The Critic ef-2

by Peter May

  ‘There’s a standard reply to that.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘There’s nothing worn under my kilt. It’s all in perfectly good working order.’

  She grinned. ‘Which doesn’t answer the question.’

  He straightened up and looked at her very directly. ‘You really want to know?’

  She nodded. ‘I do.’

  He looked down at the floor with a sense of resignation, then up again to meet her eye. Somehow they had got very close, and he could smell her perfume rising on the heat of her body. He let his hands slide over smooth silk until they cupped her buttocks, and he pulled her towards him. She moved her hands behind his head and undid the ribbon to release his hair, and her robe fell open. Full breasts swung free. He dipped his head to kiss the hollow at the base of her neck, and as his hair tumbled across his shoulders to brush her skin, she shivered. ‘You’ll have to promise never to tell a soul.’

  ‘I promise.’ Her voice was a whisper.

  ‘Because, you know, it’s a national secret. I could be hanged from the gibbet at Edinburgh Castle.’ He moved his mouth across all the curves and angles of her face, peppering it with kisses until he found her lips and then her tongue, and he pushed himself hard against her belly.

  She moaned, and drew her head back, breathing in short bursts. ‘I thought you weren’t going to be my occasional sleeping partner.’ His own words came back to him with the full force of her irony and his regret.

  But libido had triumphed over lonely. The tumescence between his legs told him he had gone beyond the point of no return. ‘I won’t tell anyone if you don’t.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  I

  It was the humiliation that had robbed him of his fear. The girls in uniform giggling behind the Air France desk at Charles de Gaulle airport. His embarrassment. Was there a problem? And when they’d shown him his ticket, he saw the misprint- Mrs Enzo Macleod — they had fallen into fresh paroxysms of laughter, looking pointedly at his kilt. What else would you call a man in a skirt but Mrs?

  And so he had passed through airport security in a fug of mortification, almost forgetting that the slightest misstep could lead him to a police cell somewhere, a full body search, awkward questions that he couldn’t answer.

  Now, with the drone of jet engines filling his head, and a coach class seat too small for his big frame, he tried with difficulty to make himself comfortable for the long hours that lay ahead. He opened his eyes at the sound of clinking bottles, and found a pretty air hostess smiling at him. The twinkle of amusement in her eyes made him think that she, too, was probably in on the joke. He glowered at her. ‘Whisky,’ he said. ‘No ice. Water. In fact, make it a double.’

  ***

  The immigration hall was busy. Several flights had landed within half an hour of each other. Lines of travellers, accustomed to delays, stood patiently waiting to be called forward by humourless immigration officers. Enzo was clutching the forms he had filled in on the flight promising that he wasn’t a terrorist, or a Nazi war criminal, or someone with recidivist tendencies. He wondered if anyone ever admitted they were. He was happy to fill his mind with anything that would stop him thinking about what could happen in the next few minutes. He drew a deep breath and felt it trembling in his chest. A film of cold sweat pricked his forehead. He stepped up to the yellow line. He was next. As he glanced around, he was aware of people looking at him. The kilt, of course. He kept forgetting. Men in skirts were not a common sight in the United States.

  ‘Next!’

  Enzo looked up to see the officer signalling him forward to the desk. He was a large man with a shaven head. He wore a white shirt with sleeves rolled up and took Enzo’s passport in big hands. He looked at it carefully, then at Enzo, then passed it through a code scanner. There was an electronic fingerprint reader on the counter, and the officer said, ‘Put your right finger on the pad.’

  Enzo looked at his hands and frowned. Then looked at the immigration man. ‘My right finger?’

  The officer gave him a dark look. ‘Your right finger,’ he repeated slowly.

  Enzo’s confusion persisted. ‘I’m sorry, which finger’s my right finger?’

  The look darkened. ‘The index finger of your right hand.’ It was clear he suspected insolence.

  ‘Oh, right.’ Enzo laughed nervously and held up his right index finger. ‘ Right finger.’ He pressed it on to the electronic reader to register his fingerprint.

  ‘Purpose of your visit?’

  Enzo felt a sudden, irrational panic. ‘Em…a holiday.’

