Gigi raced ahead, and then stopped on a small rise, standing like a pointer with one front paw raised, his head and tail high, watching the curl of the river, where he sensed something was about to appear. Squinting against the glare of the morning sun on the river, Bruno saw the silhouettes of two riders appear on horseback, picking their way across the shallow waters of the late summer. Gigi barked and raced up the riverbank to greet them, Bruno following until Pamela and Fabiola reached him and swung down from horseback to greet him.
“I’m having a wonderful day,” Fabiola said. “I have a horse to ride and a house to live in. I’m going to rent one of Pamela’s gîtes until next season.”
“With Jacqueline that makes three lovely women together in one property. You’ll have an endless parade of admirers,” said Bruno, kissing each of them. “But will one of the horses ever be free for me to learn to ride?”
“Don’t worry about that. You can have her whenever I’m working,” said Fabiola, bending to make friends with Gigi. “Pamela told me about him. I can’t believe he’s a hunting dog with these funny long ears and short legs. How can he run fast enough?”
“He doesn’t have to. He just plods along relentlessly all day after the scent until the prey is exhausted.”
“Do you use him to hunt criminals?”
Bruno shook his head, grinning. “Never had to, but he did once find a little boy who strolled away from a family picnic and got lost in the woods.”
“Come and get to know the horses,” said Pamela. “This chestnut is called Bess, after Good Queen Bess, and Fabiola’s gray is called Victoria.”
“She couldn’t be easier to ride—very patient and stately,” said Fabiola. She fished in a pocket of her jeans, pulled out a bag of small carrots and handed one to Bruno. “Here, give her this and pat her neck so she’ll know you’re a friend. She’ll remember you.”
“That’s the difference between Fabiola and me.” Pamela grinned, bringing some sugar lumps from her pocket. “As a doctor, she offers healthy carrots, and I give them these. Here, give one to Bess; she loves them.”
“Do they like apples?” Bruno asked, gingerly holding his palm forward, the carrot perched on top. Victoria delicately snuffled it from his hand, and he felt only the warmth of the horse’s breath and the touch of a very soft muzzle. Then he gave Bess her sugar lump, keeping a wary eye on her teeth.
“They adore apples. Bring a few of them and they’ll be your friends for life.”
“By the way, I have some news for you,” said Fabiola. “The pathologist at Bergerac is a friend; we did our training together in Marseilles. He and I both agree that Cresseil had a heart attack that certainly would have killed him if he hadn’t broken his neck first. He was dying when he fell, if not dead.”
“Does that mean he died before young Max?”
“Only le bon Dieu could tell you that. They died within an hour or so of each other, but that’s as much as medicine can ascertain,” Fabiola said, shrugging. “One thing we know is that Max died of asphyxiation, not of drowning. There was no grape juice in his lungs.”
“And that wound to the head?”
“Not hard enough to crack the skull, so it probably didn’t kill him, and my friend in Bergerac is still trying to establish when exactly it happened. With the grape juice washing away the blood, and then Max’s body being rinsed clean with water, it’s not easy to see how much he bled. The grape juice also washed away any chance of doing a leukocyte count, which might have told us if he sustained the head wound more than a few minutes before he died. My friend is calling in his chief pathologist, who’ll do his own examination later today. But we’re sure Max wasn’t hit with any kind of weapon. The wood splinters in the wound came from the vat itself.”
“So the pathologist has not issued a formal statement of unlawful death?”
“Not yet. It’s a delicate matter, and we’re under a lot of pressure from the police. My friend in Bergerac said some commissaire was calling the pathology lab every few hours, demanding the attestation. That’s why they are doing it on a Saturday. Maybe this afternoon. He’ll let me know.”
“I suppose the adoption makes it important to decide which of them died first,” said Pamela.
