The Vintage Caper

Twenty-one

The hours after lunch were spent finalizing the evening’s plans. Philippe rented an unmarked white van-he described it as a plumber’s Ferrari-easily big enough to hold fifty cases of wine. Sophie called Vial to tell him that she and Sam would be taking exterior reference shots in the gardens around the house for an hour or so in the evening, and suggested that they meet for a drink afterward. Vial didn’t need to be asked twice.

Sam spent the afternoon in a state of enforced inactivity, a kind of expectant limbo. There was little he could do now but hope for the best; luck had to be with him during the first crucial stage. He took his second shower of the day and changed into an outfit suitable for nocturnal burglary: dark-blue trousers, dark-blue T-shirt, dark-blue windbreaker. Everything else he threw into his suitcase. He checked and rechecked the batteries in his camera and penlight, and charged his phone. He went once again through the list of stolen wines before putting it in his pocket. He paced up and down his terrace, for once oblivious to the view. He came close to twiddling his thumbs. He was more than ready to go.

The sun was beginning its daily dip toward the horizon, and the slanting golden light was a photographer’s dream as Sophie and Sam made their way up the entrance steps to the Palais du Pharo. Before they had a chance to ring the bell, the front door opened. The housekeeper, an elegant, gray-haired woman in a crisp linen dress, came out to greet them.

“Florian told me to expect you,” she said. “You must let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.”

Sophie thanked her. “We’ll be outside for most of the time,” she said. “It’s such a marvelous light between now and sunset. But perhaps we could come indoors for one final shot through the living room window-you know, that moment just before the sun disappears into the sea. We saw it when we were with Monsieur Reboul, and it was quite spectacular.”

The housekeeper nodded. “I’ll leave the terrace door open for you. I’m sorry you won’t have a chance to see Monsieur Reboul tonight. But he gets back tomorrow, and I’m sure he’d love to see the pictures.” With a smile and a regal flutter of her hand, she turned and went back inside.

“What a bit of luck,” said Sam as they walked around the house toward the gardens overlooking the sea. “Tomorrow would have been too late. I imagine there’s always a reception committee when Reboul gets back from one of his trips.” He took his camera from his pocket and turned it on. “She’s quite a grand lady for a housekeeper, isn’t she?”

Sophie looked up at the towering façade: three floors and countless windows. Reboul could have lodged a small army in there. “It’s quite a grand house.” She stopped, and put a hand on Sam’s arm. He could feel it was trembling. “Sam, I’m nervous.”

He squeezed her hand and grinned. “Me too. That’s the way it should be. It’s when you’re not nervous that you get careless. Listen-you’ve been great all through this, and it’s nearly over. One last effort and you’re done.” He took her arm and guided her through the garden, his free hand panning the camera across the view. “Now, you’re in charge. Tell me where to start, and remember to point at what you want me to shoot. Wave your arms about. Stamp your foot. Tear your hair out. Make like a creative director. You’ll have an audience. I’m pretty sure our friend indoors will be keeping her eye on us to make sure we’re not disturbing the lavender.”

They photographed the terrace, the clipped formality of the gardens, the 180-degree view, all the time conscious of the sun’s slow progress as it dropped closer and closer to the sea. Just before they had finished, Sam stopped, put his phone to his ear, and went through the motions of taking a call before putting the phone back in his pocket. “My excuse for leaving,” he said, and passed the camera over to Sophie. “Let’s go inside for the shot through the window. This is where I disappear. Can you take pictures with your fingers crossed?”

They went into the house from the terrace, and crossed a small lobby before reaching the living room door. It was open. They were well inside the room before they realized they were not alone.

“I’m sure you have made some lovely photographs. It’s such a perfect evening.” The housekeeper got up from the ornate little desk in front of the window where she’d been making notes and came toward them, gracious and smiling, the last person Sam wanted to see.

He pasted an answering smile onto his face. “I’m so glad we caught you,” he said. “I’ve just had a call reminding me that I’m late for a meeting in Marseille, but I wanted to thank you before I left. Sophie’s taking over for the last couple of shots.”

The housekeeper put on a diplomatic expression that managed to convey both disappointment and understanding. “What a pity you have to rush.” She made a move toward the door. “You must let me show you-”

Sam held up a hand. “No, no, no. Please don’t bother. I’ll see myself out. Thanks again.” And with that, he hurried from the room, closing the door behind him.

He crossed the main entrance lobby and slipped into the dining room. Tiptoeing past the twenty-seat table with its high-backed tapestry chairs, he came to the serving alcove and the heavy swing door that led to the kitchen. He put his ear to the crack between door and wall: nothing but the muted hum of refrigerators. He went through, past the gleaming array of stainless steel and copper, and into the back kitchen. In front of him was the door to the stairs that led down to the cellar; locked, as he had expected. He checked his watch. Six-fifteen. Sophie was meeting Vial at 6:30, and taking him back to the hotel bar.

