Chapter 26 – The Big Boys Return
The day after the talk with Anna, and after conferring with Gwen, Slev told Anna she had to go see her grandfather, saying she had to be straight as an arrow about the whole deal. Face to face, talk, stand your ground, do what you think is right. When you’re done, if you want to come back to Sullivan’s and stay, you’re welcome.
Later that afternoon Helstof drove up from Kiawah and picked Slev up at her house. They went to the airport where they watched a Gulfstream touchdown, shimmering through the Charleston heat. They saw an attendant open the door, saw two passengers climb down the steps, and went to the customs area to wait. The Gulfstream had flown directly to Charleston from Moscow. Thirty minutes later Helstof hugged her husband, and Slev kissed her husband. After collecting the luggage they headed back to the islands, where the Gromstovs dropped Slev and Constantine at the Sullivan’s house and then headed home to Kiawah. They would see each other soon.
Constantine walked around the outside of the house, looking at the plants. He was very fond of the bougainvillea climbing the trellises to the first level. They didn’t have much bougainvillea in Russia. Someday soon, he thought, whenever he returned to this house, he would be welcomed by his borzoi. He wondered why he hadn’t gotten one already, thinking what’s a home without a borzoi? He lugged his stuff up the stairs from the ground level to the doorway into the kitchen, where he left one suitcase at the top of the stairs and carried the other through the door. There in the kitchen he found a young woman deboning a duck. She was struggling because it was her first attempt at this culinary feat. Just as Constantine set the suitcase down on the floor, the woman succeeded in tearing the skin off the back of the duck. The woman’s hands were slick with duck fat, and as the skin came loose from the carcass, unexpectedly, her arm jerked backwards and the duck skin was flung across the kitchen, where it splattered against the face of a cabinet. It stuck there, held by the stickiness of the fat on the inner side. The woman looked at it, and Constantine looked at it, and Slev, following her husband into the kitchen, looked at it. It was very weird, sticking there on the cabinet door.
Anna said, “Shit.” Then she looked at Constantine and said, “Sorry.” She reached for a glass of wine on the counter and picked it up. It slipped out of her duck fat covered hand and dropped to the floor. She said, “Shit.” Then she looked at Slev and said, “Sorry.”
Constantine looked from the woman, to the duck skin on the cabinet, to the wine puddle amidst glass shards on the floor, to his wife. He said, “I guess this is better than coming home to find a strange man in the house. Who’s she?”
“This is Anna, and she’s learning French cooking. We’re learning together. Today’s dish is duck a l’Orange. Anna, this is Constantine.” Anna walked the few steps to Constantine and put her hands on his shoulders, giving him the double cheek European kiss. He found this pleasant because Anna is beautiful, but then, when she stepped away from him, they both noticed the two duck fat stains, one on each of his shirt shoulders where she had put her hands. Anna smelled nice, but the duck fat did not.
Anna said, “Shit.” Then, “Oh, sorry. I usually don’t swear. Sorry.”
Constantine decided to get out of there, picked up the second bag from the top of the stairs, and carried both bags out of the kitchen and up the stairs to the third level. Slev helped Anna clean up. Half an hour later Constantine reentered the kitchen, showered, dressed casually, looking relaxed. Relaxed, that is, for someone carrying a Walther PPS in their hand. As he set it on the counter next to the chopping block, he said, “I found this in the living room, on the coffee table. I didn’t know we owned a Walther.” He looked at Slev and then at Anna.
“It’s mine,” said Anna. “Yesterday I showed Slev how to move the safety from one side of the handle to the other, like for a left-handed person. The way they designed it is kinda neat. I forgot to put it away.”
Constantine said, “Oh,” removed the magazine, and racked the slide. He was pleased to not find a round in the chamber. He slapped the mag back into the handle, and put the gun on the counter. “So how are things around here?” he asked. “Peaceful, I hope.”
Anna should have left it to Slev to answer, but she was twenty-seven and still somewhat stupid, so she said, “For now.”
Slev walked around the counter, picked up the gun, and took it out of the room. When she returned she said, “The duck's going in the oven and it’s gonna be great. Would you like a glass of wine, dear?” He nodded and sat down on a stool, figuring whatever was coming next was going to be interesting, so he might as well be comfortable.
Slev poured a glass of wine from the bottle sitting on the table, and Constantine took a sip. Then he said, “Most people prepare duck a l’Orange with the skin on. They consider that the best part of the duck.”
Anna said, “But that’s where all the fat is, so I figured taking it off is healthier.”
Constantine nodded. He acknowledged to himself that a healthy diet was a good thing, but he didn’t want to become a fanatic, especially where classic French food is concerned. Enjoying life was important too. He remembered being twenty-seven, and stupid, so he didn’t make an argument about it, even though it was his money that had paid for the duck.
Slev asked Constantine about his flight.
“Long,” he said, “but not bad. I finished a lot of paperwork, and now I can relax and have some fun. How are the others? What have you been up to? Anything interesting happen while I was away?”
Anna could see that Constantine didn’t know about the little incident with her grandfather, and she found it interesting Slev hadn’t told him she had invaded the mansion of a billionaire former Nazi hunter, armed, as part of an assault force. In her bikini. Anna wanted to learn how married couples get along and relate to each other, how they coexist, because she figured she wanted to try it some time. So she watched this interaction carefully. After all, her grandfather was not exactly a role model as a principle in your basic male female relationship. He had captured or killed too many Nazis to qualify for that.
