by Peter May
Lightning crackled somewhere over the other side of the hill, followed seconds later by an explosion of thunder.
Fabien shrugged. ‘He didn’t get them from me. You can buy my wines in any supermarket or cave around here.’
‘Why would he do that?’
‘You’d have to ask him.’
‘I would. Only someone murdered him.’
Fabien held him in a steady, unblinking gaze, face streaming. His change of subject took Enzo by surprise. ‘So, when’s the funeral?’
More lightning, more thunder. Enzo frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Nicole’s mother.’
Enzo felt anger rise up his back like bristles on a porcupine. ‘What’s it to you?’
‘I thought I might go.’
Confusion diluted anger for just a moment, and Enzo stared at Fabien through narrowed eyes. ‘Why would you do that?’
‘Me and Nicole, we have…an understanding. I think she’d appreciate my support.’
Enzo shook his head. ‘You stay away from Nicole. That’s the only thing you need to understand. You go anywhere near her, you answer to me.’
‘I’m shaking in my shoes.’ Thunder burst above their heads, so loudly that both men ducked involuntarily, momentarily chastened by an anger greater than their own before recovering their dignity and resuming their stand-off. Fabien tipped his head towards Enzo’s carrier bag. ‘Are you going to tell me what’s in the bag?’
Enzo glared at him and sounded much braver than he felt. ‘No.’
‘Looks to me like you’re stealing my land.’
‘Does it?’
‘And you’re trespassing.’
Enzo thrust out his jaw. ‘You know, in Scotland there is no law of trespass. Because we figured out a long time ago that nobody owns the land. We inhabit it for a short time. And when we’re gone, other people inhabit it. The land is forever, we’re just passing through.’
‘Semantics.’
‘That’s a big word.’
‘I read a lot.’
‘Well, read my lips. Stay away from Nicole.’ As Enzo tried to move past him, Fabien’s wet hand pushed into his chest once more. Enzo looked down at it, a hand that could do him a great deal of damage if its owner chose to use it for that purpose. Then he looked into the young man’s eyes. Their faces were only inches apart.
‘I could take you any day, old man.’
‘Maybe you could. But you’d suffer a lot of collateral damage in the process.’
The two men stood dripping in the rain, staring each other down, like animals in the wild. Each daring the other to make the first move. Each knowing that whatever the outcome, it would be bloody for them both. A few moments seemed to stretch into eternity. Then Fabien’s hand dropped to his side, and Enzo pushed past, their shoulders bumping, ungiving and hard, neither man wanting to lose face.
Fabien turned and watched, impassive, as Enzo got into his 2CV, backed it out around Fabien’s four-by-four, and headed back towards the road, down a track which had become a stream. Wipers smeared a fly-stained windscreen. Lightning flashed again across the valley, but the thunder had retreated beyond the hill. Like the threat of violence which had passed, its fury was spent and its roar muted.
III
Enzo pulled out eight inches of plastic from the roll in the machine and drew the cutter across it to make a plastic bag big enough to take a small trowelful of earth. Then, carefully, he placed the cut edge inside the machine and hit the start button. The plastic crinkled around the soil as the machine sucked out the air to create a vacuum before heat-sealing the bag.
He passed it to Sophie for labelling, cut another bag from the roll, and poured in the last of the eighteen samples they had collected.
There was a knock at the door. Michelle opened it, shaking her umbrella out on to the terrasse and propping it against the wall before stepping inside. ‘Hi.’ She tried to sound bright, but there was a tension behind her smile. ‘The rain’s really bad. Nobody’s picking grapes in this.’
Enzo had seen the harvesters out earlier, a frenzied attempt to strip as many of the vines as possible before the deluge. Now the vineyards were empty, harvesters abandoned, dripping in the rain.
Sophie cast Michelle a look, then turned back to her father who was concentrating on the final seal. ‘This is the one from Chateau Lacroux?’
‘Yes, the argile calcaire.’ It was a stony, chalky texture.
‘Hi,’ Bertrand said to Michelle. He was doing his best to ignore the atmosphere that Sophie was doing her best to create.
