Dead in the Dregs

by Peter Lewis

  “Oui,” I said.

  “Émile Sackheim. Get in. There’s work to do.”

  I tossed my bag in the back and settled into the comfortable leather seat. He examined me with ice-blue eyes.

  “But first,” he smiled, “we must have lunch.” He spun out of the station and headed into the old quartier of Dijon.

  I like a cop who’s got his priorities straight, I thought to myself. He should give Ciofreddi and Brenneke lessons.

  The restaurant was fancier than I’d expected. We were seated at a corner table discreetly isolated from the other diners, and it was clear my companion was a habitué. The maître d’ handed me a menu and Sackheim a menu and wine list. Sackheim donned a pair of reading glasses, looking more like a professor than a flic.

  “They have an excellent cellar,” he remarked and then, swiftly to our waiter, “A bottle of the ’91 Lafarge Volnay, Clos des Chênes.”

  A cop ordering a bottle of Volnay. No, Toto, I said to myself, we’re definitely not in Kansas anymore.

  Over a ripe fig stuffed with foie gras and a perfectly roasted partridge carved tableside and served in a verjus sauce with white grapes, he asked me to lay out the case as I saw it. I told him what had occurred; the several theories I had developed; that I thought Francisco Fornes had too quickly been tagged as the logical, and easiest, suspect.

  “Yet Lieutenant Ciofreddi contacted me, pleased to put us at lunch together, and asking me to offer you what assistance I can during your stay.”

  “What does he expect you to do?” I said. I was genuinely curious. I wasn’t sure what was supposed to happen.

  “Feldman, Goldoni, they are well known here. They tour the region almost continually, it seems, as I suppose they must. The Napa sheriffs, they want us to watch them. This is, of course, impossible.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “Forgive my naïveté, but why is it impossible?”

  “First of all, we have no such thing as a ‘detective’ in the gendarmerie on the Côte d’Or. Paris, certainly, but not here. And who has time? There’s work to do. Stolen cars, a burglary, the endless stream of drunks driving up and down the nationale. Secondly, no crime has been committed in France. You cannot follow people around waiting for them to do something.” He shrugged and held up his hands as if this were obvious.

  “But how do you think I should work this? I thought maybe you could tag along—you know, come with me.”

  “‘Tag along,’ c’est drôle. Non, comme j’ai dit, c’est impossible.”

  He explained that locating Feldman and Goldoni would be straightforward. Both men had their predictable routines. Appointments were set. A few inquiries would quickly establish their starting points on any given day. I told him what I knew, that Feldman tended to follow the same winemakers vintage to vintage. The names were all in the newsletter.

  “Yes, I’ve read a few issues. And Goldoni?”

  I said that, though I’d focused my attention on Feldman, their paths appeared to intersect all over Burgundy. I wondered how they managed to avoid bumping into each other.

  “Ah, you have Feldman in your sights?” He smiled and took a sip of the Volnay.

  “It’s just that, in terms of motive, Feldman had more reasons to want Wilson dead.”

  “Are you sure?” Sackheim said. “Subordinates can be vindictive, too, non? Goldoni may have resented Wilson.”

  “Maybe. The problem is, there’s no evidence that either of them was in Napa.”

  Sackheim shrugged. Clearly, it was going to be my problem to sort out their itineraries. Then I told him about Pitot.

  “Piteau?” he asked, spelling it out.

  “No, P-i-t-o-t. Jean.”

  Sackheim frowned. “I don’t know. But you will find him, I’m sure.”

  He pulled a card from the breast pocket of his jacket. “If you see something you think I should know, if something serious should happen, you call me,” he said, scribbling a number on the bottom of the card. “My cell phone.”

  My curiosity was piqued.

  “Do you mind if I ask you why you agreed to this? Why you’re helping me out?”

  “I am not helping you, I’m buying lunch.” He smiled. “But I am intrigued by this case, not to mention that we received a call from the American consulate in Lyon. If I could accompany you legally, I would, but I can’t. Besides, you, you will get near to them, whereas I, I am a little obvious, non?” He cleared his throat. “There is something else.”

