The Fifth Harmonic (6 page)

A tour of the Bordeaux wine country, eleven people wandering the vineyards, seeing the ways different wines are made, visiting the famous chateaux for tastings.

Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die
—not an empty cliché for Will. He'd been eating way too much cheese and foie gras, and drinking extraordinary amounts of wine. But merry? Not a chance.

Why am I here?

For the beauty? Yes, that sounded like a good reason. A few days in rural France, watching the wondrous changes in the light from hour to hour, were all it took to understand why Impressionism had developed here. Hell, it would have been a miracle if it
hadn't
.

Rural France . . . Will now considered the phrase redundant. On the train ride from Charles de Gaulle to Libourne he'd been amazed by how much of France was farmland—mile after mile after mile of planted fields. A country of farms and villages with a few cities plopped down here and there like fried eggs on a griddle.

As he'd traveled farther and farther south, he'd wondered when he would see the first vines. Then he'd entered the wine region and was soon wondering where he wouldn't see a vine. Every square inch of land that was not given over to the absolute necessities of life— things like a house, garage, or driveway—was planted with vines.

Chateau de Mouchac sat on a small rise in Grézillac, a tiny village in the Entre Deux Mers region of Bordeaux. Entre Deux Mers— Between Two Seas. Not really. Between two rivers was more like it. But since the Garonne and the Dordogne were so tidal, with the Atlantic surging miles upriver at high tide, Entre Deux Mers was not a complete misnomer.

Someone had begun building Mouchac back in the twelfth century. All that remained now of the original walls were what appeared to be low stone fences. The four towers and the current U-shaped house had been added in the fourteenth century.

Will marveled that all this had been completed long before Christopher was a gleam in Mr. Columbus's eye.

Mouchac had its own label, and its vineyards rolled away on the surrounding hills. Will had stood at his bedroom window this morning shortly after dawn, staring in wonder as the liquid rays of the rising sun poured across the tops of the rows of merlot and sauvignon blanc, etching the fields with stripes of golden fire.

Harvest was in progress. The white sauvignon grapes had been hauled to the winery out back and pressed this afternoon. The juice had been vatted to await the start of fermentation, and the air out here was rich with the yeasty-sour tang of the
fromage
, the discarded skins and stems, sitting now in a pulpy pile outside the pressing room. Delirious swarms of gnat-sized fruit flies would feast until the leftovers were carted away tomorrow.

He'd drunk the sparkling pousse rapière aperitif and nibbled some foie gras, but a casual remark by one of the tour's oenophiles had killed his appetite. No longer able to sit still, he'd excused himself
from the long, glass-laden oak table and wandered outside, taking a bottle of LaLouviere with him. He'd considered strolling the tree-lined path down to Grézillac's village center, but decided against it. Not much there beyond a few stone houses and mankind's three most durable and indispensable institutions: a church, a graveyard, and a bar. Instead, he'd watched the setting sun ignite pink clouds in the azure sky.

The remark . . . he'd heard it a dozen times in the past few days, but it had struck home with vicious force tonight. They were tasting a new red, straight from the barrel, and one of the men had said, “Very nice—this should open up beautifully in another five to seven years.”

Five to seven years? Will had thought. I don't have five to seven
months!

Now the nearly full moon had risen and he was still on the iron bench, suffering the perseverative question:
Why am I here?

Damn. I can't say I'm making new friends . . . I'll never see these people again. I can't even say I'm storing up memories . . . I won't be around to remember any of this.

And so he was in a rather black mood when Catherine found him.

“Room for another on that seat?” she said.

Will shifted to his right and lifted the bottle out of her way.

Catherine was average height, fortyish, and a bit on the plump side, but lively and pretty in a Lynn Redgrave sort of way. The tour consisted of four couples, plus Catherine and her brother, with Will as odd man out. The tour director had seated them together at the first dinner, and they tended to pair off on the daily vineyard walks. During those walks he'd learned that she too was divorced but had nothing good to say about her ex other than the fact that he was wealthy enough to afford whopping alimony payments.

