A Good Year

Fourteen

Sitting in his office high above the harbor, Mr. Chen lit a cigarette and reached for the phone. He was about to confirm his reputation as Hong Kong’s most exclusive wine merchant, the négociant to know if you were looking for rare vintages or special bottles, and had the deep pockets to afford them. At the mention of his name, the secretary on the other end of the line put him straight through.

Chen wasted no time on pleasantries. “This is a lucky day for you,” he said to his client. “I did well in Bordeaux. I got six cases, and I can promise you they’re the only cases in Hong Kong. Now, in view of our long relationship, not to mention our deep friendship, I’ve put aside two cases for you at $75,000 per case. That’s U.S. dollars, of course.”

He paused to let the news of his generosity sink in. “What? How does it taste? What’s that got to do with it? Come on, my friend. You know as well as I do this isn’t wine for drinking; it’s for buying and selling. An investment. My other clients here would sell their mothers for this wine. Hold it for a year, two years. The way it’s going, you could double your money. No, I’m afraid that’s not possible. Just the two cases. The others are promised to Beijing and Seoul. Yes? Good. You won’t regret it.”

Chen put the phone down, blew a celebratory smoke ring, and crossed a name off the short list on his desk. Perhaps he should raise the price to $80,000. This was going to be an interesting couple of days. He put in a call to Beijing.

On the other side of the world, Roussel had, as usual, returned to his pink palace for lunch. He was a preoccupied man, picking at the salt pork and lentils of his favorite petit salé, saying little, hardly touching his wine. His wife, Ludivine, accustomed to seeing a clean plate and an empty glass at mealtimes, came to the natural conclusion.

“It’s your stomach, isn’t it?” she said, with the conviction of a wife long familiar with the vagaries of her husband’s digestive system. “Too much cheese last night. You need a purge.”

Roussel shook his head and pushed his plate away. “My stomach? No, that’s fine.”

“So what is it?” She reached across the table and patted his hand. “Come, Clo-Clo, tell me.”

He sighed, and let his body slump back in the chair. “It’s the vines. You know, the little patch.” Ludivine nodded. “Well, yesterday we had the oenologue from Bordeaux come to look at the property, un monsieur très snob, someone arranged by Nathalie Auzet.”

“What did he say?”

“Oh, nothing much. Nothing good, anyway. I think that was the problem, because this morning Monsieur Max told me he was going to find someone else and get a second opinion. And you realize what that means?” Roussel traced circles on the table with his wineglass, his face the picture of dejection.

Ludivine did indeed realize what it meant, and had been half-expecting it for years. She came around the table and stood behind him, massaging his shoulders. “Chéri,” she said, “it was bound to end sooner or later. We’ve had some good years because of those vines-the house, the cars, more than we could have imagined when we first got married.” She bent to kiss the top of his head. “I hate to see you like this.” With a final squeeze of his shoulders, she cleared away the plates and was about to take them to the sink when she stopped, setting the plates back on the table with a rattle that made her husband start. She tapped a finger with considerable emphasis on the table. Her voice was equally emphatic. “You must tell him, Clo-Clo. You must.”

Roussel sat staring at her, chewing his lip and saying nothing.

She reached out for his hand, and her tone softened. “He seems very sympa, the young man. He’ll understand. Better that he should find out from you than from someone else, no?” She answered her own question by nodding vigorously. “Much better.”

The midafternoon air was still, and thick with heat. Max was on a ladder, wrestling with a tangle of wisteria that was trying to creep uninvited into the house through an upstairs window. Christie had gone off in search of an English-language newspaper, and Madame Passepartout, her cat crisis over, was hanging out the wash on a makeshift line she had strung up in a corner of the tennis court.

The calm of the moment was broken by the clatter of Roussel’s van coming to a stop in the courtyard. As was his invariable habit, Tonto was the first to get out, rushing across to bark at the ladder before sniffing it with great deliberation and cocking his leg against it. Roussel scolded him halfheartedly as he peered up at the figure perched above him, silhouetted against the sun-bleached pale blue of the sky.

“Monsieur Max, do I disturb you?”

