The Sauvignon Secret

Chapter 7

My grandfather’s silence filled the car until I felt so claustrophobic I had to roll down my window. The night air rushed in, sharp and stinging, as though summer had evaporated in the past few hours. The unexpected smoky tang of autumn scented the breeze and whipped my hair in my eyes. I shivered and rolled up the window again, but at least now my alcohol-buzzed brain felt like it had been jolted out of its stupor.

As soon as I drove beyond Juliette’s gardens and her greenhouse, the gravel road plunged into a thicket of woods that closed around the car. I put on the brakes because I had been speeding, and in the murky swirl of fog my headlights turned trees, underbrush, and impenetrable black holes an unnatural yellow-green. Overhead the canopy of trees wove together and blocked out the night sky so it felt like we were winding through a tunnel or a cave.

“Are you sure this is the right way?” Pépé asked after a few minutes. “Maybe you should have turned left at that fork in the road beyond the house.”

“I thought you told me Charles said right.”

We rounded a corner and he said, “I think I see a light up ahead.”

“I wonder what he wants to talk about. He said it was life or death.”

“Juliette knows he’s upset about something,” my grandfather said.

“She has no idea about what?”

Pépé tilted his head, as though he were weighing his answer. I wondered if he was thinking about Juliette or me. “She says she does not.”

“You don’t believe her?”

“I think she has her suspicions,” he said. “She asked if I would do what I could for him.”

“And you said yes.”

“I said I would try. But Charles specifically asked for you to come this evening, ma belle, and you’re the one he asked for help.” He gave me a sideways glance. “I don’t know what, if any, role he has in mind for me.”

“Mick Dunne got me to agree to fly out to California to sample some wine Charles talked him into buying,” I said. “Mick knew you had business out there, too, so he figured I could accompany you and, um, we’d … be together. And Charles was the one who set you up to talk to this Bohemian Grove group.”

“How interesting. Obviously it’s no coincidence. I wonder what Charles has got up his sleeve.”

I rounded another bend in the road and the light grew larger, winking like a wicked eye between the tree branches.

“I guess we’re about to find out,” I said. “I hope that’s the lodge, or else we’re really lost.”

I parked in front of a rustic cabin that sat in a clearing surrounded by Charles’s smallish vineyard. The cloudless blue-black sky was star filled and serene. A scuffed-silver half-moon hung high above the trees and brushed the tops of the vines so they looked frost rimed. The luminescent clock on my car dashboard showed ten minutes to midnight.

“Should we wait for him?” I asked.

“He said to make ourselves at home.” Pépé was already starting toward the front door. “And he left the place unlocked.”

The hinges creaked as he pushed open the door, and for an instant I expected the Big Bad Wolf or a wicked witch disguised as a kindly grandmother to appear and bid us to come inside. The room could have been the reading room in a gentlemen’s club, with a pair of black leather wing chairs and a matching sofa pulled up around a polished granite coffee table, all grouped in front of a large stone fireplace. The walls looked like old barn wood that had been beautifully refinished. The sconces and matching chandelier in the middle of the room were made of antlers. Tiny red shades over the candlesticks muted the light so it seemed almost viscous, except for the warm pool of spreading color that came from a Tiffany lamp hanging over the bar. A rug in the center of the room was a dead animal skin—a zebra. Something dark and furry I couldn’t identify lay in front of the fireplace.

“I didn’t know Charles was a hunter,” I said. “It’s cold in here.”

“He’s hunted for as long as I’ve known him. When he lived in France he used to go off to Scotland with a group of friends every year,” Pépé said. “Juliette loathes blood sports so I suspect that is why he has this place in the woods, so far from the house. Here, chérie, take my jacket.”

“I can’t. You’ll freeze.”

He draped his navy suit coat around my shoulders. “I’ll be fine.”