Slev was not one to prevaricate, and she knew this had to be done sooner or later, so she said, “Well, I can think of two things. Helstof got a borzoi, a female puppy, beautiful. Cost $3000.”
Constantine said, “Wow, great, when can I go see it?”
Then Slev said, “And we met Pmirhs Stirg.”
Constantine was about to take a sip of wine, but instead set his glass down on the counter. “Oh,” he said, and looked Slev in the eye.
Slev knew what that look meant, though Anna didn’t recognize it as anything special. Slev did the opposite of her husband, she picked her wine glass up from the counter and took a sip. She knew she had to say something immediately, before her husband said what was on his mind. “Anna is Stirg’s granddaughter.”
“Oh. Anna Stirg. I see.”
Constantine’s comment was non-committal, which was a skill Constantine had developed many years ago while learning the international computer business. Anna didn’t know if Constantine knew her grandfather, or knew about her grandfather, or what, so she waited to see what he would say next.
He didn’t say anything, he just sat there staring at his wine glass on the counter. What he was thinking was he wished his wife had stopped telling him things after she mentioned the borzoi. That was a good thing. Her mentioning Pmirhs Stirg was a bad thing. The fact that Stirg’s granddaughter was in his house, with a gun, drinking his wine and eating his ducks, or about to eat one of his ducks, probably was a pretty bad thing. He tried hard to fathom how this scenario could be a good thing, but couldn’t; that just wouldn’t compute. He gave a barely perceptible sigh, picked up his wine glass, and said, “How about we go out on the deck. I want to relax. The duck will be good, and we can talk later. Maybe tomorrow. Anna, tell me about yourself.”
The scene at the Rodstra house on K
iawah Island was eerily similar. Henric didn’t enter the house to find a beautiful young woman flinging duck skins around the kitchen, but he did find a new resident, his borzoi puppy. The puppy designation was nominal considering it was two months old and already weighed forty pounds. When it heard the car outside the house, and then footsteps on the stairs, it set itself in motion in the study where it had been sleeping, and had achieved attack velocity by the time it reached the interior of the front door. When Henric opened the door, the pup barreled into his knees at full speed. What would have happened if he hadn’t opened the door he could only guess. Borzois are not known for their intelligence.
It was a great surprise for Henric, and soon he was sitting on his deck, looking out over the water, with his dog sitting next to him. He was in heaven. That was when he asked Helstof, “How are the others? What have you been up to? Anything interesting happen while I was away?”
Helstof was more of a prevaricator than Slev. She talked first about how hard it had been to find a purebred Borzoi here in the States, and how expensive they were, and how it came from the former Russian ambassador to the US, who bred them as a hobby, etc etc.
Henric said, “I love the dog. Bravo.”
Then Helstof talked for a while about how Peter’s and Pater’s ballet academy was doing, and then about what Jinny and Guignard were up to, not much, and then about how Richard Adams had found an agent for his new book, and the agent was flogging it to the publishing houses. She didn’t tell Henric that she had been having four-ways with Richard and Anna and Slevov. Henric went on looking out at the ocean, sipping his wine, and petting the head of his new best friend.
Helstof hoped to get a few more glasses of wine under Henric’s belt before she broke the big news to him, but he wasn’t drinking very fast, so she decided to get it out of the way. “Something else came up, dear. Something you probably should know about.” Henric looked at her inquiringly. “We met someone you might know. A Russian guy. Lives here in Charleston, coincidentally.” Henric looked and waited. “Pmirhs Stirg.”
Henric looked at Helstof, and then looked at her some more. Then he looked down at the dog, and then out at the ocean. Helstof saw him take a deep breath. “Pmirhs Stirg? Stirg, as in the Nazi hunter billionaire international law guy?” Helstof nodded. Henric said, “You meet him in a restaurant or something?”
“Well, no, not exactly. We met him in his house.”
“He invited you to his house? A party?”
“He didn’t exactly invite us to his house. We kind of paid him a visit. A bunch of us.”
“A bunch of you, who”?
“Well, the team. Everyone except you and Constantine, because you were away. No, that’s not right, Peter and Pater weren’t there. We didn’t think it was a good idea to take them. But everyone else.”
“Why wasn’t it a good idea to take the Ps to a party?”
“Um, it wasn’t exactly a party. It was more like, a mission.”
Henric didn’t say anything, but continued looking at his wife.
“It was, like, we invited ourselves to his house. We had something we had to talk to him about.”
Henric got up and went to the kitchen. He returned with the bottle of wine in one hand and a bottle of vodka in the other. He poured himself some wine, and said, “Ok, let’s have it.”
At which point Helstof told the whole story, about how a woman in black underwear had invaded the Junes house, how they got her, and then she became their friend. How Roger figured out she was Stirg’s granddaughter, and the team had decided to act, and they paid Stirg a visit in his house.
Henric asked how they had gotten past Stirg’s security, so Helstof told him about the four women in bikinis, one with blood dripping down her neck, and the boat. About Nev, the not so great bodyguard.
Henric poured himself another glass of wine. “What happened,” he asked.
“We talked, and then Stirg got smartass, so Roger clocked him on the side of the head with his gun. Jinny told Nev not to try anything. Then Stirg started talking straight, and told us what his problem with us is, and we told him we would defend ourselves if he tried any shit. Gwen told him we’d deep-six his ass off the Fort Sumter rocks if he tried anything again. And that was about it. We left.”
“Jesus. Stirg the Nazi hunter,” was all Henric said. He picked up the bottle of vodka.