He grumbled the entire speech, but Thomas found his iconoclasm amusing.
“They say they do it the traditional way,” he remarked.
“They would,” said the American. “But what do you see here: a few thousand bottles at most? These guys must be producing in the order of six or seven million units of product a year. Maybe more. You think they’ve got some guy who walks the cellars with a candle in his hand like some medieval monk in a docudrama, twisting each bottle a few inches, one at a time? They’d have to be nuts.”
“Sounds like you know your subject,” Thomas smiled.
“Let’s just say I’m in the trade,” he said, with a private grin. “But we should probably keep that to ourselves. You?”
“Teacher,” said Thomas. “Kind of a vacation. You done many of these tours?”
“Oh yeah,” he said, ticking them off on his fingers with a mixture of bravado and boredom. “Martel, Piper-Heidsieck, Mumm, Pommery, Veuve Clicquot-Ponsardin, Lanson. And those are just the ones here in Reims. I did Bollinger in Ay, and tomorrow I’ll be in Epernay: Mercier, Perrier Jouet, Castellane and Moët et Chandon. Anything you need to know about making fizzy wine, I’m your guy.”
Thomas thought the guide was listening in discreetly and that she scowled at that reference to fizzy wine. Maybe it was the cool, softly lit alcoves in the pale stone, the hushed air of seriousness in the tourists, or some holdover from the place’s monastic origins, but it felt oddly like being in church, a house of eternal mysteries not reducible to fizzy wine. The American grinned, enjoying himself.
He was middle aged and slim faced, with a strong, sinewy build. His hair was thinning on top and he had a habit of running his fingers through it, as if estimating the day’s loss, but there was a brassy confidence to the man that Thomas found appealing.
They moved off together, drifting from display to display, admiring the vaulted arches with their stone ribbing and the endless side passages of racked and crated champagne.
“The locals will tell you it’s the squid fossils in the chalk beneath the vineyards that make the flavor,” said the American, unimpressed. “Or the climate. Or the pruning techniques. Or the centuries of tradition and the way the grapes have evolved. More BS so far as I can tell.”
“So what is it?” said Thomas, taking the bait.
“Depends which ‘it’ you mean. I’m not talking about flavor, nose, bubble distribution, and all that stuff because I think you can simulate that stuff in a lot of places. I’m talking about what makes champagne champagne.”
“I don’t think I follow,” said Thomas.
“To call it champagne, according to international law, it has to come from here, did you know that?”
“I think I’d heard it.”
“Champagne is defined by the region,” said the American, overtly scornful now, and loud enough that Thomas was aware of those around watching them. “Make the same product anywhere else and it’s just sparkling wine made according to ‘the method champenoise.’ That’s all you can call it. The champagne method. God forbid you should call the stuff in the bottles champagne unless you are one of the grand old U.S. companies who managed to get themselves a loophole in the law.”
He snorted again as if to punctuate the remark.
“You work for a U.S. wine company?” said Thomas.
“A U.S. champagne company,” he replied, pointedly.
“Right,” said Thomas. “A new one?”
The man nodded, but looked away as if he didn’t want to say more. He might have been fifty, though he moved like a younger man. His voice—a wine-soaked cannon, rich, dry, and loud—breezed with style and a command that seemed habitual. Only this almost-question about who he worked for seemed to silence him.
“I don’t know anything about champagne,” said Thomas, backing off.
“Do you like it?”
“Sure,” said Thomas, shrugging.
“Then you know enough.”
“But how do you tell the really great ones from the . . . less so?”
“Oh, they’re all pretty much the same,” he said, and this time he looked away so that the confidence sounded like bluster. “Is this the only cellar you are visiting?” he added.
“Not sure yet,” said Thomas.
“Looking for something in particular?”
Thomas immediately felt himself tighten.
“Not really,” he said. “Why?”
“Weird,” said the winemaker. “Someone who doesn’t drink champagne vacationing around here and touring cellars. Seems like a—what’s the word—a blind? Yeah. Like one of those things you hunt in. No?”
“Just a tourist,” said Thomas, conscious that he was withdrawing, conscious that the other man’s brash and opinionated persona didn’t quite square with the careful eyes that now held his. “What would I be looking for here if not wine?”
The other man paused for a second or two, his gaze level, and then the smile snapped back into place and he threw open his arms expansively, bellowing, “Search me.” He laughed then, too loudly, back in character.
Thomas wasn’t sure about this man, with his easy dismissals of champagne and his facility with a language that sounded more akin to TV and film than it did the wine industry. What the hell was a dolly shot or, for that matter, a docudrama?
“So, if it’s all a shell game,” he said, “a ruse, this myth of French champagne’s greatness, what are you here for?”
The man smiled and looked away.
“Oh, I’m just here to see what I can learn,” he said. “Maybe grease the transatlantic gears a bit, you know? See if we can strike up a first-look deal on some import-export, maybe.”
First-look deal, thought Thomas. More movie-speak.
“But,” the man in the suit concluded with a last panoramic gaze around the stone arches, “I’ve seen enough. Have fun, mister teacher. Don’t drink too much.”