I walked around the room, examining the signed photographs that lined the walls. Pépé did the same from the other direction. Each one showed Charles, with practically every American president since Harry Truman or with sober-suited men I didn’t recognize, with the exception of Winston Churchill. All the pictures looked official; there were no candid snaps of him and Juliette on a vacation cruise, at Christmas, a special dinner somewhere. I wondered why there had been no children.

I scarcely recognized Charles in the early black-and-white pictures: smooth-faced and dashing, reed slim, clear-eyed, with a pompadour of wavy dark hair and a slight grave smile befitting the seriousness of the moment. What hadn’t changed was that cocky self-confidence in his eyes, the lack of self-doubt. No wonder Juliette had fallen for him after living with a troll who beat her.

One picture that had particular prominence showed Charles shaking hands with the then president of France, Georges Pompidou, on what looked like the day he presented his diplomatic credentials as ambassador to France. Juliette, ethereal and as lovely as she’d been in the portrait in their library, stood behind him looking radiant. It was the only picture in the room in which she appeared. Behind me a door opened and closed with a quiet click and I spun around.

It appeared as though Charles materialized out of nowhere, until I noticed the door set into a wall that had been camouflaged to look like a bookcase. He was holding something partially obscured in his hand. For a wild moment I thought it might be a gun. Maybe I’d been right after all: He had come to have a man-to-man talk with Pépé about his wife’s infatuation with my grandfather. But when he raised his arm I saw that it was a wine bottle, dark like the color of old blood.

“I didn’t mean to startle you both. I went in through the cave to get the wine and came through the back door.” He opened and closed it again so we could see the neat trick of how it disappeared into the wall. “Clever, isn’t it?”

He crossed the room and flicked a switch next to an oil painting of a pair of foxhounds. Instantly a fire blazed to life in the stone fireplace.

My grandfather looked surprised and Charles grinned. “Gas,” he said. “I know it’s a lazy man’s way of getting out of building a real fire, but I enjoy it. No need to wait for it to burn down at the end of an evening.”

So this was the refuge he retreated to when he wanted to get away from … what? Or whom? I wondered if Juliette had even seen the inside of this place.

“Do you spend much time here?” I asked.

He gave me an indecipherable look and said, “Depends on your definition of ‘much.’ ”

I decided not to ask the obvious follow-up.

“Please, come and sit by the fire,” he said, “while I pour the wine. I had it opened about an hour ago. I’d like to see how it’s developing. It might need a little more time.”

He handed me a glass and I nearly dropped it. Silk-screened on the wineglass was the logo of the openmouthed alienlike figure that had been on the broken glass in Paul Noble’s studio. He handed Pépé a similar glass and took a third for himself.

“Is anything wrong?” he asked.

I looked into his eyes and saw a shadow pass behind them. What-ever his reason for bringing us here, now it seemed it had something to do with the death of Paul Noble. Somehow Charles had learned that I’d found Paul hanging in his studio and he knew about the wineglass, too. I wondered who had told him and when this game was going to end. I was tired of being played.

“I saw a wineglass with the same design on it the other day, but you know that already, don’t you?” I said in a curt voice. “Where did you get these? They look like old glasses, not the inexpensive ones we give out as souvenirs at the winery.”

“Lucie—” Pépé cautioned me.

“They are,” Charles said. “I haven’t used these glasses in more than forty years.”

“Why tonight? A celebration? Or is it in memoriam? And shouldn’t we be drinking Sauvignon Blanc?”

Charles’s mouth tightened. “You’re right,” he said. “The Margaux will have to do. It’s from the correct year.”

I looked at the bottle. “What happened in 1970?”

“I’ll get to that. Now, please, have a seat.”

He waited until Pépé took one of the leather chairs and I sat on the sofa before he sat down in the other wing chair. The fire flickered merrily.

“Do you mind if I smoke?” My grandfather indicated a large glass ashtray on the coffee table.

