Chapter 8 – Acceptance
Gwen watched Blistov sip his cognac and soda, and wanted one. She wanted something to soothe the throb of excitement she felt that was mixing with a sense of warning. At the same time she wanted the coffee to kick in and serve as an aid to her analysis. She wanted to be up and she wanted to be down. Roger felt similarly, though with some variations. He wasn’t crazy about working with a bunch of foreigners, but he was entranced with thoughts of antiques and fine wine. He noticed he was unimpaired by the knowledge that the scheme existed, or at least had the potential to exist, in a rather robust shade of moral grayness. The exact shade of gray was yet to be determined. The fact that Roger loved his auntie and his wife didn’t mean he was a puritan. For quite a number of years he had swayed back and forth between the fields of high society and low society. He liked being a gentleman detective, because of the intellectual challenges. He considered the fact that this line of work inherently involved people from other levels of society to be an occupational hazard. Gwen was ok with this, too. She lived at the periphery of his detecting endeavors, but always seemed to get involved without making an effort to do so. Roger and Gwen talked about a lot of different things, and his work was one of them. Gwen just seemed to end up around Roger when odd things happened to him. Hence her familiarity with handguns, and her skill and facility at operating them.
Blistov finished his drink and the Junes finished their coffees, and the party broke up. Blistov came through and paid not only the wine bill but the entire bill. He had enjoyed himself immensely, and his confidence in landing his partners in the deal was large. He didn’t know Roger and Gwen from Adam and Eve, but he knew one thing about himself, which was that his intuition rarely was wrong. And his intuition had told him, before he entered the restaurant, that Roger was the man to make the project work. When he met Gwen; when he realized Gwen had a gun under the table and appeared to be quite willing to use it, his intuition bonged like the bells on the Kremlin. Bong, bong, bong!
Outside the restaurant they walked a short distance, and then simultaneously stopped and looked at each other. Blistov was all smiles. Roger was impassive. Gwen, it seemed to both Blistov and Roger, looked rather devilish. Roger was used to this look, and it didn’t particularly surprise him. Blistov was surprised, and at the same time very pleased. He decided he would stack this American up against a St. Petes. hottie any day.
Blistov was a follower, not a leader. He had cooked up this complicated scheme and set it in motion, but now he assumed the role of worker bee. The Junes had not yet said yes, and here was Blistov turning over the reins of the operation to Roger. Blistov just stood there, quiet and not talking. He had done all his talking in the restaurant and now was letting things settle.
Roger looked at Gwen, and Gwen looked at Roger. She smiled at him. Contrary to his inclination to smile back at his wife whenever she smiled at him, he remained impassive and turned to Blistov. Many questions remained, and the answers to those questions would determine the shade of gray that would cloak the operation. Roger needed those answers to decide if he could live in the gray, and Gwen’s smile told him she was leaving the decision up to him. She was a bit of a wild girl who, most of the time, let Roger curb her wildness. Roger studied Blistov’s face, and Blistov had no problem with thus being studied. He stood passively and waited, the wine and cognac feeling good in him. His approach to the Junes felt good in him, the impending operation felt great inside him, and he was ready for action.
Roger stood there thinking quite competently and efficiently despite the wine. He thought first about his auntie, and her being swindled. She was wealthy, and so had been her husband, Roger’s uncle. The uncle made his money buying land back in the 40s, and building golf courses on it. He had wanted Charleston to be the place where Bobby Jones, the famous golfer, came to live and retire. Knowing that his auntie’s house was full of genuine American antiques, Roger thought his auntie would approve of this scheme.
Then Roger thought of his wife. She was a firecracker, and Roger loved that part of her. He wanted to keep her happy and content, and Roger thought this little escapade would fit that bill. Roger was able to calculate risk, and Gwen was very able to calculate risk, and Roger knew his wife would not view this as too risky. His own thoughts about risk now came into play.
Roger could deal with the real estate part of the scheme; there was nothing particularly dishonest there. Sell the Russians expensive property and take a bigger than normal commission. Same with the wine. Instead of selling the wine at the normal retail markup of 150 % of wholesale, he would sell it to them at the restaurant markup of 300%. He also would provide them with connoisseur service. No, the stumbling block was the antiques. What exactly did Blistov have in mind here? Remember, Blistov had had a piece of furniture forged, and had sold it. Roger understood that forging was a huge part of the antiques trade world-wide. If the public only knew that, they would faint away. Roger was a Divvie, a person who had a sixth sense about genuine and fake art and antiques. He had a great respect for authenticity, and he had a grudging respect for forgeries, too. He very much liked Blistov’s circa 1737 Heppleworth end table knockoff.
So the antiques part of the scam was the crux of the decision to accept Blistov’s proposal or turn it down. Roger stood there on the sidewalk and asked himself an important question: how far am I willing to go? How deep into forgery and theft am I willing to descend? This was the all-important question often posed by or to the characters in Robert B. Parker’s novels. Roger was a big fan of Parker and his moral conundrums. With Parker, the question usually was whether a basically good person was willing to kill a bad person, or not. Hence the “How far am I willing to go” issue. Roger recognized that his decision was not quite so serious, but still, forging and stealing antiques, and selling them to Russian criminals, or at least to their wives and girlfriends, was nothing to sneeze at or take lightly.
