by John Moss
“The waiter? Okay.”
They stood in the middle of the room, watching people cleaning up from the luncheon crowd, preparing for dinner.
“Does it look familiar?” Morgan asked.
“Yes.”
“Okay,” he said, surprised, “what do you remember?”
“Dancing with my father —”
“What?”
“I remember dancing with my father. We came here, just before my teens, a year before he died.”
“Really.”
“Mart Kenny was playing. I think he played here for years. My dad always wanted to see Mart Kenny and His Western Gentlemen, we heard him on the radio. But my mom wouldn’t dance with him. She could dance really well but she didn’t think he could, so he danced with me.”
“Was it the same?”
“As now? It feels like it was, but, you know, memory is fickle. No, I don’t remember being here with Philip. I don’t know, Morgan, it all seems familiar.”
She paused.
“The other man. He came before the Champagne … which is a perfect drink to conceal knock-out drops.”
“You could have been drugged before you got here.”
“Morgan, apparently I didn’t come in staggering … and it seems like I made quite a show when I left.”
They saw the maître d’ beckoning them from the side of the room. He pointed toward the kitchen.
“He just came in. Giovanni.”
They walked through the kitchen to a staff lounge. A tall, lean man with residual acne glanced at them and away, then again. He recognized them as police. Miranda and Morgan both knew instantly that his name was not Giovanni. There was no one else in the room. The man stood upright, confronting them, not belligerently but not intimidated.
“Where you from?” asked Morgan.
“Sienna.”
“You speak Italian, then? I speak Italian.”
The man’s eyes narrowed. “Yeah,” he said, “I do.”
Miranda smiled. Morgan’s bluff was being called.
“Go ahead,” said Morgan. “Speak.”
“What do you want?” said the man.
“What’s your name?”
“Giovanni.”
“When it’s not Giovanni, what’s your name?”
The man shrugged. “Malouf. Iqbal.”
“Which?”
“Iqbal Malouf, that’s my name.”
“You illegal?” asked Morgan.
“A little.”
“How’s that?” said Miranda.
“My visa ran out.”
“Recently?” she asked.
“Eight years ago. I’m married, I’ve got a kid. He’s a Canadian, in school.”
“Your wife?”
“Illegal. Lebanese, same as me. We met here.”
“At the hotel?”
“Yeah.”
“Have you ever seen me before?” asked Miranda.
“Sure, three-four nights ago, table by the wall. Dom Pérignon. You got drunk.”
“Did you know I was a cop?”
“No. You were some guy’s date.”
Miranda flinched. “And the others?”
“The guy who brought you, I don’t know. He was smooth, I’d say computers, maybe a stock analyst. Too calm for a broker. A tax lawyer, maybe.”
“Well, thank you,” said Miranda. “And the other one?”
“Never saw him before. Never saw any of you before.”
“What can you tell us about him, the third person?” asked Morgan.
“Nothing.”
“Think.”
“Nothing.”
“We’re not with Immigration.”
“Oh, come on, man. I didn’t see anything. He was just a guy. Mid-thirties, well dressed. He didn’t pay. The other guy paid, the guy who brought her.”
“Me,” said Miranda, exasperated with having to establish her presence again. “We came together, he didn’t bring me.”
“He paid. Big tip. Not too big, big enough.”
“The third person, the other guy, tell us more?”
“There’s nothing more.”
“Immigration …” said Morgan.
“He was Lebanese.”
“Good,” said Morgan. “How do you know? Did you know him?”
“No, he’s not from here. I’d have seen him around. Ethnics, you know, we stick together.”
“How do you know he was Lebanese?” Morgan repeated.
“I speak the language. I know.”
“Did the other guy speak Lebanese?”
“No, the Lebanese guy, he just said a few words. To me.”
“He knew you were Lebanese?”
“He knew I wasn’t Giovanni. I was just part of the ambiance, man. We didn’t have a relationship.”
“You’ve never seen him before?”
“Like I said.”
