t cooperate.” And she disconnected.
Richard looked at the phone, then at Gwen. Then at the rest of the team. Gwen said, “Was that Anna’s phone?” He nodded. “Was that them?” He nodded. “What did they say?”
“They said if the Junes don’t cooperate, they’ll send us a head in a box.”
That statement would put most people off their appetite, but not Little Jinny Blistov. Using the phone call as a distraction, he ladled a fourth helping of shrimp and grits into his bowl, sat down at the table, and tried to eat inconspicuously. Gwen asked, “Did it sound like a joke? Someone joking?”
Richard hadn’t had a lot of experience with people joking about head chopping, so he said, “I don’t think so. She sounded crazy.”
Roger was going to ask a question when the phone buzzed again. He said, “Answer, but put it on speaker.”
“Hello.”
“Good morning. Jools here. That you, Richard?”
“Yes.”
“Anyone else with you, sir?”
“Yes. Some friends. Some friends of Anna.”
“Oh, wonderful, just what I’d hoped. Would you be so kind as to make introductions? As we’ll all be working together, we should get to know one another, even if superficially.”
With his mouth full, spewing grits on Gale’s lemon colored jump suit, Jinny said, “You and me, asshole, we get together, not going to be anything superficial about it. You fuck with Anna, you and me gonna be intimate. A deep relationship. Understand?”
“Oh, my, who is that speaking so forcefully, and so early in the day? Richard, please, an introduction.”
“That’s Jinny. Little Jinny.”
“You exude such a forceful personality, Mr. Jinny. May I call you Jinn Jinn?”
The others looked around. Only Gale dared call him Jinn Jinn.
“You can call me anything you like, Joolies, but remember what I said about Anna. That crazy woman with you touches one hair on her beautiful head, we’ll be after your asses like a pack of fucking Russian wolfhounds.”
Gale was less interested in Jinny’s ethnographic description than she was in how he was spitting food on her. She had the courtesy to let him finish threatening Jools, and then whomped him across the head with her cloth napkin. In the June’s house, cloth napkins were used at breakfast, as well as at all other meals.
Gwen cut this off, saying, “What do you want, Jools?”
“We must get down to business, mustn’t we. Very well, but first, who does that melodic voice belong to, laced with that divinely sexy Charleston accent. I must know.”
“This is Gwen. Gwen June.”
“Oh, Ms. June, the great impresario, so nice to meet you. We saw the ballet three times. Fantastic. After the third performance, Scotilly said, ‘we must make the opera thing happen, and these people must produce it’. She was even more impressed than I. What a great pleasure to make your acquaintance. And to think we now are collaborators. Fantastic.”
Gwen said, “Who’s Scotilly?”
There was a pause on the other end of the phone call, where Jools was saying to himself, “Oh, shit.” Then out loud, “Never mind who Scotilly is, to business, if you please.”
“Is Scotilly the crazy woman? The head chopper?”
“Well, yes, if you must know.”
“Scotilly. That doesn’t sound very Talibanish to me. Sounds more cute than terroristic. You sure she was trained in head chopping by the Taliban?”
“Never you mind, Ms. June. Let’s talk about the production. That’s the purpose of this call. Now, our target date for completion of the opera, the date we have issued to Mr. McCartney, and to which he has agreed, is two months from now. This is all very fast track. We figure it’s a lot of work putting on a production like a ballet or an opera, world class, so we want you to get started now. Do your impresariation thing. Ok?”
Gwen said, “We didn’t agree to do the production.”
“Come now, Gwenny, you know you’ll do it. You know the consequence of not doing it: chop, chop, chop.”
Gwen looked around at the others, then at the phone. This guy was calling her Gwenny? “Jools, only my friends call me Gwenny, and you’re not one of my friends. Got it?”
“Oh, my, you’re right. Such a liberty; what was I thinking. I do apologize, Ms. June. It’s just that Gwenny is such a sexy name, and it goes with your voice so nicely.” He paused and sighed. “Still, it’s true, isn’t it? You will do the production. Right?”
