The Vintage Caper

by Peter Mayle

  “So far, so good,” said Sam.

  “You’re in the cellar?”

  “I’m in the cellar. I’ll be starting to pack up the wine in a couple of hours. Let’s just go through the drill again.”

  “Bon. When all the wine is packed, you will call me. The van’s parked by the Vieux Port. At that time of night, it will take me three minutes to reach the Palais.”

  “Good. Now, I’ll make sure the gates are open. Remember to switch off your lights just before you turn into the drive. I don’t want anyone in the house to see any headlights. Take the left fork off the main drive. I’ll blink my flashlight to guide you into the delivery area. The cases will be stacked up outside the cellar. Loading them into the van will take five minutes, tops. Then we’ll be out of here.”

  “Roger that.”

  “Roger what?”

  “It’s army talk. I heard it on a TV show.”

  Sam rolled his eyes in the darkness. He’d forgotten Philippe’s fondness for all things military. “Oh, one other thing. How long will it take to get where we’re going?”

  “The van isn’t built for speed, but we’ll be on the autoroute for a lot of the way. I think an hour and a half, not much more.”

  “OK. We’re all set. See you later.”

  Sam’s confidence was increasing now that he was getting close to the finish. Something could go wrong, of course; something always could. But he allowed himself a few moments of optimism as he considered facts and possibilities.

  The most encouraging of these was his almost total isolation from the outside world. There were no windows in the cellar, so there would be no chinks of light to give him away. There was no chance of anyone hearing him, thanks to the soundproofing provided by massive walls, massive ceilings, and, above them, several feet of earth. And best of all, the alarm system, which he’d checked during previous visits, was activated only by someone trying to break in, not by someone letting himself out. That made two cellars-this one and Roth’s-where electronic protection wasn’t all it should be. He made a mental note to tell Elena. She’d welcome any excuse to read the riot act yet again to Roth about his sloppy security arrangements.

  Elena occupied his thoughts pleasantly as he sat in the darkness, and he started to think ahead, beyond the night’s work. How would she react to criminal methods being used to solve a crime? Personally, she might turn a blind eye. Professionally, she’d have a few problems, and she wouldn’t hesitate to give him a hard time. But not for long. In the insurance business, as in most other enterprises involving large amounts of money, the end tends to justify the means. A healthy bottom line excuses most sins. It’s a wicked old world, he reflected, as he leaned back in Vial’s chair and waited for the hours to go by.

  He must have dozed. When he next looked at his watch it was just before ten; time to go to work. He stood up, rubbed his eyes, and found the switch by the main door. The cellar looked bigger and more mysterious at night than it had during the day, when sunshine had flooded in through the open doors. Now the vaulted ceilings were thick with shadow, and the pools of light cast by the hanging lamps seemed to stretch away forever.

  Sam loaded a batch of empty cartons into the golf cart and set off, the tires thrumming on the flagstone pathway that separated the reds from the whites. His first stop was the Rue des Merveilles, that distinguished address where Château Lafite rubbed aristocratic shoulders with Château Latour. He took the list of Roth’s wines from his pocket and smoothed it out on the passenger seat:

  ’61 Latour, 98 bottles. He went along the rows of bins, looking at the slate tickets marked in chalk that identified the vintage years until he came to 1961. There must have been at least three hundred bottles, he calculated, as he started to fill the empty cartons, and there was no means of knowing if the ninety-eight bottles he took were actually Roth’s. But, as he told himself, Roth wasn’t going to complain. He settled into a rhythm: take two bottles from the bin, check the vintage on each label to make sure, slide the bottles into their individual compartments in the carton, straighten up, go back to the bin. As each carton was filled it was placed on the flatbed behind the seats of the golf cart.

  He paused to look at his watch. It had taken more than thirty minutes to pack fewer than a hundred bottles of Latour. At this rate, he had about three hours to go, plus the trips back and forth in the golf cart. That would see him finished sometime between two and three a.m. He wondered how Philippe was managing to contain his impatience.

