Chapter 28: Details
Over the next week the Junes played tourist in Saint Petersburg. There were no further meetings with the Gromstovs or Rodstras, either socially or for business. While Jinny ate lunch and dinner in a different restaurant every day, trying to absorb vast quantities of his last bona fide native foods, Plouriva sweated the details of the theft. Henric and Constantine told her by secure phone call that all she had to do was tell them the date, and they would have the right flatbed trucks driven by the right drivers, in the city and standing by for her detailed instructions. That was the end of Henric and Constantine’s responsibility, for the interim. It was Plouriva’s responsibility to get the trucks into the Hermitage compound, get them to the warehouses, and get them out of the compound. Once she accomplished that, Henric and Constantine once again would take command and responsibility for the duration of the op, which meant until the container ship arrived in Charleston. She thought, fair enough. So did Little Jinny Blistov, who continued to drift from restaurant to restaurant, dreaming of walking his Borzoi on the Sullivan’s Island beach and eating shrimp and grits morning, noon, and night. So we come to Plouriva’s plan, the nexus and plexus of the operation on Russian soil. We come to the really dangerous part. We come to visions of gulags and low-caloric intake for life.
Some people like a peaceful quiet in which they can sit and function creatively. Hegel walked the quiet pathway along the Heidelberg River, alone, every day for forty years, thinking great thoughts. One of the turns in this pathway was where he had the very great but very misunderstood thought “freedom is necessity.” Others do their best thinking and feeling while walking country roads or teeming city streets. Karl Marx sat in the British Museum library, day after day, surrounded by others, writing away at Das Kapital.
Plouriva liked aggressive stimulation when she needed to figure things out. For her, a lot of noise goosed her brain into high performance mode. So she got the keys and hopped into her World War II era camouflage painted diesel military personnel carrier, and rumbled around the complex grounds. She rumbled around the museum buildings thinking, and she rumbled around the warehouse buildings, and she rumbled around the residential area cottages, and she rumbled around the lake with the swans swimming placidly. The elegant swans were used to her and her machine from hell, and paid no notice.
In the end Plouriva fell back onto simplicity for the execution of her plan. She would tell the hoity toity people inside the museum she was ready to move their empty artifact crates to her warehouse area. She would tell them she knew of trucks doing a job at another construction site in the city that could move the crates, and these trucks were available on such and such a date, next week. The grounds division would do the hoitys a favor and get the crates out of their basement rooms. Plouriva would arrange an incident that would interrupt the off-loading of the empty crates at the storage location, so that the trucks had a reason for spending the night in the compound. A few of the crates would be off-loaded before the theft happened, but most would remain on the trucks. Then, in the night, Constantine’s eight trusted drivers would grab the goods, load them into the crates, get the few crates back on the trucks, and drive them out of the compound. Plouriva very much hoped the result would be different from the result in The Great Escape movie. She hoped her fate was different from the fate of that American stud actor Steve McQueen. She sat thinking this through, feeling the massive vibrations emanating from the huge diesel engine throbbing in the front of her personal carrier, wondering what it would be like to make it with Steve McQueen.
She didn’t think about this too long as she had two dicey plan details still not settled. How to bribe the guards at the compound service entranceexit to let the trucks out without wondering what was going on, and how to get her and Jinny out of the country and onwards to Charleston. The throbbing of the carrier engine may or may not eventually have led her to the solutions, but in any case, she decided to dump these matters on to her real-life lover, Little Jinny Blistov. He had been scarce these last few days, eating his way through the town’s restaurants, and it was time he did a bit more work to earn his share of the proceeds.
Jinny was the soul of equanimity. When Plouriva met him for his second lunch of the day, and laid on him the two tasks of bribing the guards at the service entrance and getting the two of them out of Russia and onto the beach at Sullivan’s Island, he smiled at her and said, ok. Jinny was more like Plouriva than Hegel when it came to stimulating the mental processes. He liked sounds and commotion, so he hopped the underground metro, settled into a hard plastic seat, and watched the tunnels and the stations fly by. Four hours later he hopped off the metro and returned to the daylight of Russia’s most beautiful city. While the ride had not generated anything as profound as the Hegelian axiom about freedom, it had solved both problems. Voila! Ask and you shall receive. He knew the schedule was tight, that Plouriva needed to move into action, and that for his and her well-being, the solutions had to be damn good. On the other hand, Jinny recognized nothing was foolproof, and he knew very well the validity of the old Russian saying, “If anything can go wrong, it will go wrong.” This led him to wonder about the life and times of the Russian Orthodox monk Murphievski, who originally recorded this saying early in the 14th century.