“Call back in half an hour.” And she hung up. Gwen looked around at the seven friends in her kitchen and said, “Well?”
Gale the Mouth spoke up first; no surprise. “What about St. Barths? We were half way there; half way to paradise; half way to a vacation after working on the ballet for a year; half way to me meeting rich, handsome men, by the dozen, in paradise. And now this. A crazy Taliban woman and a polite English guy who talks like a butler. I gotta stop hanging around with you guys.”
Jinny knew he’d had his say, and besides, he didn’t want to risk spitting any more food on Gale’s clothes, so he kept quiet. Constantine, who spoke softly and infrequently, but carried a big stick with the group, gave a thumbs up. His wife, Slev, did the same. Gwen didn’t bother looking at Richard. She knew he wanted her and Roger on his side, doing anything to get back his girl. So she looked at Jinny’s girlfriend, Guignard. Two years earlier, Guignard had been head grounds-keeper at the Hermitage Museum, in Saint Petersburg, which is where she’d met the Junes. When they and Jinny had left the museum grounds in the middle of the night, with a tactical security force on their tails, Guignard had bugged out with them. She and Jinny had lived in Charleston for a while; a time that included a battle with Stirg. Then she and Jinny had disappeared for year, returning to Charleston just in time to see a performance of the ballet. They acted as if they’d never been away, and immediately had weaseled their way into the trip to St. Barths. She said, “We missed the ballet production, and don’t know these two McCartney people, but we do know Anna, and like Jinny said, these people better not hurt her. So I’m in with going after them, and if that means doing this opera thing, we’ll help with that, too. Right, Jinny?”
Jinny, in a faux attempt pretending to clean the grits off her pants with his napkin, had been trying to cop a feel of Gale’s thigh, under the table. In a good natured, brotherly kind of way, of course. Gale didn’t really mind, knowing he was devoted to Guignard, and that if his playing around ever amounted to anything other than a brotherly kind of way, any of the other people in the room, including Guignard, gladly would break his arm, if she asked them to. He looked up from where he was playing around under the table and said, “I was working in a hotel in Moscow in 2003 when Wings played in Red Square. They were great, and big tippers. Really big tippers. I wouldn’t mind playing around with McCartney here. I can be his bodyguard, fend off all the women that
want to rip off his clothes.”
Gale said, “You idiot. He’s sixty-nine years old. Things aren’t like they used to be for him. Those days are past”
He looked at Guignard and said, “When I’m sixty-nine, you’re still going to be trying to rip my clothes off, aren’t you?”
With a kind and loving smile, Guignard said, “Yes, Jinny, just like now, that’s never going to change.”
Jinny looked around the kitchen triumphantly and said, “See, sixty-nine’s not the end of the world. Must still be girls around who feel the same about him. And even if there aren’t, I’ll protect him from other kidnappers. Copycat kidnappers. And, we’re in, cause of Anna.”
That left Roger, and Gwen looked at her husband. “I’m in because Gwen’s in. She doesn’t like people messing with our friends, and neither do I. St. Barths would have been nice for a week or two, but boring after that. Now, we get to hunt down some crazy kidnappers, rescue Paul McCartney, and work with him on a rock opera, which we will produce, right after producing a world class ballet based on a lost Stravinsky score, which we found in a hidden compartment of an old desk we stole from the Hermitage a couple of years ago. What’s not to like? Lead on, babe.”
Chapter 20 – Who Are the Real Kidnappers?
The three guys dressed in black, one still wearing the white sneakers, sat on bench at Waterfront Park and stared at Stirg’s house, built halfway out a long concrete dock protruding into Charleston harbor. It was a huge, cubicle three story house of about eight thousand square feet, with a small guest house back where the dock connected to the shore. At the end of the dock was a 120 foot yacht that had a small swimming pool embedded in the rear deck. When Stirg was remodeling the old Navy radar station into his mansion, someone had said, “Incredible location and view, but no place out here for a pool.”
