Spartan Gold

CHAPTER 12

LA JOLLA

You can’t be serious,” Sam said to Selma. “Napoleon’s Lost Cellar isn’t . . . It’s just a—”

“Legend,” Remi finished.

“Right.”

“Maybe not,” Selma replied. “First, let’s talk a little history so we’ve got some context. I know you’re both generally familiar with Napoleonic history, but bear with me. I won’t bore you with his entire personal history, so we’ll pick it up with his first command assignment.

“A Corsican by birth, Napoleon won his first acclaim at the siege of Toulon in 1793 and was appointed the rank of brigadier general, then General of the Army of the West, Commander of the Army of the Interior, then Commander of the French army in Italy. For the next few years he fights a series of battles in Austria, then returns to Paris a national hero. After spending a few years in the Middle East on his Egyptian Campaign—which was at best a marginal success—he returns to France and takes part in a coup d’état that ends up with him as the First Consul of the new French government.

“A year later he takes an army across the Pennine Alps to wage the Second Italian Campaign—”

Remi said, “The famous painting of him on the horse . . .”

“Right,” replied Selma. “Sitting atop a rearing horse, chin set, arm pointed into the distance . . . The truth is a little different, though. First of all, most people think that horse’s name was Marengo, but it was actually known at that time as Styrie; its name was changed after the Battle of Marengo a few months later. And here’s the kicker: Napoleon actually did most of the crossing atop a mule.”

“Not quite befitting his image.”

“No. Anyway, after the campaign, Napoleon returns to Paris and is appointed First Consul for life—essentially open-ended benevolent dictatorship. Two years after that he proclaims himself Emperor.

“For the next decade or so he wages battles and signs treaties and so on until 1812, when he makes the mistake of invading Russia. It doesn’t work out quite as he plans, and he’s forced to conduct a winter withdrawal that all but decimates his Grand Army. He returns to Paris and over the next two years finds himself fighting Prussia and Spain, not only abroad, but on French soil as well. Soon after that, Paris falls. The Senate declares Napoleon’s empire dead and in the spring of 1814 he abdicates his rule to Louis XVIII of the Bourbon line. A month later, Napoleon is exiled to Elba and his wife and son flee to Vienna—”

“Not Josephine, right?” Sam asked.

“Right. Pulling a page from Henry VIII’s book, Napoleon divorced her in 1809 because she failed to give him a male heir. He married the daughter of the Emperor of Austria, Marie Louise, who managed to produce a son.”

“Okay, go on.”

“About a year after he was exiled Napoleon escapes, returns to France, and puts together an army. Louis XVIII flees the throne and Napoleon takes over again. This was the start of what historians call the Hundred Days Campaign—though it didn’t even last that long. Not quite three months later, in June, Napoleon is routed by the British and Prussians at the Battle of Waterloo. Napoleon abdicates again and is exiled by the British to Saint Helena—a chunk of rock about twice the size of Washington, D.C., dead center in the Atlantic Ocean between West Africa and Brazil. He spends the remaining six years of his life there and dies in 1821.”

“Of stomach cancer,” Sam offered.

“That’s the generally accepted theory, but there are a lot of historians who believe he was murdered—arsenic poisoning.

“So,” Selma concluded, “that brings us back to the Lost Cellar: The myth dates back to 1852 and the alleged deathbed confession of a smuggler named Lionel Arienne, who claimed that in June of 1820, eleven months before Napoleon died, he was approached by an agent of Napoleon’s at a tavern in Le Havre. The soldier—who Arienne simply referred to as ‘the Major’—hired Arienne and his ship, the Faucon, to take him to Saint Helena, where they were to pick up cargo, then deliver it to a destination to be named after they left the island.

“According to Arienne, when they reached Saint Helena six weeks later they were met in a small cove by a lone man in a rowboat, who carried aboard a wooden case, roughly two feet long and a foot wide. With his back facing Arienne, the Major opened the case, inspected its contents, resealed it, then suddenly drew his sword and killed the man from the rowboat. The body was weighted with a length of anchor chain, then dumped overboard. The rowboat was scuttled.

