Dead in the Dregs

by Peter Lewis

  “That night—one night—she spent with an American, a soldier,” Françoise said.

  “He was with the army of Patton,” her mother-in-law whispered. “He took me to a warehouse. We drank wine. He was so handsome, so gentle.” Her voice trailed off, swept away by the undertow of memory.

  “And then, the next morning, he was gone,” Françoise said.

  Sackheim stared from one to the other. Monique, who had gone to the window, turned back into the room.

  “You know about Henri’s father,” Françoise said.

  “The car accident,” Sackheim responded. “Yes, I have seen the records.”

  “Hnh,” she snorted. “There was no accident. He killed himself, hung himself in the shed,” and she gestured with her chin through the window to the little outbuilding that teetered in near collapse toward the well. “It is the shame that killed him, the disgrace.”

  The old woman’s face crumpled.

  “And this . . . child,” Sackheim said tentatively.

  “This bastard?” Françoise said. “He is my husband, Monsieur.”

  “Mon Dieu,” Sackheim muttered.

  “Yes, God, that’s what she says,” Françoise Pitot went on. “She believes that her blindness is God’s punishment for her sin.”

  “It is true,” the old woman insisted, her head pivoting vacantly.

  “And this explains, perhaps, your husband’s feelings for Gilbert?” Sackheim asked the old woman. She did not reply.

  “What do you think?” Françoise answered for her. “They were married that October. Henri was born in June. By then, Etienne was trapped. He knew the child was not his, but he could tell no one. For thirty years, this disgrace, it gnawed at him. So, yes, of course, he adored Gilbert.”

  “And you never heard from the American again?” Sackheim asked the old woman.

  “He said he would return after the war. He promised. Bob, that was his name. Bob.” She pronounced it Bawb.

  Sackheim’s eyes bored into her as if the sheer intensity of his gaze would unlock the secrets buried in the walls and floorboards and cellar of the house.

  “That was his prénom,” Sackheim said.

  Françoise Pitot turned to him with a look that disfigured her face.

  “But, of course, you saw the patch on his uniform,” Sackheim said.

  A silence enveloped the room. I could sense Sackheim holding his breath.

  “Oh, yes, Colonel,” Françoise said. “It was Wilson. Robert Wilson.”

  “But what makes you think . . .” Sackheim started.

  “You do not see it?” she said.

  Sackheim didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. It was obvious to all of us. You had only to look beneath the stubble and shabby clothing. Henri Pitot’s resemblance to his half-brother was unmistakable, even to Sackheim, who had only seen photographs and had never met the great Richard Wilson in person.

  Monique raised her hands to her lips, her eyes widening, dawning comprehension suffusing her face with horror. Old Madame Pitot seemed to collapse in on herself, a blind and broken old woman.

  “I deeply regret . . .” Sackheim said but stopped. He seemed at a loss for words. What could he possibly say that might staunch the overwhelming tragedy that had engulfed their family?

  “I am sorry,” he said. Then he faced Françoise. The tension between them unnerved me. I couldn’t look. I let my eyes survey the living room, moving over it inch by inch, an exercise in concentrated distraction. Françoise Pitot labored to rise from the sofa, and I could see her following my gaze.

  My eyes stopped at a hutch that stood against the wall. Behind one of its doors, an oddly shaped bottle was tucked between a Bas-Armagnac and a bottle labeled VIN CUIT. It was small, no larger than a split of Champagne, its lip curled back to reveal a tiny cork.

  I walked up to the hutch, opened the brass-knobbed door, and took it in my hand. A wan smile flitted across her lips, and a strange light, a look half fascinated, half demented, shone in her eyes.

  As I held it to the light, I could see that its contents—the bottle was only half full—were deep gold in color. On a thin label, like one you would find on a medicine bottle or a home canning jar, a fine, formal, old-fashioned hand had written MARC PITOT—RÉSERVE DE LA FAMILLE. I pulled the cork, held the bottle to my nose, and winced.

  “You’re sick,” I said to her. She clamped her jaw. I could see the veins working in her neck. “You’ll need this,” I said to Sackheim.

