He said, “Maybe your idea wasn’t so stupid after all.”
“Which one, boss? Which of the stupid ideas wasn’t so stupid?”
“The one about snatching someone else. Being able to offer a two-fer, to get the girl, to get to Stirg.”
“We’re gonna to do another kidnapping?”
“Ya never know.”
Chapter 36 – Hunt Team One
It was late afternoon when Gwen dismissed the team from The Hall. Roger took hold of Jinny’s arm and said, “Let’s walk.” They headed down King Street towards the promenade at The Battery. Just as they were walking past the guest house where Stirg’s dock connected to the shore, the Dodge pickup passed by going in the opposite direction. The BMIBC didn’t recognize Roger, but Richard did. He saw Roger and Jinny coming towards them, and hope abounded. At the same time he felt the shoulder of one NN against his right shoulder and the elbow of another NN pressed tightly against his left shoulder, and he realized he couldn’t call out. The truck was past them in a few seconds, and hope flew away.
At the end of the promenade Roger turned down a street named after a member of the Protestant Reformed Church of France, prominent in the late 1600s. Two blocks down this street Roger stopped at a storefront that said Pierre’s Men’s Club on the door, and again on the window. He turned to Jinny and said, “You need a shave.” Pierre’s wasn’t a club in the sense of a place to relax and have a drink, chat with like-minded people. It was a salon, with benefits. You could get several different services at Pierre’s, if you wanted to pay for them. These included haircuts, manicures, massages, clothes tailoring, financial counseling, a hot lunch, and a dry martini. It was a going concern for Charleston’s privileged. Soon after the Junes had met Little Jinny Blistov a year and a half earlier, Gwen not only had introduced him to Pierre’s, but had required him to patronize Pierre’s on a regular basis as part of his acculturation into Charleston society. Jinny could afford it, and had come to like it. He didn’t need to be coaxed into Pierre’s.
The reason Roger said he needed a shave was because Jinny was, not to put too fine a point on it, a hirsute individual. He had a beard that wrapped around the sides of his neck below his ears that needed constant attention if it were to meet Gwen’s standards of male grooming. And Jinny loved, and wanted to meet, these standards. It wasn’t uncommon for him to visit Pierre’s twice in one day, if there was a special event planned that would include Gwen, so he didn’t mind at all being directed into the establishment by Roger. Both of them were greeted by Pierre like royalty and taken to one of the more private alcoves that included leather chairs, an internet connection and a TV, as well as the usual barbering equipment. Roger took one of the leather easy chairs, while Jinny plopped himself down in the swiveling barber’s chair, and said, “A shave please, Pierre, and perhaps a cognac and soda in a tall glass. What’ll you have, Roger?”
“Same, please.” Roger didn’t come to Pierre’s often, but he enjoyed the weird atmosphere, and he and Jinny came here once in a while when they wanted to talk. Some people go to bars, they came to Pierre’s. And Pierre knew one thing they required was discretion. So when they visited, he took care of them, personally. When the drinks came and Jinny had downed half of his in one gulp, Pierre wrapped him up in a linen sheet and went to work. Shaving Jinny was like lumbering up in the Pacific northwest. Roger said, “Pierre, if you tell anyone about this private conversation, Jinny will pay you a visit, and it will be him with the straight razor in his hand. Ok?”
“Very well, Mr. June. I capiche.”
“Jinny, we’re the hunters, right? After the ones who have Anna. But we have no idea where she is or where they are, right? So how do we hunt them?”
Pierre decided right then and there that, short of a gun to his head, he would not be discussing this private conversation with anyone, not even with his dear wife, to whom he divulged all the considerable gossip that transpired in his shop.
Jinny held up his hand to tell Pierre to stop for a minute, knocked back the remainder of his drink, and said, “You’re the tracker. You find them. When you do, I kill them. That’s the division of labor. Simple.” And he motioned to Pierre to continue the raspy hacking going on below his right ear. Now Pierre knew, absolutely, that he wasn’t going to say anything to anyone about this gossip. This very unusual gossip.