I’d noticed it earlier. The White House logo was etched into the glass, probably a souvenir from another era, in the days when nobody minded if the president lit up and dinners ended with brandy and cigars in one of the formal state rooms.

Charles pushed the ashtray over to Pépé. “Be my guest. Juliette doesn’t come here. She’s absolutely against tobacco, and don’t get her started on hunting.”

He smiled without amusement and raised his glass. “Thank you both for indulging me.”

Pépé and I raised our glasses in silence. The wine was out of this world.

“I’m going to tell you a story,” he said, “and I’d appreciate it if you would let me tell it my way. I promise I’ll answer all your questions when I’m finished.”

Pépé snapped his lighter shut and it made a little metal clink. He slipped it in his pocket and took a drag on his cigarette, closing his eyes. I kicked off my sandals, tucking my feet under my long dress and laying my pashmina across my lap like a blanket. Pépé’s jacket was still around my shoulders and I pulled it close. Charles settled back into his chair and receded into the shadows.

“In 1970, Nixon was still in the White House,” he said, “but it wouldn’t be long before he got mired in Watergate and it brought him down. We were still in Vietnam, the ’68 riots had ended but they still left vivid scars on the national conscience, and the war, which had ended Johnson’s presidency, was more unpopular than ever. Nixon wanted to get us out of there and he did, calling it ‘peace with honor.’ Our worst enemies were the Sovs and it was the height of the Cold War.”

Pépé crossed one leg over the other and exhaled a stream of smoke. Like Charles, he’d lived through these years. The history lesson was clearly for my education.

“I was a history major in college,” I said. “So I did read about all this, you know.”

Charles made a small noise and Pépé chuckled.

“Ah.” Charles’s voice was dry. “Ancient history?”

“Prehistoric.”

“I see,” he said after a moment. “ ‘I know of no way of judging the future but by the past.’ Do you know who said that, history major?”

“You?”

“Patrick Henry.”

“ ‘Give me liberty or give me death’?”

“The same. A Virginian. A Founding Father. The lesson applies now, too.”

“You’ll explain that?” I said. “I won’t need to.” He sipped his wine. “In 1970, I was the Deputy Director for OSPR.”

“English, please,” I said. “For the uninitiated?”

“The Office of Strategic Programming and Research. Later it went under the Pentagon’s umbrella, so it became DOSPR. D for ‘Defense.’ Dosper was one of the most nimble and competent agencies in the federal government. The jewel in the Defense Department’s crown. You wanted something done, that was the place to go. No bureaucratic red tape to snarl you, no congressional hearing to ask permission first. We had carte blanche to make it rain.”

“How convenient,” I said. “What exactly did this organization do?”

“Oh, remnants of it still exist. But the original program was started in the late fifties, when the Sovs caught us off guard with Sputnik. They beat us in the space race and we had no clue what was up their little Commie sleeves. You can’t imagine how devastating that was.”

Pépé nodded and I stared at both of them, wondering what it must have been like during the years when our former World War II ally had become the “Evil Empire” and people like Charles called the Russians “Commies” and “Sovs” like something out of an old spy movie.

Charles drank his wine. “So in order for us never to fall behind, and for that never to happen again, we set up a sort of freewheeling think tank of creative people who spent their days playing military what-if and then figuring out how to invent the technology. You’ve benefited from some of the results … advancements like global positioning systems, voice-recognition software, things like that. It wasn’t just building things that went boom or the next James Bond–type toy to put in the arsenal. The sign on the door to my office was a quote from Einstein: ‘If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research.’ ”

He shifted in his chair. No one laughed.

“The wine is really opening nicely, isn’t it?” He stared into his glass. “Still got some life in it after all these years.”

I nodded, wishing he’d get on with it. Charles was leading up to something important, but at this rate we’d still be here tomorrow morning.

“You were saying about your position with OSPR?” I asked. “Or DOSPR?”

