Aristocratic Thieves

by Richard Dorrance

  Chapter 29: The Last Details

  Jinny’s reading of human nature was right again, and right on both accounts. The day after Plouriva threatened to castrate him, he went to see Henric. He figured the guy who imported supercomputers from China was the guy who could get him and his girl out of the country. He could see Henric was occupied with other things and didn’t really want to be dealing with Jinny, so Jinny was succinct in his request. Please smuggle him and Plouriva out of the country the day after the night of the theft. He was quite specific though, it had to be the very next day after the night of the theft. Henric didn’t say a word, he just picked up the landline phone and the cell phone, did the security system switchy thing, and talked to someone about the need. This took twenty seconds. He hung up, did not look at Jinny, went back to work. Jinny cooled his heels. Half an hour later, the cell phone rang. Henric said GO, listened, put the phone down, and nodded at Jinny. Jinny thought: cool dude, very cool dude.

  It wasn’t quite that easy bribing the service entrance guards. Still, he got the job done. He started with Plouriva. She made inquiries with her peer department head in charge of site security, and found out the names of the two guys scheduled for night shift on the day of the theft. She was subtle in making this inquiry, not wanting to arouse suspicion. She told the other department head that a guy on the security staff had come to her and asked if she had any opening on the grounds crew. She said the guy told her he was bored with sitting in a little cabin at the back entrance to the compound, pulling the night shift. Plouriva played this hand as if she was giving the other department head a courtesy notice that one of his staff was trying to leave his department. They shot the shit for a while, and in the end Plouriva came away with the names of the guys scheduled for duty that night.

  Plouriva gave these names to Jinny, who in turn gave them to one of his old buddies in a government “information” department, who gave them to his assistant, who looked up the addresses and phone numbers and other personal information, who gave the information back to his boss, who, in exchange for a handful of rubles, gave them to Jinny.

  Jinny now had to figure an angle by which to approach these two guys. He tried to figure an angle, and came up dry. So he did what all good detectives do when they come up dry, they go back to basics, which means they watch a person and hope that leads to the angle. So Jinny went to one of the addresses and hung out. After five hours of being deprived of eating in a restaurant, he was rewarded with the appearance of night watchman number one. At least he assumed it was the right guy because the guy went into the apartment. Jinny watched for another hour, with half his mind on the problem and the other half on the food he wasn’t eating, when the great czar in the sky beamed beneficently down on him. Guy number one came out of his apartment, walked down the street, and hopped onto the metro, with Jinny right behind. He hopped off the metro in a section of the city Jinny knew to accommodate gay cultural aficionados. Well, well. Jinny was intrigued in some as yet unknown way. The guy entered a restaurant which was connected to another building that did not have any sign on the outside. Jinny didn’t know what was what but he had a feeling something was in the wind. He called Plouriva and told her to come to the place. Which she did.

  When she arrived, Jinny told her what was up. She didn’t hiss at him, but she did give him a stare, which asked, “Well?” Jinny told her to go into the restaurant and into the attached building and see if one of the guard guys was there. Plouriva saw this was a gay joint, which was neither here nor there to her. So she went in, and three minutes later came out. She said not only was the guy the right guy, but guess what, the OTHER right guy also was in there, meaning the second guy who was scheduled to be on duty the night of the theft. So the two guys who in a sense were their targets, were in a gay joint together, right here, right now.

  What to do? What to do?

  Jinny’s mind clicked. It just clicked. We saw this happen a few times back in Charleston, and it happened again here, right on cue. Jinny told Plouriva to scram, he had a plan. So she did. When she was gone, Jinny acted. Remember when Jinny had gone into the French restaurant in Charleston, and walked up to Roger and Gwen’s table. He stood looking at them, knowing they had gats, and still accosted them? He did the same thing now.

  He entered the restaurant and looked around, noticing plates of food on the tables, which came close to distracting him from his objective. He saw what looked like deep fried fish on one of the plates, surrounded by deep fried something else, which was topped with some kind of sauce. He filed this observation away for future reference. Gay restaurant no matter; food matter. He looked for the entrance to the connected building, and saw only the door to the kitchen. After a second he made for the door, entered, made visual contact with the cooks, ignored them, made visual contact with a door in the right wall, opened and walked through the door into the other building, and stopped. He was in a bar filled with ten or twelve people, some sitting at the bar and others at small tables. He absorbed this scene in three seconds, his mind clicking like an android computer. Like Schwarzenegger in The Terminator. He found the two guys sitting together at a table, and he made for this table just like he made for Roger and Gwen’s table in Charleston. He was monomanic, mission controlled, univision objectivated. He stood over them, a gothic stare at one and then at the other, penetrating their consciousness with his. He laid the fear on them. Everyone else in the room stopped what they were doing and watched. There was no talking. Jinny waited and waited. The two guys waited too. The other customers and the bartender waited. If Putin had been in the room, he would have waited.

