Dead in the Dregs

by Peter Lewis

  “I don’t know. Jacques Goldoni’s going to be there. If you know him, you could give him a call.”

  “Goldoni? Well, that settles it. Can’t do it. And I wouldn’t want to, even if I could.”

  “Tough luck,” I said.

  “Well, bonne dégustation!”

  He left me to the last swallow of my coffee. Returning to my room, I called Colonel Sackheim. He picked up on the first ring.

  “Oui, Sackheim.”

  “Colonel, this is Babe Stern.”

  “Ah, Monsieur. How goes the investigation?”

  “I can’t seem to find Eric Feldman. Not since Freddy Rosen, an American importer, and I met him Wednesday morning at a domaine in Nuits-Saint-Georges. I swung by his hotel last night—the Novotel, just outside the walls of Beaune—but he hadn’t picked up his messages. I have no idea where he is.”

  “Well, he is a busy person. He races from one domaine to another.”

  “That’s true, but I saw a couple vignerons yesterday who seemed pretty upset that he hadn’t arrived for appointments he had scheduled with them.”

  “Curious,” Sackheim said.

  “Yes, but there’s more. After a tasting with Rosen the day before yesterday, I went to find Jean Pitot. I had two addresses, one for an Henri and a second for Gilbert Pitot. But Henri is Jean’s father. They live on the edge of Nuits-Saint-Georges. Rue Cussigny, by the railroad tracks.”

  “Yes, I know where this is,” Sackheim said.

  “Pitot was there, still asleep. I met his mother.”

  “And? What did you learn from him?”

  “Not much. He said he had to come back home to help with the harvest.”

  “Naturally,” Sackheim said with a certain impatience.

  “But he doesn’t work with his father. After lunch Wednesday, I picked up where I’d last seen Feldman, at Collet-Favreau, and then went on to Domaine Trenet, where he’d said he was going next. But he was long gone, and I couldn’t get a thing out of Trenet, so I went back to question Claudine Collet-Joubert. She suggested that I drop by Domaine Carrière, in Chambolle. It was just a hunch she had, knowing Feldman.”

  “Yes. And?” the colonel said testily.

  “I ran into Jean Pitot at Carrière. He was topping off barrels.”

  “So, Pitot, he works there?”

  “Yeah, absolutely.”

  “Et alors?” was all Sackheim said.

  “That’s not all. As I was leaving, some barrels broke loose.”

  “The barrels, they fell, in the cave?” he said.

  “They must have come loose. One almost took me out at the knees.” There was a silence. “Colonel, are you there?”

  “Oui, I am here. I am thinking.” He paused. “You suspect Pitot?”

  “Sure, don’t you? I mean, it’s possible that they just broke loose, that it was just a coincidence,” I said.

  “Possible? Oui, c’est possible, mais—you are correct, the probability . . .” Sackheim was quiet again.

  “Feldman told me that Richard Wilson has a child here, an illegitimate child. A French child.” Silence again. “Colonel?” I said.

  “And you think . . .”

  “If Pitot is Wilson’s son, and Wilson refused to acknowledge him, a lot of things begin to make sense.”

  “What are you doing today?” he asked.

  “Attending une grande dégustation at Domaine Gauffroy.”

  “And you are going to this tasting why?” he said.

  “Jacques Goldoni’s going to be there. I still haven’t had a chance to find out what he knows.”

  “So, you are out of commission today, non?”

  “Je le regrette. You could do a favor for me.”

  “And what is that?”

  “See if you can find Feldman. If that isn’t a problem.”

  “No, it is no problem. I think we have enough to make an inquiry, at least.”

  “I’ll call you after I get back,” I said.

  “Bon. À bientôt.”

  “Thanks,” I told him.

  Talking to Sackheim made me want to call Ciofreddi to tell him that I’d found Pitot, about what had happened at Carrière, and that I suspected he was Wilson’s son—a vengeful bastard driven to kill the father who refused to accept him—but it was one in the morning in Napa. It would have to wait.

  21

  Domaine Gauffroy was housed in a thirteenth-century Cistercian abbey opposite a church. The setting, improbably grand and beautiful, finally obscured the boundary between wine and religion. If Pinot Noir was worshipped anywhere, this was it.