  ’53 Lafite, 76 bottles. As he bent and straightened and shuttled between the bins and the golf cart, some of the comments of Florian Vial came back to him. When describing the Lafite, his extravagant compliments had been partially muffled by the frequent kisses he applied to his fingertips. Even so, some gems that Vial had taken from his fellow wine experts’ overblown descriptions had come through loud and clear. Sam remembered one purple patch in particular that had started off quietly enough with “firm yet supple, soft and yet assertive,” going on to “finesse, fragrance, and depth of flavor” mixed with “elegance, authority, and breeding that unfolded splendidly in the mouth,” and ending with this rousing climax: “so grand and sublime as to afford a symposium of all other wines.” All of this Vial had quoted, in English, from memory. At the other end of the prose scale had been his own more down-to-earth opinion that “in the end, the best wine is the wine you like.”

  ’82 Figeac, 110 bottles. Sam tried to picture the château in his mind while he checked and packed the bottles: stone columns, an allée of fine old trees, a gravel drive. Sophie had told him that the present owner’s grandfather had treated Figeac as a holiday home, coming down from Paris only rarely, and leaving the château closed for the rest of the year. Sam found that hard to imagine. He shook his head at the thought and started work on another empty carton. It occurred to him that it was not unlike packing bullion. How much in dollar value had he shifted so far? A million? Two?

  ’70 Pétrus, 48 bottles, 5 magnums. As featured in the L.A. Times, Sam thought, putting the first of the magnums into its nest of cardboard. Was this the one that Danny Roth had been cradling in the photograph? Who had shown the article to Reboul? Who had planned and done the job? Whoever they were, Sam couldn’t fault them professionally. Even Bookman had said that it was as close to a perfect heist as he’d seen. A shame, really, that there was no chance of sitting down with Reboul one day over a drink and filling in some of the gaps.

  ’83 Margaux, 140 bottles. Another question: who had Roth used to buy for him? Someone who knew his stuff, that was sure. There wasn’t a single doubtful bottle in the collection. It was all wine of the very highest quality. When doing his research before leaving L.A., Sam had been amazed at the rise in value of the 1980s vintages of premier cru Bordeaux. Between 2001 and 2006, for example, Margaux had gone up by 58 percent, and Lafite by 123 percent. It was no wonder Roth was climbing the walls. God knows what it would cost him now to refill his cellar.

  The cartons were becoming heavier and heavier, the trips in the golf cart offering only brief moments of relief for an aching back. Sam longed for a massage and a drink.

  ’75 Yquem, 36 bottles. The last three cartons, and a wine that brought out the best (or worst) in wine writers, those whose mission in life is to describe the indescribable. “Fat, rich, and luscious,” or “huge and voluptuous”-Sam had seen the phrases time and time again, and they never failed to conjure up images not of a glass of wine but of the kind of statuesque woman Rubens liked to paint. With a feeling of huge and voluptuous satisfaction, he loaded the final carton onto the golf cart and drove down to the other cartons piled up by the cellar door.

  He was nearly there. He turned off the lights and eased open the door. The night smelled cool and clean after the humid cellar air, and he sucked in a deep, welcome breath as he looked down the drive. He could make out the form of the gates silhouetted against the lights of the boulevard. A car passed, going up the hill, and then silence. Marseille, it seemed, was as
leep. It was 3:15.

  Twenty-two

  Sam’s call found Philippe dozing in his white van, and he couldn’t keep the yawn out of his voice when he answered.

  “Rise and shine,” said Sam. “Time to come to work. Don’t forget to switch off your lights before you turn into the drive.” He could hear the clatter of the engine being started, and Philippe clearing his throat. When he replied, his voice was doing its best to sound alert and efficient. “Three minutes, mon général. I’ll bring the corkscrew. Over and out.”

  Sam grinned and shook his head. Once this was all over, he’d look around for an antique military medal-one of Napoléon’s best-that he could pin on Philippe’s chest for services above and beyond the call of duty. He’d earned it. And he’d probably wear the damn thing.