  The immigration officer tipped his head and narrowed his eyes. ‘What holiday?’

  Enzo looked back at him, mystified. And then light dawned. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Not a holy day.’ He remembered suddenly what Americans called it. ‘A vacation. That’s what you say, isn’t it?’

  By this time the immigration officer had obviously concluded that Enzo was insane. He sighed, shoved the green entry card inside his passport and thrust it back across the counter. He regarded Enzo thoughtfully for a moment, and then something almost like a smile appeared in his eyes. ‘You’re a varr,’ he said.

  Enzo felt panic returning. ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘You’re a varr.’

  Enzo knew he was not a stupid man, but however many times he processed this statement he could make no sense of it. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean.’

  The amusement melted away from the man’s eyes, to be replaced by an irritation reflected in his voice. ‘Yo-ra-varr.’

  And suddenly Enzo heard it. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘ Au revoir! You’re speaking French. Because I’ve come from Paris.’ He grinned. ‘Only, I’m not French. I’m Scottish.’

  The immigration man looked down at the kilt, and looked up again, a looming certainty in his eyes that all Scotsmen were probably insane. After all, they wore skirts, didn’t they? He flicked his head. He’d had enough. Enzo was dismissed.

  Enzo walked across the concourse to the luggage carousel with legs like jelly. How could he have been so stupid? He was attracting all the wrong kind of attention to himself. And he knew the worst was yet to come.

  He retrieved his suitcase after a short wait and began the impossibly long walk through the customs hall towards the gate marked “Nothing to Declare”. Customs officers stood at desks watching everyone as they passed with darting, suspicious eyes. They always made Enzo feel guilty, even when he really had nothing to declare. Today all eyes were turned in his direction.

  A woman with large breasts, barely constrained by the navy blue uniform blouse tucked into her trousers, signalled him to stop. She had a US customs badge on one breast, a name tag on the other. She was Enzo’s age, perhaps older, wiry ginger hair piled up and held in place by clasps. She had a granite face and unblinking blue eyes.

  ‘Good day, sir. Would you lift your bag on to the counter top?’

  ‘Sure.’ Enzo tried to be casual. But his heart had pushed up into his throat and was nearly choking him.

  ‘Open it, please.’

  He unzipped the case and threw back the lid. His clothes had been disturbed, unpacked and rearranged. There was a printed sheet tucked into the containing belt informing him that his bag had been opened and searched by officers of the Transport Security Administration. The customs lady looked at the case, then signalled Enzo to move closer. She leaned towards him confidentially.

  ‘Don’t worry, sir. I only stopped you because…well, I always wanted to ask.’ An unexpected smile split the granite. ‘Are you, you know, regimental under there?’

  Enzo frowned. ‘Regimental?’

  Her smile became coy. ‘You know. You wearing anything under the skirt?’

  And Enzo had a sudden memory of the night before, the sweet smell and touch of Charlotte in the dark. His apprehension dissolved, confidence returning. He gave the customs lady his best eye contact and smiled back. ‘If you want to give me your number, maybe we could arrange a private viewing.’


  She flushed with pleasure and was hardly able to stifle a giggle. ‘You’d better get out of here before I drag you next door for a body search.’

  It was with an enormous sense of relief that Enzo saw Al MacConchie waiting for him on the other side of the barrier. He hadn’t laid eyes on him in over twenty-five years and was shocked by how he had aged. He was still tall and thin, though slightly stooped now, his boyish good looks long vanished. Most of his hair had gone, too, but still grew in reasonable abundance around the sides, where he had pulled it back and tied it behind his head in a silvery knot. It looked more like a little, curly pig’s tail, than Enzo’s thick, bushy ponytail. But he looked prosperous and suntanned, casual in baggy jeans, chequered cotton shirt, and tennis shoes. One leg of his sunglasses was hooked over the top button of his shirt. He thrust a bony hand into Enzo’s and grinned. ‘Jees man, what happened to you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You were such an ugly boy. Must have grown into your looks.’

  ‘Cheeky bastard.’