“Maybe we should think of this as fishing rather than hunting. In hunting, the hunters go after the prey. They flush them out and pursue them. We can’t do that because we don’t have any idea where they are. Some fisherman do that too. They wade up and down streams, casting here and there, hoping to find where a fish is hiding. Or they row boats far out into the bay, hoping they run into schools of fish passing by. But not all fishermen are like that. Have you ever ice-fished?”
“Never. They do that up in northern Russia, but not in Saint Petersburg where I lived.”
“Ice fishermen are a strange breed. They go out on the frozen lake, drill a hole through the ice, set a bucket next to it to sit on, and stay there, starring at the hole for hours and hours, hoping a fish strolls right by their hook. And they drink, of course. They probably get more pleasure out of drinking than out of fishing. A strange breed. Anyway, maybe we should be more like ice fishermen than hunters. Maybe we should set a trap, and wait for the kidnappers to come by our hook.”
“And then I get to kill them?”
“Yes, Jinny. Then you get to kill them.”
Chapter 37 – Hunters
Nev thought about inviting Constantine to Stirg’s house for lunch as a way to get their hunt operation underway, but then he realized Constantine would see the big yacht out at the end of the dock, and no doubt that would bring back memories of the evening out on the harbor near Fort Sumter, when he, waving a 50 caliber Desert Eagle handgun on the bridge of the boat, and Stirg had tried to send Constantine and his friends to Davey Jones locker. And that might be awkward.
Constantine, on the other hand, thought of inviting Nev to The Hall for a lunch catered by McCradys, but then realized that, no doubt, would bring back memories of the day Nev had entered the theater, holding a gun above his head, and demanded that they give him the Stravinsky ballet score. He would remember how two gay guys, members of the June’s team and dancers in the ballet production, had pulled their own guns from the front of their leotards, and gotten the drop on Nev, until Roger stepped in and took Nev’s gun away from him, and then took their guns from their shaking hands. How embarrassing would that be for Nev, the former Israeli commando and bodyguard. Two gay dancers, for god’s sake. Talk about awkward.
They compromised, and met at a Dunkin Donuts. In the old commando days, Nev never would have defiled his body by eating a donut. But now, well. Nev said, “I wish we hadn’t let the two idiots go. Now we have to hunt them. Stirg let them go so they would tell their boss what would happen if they hurt Anna. You got any ideas about how to get to them?”
Constantine really liked the jelly donut he had eaten, and got another one from the clerk, which gave him a couple of minutes to think. When he sat down he said, “You know what truffles are?” Truffles weren’t on the menu very often when Nev was on Israeli commando missions, which was his job before he took up body guarding Stirg. He shook his head, no. “Truffles are a little like mushrooms and a little like roots. They grow in the ground, and are used in expensive gourmet cooking. They are hard to find, and rare, and very expensive. Some truffles are like $2000 a pound.”
“You ever had truffles?”
“Yeah, a few times. They are unbelievably delicious. I like them shaved on scrambled eggs.” Nev wondered about a guy who on the one hand ate crappy jelly donuts, and on the other ate a dollars worth of eggs with $200 worth of shaved roots sprinkled on them. Constantine went on, “You know how they find truffles? In France they train pigs to know the smell of truffles, and they take the pigs out in the woods, and the pigs root
around in the dirt till they smell a truffle, and then the pig owner digs it up.” Nev wondered where this story was going. Constantine put the last bite of donut in his mouth, sipped some coffee, and said, “Maybe what we need is someone who can sniff out a neo-nazi. Knows what they smell like, what they do, where they hang out. What do you think?”
“What you’re saying is, we need a neo-nazi sniffing piglike person. Where do we find one of those?”
“We need someone who knows about racists. Ethnic racists and political racists are sort of the same animal, so they might hang out in the same places. Charleston has its history of racism, and it still exists here, like in most places. Small doses. Maybe Roger and Gwen know someone who knows about that stuff. About where those folks hang out.”