So he got right back to Plouriva, suggesting they meet for dinner, his fifth meal of the day. He was riding the storm of great, good, decent, and downright bad Russian cuisine, and he wanted to keep the ride going for as long as possible. Potatoes fifty different ways was all good to him. At the restaurant (if such a dive could be so construed), Plouriva let him eat his first plastic bowl of salted cod covered with vinegar, paprika, and cabbage broth, and let him drink his first beer, before giving him the look. He saw the look, and understood its meaning, but he still tried to get up from the table to get another bowl full of this manna. He didn’t make it, though, as Plouriva grabbed him by the front of the pants and jerked him back into his seat. This type of gesture he fully understood.
Four hours of riding the subway had produced ideas. He told Plouriva the answer to problem number two, how to get him and her out of the country the day after the night of the theft, was relatively easy. He told her that anyone who could get eight giant crates full of heritage artifacts out of the country and to the City of Charleston, USA, could get two little bodies out of the country and to the City of Charleston, USA. He said as soon as he was done with his second bowl of salted cod he would contact Constantine and Henric and ask them to get him and her out of the country. Recitation of this idea resulted in an icy stare, but no comment, from his rather hot-blooded lover. Taking this to mean acceptance (Jinny being sanguine by nature), he moved onto his idea for solving problem number one, namely how to bribe the compound guards. Jinny’s giant mental labors executed during the four hour subway ride had resulted in an even less complex and suitable solution to this problem his iffy solution to problem number two. He said, “I will find out who is scheduled for guard duty the night you want to do the deed, and I will make them an offer they can’t refuse.”
Jinny didn’t think Plouriva capable of rendering a stare icier than the one she gave him for his first idea, but he was wrong. This stare could solve the entire world crisis currently being attributed to global warming if some great Russian scientists could but harness its inherent energy. This stare froze Jinny’s balls into rocks.
He took this opportunity to get up and go for his second bowl of cod. Service was slow, it seemed to Plouriva, because it took Jinny quite a long time to get his sorry ass back to the table. It was a good thing that Jinny was sanguine by nature because it took all of his sanguinity to deal with the audible hiss that emanated from Plouriva’s mouth as he sat down. “THAT’S your idea of a good solution? THAT’S what you came up with to save our asses and make this thing work? You’re going to take THAT to the Junes for their approval?”
Jinny knew it was
best if he didn't answer immediately. He knew it was best to allow Plouriva to fully vent her internal steam system hiss before he replied. He also knew that if he attempted to take a forkful of this wonderful fish with vinegar and paprika dish, it was likely his lover would, in one powerful swipe reminiscent of a grizzly going after a salmon, send his fork flying across the room where it would embed itself in the wall. So he sat looking at her, sanguinely, not eating cod or drinking beer, waiting for the steaming hiss to dissipate. Which it did.
He said, “This will work.” He said he now knew who the two Russian big boys were, how they operate, and what their capabilities are. In a flash of brilliance he told Plouriva it was her brains that found these two dudes who could do almost anything; it was her skill that had brought them into the fold; that they were going to be successful at getting the goods to Charleston due to her planning acumen. Then he said he knew the guys who serve as entrance guards, and he had worked with this type of employee for years, during his toilet cleaning career. If you offered these guys enough money, they would send their mothers on a Siberian vacation. The Hermitage was like any other Russian government agency. It was corrupt. This didn’t mean that all Russians were bad persons, just that all Russians behaved liked Russians. It is the way it is. Jinny thought of pointing out to Plouriva that he and she were conspiring to steal Russian heritage artifacts and smuggle them out of the country, but instinct took control and he held his tongue.
The steam pressure inside Plouriva dissipated somewhat, going downwards from 8000 pounds per square inch to 7500 pounds per square inch. This reduction was enough for Jinny to pick up his fork and tackle the still warm mass of salty fish and vinegar in his bowl. He thought it was delicious.
The end result was that Plouriva agreed to both of Jinny’s ideas. She just made him understand that if either of these got screwed up, it was gonna be his nuts that got salted and served up in a plastic bowl.
Aristocratic Thieves Page 28
