by Peter Lewis
I had to wander back to the kitchen to find anyone. The woman who greeted me each morning was at work in the kitchen, making an omelet for dinner. She was so pretty, so delicate in her movements, that I considered for a moment asking her to make two. Instead, I asked to settle my bill.
“You are checking out?” she said. “Is there a problem?”
I explained the situation—that I had friends who’d offered me a place to stay, told her that I would pay for the night—and apologized. She turned off the stove.
“It will just take me a moment.”
I drove through the gathering gloom, the high beams bouncing off tree trunks, shattering and multiplying shadows through the vineyards lining the road that twisted and turned as it followed the landscape. Everything was dank, as if the earth had the cold sweats. I slowed as I passed through Auxey-Duresses. There were walls everywhere, and it gave the town a closed-in, nearly suffocating feel, as if the homes, as well as their inhabitants, had turned their backs to me.
As I reached Saint-Romain, I pulled over and took out the scrap of paper on which Rosen had scrawled the directions. I negotiated the narrow streets at a crawl. The house, well lit from the street, had been done up in fake farmhouse style, stuccoed concrete and new black tile.
Monique was sitting on the center island, vamping it up, as I entered. Rosen stood with his back to her, pulling the roasted birds from the oven. Smithson Bayne, meanwhile, was surveying the booty plundered from the tasting, naming each wine at the top of his lungs as he hoisted the bottles from a cardboard case. I said hi, dropped my bag, and set to work building a fire in the enormous fireplace that dominated one corner of the living room.
After we’d finished dinner, Monique threw herself onto the sofa next to me. I could feel her thigh against mine.
“What’s wrong?” she said. “You are sad.”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“Bullshit. Anyway, I accept your apology.”
“What apology?”
“I am not angry. I know you only wanted to protect me. Thank you.” She kissed me on the cheek. “I have a present for you.” She hopped up, ran to the kitchen island, and rummaged through her purse, returning with a tin tastevin. “This is for you. You must come to the tasting tomorrow. It will be fantastic.”
“The tickets are by the front door,” Rosen announced, “on the table. You’re all set.”
“Thanks,” I said to them.
“Promise me you’ll be there.” She waited.
“Yeah, sure. What time are you going?” I said to Rosen.
“I have an appointment first thing in the morning. You’re welcome to come with us. Then we’ll head into town. I like to get there as early as possible. It’s a mob scene.”
We sat there several hours. Rosen railed against Goldoni and his response to the wines. Then he launched into an attack on Kiers and the penchant of critics to lump whole vintages together. I fed the fire two or three times, just to have something to do—the last thing I wanted was to listen to Rosen bitch. Bayne pulled out a bottle of fine de Bourgogne he’d bought at one of the domaines they’d visited, and they started in on that. With some serious juice under his belt, Rosen then went off on the impertinence of Jean Pitot’s showing up at the tasting, demanding they sample a bottle of his wine.
“Who the fuck does he think he is?” Rosen said.
“Richard Wilson’s son,” I said. “Probably thought he had a right.”
Monique fixed me with her eyes and twisted her mouth in reproach, but she seemed reluctant to wade into the incident in Rosen’s presence.
“I wouldn’t believe everything Eric Feldman tells you,” Rosen said.
“Well, if I could just find him, I might be able to figure out what he meant,” I said.
“He’s around,” Rosen said. “He’s just too busy to waste his time on you.”
We regarded each other uneasily.
“Bonne nuit,” I finally said, pulling myself off the sofa and taking my bag.
I was spent. Bayne had dozed off in an easy chair next to the fireplace and was snoring loudly. I excused myself, headed upstairs, and found a loft overlooking the living room with a mattress on the floor. After fifteen or twenty minutes, I could just make out Rosen’s whispered entreaties through the crackling of the fire. He was begging Monique to stay, promising she would love it, swearing he would do anything she wanted.
“I don’t know. I have to be up at dawn to work at the tasting,” she said.