Max came down the ladder, and the two men shook hands, Roussel tugging at one ear while he searched for words. “I must speak to you,” he said, “and there is something I must show you. It’s about the vines.” He jerked his head toward the van. “We can go together now, if you have the time.”

They drove without speaking in the direction of the village, and then turned off to follow a narrow track that ended in front of a long, windowless barn built into the side of a gentle fold in the land, its double doors barred and padlocked. “The cave,” said Roussel. “You haven’t seen it before.”

Max shook his head. “I thought you took the grapes straight down to the co-opérative.”

“Not all of them,” said Roussel. “That’s what I want to talk to you about.”

He parked the van in front of the barn, and Max stood watching Tonto roll in the dust, squirming with pleasure as he rubbed his back on the grit while Roussel unlocked the barn doors and slid them open. He went into the gloom and turned on a light before beckoning Max to follow.

The temperature inside the cave was cool, almost chilly after the heat outside, and the air smelt slightly humid; tannic and musty. The floor was rough concrete, divided down the middle by a wine-stained drainage channel. On either side of the channel, raised up on plinths of concrete, were rows of barrels, marked in chalk with a scribbled code meaningless to anyone except the wine grower. Standing in one corner next to the door was a rickety tin table with a scattering of papers, a couple of dingy glasses, and a long glass syringe with a rubber bulb the size of a fist at one end. On the wall, hanging from a rusty nail, was a calendar illustrated with photographs of young women in the throes of some private ecstasy, draped over tractors.

Max looked around with interest, wondering if he was expected to say anything as Roussel wiped the glasses free of dust with a handkerchief and pulled two elderly wooden chairs up to the table. He gestured to Max to take a seat and half-closed one of the doors to lessen the glare. Finally, with a sigh, he took off his cap and sat down.

“Monsieur Max,” he began, “as you know, I have worked on the vines at Le Griffon for thirty years, ever since your uncle bought the house. Many times over the years, I asked him to replace the vines, which were old and tired even before he arrived.” He looked down at the table, twisting his cap in his hands. “But, for one reason or another, it was never the right moment: Next year, he used to say, we’ll do it next year.

“There was one parcel, the parcel beyond the wall, which I thought could produce good wine.” He paused to shake his head, correcting himself. “No, I was sure it could. It had the right stony soil, the right exposure, the right slope, not too big, perfect. I told your uncle-this was more than fifteen years ago-but he wasn’t interested, or he had no money left after repairing the roof; there was always something. In the end, I decided to take out the old vines and replant the land myself. Ludivine and me, we had a little money saved.” He looked at Max for a few moments in silence, his eyebrows raised, waiting for a reaction.

“I should think the old boy was delighted, wasn’t he?”

Roussel’s hands continued to strangle his cap. “Well, I never told him exactly what I’d done. He thought I had just used ordinary vine stock, but I wanted something better, something special. He had no idea I replanted with the best Cabernet Sauvignon and a little Merlot. Nobody did. These things are complicated in France. The regulations, the authorities from the agricultural ministry qui se mêlent à tout, who want you to declare every twig and fallen leaf.” He shrugged. “Impossible. It was easier to say nothing.”

Without warning, he got to his feet, picked up the syringe from the table, and walked over to the barrels. Max watched as he knocked out the bung from one of them, inserted the syringe, and drew off several inches of wine. Coming back to the table, he squeezed the bulb carefully and half-filled both glasses, holding one of them up to the light.

“Bon. Go ahead. Taste it. Remember that it’s still young.”

Max picked up the glass, conscious of Roussel’s intent stare and his own shortcomings as a wine connoisseur. But once the wine was in his mouth, sending powerful and delightful signals to his palate, even he could tell that it was a different drink altogether from ordinary Luberon wines. He wished he could remember some of Charlie’s ornate vocabulary, and was so impressed he forgot to spit.

“That’s amazing,” he said, raising his glass to Roussel. “Congratulations.”