  ‘And what’s with the kilt, Magpie? We’d better get you out of here fast. You’ll be turning heads. Most of them male. This is San Francisco, after all.’ He grinned and relieved Enzo of his hand luggage and let him wheel his suitcase across the concourse himself. ‘Couldn’t you get a connecting flight to Sacramento?’

  Enzo shook his head. He had only wanted the stress of going through security one time. ‘Afraid not.’

  ‘Man, it was a three hour drive down here. You’re going to have to get yourself a rental on the way back.’

  Enzo noticed how MacConchie hadn’t fully lost his Scottish accent. Nor had he fully adopted an American one. It lingered somewhere in mid-Atlantic. ‘I appreciate it, Al, I really do.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it. The gasoline’s going on your bill.’ There was a shuttle bus waiting out front. ‘It’s just a five minute ride to the parking lot.’

  They headed south and west to the Burlingame airport parking lot on the 101, spectacular views across the Bay off to their left, afternoon sun coruscating across diamond blue water liberally sprinkled with the white sails of myriad small boats. It seemed extraordinary to Enzo that he had left Paris midmorning, had flown for more than eleven and a half hours, and it was still just early afternoon in San Francisco. Fatigue, he knew, would catch up with him quickly.

  The shuttle dropped them at MacConchie’s car and Enzo put his bags in the trunk. They sat inside and MacConchie turned the key in the ignition. Then he turned and looked at his old friend from university and cocked his head. ‘You got the samples with you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Man, you must have moved mountains to get the paperwork through this fast.’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  MacConchie frowned. ‘Well, how’d you get them through customs?’

  Enzo grinned and lifted up his kilt to reveal an underskirt of plastic sample bags strung together with thin plastic cord. ‘I’m always getting asked what I wear under there, but no one ever dares to look.’

  II

  Sonoma was a small town of one and two storey buildings in brick and clapboard siding at the southern end of one of the most famous wine-growing valleys in California. It was a town of church spires and picket fences and a population of just over nine thousand. Its tree-filled downtown square had once been the sacred meeting ground of the Pomo and Miwok Indians.

  ‘Home of the last mission in California,’ MacConchie said. ‘It was the Franciscan monks in the missions who laid the foundations for wine growing in California, you know. They planted and cultivated the first vines, though it was mostly brandy and fortified wines they made back then.’

  He turned along Napa Street on the south side of the square and headed west until they reached Sixth Street, and he took a right and pulled into a parking lot in front of a low, single-storey building. A large sign planted in the lawn read “OENOPHILES INC.”

  MacConchie said, ‘Of course, the Americans don’t know how to spell. When I first had the sign painted, I had to have to the guy come back and put an “O” in the front of it.’

  Enzo sipped on a mug of stewed, watery coffee and wondered how people could drink it like this. He had taken the wine sample from the bottle of aftershave in his toilet bag, and MacConchie had put it in a refrigerator in the lab. Then he had removed his underskirt of soil samples to pile them up on a table by the window in MacConchie’s office. A G5 Macintosh computer on a worktop next to it ran constant checks on incoming e-mail. MacConchie leaned his elbows on a desk devoid of papers, his own reflection looking back at him from polished wood, and said, ‘People think I’m a heretic because I don’t go for all this flavour wheel, cherry-berry bullshit. Wine is science. What we consider good, we can quantify scientifically.’

  ‘How?’ Enzo was curious.

  MacConchie grinned. ‘Trade secret.’

  ‘Aw, come on, Al. It’s me you’re talking to.’

  ‘You know, Magpie, I’ve got nearly a hundred clients paying me fifty grand a time to share my secret. You got that kind of money?’ Enzo did the calculation, and MacConchie enjoyed the expression that wrote itself across his face. ‘Come a long way from the east-end of Glasgow, huh?’

  ‘How in God’s name did you get involved in the wine business, anyway, Al?’

  MacConchie shook his head. ‘Never meant to, Magpie. Came out here with a degree in chemistry looking for a job in industry. Ended up working one summer at a winery painting barrels with mildicide and stayed on for the crush.’

  ‘The crush?’

