“Is it a problem?”
“Actually, we’re good. Seven o’clock,” she said, pretending to wipe dirt from my shoulders. “Behind us. Waxing the black Jeep Grand Cherokee across the street. Dodgers cap. Where we’re parked, we’ve obstructed part of his view, so he might change his vantage point. Now’s a good time to make our move.”
I glanced into the bed of the truck and pulled out a rake, my eyes carefully low. “Got it. I’ll linger near the backyard. You ease your way back. Tell the guys to stay up front.”
“Good luck, Ten,” Marsha said. A gentle plaintiveness in her voice made me give her a long look. She thinks we’re wasting our time, I realized. It stung, hard. But most of the sting came from knowing she might be right.
Rake in hand, my head covered in an olive drab gardener’s cap with long ear flaps, I enlisted in my orange-shirted army.
Demetrio wandered toward the carport and backyard with his weed cutter as he trimmed the grass near the flower bed against the house, but I redirected him. “In the front only. I’ll take a look around back,” I told him in Spanish. Or close enough. Demetrio changed direction.
I took a last glance at the visible windows to make sure no one was watching me. Then I turned slightly to nod to Marsha. I’m going in.
I walked down the gravel driveway at a stroll, although I wanted to run.
A Siamese kitten crouched in the carport leaped in my path, and I almost jumped. The cat bolted into hiding. My heart was racing just like it had at Club Skylight.
I needed to find something, and was terrified I wouldn’t.
The cottage looked small, maybe six hundred square feet, with quaint detailing that matched the main house’s architecture. It had its own porch and a fairly large picture window, curtains closed. I ignored the front door and slipped around a corner, toward the back.
The cottage was built so close to the neighbor’s adjoining fence that the bougainvillea bushes growing through it were a thorny passage. One look at the tangle, and I almost changed my mind. But I could see a small jalousie window, already half open, that would be easy enough to remove if I got close. Up front, I was more likely to be caught.
At least the bougainvillea would make it impossible to conduct surveillance from the rear. Even the main house’s second story was obscured by a tall oak near the guesthouse, so I was already invisible. I decided to stay that way.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Marsha muttered beside me, eyeing the bougainvillea.
I wished I’d brought hedge clippers, but I used my rake to lift a heavy bougainvillea branch whose thorns were nearly the size of roofing nails. Much of the barrier went up with the branch. “Keep this out of my way, and I’m in,” I said.
Marsha took over the rake, and I squeezed behind the house to the window. At the window, I reached into my back pocket and pulled out the surgical gloves Marsha had given me from her goodie bag. Gloves on, I was ready to go in.
“Don’t toss those gloves here,” Marsha said. “They can get fingerprints from inside.”
Good to know.
Jalousie windows are great for letting in a breeze, but they’re a burglar’s wet dream. The windows were partially open, so I started working on the glass panels, fast. Some were looser than others, but one at a time the slender panes slid out.
In less than two minutes, there was nothing but a screen in my way. My knife took care of that. I looked back at Marsha, who was straining from the weight of the branch on her rake.
“I’m in,” I said. “What about you?”
“Just go,” she said. “I’ll figure it out.”
The bathroom window was narrow, but I was slender enough to fit. A small boulder behind the house gave me enough height to swing one leg into the blue-tile bathroom, and minor contortionism put my feet on the floor. Clowns on the bathroom’s wallpaper. Ugh.
My heartbeat nearly drowned out the quiet.
I was caught already if there were agents inside, so I didn’t want any surprises. It’s not smart to sneak up on people with guns.
“Hello?” I called. No answer.
Already, signs of the FBI’s search were obvious. The small bathroom’s medicine cabinet was wide open, nearly emptied, and a few over-the-counter medication bottles lay in the sink. Tylenol. Claritin. A half-used, neatly rolled tube of Crest toothpaste. A half-used, neatly rolled tube of Preparation H. Good to know both ends were getting serviced. The bathtub was filled with hand towels from an emptied cabinet on the wall above the toilet.
What the hell are you going to find that they didn’t? my Evil Voice taunted.
