Chapter 37 – Lead up to Confrontation
Henric, Constantine, Jinny, and Guignard left the Gromstov dock early Friday morning, aboard the, the….that boat needs a name. Aboard the boat. It was fully stocked with all the food and drink a very wealthy couple could afford. There was enough caviar to keep a Czar’s retinue content for a week, and those folks could eat caviar. Henric had decided to make up for missing the McCrady’s Champagne party by stocking a case each of non-vintage Krug, Billecart-Salmon rose, and Bollinger.
The trip up the inland waterway from Kiawah to Charleston was uneventful until they hit Wappoo Creek. A half mile south of the drawbridge, Constantine started telling Henric about the guest house he was thinking of adding to his Sullivan’s Island property, and that he had engaged the local architectural firm of Liollio and Associates to do a concept design. Henric asked him why he needed a guest house, considering he had five bedrooms in the main house, on two stories. Constantine said, “Because the dachas outside Saint Petersburg all had guesthouses.”
Henric said, “Oh, right.”
The architecture firm’s offices were in a building near the drawbridge they were approaching, which was what had triggered the thought of his guest house in Constantine’s mind. He remembered sitting in the conference room in the architect’s office, watching the drawbridge go up and down. He said to Henric, “Come down below, let me show you the drawings they’ve done.” They left Jinny and Guignard at the helm, and went into the cabin. Constantine pulled the large format drawings from a long tote bag and spread them on the table. Henric looked at the three different sketches that included landscaping, thinking all were nice, and asked questions about the amenities.
Topside, Jinny had the wheel. The channel was narrow, with commercial development on the right bank and residential development on the left. Jinny said, “How about some Champagne? It’s five o’clock in Russia.”
Guignard looked at him and said, “It’s ten o’clock in the morning here. No Champagne. Save it for later.”
Jinny loved it when Guignard managed his moods. It showed she cared. He drew her over to him and put his arm around her, kissing her neck and then her shoulder. Guignard loved it when he did this sort of stuff. It showed he cared. The lovey dovey escalated a little, them deciding to take advantage of Constantine and Henric’s absence from the cockpit. It wasn’t a good time for this to happen, and wouldn’t have happened with experienced boat operators. The chart on the cockpit table clearly showed the bridge ahead. The day was clear and sunny, and the channel was fairly straight. Between a glance at the chart and a steady gaze ahead, there should have been no problem. But Jinny and Guignard were not experienced, and were doing things other than piloting the boat. Jinny managed to keep one hand on the wheel, but the other hand had control of his mind, the hand exploring Guignard’s derrière.
Protocol and regulations call for boats to announce their approach to drawbridges with two blasts on an air horn. Bridges are slow going up and slow going down, and they need advance notice. Jinny, or was it Guignard, failed to calculate the rate of their approach to the bridge, and failed to sound the obligatory air horn blasts. The bridge operator saw them coming, and activated the bridge raising controls, but from experience he could tell it was going to be close.
Jinny and Guignard didn’t have much boat driving experience, and when they disengaged from their lovey dovey and saw the bridge three hundred yards ahead, starting to go up, they thought all was well. At two hundred yards, Jinny noticed the relatively slow rate at which the bridge was rising, and said to Guignard, “American drawbridges are slow.”
She said, “They certainly are.”
“Our bridges over the Neva are much faster, and they're much older than this bridge.”
She said, “They certainly are.” Guignard’s voice betrayed a touch of concern, and Jinny’s face showed a touch of concern.
At a hundred yards the bridge was only half way up. Henric was asking Constantine if the guest house would have its own wine cellar, or if the guests would have to go to the big house for a bottle of Vouvray. Constantine hadn’t thought of that, and was pondering. An experienced boat operator wouldn’t have gotten himself or herself into this predicament to start with, and even if they had, they simply would have throttled back on the engine control to a neutral position, or even to a slight reversal of the prop. But Henric’s boat wasn’t in the hands of experienced operators; it was in the hands of Little Jinny Blistov.
