What Time Devours

by A. J. Hartley

  He looked around, risking the flashlight, trying to gauge which way he had come, which way he might still be able to get out. He was no longer sure of his bearings. He knew which tunnel had brought him to the barrels, but which direction he needed to take after that, he wasn’t sure.

  He crept out of his hiding place and took a couple of silent steps up the tunnel and then froze. Someone was there. He had stepped out from a side passage, and he was carrying a flashlight in one hand and a pokerlike implement in the other.

  So, not gone after all.

  It took a moment for Thomas to realize that the flashlight was not directed at him. It was facing the opposite end of the passage, as was the man holding it.

  With excruciating slowness, Thomas stepped out of his shoes. Eyes still on the back of the man with the light, he took a step backward. Then another. The third and fourth were faster, lighter. Then he was around the corner and running again, feeling the cold stone through the soles of his socks, sure he had made it away unheard.

  He kept moving, pleased with his stealth, wondering if he might go back to hunting the man in the suit.

  Only when you’re sure they’ve given up looking for you, he thought.

  Back near the casks, he heard a cough, then voices and noisy footfalls. Then, unmistakably, two words bellowed like a hunting cry:

  “Ses chaussures!”

  They had found his shoes.

  CHAPTER 52

  Thomas ran another twenty yards flat out, turned right, dashed for the next turn, threw himself around the corner, and slammed into something solid, something that shuddered and crashed in an explosion of glass and liquid.

  Thomas fell hard among the shattered bottles. For a second he lay there, pain flaring in his wounded shoulder and in the knee that had made the most contact with the wooden rack, just long enough to catch the yeasty scent of the foaming champagne. Then he heard the renewed shouts of his pursuers and knew they were coming.

  He seized the flashlight he had dropped and shook it, but it was lifeless. He began to clamber over the ruined bottle rack, and another bottle fell and burst. Thomas pushed through the wreckage, but then the walls leaped and shrank with the sudden blue-white of a large flashlight ahead. He turned back the way he had come, but someone was there too, a big man in overalls with a heavy mustache and a heavier pickax. There was a shifting in the shadows behind him—at least two more of them—and then they started coming toward him.

  Thomas turned back toward the light source, lowered his head, and charged. There were at least two of them, but only one at the front. Thomas hit him hard with his left shoulder, and the man staggered back, leaving a dark hole behind him. Thomas rushed it, felt the whistle of a blow that missed the side of his head by inches, and was almost past them. He took another two sprawling strides and turned sideways into another tunnel. There was at least one at his heels. Maybe a lot more.

  Without his flashlight he could see only what they lit from behind him, and the surging, frenzied shadows made it almost as bad as darkness. Then two more strides and—without any warning—the darkness was gone. The lights came on, rippling through the tunnels like falling dominoes. Thomas shielded his eyes and his heart leaped. But then, just as suddenly, it failed him completely.

  Slumped against the wall no more than thirty feet away was a man. Everything about him—the angles of his limbs and the twist of his head—looked wrong. But it was the color that was so paralyzing, the crimson that daubed the suddenly dazzling walls.

  Even without being able to see his face, Thomas knew it was the American winemaker he had met in Reims. The body was half sitting, half lying, limbs splayed and head lolling unnaturally back so that the wound in his throat was horridly exposed. He was quite still and the blood was still pooling wet around those shoes with the buckles that rang like bells.

  Thomas stuttered to a halt, immediately raising his hands to his face and bending at the waist. For the briefest moment he forgot the men at his back, and when he remembered them, it was too late.

  He turned into the blow. His weak right arm rose ineffectually and the ax handle hit him hard on the side of his head. The lights became momentarily dazzling and then faded completely.

  CHAPTER 53

  Thomas dreamed of tunnels and darkness, and then there were snatches of French and a graying of the dark, until he realized he was awake. He shifted and his head throbbed where he had been hit, so that for a moment he felt nauseated. He kept his eyes closed and his body still until the feeling passed, and then cautiously he looked around him.

  He was lying on a metal-framed bed with a thin mattress that smelled of vinegar, in a vaulted stone room carved out of the ground. He was not where he had been when he was attacked, but he had clearly been moved only to some other part of the cellars. The air was chill and the light low. He was still shoeless and his watch was gone. His right wrist was handcuffed to the bed frame.

  He moved his hand, testing the cuffs, but they were tight and secure. He sat up, swung his legs around and down so that he was sitting on the edge of bed, and put his left hand to the back of his head. There was a hard and painful lump behind his ear, but his hand came away clean and he could feel no break in the skin. What they might do to him now, however, he preferred not to consider.

  Tough not to in the circumstances.

  He checked his pockets with his free hand. Empty. Which meant they had his wallet and knew who he was. That wouldn’t help the situation. He checked his shoulder. It was painful, but no blood showed through his shirt.

  There was a single metal door. The room was bigger than he imagined a cell would be, and there were a couple of barrels sitting in one corner, but otherwise it would do the job just fine. There was no window and the door looked solid. He wouldn’t have been going anywhere, even if he wasn’t chained to the bed.

