Gwenny June

by Richard Dorrance

  Chapter 24 – What to do with Glissy?

  Roger hadn’t been to the artifacts warehouse in quite a while, so he called up Jinny and asked him to meet there. Roger had enjoyed Jinny’s company during the Stirg excursion, and they hadn’t spent much time together recently, so that’s why he suggested the meeting. The climate controlled warehouse is where the Junes and their partners had stashed the artifacts they stole from the Hermitage Museum. About six months earlier they had managed to get seven large shipping containers of antiques, artwork, and other artifacts out of Russia and to Charleston, and into the warehouse. Some of these items had been sold to their partners, the Gromstovs and the Rodstras, who had purchased large houses, one on Sullivan’s Island and one on Kiawah Island. The items now graced those houses, and gave the owners a feeling of having their Russian culture right here in the low country of Charleston. The partners had worked out compensation deals whereby everyone had come out ahead in terms of cash and culture.

  Slevov was half of the Rodstra combo. Helstof was half of the Gromstov combo. The other halves were husbands Constantine Rodstra and Henric Gromstov. The Rodstras and the Gromstovs and the Junes made up the Hermitage caper team, along with Jinny, Guignard, Peter, and Pater. Richard Adams and Gale were Charleston associates who had not been at the Hermitage during the heist.

  Peter and Pater were former Mariinsky Ballet troupe members, who, because they had participated in the heist, were now persona non grata in Russia. Upon being smuggled into Charleston via container along with the artifacts, they had started a ballet academy, which was not exactly thriving, but could be said to be picking up steam. They were a happy couple. Roger hadn’t seen them in a while either, and told himself they had to have lunch together soon.

  Roger and Jinny spent half a day poking around in the warehouse, checking on the condition of the items, and just generally enjoying being surrounded by beautiful, old things. The general strategy of the Hermitage caper had been to get wealthy Russians who were sick of freezing cold Februarys and Marchs and Aprils to spend time in Charleston, and to buy beachfront houses and world class French wines and old Russian furniture and artifacts from the team members, at exorbitant prices, and this strategy had worked. The Gromstovs and Rodstras were extremely wealthy, and even though they had been part of the heist team, they had paid a lot of money to the other team members who set them up with their houses and wine and Hermitage artifacts. What Roger and Jinny were looking at in the warehouse was what remained, and that was a lot of stuff.

  The team, minus the Rodstras and Gromstovs, who didn’t need any more money, hadn’t really pursued finding and bringing other wealthy Russians to Charleston. It seemed the team members had enough money to be comfortable, and had things in the works to keep them occupied. Things like Stirg. Roger said, “When are we going to look for the next batch of Russkies to come over and buy houses and wine and some of this stuff from us? We haven’t talked about that in a while.”

  Jinny said, “Guignard and I talk about it once a week, and we think we have to do that sometime soon. Our money is ok, but sometime we are gonna need more. And Guignard is not thrilled about me getting back to my old business, even though I kind of miss it. She wants us to go legit.” Jinny said this sort of wistfully and sort of mournfully.

  Roger asked, “How about Peter and Pater? I haven’t talked with them in a couple of weeks?”

  “They’re like us. They have enough money right now, and the academy setup is going good, but it’s a year away from making any money. So sometime soon they will have to get with us for more snowbirds from Russia.”

  Roger and Jinny left the warehouse after a while and went for a nice long lunch, including wine.

  In the meantime Gwen sat at home, thinking about the name, Glissy. At this point she was ambivalent, kind of liking Anna now, which demonstrates that psychological influence can work both ways between people. Stirg had been influenced by the team members during the discussion at his house, and Gwen had been influenced by him in the matter of the woman’s name. Anna. How very Russian.

  Now the question was what to do with her? Should Gwen try to continue to influence Anna anymore? What was the point? What did Gwen want from Anna? And certainly more to the point, what did Anna want for herself? With this last thought Gwen knew what she had to do. “Hello, Slev, how are you?” she said into the phone. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m fixing some fish we bought this morning at Shem Creek. Did Jinny ever tell you the story about his mother?”

  “Which story about his mother? The one where she was stuck out in the boat for four days without food or water, and ended up rowing over to Finland?”

  “No, the one where he says she was so strong she could tear the heads right off the fish she caught. She didn’t have to cut them off, with a knife. I was just looking at these fish and thinking about that. I have a giant cleaver here, and I have to work to get the heads off. If Jinny isn’t bullshitting us, then she was some woman.”

  Gwen paused, then said, “Is Anna there? I’ve been thinking about her. Don’t you think we should talk to her?”

  “She’s here. Come over. We’ll talk.”

  An hour later Gwen walked into Slev’s house and sat down in the kitchen, which smelled like fish. “What are you making?”