Michelle gave him a smile of appreciation and crossed the room to see what they were doing. She brought the smell of damp clothes with her and looked at all the bags laid out on the table. ‘Are those the soil samples?’
Enzo nodded as he hit the start button for the last time. ‘Yeah.’
‘I thought I was going to help with that.’
Without looking at her, Sophie said, ‘Some of us manage to get out of our beds earlier than others.’
Enzo glared at his daughter, remembering all the weekend mornings he’d had to tip her out of her bed in time for lunch. ‘We had to move fast before the rain started,’ he said.
The machine sucked the air out of the bag, then buzzed as it heat-sealed it shut.
‘Wow, where’d you get that?’ Michelle said.
Enzo straightened up and stretched his stiffening back. ‘At the hypermarket in town. It’s a food saver, for vacuum-sealing foodstuffs. Ideal for preventing contamination of the soil samples.’
‘How are you sending them to the States?’
‘I’m not. I’m taking them myself.’
Michelle pursed her lips. ‘Do you have official permission?’
‘Why would he need permission?’ Sophie glowered at her.
‘Because you can’t just go carrying soil samples with you on an airplane into the United States. Americans are paranoid about contaminants being brought in from other countries. Bugs and bacteria and viruses. They’re even scared you might carry something into the country in the treads of your shoes. That’s why you have to sign a form on the plane saying you haven’t been on a farm before travelling.’ She looked at Enzo. ‘You do have permission, don’t you?’
Sophie gazed up at her father with concern. ‘Do you?’
Enzo shrugged dismissively. ‘It could take weeks to get the paperwork sorted out for something like this. We don’t have the time.’
‘So how are you going to get them through customs?’ Bertrand said.
‘I’ll pack them into the lining of my suitcase. They’re not going to show up on the x-ray.’
But Michelle was shaking her head. ‘You know, these days the TSA are going through almost every bag. They find these things in your suitcase, not only will you lose them, you’ll be in deep shit.’
‘What’ll you do, Papa?’ For the moment, Sophie had forgotten her feud with Michelle.
‘I’ll think of something,’ Enzo said, as if thinking of something might be the easiest thing in the world. While, in truth, he hadn’t the least idea of what it was he would do. He turned instead towards his whiteboard and the coded review he had scrawled across it the day before. ‘Right now, we need to concentrate on breaking Gil Petty’s code.’
IV
The rain had not yet reached Lascombes, but as she drove up the winding track towards the farm, Nicole could see the clouds gathering on the distant horizon. The wind breathed through the hills in gasps and sighs, gathering in eddies where mountain streams cut through rock as old as time, shaking leaves from trees and lifting them up to carry them off on its wayward path.
Everything seemed so normal. The tractor stood in the yard, a chainsaw lying beside the wooden trestle where her father cut the logs. The dogs came running to greet her as they always did, oblivious to the death in their midst, recognising the pitch of the old Renault 4L that her father had bought for her at the car market. As she got out of it, the wind whipped about her f
ace, and the dogs danced, barking, about her legs. She barely noticed them. She looked towards the stoop, where they had sat so often on warm summer evenings, her mother reading to her from the books she borrowed each week from the library van that came to the road’s end. And as the door of the house opened, she found it hard to believe that it would not be her mother who stepped out to greet her. Harder still to accept that it never would.
Her father stood in the doorway looking at her. Still with his old flat cap pushed back on his head, dungarees torn and stained from his labours on the farm, big boots caked with mud and shit. He looked miserable, desolate. Diminished somehow.
Tears sprang to her eyes again, and she ran across the yard and up the steps to throw herself into his arms. They stood for a long time holding each other, holding onto every memory they’d ever had of the woman they both loved, in case they might slip away just as she had. When, finally, she looked up into his face, she saw no tears in his eyes. Men like her father did not cry. They just bled inside and suffered in silence.