Stirg had replied, “I got that covered.”
Stirg was not exactly a local celebrity, but, being a billionaire, he did get his name in the papers occasionally, even though his stated aim was to live a quiet, reclusive, and relaxed retirement. It hadn’t been hard for the NNs to find information about him, which is how they found out about Anna. They started watching her, and saw an opportunity to snatch her the evening she went to dinner with Paul and Stella. Now they had no idea how to find her kidnappers, and thus her, so they could make another attempt to kidnap her, this time from her kidnappers. This was getting complicated for the BMIMC, to say nothing of his less intelligent comrades. But he had come up with a plan, which he now divulged to his boys. “Look, we don’t know who the kidnappers are or where they live, but we do know who the kidnappees are. We’re the only ones who know that. The bitch, the Beatle, and the other girl. The kidnappers are going to have to contact someone soon to ask for the ransom, right? They really didn’t want the bitch or the other girl, but they got them. When they find out who the bitch is, they’ll find out that her grandfather is a billionaire, and they’ll demand ransom from him, too. That’s what I’d do. So, we wait till they contact Stirg for the ransom, and then we’ll know something about them, and we can go find them. Grab the bitch. Maybe grab the Beatle guy.” He leaned back against the bench and waited for his boys to tell him how smart he was.
The MSMIBC said, “How we gonna know when they contact Stirg and demand the ransom?”
“Sit here and wait for Stirg to come out of his house. Follow him.”
“Boss, why bother with the bitch if it’s him you don’t like. Why not just hit him here, when he comes out?”
“I don’t want to hit him because I want him to suffer. Dying’s not really suffering, is it? Kidnapping his granddaughter would do that. And then there’s the ransom. We want that too.”
“If we hit him here, we could go into his house and steal stuff.”
“You think he’s got five mill lying around in there? In his mattress? What are you going to steal? His cookies? Let’s go find out where he keeps his car. When he comes out, we gotta be ready.”
Chapter 21 – The Alliance with Stirg
Thirty minutes after his phone had rung, it rang again. “Hello.”
“Richard, my boy. Jools here. What’s the word?”
“Here’s Gwen,” and he handed the phone to her.
“Ok, Jools, we’re in. I don’t know how we’re going to do it, but we’ll work on the production. You have any ideas on how someone composes an opera, and other people work on all the production stuff at the same time? Cause I don’t. Two months, are you crazy? It took us eight months to do the ballet, and we had the score for that. I promise nothing other than we’ll try.”
Oh, my, Gwenny, we’ll all have to try hard, won’t we, or…. chop, chop, chop. Don’t forget that. Use it, Gwen, use it as a motivator. You can do it. Paul is cool as a cucumber here, says no problem with the music. He’s even added something to the challenge. A second piece, can you believe that?”
“What second piece?”
“No can do, Gweneth. I’m not authorized to divulge that information. Fun though. He’s something; complete confidence in his ability to produce the goods. And that makes us feel good, I can tell you. Bring the same to bear on your challenge, and the three of them will come out of this in one piece. Ta.” And he hung up.
She looked at Roger and asked, “When was the last time someone called me Gweneth?” He shook his head. “Jools and I are going to have words when this is over.” She looked around at the team. “Ok. Game on. Two months. He said Paul says he can do it; write the whole opera. Says we have to get started on the production stuff now, so that’s what we gotta do.”
Constantine said, “You mean we’re not going to go after them? We’re just going to do the production stuff. Sit back and wait?”
She smiled, and it was a smile that brought tears to their eyes. It was a beautiful smile, but with an element of evil in it, which is just what they all loved about Gwenny June. Fun, but with a cutting edge. No fucking around.
“You know we’re going after them. But we have to do the other stuff, too. We have two jobs. And the reason we’re going forward with the production is that Paul seems to want to do the music. Isn’t that what he said?” looking at Richard.