Bruno nodded. “There are some cousins who stand to inherit if it’s clear that Max died first. If not, it could mean a lawsuit. Merde. I meant to tell you there’s a ceremony for Max up at Alphonse’s this evening, like an Irish wake,” Bruno said. “A lot of people will be there—the rugby team, his school friends. Would the two of you like to come with me?”
“I would. Having been a witness at the boy’s adoption, I feel somehow involved. I assume Jacqueline will be going as well. You should come too, Fabiola. It will be your chance to meet half the town. They’re not all hypochondriacs.”
“Which of Pamela’s places are you taking?” Bruno asked.
“The one beside the stables. It’s lovely, light and airy, and Pamela has decorated it very simply, just as I like it. It’s probably a bit big for me, but Jacqueline has the smaller one.”
“Have you met her yet?”
“Just briefly this morning when we saddled the horses. Poor girl, she looked very tired. Perhaps I should have offered her some sleeping pills.”
“Can you tell her about the event at Alphonse’s place this evening?” Bruno said. “I don’t have room for all of you in my van, but I can come by at about seven and then lead the way. You’d never find the place otherwise. Now I’m heading for Fauquet’s for some breakfast. Would you like to join me?”
“With pleasure,” Pamela responded. “That’s what we were planning to do. Fauquet loves it when I hitch the horse outside the café. He says it brings in customers. Did you know he keeps a small shovel just inside the garden gate for the droppings? He puts them straight onto those roses he’s so proud of.”
“They win him prizes,” Bruno said. “You’ll see the certificate he got from the fair at Bergerac up on the wall of the café in its own frame, right beside his maître pâtissier certificate. But your own roses are just as good, Pamela. Maybe you should exhibit them next year and give Fauquet some competition.”
“But if I won, he’d never forgive me,” she said, laughing. “And then I’d worry that my coffee would be muddy and my croissants burnt and he’d only give me the baguettes with the misshaped ends. Life wouldn’t be worth living.”
Fortified by his breakfast, Bruno arrived early at the Domaine and was heartened to see the winery busy and Julien bustling around the vats with his long thermometer, scribbling figures in his notebook as Baptiste stood patiently by. The aged foreman carried a long glass pipette to take his samples, and both men beamed with pleasure at Bruno’s arrival.
“It’s not time for the meeting yet,” said Julien, glancing at his watch. He was freshly shaved, and his jeans and shirt were clean. He looked like a different man from the unkempt figure who had greeted Bruno on his last visit. “I’ve still got work to do here.”
“No, I just wanted to say hello to you and Mirabelle first, if she’s here,” said Bruno. “I’m glad to see you busy, but I thought this was the time when nature took its course with the wine.”
“I’m trying something new that Baptiste suggested,” said Julien. “There’s a technique to get the maximum fruit flavor through maximum contact with the grape skins, leaving the grapes in the vat for six hours before we start the pressing. We did it with the one vat only as an experiment and we’re just seeing how it’s going.”
“What’s the verdict?”
“Promising, but too early to be sure. I was worried it might produce some bitterness, too many tannins, but the fermentation temperature is normal and there’s no bitterness in the taste.”
“You worry too much,” said Baptiste, holding the pipette over a wineglass and lifting his thumb from the end to let the young wine drain in. He handed the glass to Bruno. “Try it.”
“Tastes like grape juice, but very fruity,” he said. “Not bitter
at all.”
“Mirabelle is at home, and the door’s open. You can let yourself in,” said Julien. “Go and say hello and I’ll join you in the salon at ten.” With Baptiste’s delighted approval, Bruno left Gigi sniffing his curious way around the wine vats and went up the flight of steps into the main reception room of the Domaine.
Mirabelle was up and dressed in a flowing caftan, with a turban on her head, and her face was made up with rouge and lipstick so that she looked almost healthy until Bruno noted the hollowness around her eyes. She raised her cheek to be kissed, and Bruno recognized the scent of Chanel No. 5.
“I’m determined to be at this meeting,” she said. “I’ve put too much of my life into the Domaine for Julien to abandon it now.”