The sejour was dark, the remnants of oak logs smouldering in the cheminee, the smell of stale cooking hanging in still air. Her aunt took her in her arms and kissed her. She, too, was dry-eyed, but Nicole could see in them that there had been tears. There was a limit to how much crying you could do.
It was with an awful sense of dread that Nicole pushed open the door to her mother’s bedroom to see her laid out on the bed, candles burning on bedside tables at either side of her pillow. Their flames threw flickering shadows on the bloodless skin of her mother’s face, the only warmth in the blue-white chill of death. But the lines etched around her eyes and mouth by months of pain had gone. She looked at peace now, a strange serenity about her.
The air was filled with the scent of burning wax and something medicinal, like disinfectant in a hospital. Her mother’s hands were folded together in her lap. Nicole approached the bed to take one of them in hers. She was shocked by how cold it was. Shocked, too, by how little like her mother this dead person was: all animation and personality removed, life and laughter long departed. Leaving only the vessel that had borne them. Not really her mother at all.
She closed her eyes and thought again about kneeling in the abbey the previous night, praying for a quick and painless departure. She could not help wondering, irrationally, as she had through all the long drive from Gaillac, if she was somehow responsible for her mother’s death.
They walked in silence together up to the old abandoned farmhouse, past the piles of logs heaped up along the track, canvas covers whipping and billowing in the wind. Cloud had obliterated the sun. They could see the rain now, sweeping across the distant hills like a fog. Lightning flashed across the horizon, and they heard the far-off rumble of thunder. They stopped to watch for a moment, knowing that it was only a matter of minutes before the rain would reach them.
Her father scratched his head with fingers that were black from harvesting walnuts. ‘Can’t do it on my own,’ he said.
Nicole turned her face up to look at him, puzzled.
‘Do what, Papa?’
‘Run the farm. With Marie gone…I can’t do it on my own.’
Nicole sighed. Her mother had done so much on the farm, as well as keeping house, cooking for them, doing the laundries. Her father was right. There was no way he could do it all himself. ‘Can’t you get help?’
He shook his head and avoided her eye. ‘Can’t afford it.’ He was silent for a long time. Perhaps it was only the first spots of rain blowing in their faces that precipitated his final confession. ‘See, it was always a struggle, Nicole. Putting you through university. Paying your digs in Toulouse.’ He turned big, sad, guilty eyes to meet his daughter’s. ‘Can’t do it and pay someone to help. You’ll need to come home. Take your mother’s place.’
Chapter Sixteen
I
‘Cryptography,’ Enzo said. ‘From the Greek. Kryptos, meaning hidden, and grafo, meaning to write. Once described by the cryptographer Ron Rivest as being all about communication in the presence of adversaries.’
He set himself tipping back and forth in the rocking chair, all the while gazing thoughtfully at his whiteboard. In his hand he clutched the tasting notes of old Jacques Domenech. He was looking for a starting point.
Michelle sat on the stairs, a half-drunk glass of red wine on the step beside her. She pulled her knees up under her chin, arms hugging her shins, and stared at the code her father had created. She had no idea where to even begin to try to break it. Sophie had taken Nicole’s place at the computer. Bertrand stood behind her, a glass of wine in his hand, pointing and prompting as she pulled up different sites on the internet.
‘Wikipedia,’ he said, and she tapped some more.
‘Okay.’ She read aloud. ‘One of cryptography’s primary purposes is hiding the meaning of messages. Not usually the existence of such messages.’ She puffed up her cheeks and blew through her lips. ‘Talk about stating the obvious.’
‘No, no.’ Enzo interrupted her. ‘The obvious is what we so often miss. So it does no harm to state it.’
Sophie’s fingers rattled over the keyboard, annoyed at being put down by her father in front of Michelle. ‘Here’s a book called Between Silk and Cyanide,’ she said. ‘About code-breaking during the Second World War.’
‘I’ve read it,’ Enzo said. ‘Agents used poems they’d written themselves as the basis for their codes.’ He grinned. ‘There was no way the Germans could possibly guess the next line in a piece of doggerel which began, “Is de Gaulle’s prick twelve inches thick?”’