Thomas gave him a nod, but he was already striding out, moving quickly, the side buckles on his shoes ringing slightly in the stone hall. Thomas wasn’t sure if it was the abruptness of the parting, but he considered following him out, just to see where he went. He didn’t, but over the next few minutes he kept checking over his shoulder to make sure the guy had really gone.
Thomas approached the guide. She was a pretty girl, no more than twenty, with pale skin and blue eyes that turned frosty when she realized who was speaking to her.
“I said, I was wondering if I could ask a question,” he repeated.
“Of course,” she said, unsmiling.
“Well, it’s not about the champagne method or anything like that. I wanted to find out about a particular account.”
“An account?”
“Yes. Taittinger has a relationship with a friend of mine and I need to ask some questions about it.”
The blue eyes grew harder still.
“If anyone could tell you that, I do not think they would,” she said. “It is confidential, no?”
Her English, superb when she was comfortable, seemed to have slipped fractionally. She was suspicious.
“Could you, perhaps, ask someone?” he said, smiling.
She bit her lip, her eyes never leaving his, then said, “Wait here,” and walked quickly away. As she was about to climb the stairs up to the lobby, she turned.
“That man you were with,” she said. “The American. Is he a friend of yours? A business colleague, perhaps?”
“I’d never met him before he spoke to me a few minutes ago,” said Thomas.
She gave him a long, hard look, then turned and went up the stairs without comment. She didn’t believe him. Stranger still was Thomas’s nagging sense that she might be right not to.
CHAPTER 48
Thomas was just starting to get used to the scale of the cellars. He had assumed that such places would occupy roughly the size of the building above them, but he was way off. The cellars were actually a network of tunnels and passages, stacked on top of each other and reaching
far out into the chalk and limestone like serpentine burrows. The major champagne houses had literally miles of such cellars.
Good place to hide something you wanted people to forget about, he thought. Could that be what the man in the stone-colored suit had been hinting at? Surely not. But there had been something about the man, something almost familiar that Thomas couldn’t quite place . . .
“Sir?” It was the girl with the ice-blue eyes.
“Yes?”
“If you go back to the lobby, one of the officials is waiting for you.”
Thomas wasn’t sure what she meant by “officials,” and though he assumed it was an inaccurate translation, he thought there was a touch of pink to her cheeks, and both the smile she gave him and the way she turned away seemed hurried and deliberate. He felt immediately cautious.
The man at the top of the stairs who was so conspicuously doing nothing seemed similarly wary.
“You had a question, monsieur?”
He was a young man, businesslike and slick in his immaculate, stylishly slim-fitting suit, but Thomas couldn’t help feeling that his casual manner was feigned.
“A couple, actually,” said Thomas, opting to lead with the one that sounded more like general research. “The Taittinger house makes a Saint Evremond brand, named after Charles de Saint Denis, the marquis of Saint Evremond who was exiled from the court of . . .”
“Le Roi Soleil,” inserted the other. “Louis the Fourteenth.”
“Right. I was wondering what the connection was and if the house possesses any of Saint Evremond’s books and papers.”
“The Saint Evremond champagne is made by the Irroy company, which we own. It is made according to Saint Evremond’s own principles, with thirty percent Chardonnay grapes, sixty percent Pinot Noir, with Meunier and others for balance. It is aged for three years . . .”
“Pinot Noir?” said Thomas. “But that’s red.”
“Did you not read the display in the cellar?” said the other with a touch of hauteur. “Many kinds of champagne are made with a blend of grapes, including red, but the skins are separated from the juice. It is the skins that make red wine red.”
“I see,” said Thomas, looking suitably humbled. “But other than following the recipe of Saint Evremond . . . ?”
“There is no connection,” he shrugged. “It is a tradition that we are proud to hold.”
“Is it true that the English invented modern champagne?”
“Of course not,” he said, as if nothing could be more ignorant. “No one invented champagne by themselves, not even the monk Dom Perignon, no matter what they tell you at Moët et Chandon. Saint Evremond, like Dom Perignon, was important in blending grape varieties, but his contribution to the drink came from popularizing it in sophisticated society. What the English contributed was a market that enjoyed champagne as a sparkling wine, and the bottles to store it.”
“The bottles?”
“Many champagne producers—including Dom Perignon—tried to prevent champagne from being gassy. They tried many things to stop the second fermentation. People who liked it gassy did the opposite, but when the wine moved from cask to bottle, and the sugar was added, the fermentation was so . . . what? So fierce that the bottles would burst. It was common to lose two-thirds of the champagne in storage for this reason. The English, who are primarily a beer-drinking nation, were used to this problem and developed a stronger bottle, and a method of wiring on the cork so that the gas was trapped inside. It is important, but it is not the invention of champagne. Champagne is French.”
“My other question is about an account of yours,” said Thomas, moving on. For all the young man’s languid good humor, this debate seemed close to rekindling the Hundred Years’ War. “An English lady. She receives crates of your Saint Evremond brand periodically.”
“A single woman? Not a company?” he shrugged, the smile now genuinely confused. “I don’t understand.”
