B0092XNA2Q EBOK (21 page)

When I appeared at the window, the woman gardener shaded her eyes, winked at me, pointed at the kitchen, and then opened her hand, extending all five fingers. I climbed into the shower mumbling to myself, “How many different women is this woman?”

I shaved, dressed, and found fresh coffee waiting on me when I got to the kitchen. Gretta the gardener greeted me in the kitchen.

Gretta smiled at me. I shook my head, grabbed a cup of coffee, and sat at the table. She whispered, “The locals and the rest of staff think all of this is owned by a wealthy hedge-fund owner out of Connecticut.” A shrug. “Which is partly true. I set up a Connecticut-based shell of a company called Perrault and Partners, Inc., which, after you jump through a bunch of technical hoops and wild-goose chases, shows that Isabella Desouches is the sole shareholder. The company owns this and”—another shrug—“other assets.” A smile. “Perrault employs several full-time staff here, so I ‘play’ various roles as needed, but I have two regular characters. A distant relative of the owner who lives in a flat in Paris, but loves to garden and comes here on occasion to do so.” A smile with a slight curtsey. “And the redheaded Isabella woman with whom you flew here.”

When Steady said there were three of her, he wasn’t kidding. There was no telling how many faces this woman had.

“Sometimes I choose just one when I’m here, sometimes several. I’ve even played Isabella’s assistant and Isabella on the same trip. Depends on how long I’m here, who I’ll see, what I need to do. There are a few part-time employees who work in the house—cleaning, maintenance, stocking the kitchen. And it’s a small town,
so being several characters keeps people from getting too inquisitive about any particular one.”

She pointed out the window. “The other employees work over that hill at the vineyard.”

I almost choked on my coffee. “Vineyard?”

A smile. Both eyebrows lifted. “Would you like to see?”

“Lady, I’m so confused right now I don’t know if I’m coming or going and I certainly don’t have any idea who you are, but yes, if you have vineyards, I’d like to see them.”

“Good.” She wiped her hands on her apron and served me a frittata, sliced fruit, fresh-squeezed orange juice, and fresh croissants. “Isabella will be your tour guide shortly.”

As she was walking off, I asked, “Is this exhausting?”

A look around, followed by a shrug. “What’s the value of anonymity?”

I shrugged. “I suppose it’s worth a good bit more after it’s been lost?”

A chuckle. “You might say.”

She disappeared through the door and I mumbled to myself, “I feel like I’m traveling with the female Scarlet Pimpernel.”

She hollered down from the stairs. “ ‘We seek him here, we seek him there. Those Frenchies seek him everywhere. Is he in heaven?—Is he in hell? That damned, elusive Pimpernel.’ ”

C
arrying her clipboard and best don’t-mess-with-me expression, Isabella and I left the house, walked to the garage, and hopped into a golf cart with knobby tires. She drove me around the house, up a hill, down a long dirt road and to a small summit, which turned out to be the highest point for miles. We could see the roof of the château behind us, Langeais beyond, and pasture around us. She drove slowly forward, revealing the other side of the hill. Or, hills.

Vineyards, as far as the eye could see.

I guess my jaw opened slightly because she reached up and touched it with her index finger. “Careful, or you’ll catch flies.”

“That’s yours.”

A nod.

We drove down through the vineyards. The thick vine bases rose two feet out of the ground and new shoots were already climbing along taut wire stretched between what seemed like miles of symmetrical rows. I pointed. “How do you have time to manage this?”

“Well, I don’t. I hired a guy who does. We’re a relatively small
vineyard. Boutique, really. We make a small profit. I pay him well, give him incentives, and he’s all too happy to help Perrault and Partners make good wine.” A sly look. “Would you like to taste it?”

I nodded and we drove down the hill. I pulled my Costas down over my eyes. “You get more interesting the more I get to know you.”

She laughed. “Which one of me?”

She drove to an old barn lined with metal-looking barrels and computerized modern machinery. She motioned to the barrels. “We don’t use oak anymore. Just aluminum.”

From the far corner, a tall, midfifties, freckled man with wild carrot-red hair walked out of an office. He looked like he’d just stuck his finger in an electrical outlet. His top lip was taut, his accent was thick Australian, and his smile spread ear to ear.