  “Don’t you dare!” Françoise Pitot yelled. She rushed at me, one hand grabbing me around the throat, the other trying to wrest the bottle out of my hand. I struggled to break free, to keep it out of her reach, but her grip was ferocious. She grabbed my arm, caught me at the elbow, and wrenched it violently. The bottle flew out of my hand and shattered against the wooden floor.

  Sackheim and Ponsard ran toward us and pulled her off me. They held her by the arms. She struggled momentarily and suddenly gave up. We stood there, looking into each other’s eyes. Hers were dark with malice. They terrified me.

  Slowly, imperceptibly at first, and then with increasing pungency, a stench filtered through the air that made me want to vomit. It was putrid, a mix of powerfully distilled spirits and rotten meat.

  “I told Jean to stop you, but you wouldn’t stop,” she hissed. “And then you arrived here, and he tried again, at Carrière. But he’s an imbécile.”

  “Madame!” Sackheim commanded. “You must come with us.”

  “Oui,” she said in an exhausted voice, her breast heaving. “I will get my overcoat.”

  They released her, and she backed away, turned, and disappeared through the doorway.

  “Keep an eye on her,” Sackheim instructed Ponsard. “What is this, this disgusting odor?” he asked, looking down at the pieces of broken glass and the puddle of liquid splashed across the floor.

  “I’ll explain it to you later. Let’s just get out of here. Before we die of asphyxiation,” I said.

  We heard a door slam, and Ponsard, hapless, stuck his head out of the hallway a moment later.

  “Get back there!” Sackheim commanded. “You must come with us, too, Mademoiselle,” Sackheim said, turning to Monique. “Je regrette.”

  “But I have nothing to do with this,” she protested. “It was all her idea,” she said, flinging her arm at the hallway through which Françoise had disappeared.

  “Even so,” Sackheim said. “We must do what we can to untangle this . . . this mess.”

  At that instant we heard an explosion from one of the bedrooms.

  Racing down the hall, we found poor Ponsard standing outside a bedroom.

  “It’s locked,” he said. It was a limp excuse. I didn’t envy him Sackheim’s fury as the colonel pushed him aside and heaved himself against the door, which instantly gave way. They burst into the room.

  Françoise lay on the floor. Half her head was gone, the bed linens and faded wallpaper spattered with brains and blood, fragments of skull and strands of hair. In the corner, Henri Pitot cowered, his eyes bloodshot and crazed. He held the shotgun in both hands, staring at what remained of his wife.

  “She promised that she would tell no one,” he said.

  Sackheim nodded to Ponsard, who took the gun.

  “C’est fini,” Sackheim said. “L’histoire est terminée. Come, we have much to do.” He looked at Ponsard and sighed, shaking his head. “Mademoiselle, s’il vous plaît,” he said, placing his hand on Monique’s shoulder, “do not look. Come. And you, Monsieur,” he said to Henri Pitot, taking him by the arm. He led them down the hall, and I followed them outside.

  I could see Marcellin standing by one of the police cars. Jean-Luc Carrière stared out the window from the backseat.

  We walked through the yard. Halfway across it, Monique loosened herself from Sackheim’s grasp and grabbed the shotgun out of Ponsard’s hand. She ran to the edge of the well and turned to face us.

  “It’s all your fault!” she screamed at me. “Wh
y didn’t you stop? Why?”

  She lifted the muzzle of the shotgun to a point beneath her head and pulled the trigger with her thumb. Nothing happened. Henri had emptied the thing into his wife. She flung the gun at Sackheim, who was racing to stop her, and as he dodged it, she clambered onto the edge of the well. Sackheim took her around the waist and pulled her to the ground. She raised herself on all fours and stared at me through a mass of tangled hair, tears streaking her face.

  “I hate you!” she cried

  “My God, my God!” Sackheim said. “Quel désastre !” he stammered and put his hands to his head as if to blot out the string of calamities that had engulfed him. Ponsard, who had been paralyzed up till that moment, ran toward them and, after stooping momentarily to check on Sackheim, lifted Monique off the ground.