Sam braced himself for an uncomfortable quarter of an hour and opened the door of the dumbwaiter. What had Vial called it? “The elevator for bottles. There is no turbulence. The wine arrives relaxed.” He hoped he could do the same.

In fact, the elevator for bottles was little more than a long box, hand-operated by the old-fashioned combination of rope and pulley. But it was a substantial piece of work, solid enough to hold the weight of half a dozen cases of wine and tall enough for the cases to fit one on top of another in a single stack. Almost coffin-shaped. Sam tried not to dwell on that as he caught hold of the thick rope that operated the pulley and wedged himself gingerly into the narrow space, wincing at the sound of the pulley creaking under his weight. He closed the door and drew a deep breath. The darkness around him held the faintly musty smell of corks and stale wine, the souvenir of a bottle that had leaked during its journey upstairs. He fed the pulley rope through his hands, lowering himself slowly and with infinite care until he felt the soft thump that told him he’d arrived at cellar level.

Florian Vial put the finishing touches to the jaunty upward sweep of his moustache and walked down the cellar to the stairway leading into the house, passing within six feet of the crouching figure inside the dumbwaiter. He was looking forward to seeing Sophie again, all the more after receiving her call to say that Sam wouldn’t be able to join them. A pleasant enough young man, of course, but Vial much preferred the intimacy of a tête-à-tête with Sophie, and there was the added advantage that they could speak French, a language made for gallantries.

Sam heard Vial’s footsteps on the flagstones of the cellar floor, and gave him another few minutes to get up the stairs and into the house. He was by now beginning to suffer from mild claustrophobia and the onset of a cramp. His thigh muscles felt as though they had been stretched to the snapping point, and he was sure he’d picked up a splinter in his backside. But he’d made it. The cellar was his for the night, and the hours of physical labor ahead of him would come as a relief after his ordeal in the dumbwaiter.

The pulley rope gave a final creak as he hauled himself out, and he stood for a few moments in the darkness, stretching the kinks out of his body. Even though the risk of being detected was minimal, he had decided to wait for a couple of hours before turning on the cellar lights and starting work. By then, just about everyone in Marseille would be observing the sacred ritual of dinner.

Guided by the thin beam of his flashlight, he made his way down to the far end of the cellar, where he found everything as he had remembered it. The golf cart was parked in its place by the door, and the empty cartons from Domaine Reboul were piled up in the corner. These would have to be replaced with unmarked cartons, but there would be plenty of time later for that. He went into Vial’s office, settled himself in Vial’s chair, and put his feet up on Vial’s desk. Philippe answered his call after the first ring.

“So far, so good,” said Sam.

“You’re in the cellar?”

“I’m in the cellar. I’ll be starting to pack up the wine in a couple of hours. Let’s just go through the drill again.”

“Bon. When all the wine is packed, you will call me. The van’s parked by the Vieux Port. At that time of night, it will take me three minutes to reach the Palais.”

“Good. Now, I’ll make sure the gates are open. Remember to switch off your lights just before you turn into the drive. I don’t want anyone in the house to see any headlights. Take the left fork off the main drive. I’ll blink my flashlight to guide you into the delivery area. The cases will be stacked up outside the cellar. Loading them into the van will take five minutes, tops. Then we’ll be out of here.”

“Roger that.”

“Roger what?”

“It’s army talk. I heard it on a TV show.”

Sam rolled his eyes in the darkness. He’d forgotten Philippe’s fondness for all things military. “Oh, one other thing. How long will it take to get where we’re going?”

“The van isn’t built for speed, but we’ll be on the autoroute for a lot of the way. I think an hour and a half, not much more.”

“OK. We’re all set. See you later.”

Sam’s confidence was increasing now that he was getting close to the finish. Something could go wrong, of course; something always could. But he allowed himself a few moments of optimism as he considered facts and possibilities.

The most encouraging of these was his almost total isolation from the outside world. There were no windows in the cellar, so there would be no chinks of light to give him away. There was no chance of anyone hearing him, thanks to the soundproofing provided by massive walls, massive ceilings, and, above them, several feet of earth. And best of all, the alarm system, which he’d checked during previous visits, was activated only by someone trying to break in, not by someone letting himself out. That made two cellars-this one and Roth’s-where electronic protection wasn’t all it should be. He made a mental note to tell Elena. She’d welcome any excuse to read the riot act yet again to Roth about his sloppy security arrangements.

Elena occupied his thoughts pleasantly as he sat in the darkness, and he started to think ahead, beyond the night’s work. How would she react to criminal methods being used to solve a crime? Personally, she might turn a blind eye. Professionally, she’d have a few problems, and she wouldn’t hesitate to give him a hard time. But not for long. In the insurance business, as in most other enterprises involving large amounts of money, the end tends to justify the means. A healthy bottom line excuses most sins. It’s a wicked old world, he reflected, as he leaned back in Vial’s chair and waited for the hours to go by.

