Aristocratic Thieves Read online

  Chapter 2 – The Source of the Conflict

  Blistov was Russian and had grown up in Saint Petersburg during the heyday of the good ole USSR. His first job was cleaning toilets in the Hermitage Museum. Have you any idea how many toilets are in that place? It has something like 1285 rooms, and one heck of a lot of them are bathrooms. While Jinny was cleaning all day, he also was learning about the history of the palace, and thereby was learning the history of his country. Even though his days were spent looking at shitholes, his mind was developing an appreciation for gold-leaf gild, oil paintings of tables laden with caviar, boudoirs with commodes, and really big kitchens. There were kitchens in that place bigger than most of the houses in the city.

  Jinny spent five years working at the Hermitage before he was introduced to crime by one of the security staff he hung out with. The lessons of those five years have stuck with him ever since, and explain why Jinny ended up crossways with Roger in Charleston. We never lose the lessons of our youth, good and bad. Jinny learned about fancy things then, and ever since he has wanted those things and worked diligently to procure them. He worked at a life of crime, first in Russia, and then in the United States. Basically, crime is the same no matter what country you work in. You find a crack in a facet of society, and you wedge yourself into it. Some wedging requires stealth, and some wedging requires brains, and some wedging requires violence. Jinny was capable of all those, as the need might arise.

  Blistov was successful at crime over a period of about twenty Russian winters. Then, he wasn’t. He got caught messing with the money of a very powerful man, and the man decided it would be worse for Blistov to spend time in a Russian prison, and then suffer exportation, than just killing him. So he arranged for Blistov to spend three years away from the good life he had made for himself. Then, an hour after being released from prison, Blistov unceremoniously was driven to a military airport and stuck in the unheated belly of an Aeroflot cargo plane, without a coat, without a nickel, and without a Russian passport, bound for Pittsburgh, PA….the Iron City. Eleven cold hours later Blistov arrived, and began his new life.

  Blistov hated Russian winters. Physically he was a tough guy, but he hated the cold. So when he discovered Pittsburgh was plagued by cold winters too, he said fuck this. It was bad enough to spend three years freezing in a Russian prison, and eleven hours freezing in the hold of a cargo plane, but he was damned if he was going to spend the rest of his life freezing in a cultural backwater like Pittsburgh.

  Another thing Blistov had learned at the Hermitage was the historic link between King Charles the IV of France and Czar Brettany Prentikof. These two kings had developed a fondness for each other based on a mutual love of hunting dogs. Brettany had sent a few Borzois to Paris, and in return Charles had sent a veritable kennel of Normandy spaniels to St. Petes. Charles was a Huguenot, and his heirs crossed the Atlantic way back when, landing in a very weird place called South Carolina. Lots and lots of Huguenots arrived and settled in Charleston. And being that Blistov always would tend to a life of crime, he came into conflict with Roger, and by proxy, with Gwen.

  Roger met him about a year after Blistov arrived in Charleston. Jinny had moved to Charleston based on the following logic. A French king named Charles had given a bunch of mutts to his friend the Czar, who Blistov knew about from having cleaned toilets in the Hermitage this czar had used three hundred years ago. Charles was a Huguenot, whose ancestors had immigrated to South Carolina (Charles Town). Charles and the Russian czar were buds; ergo Charles Town with its Huguenot population was a good place to live. So when Blistov said fuck this to spending another winter in Pittsburgh, to Charleston he came.

  Blistov was a successful crook in Russia, where the boys have a tendency to play rough, and he also was a successful crook in Pittsburgh, where he considered the other crooks to be a bunch of pansies. Even though he only lived in Pittsburgh two years, he had made some money, and he arrived in Charleston flush. This gave him time to relax and get to know King Charles’ town, now his town. He didn’t have to get down to crime immediately. To his delight, he discovered that even though Charleston is in South Carolina, it’s a place of culture. After renting a modest 4000 square foot cottage on the beach of Sullivan’s Island, he began exploring. During the first full week after getting settled, he ate lunch and dinner at a different downtown restaurant each day. That’s fourteen different places, fourteen meals, fourteen experiences. Blistov knew that food was a good indicator of culture. He thought the food in Moscow was terrible, because it was strictly indigenous. He thought the food in Saint Petersburg was far better because it had been influenced by western European tastes for a hundred years, and so was cosmopolitan. St. Petes didn’t always have the raw ingredients to make art, but when they did, they made great art. He had eaten very well in his hometown. When the French nouveau cuisine movement came into vogue, he thought it was crap, because he liked the heavy sauces and the twenty hours stews that were the basis of traditional French cooking.