  “It’s too much, too terrible,” Sackheim said, gazing down into the darkness of the well, then collected himself and walked to the police cars. He took the radio and called for help.

  29

  I walked to where Monique had fallen, bent down, picked up a pebble, and pitched it into the well. I heard a faint plop as it hit the water.

  It took only a few minutes for the first police car to show up. Others followed over the course of the next hour. The flics from out of town were immediately recognizable, some in plainclothes, most in uniform, their authority acknowledged deferentially by the locals. Sackheim had been cornered by one of them—a detective, from what I could tell—who was vexed that Sackheim appeared to have continued the investigation on his own in contravention of his orders, as if the tragedy that had unfolded before our eyes had been the predictable result of provincial incompetence.

  The Brigade de Recherche stood in a cluster at first, whispering and smoking, unsure who was in charge or where they should start. The man to whom Sackheim had spoken finally issued various instructions, while Sackheim himself picked up the shotgun from where it leaned against his car, handed it to Marcellin, and told him to get Carrière to the gendarmerie. Ponsard drove Monique, and a third car ferried Henri Pitot.

  Sackheim came up to where I stood in the opposite corner of the yard, looking through the chain-link fence.

  “Henri must have been hiding in the bedroom after he ran from the shed,” he said. “He heard everything. I am an idiot.”

  It was as if the situation had taken on such enormous dimensions that Sackheim needed to anchor himself to one detail, an explanation of a single element to which he could attach his own culpability.

  “I am going home now. And you should, too,” he said.

  “If only I knew where that was,” I said.

  For an instant, he looked puzzled, then he nodded. “Come,” he said.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Where would you like to go?” he said.

  “I’d like a drink, to be perfectly honest.”

  “Quelle bonne idée. À Beaune,” he said.

  Neither of us spoke after that. We entered the old part of town, parking across from Athenaeum. I doubted I would find any narrative as tortured as the one I had just witnessed anywhere on its shelves. We walked across the square, our shoes crunching the gravel, and entered a garishly lit brasserie a few doors down from the burger joint where I’d botched my own interrogation of Jacques Goldoni. Sackheim stopped at the bar and ordered for us.

  “Come this way. It’s quieter,” he said, directing me up a staircase to an empty dining room on the mezzanine.

  “Alors,” he said, as we sat down. “It is a sad day. Let’s have a Calva to soothe our souls.” Sackheim pulled a brown leather cigar case from his inside pocket and offered it to me.

  “Merci,” I said, pulling one out and handing the case back to him. He took my cigar, carefully clipped it, and set a box of matches on the table between us. We slowly turned the cigars, the flames flaring and dying in quick succession. The barman set our drinks down and disappeared. Sackheim took a puff to ensure his was properly lit.

  “So, why did you suspect the gift Eugénie brought for her mother was Wilson’s hand? I still don’t understand.”

  “Just a hunch.”

  “What is this, ‘a hunch’?”

  “You know, a guess, a feeling.”

  “Un pressentiment, oui.”

  “What’s a hand, Colonel?” I said.

  “A hand?” he repeated. “Je ne comprends pas.”

  “Skin and bones. And what’s the oenological corollary of skin and bones? We know that Jean killed Richard. But he screws it up. He places the body in a cask where, naturally, they find it the next day. It’s the middle of vendange, after all. What did he expect?” Neither of us could suppress a smile. “But before he drops the body into the vat, he cuts off the hand, the writing hand, the symbol of everything he believes has ruined his family. He brings it to his sister, who, thinking that he had forgotten a package at her house, brings it with her. For his funeral, as it turns out.”

  “Continue,” Sackheim said.

  “The day we met Henri Pitot in the cellar, he mentioned the old still he had out behind the house.” Sackheim nodded. “Skin and bones. Skin, seeds, and stems. What’s left over: pomace,” I said. My companion, swirling the snifter of Calvados in a lazy circle, stopped. “Henri, sick bastard that he is, gets it into his head to distill the hands—Wilson’s and Eric Feldman’s writing hands—with pomace and blended what you saw, smelled, in the shed.”

  “Henri was distilling . . .” he said.

  “Richard’s hand that Eugénie brought home. The gift for her mother.”