  “We’re going to try an experiment his evening. Robert Parker, the wine expert, says Chateauneuf du Pape matches perfectly with delicate white fish. I love Pinot Noir with salmon, but I’ve never tried a red wine with something like sheepshead, which is what we bought this morning. Caught last night, off the Fort Sumter rocks. I think the wine is going to overwhelm the fish, but Parker says no, and that guy knows wine and food. Glissy’s never had Chateauneuf, so at least she’ll get to try that, even if it doesn’t go with the fish. But Parker’s hardly ever wrong, so I hope it will be great.”

  “Where is she?” Gwen asked.

  “Upstairs.”

  “You want to talk alone first, or with her?”

  “Let’s just talk with her. We know what has to be done, right?

  Gwen was happy that she and Slev saw the situation the same way, figuring they would. Gwen and Slev had a special bond. They were likes. They climbed the steps to the fourth floor because the smell of the marinating fish was a little too much to sit in the kitchen. Glissy was sitting out on the oceanside deck, reading a book. Gwen leaned over the back of the chair and gave her a kiss, then sat down.

  “Hi, how are you? What are you reading?”

  Glissy smiled at Gwen and then at Slev, said, “It’s a book about Sullivan’s Island. There’s a part in it where someone tells what it was like out here in the 1930s, before air conditioning. You know what some people did? When they went to bed they would soak their sheets in water in the bathtub, wring them out, take them into their bedrooms, wrap the sheets around them, and get into bed. The water would evaporate off the sheets, and that would cool them a little. Can you imagine? God, summer must have been brutal out here, five months of hell.”

  Gwen said, “I have a story like that. Way back then, they had screens on the windows, but the screen material wasn’t very good, and the no-seeums could get through. This drove people nuts who lived out on the barrier islands. They had to keep all the windows in the house open to get some kind of breeze through, so they would keep a squeeze bottle of kerosene on every window sill. When they went to bed, they would spray the screen in the windows with the kerosene, and that would keep the no-seeums out. For a while. The kerosene would evaporate, then someone would get out of bed and walk around the house and spray again. People loved living on the islands then, just like now, and they would put up with the heat and the bugs. We have it pretty good, now.” She gazed out at the ocean. “Roger’s auntie told that story one time.”

  Gwen sat down and looked at Glissy. Glissy put the book on the floor, and looked back at Gwen. She said, “How’s my grandfa
ther? I hope he wasn’t too much of a bear. He can be like that sometimes.”

  “He says your name is Anna, and we should call you that. What do you think?”

  “I like both names. It was pretty weird of you guys to give me a new name, but it was interesting, too. And I guess you had to since I wouldn’t tell you my name is Anna. You couldn’t just go around calling me ‘the woman in black underwear’ or ‘the woman with the Walther’, could you?”

  Gwen and Slev didn’t say anything. They didn’t have to. Anna understood she had to take responsibility for her actions. After all, she had invaded the Junes home, carrying a gun. And she had gotten caught. “I think from now on you should call me Anna. I like Glissy, and it was fun for a while, but now Anna is the right name. Especially now that you’ve met my grandfather. He was there when my parents named me.”

  Gwen looked at Slev and asked, “Did you tell her we visited her grandfather?”

  Slev shook her head, no.

  “Did you call your grandfather?” Gwen asked.

  Anna shook her head, no.

  “So how did you know?”

  “I just knew. I mean, that’s what I would have done. Take it to the enemy. Don’t sit around and wait for another attack. And do it quickly, no fucking around.”

  Slev looked at Gwen and said, “She’s pretty smart for a twenty-something.”

  “Smart maybe, but it’s something more than that. You weren’t in our house when Anna came the first time. But Catherine was. Roger and I weren’t sure what to do with her. After a couple hours in the kitchen with Anna, Catherine came downstairs. It was very early in the morning. She said she couldn’t sleep after seeing Roger and I in the kitchen earlier, naked from the waist down.”

  Slev said, “I can understand her feelings.”

  “Catherine sat down with the three of us and, as usual, took charge. Remember that, Anna?”

  Anna nodded. “Oh, yeah.”

  “Catherine talked to Anna for quite a while, and did the thing with her. The influence thing. You should’ve heard it, seen it. Right Anna?”

  She nodded. “Oh, yeah.”

  “Anyway, after about an hour, we all agreed that Anna would not mess with us anymore. And she would stay with us for a while.” Gwen looked to Anna for confirmation, who nodded again. “The reason we agreed to this is that Catherine’s intuition thing showed us Anna has something special. Something like you, Slev. Part of that is being smart, but there’s something more, so we decided to trust Anna. That’s the bottom line. Even though she came into our house with a certain amount of malicious intent, we knew, after Catherine’s thing, that we could trust her.”

