Chapter 27 - The Hermitage Caper
Nothing much happened the next day. Roger nursed a mild hangover, Plouriva was back at work at the Hermitage office, Jinny was out doing God knows what, and Gwen went to see what a Russian mall was like. She hoped they had a store that sold reproduction Faberge eggs. She had a lot of faith in Roger’s ability to provide for them, but she was under no illusion about ever owning one of the fifty-seven surviving genuine Faberge eggs.
The day after the day when nothing much happened, a great deal happened. Jinny was called to a conference with Henric and Constantine, at which they informed him they had accepted the Charleston package. They were ready to move on it and they asked Jinny when the JuneBlistov partnership could start producing the goods. Jinny took a while to answer as his internal organs all had shifted position when his heart practically jumped out of his throat. This happened because his adrenal glands did a Niagara Falls dump into his bloodstream that excited his brain neurals that zapped his endocrines that infused chemical electricity into his heart muscle. He managed to maintain a respectable outward form despite the inwardly twirling gymnastics. Looking pensively at the two Russian heavy-weights, Jinny told them the Charleston side of things was in the bag. They could start looking at property and eating shrimp and grits pretty much immediately. He told them he and the Junes still were working on the “furniture” end of things, and had to get that straightened out before they headed back to the States.
Henric and Constantine didn’t say anything. Those two guys really operate on the same wavelength. It seemed as if they understood each other without talking; as if they always had exactly the same perspective on things going on around them, and Jinny wondered if they were like, non-identical twins or something. They just sat there and looked at Jinny, waiting for more data to flow to them so they could take action on it. So Jinny gave it to them straight, that Plouriva was handling the furniture thing, and she had to coordinate that with the crate and the container ship thing.
Henric and Constantine got up like they were joined at the hip, and moved to the dining room table. Two hardline telephones appeared and each guy grabbed one. When they had a connection to someone somewhere, two cell phones appeared. They each dialed on the cells, and after a few minutes they were connected to the same people with whom they had hardline connections. They said GO at the same time, and sat back in their chairs, keeping the cells to their ears. After a minute Jinny could hear voices coming from the cells, and the hardline phones were disconnected. Jinny learned later this little procedure resulted in a secure phone connection anywhere in the world; a connection that eliminated all of the many Russian security bureau monitoring systems.
Henric asked the person on the other end of his connection about shipping schedules from Russian ports. Constantine spoke about the availability of flatbed trucks. The conversations took on a life of their own, each perpetuated, fomented, and controlled by the two Russian magnates. Jinny sat back, listened, and learned. At one point Henric motioned to Jinny to get cigars from the cabinet. Then he was asked to get coffee from the kitchen. Henric and Constantine settled in with their phones, smoking and drinking coffee, in their element. Jinny relaxed and believed this caper really had a chance of success. With a weirdness that unsettled Jinny, the two guys ended their forty-five minute calls at the same time. What’s going on here? Constantine grabbed some paper and a pen and began jotting down notes. Henric watched his cigar smoke drift upwards toward the twelve foot ceiling.
Constantine asked Henric for a calendar. Together they talked dates and ship itineraries and tides and custom inspections and port operations and road conditions and the habits of local and not-so-local police. Henric asked Constantine what he knew about the Hermitage? Constantine said it had lots of old and beautiful stuff in it. Lots of really old shotguns, and he wished he had a few like that. Henric could see Constantine didn’t know much about this, so he looked at Jinny. Jinny reacted very coolly, said Plouriva had this covered….100% percent down and certain.
Both Henric and Constantine were retired chief executives, had managed people for many years, and knew they had to rely on others to make things happen. Long ago they had developed highly refined senses of intuition about their staffs and subordinates. They looked at each other, looked at Jinny, and nodded affirmatively. Jinny thought, “Bloody hell right, we are good.” With that, arrangements were made to meet with Plouriva tomorrow at the museum.
Later that day Jinny went to the Corinthia and had coffee with Roger and Gwen. He told them of recent events, and answered their questions. It appeared to them that the caper, at this point, was out of their hands, that the two big Russians had entered the fray with barely a raised eyebrow, and their attitude was: risk, what risk? Let’s get this done so we can get on to more important things, like learning about this mysterious but enticing food called shrimp and grits. Winter was coming. Jinny thought the prospect of shooting large handguns with Gwen, and maybe a few other Charleston babes, and yes, maybe with their wives, might have something to do with their enthusiasm, but he didn’t mention this to Roger.
The next day the Junes spent time inside the Hermitage looking at a monumental collection of rare and beautiful heritage artifacts. They did not make any connection with Henric, Constantine, or Plouriva, who met together in Plouriva’s office. Jinny was absent, too, given his immigration status. Roger and Gwen walked from one room stuffed with Eighteenth-Century French antique masterpieces to the next room stuffed with Chinese porcelain masterpieces to the next room stuffed with Flemish painted masterpieces. Roger began to understand the grading of this material: the grade A stuff, which boggled his mind, to the grade B stuff, which made him drool, to the grade C stuff, which….Oh yeah, the grade C stuff. This was the material he wasn’t seeing because it didn’t rate compared to the grade A and grade B stuff that was on display. He began to question Plouriva’s rating of the material. He began to suspect that the grade C stuff was not stored just in warehouses “out back”, with minimal security, as Plouriva had told them. This was based on the quality of the A and B stuff. One notch below that still would be world-class objects d’art. Roger now was thinking their target material was more like grade D stuff. Even then, you’re talking five figure worths. What would be their profit, selling this stuff to the Russkies? Roger wondered just how much the Russkies would pay for stuff they had helped steal. Later in the day, outside the museum, Roger mentioned this to Gwen, who replied it depended on exactly how rich these guys were. If they were super rich, then money didn’t matter to them. What mattered was convenience. If the team could supply things that really turned the Russians on, then money would not be an issue. Gwen said, “I have these guys’ temperature, I own Slevov, and Helstof is cool too. When I get this group back to Charleston, the good times are gonna roll.”