Roussel seemed hardly to hear him. “Nobody down here makes wine like this,” he said. “And yet I realized that there was a problem: I couldn’t sell it-not legally, at any rate, because the Cabernet and Merlot vines hadn’t been declared. So I went to Maître Auzet for advice, thinking that she could find a petite lacune in the law. She’s clever like that.” He took a mouthful of wine and chewed on it for a few seconds before spitting it into the drainage channel. “That’s when it started. Instead of a loophole, she found a buyer; someone who would take all of it, every year, and pay cash-good money, no paperwork, no tax, no questions asked. I couldn’t resist. My wife, my daughter, my old age…” He looked at Max with the mournful, guilty expression of an old hound caught in flagrante with an illicit lamb chop.

Max leaned back in his chair while he took in what Roussel had just said: Nathalie Auzet, notaire and négociant. No wonder she looked so prosperous. “Who does she sell it to?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never met the buyer. Nathalie said it wasn’t necessary.”

“Well, where do you send it? Paris, Germany, Belgium?”

Roussel shook his head. “Who knows where it goes? The truck comes once a year-in September, just before I start the vendange, and always at night. The wine from the previous year is transferred from the barrels, and I get my cash the following week. From Nathalie.”

“But the truck. Surely it has a name on the side? A company, an enterprise of some sort?”

Roussel’s hand dropped down to fondle Tonto’s ear. “No. That’s not normal, I know, but in an affaire like this, one doesn’t ask too many questions. All I can tell you is the truck that picks up the wine has license plates with a 33 registration.” He cocked his thumb over his shoulder, in a vague northerly direction. “The Gironde.”

Max shook his head. “How long has this been going on?”

“Seven or eight years, maybe a little longer. I don’t remember exactly.”

“What I don’t understand,” said Max, “is why you’re telling me all this. I might never have found out.”

Roussel stared at the shimmering horizon through the half-open doors of the cave, his eyes narrowed, his dark brown face immobile, etched with deep lines. His head might have been cast in bronze. He turned back to Max.

“Your uncle was more interested in his books and his music than the vines. Even so, there were many times I almost told him, but-well, I paid for the vines, I planted them, I nursed them. I buy new oak barrels-the best French oak-every four years. No expense is spared. Everything is correct. And your uncle never suffered; it wasn’t like stealing. It seemed fair. Not strictly honest perhaps, but fair. And now it’s all changed, with you wanting to improve the vines, bringing in all these oenologues…” He finished the wine, swallowing this time, and put the glass down carefully. “To tell you the truth, Monsieur Max, I knew someone would find out. I thought it best to tell you myself.” He resumed the mournful expression as he waited to see how his confession had been received.

Max was silent for a few moments. And then: “You say it was Nathalie Auzet’s idea?”

Roussel nodded. “She’s no fool, that one. She took care of everything.”

Two surprises for Max in the space of half an hour. The vineyard was not what it seemed. The glamorous notaire was not what she seemed. As for Roussel: Was he genuine, or was he playing some game of his own? Could the wine be sold legally, or would there be horrendous penalties? There were complications galore, far too many for any kind of instant decision.

“Well,” said Max, “I’m glad you told me. I know it wasn’t easy. Let me think about it.”

The afternoon had drifted into a still, warm evening under a lavender sky shot through with streaks of pink, promising another glorious day tomorrow. The tantalizing whiff of cooking came through the open windows of houses in the village. Christie had managed to find a three-day-old copy of the International Herald Tribune, and was giving Max belated news of the outside world, mostly the summer antics of politicians, as they walked toward Fanny’s. Passing the boules court, they paused to watch the next throw. As always, it was an all-male event.

Christie found this puzzling, coming as she did from a country where women’s participation in sports now extended to boxing-and soon, no doubt, to sumo wrestling. “You’ve been coming down here a long time,” she said. “Do you know why it is that you never see women playing?”

“Never thought about it,” Max said. “You just don’t. Hold on.” He went over to an old man, dark and wrinkled as a well-cured olive, who was waiting his turn to throw, and repeated the question. There was a cackle from the old man, and he said something to Max that provoked a ragged chorus of cackles from the other players.

Max was smiling when he came back to translate. “You’re not going to like this. But he said women should be home cooking dinner. Oh, and he said he could teach his dog to play boules better than any woman.”

Christie’s face, her shoulders, her whole body stiffened with indignation. “We’ll see about that. Watch this, buster.”