  Sam walked across the driveway and took up his position in the shadow of Empress Eugénie’s statue. Behind him was the vast sleeping bulk of the Palais, unlit except for the glimmer of two porch lights; ahead, the gates rose in silhouette against the lights of the empty boulevard. With a silent apology to Empress Eugénie for his forward behavior, he felt beneath her flowing marble robes until his hand found the button that young Dominique had used to operate the gates. He pressed it as he heard the sound of an engine laboring up the hill, and saw the gates swing slowly open. Merci, madame.

  Philippe kept his eye on the pinprick of Sam’s flashlight and pulled up next to the pile of cartons stacked outside the cellar door. He was dressed for the evening’s expedition in black from head to toe-a portly Ninja, complete with a close-fitting wool hood of the kind much in vogue with terrorists and bank robbers.

  “I checked,” he whispered with an air of satisfaction. “It’s OK. I wasn’t followed.”

  While they were loading the cartons, Sam suggested as tactfully as he could that the hood might attract the wrong kind of attention on the open road. Philippe did his best to hide his disappointment, and took it off before getting into the driver’s seat. He peered through the windshield toward the boulevard. “Merde! The gates are shut.”

  “Automatic timer,” said Sam. “Pick me up by the statue.”

  They rolled slowly through the gates, Philippe turned on the lights, and the van wheezed along deserted streets, following the signs that would lead them out of Marseille and on to the autoroute.

  Sam collapsed in his seat, feeling drugged by an overwhelming sense of relief. The serious part of the job was over. Tying up the loose ends was going to be fun. “Have you spoken to Sophie? Is she OK?”

  “I would say très OK. She called me late last night. She and Vial had drinks at the hotel and then Vial took her to dinner at Le Petit Nice, the hotel up on the Corniche. The chef there has just been given his third Michelin star-they say he’s a magician with fish. I must pay him a visit. Anyway, she said she had a great time. I think she likes Vial very much. I told her I’d call during the night if there was a problem, or in the morning if everything had gone well.” Philippe slowed down at the entrance to the autoroute to take a ticket from the toll machine. They were heading north, and they had the wide ribbon of road to themselves. “She’s a good girl, Sophie. A little bossy from time to time, but a good girl. I didn’t really know her before this-you know how it is with cousins. Even though they’re family, you only see them at weddings and funerals, with everybody on their best behavior. It must be the same in America, non?”

  But there was no answer from Sam. Sprawled in his seat, his head lolling, his arms hugging his chest, he was starting to make up for two sleepless nights. Philippe drove on in silence, his mind busy with thoughts of his scoop and the pleasant prospect of a trip to Los Angeles to interview Danny Roth. The idea of California fascinated him, as it did so many Frenchmen. Surfers, Hells Angels, square tomatoes, whales, wildfires, mudslides, Big Sur, San Francisco, Hollywood-anything could happen in a place like that. Why, they even had a European governor.

  He turned off the autoroute at Aix and followed the smaller roads that led to Rognes and across the Durance River into the Luberon. It had been some time since he’d made this trip, and he was struck by how empty and quiet the countryside seemed after the crowds and tumult he was used to in Marseille, and how dark the darkness was. He passed the villages of Cadenet and Lourmarin, both fast asleep, and entered the narrow corkscrew road that would take them through the mountain and over to the north side of the Luberon. The steep, rocky slopes of the mountain came down so close to the nearside edge of the road that it was like driving through a jagged, twisting tunnel. And here it was darker still. It could have been a million miles from anywhere; not a place to break down. Sam snored gently through it all.

  He was shaken from sleep when the van turned onto the deeply rutted dirt track that led to the old house. Philippe cut the engine but left the headlights on. He had parked facing the remains of a well, now a tumbledown circular wall of stones supporting a lopsided framework of iron, with a chain hanging from the rusty crossbar. After several unsuccessful tries, accompanied by head-scratching and curses, he finally found the stone concealing the venerable six-inch key to the front door of the house.

