Gwenny June

by Richard Dorrance

  Chapter 36 – Stirg’s Mind

  Constantine and Henric missed the McCrady’s Champagne bash because they were down at Hilton Head, buying a boat. A big boat. Henric had planned to buy it from Charleston Yachts, at the Charleston Marina, but they didn’t have one big enough, soon enough, so he went to a broker on Hilton Head. His challenge was to buy one big enough to satisfy his ego, but small enough to fit at his dock at Kiawah. The broker helped him sort this out and sold him a Beneteau Oceanic 48. This boat was a cruiser that sported a stateroom and two guest rooms, a fully functional kitchen and bathroom, and it was painted a beautiful burgundy.

  A professional crew brought it up the Inland Waterway about a month later and tied it up at the Gromstov dock. The purchase price included a week of training by two of the crew on the basics of sailboat ownership and operation, and Henric was in heaven. At the end of the week, he could drive the boat around in circles, and that was about it. The prospect of sailing it was months, if not years, away. Henric and Constantine and Jinny could take it out in the Inland Waterway and get it up into Charleston harbor and back without causing too much havoc among other boat owners, and were able to keep dings in the hull to a minimum.

  The bad news was that Henric’s application to the South Carolina Yacht Club was denied. Those boys didn’t care how much money you had - if your great great great great great grandfather didn’t fight for the South in the Civil War, you weren’t gettin’ in. They asked, what the hell kind of name was Gromstov, anyway?

  So while Peter and Pater worked at building their ballet academy, and Jinny and Guignard did whatever it was they did, and Helstof spent time writing with Richard, and Slevov experimented with preparing French food, Henric and Constantine played with their new toy. When they stopped running into things and putting dings in the burgundy hull, they decided it was time to have a boat-warming party. They still weren’t ready to take the Beneteau out into the Atlantic, but they could putter around Charleston Harbor, and they found this to be both challenging and rewarding. The more vodka or wine they drank, the more challenging and rewarding it became.

  The boat-warming party coincided with the two month anniversary of the invasion of Stirg’s home. That time had not been kind to Stirg, and by default had not been kind to Nev, with Stirg behaving like a Siberian bear. Nothing worked to get his mind straightened out, and in fact, everything seemed to make it more crooked. The more he thought about the Hermitage heist, the more bearish he became. The more bearish he became, the more he saw Anna’s defection to the June camp as a personal failure as a guardian. The more he saw himself as a guardian failure, the more he blamed the Junes and their associates. And as he transferred responsibility from himself to the Junes, he coincidentally escalated his visions of injustice. His sense of Russia having been diminished by the theft of artifacts became magnified into a need for patriotic retribution. Stirg lost sight of the real issue, which was Anna, and focused solely on thoughts of revenge against thieves.

  Nev could see his boss was becoming irrational about matters, but he went along because he too wanted to kick the June’s asses, and the asses of their Russian associates. Their invasion of Stirg’s home pretty well had demolished his sense of worth as a bodyguard. He remembered the four women in bikinis pulling guns on him, and he still felt humiliated. The low point, of course, was when Roger clocked Stirg in the head with the butt of his gun. That had never happened before; in all the years of Stirg chasing Nazi motherfuckers around the world, no one ever had laid a hand on him; the Israeli protection effort was that good. Until now. So Nev was up for a quotient of revenge too, though he recognized that the real problem was Anna, and not the artifacts. No matter. Nev followed Stirg towards confrontation.

  And confrontation, it was. The day the June team had approached Stirg’s long dock, they had been able to land at the end because Stirg’s boat wasn’t there, in its usual place. It was up the Cooper River, at Dentyn’s Shipyard. Yeah, it wasn’t at a boatyard, where most people took their recreational boats for maintenance work. It was at a shipyard. It was that big. Now it was back home at the end of the dock, serving its primary purpose of allowing Stirg to say he had a pool on his property, the pool being on the stern of the boat.

  During the two months since the visitation by the June team to Stirg’s house, Nev had conducted investigations. Rather, he had hired local private investigators to investigate, who had provided Nev with the addresses of the June team members, their license plate and telephone numbers, and had reported that Anna was living with the Rodstras on Sullivan’s Island. He had visited the various residences at different times of the day and, posing as a UPS guy, had gotten into Peter and Pater’s place, The Hall, on John Street. He even knew where Gale and Selgey and Bart lived, and they had not even participated in the invasion of Stirg’s place. Money well placed can result in lots of information, and money was no object for Nev. He had what is known as a gold expense account.