  Both Gwen and Slev looked at Anna, who said, “How’d you guys get past Nev? You know who he is? He was the bodyguard of a former Israeli prime minister.”

  Gwen said, “Looks like they put him out to pasture at the right time, no offense intended.”

  “How did you get past him?”

  “Four women, bikinis.”

  “Oh, yeah, I can see how that would work. Nev’s a lot younger than my grandfather, and my grandfather still likes bikinis.”

  Slev said, “Nev never messed with you, did he?”

  “Just once,” said Anna. “Tried.”

  Slev and Gwen waited, looking out at the gray distance line of the ocean.

  “When we moved to Charleston ten years ago my grandfather wanted two things. On the one hand he wanted to get away from his past. He wanted a quiet town, small but not too small, different than the places we had lived in before, the big cities. He wanted me to go to college and be a normal person, unlike him. I guess you know he was a Nazi hunter?”

  They nodded.

  “On the other hand, he wanted me to be different, not normal. He wanted me to have certain skills that other women don’t have. The reason was because he had seen a lot of bad things in his life, and he wanted me to be able to take care of myself. He knew I couldn’t walk around with an Israeli commando bodyguard the way he did, so he tried to help me help myself. I would go to lit class in the morning, and play tennis in the afternoon, or workout with the college sailing team, and in the evening I would learn a little hand-to-hand combat, and I learned about guns. So the normal stuff and the not normal stuff. I really love Charleston, and so does my grandfather, and I’m happy living here. I got my degree in architecture. It was a five year program, but I haven’t done anything with it. I don’t have that drive.”

  Some kids were down on the beach, and they started yelling and screaming. The three women looked over the railing and watched them. Slev said, “You want kids, Anna?”

  She said, “Sometimes I think so. But that requires a serious boyfriend, and so far that hasn’t happened. I like being alone a lot. I’ve made four trips to Russia since I finished college, and gone to a few other places. Around here I just hang out. I have a condo downtown, I run a lot, and I tutor at an elementary school one afternoon a week. Did you know you can’t take a concealed weapon into hospitals or schools? But I fuck off a lot too.” She smiled at Slev and said, “She’s going to teach me about wine. Starting tonight with Chateau something de something.”

  Gwen asked, “What do you do with your grandfather?”

  “Well, I tease him when he gets his name in the paper for doing something stupid, usually involving a woman. He’s always saying how he wants to live a quiet retired life, but that doesn’t always happen. We go out to dinner a lot, and he has parties at his house, but those are for out of town people. He doesn’t have friends here in Charleston. He reads a lot, about Russia. He’s very honest with me. He says he’s getting older, and the older he gets the more Russia means to him. He thinks about when he was a kid there.”

  Slev asked, “And now you and he have something going, about Russia?”

  She nodded. “He’s always been two-handed with me: protective sometimes, and sometimes pushing me to be independent and self-reliant. Now, he’s pissed. At you guys. And he’s using this as a: ‘Anna, you need to be tough and learn something here and take risks’ moment. So he got me involved, and I wanted to be involved. I understand the way he thinks about this. He’s very emotional, and I feel it too, though not as much. I’ve been to the Hermitage. It’s incredible, and it had a strong effect on me. So when he wanted me to get involved, I said sure, 'Let’s go.'” Slev and Gwen waited. Anna was talking, at the end they would know where they stood.

  “Why did he send you into our house? Why not Nev?”

  “He didn’t send me. I did it myself.”

  Gwen said, “Oh.”

  “Yeah, now I know it was stupid. But I’m twenty-seven, so I’m stupid. Maybe a little less stupid now. I’ve learned from this. That’s what I’ve been thinking about since I’ve been here. And I’ve met you guys, and I like that.”

  “What were you looking for in our house?” What were you going to do? We know we have a deal with you not to ask those questions, but maybe it would help all of us, including your grandfather, if we knew. It’s him that’s coming at us. We have no quarrel with him. We want to go back to our business of enjoying life.”

  Anna said, “What did you do at his house? What did he tell you? You really got past Nev?”

  Gwen said, “Anna, four women got past Nev. Then we brought in Roger and Jinny.”

  “Did you hurt him? Did you hurt my grandfather?”

  “We didn’t hurt Nev. Well, we pretty much demolished his pride, that’s true. Is he the vindictive type? But, yes, we hurt your grandfather. Not badly. He got a lump on the side of his head. We were serious, Anna. We are serious. If he comes at us again, we’ll defend ourselves. You know that.”

  “Yeah, I know that.”

  “That’s why if you tell us what he wants, maybe we can do something about that, short of violence. And if you talk about this with Slev and me, it will be good for you, too.”

  “Why,” Anna a
sked. “How would it be good for me?”

  “Let us tell you about The Deneuve. If after that you don’t want to talk about this anymore, then that will be the end of it. We’ll stick with our deal.”