Charles fixed his gaze on the fire. “I’m getting to that, what I did. R & D is the heart of playing what-if. You have conventional warfare—soldiers fighting each other on a battlefield—and then you have unconventional warfare,” he said. “Both are as old as time. People have been using some variant of biological and chemical weapons in wartime as far back as the ancient Greeks.”

Pépé sat up straighter in his chair. I’d been about to take a sip of my wine, but I stopped and uneasily waited for him to go on. Charles had changed the direction of this conversation with as much subtlety as shifting tectonic plates.

“Unconventional warfare took a different direction in the twentieth century, gassing troops in the trenches during the First World War to name one of the most graphic examples,” he said. “Then during World War II the use of airplanes to drop bombs that would cause widespread destruction took what-if to the next level. What if you could fill a bomb with some pathogen or crop agent and drop it over a city or farmland? You wouldn’t destroy buildings, but the damage would be incalculable. Think of how many people you could sicken or kill, wiping out food supplies for decades because you’d poisoned the soil, how paralyzing it would be to a country.”

He saw my eyes widen. “I’m not talking about the good guys, Lucie. Imagine the Nazis with that technology and you live in Paris or London in the 1940s knowing there’s a goddamn bull’s-eye painted on your back on a war room map in Berchtesgaden.”

“Go on, Charles,” Pépé said. “Lucie and I are listening.”

Charles sipped his wine. “Where was I? Oh, yes, the U.S. had its own programs—biological and chemical warfare—all conducted in the utmost secrecy. Then the war ended and things started to wind down. I’m going to fast-forward through some of this, but in the aftermath of the war there was a massive ethical and moral debate about whether to continue or abandon something so heinous, so reprehensible to the American psyche. That was what the politicians and civilian leaders wrestled with. So the military decided to move the program under its own tent, though by then we had field-tested the A-bomb and discovered that it worked.”

I was glad to hear the small note of irony in his voice.

“Weren’t plans for the atomic bomb drawn up at the Bohemian Grove?” Pépé asked.

“The Grove is rented out all the time to people who want to use it when the members aren’t there.” Charles sounded irritated and a little peevish. “It’s true there was a planning meeting held there for the Manhattan Project, which led, of course, to the A-bomb—but it wasn’t a plot concocted by the Bohemian Club, I can assure you.”

Pépé set his glass down on the table and reached for his cigarette pack. “I see.”

Charles shot him an inscrutable look. “Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on where you stood, the Cold War ramped up and that breathed new life into BW and CW research, saved the programs. We couldn’t afford to fall behind again.”

“You mean biological weapons and chemical weapons?” I said.

He nodded. “Some of it was run out of a small installation—Fort Wilton—just down the road in Maryland. We built on what was accomplished during the war: germ warfare, chemical warfare, plant and animal toxins, it’s a long list. But with any kind of research comes field testing. To be blunt, testing on animals only goes so far.”

He paused and now I was starting to guess where this was going.

“The Japanese did the most experimenting on human subjects during the war, and in return for us not prosecuting them for war crimes, we got a peek at their results. It was a Faustian pact, but it happened.” He shrugged. “Hell, we did our own testing here at home—open-air tests using simulants and then monitoring the results. No one knew at the time, of course. It wasn’t the sort of thing where you sent out permission slips door-to-door.”

I choked on my wine. “You’re talking about our government testing biological and chemical weapons on its own citizens?”

“Lucie, there were hearings on this in the late seventies. It is ancient history,” he said with the weariness of someone who had been over this ad nauseam and was tired of defending it. “We only did what was absolutely essential, took no unnecessary risks. You may have studied all this in your history books, my dear, but you’re forgetting these were the Cold War years when kids hid under their school desks during drills to prepare for a nuclear attack. It’s a cheap shot to look back and condemn; it was different living through those times.”

He got up and poured the last of the Margaux into our glasses.

“Charles, you took none for yourself,” Pépé said.

“I’m switching to brandy. Care to join me, anyone?”