“I’m happy to see you looking so much better.”
“It’s one of my good days. I was determined it would be,” she said. “Julien has been a lot better since you came, more his old self. Listen, the important thing to ensure at this meeting is that Julien buys back the option to sell the Domaine. It means raising fifty thousand euros one way or another because if he doesn’t have this place to fill his time when I’m gone, he’ll just fall apart again. I know him.”
“Is that the only way, Mirabelle? What if he were to run the winery but let somebody else manage the hotel and restaurant like you’ve been doing? That’s not his strong point.”
“But they need to be under a single ownership. That’s how we make our profit, by selling our own wine at restaurant prices. If he just makes wine, the négociants will screw him on pricing like they do all the small producers. Now will you help me across to the salon so I can greet our guests?”
As Bruno helped Mirabelle up the steps, the mayor and the baron arrived together in the Baron’s car with Vauclos, the local bank manager. Then came Hubert in his Mercedes with Jacques Lesvignes, who ran the largest of the town’s small building firms. Xavier’s Renault followed, and the young maire-adjoint came out with his father, the local Renault dealer, and his father-in-law, who ran a timber business. As Julien bustled in from the winery, an old Jaguar appeared, and Dougal, a Scotsman, joined them. Having come to Saint-Denis to retire, Dougal found himself bored and started a company called Delightful Dordogne that specialized in renting the local gîtes and houses to tourists. With the handymen and cleaners he hired, Dougal had become an important local employer. Bruno smiled to himself in admiration at the mayor’s planning; the leading businessmen of Saint-Denis were now assembled. Julien shook hands all around and steered everyone to the corner of the salon that Mirabelle had chosen, under the painting of Madame Récamier.
“I think we have to presume that the American venture is dead,” the mayor began. “The son is under arrest. Even without that, many of us have doubts about the desirability of the big Bondino company as a partner for our little town. But there’s been one important benefit for us in this, which is that I’m now confident of getting appellation contrôlée status for our wines. The heart of this venture is the Domaine, so the first question has to be what are your intentions, Julien?”
“I have two problems. The first is the option to buy the Domaine. I could buy it back for fifty thousand euros, but I don’t have the money. The second is that I timed my expansion wrong. There’s a wine glut, so prices are low, and I’m already making more wine than I can sell through the hotel and restaurant. What’s worse is that I don’t have the working capital for a proper marketing campaign.”
“We have put together a proposal for you that has the backing of everyone here,” said the mayor. He went on to describe the initial investment each man at the meeting had agreed to put into a new company, Vignerons de Saint-Denis-sur-Vézère, before offering to sell shares to all the citizens of Saint-Denis. The new company would buy back Julien’s option to sell the Domaine, so he’d keep the hotel and vineyard. Hubert would market the wine Julien couldn’t sell.
“We’ve also decided that the company should see if it can acquire Cresseil’s farm cheaply,” said the baron, explaining the problem with the inheritance. The mayor had tracked down Cresseil’s relatives, distant cousins in Tulle, who would be at the next day’s funeral. They might have been hoping for a windfall from the farm, the mayor explained, but instead would discover that they faced a long lawsuit.
“So we’re going to propose that we buy their claim to the property for fifty thousand in cash. I’m prepared to go a bit higher, but that should tempt them,” the baron went on. “We may have to offer the same to Alphonse, but even then we’ll be buying it for less than half what it’s worth. The prospect of big legal costs while property taxes mount up should give both sides an inducement to settle. And if we have both claims, there’ll be no lawsuits.”
Bruno watched, fascinated, as the meeting progressed—remarkably smoothly, he thought, given the different interests involved. The mayor was at his most articulate and persuasive, and his explanations were backed by the hardheaded business sense of the baron. Wily old politicians, the pair of them. Years of practice, he supposed.