Will had gathered from a few chance remarks by some of the other males on the tour that they had a pool going as to when he and Catherine would wind up in the sack.

Sorry, boys, he thought. No winner.

He and Annie had had a passably active if not terribly inventive sex life during their marriage, and Will had had a few brief flings
since the divorce, but nothing serious. His sex drive, however, seemed to have shifted into low gear since he'd read the path report on the tumor. In fact, sex rarely crossed his mind these days.

Even if that weren't the case, Catherine could be a little wearing. She seemed to think she was an authority on everything and had a tendency to expound on any subject, no matter how common or widely known.

And to further dampen any nascent lust, damned if he hadn't begun recently to sense a swelling at the back of his tongue. His imagination? Or was the primary tumor finally announcing its presence?

If his thoughts were on any woman, it was Maya. Why, he couldn't say. He almost wished she were here. She was a kook, certainly, but an intriguing one, and more interesting than anyone on this tour.

“Are you all right?” Catherine said.

“Oh, I'm just great,” he told her.

“Good. Because you didn't look so hot when you walked out. We all thought you might be sick.”

“Just needed some air.”

“I know what you mean,” she said, moving closer. “I—”

He felt her stiffen and glanced at her. Catherine was leaning forward, staring at the sky.

“Oh, my God, will you look at that!”

Will looked up and was startled to see a piece missing from an upper corner of the moon, as if some celestial predator had taken a bite out of it. Just moments ago it had been almost perfectly round.

Catherine bounded from the seat and dashed toward the chateau, calling for everyone to come out.

Will stayed where he was while the rest of the party emerged from the dining hall and gathered in Mouchac's courtyard, oohing and ahhing as they gazed skyward. Catherine returned to his side, but remained standing and staring at the shrinking moon.

“This morning's paper had mentioned that an eclipse was due,” she said, “but I'd forgotten all about it. It isn't going to be a full eclipse, though.”

The upper three quarters of the moon were gone now, leaving only a glowing horizontal crescent hanging in the sky.

“Looks like a big grin, doesn't it,” Catherine said. “Like the
Cheshire Cat in
Alice
.” She slipped into her lecture mode. “The monthly crescents of the moon are a result of the angle of the sun, you know. This is different. That's the earth's shadow up there. So in a sense, the earth is making the cat disappear, leaving us with just the smile.”

Will's glass slipped from his fingers, spilling wine on the grass as he shot to his feet.

“What? What did you say?”

“That it's good old Mother Earth creating that smile up there.”

Shaken, he took a step toward her. “Who are you? Who told you to say that?”

Catherine backed away. He could see the alarm on her face. “What are you talking about, Will?”

His head was buzzing like a wasp nest. “Who sent you?”

She moved further away. “I think you've had too much to drink.”

She turned and hurried toward the others in the courtyard, leaving him alone in the dark under the tree. Will looked up at the glowing crescent grinning down at him, and remembered Maya's parting words.

. . . the All-Mother . . . will give you a sign. Watch for it. She will smile on you to let you know that she wants you to be saved.

This was crazy. Had she known he was coming to France? Had she known there'd be a partial eclipse? Possible, sure, but . . . damn!

“Too much to drink?” he muttered, locating his empty glass and picking up the bottle of Graves. “Oh, no. I haven't had anywhere
near
enough to drink.”

With a trembling hand he poured himself half a glass and wandered farther away from Mouchac. He stopped at the edge of the vineyard and leaned on one of the vine row end posts, careful to avoid the thorns of the traditional rose bush planted there.

Calm down, he told himself. This eclipse didn't just happen out of the blue—it was expected, scheduled. Catherine had read about it in the paper. This was a regular phenomenon. Nothing supernatural about it. Certainly no All-Mother smiling down at him.

And yet, it looked
exactly
like a smile. He realized that if he were back in the States now instead of here, he wouldn't have seen a damn thing—it was mid-afternoon on the East Coast.

But I
am
here, he thought. And I've been asking myself why.

