The Vintage Caper

Two

It was Christmas Eve in Los Angeles, and all the traditional sights of that most joyous of seasons were on display. Santas in sunglasses-some wearing red shorts as a concession to the heat-rang their bells and wagged their false beards as they set up camp in the prosperous parts of town. In Beverly Hills, a few of the more festive lawns had been dusted with artificial snow imported from China. Rodeo Drive was a-twinkle with the glint of platinum American Express cards. A bar on Wilshire was offering an extended happy hour, from eleven a.m. to midnight, with the added inducement of organic martinis. And members of the L.A. Police Department, brimming with goodwill to all men, were dispensing parking tickets and D.U.I. citations with unusual generosity.

As the dusk of evening deepened into night, an ambulance made its way through the holiday traffic on Sunset and headed into the hills before stopping at the security barrier that marked the entrance to Hollywood Heights. The guard, yawning with boredom after an uneventful few hours, emerged from his air-conditioned sentry box and peered at the two men inside the ambulance.

“What’s up?”

The ambulance driver, spruce in his hospital whites, leaned out of his window. “Sounds serious, but we can’t be sure until we get there. Call from the Roth residence.”

The guard nodded, and went back into his miniature fortress to call the house. The driver saw him nod again before he put the phone down and the barrier went up. Recording the visit in his log, the guard checked his watch and saw that there were only ten minutes left until the end of his shift. Tough luck on his replacement, who would be spending the rest of Christmas Eve in the gatehouse, watching reruns on TV.

Arriving at Château Roth, the ambulance was met in the driveway by the man who had given the green light to the security guard, a visibly agitated Rafael. He had been left in charge of the property while the owners spent Christmas in Aspen, and only the thought of vanishing across the Mexican border with $50,000 in cash had persuaded him to abandon his comfortable, if undeclared, employment. He took the two ambulance men down to the cellar and let them in.

Unhurried and methodical, they pulled on rubber gloves before unloading empty cardboard cartons bearing the name of a winery in the Napa Valley. A preliminary tour of the cellar showed that the bottles of Bordeaux occupied a separate section, which was helpful. They would need to spend less time looking through the storage racks. Working from their list, they began to pack bottles into the cartons, ticking off names and vintages as they packed. Rafael was kept busy putting the filled cartons into the back of the ambulance, with a warning that any breakages would cost him dearly.

Each carton held either a dozen bottles or six magnums, and by the time the men had finished, forty-five cartons had been filled and loaded. After one last check, and a regretful glance at Roth’s California wines and his boxes of pre-Castro Havanas, they switched off the cellar lights and closed the door. Now it was time to make a few adjustments to the interior décor of the ambulance.

The cartons were stacked neatly on either side of a stretcher bed before being covered with hospital blankets. Rafael, by now so nervous that he was very close to being a genuine emergency case himself, was tucked into the stretcher bed and hooked up to a fake morphine drip that would alleviate the pain of his fake burst appendix. Thus prepared, the ambulance drove down to the security gatehouse, pausing only long enough to wish the guard a brisk Merry Christmas before disappearing, lights flashing, into the night.

The driver grinned as he heard sounds of movement from the back of the ambulance. “OK, Rafael, time to get up. We’re going to drop you off before we get on the freeway.” He took an envelope from his pocket and passed it back over his shoulder. “Better count this. It’s all in hundreds.”

Five minutes later, the ambulance pulled into a dark side street to let Rafael out. Next stop was a lock-up garage on an even darker street in a run-down section of west L.A., where the cartons of wine were transferred from the ambulance to an unmarked van. All that remained was to remove the license plates from the ambulance and abandon it in a nearby hospital parking lot before the two men headed off in the van toward Santa Barbara.