Chapter 47 – Grandfather and Granddaughter
The next day Anna called Jinny and asked him to meet her on The Battery. This was the place of Roger’s incident with the four punks. Anna and Jinny met near the four Civil War 13-inch Seacoast mortars that pointed out over the harbor waters. Originally they were located on Fort Sumter, and pointed towards Charleston.
They did the double-cheeked kiss, and started walking. It was a beautiful day in a beautiful place. Jinny could tell Anna was in a serious mood, so he let her dictate their interaction. He knew what she needed.
“How’s my grandfather?” she asked. “What happened after he attacked us? Do you know what he’s doing?”
Jinny was ready for this. “We know something. He’s ok. Roger tries to keep track of him. Sometimes your grandfather is at his house, and sometimes Roger doesn’t know where he is. But he’s ok. He even goes up to the campus once in a while, hangs out. He hasn’t done anything else against us, which is good. Nev is with him.”
“What happened to his boat?”
“Nothing, really. The next day he hired a tug to pull it off the sandbar. It was no big deal and the boat is over at his dock. He hasn’t had it fixed yet, so you can see the scrape along the side, where he hit us.”
“What do you think he’s going to do next?”
Jinny didn’t answer right away, and they walked the promenade for a while. Then he said, “Look, there are three options. He could get crazier and come after us again, with more violence. I hope that doesn’t happen. I hope the attack out at the fort, and his failure, was a shock to him. People don’t change behaviors unless some really powerful force acts on them. Maybe that was strong enough to rock him back to sanity. That’s what I hope. The second option is that he gives it all up, lives with it, and is reasonably content. The third possibility is that he is halfway in between. Between crazy and reasonable. That’s where he was until he went overboard, and attacked. Not crazy but not healthy. We don’t know. We just don’t know.”
“Does he know I was on Henric’s boat?”
“Yeah, he knows. He found out. Both he and Nev were stupid when they were planning the attack. They should have thought about you, but they didn’t. They both were all emotions and no brains. I hope that means something to him. I hope that brings him back to normal.”
Anna stopped and put her hands on the railing. She looked out towards Castle Pinckney and breathed deeply. She let the emotions come over her in a wave. Her grandfather. Her grandfather. She felt that sickness that comes over you when something bad happens in your family, something really bad. It’s such a dreadful feeling. She closed her eyes and felt it all, Jinny standing motionless, looking at her. She let it happen, and then she led it away, led it through her and away from her. She opened her eyes and looked at Jinny. “Tomorrow I’ll go see him.”
Early in the morning she rang the buzzer on the ornate iron gate near the guest house, back at the land end of the long dock. Inside the house Nev looked at the security computer screen and saw it was Anna who had buzzed. He went into the living room and told Stirg. Stirg looked out the window for a moment, then nodded. Let her in.
When Nev opened the door and Anna entered the house, she gave him a neutral stare. She didn’t know if he was good for her grandfather, or bad, but she gave him the benefit of the doubt. He had been loyal for a long time. She nodded and said, “Hello, Nev.” He gestured towards the living room.
Her grandfather was standing at one of the big windows, looking out at the tiny flags flying over the fort. He didn’t turn towards her when she came into the room, but he knew she was there. She walked over to him, put her hands on his shoulders, and turned him around. He was crying. The guy who had chased Nazis halfway around the world, was crying.
Anna knew then which of Jinny’s three options had happened. Stirg had found out the next day that Anna was on the boat during his attack, and that had rocked his world. Anna. Thank god he had failed. Thank God Roger was better at boats than he was that night. The shock had brought him back to reality. His mind was dulled, hurt, bashed in, but it moved out of the cloud of delusion and resided in the real world again. That was good. Maybe it would heal.
Anna was a different person now than the last time she had been in this house. Both of them were different. Both had lived through powerful events, and Anna had moved into a new culture. She had left her grandfather’s life and entered the orbit of Gwen and Roger June. She had lived with The Deneuve. She was different and better, understanding her gift of intuition; what it is and how to tap into it. Catherine had shown her that.
Over a period of a few years, Stirg had gone from international power stud to retired guy looking for meaning in his life. All the meaning resided in his granddaughter, and then something happened to her. She modulated from young adult to adult. She walked into a new world of special people, three of whom happened to be high level users of the tool of human intuition. Three women. And around the three women were a bunch of really interesting men. She plunged into the new world, leaving her old one. It happens.
Stirg took it really hard. The traits that made him a Nazi hunter didn’t work very well in dealing with this situation. He went dark, into a place without a touchstone to reality. What he saw was this group of Russians in Charleston, surrounding his granddaughter, led by a couple of American squeakers, sitting around on sofas they’d stolen from the Hermitage Museum. Russian stuff. Czar stuff. Heritage stuff that should be in Russia. Not here.
Snap.
What a weird progression of events for Stirg. Learning of the Hermitage caper and tracking the perpetrators to his adopted town of Charleston. Wanting to avenge the theft of Russian artifacts by Americans. Pointing Anna into the June’s home, and her getting caught. The presence of Catherine there, and her subtle influence over the Junes to co-op Anna into their fold. Gwen’s decision to counter-invade his house. And then his crazy attack out in the harbor. An attack on his granddaughter. Thank god he and Nev were past it, and Roger was not.
Stirg took a very deep breath, and let it out. He closed his eyes for a minute, and when he opened them, he was back in the real world, with his granddaughter. His adult granddaughter. He didn’t say anything, and neither did she. They both knew things were ok.