  Cars were lined up side by side in a parking area, and I saw Rosen’s Peugeot. I proceeded through a small courtyard and entered a massive, heavily timbered door. In the anteroom, pieces of plywood had been laid out on trestles, the table running some fifty feet in length and draped with pink damask cloths. I surveyed the room, all stone and timber. Stained-glass windows, recessed in oblique niches and depicting scenes of the harvest, lined the wall behind the tables. Opposite the wine, a woman I assumed was Gauffroy’s wife, assisted by the wives of the other vignerons, busied herself setting out platters of fruit and cheese and charcuterie, baskets of bread, paper plates, and napkins. The place was bustling. Smithson Bayne was randomly opening cases of wine across the enormous flagstones, and I saw Rosen talking with his producers about the arrangement of the bottles in an appropriate order.

  Roland Joubert was the only vigneron I recognized. The winemakers—some twenty in all—comprised a bizarre and opaque pecking order, and, predictably, most of them appeared put out by their placement on the table. Another two dozen people—assistants, children, friends—were circulating around the periphery of the room, where giant spittoons had been strategically placed.

  I wandered, looking at the pictorial windows. In one a woman stooped over a vine, harvesting bunches of grapes. In another a vigneron stood at an antique wine press. In a third two laborers were bent over barren vines, pruning shears in their outstretched hands. So little has changed, I thought. Here I am, standing where peasants delivered their tithes eight centuries ago, and here they are again, offering up the fruits of their labor to that great, implacable deity, Commerce.

  Goldoni now arrived, full of bluster, slapping the winemakers on the back, kissing their wives, prattling on in his enviably idiomatic French. The throng seemed to distance itself from him, the members’ expressions ranging from the intimidated to the merely wary. Maybe it wasn’t a god at all they were hoping to appease, but the self-appointed priest who would pass judgment, consigning them to their annual heaven or hell, an arbiter of taste who pretended to a convivial commonness but, in fact, lorded it over all of them.

  Goldoni dawdled, stuffing himself with morsels of jambon persillé, baguette, and fromage, while the winemakers milled about, supplicants awaiting their appointed turns. Finally he assumed his position at a small table in an interior cellar. I was hoping to join them there, but Rosen waved me off. Too bad. I wasn’t sure how or when I’d get a chance to confront Goldoni—undoubtedly, the opportunity would present itself later in the day—but I’d wanted to observe him up close, not from a neutral distance.

  The tasting commenced unceremoniously. Rosen ascended the three steps from the lower cave—impeccably laid out with oak barrels lined along the walls and down its center—and asked the first winemaker to step down.

  This was the cue for the tasting to begin, and the winemakers, their guests, and hangers-on slowly made their way to the long table in the common room, randomly or systematically as they chose, pouring an ounce or two of wine, and drifting back to sip, spit, and gossip. The older vignerons stood singly or in pairs, shuffling their feet, isolated and silent, while the young winemakers clustered together and were generous with their opinions and toward each other, joking and talking. Bayne stood in a corner, isolated by his lack of fluency in French, and would occasionally saunter up to the table to pour himself a sip of the wines in which he was interested.


  I nonchalantly approached the entrance to the cellar where Goldoni and Rosen stood, making my way down the length of the table as I counted the bottles. One hundred six wines. I’d been to my fair share of trade tastings set up in the ballroom of some fancy hotel or spread across the concrete slab of a distributor’s warehouse, the banquet tables chockablock with bottles, spit buckets, and loose-leaf wine labels fanned like calling cards, but this, I told myself, was a preposterous exercise.

  It wouldn’t result in a handful of restaurant or retail orders but rather would determine the fate of the domaine internationally for the next year, maybe two. Village wine, premier and grand cru red Burg from every imaginable appellation: Givry and Mercurey from the Chalonnaise; Volnay, Pommard, Ladoix, and Savigny from the Côte de Beaune; Nuits-Saint-Georges, Vosne-Romanée, Vougeot, Chambolle-Musigny, Morey-Saint-Denis, and Gevrey-Chambertin from the Côte de Nuits. Each vigneron was represented by four, five, or six bottles from their chosen appellations, three of each on display to cover the crowd, nearly twenty-plus winemakers in all. Who could possibly taste so much exquisite juice and keep track of what he was doing?

