Chapter 53 – Stolen Again
Peter and Pater each spun a white board around so Richard and Anna could see the stuff written on the back. Richard and Anna sat side by side on the bench in front of the synthesizer, and Helstof was over at the edge of the stage, sitting in front of the computer that recorded everything Richard played on the synthesizer and Anna played on the piano. Richard put his arm around Anna and said, “Do you see anything we missed?”
She stared at the white boards, and motioned to Pater to turn his around again. Her eyes scanned the words and the little pictographs they used to storyboard the ballet. Pater turned the board again, and again Anna scanned the images. Then she closed her eyes, thinking about sixteen weeks of intense work. She opened them and looked at Richard.
“We’re done. I think we’re done.”
Richard dropped his chin to his chest, feeling a combination of exhaustion and elation. Then he looked at Anna and said, “Yeah, I think we’re done. Thank God.”
Peter and Pater watched closely because they weren’t sure what was happening. They hoped it was something good, and it was. Richard got up and went over to where they stood and said, “The first draft of the music is done.” Anna got up and went over to Helstof and said the same thing. Done. Peter and Pater hugged Richard, and Helstof hugged Anna. They had written original music for a ballet.
Pater ran into the back office and told Selgey and Bart and the admin woman the news, and they ran out to the stage and went to Richard and Anna and congratulated them. What an accomplishment. Now Selgey and Bart could fully attack the choreography. They had been working on it the entire time Richard and Anna had been working on the music, following the storybooking on the white boards. And as they created the movements of the dancers, Peter and Pater had written down their descriptions, using dancer language and terms and shorthand. Locations on the stage. Positions of the dancers. Flows and changes and rhythms and gestures. Sometimes as Richard or Anna played sections of the music, Selgey or Bart would dance the choreography, and other times they would have Helstof play a recording of the music on the computer, through the theater’s new sound system, and they would dance to that.
The two composers and the two choreographers knew completion of the entire first draft of the score was a major milestone in the project, and had agreed, when that was done, that they would move forward with the production. They knew they could finish the choreography and begin revising the music over the next few months, while at the same time committing themselves to the business part of the academy, the students and the production. Their business plan was to stage the production first, and use publicity from that to attract and choose the students.
Over coffee, the six artists sat with the admin woman and carefully went down the list of tasks to be done over the next few months. They came to an item the admin person had been eyeing for some time, a high dollar item. Her list said, “Purchase large beach house for visiting dancers.” She knew real estate values in Charleston, so she asked, “What about this house? Where, and how much, and who’s paying?”
Peter said, “Pater and I’ve been talking about that, and we think we should change that from beach house to ‘old historic house south of Broad Street.’ We think the dancers will want to be downtown, where there’s some action, since they’re here for three months, not years. What do you think?”
Everyone agreed. Pater said, “Ok, then, we go to Henric and ask him to give us the money, and we go to Gwen and ask her to find the place.”
The next day Peter and Pater went to the June’s house and told Gwen and Roger about the completion of the music. They were on their way. Gwen got on the phone and told Guignard, who got on the phone and told everyone else. When Slev heard, she immediately organized a celebratory dinner, which she and Gale would cook, and which would be at the June’s house. They set the date for a week hence, and sent out the invitations. This would provide time for the admin person to get moving on new tasks, and for Henric to come up with money for the new property, and Gwen to start looking for it. Everything shifted into high gear.
Roger wasn’t sure he wanted to shift into high gear, because he was enjoying being a bum. A gentleman bum, but a bum nonetheless, He hadn’t done much of anything for weeks other than dink around with the hundreds of bottles of burgundy in his cellar. That’s about it. Same with Jinny, who was enjoying learning to sail. He and Constantine and Henric went out two times a week with the College of Charleston coach. They had one thing on their minds: St. Barths. But Gwen kicked both of their asses, and told them she would have a new property soon, downtown. They would have to furnish it, just as they had done with the Sullivan’s Island house and the Kiawah house.
