Aristocratic Thieves
By Richard Dorrance
Copyright 2013 Richard Dorrance
This book was written at
The Charleston Library Society.
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Chapter 1 –An Interrupted Dinner
Roger June’s finger stopped moving down the items on the wine list. His finger stopped on the lines Chateau Latour 1989 and Chateau Latour 1990. He knew he had drunk one or the other of these two superb vintages, but couldn’t remember which one. His eyes glazed over trying to mine this memory, and with his finger on the page, for a few moments he looked like a six year old trying to read.
When the memory attempt failed and his eyes refocused on the here and now, he didn’t like what he saw. He really, really didn’t like it, because what he saw was Little Jinny Blistov entering through the door of the restaurant. June and his wife were seated at a banquette table against the back wall, quite a distance from the door. June’s memory had failed him, but his eyes didn’t; he saw Blistov long before Blistov saw him, his right hand brushed aside the panel of his suit coat and he pulled his gun. The sound of him racking the slide under the table alerted his wife to an urgent situation. Being married to Roger for so many years, she was used to all sorts of urgent situations, some life-threatening and some not. She liked the not-life-threatening ones better, and of these, she liked the sexual ones best. Roger always made those lots of fun.
The sound of a slide racking on a semi-automatic handgun was common to Gwen, her having done this hundreds of times at the gun range, and a few times not on the gun range. However, the sound coming from under the table at one of Charleston’s fanciest restaurants gave her pause, however brief. Five seconds after hearing the sound, Gwen bent slightly, picked her purse up from the floor and pulled out her own gun. Another ominous racking sound came from under the table.
Only when Gwen had her gun securely in her hand and her hand in her lap did she look out at the room. She didn’t need to look at Roger, the sound having told her everything, and she knew he had his gun securely in his hand and his hand in his lap. At least she hoped he had the good sense to keep the gun hidden and not just lay it on top of the table next to the wine menu.
Gwen scanned the thirty or so people in the room, and her gaze came to rest on the face of Little Jinny Blistov. She’d never seen Blistov before, but she knew his story. Her husband and Blistov had come face to face in the past, in a confrontational way. She didn’t know the guy standing out near the check-in desk was Blistov, but sure as shit she knew he was the guy who had garnered her husband’s very serious attention. She knew he was serious because he was not in the habit of pulling his gun while trying to select the wine to accompany their dinner. In point of fact, she couldn’t remember it ever happening before. She had been present a couple of times when Roger had pulled his gun in a serious way, but never before at dinner. This was a new one.
Gwen knew Blistov was the guy because he just didn’t fit into this restaurant’s crowd. The guy standing out there was Charlestonian, neither in nature or presentation. Blistov stood five foot five, and weighed in at an even 200 pounds, yet he wasn’t fat. He had shaved that morning but looked like he last had shaved three days ago, and his whiskers wrapped backwards around the sides of his neck below his ears. He was wearing a black cotton sweatshirt and black cotton jeans, and on his feet were the ugliest pair of white sneakers Gwen ever had seen.
Gwen was thankful she was female because she was a shoe aficionado. She knew beautiful women should wear beautiful shoes on their beautifully sexy feet, and she performed this duty flawlessly. She was sorry for males, knowing they didn’t have beautiful feet upon which to wearing correspondingly attractive shoes.
Blistov’s shoes were so ugly she was tempted to shoot him on that count alone, never mind whatever was bothering her husband. There were plenty of people in the restaurant wearing black clothes, but they certainly weren’t made out of cotton. The dresses were silk, the suits were merino wool or better, the mock turtlenecks were silk, and a half dozen men were wearing silk socks. Blistov’s black stood out from all the rest of the black in the room, and Gwen didn’t like it.
Now she looked at her husband and found the rather tight smile on his face amusing. Gwen preferred her dinners to be uninterrupted by gunfire, but there was something oddly humorous about this situation. Here they are, essentially at ease within a world of ease, about to pull the string on ordering a $400 bottle of Bordeaux, and they find themselves face to face with an ex-Russian mobster who has a beef with Roger, and Roger seems to think, as evidenced by the racking of the slide on his gun, that the beef might be serious. If Blistov’s issue was with Gwen rather than Roger, she might not find the situation so amusing, but as it was, well, she smiled a bit inside.
Which tells you something about Gwen. It’s nice when a wife has complete confidence in her husband to protect her. It’s more interesting when she has complete confidence in herself to protect her husband. Either way, Gwen knew with absolute certainty that if Blistov started anything, he was dead meat. With this thought her amusement disintegrated, she tightened the curve of her mouth, and went back to meditating on the hate she felt towards his shoes.
Despite the look on his face that only his wife could tell meant he was in a serious mood, Roger was reasonably relaxed. The way a person grips their gun under stress tells you something about them, and Roger’s grip was firm but relaxed.
By now Blistov had finished his scan of the dining room and had located Roger and Gwen in their banquette table. He smiled and sent his 200-pound body into motion towards them. He not only acted like he owned the place, he acted like he and Roger and Gwen were the only people in the joint. He walked straight up to their table, stopped, looked at Roger, looked at Gwen, and said, “You heeled, Roger?” This amazed Roger, who knew what it meant to be heeled. Roger was shocked that a guy from Russia, and a criminal no less, knew an archaic and very American word like heeled. Roger likes to be surprised when it comes to cultural trivia, so his estimation of Blistov was raised a notch. To be heeled means to be armed with a gun, and is a cowboy word from the 19th century American west. Roger had learned it reading Elmore Leonard’s old novels. Today, Leonard is known for writing crime novels, but he started his craft by writing westerns.
While Roger sat for a moment in amazement, with his appraisal of Blistov edging upward, the appraisal by his wife declined. In fact, right after Blistov asked Roger if he was heeled, Gwen let out an audible snicker, and inherent in the word snicker is an inference of derision, which is exactly what Gwen felt. The reasons? First because Blistov asked Roger if he was armed, and second because of Blistov’s height. He is short. In Gwen’s eyes, he isn’t just short, he is munchkin short. She thought Blistov could just walk up to a table and start eating, without even sitting down. Other people would sit and eat while Blistov would stand and eat, and this vision is what made Gwen snicker. Not many women can snicker at someone while holding a gun, but Gwen can.
While his wife was snickering, Roger said, “This is one of Charleston’s nicest and most expensive restaurants. People don’t bring guns in here.”
Blistov might be short, but he also is quite bright, and knew Roger was lying. He didn’t care. He said, “Who’s she?”
Gwen hated this guy on two counts already: his shoes, and his adversarial relationship with the man she loved. Now she had a third count, the denigrating manner in which he had referred to her. Roger knew his wife thought and acted ju
diciously (most of the time), and he was pretty sure she wouldn’t shoot Blistov on just the first two counts, but when Blistov added count number three, Roger became a little apprehensive. He didn’t actually look at his wife, but he sent extra feelers her way to sense her mood.
In the great State of South Carolina it is a felony to point a gun at another person if that person is not threatening your life. Gwen knew this, so she resisted the temptation to stand up, stick her piece in Blistov’s face and say, “I’m Gwen, who are you, you little munchkin fuck?” What she did was elevate her snicker to an actual smile, stand up while hiding her gun behind her back, look Blistov in the eye, and say, “Roger, is this little munchkin fuck the Russian who stole your auntie’s money?”