Shadows in the Vineyard: The True Story of the Plot to Poison the World's Greatest Wine (26 page)

Although he was twenty-seven years old and carried himself like one of those rappers Prignot saw on TV, in a hoodie and baggy clothes with the tough-guy swagger, Cedric had a boy’s face and a childlike mind. More than anything, the vibe Prignot got from him was—strange as it may sound—innocence and hurt. This was a kid, even though he wasn’t a kid, who was hurting inside and had been for a long time. It was easy to imagine him on the side of a road, with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, ever so gently tucking a flower into the ground.

Prignot’s read of the situation was that there was another reason why Cedric went along with Jacques—why he did it despite the fact, as Cedric had said to her, that he told his father he knew they were going to get caught. Prignot did not explore that unspoken other with Cedric. Clearly he had serious issues and she did not want to make things any worse. “Fragile.” That’s the word she would use to describe him. “Cedric,” she would say, they all would say, was “fragile.” She did not want to break him.

From the Soltys home, the detectives seized a computer, a hard drive, and various documents. They had Cedric’s statement and Jacques’s own words, among a mountain of other evidence, including the security video. They went to Cedric’s apartment and retrieved the postcards and other correspondence he had described.

On their drive back to Dijon, the investigators had cause to be happy. The crime against the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti had been solved and turned out to be something far less nefarious than anyone had ever imagined. Prignot was sure they were prepared to answer all the evidentiary questions that would come with the trial and that the prosecutors would win and Jacques
and Cedric would be convicted. Yet neither of the detectives felt much like celebrating. Of all the many possible conclusions the two detectives had gamed out, none of them had looked anything like this. Rather than feeling a sense of accomplishment, they left the Soltys’ home feeling full of… what? The detectives were not sure how to describe what they were feeling.

On the long ride home Pageault and Prignot discussed how the plot to commit such a crime against the greatest vineyard and most storied domaine in the world began and ended in such a dark, depressing house in Champagne, with such a sad, fractured family; in a place filled with such emptiness. That was how they felt—full of emptiness. It was almost as if they had caught the emptiness in there like one would catch the germ of a cold. Ultimately, their conversation turned to Cedric and what they both believed was his true motivation—love, a son’s love for his father.

Pageault and Prignot spent much of the drive back wondering just what it was that had happened to Jacques Soltys, why he grew into someone who was capable of poisoning so much.

Sometime before 1953, Antoine and Françoise Soltys emigrated from Poland to France and settled in the Champagne region, near the city of Reims. As with any immigrant story, the Soltyses moved elsewhere in the hopes of putting down roots and cultivating a better life.

Champagne’s reputation as the “the drink of kings” was born of the fact that Reims was where the ancient French kings were crowned. The Reims Cathedral was to the French monarchy what Westminster Abbey was to England’s royalty. The aura of that regal history and wealth bubbled from the grand champagne houses that line the cobblestone boulevards of Reims: Veuve
Clicquot, Charles de Cazanove, Ruinart, G. H. Mumm, Dom Pérignon, Taittinger.

Antoine and Françoise hoped to capture enough drops of Champagne’s prosperity to make a decent living. They believed they could grow a bright future in the vines of white grapes. And indeed they did. Antoine and Françoise went to work in the vineyards and saved enough money to buy vines of their own. About an acre in Bouzy, and about an acre in Ambonnay. It wasn’t much, but enough, and the vines they acquired were of a fine quality, producing
grand cru
champagne grapes. Antoine arranged a contract to sell his harvests to the champagne house of Georges Vesselle.

Antoine’s vines and his two children were everything to him. Cecile was born in 1947, and then came Jacques on July 28, 1953. They were baptized into the Catholic faith, which their parents took seriously. Cecile proved herself to be an excellent student, and at church little Jacques served as an altar boy.

Antoine envisioned his vines and children growing together. He imagined a day when he would pass along the estate of his hard work to his two children and they would care for the vines; maybe Cecile and Jacques would work together in the vines with families of their own; maybe they would grow the Soltys vineyard holdings into something more. Maybe one day the Soltys name would be on one of those grand champagne houses on the cobblestone boulevard in Reims, and they would be the ones buying grapes from farmers just like him.

Those hopes would never flower. Virtually from the moment Jacques was able to make his own choices, he made it clear that he did not share his father’s passion for the vines. In less than a year, teenage Jacques was expelled from the Lycée Viticole in Beaune. He was a discipline problem who mouthed off to teachers, according to his file at the school. A short while later, he entered
the army, where he worked as a tank mechanic. After the service, he returned home and without a better option went to work in the vines with his father.

In the mid-1970s, while he was at a bar near Ambonnay, Jacques met Martine Richomme. Her parents were also champagne vignerons. Jacques and Martine were both in their midtwenties. What Martine first noticed about Jacques was his striking blue eyes. She was beautiful then, and she knew that he was taken by her when he started inviting her on dates to nice restaurants and bringing her flowers. The second oldest of nine children, Martine wasn’t accustomed to such attention. Martine hadn’t yet taken the time to envision her future. She had not been raised to have dreams of her own.

Jacques became her life. They married in October 1978, and while she was pregnant with their first and only child, they purchased their home in Louvois, the very same home Inspectors Pageault and Prignot visited. For a very brief time, just after Cedric was born, Jacques and Martine’s life together was uneventfully happy. On Sundays they would take Cedric to have dinner with Jacques’s parents. Antoine and Françoise would make pizza and quiche and they would fuss over the baby. It was the sort of life Martine had wished for when she married Jacques. It was more than enough for her.