Even in my gigolo days, when I was invited into homes by my clients, I felt like an intruder because of the boyfriend, fiancé, or husband who had no idea I was his guest. I learned to study my clients from their homes to help create a better fantasy man for them.
Paki’s apartment left him a mystery to me. He might be a neat freak, or a slob, but the FBI’s souvenirs made it hard to tell, except that there were no dirty clothes on the floor or dirty dishes in his kitchen sink.
I guessed that the apartment must have come furnished, because the furniture was sturdy but old, like a grandparent’s home. Except for the futon, the pieces matched, had been carefully selected, and had been in the house a long time. The carpet was old, slightly stained beneath the newspaper that covered the living room floor. The FBI had apparently sorted through a stack of the L.A. Times. Maitlin had given Paki a new start in life, but it was modest.
Is that what happened? She let you visit her house, and you started wanting more?
Nothing was framed on the walls, except a faded Norman Rockwell print of a kid in a dentist’s chair that I was sure had come with the room. The cottage was a studio, not a one-bedroom, so Paki’s futon was propped up against the wall as a sofa. He had a night table on one side of the futon, and a small computer desk on the other. The computer, of course, was gone. Only the monitor and printer remained.
The futon faced a twenty-seven-inch television on a TV table against the opposite wall, next to the picture window. Paki probably kept the curtains closed to see the picture better, without too much light. The curtains were heavy, only slightly frayed at the floor. I was glad the curtains were closed, so I could walk without worrying about the window.
Paki was a soccer fan. A yellow jersey from Cape Town’s Santos team lay across the arm of his futon, and I noticed a soccer magazine on his dinette table. Otherwise, the table was clear except for an apple. The apartment had been cleaned out to the bone.
“Not much to it, is there?” Marsha said.
Her voice had the too-gentle quality I had noticed before. Her voice said, Well, Ten, now it’s time to face facts . . . Marsha’s hair was disheveled, and I saw three parallel scratch marks across her forehead. And a tiny bead of blood.
“The bush got you,” I said. “You’re bleeding.”
“I am?” she said, surprised. “Where?”
With my index finger, I gently dabbed the spot. No more blood came. I laid her blood on my tongue. The sharp taste melted down my throat and was gone.
“All better,” I said. It had been several days since Marsha and I had spent a night together, I realized. I couldn’t remember how long, but it was too long.
“Fuck it, we leave through the front door,” Marsha said. Beat. “When we’re done.”
The search, to her, was an afterthought. Meaning: We can use the front door after you finally realize there was nothing you could have done for Nandi from the instant you let her go.
The day was caving in. The growling of strangers’ gardening tools sounded absurd.
But for twenty minutes, we looked wherever we could think to look. Every inch was a football field. I couldn’t let my eyes miss anything. Trash cans. The closet. Drawers. Cabinets. Under the futon. The TV cabinet. DVD cases. The walls. The refrigerator.
Paki liked to cook. There were no restaurant containers in his fridge, only pots and pans from meals he had fixed for hims
elf on the tiny kitchen’s two-burner stove. Fresh milk. Fresh fruit. The rice, flour, and spices from his kitchen cabinets were laid out across the Formica counter. He liked wine—a 2006 California Viognier-Roussanne blend was chilling in the fridge, with four more identical bottles in a wire wine rack on his counter. Good wine.
No junk food. No sweets. Paki’s vices weren’t culinary.
The refrigerator had a magnet shaped like the South African flag, pinning coupons. A magnet shaped like a bottle of wine, labeled Happy Cellars, pinned nothing. Was it decoration, or had something fallen?
I looked down toward the floor, at the crack between the fridge and the counter. The corner of a photograph was sticking out, so I picked it up. My heart got its hopes up. Please let this be a photo of Paki posing with Spider outside Spider’s house—the address in plain view.
But it wasn’t, of course.
It was a photo of Paki posing with Maitlin, Alec Dimitrakos . . . and Nandi. They were all in swimsuits; the photo had been taken by the pool at Maitlin’s house. From Nandi’s face, still as pudgy as it had been at the orphanage, I guessed that the photo was taken soon after she arrived in the States. One big happy family. Even Alec was smiling.