He nodded. “Definitely. He wasn’t scared, and he wasn’t upset. He was positive and businesslike.”
“Ok, then, here’s the division of labor. Jinny and Constantine are the hunters. They go after Jools and Scotilly. The rest of us start putting the production together. Roger, Gale and I did the ballet, so we know how to do this. The rest of you can learn, and learn fast. It’s going to break our backs, but if Paul can write the opera in two months, we can do the production. Ok?”
Richard stood up from the kitchen stool, agitated, and said, “I’m going with Jinny. I want to find Anna. The hell with the production.”
Gwen stood looking lasers at him, her intuition soaking up every vibe coming out of his body. After ten seconds, she looked at Roger, who blinked his eyes, meaning, yes. Then she looked at Slev, who had greater intuition than almost anyone Gwen ever had met, and she, too, telegraphed affirmation to Gwen. Gwen looked back at Richard and said, “Ok. But you do what Jinny and Constantine tell you to do. Nothing else. Ok?” He nodded and sat down.
She went on, “The second thing we gotta do is make contact with Paul, and talk about the music. We have to know something about his ideas and themes. The next time Jools calls, tell him that. Tell him we have to start communicating directly with the three of them, wherever they are.”
Gale asked, “What’s the first thing?”
“The first thing is Stirg. We tell him about Anna. We have to.”
Jinny looked at Guignard, Slev looked at Constantine, Richard looked at Gale, and Roger looked at his wife. All of them knew she was right, they had to tell him. And they all hated the idea. Stirg was their implacable enemy, a man who, one balmy evening out in Charleston harbor, had tried to drive
his power yacht through the center of their sailboat. In turn, they’d invaded his mansion, made him sit in a chair and listen to them make demands on him. He’d gotten uppity, and Roger had clocked him in the side of the head with the butt of his gun, an action Stirg had not appreciated. Then, Stirg had stolen from them all the artifacts they had stolen from warehouses of the Hermitage Museum and smuggled back to Charleston. And now, ironically, they had a common enemy, and a common goal: rescue Anna. She was their friend and his granddaughter. How would this work out?
Gwen said, “We’ll wait for Jools to call. Tell him we have to talk directly with Paul and Anna. After we get that going, we’ll call Stirg and tell him. That’ll be fun.
Chapter 22 – Organizing Things
It now was the third day after the kidnapping, and the bunkerites were roughing it. Stella and Anna had spent two nights sleeping on sofa cushions on the concrete floor, and eating canned soup and crackers. Paul ate the soup too, but had it better, sleeping in the one bed and playing his new bass. Stella and Anna read some of the old books on the shelves and got bored. They watched Paul walk up and down the long concrete corridors that were in a T shape, sometimes muttering to himself, sometimes singing. Stella had seen this before, and said, “It’s happening. It’s starting. The music’s coming. Jools had better get the recording equipment in here fast, or we’re gonna lose stuff. He composes while he walks around, then plays something on the piano or guitar, then sits in his home studio, turns on the machines, and sings and plays something. Makes a demo. Then back to walking around. That’s the process. It’s starting.”
Anna didn’t have fifty years of writing songs under her belt, but she recognized what Stella described. She and Richard had spent six months together working on the score for a ballet. This was just before the Junes had discovered the Stravinsky score in the hidden compartment of the desk that came from Saint Petersburg, and just before she had been offered the part in the Spielberg film. Those two things had interrupted their composing, but that six months of work had introduced Anna to the creative act. She had played piano for years, and Richard had played synthesizer for years. Neither had composed anything, or played in groups, but during the six months, they had fallen in love, found a creative muse inside themselves, and learned a lot. Anna didn’t like being kidnapped, didn’t like Jools, and didn’t like being cooped up in a big concrete box, but the more she thought about things, about spending two months shoulder to shoulder with Paul McCartney, the more she liked the situation. There were so many variables that would come into play, the first and most important one being the involvement of Gwen and Roger June.
The Kidnapping of Paul McCartney Page 8