  So he waited, replaying what had happened in the tunnels, gingerly approaching the memory of the dead winemaker—or whatever he had been—as if walking slowly up to the corpse again. He felt no great sadness for the man he had not known, only confusion and horror at the manner of his death, and a certain dread about what it meant for Thomas himself. After all, whoever had done that to the man in the buckled shoes might be about to do the same to him.

  Except, of course, that they could have already done it.

  He considered this, and could come up with two explanations. If the men who had hit him had also killed the other American, then they wanted him alive for a reason, and it probably had something to do with what he had to say when his captors eventually showed up.

  If they hadn’t killed him, then there had indeed been someone else skulking around those cellars.

  Thomas was baffled by the dead winemaker. If this had been the man who had been in his yard the night after the murder of Daniella Blackstone, then what was the link between them? He thought of the man as he had met him in Reims, wondering if the other had been sizing him up, testing to see if he recognized him from that dark passageway in Evanston. It must have amused him that Thomas had had no idea that they had met—and fought—before. The idea was maddening and reinforced that sense that Thomas had no business being here, that he knew nothing, and that he had merely blundered from one disaster to another.

  This one might get you killed.

  So he waited, wondering how to prepare for whatever the inevitable interview would bring, wondering how long he had been out and, because he had no watch, how long he had been awake. Five minutes? Ten? He wasn’t sure.

  The more time passed, the less sure he became, and it was only the lack of serious hunger or the need to go to the bathroom that told him that what felt like four hours had probably been only one. From time to time he thought he heard distant rumblings or movement in the tunnels and once was sure he had heard voices, but he got no response to his shouts of bad French and didn’t know what to call out anyway. Anyone who could hear him, he figured, already knew he was here.

  Once the lights flickered. Thomas
stared at them, willing them to stay on, swallowing back the bitter panic that had risen like acid in his throat. They settled again, low but steady, and Thomas watched for a full five minutes until he was sure they would stay on without his attention, and looked away.

  As he sat there, the pointlessness and stupidity of the whole thing weighed on him. He was an amateur, blundering around as corpses accumulated in his wake. He thought of David Escolme. What he should have done was leave well enough alone. Where he should have gone was Tokyo. What the hell did Deborah know about what Kumi needed? She had never even met her.

  The surgery had gone well and radiation was scheduled. Was that what made people’s hair fall out? Or was that chemotherapy? He knew, he was startled to realize, nothing whatsoever about cancer. It was one of those words he had fled from all his life, as if ignoring it would make it disappear. That it might be real, that it might stalk people of his age, of Kumi’s age, had never seriously occurred to him. She was still in her thirties and had no family history of the disease. He knew it was possible, of course—intellectually—but understanding it with his gut, grasping it like you might grasp the tumor itself, hard and expanding so fast you could almost feel it . . . ? No. How could you? How could you go on knowing how quickly it could all be taken away by your own body turning on itself . . .

  Stop.

  Yes. No more of that.

  The footsteps, when they came, began abruptly and close, as if their owner had been waiting only a corridor away. There were two of them, sinewy men in overalls dusted with chalk and dirt, their eyes dark and mournful. One had an ax handle in both hands, the other a large and ancient-looking black revolver. Neither spoke. The gunman stood by the door, the weapon trained lazily on Thomas’s midsection as the other unlocked the cuffs. Once free, Thomas was nudged toward the door with the butt of the ax handle, and out. The gunman followed.

  They walked straight for a hundred yards or so, then another couple of jabs steered Thomas right and down to the doors of a service elevator, all scraped and dented iron, a far cry from the polished, elegant thing the tourists used. Thomas got in, standing silently between them, wondering vaguely where they were going and whether he should make a grab for the gun.

  Ah yes, he thought. A survival plan based on your extensive experience of watching James Bond movies. You could stun them with your exploding shirt buttons . . .

  He smiled to himself, and the guy with the ax handle gave him a sharp look.

  The elevator rose clanking but fast. It was one of those old-fashioned affairs with the grille that closed inside the door so you could see the floors streaking past. Except that here were no floors, only a few dozen feet of stone, then a battered steel door and, one level above it, something quite different.

  The door was a lacquered exotic wood with a pronounced striping in the grain. It was trimmed with polished brass.

  As his companion dragged the metal grille aside, the gunman stepped back and motioned for Thomas to lead the way. It felt strange, as if some curious shift in the tone of the day was happening, but in ways he couldn’t understand. He pushed the wooden door open and glanced down, half expecting to be thrust out into nothingness like the kid stepping into the floorless tower room in Stephenson’s Kidnapped. There was a plush crimson carpet trimmed with gold. Thomas stepped out, but his escorts did not follow. They closed the grille behind him, their eyes unaltered and blank, as the door closed, and the elevator whirred into life.

  Thomas was in an elegant hallway hung with oil paintings in ornate gilt frames: landscapes and portraits from, he guessed, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At one end of the hall was a pair of the same wood paneled doors, closed. At the other end a pair of identical doors stood open, inviting him into a broad and sunny sitting room of chaise longues and formal armchairs. Everything was royal blue and gold leaf. Chamber music was playing, recorded, Thomas assumed, though he would have been only mildly surprised to round a corner and see violinists in powdered wigs. There was a solitary figure standing near the window, a man in his sixties, small and frail-looking, dressed in a well-cut suit of pin-striped gray flannel. He wore a white carnation in his buttonhole.