“So we get this pig person to sniff ‘em out, then grab ‘em?”
“I don’t know if that will work, but sooner or later, we’re going to have a meeting of minds. We have four groups involved here, and they’re all linked. The two kidnapper groups, the kidnappees, and us. Like someone said before, that’s about twenty people, and we’re on a collision course. It may be a violent collision, or it may be more like a tea party, with guns. Either way, I think we'll come together. We all will have our parts in that, but Gwen is the chef. We bring the ingredients to the kitchen, and she’s going to mix them together. Any chopping up of ingredients first, that’s where we come in.”
Nev, having tangled twice with the Junes, and lost both times, helped himself to his second donut, and thought, “That sounds good to me.”
Chapter 38 – Getting the Singer
Roger and Gwen sat in the downstairs study the next morning, waiting for the call from Jools that would tell them what demands the NNs had made for Richard’s release. Roger badly wanted to pick up the Donald E. Westlake book sitting on the table in front of him, but he knew Gwen had started work on the opera production: insurance, PR, cost estimates, lighting, sound, instruments, etc. With her working, he figured she might think it bad form on his part to read a funny book; everything about a Dortmunder novel is funny. So he stared at it but didn’t pick it up. Gwen’s phone rang, and she motioned to him to answer it while she kept scribbling on a yellow legal pad. “Good morning.”
“Mr. June, is that you? Jools here.”
He hit the speaker button and said, “Yes, hi Jools. Did you get the call from the nitwits?”
“Nitwits, nitwits, not a word normally in the vocabulary of a butler of my stature. Are you referring to the morons?”
“Yes, Jools, the morons.”
“No, we haven’t received that communication as yet. We are waiting for it, however. Les artists are here with me, and they need to talk with you and Ms. June about the production. Gwenny, dear, are you there?”
“I’m here, Jools. What’s up? You there, Paul? Anna?”
Paul said, “We’re here, with Stella. We need something. A person. We need you to get a person for the show. Anna will tell you.”
“Hi Gwen, hi Roger.”
Gwen said, “Hi dear. Everyone ok? Is Jools treating you right? If he isn’t, he’s clear about the consequences, right?”
“We’re ok. Waiting to hear about Richard. He’s the one I’m worried about.”
“We’re working on that. When we hear from the nitwits, that’s when the hunt will begin. What’s this about a person for the production? What person?”
“Gwenny, this is going to be a really big request, but Paul wants this person, says you gotta get her. Says he needs the best singer in the world to sing the songs.”
“Who is she?”
“We weren’t around for the ballet production, but we’ve heard the story about how you got Pete Townshend to transcribe the Stravinsky music, and then perform the whole thing on synthesizer, live. How he lived here for four months, working seven days a week, then blew everyone away with the performance. This request is going to be something like that. That level of person.”
Roger sat back against the sofa cushion and looked at Gwen with a self-satisfied expression. She said, “That was Roger’s handiwork. He figured out how to get Townshend. Of course, my southern accent had something to do with it, as well as the fact that Catherine had had a fling with Townshend way back in the wild years, and she called him up and asked him to do it. But mostly it was Roger.” And she smiled at him.
“We hope he can do the same thing now, work the magic.”
“Who is it?”
“Renee Fleming, the opera star.”
“Renee Fleming, the classical singer? The world famous singer? Like La Scala famous, Met famous?”
“That’s her. Only she doesn’t just do classical. She’s done two pop CDs, and Paul says one of those makes her the greatest female pop singer of all time. We haven’t heard those CDs yet, but Jools is getting them for us.”
Gwen felt a little of the devil, and said, “So what’s Paul know about pop singing?”
“You’re feeling feisty this morning, aren’t you, Gwen?”
“Just kidding, Paul. Love Norwegian Wood, love that singing.”
Anna said, “So, Roger, can you do it? Can you get Renee Fleming to agree to sing Paul’s songs, here, two months from now?”