  Jinny pulled out a chair and sat down, facing the two guys. He decided he didn’t care about the other people in the room, he was in full-blown risk-taking mode. Evidently all the food he had consumed over the past week had not softened him and affected his sense of duty to the mission. He was on point, the tip of the spear. He knew these guys were the last piece in the puzzle that his beloved Plouriva was putting together. If he got these guys into the game in the way Plouriva needed, their chance of success was boosted. If these guys did not get in the game, success was questionable. Risk, risk, the whole game from Charleston to France to here was one big risk. So be it, Jinny was down.

  He said, “Do you guys know the American movie The Godfather? The two guys didn’t know what was going on, but they did appreciate the sheer force of persona Jinny was deploying in their direction. They understood the guy in their faces asking them a strange question was nobody to fuck with. They were getting this, “Don’t fuck with me” vibe very loud and clear, as were the other people in the room. With this huge psychic vibration rattling their minds, it was hard to concentrate on the question, so they didn’t answer. Jinny realized their dilemma, and sympathetically asked the question again, “Do you guys know the American movie The Godfather?” This time the question penetrated their consciousness and both of them shook their heads, Yes. Jinny asked a second question, “Do you remember the scene where Marlon Brando talked about making someone an offer they couldn’t refuse?” The two guys thought a second and looked at each other, and them both nodded again, Yes, which pleased Jinny because now he knew he was communicating with the guys in an efficient and effective manner. So he said, very simply and quietly, “You guys are coming with me right now, no fucking around, because I am going to make you an offer you absolutely do not want to refuse. Understand?”

  The force of Jinny’s personality, as well as his message, was received loud and clear not only by the two guys, but by everyone in the room who remembered that scene from The Godfather, which was everyone, since pretty much everyone in the civilized world has seen this, one of the greatest movies ever made. The two guys had not the slightest inclination to fuck around with Jinny. Jinny stood up, and the two guys stood up. Jinny turned and walked towards the door, and the two guys turned and walked towards the door. Everyone else
in the room turned and watched the three guys go through the door, mouths pretty much open.

  Jinny led the way through the restaurant, glancing again at the deep fried fish on one of the tables, and he led the way down the street to a little park with a few benches, where he sat down, and motioned to the two guys to sit with him. Which they did. He asked who was who? One guy said Peter, and the other guy said Pater, the names matching those Plouriva had given him. Jinny ratcheted down his heavy-as-a-motherfucker persona and modulated into a nicer person. His goal was to be friends with these guys by the end of the conversation.

  Jinny said that he knew who they were and what they did for a living. He told them he knew they worked at the Hermitage as guards at one of the back service entrances. He told them he knew this because he knew other people who also worked at the Hermitage, in high positions. He came across as omniscient about Hermitage operations, having decided that the direct approach was the way to go in this situation. He didn’t know if this was the right way to go, but he had faith in his intuition, and so he took the risk. He told the two guys exactly what he wanted of them, which was to let some trucks leave the compound through their gate, in the middle of an upcoming night. He told them if they didn’t do this, they would be dead the next day. He emphasized this point by telling them their addresses, and that he knew they were partners, on a personal level. Jinny followed this rather serious point by telling them that if they did this correctly, he had a proposition for them. They didn’t say anything, which Jinny took to mean they were listening with open minds.

  Jinny laid out his proposition, which he had conceived about three hours beforehand, and had not run by his partners, Plouriva or the Junes. Jinny thought some elements in an operation like this had to be done on the fly, come what may. He thought he would go along with his partners if they laid this type of thing on him.

  He told the guys if they did this thing, he would arrange to take them out of the country and get them to America and find them good jobs. He would find them jobs in South Carolina, where it was warm in February. And he told them there were lots of gay people in South Carolina, which he really didn’t know about, but claimed it as fact anyway. There would have to be a least a few, he figured. Jinny didn’t know these guys from Adam, but figured anything had to be better than sitting in a little shack all night staring at animals creeping around. And he hoped they hated Russian winters as much as he did. Beyond these few rudimentary thoughts, he really was winging it. If they didn’t find this proposition interesting, he knew he was screwed.