So Roger scheduled a day with Jinny for them to go to the warehouse and look through the Hermitage stuff for items they would put in the new place. Gwen told Roger to do that the afternoon of Slev’s dinner. She had invited the entire crew over for 3pm, to socialize before dinner. She knew everyone enjoyed sitting in the big kitchen, watching Slev and Gale cook. She also knew that if Jinny was there, he would try to open bottles of wine immediately and start drinking, and she didn’t want a bunch of sloshheads around before the meal began. After the meal, sloshheads were fine. So she banished Roger and Jinny from the social hour.
Jinny picked Roger up at 2pm, and they drove over to the warehouse. Neither of them had been there in more than a month. When they pulled into the warehouse parking lot, Jinny opened the trunk and took out a cooler. Inside were two bottles of Champagne, which he showed to Roger.
“You’re a bad boy, Jinny Blistov. A very bad boy.” And Roger popped a cork. They sat on the edge of the loading dock, enjoying the wine and their shared sense of accomplishment at sticking it to Gwen, the partypooper. Two glasses each flowed down their throats, and the transformation began.
Roger stood up and said, “We gotta do something here or Gwen will shoot us.” While Roger unlocked the wide sliding doors, Jinny put the cooler back in the trunk of the car. He climbed back up on the loading dock where Roger stood in the warehouse doorway, looking inside. Roger reached to the side of the doorway and flipped the light switch. It was empty. The warehouse was empty. No velvet sofas, no paintings of borzois, no Tiffany lamps, no Turkish carpets. What they saw was a whole lot of empty. They looked at each other, and with not even a second of hesitation, both said the same thing: STIRG.
Chapter 54 – Gone in the Night
They left the sliding doors open because there wasn’t anything inside for anyone to take, and drove back to Roger’s house. As they mounted the back steps leading into the kitchen, where they heard people talking, lots of people, Jinny asked, “What are you going to tell them?”
“Me. Why do I do the telling? It was your idea to go to Russia and steal the stuff. I just helped. You tell them it’s gone.”
Jinny thought Roger was being childish. This was his house, he should tell his guests what they’d found. The theft. They entered the kitchen where they were greeted by thirteen people, the same people who had been on the boat when Stirg attacked off Fort Sumter. Of the fifteen people now together, eight had been directly involved in the theft of artifacts from the Hermitage. The other seven were peripherally involved, or learned about the heist after the heist team returned to Charleston.
In the June kitchen were thirteen happy people, celebrating the completion of the first draft of the ballet score, and two sad people, those who knew all the valuable artifacts had disappeared in the night. Thirteen happy faces, two stone faces. Roger and Jinny might have categorized the expression on their faces as neutral rather than stony, but to the others in the room, who symbolically had been dancing and singing, there was a difference between them like night and day. Gwen and Guignard, especially, could see that something was wrong. Gwen asked, “Is the dog ok?” Ever since the dog had alerted Roger and Gwen in the middle of the night to the presence of an
invader in their home, she had held an exalted place in the June home.
“The dog’s ok. She’s out back,” said Roger.
Gwen waited. Guignard waited. Jinny waited for Roger to tell. Roger waited for Jinny to tell. It was Anna who cut through the wimpiness of the two guys, Anna and her intuition. She said, “It’s all gone, isn’t it? All the stuff.”
Roger looked at her, looked at Gwen, looked around the room.
“All gone. Every piece,” he said.
Then Anna looked around the room at the fourteen faces. Sixteen counting the two Russian blue cats sitting on the counter near the pantry. Twenty-one if you counted the baby kittens, soon to be born in a box in the pantry. The kittens didn’t understand the human conversation, but they were listening, nonetheless.
Anna said, “Good old Granddad. He’s not over the hill yet.”
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Richard Dorrance lives in America's most beautiful town,
Charleston, South Carolina.
You can look at other books on his website: richarddorrance.com
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