“Thanks for your help,” said Miranda. “Do you think you could give the police artist a description?”
“Yeah,” said the man. “But it would, you know, be generic. He just looked like a prosperous Lebanese guy about my age in good condition.”
“Did you go to university?” said Miranda.
“Yes, in Beirut, engineering.”
“Get legal,” she said. “Do what you’re trained for.”
“I make more money as a waiter,” he said with a shrewd grin. He smiled. “So you’re not going to turn me in?”
“No,” said Morgan.
“Thanks, man. Yeah, and he wore a big ring.”
“A big ring?”
“Like a sports ring, like if he won the Stanley Cup or the Boston Marathon.”
“A lot of gold, no diamond,” said Miranda.
“Yeah, like that.”
“We’ll be in touch,” said Morgan.
3
Strange Bedfellows
Morgan telephoned Miranda in mid-evening to see how she was doing. She was touched and a little irritated by his concern. It was warm but she was wearing flannel pajamas, purple moose printed on white. Morgan was in boxer shorts, which he wore as pajamas, and a T-shirt from Home Hardware.
“You want me to come over?” he said.
“I’m watching Buffy reruns.”
“The Vampire Slayer? Good grief.”
“It’s not hepatitis, it’s postmodern.”
“Postmodernism is over, Miranda. Before anyone figured out what it was. ”
“You watch Survivor.”
“For the organized spontaneity.”
“Have you ever watched Buffy?”
“Not without feeling guilty.”
“For what, Morgan? Sex and death, short skirts?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
They bantered for a while, then Morgan signed off and returned to his book, letting Miranda get back for the closing credits of the best show on television; she admired the moral complexity.
It is a lot easier to be right than good, in a world where irony is how things actually are.
Morgan was reading wine books. He was trying to find information on Philip Carter’s Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Even Hugh Johnson didn’t list it.
The label was puzzling. Like the better French wines, it stated in small print, Mis en bouteille au château, and there was a pen-and-ink sketch of a generic chateau. The agent exclusif was Baudrillard et fils, Avignon, but the chateau was not actually named. The odd spelling on the label, ChâteauNeuf, one word, capital C capital N, was peculiar, but led nowhere. The vintage was signified on a separate neck label, 1996.
It was not one of those frou-frou bottles, with the glass melted into a languorous shape, covered with fake dust as if it had been mouldering deep in the cellars for an age, like some of the more urgently marketed Châteauneuf-du-Pape found in upscale wine stores throughout Canada and the States. It was a fine wine, presented in a bottle as sleek and muscular as the wine it contained.
The grapes were unidentifiable. The wine was a blend of the pliant and the austere, sun-rich from the s
tony hardscrabble southern landscape, suitably named for the doughty popes of Avignon who made it their favourite drink.
Having been opened for three days, it was beginning to take on a madeirized note, but Morgan swirled a bit in his glass and found the air cleaned it up.
Suddenly, he recognized a taste, a hint on the nose, of something strange but familiar. Not Châteauneuf-du-Pape, something else. At a wine tasting once, a blind tasting, they had been given a mystery wine. No one guessed it, and it turned out to be a Cabernet Sauvignon from Lebanon, with just a touch of Merlot to soften it, and, if he remembered right, a bit of Cabernet Franc for the spice.
Morgan had attended a couple of tastings organized by the Opimian Society but found them frustrating because, while he had the nose to appreciate the flourishes in their esoteric discussions, he lacked the resources to buy their selections. He was sufficiently discriminating that he remembered the mystery wine. That pleased him.
Miranda was searching a long shot on the news of black-bearded men thronging the streets of, she wasn’t sure where, angry and relieved there wasn’t a woman in sight, when she was startled by a knock at the door. It must be Morgan; he had slipped by the security door without buzzing. She was pleased. She knew right now he needed her as much as she needed him. It’s funny, she thought, how men feel violated when someone close to them has been damaged. It was flattering but oppressive, like they should be able to control the world.
