Chapter 7 – The Details
It is a testament to Jinny’s elucidatory skills that he was able to describe the entire scheme in a busy restaurant without allowing anyone else to hear, and also be able to place a new player, Gwen, into the picture on the fly. Jinny’s plan included the following details: (1) smuggle Russian antiques from Saint Petersburg to Charleston; (2) import fine French wine into Charleston; (3) induce nouveau riche Russians to spend the winter in Charleston; (4) sell them the antiques of their homeland, along with great and expensive French wines as status symbols; (5) take a cut of all real estate deals; and (6) educate them about American cosmopolitan cultural manners.
You can see why Roger and Gwen were dumbfounded. The scheme is serious, complex, lucrative, and dangerous. Jinny outlined their respective partnership roles like this: Jinny knows a lot about Russian antiques from his time working in the Hermitage, and he knows some of the players in the massive world of Russian crime. He knows Russian culture, and Russian ambitions. And he knows about Russian winters.
Roger knows a lot about antiques in general and about the American antiques market. Specifically he knows all about Charleston culture, including the players and the mores and the customs. Blistov knows Roger is a connoisseur of French wine, and he knows that Russians prize French wine as the epitome of western culture. Blistov figures that because Roger is well off, either he knows about real estate or can learn about real estate. Roger also is a bit of an aristocrat, and Blistov thinks Roger would fill the role of cultural attaché for the now wealthy but backwards and uncouth Russians.
Enter partner number three, the woman of many unexpected talents, Gwen June. Eureka, for Blistov. In a flash of very impressive intellectual effort, Blistov created a new role for Gwen that added depth to his proposal and solved some of the stickier details. Gwen would assume the duties of entertaining the Russians, educating them about cultural customs, scamming off the real estate cuts, finding the properties, and selling them the French wine at exorbitant prices using her feminine allure and savoir faire. And in an epiphany previously reserved for luminaries such as Newton and Einstein, Blistov saw Gwen procuring handguns for the Russian men, who basically required them because of their lifestyles, and for the Russian women, who may not actually need them but who would find them interesting as unusual toys. Gwen would get the women guns, and teach them how to use them. Blistov sat thinking about the Russian hoods in Saint Petersburg, about trying to persuade them of the multifarious merits of his scheme, about topping off his spiel with a promise of handguns for them, and handgun instruction for their women, taught by a beautiful American babe. Blistov’s mouth watered at these thoughts.
Blistov had no doubt that he and his Russian associates could find, steal, or otherwise procure authentic antiques in Saint Petersburg, and find a way to smuggle them into South Carolina. The Russian crime system had matured under Putin’s reign, and had developed sophisticated networks of buying and selling, transportation and dissemination. Blistov saw an opportunity in the international antiques trade that still was unexploited.
All this was not a simple matter, by any means. But it was doable. What Blistov needed was an American market for the goods. The genius of Blistov’s scheme was that he was not going to rely on Americans to form the market; he was going to import the market, along with the goods. He would bring good, patriotic Russians who loved their culture, to Charleston. They were patriotic Russians who happened to hate Russian winters, and they were rich. One shipping container of antiques for every two wintering Russian families seemed about right. Blistov would make them feel right at home in their new houses on Sullivan's Island. They would sit on their decks and porches, look out at the Atlantic Ocean, feel the warm January sunshine on their feet, sip a fabulous Rhone Hermitage, and look at a nineteenth century painting of some Romanov family dog with a dead rabbit in its mouth. This was a sure thing.
Blistov would perform the Saint Petersburg duties, Roger would perform the Paris wine-buying and Charleston marketing duties, and Gwen would perform the Charleston entertainment and cultural adjustment duties. What a team.