Getting paranoid, Thomas, he thought. Not a good sign.
He got back into the car and turned it around.
Epernay, once he found his way, was a picturesque town of tree-lined avenues and large, square-fronted buildings with steeply pitched tiled roofs. It was getting dark fast and Thomas was tired. He found a small, anonymous hotel where he dined on a rich venison stew and an assortment of local, Brie-like cheeses and then went up to his spartan room. The bed was hard and narrow, but Thomas fell quickly asleep, waking only once before it was completely light. He did not remember his dreams, but woke anxious, sure there was something he was supposed to do that he could not remember.
Thomas thanked his slightly officious landlady for his breakfast of bread, cheese, and café au lait; studied a map of the town center; and decided to leave the car at the hotel.
Epernay seemed almost wholly geared to champagne, and one broad street was lined on both sides with the gated mansions of the famous houses: Perrier Jouet, Mercier, and, of course, Moët et Chandon, with the statue of the monk after whom their most famous label was named, Dom Perignon. There were other, smaller houses, all backing onto vineyards that rose above the town, and among them, close to the end of the street, Thomas found Demier.
It was not as impressive as the other champagne houses, less elegant, resembling something between an overgrown farmhouse and a small and poorly maintained château. But as with many of its neighbors, there was a gravel drive behind ornate wrought-iron railings, painted black and trimmed with gold. The gate itself was open and a sign welcomed the public to its cellar tour. Halfway down the block, a green Citroën was parked by the curb, empty. Thomas strolled casually by it and into a tabac on the corner, but couldn’t be sure the car was the one he had seen in Reims. In the shop he bought a small plastic flashlight, which he stuck in his pocket before returning to Demier.
Again, Thomas bought his tour ticket—twelve euros this time—and browsed the lobby materials as he waited. Unlike Taittinger’s fairly casual arrangement, Demier’s tour was regulated and—he learned—automated. He had assumed Demier to be a minor producer, hardly worth the attention of tourists spoiled by the delights higher up the road, but the place was full of people, almost all of them French. Demier was indeed a small champagne house with a tiny output compared to juggernauts like Moët et Chandon, but it produced what was regarded, at least domestically, as champagne of excellent quality. The company owned less than forty acres of vineyard and produced only a few hundred thousand bottles per year, but—they claimed—they were alone in adhering absolutely to traditional methods of champagne production, and their prices reflected as much. Thomas strolled through their extensive store and didn’t see a single bottle priced at less than one hundred fifty dollars U.S., with many reaching several times that. Thomas wondered if people could really tell the difference, if they could really like—really want—something so outrageously expensive—a thousand dollars a bottle? Two thousand? Five?—or if it was all a ruse to lure those with more money than sense.
As the tour group was herded into a pair of stainless-steel elevators by three attendants, Thomas scanned the crowd and saw two familiar faces. One was the suited American he had seen in Reims; the other was the young man in the coat who had followed him in the green Citroën. The driver was probably there too, but Thomas hadn’t gotten a good look at him.
“Step inside, please, sir,” said the attendant.
Thomas gave the huddle in the elevator a worried look and said,
“I’ll wait for the next one.”
He turned away as the door began to close, unsure if his pursuer had seen him, but pretty sure the American had not. The attendant, a hard-faced woman with streaks of gray in her black braided hair, gave him a polite nod that didn’t bother to mask her displeasure.
Tourists, she was thinking. Or—worse—Americans.
Thomas bobbed his head apologetically and smiled. She didn’t thaw, but stood there clicking her fingernails together as she waited for the second elevator. As soon as it arrived, she motioned him in and began the speech her colleagues had done for the larger group as they descended.
“When we reach the bottom, please proceed to the train on your right . . .”
“Train?”
She stared at him.
“Yes. It is not a real train. It is . . . joined-up electric cars. When you get there, move to the right and take a seat. The train is guided by lasers, so if you take flash pictures, please shoot them to the sides, not directly ahead, or this can confuse the directional controls and produce an accident.”
Thomas, unable to stop himself, grinned. The attendant glared. The elevator slowed and stopped.
It was cold in the stone passage, and almost all vestiges of the modernity and luxury of the lobby were gone. Here were only tunnels carved out of the rock, dimly lit by softly glowing strip lights that ran overhead. The train—more like a sequence of square golf carts—was waiting. He took a seat at the very back, two empty rows behind the last passengers, and sat as low as he could. No one in front turned, their attention on the guide. She was sitting at the front of the train on a raised, rear-facing seat. No one was driving and she couldn’t see where they were going: hence the laser guidance system, visible as pinpricks of red light in the tunnels ahead.
