Cognac Conspiracies (3 page)

3

After his meal, Benjamin asked the pimply waiter to bring him a Lavoisier cognac. The unattractive youth in a barely clean shirt apologized profusely. It was a rare brandy that was hardly ever offered at this establishment, whose patrons were mostly business people in a rush. The winemaker was disappointed but accepted a Frapin VIP XO while he took a Cohiba Siglo VI from his sharkskin case. Thick billows of smoke isolated him from the rest of the room, where a few customers were hastily gulping down a second cup of coffee. This quarantine pleased him; each puff fanned his reflections.

This business was beginning to seem like a bad undertaking. Shiyi Cheng had already asked for a report in an e-mail that had arrived that very morning at Benjamin’s Allées de Tourny office. Benjamin had asked his devoted secretary, Jacqueline, to respond with a quote from the French Renaissance writer François Rabelais: “Everything comes in time to those who can wait.” Being in Jarnac, his initial thought had been to quote François Mitterand, who was known for saying, “Give time the time it needs,” but he had decided against it.

The winemaker had naively assumed that his client would be patient and wise. Weren’t these Eastern virtues? But the Chinese investors were keen on his fully detailed conclusions. The underlying objective was becoming clear: to determine if they should pick up even more shares of this presumably undervalued company. Without the complete cooperation of the Lavoisiers, Benjamin would be forced to delay his preliminary report. Unless Virgile, armed with the audacity of youth and an angelic face, proved to be a better sleuth.

Despite his concerns, he sent up thanks for the marriage of cognac and Cohiba that he was now enjoying. The restaurant owner, having recognized him, cheerfully offered another glass. Benjamin declined, paid the bill, and took his smoky meditations to the banks of the Charente. He strolled down the Rue du Château to the Quai de l’Orangerie. He walked past the Bisquit cellars and the House of Hine as he looked for a bit of shade. But there weren’t many trees along this wharf, where salt was once unloaded, and cereals, wines, and fine eau-de-vie were shipped out.

The fruity notes of Benjamin’s cigar had given way to the subtle scent of cacao. The winemaker had slowed his pace and was contemplating the Tiffon cellars on the left bank. The building looked like a beached ocean liner with its rows of arched windows mirrored in the unruffled waters of the river. Benjamin remembered an old Jarnac merchant’s history lesson about this stone structure. It had been built in the eighteen seventies for the House of Vert & Cie, which had been forced to surrender all its cellars to the Tiffon firm, founded in 1875 by a certain Médéric Tiffon.

The meditation brought him full circle to the Lavoisier family. What strange dynamics he’d felt there. Why had Claude-Henri sold his shares? To get away from his shrew of a sister and his weakling of a brother?

Benjamin savored his cigar to the last third before throwing it into the water. He watched the core float to the surface, but then a dinghy distracted him. A woman of indeterminate age was at the steering wheel, proudly smoking a cigarillo. She had red hair and was tall and slender. Benjamin thought she looked like the actress Claudia Cardinale. As she drew closer to the lock, Benjamin could make out a companion and hear the woman letting out little squeals of pleasure. The companion was holding her hips and pecking her on the neck. Their happiness was so out in the open, but their small boat seemed too fragile.

Benjamin’s heart wasn’t in his work. He decided to take a drive. After all, Virgile seemed motivated enough. He retrieved his convertible, and once he had crossed the bridge, he took the D141 road toward the town of Cognac. The winemaker stopped briefly to put the top down. The air was full of the sweet fragrance of mock orange, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. He slipped his Carmen CD into the player and listened to “The March of the Toreadors.” Bizet was a perfect companion when one needed an escape from serious thinking.

Benjamin finally forgot his disagreement with Marie-France. That night, in the impressive eau-de-vie library at the Château Yeuse hotel and restaurant, he would order his Lavoisier cognac. Perhaps he would sip it while listening to Virgile’s account of his investigation thus far. He sincerely hoped—for Virgile’s sake, as well as his own—that his assistant was keeping his well-trained nose clean.