“Non, merci,” my grandfather said, and I shook my head.

He walked behind the bar, setting a bottle of Rémy-Martin on the counter. “In 1969, Nixon bowed to ethical and moral pressure to stop the program. He signed orders that all chemical and biological weapons development and testing was to cease. They dismantled the lab at Wilton, let people go, moved equipment, animals, everything elsewhere.”

He splashed cognac into a snifter. “You can probably guess what I’m going to say next. A small group of biochemists, brilliant young scientists who’d been hired as contractors, thought it was insane to shut down our program when other countries were forging ahead.”

He came back to his chair, swirling the burnished liquid in his glass with the practiced ease of habit. I wondered why he wasn’t drunk yet. My own head was spinning. Writhing figures, like the sinewy one on my glass, danced in the flames of the fire and waved their arms.

Charles resumed his talk as he sat down. “It was easy enough to keep them off the grid. Wilton was the perfect place to do it. Plenty of other stuff went on that no one talked about. They were a tight-knit group, all good friends. They hadn’t wanted to split up anyway.”

“What did they do?” I asked.

“Mostly the same thing they’d been doing before.”

“Including experimenting on humans?”

“I’m getting to that,” he said. “Don’t rush me.”

Pépé caught my eye and made the universal gesture with one hand that meant Calm down.

“Sorry.”

“First you need to know about these young people,” Charles said. “Who they were. It’s important.”

Pépé nodded and exhaled a stream of smoke. I settled deeper into the cushions of the sofa.

“They used to get together on weekends after work. One of the girls’ families had a beach house on Pontiac Island in Maryland. Beautiful place, that island. Only a few hundred inhabitants. A two-lane bridge from the mainland and then you’re transported to another time where life moved more slowly. In the beginning it was idyllic.” A ghost of a smile flickered across his face.

“You, also, went to the beach house?” I asked.

“Once, for a birthday party, and one other time, but I didn’t socialize with them. There was a lot of drinking, weekends got a bit wild.” He paused, a distasteful expression on his face. “It led to some rather casual and open sexual activities, not my thing at all. Besides, I was married to my first wife.”

I waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t.

“One of the girls, Maggie Hilliard, decided their little group needed a name—you know how girls are.” He gave me a tolerant smile and I bit my tongue, resisting the urge to ask him for his own interpretation of how girls were. “Some folderol invented one night when everyone was in their cups at the cottage. But it stuck. They called themselves the Mandrake Society.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Mandrake was a plant that had been used as long ago as the ancient Greeks,” he said. “It’s a deliriant causing hallucinations. Used to induce sleep. It’s part of the nightshade family. The Greeks used mandrakes in war, scraping the bark and putting it in wine that they left for the enemy to discover. The foreign troops drank it and, once drugged, their captors easily overcame them. It was one of the earliest biological weapons. The name was sort of an inside joke among the five of them.”

“I’ve heard stories about mandrakes,” I said. “If you pull one out of the ground it starts screaming. Anyone who hears the sound will die.”

“I see you know your mythology,” Charles said.

“More like my Harry Potter.”

“How amusing,” he said in a dry voice. “There is another legend, a bit of folklore, that a mandrake will only grow where the semen of a hanged man has dripped to the ground.”

He steepled his fingers, and I shuddered.

“Do you mean Paul Noble?”

“I heard one of the stories about the possible cause of Paul’s death,” he said. “It is a bizarre coincidence, you must admit.”

Pépé pointed to the figure on his glass. “So this creature was the symbol of the Mandrake Society?”

Charles nodded. “Maggie had the wineglasses made for everyone. I used to have a set of six. These three are the only ones left.”

I set my glass on the coffee table with a sharp little clink. Charles stared at me.

“Do continue about this group,” Pépé said.

Charles leaned his head against the back of his chair like he was contemplating what to say. “They needed to continue field testing,” he said finally. “On humans. So they advertised for volunteers. Offering money.”