  “And the little bottle you discovered?”

  “Le Marc Pitot, Réserve de la Famille? Feldman’s hand, of course. Henri had left room in the bottle for the second batch.”

  “Mon Dieu,” he muttered.

  “Do you drink marc, Colonel?”

  “Too harsh. I prefer this,” he said, lifting the Calvados and taking a sip.

  “Yeah, it’s an acquired taste,” I said. “Not that one could ever acquire a taste for marc blended with a dead person’s hand,” I added. “I doubt I’ll ever be able to drink the stuff again.”

  “But how did you solve this puzzle?” He looked at me, genuinely curious.

  “I kept asking myself, Where are the hands? What the hell can you do with hands? And then, when we were at Pitot’s, it came to me. It’s the same method I applied to the mystery of le collage: to employ les techniques de vinification to the elements of the case. The hands had to be somewhere.”

  Sackheim thought for a moment. “You know, this piece of furniture in which you found the bottle today, in French we call this un buffet deux corps.” He paused. “But it contained only one body. It awaited the arrival of the second.”

  He stared down at the table. His cigar had gone out. Slowly, meticulously, he relit it, sucked it with relish, blew a long, precise stream of smoke into the thick atmosphere of the café, and looked at me. Then he sipped the Calva and stared at the ceiling.

  “They have taken me off the case,” he said.

  Smoke swirled in heavy waves around the globe of light ensconced on the wall.

  “Jesus, Colonel. It’s my fault, isn’t it?” I felt wretched.

  He didn’t answer me directly. “My men will need me, but there is nothing I can do for them.” He signaled for the check. “Give me just one minute,” he said. He pulled out his cell phone and walked away.

  “I have made a reservation for you in your old hotel,” he said, returning to the table. “One requires the comfort of the familiar after such a day.”

  He had me drop him at the gendarmerie.

  “There is no need for one to go back to see the carnage,” he said. “In fact, they will not let me go back. I think perhaps, in the end, I broke a few too many rules.” I started to say something, but he put his hand up. “Get some rest. Tonight I will cook. I need something to keep my mind off this . . . catastrophe. I’ll pick you up at seven o’clock.”

  Le Chemin de Vigne was nearly empty aft
er the frenzy of the Hospices, and the owner gave me the same room I’d used the week before. I wanted to sleep, but my mind was whirling and I decided to take a walk.

  I stepped out the front door and wandered down the street, passed through the tiny plaza, and skirted the vineyard I could see from the window of my room. I stuck to the road that fronted a walled mansion and passed the hillock that contained the cisterns that fed Aloxe-Corton. They really did look like bomb shelters, their vented chimneys rising out of the earth like ventilation pipes.

  The road paralleled the irrigation ditch, a channel I now realized fed the wells from the hills and vineyards of the Bois de Corton. I walked uphill against its current, the water descending the channel in a trickle. At the end of the road, I turned left and crossed a concrete bridge. Brush and weeds all but obscured a modern cabotte dug into the hillside like a pillbox.

  As I ascended to the wooded crown of the hill, I passed the ancient stone hut I had seen that morning when Sackheim had driven us to the body of Lucas Kiers. A small van was parked on the side of the road, and workers stood in a vineyard watching me. We nodded from a distance. Mist hugged the hollows of the land that rose and fell in gentle waves across the imperceptible microclimates of Aloxe. At the end of the track where Sackheim had parked, I turned and looked back toward the village, turned again, and headed up the path.

  Just beyond where we’d found Lucas Kiers lying on the ground, I saw a sapling with a hand-carved sign set into the earth. It was a beech tree, the plaque marking the convergence of the four communes of Aloxe-Corton, Ladoix, Magny-lès-Villers, and Pernand-Vergelesses. I did a circuit of the Bois, following the same path I was sure Kiers had jogged on the mornings he’d staggered into the Chemin’s dining room, breathless and drenched in sweat.

  As I came down the hill and descended toward the village, the sky unleashed a rain shower and I ducked into the concrete hut to sit it out. My mind was numb, empty, and I sat on the ground, listening to the endless pit pit pit of water hitting the earth.