Gwenny June's Tommy Crown Affair

  Chapter 5 – The Type of Guy He Is

  The 747 touched down at Kennedy and Tommy Crown was the first one out of the first class section. He wanted to get home and lock himself away in his apartment for a week. He wanted to sleep until nine, eat a breakfast of eggs and potatoes, instead of that vile French non-breakfast of croissants and jam, read the New York Times until noon, and then have a decent lunch with a decent bottle of French wine. How those Frenchies got is so right with wine and so wrong with breakfast he’s never understood. And the British, they’re the opposite; they know breakfast. Thank god us Americans get everything right. Everything. Right? Well, almost everything.

  In the taxi on the drive into the city he looked at his email and saw the subject line from the office, “Call in immediately.” He selected the message and hit the delete button. Screw them. He’d been in Paris for six weeks running down some guys who were duplicating and printing the labels for rare bottles of old German rieslings, and flogging the fakes on the auction markets. The labels were printed on old paper and the bottles were old; it was just the wine inside that wasn’t old. These guys also had devised a way to give the wine a semblance of aged flavor, by adding a chemical called dymethyaminetestoserone, which fooled those collectors with more money than tasting expertise. These collectors were all about acquiring trophy wines for their cellars, never having the intent to actually drink the wine. But one real seventy-five year old connoisseur had, and he thought the wine tasted like the Viagra he was taking, and raised an alarm, and the auction houses that had guaranteed the provenance of the wines made a claim against the insurance company, and they sent Tommy to sort it out, which he had. Six weeks of seven days a week, dealing with the fucking French bureaucrats and cops, and now he almost was home and had no intention of reading any email from his boss that said “Call in immediately.” He could hear the three security deadbolts on his apartment door clicking, one after the other, shutting out the world for an entire week. Just him and his newspaper and his wine.

  Four hours later, just after finishing the second glass of an aged Hermitage, someone knocked on his door. He went to the table in the hallway, opened the center drawer, took out his gun, went back to the dining room table, and poured himself a third glass. If Sharon Stone had called through the door saying, “Tommy, I need you, now,” he wouldn’t have opened it. And it wasn’t her voice he heard after the third knock, it was Jimmy’s voice, saying, “Mr. Crown. Mr. Crown. If you’re in there, I have a message from Ms. Granite. She says you gotta call her.” Jimmy was the office boy with only one hand who Ms. Granite sent after Tommy when she found out Tommy couldn’t ignore Jimmy the way he could ignore her, despite the fact that her management style mirrored her name. “Mr. Crown, it’s Jimmy. Ms. Granite told me to tell you who it is at your door. It’s me, and would you please call the office? Ms. Granite says my job depends on you calling the office right away. Ms. Granite says she has a bonus for you for the Paris job, and she’ll present it to you in the office providing you’re there in one hour which she says should give you time to make yourself a large cup of coffee and repack your bag, providing you’ve unpacked it. If you haven’t unpacked your bag she says you can just bring it with you as is and just put the cleaning bill from the Charleston hotel on your company credit card.” Jimmy paused, thinking what a clever woman Ms. Granite was, sending him and coaching him how to sound mournful and plaintiff through Tommy’s door. He’d have to remember this when he was running the company in a couple of years. He went on, “Mr. Crown. Mr. Crown. You ever been in the offices of the State of New York Unemployment, Disability and Rehabilitation Department (SNYUDRD)? Makes the Motor Vehicle Department seem like a Silicon Valley startup, you know, with ping pong tables and cafes and surfboards lined up for the staff during break time. Mr. Crown, can’t you please call in, save my ass from SNYUDRD, a fate worse than death. Please, sir.” Jimmy leaned against the wall opposite Tommy’s door, hoping he hadn’t laid it on too thick, but confident he’d crack Tommy even if he had. He checked his Facebook account, then read an email confirming his handball reservation at the New York Athletic Club for later that afternoon. The company had a corporate membership, and Jimmy got special perks from the club staff, who he played just like he was playing Tommy.

  And Tommy knew he was being played, and knew his boss had won this one, the bitch, and why hadn’t he had more sense and checked into a hotel for a few days before going back to his apartment. It was the allure of that aged Hermitage, that’s why. He wasn’t one to cry over spilled wine, so he unlocked the three deadbolts, and a smirking Jimmy entered. Jimmy didn’t say anything, though he thought, at least superficially, ‘sorry, guy’, sat down at the dining room table and looked at the bottle of wine and the gun. He thought, ‘If he offers me a glass of the wine, should I take it, knowing I gotta play against a guy with two hands later today, at the club?’ Jimmy knew any wine in Tommy’s place was going to be special, but he decided he’d better not take the wine, and transferred his attention to the gun, which was an H&K forty caliber semiautomatic. He said, “You expecting trouble?”

  “Any trouble that required use of the gun,” Tommy said, “would have been less than what you bring, and you know that.”

  Jimmy said, “Charleston’s a great town. The people there are polite; not like here. The women who bag your groceries call you honey, and baby, names like that. ‘Can I help you out to the car with those bags, baby?’ The restaurant waitresses ask, ‘What you having today, hon?’ You ever heard anyone here say that? You’ll love it down there.” He picked up the gun and hefted it, knowing he'd have trouble racking the slide if push ever came to shove. He’d have to stick with the Smith and Wesson 38 revolver he kept in his hallway table drawer. Maybe he could get H&K to make a semiauto for the disabled, be their poster boy, earn a nice fee.

  Tommy said, “Why am I going to Charleston?”

  “Because Ms. Granite says so, I guess.”

  Tommy really wanted to argue that point but he knew he couldn’t, given the percentage she paid him for recovering stolen stuff and obviating the company from paying out. Seven percent, plus the expense account. For the six weeks in Paris he’d earned $70K. He asked, “What got stolen in Charleston?”

  Jimmy knew Tommy only did thefts, which included forgeries. “Some painting. Famous, at least for Charleston.”

  “What’s the coverage?”

  “2.5.”

  Tommy did the math: $175,000. He nodded at the wine in the bottle, Jimmy nodded, No, so he poured it down the sink, put the gun in the table drawer, got his unpacked bag out of the bedroom, and said, “Let’s go.”