He bear-hugged Isabella. Then me. She spoke in French to begin with, then transitioned to English. When she finished, he responded to her in French, then turned to me and spoke in English. “Welcome, mate.” He stuck out a callused, thick, muscled hand. “Ian Murphy. If you need anything…” I liked him immediately.

Isabella led me to a table where he uncorked several bottles. Two white. Two red. One sparkling. He handed me a glass. He turned his, spinning the wine. He called it “aerating.” Then he gulped, swirled it around his mouth, gargled, and spat in a spittoon-looking thing at his feet. Oddly, Isabella did the same. She gulped, swirled, gargled, and spat with some precision. She motioned for me. I sipped, swirled, and swallowed.

She said, “You’re supposed to spit it out.”

I held up the glass. The wine was really good. “I’m not much of a wine person, but I’m not about to spit that out.”

Ian laughed deeply, welcoming my comments. He talked freely about the wine, and the process. He used words like “volume,” “sticks to your cheeks,” “muscular structure,” “aerobatic something-or-other.” I didn’t understand a word he said, but in five seconds I was pretty well convinced that he knew more about wine than I’d ever known in my life. He poured a second, then a third,
a fourth, and finally a fifth. He smiled, proudly. Holding the bottle to the sunlight. “A 2005. Best wine year on record. Maybe ever. Ninety-nine points.” He poured. “It’s firm in the mouth. You can taste the complex body of flavors.” I didn’t know anything about firmness or complex flavors but it tasted like really good red wine to me. I nodded. A young man’s French voice hollered from the back of the barn. He set down his glass. “Great to meet you, mate. If I can do anything—” He shook my hand and returned to the barn.

“What did you tell him?”

“You mean, as in ‘Why are you here?’ ”

“Yes.”

“I told him you were a buyer from a distributor in the U.S.”

I could imagine how convincing I was. But if Ian thought I was someone else to Isabella, he gave no indication.

She looked at me, a long few seconds. Considering something. Considering me. She tucked her clipboard under her arm. “Come on. I want to show you something.”

She drove me back toward the château, taking another road. We skirted the hillside and came upon another barn-garage-looking structure and several doors that led into the rock wall below the château.

She stepped out, waving her hands across the iron doors that led into what looked like caves dug into the rock. “More than a thousand years ago, the people that lived along the Loire River—called Troglodytes—came up here and dug, for lack of a better word, ‘homes,’ into the rock walls. Those caves grew over time.” She unlocked the first door and clicked on a series of light switches on the wall. The cave lit up to reveal it wound deep into the mountain. The entrance was large enough to drive a tractor-trailer through. We followed the primary cave, lined with smaller caves on each side. She pulled a flashlight off its charging post on the wall and shone it into the smaller caves. Each was lined with bottles of wine. Labeled by year. The farther we got back into the cave, the older the dates became. Finally, maybe some two to three hundred meters
into the mountain, she walked me to a set of steps, cut into the rock, leading down. She flicked another switch and lights, hung along the wall, shone yellow and dull. At the bottom, she unlocked an iron gate and swung it open. It creaked. Another light switch. This cave was smaller. Low ceiling. Barely tall enough for me to stand in. She pointed her flashlight at a hole in the ceiling. Two bats hung sleeping. She pressed her fingers to her lips, turned left, and walked to another iron door. Like the other caves, the walls around us were lined with numbered bins all stacked high with bottles. “The temperature stays constant at fifty-two Fahrenheit, year round. Perfect for wine.” She unlocked the large iron door, pulled it open, another light switch, and we stepped in. She said, “My father’s room. Where he kept his Reserva.” The room was filled with thousands of bottles of wine. She pointed at a bin labeled “1977 Isabella.” “He bottled that the year I was born. Set it aside for my wedding.” The dates went back to the 1920s. She continued. “Some of it’s gone bad. Some”—a confident shrug—“hasn’t.”

She looked at me. “My father was the head gardener. Eventually, once he’d won the confidence of the countess after her husband died, he oversaw the vineyard as well.” A look away. Then another look at me. Into me. “He was what the countess liked to call a ‘purple-tinted-finger, eccentric genius of the vine.’ My mother cleaned the house, washed linens, and left when I was less than a year old. I have no memory of her. I—” She ran her fingers along the dusty bottles. “I was the ugly kid with glasses and hair down over her face. Dad couldn’t afford childcare so I ran to town, the market, bakery, washed floors, and tried to make myself both useful and invisible.”