  He straightened the tablecloth, brushing the bread crumbs off before the waiter had the chance. “You have heard the name Gaston Laurent?” I nodded that I had heard of the three-star chef. Laurent’s death had made news even in the States the year after I left Seattle. “I was assigned to that case. It was a suicide, obviously. He put a gun to his head. There was no question as to what transpired. He was in debt; he had done too much too quickly. The restaurant outside of Beaune, the bistro in Paris, his plans to conquer New York. But when they took away his third star, it killed him.” He surveyed the dining room. “I was a regular at his place. I knew him well. We shared many Cognacs late at night. He was a madman, fou. He spent too much, was obsessed with his produits: petites courgettes, the perfect loup de mer, everything. He could talk for hours about linen and wineglasses. The smallest details.” He paused. “These critics—it doesn’t matter if they’re French or American—they hold a person’s fate in their hands as if it were nothing. Their arrogance is . . . too much.” He shook his head in disgust.

  “No, I understand,” I said. And I did. I’d felt the same way for years.

  “They destroy people très cavalièrement. How do you say?”

  “‘Very cavalierly,’ it’s the same.”

  “So, this case. It is interesting, non? Somebody kills a critic. Who? Why? This interests me. And Richard Wilson . . . en France . . .” Sackheim curled his lower lip and nodded gravely. He clearly understood the power Wilson had come to wield, how revered he was, and how despised. “Now, this drama, it moves to France. Lieutenant Ciofreddi believes so, and I, too, fear that this is so. I wish that I am not constrained by the law. But you, you have more freedom. You must do this, Monsieur Stern. But you must find the killer before he finds you.” He smiled again, though there was nothing gentle or friendly or humorous in his expression.

  “I am serious. There are people here who hate, hated, your Richard Wilson. They count themselves as his enemies, but, of course, he has made some vignerons very rich. For every winemaker he ruined, there is another he made a wealthy man. Here, I have to tell you, we can be quite ruthless. You will need to keep your wits about you and to tread carefully.”

  I pondered the warning, and our conversation lagged. We ordered coffee.

  “I know it probably seems a very American thing to do, but would you mind telling me a little about yourself? Your English is incredibly good,” I said.

  “No, my friend, my English is proficient. This partridge paired with the Volnay was incredibly good.”

  His story transfixed me.

  He was, he admitted himself, a curiosity: There weren’t many Jews in the gendarmerie. Studious and scholarly in his youth, he found himself almost rabbinical in the fastidious way he tackled criminal cases. He credited this, ironically, to a Jesuit education and the fact that his father had been a lawyer and had trained him to ask questions and split hairs, and had always adopted an adversarial posture to get to the heart of whatever they talked about when Émile was a boy.

  “The Talmudic school of criminal investigation,” he smiled.

  His father held small interests in a number of domaines, miniscule and insignificant shares, really, given as payment for legal work he had performed on behalf of the propriétaires. But these had entitled him to help in the harvest—a yearly event Sackheim père had looked forward to as a welcome distraction from the staid practice of law—and to small amounts of wine annually that he greatly enjoyed.

  Banned from practicing law under the Statut
des Juifs in 1940, Émile’s father had been cheated out of his vineyard holdings a year later. A gentile négociant and friend had convinced him to sign over his shares, “until all of this is over, to keep them safe.” His parents barely eluded deportation to the death camps and managed to survive, eking out a living in a series of ever more menial jobs, moving from place to place. Young Émile was born in the aftermath of the war, and though the conditions of their family life remained precarious, his memories were reasonably happy. Still suffering from a residual paranoia, they even found a parochial school that had agreed to accept the young Jewish student as a gesture of atonement for the Church’s complicity in Vichy. Offered conversion by a particularly assiduous priest, Sackheim had graciously declined.

  “I know where I come from. Now I am nothing—neither Jew nor Catholic. I am a true child of the Republic, a practicing member of the Church of Justice. But you see, when I describe the French as vindictive and vengeful, I know what I’m talking about.”

  The waiter served coffee, and Sackheim waited for him to leave the table before continuing.