“It was at this point in Arienne’s telling of the story that the old smuggler was said to have simply died—in midsentence, no less—taking with him any clue as to the contents of the case or where he and the Major took it. And that might have been the end of it,” Selma said, “if not for Lacanau.”

“The name of Napoleon’s private vineyard,” Sam offered.

“Correct. While Arienne and the phantom Major were supposedly on their way to Helena, the vineyard at Lacanau—which the French government had generously allowed to remain as part of Napoleon’s estate—was burned to the ground by person or persons unknown. The vines, the winery, all the casks—utterly destroyed. Even the soil was obliterated, dosed with salt and lye.”

“As well as the seeds, right?” Remi said.

“Those, too. Actually the name ‘Lacanau’ was one of convenience. In fact, the Lacanau vineyard grapes came from seeds taken from the Corsican regions of the Ajaccio Patrimonio. Napoleon had Archambault cross-pollinate the seeds to create the Lacanau strain.

“Anyway, while he was still in power, Napoleon ordered the seeds for the Lacanau grape to be kept in secure repositories at Amiens, Paris, and Orléans. According to legend, while the fires were raging at Lacanau, the seeds mysteriously disappeared and were assumed destroyed. The Lacanau grape, which grew only in that coastal region of France, was gone forever.”

Remi said, “For argument’s sake let’s say all of this isn’t just a folk-tale. What we’re getting at is this: From exile, Napoleon, via secret messenger or carrier pigeon or whatever, ordered Henri Archambault, his chief winemaker, to produce a final batch of Lacanau wine and have it delivered to Saint Helena, then he orders his loyalist operatives back in France to raze the vineyard, ruin the soil, then kidnap and destroy the seeds. Then a few months later he orders this . . . Major to sail to Helena and spirit—no pun intended—the wine away to points unknown.” Remi looked at Sam and Selma in turn. “Have I got that right?”

“Sounds about right,” Sam said.

The three of them paused for ten seconds, staring at the bottle on the table with new eyes.

“How much is it worth?” Remi asked Selma.

“Well, the story has it there were twelve bottles in the case the Major and Arienne took from Saint Helena, and it seems likely that one of the bottles is already broken. If the case were intact . . . I’d say nine or ten million dollars—to the right kind of buyer, of course. But the case isn’t intact, so that really brings down the price. If I had to guess . . . I’d say each bottle would be worth between six and seven hundred thousand dollars.”

“For a bottle of wine,” Remi breathed.

“Not to mention the historical and scientific value,” Sam said. “We’re talking about a strain of grape that is in all likelihood extinct.”

“So what do you want to do?” Selma asked.

“We have to assume Scarface is after the wine rather than the UM-34,” Sam said.

“And he didn’t strike me as a connoisseur,” Remi added.

“Which means he’s working for someone. I’ll make some calls, pull in some favors, and see what we can find out. In the meantime, Selma, call Pete and Wendy and fill them in. Remi?”

“Agreed. Selma, you stay on the Lacanau angle. We need to know everything about it, about the bottle, about Henri Archambault—you know what to do.”

Selma was jotting notes. “I’m on it.”

Sam said, “When Pete and Wendy get here and they’re up to speed, turn them loose on Napoleon and his mysterious Major. Anything and everything.”

“Got it. There’s one thing that’s been nagging me, though. The crushed-beetle ink on this label came from the Tuscan Archipelago in the Ligurian Sea.”

Sam realized what she was getting at. “Which is where Elba is.”

“Which,” Remi said, chiming in, “is where Napoleon spent his first exile. Six years before Arienne claims he and the Major arrived at St. Helena to pick up the wine.”

“Either Napoleon had been planning this since Elba or he brought the ink with him to St. Helena,” Sam said. “We may never know. Selma, get started on your end.”

“Okay. And you two?”

“We’ve got some reading to do,” Remi replied. “This bottle was aboard the UM-34, left there by Manfred Boehm. We find out where the UM-34 and Boehm started, we find out where the bottle came from.”

