Chapter 14 - Launch to the Old World
Travel plans were complete and the excitement mounted. The team decided that all three would go first to Paris to work the wine angle, and then to Saint Petersburg to work the antiques and clients angle. This would give Jinny more time to make his contacts. His was by far the most difficult part of the plan, and he needed time to set things in motion. He had been gone from his homeland a long time. Both Roger and Gwen were excited about the Russian leg. What a strange place. How very different than Charleston, or even Paris. Gwen wondered about the mechanics of the toilets, and frankly, was a bit apprehensive. On the other hand, she also wondered about Russian men. Were any of them handsome? Were any of them couth? Were any of them genteel? One thing she didn’t wonder about was handling them. That, she never worried about.
Boarding the plane at Charleston airport was very odd for Little Jinny. The last time he flew in the hold of the cargo plane. The only other planes he ever had flown in were Russian military planes, and those he knew something about. He remembered once being led to a military helicopter in the 1970s. As his troop approached the copter they noticed oil running down its side from the rotor shaft, and small holes in the metal of the fuselage. One of the troop, an old hand, looked at this and said, “Just back from Afghanistan.” The guy didn’t even blink, and got on. The others followed, including Jinny, though he had misgivings.
The first class section was a religious experience for Jinny. He didn’t know there were planes like this. In his flight to Pittsburg two years earlier he had curled up to sleep around one of the landing gears. The hold had been pressurized, of course, but heated only to about forty-five degrees, so it had been a very cool flight. This was much better. After getting them seated the flight attendant brought forward the obligatory champagne. Jinny asked her if there was any vodka. Gwen, sitting next to Roger and across the aisle from Jinny, heard this, turned her head towards Jinny, and gave him The Stare. Jinny understood he had done something wrong, but didn’t know exactly what it was. Gwen nodded towards the champagne and said, “Jinny, that is your drink from here on out.” With his usual good grace, Jinny accepted the glass from the attendant, and sipped. It was good. He thought a moment and then asked Gwen, “What about when we get to Russia? Can I have some vodka then, or just champagne? The guys over there are gonna wanna drink vodka.” Gwen decided she would cross that bridge when she got to it.
After the filet mignon, and with the lights going down, the attendant showed Jinny how to recline the seat into a bed, and handed him a blanket and pillow. An hour later Gwen looked at him and saw him under the blanket, staring at the ceiling. No movie watching for Jinny. Two hours later, same thing. Three hours later, ditto. Gwen asked him what he was doing.
He said, “Thinking.”
“Thinking about what?”
He said, “About how to get the antiques into a shipping container bound for Charleston.”
After four hours, still under the blanket with eyes wide open, she again asked him what he was thinking.
He said, “About how to get the antiques into a shipping container bound for Charleston.”
This was ok with Gwen. When there was serious business on the table, she liked to see people hard at work. She went back to watching the Sean Connery movie. Long ago she had decided that Sean Connery was the only man she ever would have sex with who sported a beard. She hated beards, but on Connery, she fantasized about having that thing come in contact with her, all over.
Jinny did nothing the entire seven hour flight other than think. Both Roger and Gwen appreciated this, and both wondered if maybe a short stint in prison might not be good for most young people. Maybe instead of one semester’s worth of the normal college curriculum. It seemed to serve as a pretty good training program in thinking, at least for Jinny.
Then came De Gaulle airport, the hotel shuttle, and the arrival at the Intercontinental Grand, across the boulevard from the old Opera House. This was an old style hotel, with the huge grand lobby, the nice rooms, the heated towel racks, and the bidets. Jinny hadn’t seen one of those since his days in the Hermitage. Some Czar or other had ordered them installed, all six hundred of them, after a trip to Paris in the early 1700s. Jinny thought of asking what this place cost per day, but decided against it. If it was good enough for the Junes, it was good enough for him.
The main dining room at The Grand was too stuffy for Gwen, so they ate dinner in the second, less formal restaurant. She liked to look out the window, across the brightly lit street, to the imposing entrance steps of the opera house. She and Roger had seen the Bolshoi there three times, and each time it was a superlative experience. At dinner that evening she asked Jinny if he'd ever seen the Bolshoi?
He said, “No, but one time years ago one of the Bolshoi’s prima ballerinas came to the Hermitage to look at the sixteen paintings of ballet scenes by Degas that the last Czar had acquired in France, before losing his head in Moscow in the 1917 revolution. The ballerina complained about the cleanliness of the toilet she used, and the museum guard told the chief housekeeper and the housekeeper blamed me, and made me apologize to the ballerina in person. She was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, even given the fact that 75% of her body was below her waist and only 25% above her waist. Her legs were as beautiful as those on any Italian sculpture, but they could kick a hole in a cinder block wall. I told her from there on out I would keep all of the one hundred and twenty-two toilets under my care spotless and waiting again to be graced by her. My apology, and the fact that I was kneeling when I said it, seemed to satisfy her.” Roger, being the connoisseur of female bodies that he was, spent a considerable portion of the remainder of the meal trying to envision the three to one body ratio of the Russian ballerina.
Aristocratic Thieves Page 14