  His father, nonetheless, despite his family’s survival, died a bitter man. To honor his memory, his mother insisted Émile go to law school, but Sackheim was restless and quit after his first year.

  “Why practice law if they can pass laws that make it illegal?” he asked sardonically. I had no answer. His mother died when she heard the news. “That’s a joke,” he said. “A Jewish mother dying when her son, how do you say, ‘drops out’ of law school. In fact, she had all along been ill, never completely recovering from her ordeal.”

  Instead he joined the gendarmerie, and his natural abilities and ready intelligence made for swift advancement. Growing up under such circumstances, he felt himself to be an outsider; now he turned it to his advantage.

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Never mind. It was a long time ago. Anyway, I received an excellent Catholic education. Alors!” he called to our waiter, “l’addition, s’il vous plaît.” He regarded me again with startling blue eyes. “I am an old man, nearing retirement. They are reorganizing the Police Judiciaire and have been trying to get rid of me for several years, but I am holding out until the end. This will probably be my last case. So what if I break a rule or two? What can they say? ‘You’re fired’? Eh, bien. Who cares?”

  Once we were in the car I said, “Forgive me. I know it’s an impertinent question, but your name, Sackheim, it sounds so . . .”

  “German?” he laughed. “My father was from Alsace. My mother was Lyonnaise. But my hair—it was red when I was a boy—and my blue eyes, they provided, how do you say, ‘protective coloration’ at the lycée. But you, Shtayrn, you’re a Jew, non?”

  I nodded.

  “I thought so. Your name. And, unlike me, you, my friend, look Jewish.” We both smiled. “So, do you need to check into your hotel? No? Excellent. First you need a geography lesson. This place, Bourgogne, is maddening.”

  We drove south down the N74, turned off the highway at Fixin, and found ourselves on a narrow road.

  “This is La Route des Grands Crus. It goes through Gevrey-Chambertin, Morey-Saint-Denis, Chambolle-Musigny.” We passed through one legendary village after another, and I remembered back to when I’d first attached these real places to the names I’d memorized as a young sommelier.

  On the far side of Chambolle, we switchbacked by the Clos de Vougeot, and Sackheim pulled over to take in the legendary vineyard and domaine. The place floated on a sea of mist broken by the tips of vines that fanned out in unending rows, the château’s volumes of gray stone massed and fractured as if they had split and multiplied over centuries. He gazed at the place in awe.

  “These wines, they are . . . incroyable, extraordinaire.” English was insufficient, obviously, and the wines, a few of which I had tasted in my glory days, were a luxury I could no longer afford on a bar-tender’s tips.

  In Nuits-Saint-Georges, Sackheim pulled into a parking space across from a tabac, took the map I had in my hands, and ordered me out. He spread the map on the hood of the Citroën, overlooking a stream that passed through the south side of the town.

  “In two months this river, le Meuzin, will be full, rushing . . .” He extended his arm to the west.

  In broad strokes he explained the Côte d’Or, a patchwork of vineyards forming an irregular and inscrutable checkerboard of names—communes, premiers crus, grands crus—so complex in their array that I wondered how a worker found his way through the maze of plots and parcels and rows.

  “But you know all this, non? Lieutenant Ciofreddi told me that you are a distinguished sommelier.” I thought I detected a touch of irony. No American could be the real thing in a Frenchman’s eyes. “Come, I will take you to your hotel.”

  We turned off at the sign for Aloxe-Corton. The road passed through a corridor of ancient acacias and narrowed, winding its way through two small squares. Sackheim dropped me in front of the hotel. I stood at the curb, my bag at my feet. He rolled his window down.

  “Tell me, is there a restaurant in town where guys like Feldman and Goldoni might tend to go?” I asked. “Somewhere people talk about?”

  “Perhaps you should try La Bourguignonne. She is a very good cook. C’est branché.

  “Thanks.”

  “Happy hunting,” Sackheim said. “And pay attention,” he added. “You must watch your back, eh?”

  16

  Le Chemin de Vigne stood off the street, set back from a low stone wall, the vestibule framed by trellised roses, its façade awash in a crimson scrim of ivy. I entered the hallway and, finding it empty, walked into the common room. A woman was bent at the fireplace, sweeping ashes into a dustpan. Hearing my steps on the flagstone, she craned her neck.