She stepped onto the court, taking a boule from the startled old man, and went up to the pitching mark drawn in the dust. The players fell silent. She crouched down, took long and careful aim, and let fly, scattering the other boules and scoring a direct hit on the cochonnet.

Turning to the old man, now even more startled, she tapped herself on the chest. “ St. Helena junior bowling champion, 1993.” Reversing the direction of her hand, she then tapped him on the chest. “And you can tell your dog to eat his heart out.” The old man watched her leave the court, raising his cap to scratch his head. How times have changed, he thought to himself. How times have changed.

As soon as they reached the restaurant, Christie went to wash the dust from her hands, giving Fanny the chance to ask Max a question that had occupied her for several days: “The little American girl-she’s your copine?”

“No, no, no,” said Max. “Just a friend. Too young for me.”

Fanny smiled and ruffled his hair as she gave him the menu. “You’re quite right. Much too young.”

Christie came back to find the look of dismay still on his face, but put it down to hunger. “So tell me,” she said, “where were you this afternoon?”

As they worked their way through the meal-a vegetable terrine followed by breast of Barbary duck, served, as it should be, with the skin crisp-Max reported on his expedition, and Roussel’s revelations.

Christie’s immediate reaction was smug satisfaction. “I knew it,” she said. “You can never trust a woman with hair that color. What a piece of work. You can be sure she’s robbing old Roussel blind somewhere along the line.”

“You’re probably right. I’d really love to find out where the wine goes. If we knew that…”

Christie mopped up some of her gravy with a piece of bread, a French habit she’d acquired unconsciously. “She must be working with someone. Has she ever said anything that made you suspicious? Did you see anything in her office?” A smile of pure mischief. “I guess you never made it to her bedroom.”

Max cast his mind back to the previous Sunday, when he had waited for Nathalie in her living room. What can you discover in ten minutes? He thought of the good furniture, the vintage carpet, the signed Lartigue photographs, the expensive volumes on painting and sculpture, the wine book he had leafed through. The wine book.

“There was one little thing, a wine label she was using as a bookmark. Odd sort of name, which of course I’ve forgotten. But I did make a note of it when I got back to see if I could find some of the wine. Apart from that, nothing. Are you going to have cheese?”

They ate on in thoughtful silence, broken eventually by Max. “The simplest thing would be to blow the whistle on her-I mean, the wine belongs to the property, and she and Roussel have been stealing it. Get her to confess. What do you think?”

Christie snorted. “Confess? Her? That broad? Don’t hold your breath. It would be her word against his, and she’s some kind of lawyer, isn’t she? Forget it. No, I think it would be better to wait and see if we could find out who she’s been working with. Then you get them all.”

“I don’t know about Roussel, though,” said Max. “He may be a bit of a rogue, but I’ve developed a soft spot for him. And he did look after the old boy. Sorry, your father.” Max put down his wineglass and tapped his head. “That reminds me. I had a call just after you’d gone out this afternoon from Bosc-you know, the lawyer we went to see in Aix.”

Christie rolled her eyes. “Let me guess.”

Max nodded. “You’re right. The gray area is now so gray it’s almost black. Much more complex than he had originally thought. Extensive investigation in France, probably a trip to California to consult authorities there, no stone to be left unturned, all that stuff. Months of research. He sounded very cheerful about it.”

Even before Max had finished speaking, Christie’s head had been shaking slowly from side to side. “Why am I not surprised?” she said. “I used to live with a lawyer, remember? God, it’s like-well, as my ex once said when he’d had too many beers, it’s like milking a mouse. You know? Trying to squeeze something out that isn’t there. They all do it.” With a look of high disdain on her face, she reached for her cigarettes.

“Calvados?”

“Absolutely.”

Leaving the restaurant, they saw that an after-dinner boules game-or perhaps the same game-was being played by the light of moth-freckled street lamps. The contestants looked identical to those playing earlier: the same wiry, wizened old men, still wearing their caps, the same endless flow of loquacious dispute. One of them saw Christie and nudged the man standing next to him. As she passed, he shook one hand vigorously from the wrist, as though he’d burned it, and gave her a smile that glinted with gold fillings.

“What does that mean?” said Christie.

Max thought for a moment. “One-nil to California, I’d say.”