If Jinny had been confronted by, say, a stranger with a gun, threatening Guignard, his woman, he would have responded skillfully. He would have figured a way to distract the guy, pull his piece, and shoot the fucker through the chest. But confronted with the fact of his boat rapidly approached a very slowly rising, four lane wide steel drawbridge, he didn’t respond skillfully. His pride wouldn’t let him call for Henric, which probably wouldn’t have helped anyway, Henric being just as inexperienced as himself, and he panicked. Instead of throttling back into neutral, he decided to turn. This was wrong. It was completely wrong. When he was halfway through the turn maneuver, with the boat now perpendicular to the channel, Jinny saw it was wrong. No way. The drawbridge operator, watching through the large window of the control pod located at the stationary end of the bridge, watched with fascination. He had sat in this little room every day for four years, and he never had seen a large sailboat approach the bridge perpendicular to the channel. This was new and exciting, because his days invariably were dull, watching thousands of cars drive over the bridge and a dozen boats drive through the bridge. This crash was going to be the high point of his tenure, and he wished it well.
At fifty yards from the bridge, Guignard reached for the throttle control and yanked in back into the neutral position. This, coupled with the ninety degree turn to starboard Jinny had executed, alerted Henric to a change in the boat’s navigation, and he and Constantine came up on deck. When they had gone below, the boat was facing down the channel. Now it was facing the marshland on the channel’s left bank. That’s what they saw at first glance. Then they turned right, and saw the bridge only three quarters of the way up. They saw the bridge, sitting on steel supports, and they did the math.
The good news for all concerned, but especially for Henric, being the owner of the boat, was that the tide was coming in, up Wappoo Creek. The boat had been churning forward, against the tide, since leaving the dock on Kiawah. It flowed strongly, and now acted as a natural brake to the forward momentum of the boat. This was bad news for the bridge operator, who was hoping for a major, spectacular crash of this rich guy’s boat. Serve him right, having all that money, and maybe the bridge would be damaged, and he would get paid time off. So when the boat came to rest against the bridge supports with a rather gentle bump, its momentum stopped, parallel to the road and perpendicular to the channel, he was disappointed.
After a minute the tide began to move the boat slowly away from the bridge supports, and Henric took the controls, putting the engine in reverse turning the wheel counterclockwise. He backed it into the center of the channel, got it pointed straight ahead, and pushed the control stick forward with just enough power to the prop to maintain his position against the tide. He looked at Jinny, who looked at Guignard, who looked at Constantine, who watched Henric, wondering what he would do.
The only people who observed this little incident, other than the four Russians and the bridge operator, were the two architects and their clients, sitting in the conference room in the office building on the shore, mesmerized by the scene. By this time the bridge was in the full up position, and Henric powered the, the….that boat needs a name, through and into the channel beyond, averting a catastrophe. Consequences for Jinny were in the making.
In a show of good faith, Henric handed the wheel back to Jinny after a few minutes, the handoff accompanied by a stern glare that said, “Don’t fuck up again,” and he and Constantine went below
again to study the sketches. Guignard said, “It wasn’t me that started the lovey dovey stuff. It was you.”
“Did you like it, or not?”
Guignard ignored this and kept watch ahead. She and Jinny had not accumulated enough money to buy Henric a new boat, and she now stood at the far side of the cockpit, which hurt Jinny’s feelings. Another half hour motoring down the Ashley River brought them out into Charleston harbor and past the Coast Guard station. Moored at one of the floating docks was the Coast Guard’s drone Boston Whaler. This was a small outboard that had been outfitted with state of the art remote controls and cameras. Boaters were startled to see it flashing around the harbor, no operator aboard. Its driver sat in an office of the Coast Guard station, watching computer screens, hands on joysticks. The boat spent a lot of time poking around and under the container shipping terminal piers.
Five minutes after passing the Coast Guard station, Jinny and Guignard pointed out Stirg’s dock and house to the others. The dock was empty. On Thursday afternoon, Nev had moved their boat from their dock over to the marina. He knew the Gromstov boat would pass by their dock as it came out the mouth of the Ashley, into the harbor. Stirg did not want them to see his boat at his dock, and thereby know what it looked like. Henric also brought his boat into the marina, where Jinny, Guignard, and Constantine got off, and Helstof got on. Friday was to be time for Henric, alone with his wife. They wanted to fish. Saturday was the boat-warming party with the gang.