The mayor described the plan to restore the barns on the various properties into gîtes, which meant lots of work for Lesvignes’s building firm, which in turn meant jobs for apprentice plumbers and electricians. Xavier described the state grants available to pay for their training and salaries while they worked and learned their trade. Dougal said he’d been planning to expand, anyway, and would rent the new properties to tourists.
“This sounds like a property company,” said Julien. “What about the wine?”
Hubert explained that the Domaine would remain the property of the existing owners, Julien and Mirabelle. But it would be leased to the new company, which would make wine under his and Julien’s direction. On a rough calculation, the new company would have at least twenty hectares of vines that should produce one hundred thousand liters a year or more.
“Right now, I sell only about a thousand cases a year through the hotel and restaurant. That’s twelve thousand bottles,” said Julien. “How do we find a market for the rest?”
“I get over five hundred tenants a year,” said Dougal. “We give them each a free wine tour and tasting at the Domaine and a discount price and I’ll be surprised if we don’t sell another five hundred cases.”
“I’ll sell the wine at my cave, and I’ll offer it to all the local restaurants who are already my clients,” said Hubert. “I’ll also suggest it to customers who buy my Bergerac blends. Since I’ll be the négociant, in a company in which I’m a major shareholder, we save the usual middleman’s profit. I’ve talked to Duhamel at the supermarket, and he’ll take five hundred cases. That means we already have a market for all the wine the Domaine makes now, and quite a bit more. We won’t be selling the wine from the new vines we plant for another three or four years at least, and by then we should have built up a reputation. That’s our challenge. You and I are going to have to make wines that win prizes.”
“We also have to build a proper visitors’ center at the Domaine, for which we’d like a bank loan,” said the mayor.
“I’m certainly prepared to make the loan for that and to provide working capital for the company,” said Vauclos, the plump-faced and genial Gascon who ran the town’s Crédit Agricole. “Indeed, I’m putting fifty thousand of my own money into shares in the company.”
Bruno smiled inwardly. The mairie was the bank’s main client. All the mairie’s salaries and the town’s taxes went through its books, and the handful of men in Julien’s salon accounted for most of the town’s business. It would be a foolish bank manager who did not support a venture with such backing. And then Bruno began thinking of his own modest savings and how many shares he might be able to afford.
“When you suggested offering shares to the citizens of Saint-Denis, how would that work?” he asked.
“We price each share at a hundred euros, but any local taxpayer can buy a share at a discount, say ninety euros,” said Xavier. “And of course every shareholder will have the right
to buy the wine at a special discount. We have nearly a thousand households here in Saint-Denis. If they each buy a case a year, that’s twelve thousand bottles. Then we can sell more at a stall in the market to catch the tourist trade and tell them about the visitors’ center.”
“So what we’re planning to do is to take Bondino’s idea and do it ourselves without Bondino and on a slightly smaller scale,” Bruno mused out loud.
“Well, I’m convinced,” said Mirabelle, who had been following the proceedings closely. With an obvious effort of will, she sat upright and fixed her eyes on Julien. “This is the best way for Julien, for the Domaine and for Saint-Denis. We accept.”
“What if the citizens don’t go for it and you don’t sell all the shares?” Bruno asked quietly.
“Then the mairie buys the remainder on behalf of the commune as a whole,” said the mayor. “This will be a good investment. We can use any profits for that indoor sports center you’re always nagging me about, Bruno.”
“All right,” said Bruno. “If Julien and Mirabelle and all of you are agreed, I’m prepared to join in. The shares are a hundred euros each, right? So with my discount, I can get a hundred shares for nine thousand euros. But I warn you all, I’m going to be a very active shareholder. These are my life savings I’m investing.”
“Bruno,” said the mayor, “why do you think you’re here? All this was your idea. You were the one who said that if this made sense for the Bondinos, it would make sense for French investors as well. And here we are. So you’re already getting an allocation of two hundred shares as the initiator of the project, and we all want you on the board of directors. But of course we’re delighted to have your nine thousand euros as well.”
Bruno 02 - The Dark Vineyard Page 23