‘Papa, that’s disgusting!’
‘That was the point. The more crude or absurd, the more impossible for someone else to crack it.’
‘It doesn’t sound like my father,’ Michelle said.
Enzo nodded his agreement. Petty, it seemed, had been a pretty humourless individual. ‘But in any case, he wouldn’t have needed to make his code that difficult. He was guarding against accidental discovery. I don’t think he ever imagined that anyone would be making a concerted effort to break it. I guess it was almost like a kind of shorthand. More for himself than anything else.’
‘Did your father speak another language?’ Bertrand glanced towards Michelle.
‘French. Some Spanish. I don’t think he was particularly fluent in either.’
Sophie looked up at the board. ‘oh, nm, ky, ks is not French. It’s not like any kind of Spanish I’ve ever seen either.’
‘No, but it’s a good thought,’ Enzo said. ‘What’s another language, except another set of words for the same thing? A French-English dictionary, for example, is just two lists of corresponding words, one of which is alphabetical.’
‘I see what you mean.’ Michelle lifted her glass and sipped pensively. ‘So you think my dad just made a list of the terms he uses to describe wines, and set them against another list of some kind.’
‘A poem, maybe?’ Sophie chipped in. ‘The first and last letters of each word.’
‘I doubt it.’ Enzo shook his head. ‘Too complicated. It would have to be something he could remember quite easily, without reference to something written.’ He caught Sophie glaring at him and felt a stab of guilt at having dismissed her so easily. ‘But it’s a good thought.’
The damage, however, had been done. Sophie confined her frustration to a single, audible tut. She turned back to the computer and the chatter of the keyboard reflected her annoyance as she typed another search into Google. Her eyebrows shot up in sudden surprise and she looked at Michelle. ‘Did you know your dad’s website’s still up on the net?’
Michelle shrugged. ‘There wouldn’t have been anyone to remove it. I guess there are probably thousands of websites out there belonging to dead people.’
Bertrand stabbed a finger at the screen. ‘There. What’s that?’
Sophie peered at the screen. ‘It’s a link to something called a taste wheel. What the hell’s a taste wheel?’
Michelle said,
‘It’s a wheel divided into flavour segments. Just a graphic representation of tastes and smells. It was the department of enology at UC Davis that first came up with the concept. My dad published his own version of it in a book he wrote about wine tasting.’
Sophie clicked the mouse and waited a moment. ‘And he put it right up here on his website.’
Enzo eased himself out of the rocker and rounded the table to have a look. The wheel was divided into multicoloured segments. An inner wheel was separated into the ten perceived categories of taste and smell, the largest of which was Fruit. It then ranged through Sweet, Wood, Spice, Savoury, Herbal, Floral, Nutty, Mineral, and Dairy, which was the smallest. Each category was allotted a different colour, subdivided through the outer wheel into individual flavours represented by tonal variations of that colour. Fruit was split into red and green and went from apple, pear, and lemon, through to prune, fig, and jam. Spice was pink and included tobacco, smoke, and liquorice; while Dairy, which was yellow, comprised only butter and cream. In all, there were sixty-four flavours.
Enzo shook his head and marvelled at the smells and flavours people were able to discern in wine. Ground coffee. Leather. Cut grass. Toast. Stones. And yet, they were all things he had perceived himself in one wine or another over the years. Violets, cherries, grilled nuts. Some were appealing, others less so. Earth, green pepper, petrol. He screwed up his face at the very thought.
Bertrand said, ‘Look, he also lists the words he used to describe the sensual qualities of wine in the mouth.’ He pointed to an alphabetical list of seventeen words below the wheel. They went from Astringent, describing mouth-puckering tannins, through Firm, Heavy and Sharp, to Thin, representing a lack of flavour and body.
‘Okay,’ Enzo said, ‘print all that out for me.’ He felt a frisson of excitement. Things were starting to fall into place. ‘This gives us pretty much his full flavour vocabulary, describing what he smelled in a wine, tasted in a wine, and how it felt in his mouth. These are almost certainly what he created the codes for.’