“No, come on. Come downstairs. Stay with me.” I heard him pour another two glasses of the fine de Bourgogne. A moment later, the lights were turned off, and they tiptoed down the carpeted staircase.
23
The next morning I heard the front door close and wandered downstairs. No one else was up. I assumed Monique had taken off to work the public tasting. The kitchen was a disaster: bottles and glasses, bits of chicken carcass, greasy napkins. I did the best I could to tidy up without waking anyone. Just as the coffee I was making sputtered and was done, I heard a knock on the door. It was a little before eight.
Sackheim was standing at the door, backlit by a blinding sun.
“Bonjour.” His uniform was crisply starched. “Ready to get to work? First, you come with me, then I leave you at the tasting.”
I trotted to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. Not a pretty picture. I pulled myself together as quickly as I could, grabbed one of the tickets and programs Rosen had set out and the tastevin Monique had given me, and joined Sackheim.
“If you have time, you must discover the little park. It’s just down the street,” he said as we got in the police car.
He parked in front of a small café on the road that ran through Saint-Romain. “Deux crèmes, s’il vous plaît,” he said to the old guy standing behind the bar. “Et un seul croissant,” he added, pushing a ring of hard-boiled eggs and a saltshaker in front of me. “You look the worse for wear, my friend. Eat something.”
He explained that he’d set his lieutenant to finding out what he could about Jean Pitot, but that our time together now would be spent tracking down Jacques Goldoni.
“It is strange, non? Perhaps Goldoni was in Napa when Wilson was there. Yes, yes, I know about the phone message Feldman left for Wilson. And the calendar with Wilson’s and Goldoni’s itineraries. Lieutenant Ciofreddi told me. But, it is possible, non?”
“But I thought that . . .”
“Yes, I know, you think that Feldman had a motive for killing Wilson. And maybe he did, but he was not in Napa, either, as far as we know. As for Goldoni, je ne sais pas. Maybe he simply wants to, how do you say, ‘clear the field,’ eliminate the competition. First, Monsieur Wilson, and now, Monsieur Feldman.”
“But he’s an oaf.”
“An ‘oaf’?”
“Un crétin.”
“Hah. You should see some of the imbéciles who commit murder. The human heart is a dark mystery, my friend. It is our job to provide . . . illumination.” He swallowed his coffee, plunked three euros on the counter, and led me outside.
We passed through Auxey-Duresses and Pommard, but on the ring road that circled Beaune, he turned off before entering the town. He parked in the lot of the Novotel and smiled.
“But I thought we were . . .”
“Yes, very curious, non? Feldman and Goldoni, they are staying at the same hotel. But did Feldman know this?”
We entered the Novotel lobby, jammed with tourists in town for the Hospices. Sackheim approached the front desk and patiently waited while the same guy who’d hidden from me that first day drew an itinerary for an older British woman on a map of the town. He grew increasingly testy as she asked him to clarify his directions yet one more time.
He rolled his eyes, looking for sympathy as Sackheim approached, but didn’t acknowledge me.
“Oui, Monsieur,” he said, deferentially.
“Je cherche Monsieur Jacques Goldoni,” Sackheim said.
“Oui, Monsieur.
I think Monsieur Goldoni is in the salle à manger. I saw him just a little while ago.” A bit more forthcoming this time around.
“Stay here, if you don’t mind,” Sackheim instructed me. “Hide behind a newspaper. I don’t want him to know you are here.”
I found a copy of the Herald Tribune on a table and positioned myself behind a column. From where I sat, I had a perfect view of Goldoni’s table in a floor-to-ceiling mirror.
The dining room stood off the main lobby. A group clustered at the buffet and turned to stare at the entrance of a gendarme. Goldoni was seated in the corner with a copy of Wine Watcher’s World. Sackheim approached him and waited a moment—Goldoni was lost in the pages of his magazine—before introducing himself. It was impossible at my distance to tell what they were saying. Sackheim appeared to ask a question, Goldoni would answer, Sackheim would pose another. None of Goldoni’s responses seemed very expansive. The interview lasted no more than ten minutes.