  “Ah, pardon, Monsieur,” she said, standing and wiping her hands on an apron. She was young, her black hair in a wild tangle, and she wore black jeans and flip-flops and a loose sweater beneath her apron. She led me to the front desk, where I handed her my passport and a credit card. Then she took me upstairs.

  “Voilà, votre chambre,” she said. “It is okay?”

  “Better than okay. It’s perfect, lovely.”

  “Enjoy your visit, Monsieur.”

  I looked around. The room had a rustic elegance, its off-center lines framed by rough-hewn beams, the walls washed with pale mustard-colored plaster. I splashed my face at the marble sink to shock myself awake and did a circuit of the room, wondering if I’d have a chance to enjoy it. The windows faced a vineyard to one side and a small park to the other, a towering linden and an ancient, stunted holly set amidst a table and chairs that had been covered for the season.

  Downstairs, I asked if she had a phone book.

  “Oui, bien sûr.” She returned a moment later with a thin Pages Jaunes in her outstretched hand.

  “Is this just for Aloxe-Corton?” I asked.

  “Mais non, it has all the communes surrounding Beaune,” she said, then disappeared through a door at the far end of the room.

  I sat at a table and leafed through the book until I arrived at P. There were two listings for Pitot in Nuits-Saint-Georges: Gilbert and Henri. I copied the addresses in my notebook and walked to the door through which the woman had gone.

  “Excusez-moi, Madame,” I called. I thanked her and asked if she could call me a taxi.

  I had the cab drop me at the Hertz office in Beaune, where a prim attendant handed me the keys to a sporty Rover sedan, fittingly painted a rich burgundy red. I went over the map with her and figured I’d start at the Novotel, the place Eric Feldman said he’d be staying.

  The Novotel, the local representative of a national chain that catered to the business traveler—in France, an exclusively male club—occupied a square block on the edge of town not far from the Hertz office. I’d stayed in one of these places on my first trip to France, organized by a distributor in Seattle. Made a Day’s Inn feel like the Plaza Athénée. I remembered how I’d felt in the morning. The co
ffee alone had made me homicidal, not to mention the day-old croissants, foil-wrapped butter, and recycled confiture. Personally, I’d want to punch my first client in the nose. Given the range of accommodation available, it seemed an unlikely choice for a wine writer, but Feldman was doubtless on a budget, and his pick fit Jordan Meyer’s description of him: dry, lifeless, keeping himself ascetically aloof from the sybaritic pleasures of his métier.

  Management had seemingly abandoned ship, leaving the operation on autopilot. I rang twice, and a man peered out from the office behind the front desk.

  “Oui, Monsieur? May I help you? Checking in?”

  “Non, merci. I am looking for Eric Feldman. He arrived . . .”

  “On Sunday,” the man answered efficiently.

  “He is not here?”

  “Non, Monsieur. Mr. Feldman has his appointments. Would you like to leave a message?” He placed his hand on the lip of Feldman’s room box. It was empty. When I said nothing, he busied himself with paperwork and fiddled with the computer.

  “If you would like to leave your card, Monsieur, I will make certain that Monsieur Feldman gets it,” he said, staring at the computer screen.

  A card. That was good. What would mine say? That I was a retired sommelier and unsuccessful sleuth?

  “Non, merci, Monsieur,” I said.

  I stood in front of the desk, contemplating my next move. The man stared distractedly at me from the tops of his eyes and then, when I didn’t budge, retreated to the excitement of his office. I dawdled at the desk, checking out the lobby. He peeked out a few minutes later and, seeing me still standing there, disappeared back inside.

  Come on, I thought, be a Frenchman. Stand firm and be rude to me. I’m an American, damn it. But he refused to cooperate.

  I found my way to the center of town and parked off the Place Carnot. It was too early for dinner, even for an American. I wandered into Athenaeum, a famous bookstore specializing in the subject of wine, and browsed the shelves. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. Why French Winemakers Hate American Critics? How to Kill a Wine Writer? I was out of luck.