I almost kept the photo; once it was in my hand, it took a moment to let it go. I finally slid it under the wine bottle magnet. Then I turned away from the face that haunted me—and maybe would for the rest of my life. Whether or not Paki had been involved in Nandi’s abduction, the photo’s haunting rightfully belonged to him.
I toured every cranny of Paki’s apartment a third time, a fourth. I flipped through his yellow pages to see if he’d scribbled any numbers, or circled any names. I checked the dusty top of his refrigerator for stray scraps of enlightenment. There were no notebooks, no addresses, no telephone numbers. No information.
My father had warned me what Hell would feel like, and Hell was all I found. Denial was lifting like a giant balloon, and reality sat hard in its place. My stomach ached, searing pain. For the first time all morning, the throbbing across my back from Spider’s knife was fully awake.
What the fuck are you doing? Wearing bullshit disguises and breaking laws—for what?
Behind me, Marsha sighed. She’d stopped searching ten minutes before I had, and was now merely going through the motions. Reality had hit her much sooner.
“We knew it was a long shot coming after the FBI,” she said. “Thorough is their job.”
Her condolences didn’t unclench my stomach.
“Maybe Paki didn’t run,” I said. “Maybe his people killed him.”
Marsha nodded. “Crossed my mind,” she said. “He’d just spent all night with the FBI, and we have no idea what he said. Yeah, maybe the Kingdom got him. But the feds might be following his leads, grabbing Nandi right now. Locking up the bad guys.”
“Maybe,” I said. Hans Christian Andersen wouldn’t have bought that fairy tale.
I hadn’t heard from Rachel Wentz or Maitlin all day. Maybe they had finally been silenced, or maybe Maitlin was too distraught to call. It wasn’t a good sign if the kidnappers had been out of contact since my confrontation with Spider, with no further proof of life.
My feet needed somewhere to go after pacing tracks in the living room, so I found myself back in the kitchen. Marsha followed. My eyes traveled its surfaces, looking for what I’d missed. I tried not to notice the photo, whether it was a visual hoax or a simple tragedy.
The narrow kitchen was claustrophobic. Two steps in, and there was nowhere else to go.
Beside me, Marsha opened the refrigerator. “I’m starving,” she said. She pulled out the bottle of wine and studied it. “Mmmmm. And thirsty, come to think of it.”
I didn’t want to eat Paki’s food or drink his wine, but Marsha started searching through the assortment of kitchen supplies on the counter and in the drawers. She found a corkscrew.
“Ten, listen . . . ,” she began in her woe-is-you voice. “We can’t stay here much longer. I told the gardeners to leave when they were done, but someone might come looking.”
“I know,” I said.
Marsha opened the cabinet, where a few cheap dishes remained. She found two wineglasses and pulled them out. I couldn’t help one last peek high on my toes to see if I’d overlooked any papers. But the cabinet was nearly bare. I felt around, and nothing was hidden.
“Ten, this happened despite your involvement, not because of it,” she said. “You’re good—I mean really good. You’re quick. Resourceful. You’ve given Nandi everything you have. You’re as good as anyone I’ve worked with—people with real training. So it’s getting more and more unbearable for me to watch you beat yourself up.”
She handed me the chilled bottle, and the corkscrew. My fingers went to work without my mind engaging. I’ve opened more bottles of wine than I can count, so my pop was quick and efficient.
“None of it brought Nandi home,” I said.
“She may still come home. I never say never. Nothing is ever exactly what it seems.”
My throat and tongue were dry. Since the wineglasses were set up on the counter, I poured one glass half full and gave it to Marsha. She held her glass, waiting for me to pour mine. I wasn’t in the mood for celebrating, and alcohol wouldn’t knock Nandi out of my head. But I splashed wine into my glass to be sociable.
“A small toast?” Marsha said.
“To what?”
“To hope.”
Who can refuse a toast to hope? I clinked my glass against hers, gently, and sipped.
My first thought was, Qood wine. Light and crisp. Sweet tropical citrus.
Then I sipped again, and the world rocked still. I took a third sip to be sure. The soles of my feet stung, as if I’d immersed them in ice.