  It was clear by the sequence of bottles that the lush, opulent wines from the northern villages were favored. Their placement on the table conveyed an implicit message by which the importer was already signaling the critic, pointing him toward a final verdict.

  It was exactly the sort of exercise I’d begun to loathe in my last years as a sommelier. I’d realized well before his death that I’d come to resent my brother-in-law’s arrogance and power far more than I could ever admit. Now Goldoni had stepped into Richard’s shoes—he was, in fact, wearing a pair of Mephistos that looked just like the ones I’d seen in the closet at the apartment they shared.

  The tasting quickly fell into a pattern, no winemaker spending more than ten or fifteen minutes within the inner sanctum. “Comment allez-vous?” Goldoni could be heard bellowing from the lower room. “How did you do this year? Have you overcome your faults with the last vintage? I would like to treat you well, but . . .” and he would pause dramatically, taking his first sip, self-importantly swishing the wine. Each winemaker was on the hot seat, forced to launch into excuses, attempting to defend his decisions and trying to justify what, it had to be admitted, was a less than perfect expression of what he’d hoped to attain.

  “The flowering went well. The summer was hot. The grapes ripened in good form. The crop was generous. I dropped fruit in July and all was going well. Then, of course, it rained. The first week of September . . .” Every explanation sounded like an admission that the vigneron himself had sinned, that owing to his own faults or failures, the weather had acted to punish him. How else could it have happened that the wine had failed to achieve its full potential?

  “Eh bien, you did the best you could, under the circumstances.” Goldoni sounded merciful, as if he had the power to forgive the misdeeds of the poor sinner and explain away the mightier and irrevocable actions of an unforgiving and merciless deity. My stomach churned at this ritual groveling—or was it the acid in the infantile juice that gurgled in my belly?—and I drifted off.

  As the morning wore on, sunlight filtered through the cut pieces of aquamarine, gold, and garnet glass, refracted across the pitted stone floor in distorted and illegible splashes, and splintered against the pink tablecloths, each fragment tinted a light rosé. Corks littered the trestle tables. The bottles stood in silent ranks, shedding their blood for a higher cause drop by drop. The tasters sipped, slurped, sucked, swished, slowly drifted to the spittoons that sat on upended barrels, and expertly shot thin streams of wine past each other’s ears to the center of plastic funnels.

  When his name was called by Rosen, the vigneron would break into a sweat like a kid called to the principal’s office, exchange sympathetic looks with his comrades, and proceed to the fate that awaited him.

  I walked outside. In the brilliant light, finches flitted from the eaves of the abbey, and mourning doves cooed plaintively in the towering cedars. The church bell chimed again. A dog barked at the arrival of each intruder, real or imagined. One real one was Monique, who pulled up in her battered Fiat. We kissed on both cheeks—the usual, insignificant greeting—verveine scenting the air.

  “What happened last night?” I asked.

  “We need to talk,” she said, “but I must go in. I’m already late.”

  “I’ll catch up with you in a little while,” I told her. She smiled as she disappeared inside. Was she being suggestive, provocative, mysterious? I couldn’t tell.

  In the distance, trucks could be heard running north and south between Paris and Lyon. High overhead, twin Mirages drew vapor trails crisscrossing heaven.

  I went back in and lingered by the door, eavesdropping as best I could. Monique had joined them in the lower cellar, and I watched her flirt with Goldoni and Rosen, turning first to one, then the other, listening, sipping, taking issue with their running commentary. Both men quickly strove to impress her. “Bon nez!” “La fraîcheur !” “Quelle couleur!” The standard banalities I’d been accustomed to hearing in my former life.

  Goldoni sensed me at the doorway. His nonchalance seemed forced. Business as usual, but with an edge. It bugged me. I pretended not to see him, at the same time wondering if he could have had anything to do with Feldman’s disappearance. His mentor had been murdered, and his main competitor was nowhere to be found. Why wasn’t he scared? I was.

