“I thought you were a dashing, daring, wine-quaffing, save-the-world spy, but you don’t know a Merlot from a Pinot Noir. When I think about it, you really let down the spy brotherhood, don’t you?”
He smiled again, head tipped, one brow arching. “At least I’m dashing.”
Her hand in his, Mae went along with him down the first row of shelves. “You do know how to wear a dinner suit, but that’s beside the point. I’m not a sommelier, I’m merely a well-trained butler. I told Llewelyn what I know about wine comes down to what to serve with what meal, something every decent butler and the wine steward in any fine restaurant would know. This is a bottle of Petrus, worth about two thousand US dollars, and it looks like every bottle of Petrus I have seen before. There are,” she stood on her toes and counted from top to bottom, “eight of them.” She let go of his hand and moved a little further along the row, pulling out bottles to examine along the way. “Here are six Henschke Hill of Grace shiraz, all 2006 vintage, usually around $600 a pop. These ten are Giaconda Nebbiolo from the Piedmonte region of Italy, $100 maybe. All different grapes, all different values. Would you like to know what food to pair with these wines?”
“Red goes with meat, white goes with fish, and bourbon tastes better with both. What more do I need to know?”
“How about, there are bottles of bourbon, scotch, and whisky on these shelves too.”
Kitt hurried to her side and looked where she pointed. “A Gordon & MacPhail Generations Mortlach seventy-five-year-old single malt whisky, The Macallan Lalique sixty-two-year-old single Malt scotch whisky, and Old Rip Van Winkle twenty-five-year-old Kentucky straight bourbon.” He whistled, impressed.
She laughed. “So, I report this cellar to Bryce, you try to sneak a taste of the Macallan Lalique when my back is turned, and...then what?”
“What were your instructions, what were you told to look for to ascertain if Taittinger was blending his own wine and passing it off as something else?” Kitt turned and went back toward the lift.
Mae watched him move around the portion of the cellar hidden by the folded freight platform. “Anomalies; old bottles and very, very old bottles. Old paper, ink, stamps, corks, handwritten labels on very old bottles. A pattern to the bottles he’s collected, bottles in tubs of water to soak off labels, a kitchen set up with tubes and chemistry glass carafes for measuring and mixing, anything that might be used for blending wines, the way Kurniawan did with Burgundies in 2012.”
“Kurniawan was Malaysian, wasn’t he?
“Indonesian.” She headed down another row and kept talking. “The capsules all appear to be original, the labels legitimate. I’ve never found old paper, ink, stamps, glue or wax, or aged corks, and no formulas scribbled anywhere. Llewelyn seemed to think that engaging a master sommelier wasn’t necessary, that my knowledge base and years in service were enough.” The slight muffled sound of rumpling plastic travelled down the rows. “I don’t see anything I was told to be mindful of down here, and I certainly haven’t found anything in the other cellar in the house, or anyplace else on the property.”
Mae went on looking at expensive wines mixed with extraordinarily expensive wines. She counted three bottles of 1945 Domaine de la Romanee-Conti Grand Cru, four bottles of 2008 Le Pin, two 1975 Egon Müller zu Scharzhof-Scharzhofberger Riesling Trockenbeerenauslese Goldkapsel and nine bottles of a 1921 Schloss Vollrads German Riesling. “This may be something,” she said, “or it may be nothing at all. Every so often there are printed sticky labels, fixed to the top of the rack, with some kind of letter and number code. For example, RN3 dash F16 or BRB12 dash M09. They could be cataloguing or blending codes.”
“At this point, who knows?” Kitt ran his hand over the rear side of a half-folded heavy carpet atop a shipping crate that sat to the left of the freight lift. The rug was stained and dusty, the dirtiest thing he’d come across on Taittinger’s estate, and it made his mouth go dry.
The front of the very old, hand-knotted Sarouk Persian rug had an intricate pattern in shades of deep red, dark blue, and cream. “When did Taittinger’s new Persian rug arrive, the one you hung in the foyer?” he said, the hair on his neck prickling. There were rugs like this in the containers in Singapore, but they were polyester reproductions. The rug over the crate was wool and silk, threadbare and moth-eaten in places. It wouldn’t be worth much in this state.
“Just before Christmas,” she called out. “Well, this is different.”