  “Come in, Mr. Knight,” he said. His voice was rich, distinctly French in accent, but perfectly clear. “Have a seat.”

  CHAPTER 54

  “Why am I being held here?” said Thomas, still standing.

  “Please,” said the man, gesturing to an armchair. He had white hair, heavy eyebrows, and eyes so blue and bright that they shone across the room. They were unnerving, almost unnaturally vivid, like the blue of the Chagall windows Thomas had seen in Reims. They projected an extraordinary intelligence and an energy belied by his birdlike frame. On an end table beside an armchair were Thomas’s wallet, his watch, and the contents of his pockets. His shoes sat on the floor like slippers awaiting his arrival. Thomas stepped into them with as much dignity as he could manage, then sat.

  “Mr. Thomas Knight,” said the man. “A high school teacher. Among other things.”

  He smiled, and Thomas wasn’t sure if there was a question there.

  “And you are?” he said. He was trying to throw the other man off, derail his aura of ease and control. It didn’t work.

  “I am Monsieur Arnaud Tivary,” he said, smiling. “I own this house, the Demier factory, and the cellars beneath it. Perhaps you would like to tell me what you and your friend were doing down there.”

  “I came on a public tour. Alone,” said Thomas.

  Tivary, still smiling, went back to looking out the window.

  “This will be a good deal easier, more—pleasant—if you tell me the truth, Mr. Knight. You entered on a public tour, but then you left it and did a little exploring of your own.”

  “The power went out,” said Thomas. “I was disoriented.”

  “So it would seem,” Tivary replied, and now he fixed Thomas with a long look and the smile drained. “But the power did not simply go out, did it? Someone used a spade to cut through the main power line. Was that you, Mr. Knight?”

  “Don’t be absurd.”

  “Perhaps it was your friend?”

  “I told you,” said Thomas. “I came alone. I had no friend here.”

  “Who do you work for, Mr. Knight?”

  “I’m a high school teacher, as you said.”

  “And your friend?”

  “For the last time, I came alone. If you are referring to the man your people butchered in the cellars, I met him once in Reims. We chatted a little, but I did not know him.”

  “And he worked for . . . ?”

  “He said he worked for a winemaking company in the States, but I don’t know which. No doubt the police can find out for you, if you are curious.”

  The smile came back.

  “No doubt,” he said.

  “Is that why you killed him?” Thomas ventured. “Because he was snooping around your facility looking for . . . what? Industrial secrets he could take back to Napa Valley?”

  “You sneer,” said Tivary, “but it is not so unlikely. Industrial espionage is part of the world we live in. Mechanization has meant that most champagne brands use essentially the same processes. What makes them different is the grape blend, the yeast, and any other additives, including types and amounts of sugar. These are what make the wines different.”

  “So?”

  “So?” echoed Tivary, incredulous. “You may be a barbarian, Mr. Knight, but surely even you understand that the difference between brands is what separates their values. If a house that produces champagne for thirty euros a bottle can make the kind of adjustment that will allow them to sell it for three hundred, what would they not do to get that information? What if they could sell a single bottle for three thousand euros? They could increase the value of their production by a hundred times simply by learning the secrets of another house and implementing them.”

  “So you slit a man’s throat to keep his bubbles uneven.”

  Tivary’s smile sp
lit wide.

  “So you are not a complete barbarian, Mr. Knight,” he said. “You know a little about the bubbles. But it’s really about taste. To find the right ingredient, or the right amount of that ingredient . . . some people will stop at nothing.”

  “Apparently.”

  “Not me. Not anyone at Demier.”

  “Taittinger then.”

  “This is ridiculous, what you say,” said Tivary, with a dismissive Gallic wave.

  “Because you are all fine, upstanding citizens, though your men came armed to catch me, beat me, and imprison me.”

  Tivary shrugged.

  “Some precautions are necessary,” he said. “We do not work in the light of the streets where the police patrol. We work deep in the earth, in the shadows of the stone underground. The rules are a little different down there. We have to protect our work. It is what we love and it is our livelihood. But this does not make us monsters.”

  “And you can prove this, I take it.”

  “No,” said Tivary. “As far as I am concerned, you found the body of the American while being pursued—lawfully—by my workers. Gresham was his name. Miles Gresham. The police know about the unfortunate victim, though they do not know about you. To tell them that we were pursuing another American at the time this Gresham died . . . It makes things, untidy, does it not?”

  “I’m sure it would,” said Thomas. “But they will find out I was here.”

  “Probably,” Tivary agreed. “In time. But by then they will be on the trail of the murderer, and your involvement will be an irrelevance. But you still seem to be suggesting that I—or people I employ—killed this man and that you are also in danger. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

  “But you’ve just explained why you would want Gresham dead.”

  “No. I explained why we would not want a rival winemaker snooping—that is the word, snooping?—snooping around our cellars. But this Gresham was not a winemaker.”