“I’m acting on her behalf,” Thomas improvised. “Or rather, on behalf of her estate.”
The young man’s brow creased as he considered the word.
“She died,” Thomas inserted. “I’m just trying to clear up some details of her arrangements.”
“Certainly. Come this way, please.”
Thomas followed him through the lobby to an imposing door that opened into offices of a less public kind. They passed several, wordlessly, until they came to what seemed to be the rear of the building. The young man took a seat at an immaculate desk and tapped his fingers on a computer keyboard, nodding to Thomas to sit. After a moment, he asked for the name on the account and Thomas spelled Blackstone’s name. The Frenchman typed some more and then grunted with puzzlement.
“What?” said Thomas.
“Daniella Blackstone,” the other read off the screen. “One crate, per year.”
“For how long?”
“Life,” said the man at the computer.
“Would that be expensive?”
“Not for her. She has never been charged.”
“Is that common?” asked Thomas.
“Not at all. I have never seen such a thing.”
“How long has she been receiving the champagne?”
“It does not go to her precisely,” said the young man, turning to Thomas. “It goes to her family. It has done so since 1945.”
“Do you know why?”
The other shook his head.
“There is no information in the file and we have no paper records that go back so far.”
“Why 1945? Something to do with the end of the war?”
“Indirectly,” he said. “The deal, I suspect, goes back further in time. It begins in 1945 for Taittinger because that was when we bought up certain smaller champagne houses in Epernay. The arrangement with the Blackstone family seems to have come from one of those houses: Demier.”
Thomas walked past where he had parked and up to the cathedral. It had been one of the most extraordinary medieval churches in Europe, a rough counterpart to Westminster Abbey in terms of royal coronations and age, but it was brutally shelled during the First World War and had been heavily restored. Even so, much of the statuary around the outside was headless or otherwise fractured, and Thomas could only imagine the hell that must have been unleashed when the building had been hit by—according to his guidebook—285 shells. It was said that of the forty thousand houses that had surrounded the cathedral, only forty survived the devastation.
In many ways it was a very different kind of place from Westminster. It was sparer inside, uncluttered by monuments, so the overall impression was of air and vast stone, and flashes of color from the windows. It was also quieter. Thomas wandered its cool, massive transept, admiring the immense columns with their decorative vine-leaf carvings, then sat staring at the deep cobalt blues of the Chagall stained glass. It was like being under deep water and looking up toward the sun, a shifting and vivid color that seemed to extend into infinity. The more he gazed at it, the more he felt himself floating on undulating currents, drifting like a spirit cut free from the body.
He remembered the lines from the XTC song about God making disease and the diamond blue . . .
He had to force himself to get up and return to the world, which seemed darker by comparison. He lit a candle in a rack for Kumi and walked back to the car. It was cold outside now, breezy and on the point of rain. He felt reflective. What sense of progress he had had was dulled even when he imagined scooping a lost Shakespeare play from some crumbling and forgotten cellar under Epernay. In this reflective mood he was surprised to notice the man at all.
He had been behind Thomas in the cathedral, a young man with close-cropped hair and a long, drab coat, and Thomas suspected he had seen him before that as well, perhaps in the Taittinger cellars. He had been walking briskly only a few yards behind Thomas when he reached the Peugeot, but had faltered as Thomas paused to fish for his keys. The young man had turned to a shop window as if arrested by something he’d seen there. As
Thomas pulled away from the curb, the man in the long coat turned back to the road and stuck out his arm as if hailing a cab. Thomas watched in his rearview mirror as a green, low-slung sedan—a Citroen, he thought—that had been idling at the corner sped up, and the man got quickly in. He couldn’t be sure, of course, but Thomas was prepared to bet that the sedan was no taxi.
CHAPTER 49
Thomas took the N51 south to Epernay, through broad flat expanses of fields and vineyards in meticulous array on the sides of low chalk hills. He came off the highway and took at least one wrong turn that took him through quaint villages of antique farmhouses, markets, and war memorials, some Napoleonic, some First or Second World War. One, where he got out to check a road sign masked by a heavy plane tree, was located in what seemed like the middle of nowhere. He assumed it had been a battlefield of some sort and climbed the few steps to the monument with its faded French flag, brick obelisk, and surrounding slabs covered with names. Flowers had been laid recently. It was only when he considered the inscription and saw how many of the surnames repeated that he began to wonder if there had once been a village here that the war—in this case, the First World War—had overtaken and destroyed. Many of the names were women. Was it possible that whole villages could have been wiped out, their buildings and people eradicated in the entrenched four-year horror that had been the War to End All Wars? He checked the map in his guidebook and decided that it was possible. Epernay sat squarely on the river Marne, the site of major battles at the beginning and end of the war. In the meantime, the land around the river had shifted from Allied to German control, and the region had been utterly decimated.
He stood at the top of the steps and looked back along the road he had come. There was nothing more than fields and the curious round towers with slated, conical tops that might have been silos, and a few isolated trees. There was no sign of the green Citroën he had thought was following him when he left Reims, and he couldn’t be sure he had even seen it on the highway once he was out of the city.
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