Exiting the lobby, Sackheim walked straight past me. I folded the Trib and followed him out.
We sat in the car, our eyes trained on the entrance to the hotel. Sackheim pulled out a small black book and jotted a few notes.
“He says that he had dinner Wednesday evening with Monsieur Rosen. On Thursday he dined with two British importers, and last night he met a winemaker who is trying to get his name before the American public. After dinner he returned to his room. He agreed to provide his schedule so his appointments can be verified. We shall see.”
We drove in silence. As we approached the highway, I could make out the Gothic spire of Saint-Nicolas in the distance rising from the center of Meursault. Flocks of sparrows landed and rose again in the vineyards in unpredictable and ever-changing clouds while crows picked at clusters of shriveled fruit that had been left on the ground to rot. Minivans were parked on the dirt tracks, and workers crouched in the vineyards, paring the vines down to stumps and burning the cuttings in rusted-out wheelbarrows. Fumaroles wafted from the barren rows in the morning light and settled into a low, pungent haze that hugged the hills. I lowered the window. The sweet, acrid smoke scented the air, burning my nostrils and stinging my eyes.
As we headed north from Beaune, I gazed out at the lichen green wash of the ground cover glistening between the rows of vines, the pearlescent skies of Burgundy, the neat hedgerows like sutures on the land, the white of Charolais cattle an absence of color in abstract against the sienna of pruned vines and the dazzling emerald of pastures. The last leaves of the chestnuts feathered the air. Autumn had arrived, and the sere slopes of the côte composed a kaleidoscope of earth tones: umber, ochre, burnt sienna, the blood red burgundy of ivy trained across the raw stone of châteaux, and the gold and carmine spangles of grape leaves, desiccated and frozen in the still light.
Entering the village of Nuits-Saint-Georges, Sackheim parked in front of the gendarmerie.
“Bonjour, Colonel,” the officer on duty greeted him as we entered.
Sackheim was on his own turf, all business. He led me through a door and down a hallway to a small office. A uniformed man sat at a desk, reading what looked like a thick ledger. Sackheim introduced us.
“Lieutenant, our American friend, Monsieur Stern. Lieutenant Georges Ponsard.”
The man nodded, unimpressed, and returned to his work.
“We are digging around, doing a little excavation among the stones of la famille Pitot, searching through the buried foundations.” Sackheim paused, then said, “On y va.”
“I came out here the night before last,” I said as we crossed the highway to the east side of Nuits.
“Chez Pitot? Vraiment?” Sackheim said, glancing at me. “With what purpose?”
“I’m not sure. I wanted to go back after seeing it the day before. I walked around to the back of the house.”
“You trespassed?”
“Yeah, I guess I did,” I said.
Sackheim smiled. “Do not be concerned. I am not going to arrest you, but it was not wise.” He paused. “What did you learn?”
“Wait till you see the place. It’s a real dump. Anyway, Jean’s mother was in the kitchen, making dinner for her husband. She was just going off on him.”
“What does this mean, ‘going off’?”
“Screaming, shouting. She was out of control.”
“Screaming about what?”
“Sorry, my French isn’t that good. And I wasn’t that close, anyway. He just sat there, taking it.”
“It is too bad. It would be interesting to know what she said.”
“This is it,” I said as we pulled astride of the house.
Sackheim parked in front of the fence.
“In English we say, ‘Born on the wrong side of the tracks,’” I remarked.
“Précisement,” he said.
We crossed the near ground, and I glanced over to the carport. The diminutive work vehicle was gone.
Sackheim knocked on the door, and we stood there. A moment later Jean’s mother opened the door. When she saw me, her jaw tightened, then she looked back to the policeman, a trace of fear playing across her features.