She opened the door.
A young woman stared through her, wavered, then collapsed. Her legs splayed awkwardly to the side so that it was difficult for Miranda to drag her inside. Miranda knew she wasn’t dead, not even dying. She recognized the kind of emotional exhaustion she had seen before when someone has witnessed a brutal crime against a loved one, a child or partner. Sometimes they collapse when an ally approaches to share the pain.
Miranda closed the door. The woman lay on the floor, very still. Her blond hair fanned over the hardwood, although her face rested against the scatter-rug that had bunched up under her head and shoulders. She was wearing a grey skirt and a designer T-shirt; bare legs, sandals, not a lot of make-up, well-manicured nails, clean hair, no rings, a thin gold chain around her neck, wrist wrapped around the strap of a voluminous Monica Lewinsky handbag. Her eyes were glazed, unblinking, and vacant.
Miranda stepped back. She had never seen the woman before in her life.
As she squatted down beside her, her white flannel pajamas imprinted with grazing moose struck her as weird.
“Have we met before?” she said.
No response, but the woman was conscious.
“Hey,” she said, gently shaking the woman’s shoulder, “do you know me?”
Miranda felt a strange surge of empathy.
“Come on,” she said, trying to get a grip on the woman to help her up. “Let’s get you comfortable, then we’ll introduce ourselves. No? Okay.”
Miranda lowered the woman’s head gently against the rug and walked back into the living room. She sat on the sofa so she could see into the hallway, where the woman lay very still, breathing softly. She got up and went into the kitchen and poured herself a straight Scotch, single malt. She sat down again on the sofa, contemplating her guest.
“Can I get you anything?” she called, feeling ridiculous. After a long pause, she added, “If you want to talk, you know.…”
Miranda tried to think clearly. If I wasn’t traumatized by recent events in my life, what would I be doing now? What should I be doing?
She got up and walked closer as a pool of water spread slowly from under the young woman onto the hardwood.
“Oh jeez,” Miranda exclaimed. “You can’t pee there.”
With the strength of propriety, she lifted under the young woman’s torso, hunkered down, swung a limp arm over her own shoulders, and hauled her to the bathroom, the woman’s legs dragging behind, inscribing a wet trail on the floor.
Miranda was shaken. She had been confident the woman was in shock of some sort and would snap out of it. Now she wasn’t so sure. Then she decided the urination wasn’t from poison or drugs but a natural release of the muscles, as if the woman had found safe refuge after a sustained surge of adrenalin and her body relaxed beyond appropriate limits. It could be worse, thought Miranda.
It did not occur to her to call the police; she was the police. It did not even cross her mind to call her partner. This was personal, something she had to deal with herself. That seemed logical at the moment — just the two women, both victims in a baffling and hostile world.
Miranda slid a bath towel under the woman’s body, folded another, and put it under her head. Then she sat down on the floor beside her, leaning against the cool porcelain tub, and drew her knees up against her chest. She reached over and with the back of one hand gently brushed the woman’s blond hair away from her face. Her eyes flickered and for a moment Miranda thought they were beckoning to her, trying to make contact, but they went dull again.
Miranda got up, switched on the heat-lamp and fan, and resumed her position, as if she were keeping vigil. With the overhead on as well, the light in the room was tinged with amber and the rumbling of the fan filled the air with a brittle noise, like wind over dry grass.
The young woman — Miranda could see she was not a girl, she must have been in her mid to late twenties — looked radiant in the amber light, but she lay very still, almost like a corpse on display at a wake, except she was turned to one side and breathing.
Miranda touched her again on the forehead then let her fingers drift over her cheek, finding reassurance in the warmth of her flesh. Miranda stared at the woman’s blue eyes, waiting for a person to appear in their depths, someone who could explain what was happening to both of them.