They worked on Boehm’s diary and the UM-34’s log late into the night, Remi jotting notes she thought might help them better understand the man; Sam trying to retrace the UM-34’s course backward from its final resting place.

“Here,” Remi said, straightening in her chair and tapping the diary. “This is what we’ve been looking for: Wolfgang Müller. Listen to this entry: ‘August 3, 1944: For the first time as brothers in arms Wolfi and I ship out together tomorrow. I pray God we succeed and prove worthy of our commands.’ ”

“Brothers in arms,” Sam repeated, “and the man with the other bottle. So Müller was also in the Kriegsmarine—Boehm the captain of the UM-34, Müller the captain of . . . what? Gertrude, perhaps? Boehm’s mother ship?”

“Perhaps.” Remi picked up her cell phone and called down to the workshop. “Selma, can you work your magic on something for us? We need anything you can dig up on a World War II Kriegsmarine sailor named Wolfgang Müller. In summer or fall of 1944 he might have commanded a ship of some kind. Right, thanks.”

True to her reputation, Selma called back thirty minutes later. Remi put her on speakerphone.

“Found him,” she said. “You want the short or long version?”

“Short for now,” Sam replied.

“Fregattenkapitän Wolfgang Müller, born 1910 in Munich. Joined the Kriegsmarine in 1934. Standard promotions, no disciplinary action. In 1944 he was assigned to captain the auxiliary ship Lothringen. Home port was listed as Bremerhaven, her duty area the Atlantic. According to Germany’s naval archive database, Lothringen was orginally laid down as a French ferry named Londres. The Germans captured it in 1940 and converted it into a mine layer. It was reassigned for ‘special duty’ in July of 1944, but there was no mention of the particulars.”

“A mine layer?” Remi said. “Why would they—”

“By that time in the war the Germans were losing and they knew it—everyone but Hitler, that was,” Selma said. “They were desperate. The kinds of auxiliary ships they would have normally used to transport the UM-34 had either been sunk or converted into troop escorts.

“I also found a website entitled Survivors of the Lothringen, along with a fair number of blogs dedicated to the subject. It seems the Lothringen was attacked and disabled during a storm by a U.S. Navy destroyer in September of 1944 off Virginia Beach.”

“About fifty miles south of Pocomoke Sound,” Remi said.

“Right. Only about half the Lothringen’s crew survived the attack. Those who did spent the remainder of the war in a Wisconsin POW camp called Camp Lodi. The Lothringen was towed to Norfolk and sold to Greece after the war. As far as I can tell, there’s no record of it ever being scrapped.”

“What about Müller? Any idea what happened to him?”

“Nothing yet. Still looking. One of the Lothringen blogs, run by the granddaughter of a survivor named Froch, is sort of a diary in itself. The entries talk a lot about the weeks leading up to the attack. If we’re to believe the account, the Lothringen spent about a month undergoing a refit at a secret German base in the Bahamas and frolicking with the native girls. Someplace called Rum Cay.”

“Selma, did the Lothringen have facilities to do refitting?”

“Not even close. The best it could have done was simply strap the UM-34 to the deck, cover it in a tarp to keep it hidden from prying eyes, then transport it across the Atlantic.”

“That would explain why they didn’t do whatever refitting was required at sea,” Remi said.

“True, but why didn’t they do the refit in Bremerhaven before they left? Maybe they were in a hurry. As I said, they were getting desperate by that point.”

“Wait a second,” Sam blurted out, then grabbed the 34’s logbook and began paging through it. “Here, right here! At the beginning of his log Boehm mentions a place, but only by initials: R.C.”

“Rum Cay,” Remi murmured.

“Has to be.”

“It fits,” Selma agreed.

Sam looked questioningly at Remi, who smiled and nodded back. “Okay, Selma, time to put on your travel-agent hat. Get us on the next flight to Nassau.”

“Will do.”

“And a rental car,” Sam added. “Something fast and sexy.”

“I like your style,” Remi said with a sly smile.