The devil rubbed off onto Roger, and he said, “Well, not going to be easy. A person like that is booked up years in advance. And I’m not clear on the incentive, here. What happens if I can’t? What happens if we don’t get the production ready in time? All we’ve heard is Scotilly’s chop chop threat, and we can’t take that seriously, no matter how crazy she sounds, now can we?”
Jools said, “Mr. June, Scotilly is very serious. Don’t push that button. She’s not done with her morning toilette, or I have no doubt she’d express her intentions most vigorously. She spends several minutes every day keeping her sword handling skills honed to razor sharpness.”
Gwen said, “Ok, we’ll get on it. Roger will. We’ll pick up the two CDs and see what this is all about. But we trust Paul’s taste, and what he wants and needs is what we all want.”
Roger looked at Gwen and said, “What should I do first? Starting working on landing Renee, or keep on the hunt for Jools in his hiding place? Set up the commando raid on it, rescue the kidnappees and kill the kidnappers.”
“Art in the morning, dear, leave killing kidnappers for the afternoon.”
Chapter 39 – The Truth About Relationships
Just after Gwen told Roger to think about how to land Renee Fleming as the star performer of the rock opera, Scotilly entered the living room wearing gold flats, white silk pants with sharp creases and pleats, and an emerald gauze blouse with black trim on the collar and sleeves. None of the others had ever seen an actual Taliban, but they were pretty sure this was not what one looked like. If it was, that group was a lot smarter than any of the worlds intelligence agencies knew. And if this was what an extended morning toilette produced, Paul was all for it. She said, “So how are the musicians and designers feeling this morning? How many songs are you going to write today? Costumes?”
Paul was enchanted by the golden slippers she was wearing, and started to answer in a friendly way, but Anna butted in and said, “How many executions today, Scotilly? How many beheadings?” She didn’t cut kidnappers, even benevolent ones, much slack.
Jools started to defend his master, but she said, “Honey, I didn’t have any planned for today, actually, but it’s early, and I’ve been known to change my mind.” She looked at Paul and said, “You have a central concept for the opera. What is it?”
Paul was happy to field the question because he needed an answer from Anna and his daughter: Were they in or out with his basic idea? He said, “It’s simple. The songs are going to express my opinions about the relationships between men and women. There will be romance in them, of course, but also pragmatism and reality. One of the main themes will show, or attempt to show, that successful relationships depend on the
two people having very strong common outside interests, meaning physical activities they share and do together, and almost nothing to do with so called inner compatibilities.”
“You don’t believe in things like honesty and compassion and sincerity?”
“I don’t believe in them the way most people today believe in them, as if they are things that are inside another person. That’s what most of the self-help books say, and what the self-help television scammers say. Their message is, if you find a person who is good inside, who has these wonderful qualities, then you will be compatible with them, because you have these qualities inside you. They say, that is the secret: inner qualities. Integrity in one person matches with integrity in the other. Gentleness matches with gentleness. Consideration matches with consideration. If you search for those qualities and find them in another, your life together will be wonderful. These relationship gurus create this perspective in people; they try desperately, and so altruistically, to influence people to view the world this way, to condition people to search for these inner qualities, and they assure them this is the recipe for happiness. I don’t believe any of that for a minute.”
Scotilly said, “And you believe the way to success is….?”
“Like I said, it’s about outside interests and activities. Doing stuff together. If you have that type of compatibility, and a lot of it, you’re can stay together for a long time. If you don’t, forget about a long term positive relationship.”
“What are outside interests and activities? What do you mean by that?”
“Off the top of my head, and I’m not saying all these are things I’m interested in, but examples are: hiking, going out to dinner at nice restaurants and talking about the food as you eat it, church activities if you are religious, going to sports events together and rooting for a team or an athlete, gardening together and then sitting in the garden with a glass of wine and enjoying the flowers you grew, reading in bed at night, paying attention to politics and supporting political causes. That kind of stuff. Activities that you love to do together, and that you do together again and again over twenty or thirty years. Things you love to do. It’s that simple. Or complex, depending on whether you can find someone to do those things with.”