In Plouriva’s office the boys didn’t actually talk about stealing the goods from the warehouses. They just kind of shot the shit with Plouriva, using this as an opportunity to size her up, again. Plouriva was solid as a battleship. She knew what was going on and she played this hand deftly. She talked about the history of the Hermitage, the surrounding grounds, and the stuff inside the museum. After a while she took them on a walk. In an hours stroll they saw maybe twenty percent of the property. They didn’t go anywhere near the warehouses, but Plouriva talked about them, giving the boys the lay of the land.
Plouriva had two important logistical points still to figure out. One involved the big shipping crates, and the other was how the hell SHE was going to get out of the country alive. Plouriva’s original plan was to use the shipping crates now sitting in the workrooms of the museum basement; the ones in which the artifacts from the University of Vladivostok Art Museum had arrived. She could see the flaw in this. The crates had to be ones that could roll through the streets of Saint Petersburg without exciting the interest of any security types. Now she could se
e the brilliance of Constantine’s method - use crates that he had used once already and that had passed security muster. Plouriva’s challenge was to get the trucks into the Hermitage compound, empty, and get them out loaded with the Vladivostok crates filled with artifacts. She had no doubt that Constantine, somehow, somewhere in the city, could have the goods transferred from the Vladivostok crates to the computer crates. Then, onwards to the port and the container ship.
As far as her escaping the country, she knew Roger and Gwen were going to leave Russia the night before the theft. The theft itself was all on Plouriva, that being the price she had to pay to be a full partner in the caper. The deal Jinny had made with her, that the Junes had agreed to, was if Plouriva succeeded at getting the stuff out of the Hermitage compound, and if she had a way to get the stuff out of the country and on its way to the States, that would invest her as a full partner in all future financial returns. In other words, her part would be done, and she could coast the rest of the way.
The important logistical point Plouriva had not yet figured out was how to get herself out of the country after the theft. She knew she had to manage the actual stealing of the goods. She had to be, so to speak, the on-site manager. Once the stuff was out of the compound, the remainder of the transportation basically was on auto-pilot. The trucks would take the Vladivostok crates to someplace where the goods would be transferred to the computer crates, which then would be trucked to a shipping terminal where they would be loaded into containers, and the containers would be trucked to the port where they would be loaded onto a ship which, eventually, would arrive in Charleston. Just as Constantine and Henric were sizing up Plouriva, she was sizing up them. Could they manage the goods once they were out of the compound? Would they do so, honestly? Or would they hijack the goods and turn her in to the security apparat?
The stroll around the grounds was a very interesting experience for Plouriva; perhaps less so for the guys. For the guys, this caper was kind of elementary. They were used to stealing the country’s oil, and procuring and appropriating the country’s supercomputers that were used in making really big and badass bombs. Plouriva, though, had to determine if her neck was safe with these dudes, so her scoping of them was at fever pitch.
The pitch of her fever lessened later in the afternoon after Henric and Constantine left. They had been friendly to her and were absolutely calm and assured. This alone was not enough for Plouriva to put her neck in their hands, but it was enough to reduce her inner tension. The three agreed to meet the next day with Jinny, which they did, at a local beer bar. They stood at an isolated chest-high table, like the rest of the patrons, sipping Czech beer. Henric and Constantine told Plouriva they could pull off the heist. They said they had arranged the basics of the logistics, and that it had been relatively easy. It came down to having exactly the right kind of trucks, carrying the right kind of crates, driven by exactly the right guys, traveling down the right roads, at the right time of day, to exactly the right terminal. There the crates would be loaded into exactly the right containers, which would be put on the right trucks, and sent to the right port, in time to flow onto exactly the right ship. Henric and Constantine didn’t mention this to Plouriva, but they had people who made arrangements like this on a fairly regular basis, and did it really well. Hence their opinion that these logistics were relatively easy. And hence their assured demeanor. Neither did they mention that they were footing the bill for this part of the heist. Plouriva knew this was costing some bucks, but her intuition was, “If they ain’t bringing the subject to the table, neither am I.” Plouriva, and later Jinny, and later Roger and Gwen, all understood these guys were seriously rich, and they were serious about the Charleston package. They wanted to make this thing a success, and they were investing in it.
Compared to many previous machinations involving oil, computers, and other valuable and dangerous commodities and services, for Henric and Constantine, this little op was, well, little. In any case, Roger, Gwen, Jinny, and Plouriva accepted what appeared to be the inevitable: the planning was complete, and execution was at hand.