  ‘The vendange you guys call it. The harvest. Anyway, that’s where the interest started. I went back to university, did a PhD, and got myself involved in a discipline called chemical ecology, which studies the interrelation of environment and plant biochemistry. That led me to some research already done by the Japs and others into the chemistry of grapes. Ended up sifting through the hundreds of chemical compounds you’ll find in fermented grape juice. You know, tannins, phenols, norisoprenoids, that kind of stuff. Identified eighty-four of them that comprise those flavours, and smells, and colours that make wine special. Thirty-two in reds and fifty-two in whites. Put them together in the right quantities and you’ll end up making wine that’s going to get a ninety score or better from Parker or the Wine Spectator. Or an A or B from Petty in his day.’

  ‘But how do you do that? How do you know what makes a great wine?’

  MacConchie smiled. ‘Easy. Choose one that everyone agrees is great, like a 2003 Petrus Pomerol, and take it apart, molecule by molecule. Once you know its chemical profile, it’s not so hard to recreate it.’

  Enzo shook his head in wonder. ‘That would be anathema in France.’

  ‘Sure. They make great wines there because they have hundreds of years of tradition and experience behind them. Plus great terroir. And, hey, I’m not one of those that thinks terroir’s not important. The weather, the temperature, the lie of the land, the chemistry of the soil.’ He waved a hand at Enzo’s “underskirt” lying on the table. ‘Those samples you brought. Each and every one of them will produce a different wine from the same grape. I’m just using science and technology to achieve the same effect.’ He grinned. ‘You know what the main difference is between any one of my clients and a French wine producer? The French guy’s driving a tractor. My guy’s driving a Porsche.’

  ‘You’re still not letting me into the secret.’

  ‘Hey, Magpie, a secret’s a secret. But I’ll tell you this much, it’s mostly about number-crunching. Facts, figures, statistics.’ He nodded towards his computer. ‘They’re all in there. In the database. Most winemakers decide when to harvest the grape by using a hydrometer to measure sugar content. You know when the hydrometer was invented? 1768. Shit, man, talk about old technology! My clients send me their grapes once a week. I crush them, process them, run them through a liquid-liquid chromatograph connected to a spectrometer that feeds direct into my computer. And they get
to pick their grapes at the moment of perfection. It’s not a judgment call; it’s science.

  ‘And, you know, it doesn’t stop there. Once it’s in the barrel, I run tests at regular intervals. Wines are hard to taste in the early days, but I can measure the key compounds, and can make a quality judgment from the facts and figures in my database. We can then make virtual blends between barrels and run the figures through the computer to see how they’ll taste. That way, you don’t actually have to mix the wine until you know it’s going to be good.’

  He laughed. ‘I had dinner with a client the other week. He produced a bottle of his best wine. I told him I would be really interested to taste it. I’d only ever tried it on my computer screen.’ He leaned confidentially across his desk. ‘These wine critics… Petty, Parker and the rest. They’re so goddamned predictable. I say to them, this is what you like? Okay this is what I’ll make. In a blind tasting I’ll predict nine times out of ten the score they’re going to give. And do you know what kind of power that gives me, Magpie? It’s like knowing today what a stock’ll do tomorrow. It’s inside info.’

  And Enzo thought of the lengths that Petty had gone to just to keep his ratings secret. Of the alchemy that Laurent de Bonneval had talked about at Chateau Saint-Michel when Enzo first arrived in Gaillac. MacConchie was exploding it all. The myths, the mysticism, and two thousand years of tradition. His secret for success was a marriage of Silicon and Napa Valleys; his wines constructed from the building blocks of molecules. And Enzo couldn’t help but wonder if in all this science, the fundamental human component might be missing. The instinct, flair, and sophistry of which Bonneval had spoken. That element impossible to define by maths or science-the personality of the winemaker.

  But he said none of this to MacConchie. There was no point. Whatever it was he was doing, it was working for him. A hundred clients on his books and a turnover of five million a year. A lifestyle that a boy from a housing scheme in Glasgow’s deprived east-end could hardly have dared to dream of. He’d had a brain, and used it. Enzo regarded him thoughtfully across the desk, and couldn’t help but admire him. They’d both come a long way in the thirty years since they’d first met. And very different paths had led them, strangely, to meet again in this place in the heart of California wine country, thousands of miles and millions of dollars away from where they had started.