She looked around. “By the time the countess died…” A shrug. “I’d been gone a decade and made a little money. Was over here on a vacation of sorts. Saw a sign on the front gate about it being sold at auction. It was run-down. In disrepair. The countess was a widow, had no family, and through the years she’d sold bits and pieces because she needed the money. Châteaufort was a shadow
of its former self. I walked into the bank and bought it that day. As I made more, I bought more. Putting it back the way my father would have known it.” A glance around. “I thought he’d like that.”

The underground was a maze of one cave after another and more wine than I’d ever seen in my life. “About a quarter of this wine was down here when I bought it. Much of which was my father’s.”

“You all have been working hard.”

“Ian has. Not me.” A fun smile. “I just sign the checks.” She reached in her pocket. “Speaking of checks—” She handed me a wad of euros. “In case you get lost.”

“Thanks.”

She smirked. “Consider it payment for services rendered.”

I laughed and pocketed the money.

It was late afternoon when we exited the caves. Sun going down. Coolness in the air. She turned to me, pointing at the château. “Think you can find your way back?”

I nodded. She turned. Almost said something. Didn’t. Then spoke over her shoulder. “I need to do a few things. Can you entertain yourself a few hours?”

“Sure.”

“I won’t be gone long. How about you let me cook you dinner? Say, eight?”

“Can I help?”

Another fun smile. “No, but you can watch.” She waved her hand across the world. “This is France. Food is an experience.” She walked off, then turned. “If you’re nice, I’ll let you open a good bottle of wine. And if you don’t turn your nose up at my cooking, I’ll let you actually step foot in the kitchen—which is a big deal.”

I
waved, watched her walk to the garage and climb into a silver Mini Cooper with tinted windows. She pulled up next to me and rolled down a window. “If you go into town, you’d do well to remember three very important words: ‘
s’il vous plaît
.’ ” She pulled her sunglasses down over her eyes, shifted into first, let off the clutch, and exited a driveway that led out through the trees opposite the front entrance. Through the trees, I heard the engine whine, and she shifted into third before fading behind the hill.

I turned around and looked at the château towering above me at the top of the hill. That enormous shell of a house that housed no one. Where memories walked the halls. Something in my gut started to hurt. Pain is not an accurate description. But I don’t know what else to call it. I wanted to call Steady and ask him what he’d gotten me into but I had an idea he knew all too well. That’s why he sent me. And make no mistake about it—Katie, or Isabella, might have thought she was inviting me or ordering me or whatever, but she and I were little more than puppets.

If I thought I was screwed up, I had another thing coming. I lived one lie. This woman lived multiple. Simultaneously. She was probably a genius, illustrated by the fact that she kept it all straight. No wonder she’d won three Academy Awards. If they knew what she was really like, they’d give her one for each persona—Daisy the well-endowed ditz, Ashley the long-legged Asian lingerie model, Isabella the don’t-mess-with-me-I-don’t-have-time-for-you CEO, Gretta the haggard, arthritic gardener. There’s no telling who would be in the kitchen tonight. And while anonymity explained some of them, it did not justify them all. One or two would get the job done. This many had its roots in something else. Something about the number of them bothered me. As in, Katie was trying really hard
not
to be someone in particular.

I had a few hours, so I grabbed my wallet and walked down the drive and into town. Maybe I could order a cup of coffee. I walked the mile to town, past the thousand-year-old church, around the rock-of-Gibraltar Château de Langeais, and into the center of town, where my nose led me to a bakery. I sat at a table and a server approached me. “
Bonjour.
”

I held up one finger. “Coffee?”

She said, “
Americain?
”

I nodded, figuring if she was offering, I was agreeing.

She smiled, nodded, and disappeared inside. When she returned with what looked like a cup of coffee, I pointed at the window and the many croissants displayed in the glass. “Croissant?”

She said, “Shoco-lott?” The word exited her mouth emphasizing all the wrong syllables.

I thought about it. The syllables rolled inside my head, finally registering. “Yes.” Then I tried to remember what Katie had told me. I racked my brain, finally speaking. “See view… place.”