“You mean discreet ads in newspapers?” I asked. “Like they used to do before the Internet?”

“Of course not.” He sounded annoyed. “It was easy enough to find people who needed spare cash if you knew where to look … people sleeping in the rough. Homeless individuals.”

“Oh, my God,” I said. “They got people who were desperate for money to volunteer to be experimented on?”

“It happens all the time. How else do you think they test new drugs? Don’t judge, Lucie.” Charles sat forward and shook his finger in my face. “They were protecting you. The people who volunteered were patriots. They wanted to help.”

I kept my mouth shut. Drug testing was one thing. This was about creative ways to kill people.

Charles sat back again. “There was, well, an unfortunate incident. One of the volunteers, a homeless man who said his name was Stephen Falcon, was also mildly disabled. Autistic, I guess, is how you’d describe him today. Unfortunately, he died during one of the experiments. It happened in the lab, very traumatic, upset the hell out of everyone.” He held out his hands palms up as though entreating us to understand the small setback. “There was nothing anyone could do to save him. A tragedy, obviously.”

I couldn’t tell if he meant for the Mandrake Society or for Stephen Falcon. Neither Pépé nor I spoke. Pépé’s lips were pressed together and his face was the color of ashes.

“Of course, we took care of his burial. Actually, he was cremated. We didn’t find a next of kin.” He looked rueful. “That was our undoing, where we went wrong. His real name was Stephen Falcone. He wasn’t homeless; he’d run away. At the time he was living with his sister in D.C., Elinor Falcone. She found out that he’d volunteered for our program from someone who knew Stephen and tracked us down. I went to see her.”

He gave an elaborate shrug. “I told her that her brother had died serving his country and she should be proud of him. After all, he was autistic—what kind of future could he have? She was well compensated for her loss, spared his future medical expenses, what have you. In return, of course, she couldn’t talk about what happened to him.”

Blood money. I blinked hard listening to Charles’s description of the “favor” he had done Elinor Falcone.

“Did she keep her word?” Pépé asked.

He waved a hand. “Oh, yes, she did, indeed. But it didn’t end there. Stephen’s death … I don’t know … it changed everything. The Mandrake Society got together one night at the cottage and, from what I heard, everyone got stinking drunk, really crazy out of their minds. Theo Graf, the head biochemist, said he was done with the group, the experiments, everything. He planned to quit, leave Fort Wilton and go somewhere else. Maggie was so upset that she said they ought to come clean about what really happened to Stephen. Aside from the fact that they were operating a program that shouldn’t even exist, there was the issue of what charges they might face—manslaughter, or worse. Everyone’s careers would be ruined. A tragedy when they all had such brilliant, promising futures.”

“How many ‘others’ were there?” Pépé asked.

Charles ticked them off on his fingers. “Besides Maggie and Theo there were three others,” he said. “Two men and a woman. Mel Racine, Vivian Kalman, and … Paul Noble.”

“Paul Noble was a biochemist who worked for a secret weapons program at Fort Wilton forty years ago?” I should have seen it coming, but it still floored me. “That’s a long way from owning a multimillion-dollar business distributing wine.”

Charles shook his head. “Not as far off as you think. When you consider it, there’s a lot of chemistry in wine.”

“What happened at the cottage that night?” Pépé asked. “You didn’t finish the story.”

Charles took a deep breath as if the memories still pained him. “I told you Theo left the place in a rage. Got in a car though he never should have been behind the wheel. Maggie went after him, although she was drunk, too. They were, ah, a couple, sleeping together on the quiet since fraternizing with colleagues was frowned on. Theo was crazy about her, so she figured she could talk some sense into him.” He paused and cleared his throat. “Maggie never made it off Pontiac Island and Theo didn’t know she had followed him. The car she was driving was found the next morning where she drove it off the bridge. Her body washed up on the beach.”