He must have dozed. When he next looked at his watch it was just before ten; time to go to work. He stood up, rubbed his eyes, and found the switch by the main door. The cellar looked bigger and more mysterious at night than it had during the day, when sunshine had flooded in through the open doors. Now the vaulted ceilings were thick with shadow, and the pools of light cast by the hanging lamps seemed to stretch away forever.

Sam loaded a batch of empty cartons into the golf cart and set off, the tires thrumming on the flagstone pathway that separated the reds from the whites. His first stop was the Rue des Merveilles, that distinguished address where Château Lafite rubbed aristocratic shoulders with Château Latour. He took the list of Roth’s wines from his pocket and smoothed it out on the passenger seat:

’61 Latour, 98 bottles. He went along the rows of bins, looking at the slate tickets marked in chalk that identified the vintage years until he came to 1961. There must have been at least three hundred bottles, he calculated, as he started to fill the empty cartons, and there was no means of knowing if the ninety-eight bottles he took were actually Roth’s. But, as he told himself, Roth wasn’t going to complain. He settled into a rhythm: take two bottles from the bin, check the vintage on each label to make sure, slide the bottles into their individual compartments in the carton, straighten up, go back to the bin. As each carton was filled it was placed on the flatbed behind the seats of the golf cart.

He paused to look at his watch. It had taken more than thirty minutes to pack fewer than a hundred bottles of Latour. At this rate, he had about three hours to go, plus the trips back and forth in the golf cart. That would see him finished sometime between two and three a.m. He wondered how Philippe was managing to contain his impatience.

’53 Lafite, 76 bottles. As he bent and straightened and shuttled between the bins and the golf cart, some of the comments of Florian Vial came back to him. When describing the Lafite, his extravagant compliments had been partially muffled by the frequent kisses he applied to his fingertips. Even so, some gems that Vial had taken from his fellow wine experts’ overblown descriptions had come through loud and clear. Sam remembered one purple patch in particular that had started off quietly enough with “firm yet supple, soft and yet assertive,” going on to “finesse, fragrance, and depth of flavor” mixed with “elegance, authority, and breeding that unfolded splendidly in the mouth,” and ending with this rousing climax: “so grand and sublime as to afford a symposium of all other wines.” All of this Vial had quoted, in English, from memory. At the other end of the prose scale had been his own more down-to-earth opinion that “in the end, the best wine is the wine you like.”

’82 Figeac, 110 bottles. Sam tried to picture the château in his mind while he checked and packed the bottles: stone columns, an allée of fine old trees, a gravel drive. Sophie had told him that the present owner’s grandfather had treated Figeac as a holiday home, coming down from Paris only rarely, and leaving the château closed for the rest of the year. Sam found that hard to imagine. He shook his head at the thought and started work on another empty carton. It occurred to him that it was not unlike packing bullion. How much in dollar value had he shifted so far? A million? Two?

’70 Pétrus, 48 bottles, 5 magnums. As featured in the L.A. Times, Sam thought, putting the first of the magnums into its nest of cardboard. Was this the one that Danny Roth had been cradling in the photograph? Who had shown the article to Reboul? Who had planned and done the job? Whoever they were, Sam couldn’t fault them professionally. Even Bookman had said that it was as close to a perfect heist as he’d seen. A shame, really, that there was no chance of sitting down with Reboul one day over a drink and filling in some of the gaps.

’83 Margaux, 140 bottles. Another question: who had Roth used to buy for him? Someone who knew his stuff, that was sure. There wasn’t a single doubtful bottle in the collection. It was all wine of the very highest quality. When doing his research before leaving L.A., Sam had been amazed at the rise in value of the 1980s vintages of premier cru Bordeaux. Between 2001 and 2006, for example, Margaux had gone up by 58 percent, and Lafite by 123 percent. It was no wonder Roth was climbing the walls. God knows what it would cost him now to refill his cellar.

The cartons were becoming heavier and heavier, the trips in the golf cart offering only brief moments of relief for an aching back. Sam longed for a massage and a drink.

’75 Yquem, 36 bottles. The last three cartons, and a wine that brought out the best (or worst) in wine writers, those whose mission in life is to describe the indescribable. “Fat, rich, and luscious,” or “huge and voluptuous”-Sam had seen the phrases time and time again, and they never failed to conjure up images not of a glass of wine but of the kind of statuesque woman Rubens liked to paint. With a feeling of huge and voluptuous satisfaction, he loaded the final carton onto the golf cart and drove down to the other cartons piled up by the cellar door.

He was nearly there. He turned off the lights and eased open the door. The night smelled cool and clean after the humid cellar air, and he sucked in a deep, welcome breath as he looked down the drive. He could make out the form of the gates silhouetted against the lights of the boulevard. A car passed, going up the hill, and then silence. Marseille, it seemed, was asleep. It was 3:15.