  Everyone, including Bayne, had started in on the food. I assembled a plate of ham and cheese and a bunch of grapes and headed outside for another break. I sat in the courtyard on a stone ledge in the shade. A light breeze rustled a flowering plum that stood at the center of the courtyard. Swallows swooped, gulping insects in violent arcs, and a butterfly careened against invisible barriers above a patch of grass—the manic pattern language of the natural world against which man plays out his own sordid little dramas, I thought to myself.

  The tasting wore on into the afternoon. I wandered up and down the table, sampling randomly. Even though I spat religiously, the wine began to seep into my bloodstream. I felt sodden and sluggish. Sometime after two, Pitot’s mother showed up. She was poorly dressed and carried a terrine wrapped in tin foil. From what I could see, the other wives shunned her, whispering and smirking behind her back. I couldn’t tell if they resented the late hour of her arrival or the fact that she’d shown up at all. Her presence struck even me as odd. Rosen had nothing to do with Domaine Pitot. Nonetheless, Gauffroy’s wife dutifully made a place for her contribution. Still, no one touched the food she’d brought.

  I decided to take another break, and as I passed her, Madame Pitot beckoned me, encouraging me to sample her dish.

  “Bonjour, Monsieur,” she said. “Please try my pâté de campagne. It’s an old family recipe.” Her knife was poised and ready.

  “No, thank you, I’ve eaten. Maybe later,” I said politely. Then I wandered outside, crossing the yard to examine the church and have a cigarette. I could see a young man in the parking area at the far corner of the abbey who was waving his arm and arguing vehemently. I walked a little farther, merely to see to whom he was talking. The scene was dreamlike, weird: No one was there. As I crossed back to return to the tasting, the figure I’d been watching heard my footsteps on the gravel and turned suddenly. It was Jean Pitot. He held a bottle of wine in his other hand and had a peculiar look on his face. I did a lousy job of disguising my shock.

  “What are you doing here?” was all I could get out.“I just saw your mother.”

  “Il fait beau aujourd’hui,” he said. “A beautiful day.” His smile was offset by the light in his twitching eyes, which were focused on nothing. The effect disturbed me.

  “You following me?” I said.

  “Why would I?” he said. “C’est bizarre, ça.”

  “You tell me. Why did you try to crush me in the cellar the other day? Was that you behind me in the car? What the fuck is going on?”

  Pito
t backed up, slowly at first, then turned and ran toward the abbey. People were mingling in the courtyard, eating and visiting and smoking. They ignored him as he entered the doors, which had been thrown open. I followed him inside.

  He stopped at the food table, and the women stopped what they were doing, watching him. He and his mother were staring at each other. They seemed engaged in intense conversation without saying a word. The tension was palpable. No one knew what to do.

  Pitot broke off from his mother, and as he walked the length of the tasting room, the vignerons all stopped talking, glancing at each other nervously. He hesitated at the threshold of the lower cellar, Bayne following some ten feet behind him as if sensing trouble. Rosen, suddenly aware of the hush that had fallen on the adjoining room, looked up, and Goldoni stopped midsentence. Monique appeared panic-stricken. Then Pitot bounded down the steps.

  “You have to taste my wine,” he shouted at Goldoni.

  “I . . .” Goldoni stammered and turned to Rosen.

  “Who the hell are you, barging in here like this? I don’t even know who you are,” Rosen said.

  “Je m’appelle Jean Pitot. I am a vigneron, too,” Pitot said, gesturing to the winemaker standing between Rosen and Goldoni who just stared, slack-jawed.

  “I’m sorry. Everybody here works with me. I’m their importer,” Rosen said. “It’s not an open tasting. You can’t just walk in here and make a demand like that.”

  Smithson Bayne stepped down into the cellar, positioning himself between Pitot and Rosen, looking to Freddy for a signal to eject the young interloper.

  “But I want him to taste it,” Pitot said, pointing to Goldoni. “I brought it especially.”

  “I couldn’t care less,” Rosen said in English. Then, dropping back into French, he added, “It’s not possible. I won’t allow it.”

  Pitot took a few steps up from the floor of the cave and turned back. “Trou du cul!” he shouted.

  “Fuck off!” Rosen retorted.