  Anyway, he enjoyed what he ate in Charleston’s restaurants, except of course what the menus lauded as “real southern cooking.” Boiling a vegetable in water for three hours, throwing out the water that contained all the flavor, then adding a pound of butter and serving this mess on an inch thick clay plate was not his idea of good food. He also explored the shops of the historic district, and again was pleased by all the antiques he saw, some of which were as nice as those in the Hermitage. Not as old, but still classy.

  Blistov enjoyed this time, getting to know his new home. When February came and he found himself walking on the sunny beach in front of his house, he decided he had died and gone to heaven. During this winter he realized his money was dwindling, and soon he would have to get back to work. This was ok because basically he liked his work. Doctors like doctoring, lawyers like lawyering, and criminals like crime. He also recognized he was getting on in years a bit, and decided to give up the rough stuff in favor of gentile swindling, which is how he ran into Roger, and where the conflict between them began.

  Blistov decided to fake an antique and sell it to a shop on King Street. This is a time-honored tradition around the world; one third of the antiques in museums are fakes, and half of the antiques in shops are fakes. We won’t even talk about what’s offered on eBay. Blistov contacted some friends in Russia who contacted some friends in Amsterdam who contacted some friends in Boston who contacted some friends in the furniture-producing district of western North Carolina. Blistov spend a month up there, and when he returned to Charleston, he possessed a circa 1737 Heppleworth end table, and it was good. He had no trouble selling it to a shop on King St. for a $27,000 profit, which would pay the rent on his beach house for some time to come.

  The conflict with Roger came into being when the antique shop sold the table to a local granddame for $37,000, and the granddame was Roger’s auntie. The old lady had an English relative in the antique business, who, while visiting, told her it was a fake. The old lady took it back to the shop, which was one of the newer dealers on the block, and who said to her, “Madame, caveat emptor.” With the expression of that very non-Charlestonian attitude, the lady went to her lawyer, who sadly concurred with the antiques dealer: “My dear, you are out of luck.” But the old lady was stubborn and of great moral fiber, and didn’t just roll over. She went to her nephew, Roger, who she knew was involved in some sort of detective thing when he and his wife were not traveling in Europe. She explained her dilemma and asked for help. She didn’t like getting swindled. Roger thought, ‘Auntie, caveat emptor, and by the way you are rich so don’t sweat the small stuff.’ Of course he didn’t say this because he loved his auntie, and he did not particularly like that someone swindled her, either, so that evening he told Gwen he had a new case.

  Now you can see how the conflict between Roger and Little Jinny came to be. Roger was good at many things: choosing great wine to drink, loving his wife in an
d out of bed, shooting handguns, writing the occasional piece of romance fiction, and detecting. He did the detecting mostly for amusement, but sometimes for high fees, and occasionally because he felt sorry for someone. Like his Auntie.

  His auntie, who wouldn’t tolerate a fake in her home, even a beautifully made one, gave the table to Roger, and he rather liked the way it looked at the end of his third floor hallway. It didn’t take him long to backtrack the fabrication of the fake. His friends in the trade looked at it and told him it was made either in a workshop in south Philadelphia or was made in a small factory in Brevard, North Carolina. Roger didn’t think much of the City of Brotherly Love ever since they demolished historic Connie Mack baseball stadium, which had the deepest center field in all of baseball, at 450 feet. No one could hit it out of Connie Mack to straightaway center, and Roger respected that.

  So he headed for Brevard, found the furniture factory, made some discreet inquiries, and got the name of a craftsman who lived way out in the country. Using a persuasive combination of money and gun, he convinced the craftsman to tell him who he made the table for. Unfortunately all the craftsman really knew was that the guy was short and strong and scary, and had an accent. That was enough for Roger, who is very good at detecting.

  One sunny spring day at nine in the morning, Roger climbed over the railing of the ground floor deck of Blistov’s beach house, pulled aside the sliding patio door, entered Blistov’s living room and found him sitting right there on the sofa, reading a Tolstoy short story. Roger pulled his gun, racked the slide, pointed it at Blistov, and said: “You swindled my auntie. Time to pay.”

  Blistov didn’t even blink, but slowly lowered the book to the coffee table, remembering to dog-ear the page so he could find his place later. It was then that the conflict between the two men commenced, both being smart, cultured, tough-minded, and results-oriented. The conflict that day ended with Roger winning, sort of. He told Blistov he had two choices: give him $37,000 in cash right then and there, or go to jail. Blistov took the jail option, and went there for six months. He decided he could do six months in a pansy American jail standing on his head, and he did. When he got out he felt fine. He wanted something other than the southern-style prison food, but basically he was good to go.

  And here he was, four months later, standing at a restaurant table, looking at Roger and someone he took to be Roger’s wife. A real relationship begins.