In the town of Cognac, the winemaker parked with some difficulty near Place François I. He went to the Maison de la Presse to buy newspapers and magazines and, still in his Loden, took a seat on the terrace of the Coq d’Or. He ordered a lemon Perrier before taking the top off a cigar. He perused
Vinomania
with a cynical eye, as if he already knew the contents and final verdicts of the tasters, some of whom—not that he cared—were his most ardent detractors. In the end, he was supremely bored with all the wine industry news. Only the
Revue des Vins de France
and
La Vigne
met with his approval. He set aside his reading and amused himself by studying the buildings and watching the small town’s residents parade by.

Cognac had known prosperous times. Fortunes had been amassed on the banks of the hard-to-tame Charente River. Dynasties had been built in the wake of barrels carried off on its waters. Wars, dissension, and unfortunate associations had destroyed some of these dynasties. One could still make out the names on the walls of abandoned wine cellars. Other well-known families, hoping to salvage what was left of their honor, had found themselves under the heel of large companies, and the old cellar masters had been forced to turn in their aprons.

The town of Cognac maintained a certain Napoleonic pride, with its slate roofs, pretentious gables, ceramics memorializing illustrious founders, stucco cornices, winter gardens, and generally polished ambience. But alongside the gated residences were atrocious buildings, where cement rivaled glass in a burst of modernity meant to be a sign of progress. Benjamin thought it was a glaring example of poor urban planning.

Most of Cognac’s luster was now faded. A few wine-merchant companies boasted authenticity but produced only advertisements. The myriad billboards at the edge of town, touting cognac and pineau as elixirs, seemed vulgar.

But the true and unique aristocracy of Cognac still survived in Jarnac. The Lavoisier family belonged to that lineage: daring and resolute, discreet and fiercely unyielding. Marie-France’s character had been forged from these values, which stood in danger of extinction. Benjamin told himself that he should never have agreed to work with the foreign investors. It was a matter of ethics. Perhaps it wasn’t too late to back away.

A woman sat down at the next table. She was wearing a straw hat, faded jeans, a pair of necklaces, and designer sunglasses. It was obvious by her affected gestures and the freckles visible above the low-cut neckline of her sweater that she was a foreigner. Irish perhaps or, more likely, English. Benjamin could detect his compatriots as easily as his setter could find a rabbit in a field of tall grass. He lowered his reading glasses and studied his neighbor. The foreigner took off her tinted glasses and revealed heavily made-up eyes, which were almost turquoise.

“Oh my God! Can it be? Benjamin! You’re Benjamin Cooker, aren’t you?”

Even more than the blue-green eyes, the voice resonated in the winemaker’s memory, like an old melody or a musky perfume. It was the strange music of an Oxford accent. For a few seconds, Benjamin remained speechless. Then he uttered the name he had never truly forgotten: “Sheila! Sheila Scott.”

The English woman burst out in laughter, rushed over to Benjamin, and threw her arms around his neck with such effusive affection, he was almost embarrassed. She nearly smothered him before pulling herself away and patting his chest and shoulders, as if trying to convince herself that this reunion was not a dream.

“Ben! My Benjamin. You haven’t changed one bit. Just a little heavier and a few gray hairs! My God, I don’t believe it. You, here, after all these years. You know, I often see your picture in the paper, but I never dared to get in touch with you. All that is ancient history. We were just kids. How old were we again?”

Benjamin was a little taken aback and pretended to ponder the question, even though he was well aware of the answer.

“Nineteen. It was our first year at art school. You had beautiful blonde hair, and your French was not great, but you sure could draw. Even the drawing professor was a bit in love with you.”

“I remember that tiny, top-floor closet your father rented for you in that chic neighborhood: the Avenue Raphaël in the sixteenth arrondissement. You were already living like a king with all that cash you were getting from London. The bohemian life wasn’t for you. And there I was, modeling for magazines. I had to bare my chest to make ends meet!”

“You used to tell me you enjoyed that,” Benjamin replied, his eyes full of mischief as he tried to relight his cigar, which had gone out during the burst of memories.

“Just as naughty as ever, my Ben! I’ll bet your wife doesn’t get bored with you.”