The web was a last resort. Morgan preferred books for such an inquiry; he wanted to turn the pages of wine books and revel in the graphic design of grapes and landscape among blocks of text in a pleasing variety of fonts. But nothing he owned showed a listing for Baudrillard et fils in Avignon or anywhere else. Nothing for a Châteauneuf-du-Pape called simply that, ChâteauNeuf-du-Pape. He realized in a satisfying small revelation that this might be its name, the Ninth Château; there was no break between Château and Neuf and there was a cap on the N. Or perhaps Neuf simply meant New and was nothing more than an aberrant spelling.
There was nothing on the Net.
This was a quandary not unrelated to the strange death of Philip Carter. It was Carter’s bottle — he had to have bought it somewhere. It must have an origin, however obscure. He thought about Carter’s Lebanese friend and felt a wave of revulsion sweep through his gut, but he could not conjure a connection between the hint of Lebanon in the wine and the man who assaulted Miranda.
Rising from the sofa, Morgan smacked his shin against a painted wood chest he used as an end table. It was precariously stacked with books and magazines so that its dimensions were illusory, and when he hit it a number of them clattered to the floor. While on his hands and knees to retrieve them, the faded black- stencilled lettering caught his eye. S. Sutter, 1789. This was on a field of thick green paint, worn and cracked by time into a lustrous patina.
Morgan paused and ran his fingers over the letters. After his parents died, when he had retrieved the chest from the shed that his mother called the summer kitchen in the home they rented all their lives in old Cabbagetown, he used it to pack the few possessions they had worth keeping, and then only for sentimental value. This was when Cabbagetown was still a slum, before it became urban chic. These were the sole remnants of his childhood among the working poor.
This was also the beginning of his interest in country antiques. When he got the painted pine box home and cleaned it up, he discovered the stencilling. After a bit of research he found it was a woman’s dower chest built in the Niagara Peninsula, probably Welland County, Bertie Township, and that it had belonged to Sarah Sutter, who married Jacob Haun in 1794. The Sutters were Loyalists during the American Revolution. Sa
rah’s father, having served fourteen months imprisonment in New Jersey for his British sympathies before coming to the Niagara area in the summer of 1785, was refused compensation; it was judged that “he had not come within the British lines” during hostilities, but only afterwards in hope of recompense.
Morgan sat back on the floor, staring at the box. Why was he thinking about this? Why was he rehearsing in his mind the facts he had dug up about an antique hope chest?
He trusted his own discursiveness; it sometimes led to intuitive leaps where unlikely connections, once made, would suddenly seem inevitable.
Was it the chest itself, with the traditional bracket base, the rural Pennsylvania Chippendale coping, the austere slab face with its tiny lock opening, the thick, worn paint, or was it Sarah Sutter, whose father established Sutter’s Mill in early Toronto before the American invasion? No, it was Niagara. Something about Niagara.
Morgan got up from the floor and wandered distractedly into his kitchen, where the ChâteauNeuf-du-Pape stood open on the counter. He poured himself two fingers in a brandy snifter and swirled it vigorously, then held it to his nose and inhaled a deep draught of the pungent aroma, redolent with sunbaked soil and ripe fruit.
As he closed his eyes to savour the smell of the wine, wheels clicked into place like a slot machine coming up with a winning set. Lebanon and Niagara, unexpected locales for the origin of fine wines, and a mysterious wine labelled as ChâteauNeuf-du-Pape but not from the Avignon region — these connected.
He had heard of the millions to be made in counterfeit wines but he had never taken the rumours seriously. Not because he did not think such things happened but because it seemed a frivolous crime, relatively harmless to all except those willing to pay exorbitant prices for exquisite small pleasures.
Suddenly, he envisioned Miranda’s assailants as operatives in an international conspiracy of epic malevolence, concerned with illicit wine trade on a major scale.
He knew of a twenty-four hour wine merchant in Rochester who had the best fine wine offerings in the northeast. He called and got an assistant manager who assured him, yes, they did carry ChâteauNeuf-du-Pape, some very good vintages, and could give a reasonable discount by the case, along with a lower invoice, if required, to offset excessive Canadian tariffs.