  They asked questions. Where was South Carolina? How would they get there? How would they do this when they didn’t have much money? What jobs would they get in South Carolina? How warm in February was warm? Where would they live? Could they take their four cats with them? Were there a lot of people in South Carolina that speak Russian? What state was South Carolina in? What was it south of New York City? Miami?

  Jinny sat back and patiently answered. He was honest about some things, and not so honest about others. If he didn’t know the answer to a question, he made up an answer. He spoke reassuringly, quietly, almost fatherly. But he kept an edge on things so they knew he still was boss in this matter, and serious. He was like a benevolent dictator.

  After half an hour of this the three of them sat quietly, all the questions having been asked and answered. Jinny told them to go home and think about it. They had three hours. They were to meet him back at the restaurant then. If they didn’t show up on time he would know they were refusing his proposition, and he would implement his godfatherly mandate. When he said this he looked at them with a neutral stare behind which he planted a vibration of hellish death. He hoped this would work. He got up, put a hand on each of the guy's shoulders, did a little squeeze, and walked off.

  He was very tempted to go back into the restaurant and order two plates of the deep fried fish, but he controlled himself and headed back to Plouriva’s apartment. There he related his recent coup. Well, he hoped it was a coup. She, on the other hand, thought of it as an expression of deep and abiding idiocy on Jinny’s part. “You did WHAT?” she asked. “You’re going to bring a couple of gay guys with us to Charleston? You’re smuggling gay guys out of Russia, guys we don’t even know, guys we don’t know we can trust, security guys that may turn us in just for a couple of days off the night shift?” Jinny was calm, calm as ever. He replied first, he didn’t know that they were coming. He didn’t know if they would accept his proposition, even though he knew he had scared them nearly to death (and everyone else in the bar). He told her he was pretty certain they would accept the offer, and everything would be ok.

  Plouriva didn’t bother to answer. She wondered at Jinny, who until the day before, did not know how THEY were going to get out of the country (they still didn’t actually know, they just were putting themselves in the hands of Henric), and now he had committed to getting two more people out and finding them jobs in Charleston, no less.

  Jinny spent the next hour taking a nap, while Plouriva spent the hour speculating what life in Charleston with Little Jinny Blistov was going to be like.

  The two of them went to the bar at the appointed hour. Jinny again scoped out what was on the tables as he passed through the restaurant and then through the kitchen. This time he stopped in the kitchen and looked into the pots simmering on the range. Everything smelled great to him. He smiled at the cooks, and gave a thumbs up. From their point of view this was encouraging, compared to the way Jinny had looked the first time they saw him, with his game face on.

  In the bar they sat down at a table. Plouriva looked around at the clientele, noticing a table with two guys, and the next table with two guys, and the next table with three women, and the next table with three guys, and….They were the only mixed gender table. Jinny, without verbalizing it, expressed to her, 'What did you expect?' The bartender came over to take their order but Jinny waved him away. Jinny was thinking if the two guys did not show, meaning they were calling his bluff, he would order vodka to drown his sorrows at failing to fulfill his task. He also figured if the guys did show up, meaning they had accepted his proposition, he would order something more festive for the four of them to drink, something like….he looked around at the bar, assessing potential….well….vodka.

  Exactly three hours from the time Jinny issued his ultimatum, the guys entered the bar. When he saw them, Jinny breathed a sigh of relief. He didn’t show this, of course, still playing the heavy that everyone thought he was, but inside he was relieved. The guys stood looking at Jinny because they saw Plouriva, and they knew who she was. They knew her as Hermitage management. They knew her as grounds boss. They were really surprised….and now again scared. Jinny waved them over, with a smile. With some hesitation they sat down. Jinny waved at the bartender and ordered a bottle of vodka. He shook hands. Everyone in the bar relaxed, a little.

  Jinny introduced Plouriva, who managed a smile. They each downed a shot, and things were ok. After another shot and some small talk, Jinny led the party into the restaurant and commandeered a table. He didn’t wait for a waiter, he got up and went into the kitchen, where, after conferring with the cooks, he ordered enough food for ten people. Basically he ordered everything on the menu, all four items. The cooks were happy to see this, because three hours ago they had learned what had gone down in the bar. They had been told in detail about, “The offer that couldn’t be refused.” They had seen The Godfather.

  The conversation at dinner was not about business. It was limited to the subject of other great movies. Jinny made arrangements for the guys to meet with Plouriva the next day, when she would explain to them the details of the job, and how they fit in. He left plenty of money on the table.