  Sam followed him inside, where there were more curses while Philippe looked among festoons of cobwebs for the fuse box and the main power switch. With a grunt of triumph, he turned on the electricity, which produced a dribble of light coming from a forty-watt bulb hanging from the ceiling.

  “Voilà! Welcome to the family château.” He wiped a strand of cobweb from his nose and clapped Sam on the shoulder. “You slept well?”

  “Like a baby.” In fact, Sam felt surprisingly fresh after his nap: clearheaded and cheerful, as he always was when a job had gone well. He followed Philippe through a series of small, low-ceilinged rooms carpeted with dust, empty except for the odd ramshackle chair or table pushed into a corner.

  “What happened to the furniture?”

  Philippe had come to a stop in what had once been a kitchen, now stripped of anything useful. A bird’s nest had fallen down the chimney and into the hearth of the stone fireplace. Propped on the mantelpiece was a faded, stained calendar from the Cavaillon fire department, dated 1995. “Ah, the furniture,” Philippe said. “There were one or two really nice pieces. But the minute the old lady was in her coffin, the relatives came with a truck and cleaned the place out. I’m surprised they left the lightbulbs. They’re probably still arguing about who gets what. But at least they couldn’t take the cellar.” He pushed open a low door in the corner and reached for the light switch, causing whatever it was in the cellar to scurry back to its hole. “We’ll have to put rat poison down, or they’ll eat the labels off the bottles. I think it’s the old glue they like.”

  As in the rest of the house, the cellar had been subjected to the acquisitive attentions of the relatives, and not a single bottle remained. After the vast magnificence of Reboul’s cellar, it seemed decidedly humble. A short flight of steep stairs led to the storage facilities, which were no more than shelves made from old planks resting on iron bars driven into the walls. The surface of the walls was black with mold, and the coating of gravel on the floor had worn thin, exposing patches of beaten earth. But, as Philippe pointed out, it was cool, it was humid, and it was the last place in the world one would expect to find three million dollars’ worth of wine.

  Bringing the cartons in from the van was a slow business, made awkward by doorways and ceilings which had been designed, it seemed to Sam, for dwarves. Were people that much shorter and smaller two hundred years ago? By the time the last carton had been put in place, both men had skinned their knuckles against the rough stone edges of the narrow doorways, and their backs ached from stooping. They had hardly noticed that while they’d been working a new day had arrived.

  “What do you think?” said Philippe. “I’m not a country boy, but this is special.” They were standing outside the house, looking east, where the first splinter of sunlight had just appeared above the horizon. Sam made a slow, 360-degree turn. There was no other house
in sight. They were surrounded by fields that would turn purple later in the year, the clumps of lavender looking like rows of green hedgehogs. Behind them was the mass of the Luberon, misty blue in the early light.

  “You know what?” said Sam. “It’ll look even better after we’ve had breakfast. I haven’t eaten since lunch yesterday.”

  They drove down to Apt, found a café with a terrace in the sun, and raided a nearby bakery for croissants. Big, thick-rimmed cups of café crème were set in front of them. Sam closed his eyes and sniffed the fragrant steam. Only in France did it smell like this; it must have something to do with French milk.

  “Well, my friend,” he said, “we have a rich, full morning ahead of us.” Philippe, his mouth busy with croissant, raised an eyebrow. “First, we’d better check out of that hotel before Vial discovers that he’s suddenly five hundred bottles short, and we need to find someplace else to stay-not in Marseille. So I’m going to need to rent a car. Then we have to find some unmarked cartons, come back to Grandma’s house, repack the wine, and get rid of the other cartons. After that, we can celebrate.” He checked the time and reached for his phone. “Do you think Sophie will be awake yet?”

  She was. Not only that, she had anticipated a swift exit from the hotel and had already packed. She went up even further in Sam’s estimation.

  Philippe dropped him outside the Hertz office at the airport. He told Sam to meet him in the parking area at the entrance to the autoroute and went off in search of wine cartons. A friend of a friend was a vigneron. He would have a barn full of cartons, Philippe was sure.