The writhing figures kept dancing as the fire blazed with the same intensity as when Charles had flipped the switch … how long ago? It seemed like we’d been here all night.

“Maggie’s death and the incident involving Stephen Falcone sent Theo off the deep end,” he said. “He was … I don’t know … wild, out of control. The day he came to my office for the last time—”

Charles stopped speaking and pressed his lips together.

“What happened?” Pépé asked finally.

“He made some crazy accusations. Claimed her death wasn’t an accident, and that the others had done something to tamper with the car to keep her from talking about Stephen. It was preposterous, of course. He even accused me of being part of the conspiracy.” Charles’s voice rose and his face grew flushed. At first I thought it was shame, or maybe the cumulative result of enough alcohol to float an ocean liner, but as he went on, I realized he was outraged.

“Theo swore that if he ever found a way to prove that Maggie had been murdered, he’d make sure everyone paid for it. I can still hear his voice that day,” he said. “Shouting over and over that he’d see to it each of us lost someone we loved as much as he loved Maggie. I told him he was absolutely cracked, out of his mind.”

Charles took an unsteady breath. “At the time, I dismissed it as, well, you know, an idle threat, nothing he would really act on. Besides, what was he going to uncover about Maggie’s death except the truth? She was blind drunk and she drove off a bridge in the middle of the night and drowned.”

He swirled his brandy and finished it with his eyes closed. When he opened them he said, “I disbanded the group after that. What choice did I have? They all left, went elsewhere, and it fell to me to clean up. Erase Stephen Falcone’s death. Erase the Mandrake Society altogether. So I did.” He reached over and picked up his empty wineglass. “But I did keep these as a reminder to myself. Not a day passes that it hasn’t haunted me.”

“Did it haunt Paul Noble, too?” I set down my own glass and wished I hadn’t drunk from it. “You must have gotten together from time to time and it came up?”

“Actually,” he said, “we avoided each other. It wasn’t hard to do.”

He got up for more brandy, swaying slightly. Pépé and I exchanged glances.

“I kept track of them all over the years,” he said. “Though we were never in direct contact again, you understand.”

“What happened to everyone?” I asked.

“Theo disappeared … just vanished. I heard that he was killed in a car accident while he was in Europe about twenty years ago. Even saw a copy of a grainy photo in an Austrian newspaper that looked like him.” He shook his head, remembering. “I can’t tell you how relieved I was. Then Vivian died. Heart attack last winter. She’d retired to France. That just left Mel and Paul.”

He ticked off two fingers. “Mel was out in California, the Bay Area. Owned a couple of car dealerships … talk about a lifestyle change. He set up a wine club and rented out temperature-controlled storage to people who needed a place to keep their high-end collections. He bought an old bank building and converted the vault into a cellar. Paul, well, you know what happened to him. But a few years ago when I was out in Monte Rio at one of the Bohemian Grove’s summer campouts, someone brought a couple of cases of wine made by a new winemaker in Calistoga. Named Teddy Fargo. Turned out the guy also grew roses so he named the place Rose Hill Vineyard. Graf spelled backward is F-A-R-G. Theo’s middle initial was O for Octavius. I began to wonder if it could be Theo.”

“That’s the vineyard you recommended to Mick Dunne,” I said. “Told him that he should buy wine from them. But I’m sure Mick said ‘she’ and not ‘he.’ ”

“The new owner is a woman,” Charles said. “About six months ago Theo, or Fargo, sold the vineyard and vanished. A couple months later Mel Racine was found dead. It looked like a heart attack, same as Vivian. He’d been drinking, too. Guess which wineglass the police found in his office, next to his body?”

He stared at both of us. No one said anything.

“Then two days ago, Paul committed suicide. Something drove him to it—or someone,” he said. “I think Fargo is Theo. I think he decided to hunt down the remaining members of the Mandrake Society after all this time. I think he’s kind of flipped and he’s carrying out the threat he made forty years ago.”