The woman who had escorted Thomas down gave a nod to the guide and returned to the elevator. The guide brightly gave final safety notes in a very English English—all long a’s and precise little final t’s—and set the train in motion. It moved with a faint electric whir, gliding down the passage and snaking around the corner past a dozen arched alcoves of bottle racks. The guide talked constantly in her practiced, lilting way, presenting the obligatory facts on soil conditions, the properties of chalk, an abbreviated history of champagne before the seventeenth century. Then came biographies of the monk Dom Perignon and his fruitless attempt to rid the wine of gas, and the Veuve Clicquot, the widow who industrialized nineteenth-century champagne production and perfected the riddling rack by which the yeast plugs were collected and disgorged. Thomas had heard or read most of it before, but there was something pleasingly cryptlike about the cellars, and their sheer scale was impressive enough to keep his old claustrophobia at bay. The place was a maze of interconnected tunnels, each both a storage area in its own right and a way of getting somewhere else.
“There are six miles of tunnels,” said the guide, “mostly on the same level, though some have not been reopened since the last war.”
It was, Thomas thought, something between an underground town and a great pale mine. That some parts were closed suggested structural instability, but he decided not to think about that. That was why the train made sense for tourists, he thought. It kept them contained and made the trip fun—slightly comic, even—like they were on some Disneyland ride. Without it, the great network of passages could quickly get daunting, even scary, and that was before anyone started using phrases like structural instability.
He was still grinning at his own insight when, without warning, the train stopped and all the lights went out.
CHAPTER 50
The panic took a few moments to blossom. For a second everyone sat there, polite tourists still, as the guide brayed calming suggestions into her dead microphone, waiting for something to happen. But when nothing did, when the darkness continued, and the silence—untouched by all the humming electronics no one had noticed till they disappeared—deepened, things got quickly out of hand.
“What’s happening?” shouted someone.
“Is this supposed to be funny?”
“Put the lights back on. I can’t sit here in the dark!”
“Why are there no emergency lamps?”
“Who touched me?”
Then they were moving, though they couldn’t see where they were going, spilling off the train as if afraid it might lurch suddenly into wild motion and kill them all. Indeed, with all the movement and feverish talking, and the guide’s shrill ple
as for restraint, Thomas wasn’t sure how he knew that at least one person had left the train and moved quickly away. He sensed it, a movement that was unlike all the chaos around them: purposeful, deliberate. He thought he heard measured footsteps receding to his right, brisk, confident strides. Someone who knew where he was going.
Thomas slid out of his seat, arms spread against the darkness, and began to follow those receding footsteps, fumbling in his pocket for his flashlight. He was almost into the perpendicular tunnel when there was a flare of yellow light back at the train. Someone had struck a match. As the shadows leaped, the guide’s voice rang out.
“Stay on the train, please! Sir? Sir!”
He kept walking, snapping the flashlight on and breaking into a padding run, his ears straining for sounds of whoever it was who had left the group first. Someone saw his light and called after him, “Over here!” as if they had been at sea for weeks, waiting for rescue. He made a hard left to get out of sight and picked up the pace.
He didn’t know where he was going, and once out of sight of the train he stopped, trying to hone his senses. He shut his eyes, held his breath, and listened.
There were three levels of sound. First, and most obvious, was the garbled panic of the tourists back the way he had come. They were no more than a hundred yards or so away, but the caves bounced and distorted their indignant bluster so that it seemed to drift at him, ghostlike, from all sides. Second, lower but at least as insistent, was the throbbing of his own heart. He had to reach for the third sound, stretching out with his mind as if only imagining it would allow him to hear, but there it was: brisk footfalls. He rotated, eyes still shut, tracking the sound until he felt he had its bearing, and began to walk.
He was breathing again, but his mind was holding on to the footfalls so that the other sounds faded away, screened out by his concentration. The footsteps were hard and rang slightly on the stone, not with the clack of a woman’s high heel, but with the solid thud of hard leather soles, and something else, another sound he couldn’t place. A man, he thought, still walking, who knows where he’s going. He tried to identify the other sound, and thought it was a thin and high-pitched metallic clink that punctuated each step.
Remember that sound? he thought.
He did, and the memory made him pick up the pace.
The flashlight was inadequate, its beam yellowish and hazy, and trying to keep up with the footsteps was making Thomas reckless. If there was a rack of bottles in the center of the tunnel, instead of in the alcoves to the side, he might run right into it before he saw it. He slowed for a second, caught the insistent stride of his quarry, and sped up again.
Each length of passage was virtually identical to the one before it, and as he moved, the limited reach of the flashlight repeated the same shapes in the pale stone arches above, the same dark alcoves and tunnel mouths to the sides. Thomas felt like he was burrowing deep into the hill, and realized that his jaws were clamped. He was also starting to sweat. Neither was from exertion or anticipation of what might happen if he ran into the man he was pursuing. It was the place itself that was starting to get to him: the tunnels, the darkness, the colossal weight of stone overhead. With each step he took away from the parts the tourists saw, the ceilings seemed to get lower, the limestone more cracked and irregular. He was running now with his head dipped, ducking still farther as the rock kicked down and in.
Keep breathing, he told himself.
He sucked in the air, and it felt dank in his throat and lungs. The ache in his shoulder was starting to spread again. He could smell the stone that crowded in on him from all sides.
... structural instability, he recalled.