Kitt turned around, shrugging off the prickling and the prod it failed to give to nightmarish memories. He travelled back in Mae’s direction, glancing at Felix with his nose shoved in between bottles. “Have you found a secret passage?”
“No,” she snorted, voice slightly muffled. “There’s no more wine, but there is art. Lots of it.”
“What kind of art?” Kitt looked down one row of wine bottles and then another. He paused. “Where are you?”
“Back here. Go to the end and turn right.”
He followed her directions and repeated his question, “What kind of artwork?”
“Art that doesn’t quite match Taittinger’s taste for the cosmos.”
When Kitt found her, she stood beside an open shelf full of sculptures and carvings of various sizes, looking at a figurine that resembled a woman with enormous breasts, but turned out to be a woman holding a child. “That’s a fertility goddess.”
Mae looked up at him through her lashes. “Naturally you’d know about fertility goddess statues.”
“Technically, it’s not a statue, but a figurine from the early Bronze Age. That round one there, I believe,” he pointed, “is Aztec, while the gent performing fellatio is Peruvian.”
“You know nothing about wine, but everything about bourbon, Minton china patterns, pornographic Peruvian and Bronze Age fertility figurines.”
“You can eat off china.”
“And the fertility figurines?”
“I’ll leave that to your very active imagination.”
“Men are such little boys sometimes.” Mae gave a little laugh. “The day before yesterday—when you hadn’t yet arrived—there was a discussion about Venus figurines and phalluses.”
“The phalluses are on the shelf above you.” His gaze flicked above her head.
She poked a thumb over a shoulder. “This place goes on and on. There’s more down this way, little boy. Bigger things.”
“Bigger isn’t always better.”
“Oh, stop.” She turned and headed toward the rear wall where various sized boxes and wooden crates sat. The dog appeared and shadowed her.
Kitt laughed and shadowed the dog, rubber-soled boots softly ss-ssing on the slate tiled floor. The room did go on and on. “Why does it matter if these pieces down here don’t match Taittinger’s taste? Tastes change.”
“I get the feeling that question is rhetorical, Kitt.”
“I’m thinking out loud. And you’re here looking for patterns, aren’t you?”
“Perhaps he’s embarrassed by his little collection of knobs and diddies and that’s why he keeps them down here with the wine.”
“Knobs and diddies?”
“My point is, phalluses might not match his pattern, but those boxes over there are hand-painted tiles for the terrace he wants Hector to build, and these things here fit his taste.” Mae stopped in front of a slab of a fresco framed in by wood and sheeted with plastic, and waved her hands over zodiac images of warped, yet still distinct, Aquarius and Pisces. “He collects work with a ‘celestial’ theme.”
The rows of wine ended. This vast side of the cellar held nothing but wooden crates, some unopened. Various boxes had the front removed and had been half-unpacked, like the fresco. Small boxes sat on shelves, other things stuck out or peeked through polystyrene bits. Bronze bowls and vessels were swathed in bubble wrap, round carved stone slabs rested against the frame of a crate bubbling over with straw-like wood shavings. Other crates and boxes contained various large automotive parts, windscreens, exhaust pipes, and chrome bu
mpers that had lost their lustre.
Mae pulled out her mobile. “Those three long boxes arrived the same day as the rug in the foyer. And the stuff over there with the carpet half-covering a Greek, Roman, or,” she snorted, “a Bronze Age fresco, is similar to the one in the house.” She turned and began to take pictures of the wine and cellar.
Kitt crossed to the two crates, both of equal size. A crowbar rested near the bottom of the one that had been partially opened. He began to slip away another rug. “It’s a mosaic, not a fresco. Frescoes are paintings on plaster.” The rug dropped to the clean, tiled floor below and his eyes ran across thick, clear plastic torn apart in several places. Behind the tattered plastic sheet, shit-brown smudges and rusty fingerprints smeared across a tiled, not painted, surface. Cascading grapes and a face peeked out from the mosaic, tile eyes looking at him. The grapes dangled down to a woman’s shoulders.
The air turned rank with the sudden stench of decay.
Mae’s phone clicked like an old-fashioned camera, the noise an unnecessary throwback to the days when cameras had shutters and actual film. The dog snuffled his nose into the rug and plopped down on top of it, front paws crossing. “What time is it?” Dalton said.