  The private investigators had included on their list of associated places the modest dock on Kiawah where Henric and Helstof kept their new pride and joy, the Beneteau. At this point it didn’t even have a name painted on the stern because Henric and Helstof couldn’t agree on one. Their bickering was good-natured, and had taken on tones of a game. Henric wanted a Russian name, and Helstof said hell no, they were living in America, give the boat an American name, a southern American name. One evening, sitting on the fourth level deck of their home, looking out at the ocean and sipping Bordeaux, she suggested Lowcountry Dream. He countered with Czar’s Heaven. So you can see the divergence of perspective on the matter.

  In any case, Nev knew about the boat, and Stirg told him to monitor that. Stirg had an idea brewing in the back of his somewhat addled mind, where the cancer was growing. Nev needed to get away for a day or two, so he hired a deckhand, fired up the engines of Stirg’s yacht, and took it down to Kiawah, where he moored at the main marina. He kept it there for two nights, and during that time he buddied up with the marina workers. One of them asked Nev what kind of name Romanov’s Revenge was, the name on Stirg’s boat, and Nev said it was Russian. The marina guy said a Russian guy had a new boat on the island, a sailboat. No name on it. Nev pumped him, and learned the boat had been fueled and supplied for a short trip up the Waterway.

  “You know when that trip is?” Nev asked. “Maybe my Russian boss would like to meet this Russian guy, since they both have boats.”

  “This coming weekend,” the guy said. “Leaving Friday, coming back Sunday. Up to Charleston for a party.”

  An hour later Nev left the marina and drove the big boat home. He took it outside the barrier islands and came in from the Atlantic, through the Charleston jetties. Stirg came out of the house and helped to moor. He climbed onboard and asked Nev, “Well?”

  Nev said, “Gromstov is bringing his boat up Friday for a party. Staying two nights.”

  Stirg said, “What party? Party with whom?”

  Nev wondered at the properness of the English grammar. Whom? Where did Stirg get that? Whom?

  Then Stirg said, “Can you find out? I want them. I want action. They deserve a lot of action, and I’m gonna give it to them.”

  Now Nev wondered at, gonna. Where did that come from? Gonna. How can that square with Whom? Nev said, “Ok, I’ll find out.”

  Which he did. For a fee of $8,000, the investigators threw a team at the problem. The team consisted of one twenty-two year old computer hacker who was the daughter of a junior staff member. Within four hours she had accessed the email accounts of five June team members, and found the same email from Helstof to each of them. The email was an invitation to a boat-warming party to be held in five days, aboard the as yet unnamed craft, sailing around Charleston Harbor in the vicinity of Fort Sumter. Henric, like Stirg, loved seeing those flags. From these emails the hackette learned the email addresses of the other June associates, and confirmed t
hat all of them had been invited to the party. In addition to the Gromstovs, there would be fifteen others on board.

  The junior staff member of the investigation firm, who didn’t know about the $8,000 fee, was given a performance award of $500. Out of this he gave his daughter $100, meaning she had earned $25 an hour for her work, which was pretty good money for her, she being the generally honest type who only did hacking jobs to help out her dad.

  Something problematic happened in Stirg’s mind when Nev told him about the sailing party five days from now, on Saturday night, out near the fort. The problem was that Stirg didn’t ask Nev for a written list of people who would be onboard Henric’s boat. He just assumed they were, collectively, his nemesis. If he had asked for a written list he would have noticed Anna’s email address among the others, and Nev didn’t think of this angle either. He was slipping.

  Anna’s disaffection was invisible to Stirg. He saw only a vicious stab at his homeland by a gang of Russian traitors led by a couple of American aristocrats. Paintings of borzois, velvet sofas, Kazakhstani carpets, and gold-leaf plate ware, no longer were ensconced in the great halls of the Hermitage. They now adorned hovels in America. If they had adorned Stirg’s hovel, hanging out over Charleston harbor, his $6 million dollar hovel, that might have been different. But they didn’t. And the fact that the artifacts had been stored in warehouses out in the boonies of the Hermitage grounds for the last 100 years didn’t matter either. Not to Stirg’s mind. He was offended in a very big, all-consuming way. Stirg’s mind processed one thought over and over. Right the wrong. Right the wrong.