The flashlight flickered, and he shook it, still running. It came back on full, but Thomas felt a mounting dread. If he lost the light and the power wasn’t reconnected, how long would it take him to blunder out to the elevators? If they got the tourists out and there were no voices to guide him back, he could be down in this antique labyrinth for days, weeks . . .
The footsteps seemed to have faded, but quite suddenly they grew louder, as if their owner had rounded a corner somewhere. Thomas hesitated, sure now that the rhythmic pounding of the footfalls was counterpointed by a tiny, shrill ringing like a bell.
He thought back to when he had heard that sound last time, and the memory slowed him for a second. For a moment he was back in a different darkness, on the porch in Evanston, listening to those footsteps down the side of the house, as someone crept into his yard . . .
And don’t forget what happened next.
No chance of that. And almost immediately he remembered the side buckles on the shoes of the American in the suit, the man who had claimed to be a winemaker but who talked like a studio executive.
Not for the first time on this trip, Thomas felt manipulated and abused, and he suddenly wanted to find this man in his fancy shoes and pay him back for their encounter on Sycamore Street.
The thought drove away his rising discomfort, and he made another turn toward the sound, running as quietly as he could, trying to match the other man’s strides so that their footfalls came together.
But then there was something else: another set of footfalls from over to his right. Thomas stopped and spun around. For a second he thought he had imagined it, but then, in between the jangling steps of the winemaker, he heard them again. They were cautious, stealthy.
Thomas felt his skin go cold, and the hairs on his arms bristled.
Someone else was down there with them in the dark. Someone new who didn’t want to be heard.
Thomas started to walk again, faster than ever now, trying to fasten again on those distant, jangling footfalls. He made a left, then a right, then went straight for another hundred yards, and then he heard something different and stopped, shutting off the flashlight. He felt his eyes widening, in spite of the darkness, as he tried to home in on the new sound.
Running feet. A lot of them. Coming from behind him.
CHAPTER 51
There were voices now. Not the whining and demanding voices of tourists, but terse and guttural shouts. They seemed to be coming down several passages at once, calling to each other in what Thomas took to be French, though he couldn’t catch the words in the vaulted and echoing passages. The running sounded purposeful, organized, like soldiers.
They’re hunting, he thought.
It was a controlled and rapid sweep of the tunnels, and it sounded both urgent and brutal.
Ignoring the swelling pain in his shoulder and chest, Thomas ran. He was used to running in his lumbering buffalo fashion, but he was no forty-yard sprinter even when he was healthy. The exertion was getting to him, and even in the clammy air of the cellars he was starting to feel hot and breathless. He looked behind him, saw the strobing white splash of a halogen flashlight as it bounced through some archway, and forced himself to go faster. He could no longer hear the man he was pursuing, or those other, stealthy footfalls, but that hardly seemed important. This was no rescue party rounding up stray tourists.
He played his light off to the sides, looking for somewhere to hide, but saw only tunnels.
The voices were getting louder.
He made a right, still swinging his flashlight’s sorry glow over the walls, then stuttered to a halt. What he had taken to be a tunnel was actually a large open area filled with stacked wooden casks, the walls hung with ancient iron implements. He had no time to think. He decided.
Thomas ducked among the barrels, forcing his way through to the center, and squatted, listening. His heart was beating so hard and fast that his bullet wound ached in time with it, and his breathing was ragged and hungry. He forced himself to breathe as deeply as he could, resting his forehead against the metal-strapped timber of the barrels, trying to hear past the panic in the blood pulsing through his shoulder.
He could still hear them. They sounded like they were everywhere, their harsh voices calling from the dark mouth of every tunnel. And then there was one set of foots
teps closer than the rest and slower.
It wasn’t the man in the buckled shoes. It could have been the other, the careful walker, but Thomas doubted it. This man had a slow, cautious step, but his shoes dragged slightly on the ground as he moved. It was one of the hunters, and he had a hunch that Thomas was here.
Thomas clicked the flashlight off and kept very still.
The footsteps entered the storage area from the tunnel Thomas had come down, and then they stopped. A light flared, a hard-edged white beam flashed over the tops of the casks, and then there was a new sound: a metallic ting, as if one of those metal implements had been taken down from the wall. It was probably something like a poker, but it scraped the stone and rang like a sword.
The man was stalking him now, his feet soundless as he crept around the perimeter. Thomas didn’t breathe. His fingers were splayed against the stone floor for balance. A trickle of sweat ran into his right eye and he blinked it away. He could hear the other man moving: not his footsteps, but the shifting of the fabric he wore. He was very close now.
There was a moment of total silence, and then, quite suddenly, he was moving away again.
Thomas stayed where he was for a full minute, counting the seconds silently to himself as he listened. Then the man was gone.
Cautiously, waking each muscle one at a time, Thomas began to move. First he straightened his neck, which had been bowed, feeling the cool air on the sweaty patch where his forehead had been pressed to the cask. Then he flexed his fingers and, when they felt suitably braced against the ground, began to straighten his elbows till his back was stiff. He could see over the barrels now. There was no light. No sign of movement. He flexed the muscles in his thighs and started to stand up. He thought the sounds of pursuit had faded some.
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