“Holy shit,” I said. I picked up the wine bottle again to stare at the label.
“Yeah—it’s great,” Marsha said, misunderstanding my excitement. “Let’s take a bottle.”
The light blue label was simply designed, and was marked HAPPY CELLARS—PASO ROBLES—2006.
The bright yellow smiley face on the label looked hand sketched. The bottle confused me. I sniffed the mouth, trying to understand. What was it that had lingered after the citrus faded? A little something vintners call “minerality.” Delicious. Rare.
“Wine connoisseurs turn me on,” Marsha said. “What’d you find? Hidden floral notes?”
I held up my hand to stop her jokes. I needed to think.
Finally, Marsha realized my mind was somewhere else. “What’s going on?”
“I know this wine,” I said. “I’ve had it before. In South Africa.”
Marsha took the bottle and read the label. “It’s a California wine.”
“I know. That’s what I don’t get. But I’ve had this wine, with Sofia. While we were in Cape Town. Sofia Maitlin gave me a sip. It was local, from Stellenbosch. I’m sure of it.”
Slowly, Marsha’s face changed as she lowered the bottle, all playfulness fleeing her overly bright eyes. “Why does a South African wine have a California label?” she said.
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“Could this . . . Happy Cellars be rebottling it? Why?”
“I don’t know.”
My fingers trembling, I pulled out my iPhone to do a quick Google search on Happy Cellars, in Paso Robles. Was it even a real winery?
It was. There weren’t many listings, but I got a few bloggers singing its praises. Best wine on our trip to Paso! I wish I could find it in L.A. ! crowed a woman who called herself Biker Gal. Happy Cellars had its own cheap website, probably from a free host. No flashing images or elaborate photography, just a home page with a photo of a vineyard and the winery’s address in Paso Robles. No mention of South Africa. I scrolled through the site, looking for any winery employees. None was mentioned. No faces.
“So you’re saying . . . this South African wine is in a Paso Robles bottle? At a vineyard called Happy Cellars?” Marsha said. “I’m still trying to wrap my mind aro
und this.”
I shook my head, frustrated. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s locally grown—but if it is, they’re re-creating the conditions exactly. Probably using the same winemaker.”
“I’m still confused, Ten.”
My heart raced as my mind put it together. “A winemaker is like a chef. You can give ten different winemakers the same raw ingredients, grapes grown and stored in identical conditions, and they’ll create ten different bottles of wine. A winemaker’s creation is like a signature.” Alice had taught me that, once upon a time. We had spent many lazy hours in Cape Town’s wine country.
“So this wine has a South African winemaker’s signature,” Marsha said.
“Yes.”
“You’re sure?”
“There’s a winery in Cape Town that uses concrete aging bins. They are more temperamental than steel drums, but they breathe. I’d have to taste them side by side to be sure, but . . .” Revelation swamped me. “Shit! Paki and Sofia were drinking this wine at Nandi’s party. The bottle was on the table. I don’t know if it was her bottle or Paki’s, but I remember seeing it.”
Marsha went silent, thoughtful, while I went to the wine rack to grab one of the other bottles. Same wine, same vineyard, same vintage. Had Paki gone on a spending spree?
“Wine like this . . . maybe twenty dollars a bottle?” I guessed. “It’s not cheap. Paki’s living on a shoestring, working as a mechanic, and he’s gonna drop a hundred bucks or more on wine? Plus . . . it’s a boutique winery. Paso’s wine country. If you live in the Bay Area, you drive up to Napa. If you live in L.A., you drive to Paso, stay in a B and B, go from vineyard to vineyard. Most people probably buy from the source.”
Unless Paki has a friend who works there, I thought.
“A gift from Sofia Maitlin?” Marsha guessed.
“Maybe, but . . . if the winemaker is South African . . .”
“. . . Paki might know him,” Marsha finished. She sounded awed.
“Paso Robles,” I said. “If Paki’s not dead, maybe that’s where he ran.”
Paso Robles was a four-hour drive from Los Angeles, fairly secluded, with acre after acre of grapevines. Farmers with lots of large storehouses. Barns. Privacy.
From Cape Town with Love Page 28