Nausea unwound, the snake of it slithering through his stomach, curling along his spine. Kitt pushed it away, shoved it down. “Christ,” he muttered, swallowing hard, battling the nausea. “Oh, Christ.”
“Oh, Christ what?” Mae said from someplace very far away. Kitt looked at her and back at the dried smear of shit that was a dried smear of blood.
“What time is it?” Dalton asked.
Queasiness undulated, rippling the fear that kicked up his pulse. The rug gone, Kitt’s hands shook when he ripped off more plastic and yanked a wooden cross-brace from the frame. The action revealed a face set in mosaic tiles, a woman wearing a vine-woven garland, bunches of grapes hanging above her shoulder. He stared at the tiny tile portrait, and the world around him putrefied and distorted like the faces of the dead in the container.
Dalton bleated about his goddamned broken watch, and, in a climate-controlled wine cellar, Kitt stared at a mosaic tiled face framed by grapes and let the deluge of horror crash over him.
Chapter 12
What a thing it was to relive a moment, to physically be half a world away, yet mentally exist in another place with time vividly recreated right down to the stench. Handkerchief to his nose and mouth, Kitt rose from the fetid corpse and moved away from the crate that held the same contraband handbags and scarves as the last container, which unlike this one, had not also served as a tomb for Dr Vida Zora and three others. Bloody hell, amid bodies, counterfeit goods, and the presence of the Malay customs broker representative, her young Chinese assistant, Dalton whined about his broken Rolex, and what idiot wore an expensive dress timepiece to such a filthy job, anyway? Bill Dalton, that’s who.
Not that he was any better, thinking about Mae and the Christmas tree and his proposal and how he hadn’t considered she’d ever say anything except yes. Since that was the case, it was time to get out, to make a move in another direction, to retire without keeping his hand in anything related to intelligence work.
The green-faced NCB officer had sunk to his knees outside, downwind, opposite where he had vomited. The Chinese assistant harbourmaster splashed his face with bottled water. The Indian-Malay, or possibly Nepali, dockers Molony had roped into service to open the containers shook their heads and shrugged, Tzin securing his plait, thickset Popo snapping chewing gum that, before the doors had swung open, smelled of violets.
The Malay customs broker patted her young assistant’s back. “He’s stone, lah.”
“Get him out of here,” Molony pinched his nose. “Her too.”
“What time is it?” Dalton asked.
Jaw tight with annoyance at himself, at Dalton, Kitt sent a text to follow up the call he’d made to Reed—As per your suggestion. Shithouse, henhouse, sweatshop—and glanced at his own watch, a practical Citizen. “Nine-fifteen,” he grumbled.
“No! No!” Molony shouted from the open doorway.
Kitt looked up and the Professor, tiny knife in his hand, fell through the door of the container, face down behind the NCB officer shrieking, “Teedak! Teedak!”
The assistant harbourmaster tumbled inside the space, arms stretched out to the screaming customs broker, his arterial spray spattering her face. “To-long! To-long!” she cried for help in Malay.
“Christ!” Kitt hissed, dropped his phone and hurtled himself clear of a pallet plank Popo swung at his head. He rolled to his feet as Tzin, the thinner brother, slashed out at the NCB officer. The still-green-faced man stumbled and staggered as blood erupted from the gash across his throat.
Dalton fumbled for the palm pistol strapped to his ankle and the length of pallet wood struck his back, splintering, knocking him out of the container, the pop-pop of two bullets ricocheted off metal.
Tzin moved for the boy. Kitt ducked another blow and tried to reach him, tried to drive forward and shove the kid out of the container, shouting at him to run. Then a length of wire passed in front of his eyes and caught the fingers he’d raised in defence. In an instant, jerked in reverse, the floral scent of Popo’s violet chewing gum gusting into his face.
Wire digging into his throat, Kitt witnessed the woman’s desperate try to intervene and save her petrified young assistant. Tzin gutted her with a single slash. Screaming, entrails spilling, she spun and slid down the front of the wood frame of a box, dark hair fanned out, clawing at the plastic and rug wrapping, exposing the patterned tile beneath.
Kitt dropped to a knee and dragged Popo down with him. Tzin’s knife flashed again and the young man fell next to the woman without a sound, and Kitt rammed upwards. The thin metal wire bit deeply into his neck, into his flesh, slicing through bone, and his skull met nose. Blood exploded into his hair. Popo’s grip on the twisting wire garrotte slackened. He slumped and staggered away.