Against his will, his thoughts gravitated to Maya and her proposal.

Will already had an irrevocable trust set up for Kelly, so she was taken care of. Annie would have no financial problems after she remarried. So he could see no reason why he couldn't liquidate his assets, give half away to, say, cancer research, and stick the rest in a trust set up as Maya had described.

He had no illusions: Before year's end, Kelly would wind up with the contents of that trust as well.

And then what? Head off with Maya into the wilds of Latin America—what she'd called “Mesoamerica”—and search for a cure?

Yeah, right.

Then again, hadn't he wanted to spend what little time he had left traveling? Why not do the traveling in “Mesoamerica”?

Will poured some more wine.

Yes, really . . . why not? Why the hell not?

Not in search of a cure, but just for the sheer damn bloody hell of it. A truly crazy, futile, wrongheaded gesture, but in some perverse way its very craziness, futility, and wrongheadedness appealed to him.

In his entire life, when had he ever done
anything
on impulse? Never. If he was ever going to act on a reckless urge, this was the time. Because soon he'd be unable to act, and not too long after that, he'd have no more impulses, reckless or otherwise.

Yes, Will Burleigh, he thought. Why not choose something utterly foolish as the last grand gesture of your otherwise safe, sane, staid, straight-laced, predictable life? Go off with a New Age healer, go through all the motions, perform every ritual she prescribes, all without one shred of hope of a cure.

But who knows? he thought. Maybe I'll be surprised.

He'd lived his whole life believing that the universe functioned according to the physical laws of matter and energy set down by human science. He'd always believed those laws to be right.

But now he realized that a small desperate part of him ached for them to be wrong.

He lifted his glass and toasted the grin in the sky, growing lopsided now as earth's shadow moved on.

“Mesoamerica, here I come!”

What had seemed like such an easy, straightforward decision in France turned out to be a complicated process back home.

Will had broken off from the tour and returned to the U.S. the day after the eclipse, but he didn't contact Maya immediately. Before he became involved with this woman, he wanted to know more about her. So he got in touch with Max Eppinger, his long-time lawyer and an old friend. Max put him on to a private investigator named Vincent Terziski.

Will met with Terziski, a heavyset man with a florid complexion, and hired him to check out the mysterious woman “healer” with the shop in Katonah.

The detective stopped by Will's apartment two days later. He was sweating, wheezing, and smelled like an ashtray. Will wondered about the man's blood pressure and the state of his coronary arteries, but said nothing. He'd learned the hard way that some people don't appreciate unsolicited medical advice.

He listened to Terziski's initial report.

“Don't have much,” he said, “and most of what I've got is from secondary sources.”

“Meaning?”

“From applications to open her business, stuff like that. I mean, I know where she
says
she got a degree, but I haven't checked with the school itself yet. Anyway, your gal's full name's Maya Quennell, which made my job a helluva lot easier since there aren't a whole lot of people with either name. She was born thirtyfour years ago in Oran, Algeria, of a French father and a Mayan mother. Grew up in Paris, attended the Sorbonne—don't know if she ever graduated—and supposedly has a philosophy degree from Berkeley.”

Berkeley, Will thought. Why am I not surprised?

“She's got a checking account with roughly eighteen thousand on deposit, but no other tangible assets, not even a car. She lives in the apartment above her storefront. No arrest record for fraud or anything else; and not a single consumer complaint against her.”

So far, so good, Will thought.

“That's all?”

“So far, yeah. I did find a Maya Quennell who was arrested during a logging site protest back in 1972, but that can't be the same girl—she's not old enough. Like I said before, I'll be checking out the schools and such for confirmation, but all in all I'd say your gal looks pretty clean right now. Wouldn't mind having a set of her fingerprints, though. Any chance—?

“I don't think so,” Will said quickly.

Scenes from old movies about pocketing a cocktail glass to secure a set of prints flashed behind his eyes.

“She didn't happen to give you a crystal or anything like that, did she?”

And then Will remembered: “She did give me a business card.”