“Did Paul Noble know about Mel Racine’s death?” Pépé asked.

“Not from me.” Charles’s morose mood seemed to deepen. “At first I thought it was just what it was. We’re all getting up there in years now … hell, Mel was probably in his mid- to late sixties. I just figured it was a heart attack. But when I heard about Paul and that wineglass, I called in some favors and learned that they found a Mandrake Society wineglass next to Mel, too.”

“What about Vivian? Any wineglass there?”

“I don’t know. I’ve checked with some old French contacts, but I’m still waiting to find out.”

“You think Theo was responsible for their deaths?” I asked. “That he’s this Teddy Fargo person?”

“I do. It would explain finding the wineglasses with Mel and Paul. Theo was a brilliant biochemist,” he said. “He could get away with murder, especially if no one was suspicious about the causes of two seemingly unrelated deaths. The police wouldn’t bother with a tox screen.”

“Paul Noble’s death appeared to be suicide,” Pépé said.

“I still think Theo was involved, though I’m not sure how. And maybe it wasn’t suicide.”

“What does this have to do with Rose Hill Winery—and me?” I asked.

“I need to know if it’s really Theo,” Charles said. “And I’m betting the clue that would confirm it can be found at his old winery. Somewhere on the property, there will be black roses.”

“There’s no such thing as a black rose. They’re just very dark red roses,” I said. “It’s fiction.”

“All the same, they were Theo’s passion. Obsession, really. They’ll be growing there somewhere. No one will wonder if you ask for a private tour of the winery,” Charles said. “Especially if you’re there to buy wine. Trust me, those roses will be in a garden where no one would see them if they were just visiting the tasting room.”

“Why don’t you fly out to Calistoga and take a look? Why me?”

He smiled. “And tip my hand? Not a chance. It’s equally possible I’m barking mad, still haunted by old ghosts. There are days when I wonder myself. Like I told you, I saw a photo of Theo in a newspaper. Supposedly he died two decades ago. To be honest, I feel a bit of a fool even telling you all this.”

I glanced at my grandfather, but he remained mute. My choice. My decision.

“All I’m asking is that you find out whether there is a garden with black roses at that vineyard. That’s it.” Charles’s tone was reasonable, but he was also pleading. “And the wine, I promise you, is first-rate. I’m not worried that you’ll advise Mick Dunne not to buy it. I have that much faith in it. So you see, it’s a win-win situation. You also get to accompany Luc to California, spend more time together.”

Win-win for whom?

“And then what?” I asked. “What if I find these roses?”

Charles sucked in his breath. “Then, I guess, I’ll be one step closer to believing I’m right and that Theo could be alive.”

“Then you’ll go to the police?” Pépé asked.

“I … maybe not the police, but someone. Dragging up Stephen Falcone in this day and age could be like throwing gasoline onto that fire right there,” he said. “Can you imagine opening up the Pandora’s box of an off-the-radar project involving human testing gone wrong, having it show up in some newspaper next to a story on waterboarding or Guantánamo?”

Charles shook his head, without waiting for an answer. “I told you Theo swore he’d hurt someone each of us loved as deeply as he loved Maggie.”

The fiery figures rose up and became more menacing. The room grew hostile, unwelcoming. I resisted the urge to glance at the windows where a ghostly face from Charles’s past might be staring through the glass at the three of us.

Pépé’s voice was hoarse. “Juliette.”

Charles nodded. “Juliette. Who else?”

Of all the mental and moral blackmail Charles could have brought to bear on me that night—and I wouldn’t have thought there was anything—he’d found the path to my heart. He knew Pépé would suffer if something happened to his wife and I’d refused to do one small favor that might change the outcome of this situation, save her somehow.

I stole a look at my grandfather. His hands gripped the sides of his chair and he was staring into the fire, a bleak expression on his face. He wouldn’t ask me outright; it was my decision.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll do it.”