“Madame Françoise Pitot?” Sackheim said.
“Oui,” she said, looking past him, her eyes fixed on mine.
“I am Émile Sackheim, colonel in the gendarmerie, Compagnie de Beaune. I am looking for your son, I believe: Jean Pitot.”
“He is not here.”
“Do you know where we can find him?”
“He is working. He is at the public tasting today.”
“Ah, oui. And where does he work, Madame?”
“Domaine Carrière,” she said, returning her attention to Sackheim. He and I exchanged looks.
“But he lives here?” the colonel asked.
“Oui.”
“May we come in?”
She opened the door.
“Jean worked at a winery in Napa Valley this last summer?” Sackheim said.
“Yes.”
“An American wine writer, Richard Wilson, was murdered while he was there,” he said.
“Yes, he told me,” she said.
“Did he tell you anything else about what happened during his stay there? Or about the crime itself?”
“Of the crime, nothing. He wasn’t there. He had gone to visit my daughter—his sister—when it happened.”
“Has Monsieur Wilson ever visited your domaine, Madame? Did he ever review your wines?”
She snorted, an explosion of air that dismissed the question as absurd.
“Is your husband at home?” Sackheim inquired.
“He is downstairs, I think. Would you like me to find him?”
“If you don’t mind.”
She walked slowly back to the kitchen and opened a door, calling into the depths below, “Henri!” She turned to face us. “Go on. He’s downstairs.”
We passed through the kitchen, which I had seen only from the distance of the vineyard out back. It matched the state of neglect and decrepitude prevalent throughout the house. Frayed rugs inadequately masked the cracked linoleum floor. The pots and pans hanging from iron pegs on the walls looked as if they hadn’t been scrubbed in years. A stack of dishes tipped precariously in the diminutive stone sink, the spigot marking time in a regular drip that ticked off the seconds that had added up to years of slow but ineluctable despair.
I steadied myself against the wall as I followed Sackheim down the rickety steps to the basement. The subterranean portion of the house was, if possible, even more depressing than the living quarters, which at least saw some sunlight each day. Metal racks held makeshift shelves of dusty bottles obscured by cobwebs, an off-white mold sprouting from their corks and spreading down their necks. Three rooms snaked irregularly one to another, their gloomy confines illuminated by a single bare lightbulb that dangled from an exposed wire in the central space. We picked our way, stepping precariously on raw planks that protected us from the floor, part dirt, part rotting wood. The place stank of filth and yeast, musty wi
ne and decay.
A man straightened himself from his stooped position. He was large, ponderous, his face etched with stubble. He wore tall rubber work boots over a pair of faded, muddy blue jeans and a thick, poorly patched sweater. He peered at us from a pair of watery, bloodshot eyes.
“Bonjour, Messieurs,” he said in a surprisingly hearty voice, its edges scratched by years of cigarette smoke and what I suspected was a predilection for marc de Bourgogne. “You are here to taste?” His eyes lightened perceptibly.
“We are looking for your son,” Sackheim said.
“Ach!” he muttered, flicking his hand in disgust. “That fucking idiot. He’s useless. Works at Carrière, when he could have his own property. Kids nowadays. They don’t know what it means to work, really work, like we did in the old days. What does he think? That I’m just going to give it to him? No fucking way. He’s got to pay.”
“So, I presume that it was Monsieur Carrière who arranged his stage in Napa, and not you yourself?”
“Fucking Carrière,” the man cursed.
“Do you know where Jean is now?” Sackheim asked.
“I never see him. He’s out till all hours, leaves at the crack of dawn. Sometimes he sleeps till noon. I can’t keep track of him. He’s a waste. He should have taken after his sister. At least she made something of herself.”
“Domaine Carrière? Do you think he’s there now? Your wife said that he’s to be pouring wine at la dégustation publique.”
“How should I know?” Pitot suddenly shouted. “Go ask Carrière! Why waste your questions on me?”