“You’d have to ask Elisabeth yourself. In any case, if she were, I’m sure she wouldn’t let on,” Benjamin quipped, confident of the charm he still exercised over this love of days gone by. The two English compatriots had met in Paris under the glass roofs of the École des Beaux-Arts. Both of them yearned to express themselves in more than their artwork. Their common language, their youthful and vigorous bodies, their shared passion for the Impressionists, and a sweltering September had transformed the room on the Avenue Raphaël into a licentious suite for lovers. The once-proper Brits remembered their upbringing well enough to cry out “God!” at every opportunity in their couplings and even managed to arouse their landlady, a hardened spinster doomed to solitary pleasures.

“Blasting Kiss and Aerosmith on your cassette player wasn’t enough to drown out our noise!” Sheila said, motioning to the waiter. “Two glasses of Champagne, please.” Benjamin noticed that her milky skin was already turning pink in the sun.

“Fortunately, my love affair with heavy metal didn’t last.” He turned to the waiter and asked in the tone of a customer who could not be fooled, “What do you suggest?”

“Uh, we have Mumm, Moët, and Gosset.”

“Gosset will be perfect,” Benjamin said. He had thrown off the poor young man, bestowed by nature with a cleft lip.

“Honestly, you haven’t changed a bit. You leave nothing to chance.”

“That’s not true. Otherwise, we would never have met again!” Benjamin joked. He took a puff of his Dominican cigar. “May I ask what you’re doing in Cognac?”

“I’ve been living here for almost ten years now. That is, not exactly in Cognac—in Migron. It’s a little village twelve miles from here. I restored an old water mill. I love it there.”

“Excuse me if I’m prying, but do you live alone?”

“After Styron died, I decided not to have another man in my life.”

“You were married?”

“As good as. I can assure you, he left me everything. Even now I’m living on his royalties. It’s enough to get by. I would so love for you to come to Samson’s Mill. That’s the name of my place.”

“So that you can be my Delilah for a night?” Benjamin immediately regretted his words. Charming was one thing—suggestive was quite another. He squirmed in his seat.

“Some embers are better left unstirred.” Sheila sighed as she slid a hand into the neck of her cashmere sweater to adjust a bra strap.

The waiter placed the two glasses of Champagne on the table. A brown birthmark ran down his neck, and he hunched his shoulders as if to conceal this other congenital affront. Although Benjamin detested pity, he would shell out a generous tip.

“Is it cold enough?” ventured the young man.

“It’s perfect,” Sheila said with a lovely smile.

The two friends raised a toast, exhumed buried memories, and roared with laughter at the childish antics of their late teens and early twenties.

It had turned out to be a beautiful afternoon, after all. Benjamin promised to visit Sheila at teatime the following day. The recollection of these tender years had made him happy and even aroused guilty feelings regarding his assistant.

But at Château Yeuse that evening, he said nothing about his encounter. He was quiet at dinner and just played with his
pigeon de Gâtine
. Even its perfectly rosy flesh could not whet his appetite. He told Virgile that he had taken a short stroll along the banks of the Charente River and spent some time on his guide. His editor had been uncharacteristically critical of the latest chapter.

“You don’t seem yourself, boss,” Virgile finally said, after telling him everything about his conversation with Pierre Lavoisier. “Is it that argument with the Lavoisier woman that’s bothering you?”

“Not exactly,” Benjamin replied listlessly as he sipped a Léoville Poyferré that should have remained in the wine cellar a few more years.

“Nothing serious, I hope.”

“It’s really nothing. Maybe it’s just this Saint-Julien wine, which is way too young. Or maybe it’s fatigue, the annoyances, and my impatience to get back to Grangebelle.”

“We’ve just gotten here, and you already want to wrap up the assignment and leave? You’re in a hurry, Mr. Cooker, and that’s not like you.”

“Just a bit weary, Virgile. Don’t mind me,” he said. He folded his napkin, indicating that dinner was over, and he had no desire for dessert, coffee, or even a cigar.

He left the restaurant without a word. Virgile followed him out to the terrace, which overlooked the château’s lush hanging gardens. The scents of wild mint and chamomile floated in the night air.

“Isn’t it nice here?” Virgile said. Benjamin could tell he was trying his best to sound enthusiastic.

The two men watched the lights of Cognac beyond the river. The moon was spilling its silver luminescence on the sleepy water. The air was a bit cool but not at all humid.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Virgile said again.

Benjamin turned up the collar of his Loden and leaned against the railing. “Charente: it’s the most beautiful stream in my kingdom,” he said dramatically.