Gwen could tell Roger was thinking hard, and she left him to it. She decided to spend her time wisely by gauging Blistov a bit more. Gwen had the devil in her, and that was one reason Roger loved her. By the end of Blistov’s presentation, she was warming up to the Russian in general, with the exception of his shoes, which deserved a never ending loathing. So Gwen decided (or was it the wine deciding) to play a bit with Blistov, who was standing resolutely still and quiet, enjoying the salt laden Charleston night air. It was warm air, and moist, not like Saint Petersburg air. He liked it.
Gwen kind of sidled up to Blistov with a half-smile on her face, and asked him if he preferred the Petrova .45 caliber or the Brusshev 10mm. As she asked the question, she kind of stuck her hand, with its index finger extended, into Blistov’s gut. She didn’t stick it in his chest or his face, as she figured that would be a bit rude, but sticking it in his gut seemed well within the bounds of civility. It was just a hand, after all.
Blistov heard the question quite clearly, but the content was so unexpected that it took his neurons extra time to process the data and arrive at comprehension. This American broad is pretty cool, him smiling without conscious volition. He didn’t answer right away, but his smile was a reaction, of sorts. Petrova or Brusshev, Petrova or Brusshev? Damn. Where is God’s name did this women come to understand anything about Russian handguns? Blistov was blistered.
Blistov was smart, so he didn’t stay bewildered very long. He said he liked the Brusshev a lot, and had owned one once a long time ago. He said he’d never seen a Petrova, much less fired one, as Petrovas were scarce in Russia, and therefore very expensive. Petrovas were the choice of ex-military guys with lots of money. Gwen told Blistov she had fired both of them when her father took her to a range outside Washington DC, and met an old friend of his there. This friend had a gym bag that must have weighed thirty pounds. When he unzipped it, Gwen watched him take out six different pieces, followed by ammo for each piece. Two of them were the Ru
ssian guns, and he had brought them for his old buddy and Gwen to fire. The Petrova was a beast, and just about jumped out of Gwen’s hand at detonation. The Brusshev had decent balance and Gwen was able to put all eight rounds from the mag into the target. Her hand hurt only a little bit.
Blistov was amazed at the story, and liked her even more when she looked around the street, and then reached into her purse and pulled out her own gun. She liked her semi-compact Glock 40 cal. Its downsized grip fit her hand and it carried a bit of comforting weight without being too heavy for her to control. She handed it to Blistov, saying, “Here is my Austrian baby, wanna feel it?” Blistov looked over at Roger. Roger was standing the same way as he was five minutes ago, passive and inward-looking. Roger’s eyes saw Blistov’s eyes, and Roger’s eyes saw his wife hand over her gun, but his mind still was wrestling with the moral question of forgery and theft.
When Blistov saw that Roger knew what was happening and didn’t seem to mind, he reached out and took the gun from Gwen, and immediately did something that pleased Gwen no-end. He pointed the gun at the ground. This little maneuver told Gwen that Blistov knew something about handling guns safely, which instilled confidence in Gwen about this Russian guy she was playing games with. Blistov looked around the street before raising the gun and feeling its weight. It was too small for his meaty paw, but he saw how it suited Gwen. He smiled an innocent smile and said, “Feels pretty good.” With that he handed it to Gwen, who put it back into her purse.
She turned and looked innocently at her husband, sighing when she saw he still was thinking. She was about as ready for action as Blistov was. In her mind the acceptance speech already had been issued by Roger, and she was thinking about how and when this rollercoaster was gonna get rolling.
Roger saw and understood the little gun play deal that had gone on between his wife and this crime guy, and had let it slipslide away. His wife did this stuff all the time in one way or another, her being a pistol, literally and figuratively. He had more important stuff to figure out than what wifey was up to. He had to answer the question, “How far am I willing to go?” He realized the question hinged on Blistov and his Saint Petersburg connections. If Blistov had good connections in the world of Russian antiques, as he claimed, then it was possible Blistov actually could procure and export (smuggle) real antiques. If that was case, Roger’s quandary was lessened. His job would be to get the goods to Charleston, and either directly into the hands of the wintering Russian criminal population, or onto the public market where the Russians would be willing to pay exorbitant prices for them. Russian antiques are unusual in America, and just might find a special, and wealthy, clientele. On the other hand, if Blistov was all BS about his connections, and his intent was to smuggle forgeries out of Saint Petersburg and into Charleston, then Roger’s job was very different. It would be to sell forgeries. Or, if Blistov’s plan was to manufacture forgeries of Russian artifacts in Charleston and sell them to the Russians as genuine, that also presented Roger with issues. Did he want to sell forgeries to Russians of the kind Blistov was planning on bringing over for warm Februaries spent on Sullivan’s Island second story porches? Did he want to sell forgeries to American collectors?
Roger thought about his auntie and his uncle. He thought about his wife. And he thought about Little Jinny Blistov and how far he could trust him. Then he thought about how much he liked really, really fine French burgundy. He thought about how much money was a good amount of money to have. And lastly he thought about his wife again, and what she liked to do, and he figured this caper was exactly the kind of thing she would like.
Voila, decision made. He turned to the pair standing a bit away, hissed a little whistle he knew his wife would recognize, and, when she turned and looked at him, smiled. Acceptance.