Kitt tottered, saw Dalton lurch sideways, his expression a chilling rictus of missing teeth and bloodied, frothing spittle. He fell over the twitching bare legs of the NCB officer in the doorway and landed on Molony. With a thin gasp of breath and then another, Kitt tripped across a corpse and dug at the wire eating into his throat. The top knuckles of two fingers dangled, bone exposed. He heard the faint whistle of swinging wood before it cracked his occipital bone. He dropped chest-first on the side of the crate, smashing his face, bouncing, and crumpling, landing on a rotting corpse, torn, trapped fingers stuck between his throat and the wire, lights, colours, shapes bursting in his blood-sodden vision.
Dazed, half-strangled, half-blind, no part of his body functioned normally. Breathing was a chore. Sound warbled in and out, he heard groaning, laughter, a repeated word—chichiltic—a language that wasn’t Chinese, Malay, or Singlish, a language his addled mind knew was out of place in this part of the world. What were they saying?
Jostled and lifted, he floated for a moment then crashed onto the bones of a body. Chichiltic, the splintering and crackling of wood and plastic, the stomping of feet, laughter, chichiltic it all wavered softer and louder over the noisy thrum in his ears. Through blurry, blood-muddied eyes that wouldn’t close Kitt stared at Tzin’s bloody face, at Popo’s open laughing mouth, at long black hair stuck to ripped plastic, at a bunched-up multicoloured rug, at a distorted old painting of a woman wearing a garland of grapes that hung to her shoulders. He stared until the grapes withered and died and everything around him rotted and stank and day became night and night blistered beneath an absent sun and Kitt began to roast in his own skin.
Christ. Oh, Christ. At fault and yet faultless, he had been trapped by his inattention, by thoughts of a Christmas tree and a woman he loved, by his own self-preservation. He had been made powerless by a goddamned length of metal packing wire digging into his throat and could do nothing more than fight for his own life, watch a young man die, and long for a woman he loved. “Come home,” a voice said, from v
ery far away, over the screaming woman, over the deafening silence of the boy who would never grow to be a man, over his own congested panting for breath. “Just come home.”
The visions flickered, shifted, and spun along from beginning to the end, where he’d believed he’d met his end, when the last thought he’d had was of Mae, and Mae was there, really there, shaking her head at the ancient mosaic depiction of the Four Seasons. Kitt had to move, had to exit the grisly, decaying, depraved horror before it started again.
He found Mae’s hand, and through a veil blotted by illusory, blood-drenched gore, he turned, squeezing her hand, compressing down the nightmare and queasiness that wanted to liquefy his guts.
He pulled her to the front of the other still-wrapped crate. He took a breath and tore at the plastic sheeting, uncovering another old mosaic depicting the Four Seasons; an urn filled with blossoms, a winged man crowned with wheat, a heavy-lidded woman wearing a garland of grapes that hung to her shoulders. “God damn it,” he said quietly, through his teeth. “There are two of them.”
“Two of what?” Mae stuffed her mobile back into a pocket beneath her apron.
No part of this mosaic was marred by dried blood. It would have been so easy to be unhinged, to grab the crowbar and swing it, but Kitt dug in and clawed his way back. Barely, just barely held on to the antipathy that urged him to kick and tear and smash the sodding mosaic. Softly, evenly, he drew in a long, deep breath, and swallowed down his whirling cyclone of hostility. “It’s not the wine,” he glanced back over Mae’s head to the other side of the cellar, “it’s the artefacts.”
“What do you mean?”
Kitt gave an arid smile. “You’re here looking for counterfeit wine, but Taittinger’s not counterfeiting wine. He’s smuggling artefacts. I thought we’d uncovered a contraband ring, peddling phoney handbags, but this is directly connected to Switzerland, to missing pieces from freeport storage units. The bloody art and antiquities down here. This stuff, Mae, those tiles aren’t for the terrace Taittinger wants built. It’s a mosaic, an artefact stolen from a freeport or smuggled out of Syria, Iraq, or Afghanistan.” He pointed. “That piece was in the container where I almost died. Those brown smears on the plastic torn off the mosaic, that’s blood. Someone was, someone is willing to kill to ensure no one finds out where this artefact came from, or where it’s going.”
Forever in Your Service Page 17