That was not enough for Jacques. Martine would not remember when or why exactly, but in the early 1980s, her husband grew steadily dissatisfied with their life, with his life, with her, with Cedric, with life in general, and especially with his work with his father in the vines. He had never enjoyed vigneron work and now he hated it. He felt that his father was taking advantage of him and not paying him enough. Jacques and Antoine were always arguing over his salary.

Jacques began to drink heavily. The more he drank, the more angry he became. The angrier he became, the more he drank. Antoine didn’t like that Jacques drank so much and didn’t want him coming to work in the vines when he did. That was an easy one for Jacques; he chose to drink. The family got by on Martine’s salary from the cardboard factory. Which made Jacques even angrier.

One day in the mid-1980s, Jacques got it into his pickled brain that he was going to rob a bank. In the middle of a bright, sleepy day, Jacques, who was then in his mid-thirties, walked into a Banque Postale in Auxerre with a pistol. According to a French newspaper account, the “heist” was the stuff of black comedy, worthy of a French sound track of trumpet, brushes on a snare drum, and strumming guitar.

Jacques walked in, no mask, pointed the gun at the teller, and demanded whatever was in the teller’s money drawer. Behind the glass, the clerk sized up Jacques and determined that pistol or not, Jacques wasn’t much of a threat. The clerk put about two hundred dollars on the counter and said that’s all that was in the drawer and surely it wasn’t worth going to prison over. Stunned by the response, Jacques hesitated for a moment and said, “Well, give me twenty.” The teller refused and told Jacques to just go away. Jacques mumbled something the clerk couldn’t make out, turned and walked away. He was picked up within in a few blocks. The gun wasn’t loaded. He was drunk. Without a previous record and thanks to the help of his parents, he got off with little more than a warning.

A few years later, in 1986, while Cedric was off at school and Martine was off at the factory, Jacques went off the deep end. In the middle of the day, he was so intoxicated, he urinated on the wall outside a Banque Postale and belligerently accosted people
on the street. When the gendarmerie arrived to the scene, Jacques picked up a pipe and attacked them. He was arrested and this time sentenced to seven months in prison, but was out in five.

Because Jacques did not have the money to pay his legal fees and fines, the courts garnished Martine’s salary. The family had barely been paying their bills as it was and now they fell into debt. Jacques’s solution was to seek his version of revenge on the government, on the Banque Postale in particular. In April 1990, just before noon, no mask, he walked into the branch in St.-Michel-Mont-Mercure with a gun and walked out with about two thousand dollars. He hit another bank in another village. This time for three thousand. After that one, to calm his nerves he walked to a nearby restaurant and had a few drinks over lunch. In the summer of 1990, he got busted stealing from a Burgundian village of Puligny-Montrachet. In the summer of 1991, he was arrested for what would be his last in a series of robberies.

At his trial, Jacques told the judge, “My wife’s salary has been garnished. I told several government agencies that I just could not go on anymore, but nobody takes me seriously. What can you do when you can’t live on what you are earning?”

The jury was moved by the prosecutor, who felt badly for Jacques and argued, “The accused is not a bad man. A little lost and bewildered by his circumstances.” Jacques was sentenced to six years, but was released earlier, sometime around 1995.

While Jacques was in prison, Antoine died at the age of eighty-two. Jacques learned of his father’s death from Martine. She told him during one of her visits. His only reaction, from what she would remember, was that he lowered his head and was silent for a bit. In accordance with French law, despite what Antoine may have wished, he had no choice but to divide his estate equally between his children. Cecile got the vines in Ambonnay and Jacques got
the vines in Bouzy. Within months of being released from prison, Jacques sold his father’s beloved vines for about $140,000. He spent much of it on booze and dinners and nothing. Within a year and a half almost all of the money was gone.

Jacques came up with the idea to take a hostage for ransom. He hated wealthy landowners and fancied himself as something of a Robin Hood, though a Robin Hood for himself. Steal from the rich so he would not be poor. He figured there were plenty of rich landowners in Bordeaux, what with all of their châteaux and high-priced wines, and so he decided on Bordeaux. In the early spring of 1997, he traveled to Bordeaux and set up a tent in the woods around the vineyards just outside St.-Émilion. He went to a local library and pulled the registries listing the names of the prominent châteaux owners and decided upon Luc and Beatrice d’Arfeuille, whose Château La Serre was immediately outside of St.-Émilion, surrounded by their vineyards.

Jacques spent a few weeks casing the d’Arfeuilles’ home and monitoring their comings and goings. It was just Luc and Beatrice in the house. They were in their sixties. In the morning, Luc left to go to work at his
négociant
business and Beatrice stayed home, mostly tending to her garden or knitting or going for walks. One day in May, just after 8 a.m., right after Luc left the house, Jacques approached the back door. It was, as he expected, open. He stepped inside. He was wearing a bandanna over his mouth and sunglasses. In one hand he had a pistol, in the other, a rifle.

Beatrice, who looked every bit the daughter of French aristocracy she was, was slender, graceful, and calm. She was making coffee and having breakfast alone. Jacques told her not to
make a sound, that he was there to take her hostage; if she did as she was told he wouldn’t harm her, but if she gave him any trouble, he wouldn’t think twice about killing her.