The Sauvignon Secret (9 page)

“The lady of the house is asking for you. I told her you were in the bathroom.” She waved something at my cousin. “Breath mints. I figured you could use them.”

Dominique and I exchanged glances. “Well,” she said, “here we go.”

On our way inside I said, “I like your new chef.”

“She’s amazing,” Dominique said. “I was lucky to get her.”

“How’d you find her?”

“She contacted me. She was born in France, spent a lot of time there, but grew up here. Her father was Iranian, a university professor. American mother, died last fall. Apparently she brought up Jasmine in a home that only ate organic produce, anything locally grown. They owned chickens, a goat, that sort of thing. Jasmine worked with Juliette on tonight’s menu, so all the fruit and vegetables could come from her garden.”

“I’m impressed,” I said. “At least the food is going to be fabulous.”

“It is. Which reminds me. We’ve been planning a dinner at the Inn where everything on the menu was grown or raised within a hundred miles of here. We’ve had so much interest that I was wondering if we could move it to the vineyard.”

“Sure, no problem. Talk to Frankie and we’ll get it on the calendar.”

“There won’t be time. It’s next Friday.” She saw my alarmed
look. “Don’t worry. Jasmine’s got it all organized. There’s nothing to worry about.”

“You’re letting Jasmine run this?”

“It was her idea,” Dominique said. “She’s very capable, Lucie. Besides, you know what they say—never let a gift horse in the house. How could I say no?”

“When you put it like that,” I said, “I suppose you couldn’t.”

Juliette seated Pépé at her table and exiled me to a remote corner of the living room with an elderly crowd who talked about the old days at their various foreign posts and the new days with their aches and pains, and the hassles of dealing with Social Security and Medicare. Mercifully everyone began leaving at eleven. By eleven thirty Pépé and I were the only guests remaining. Charles took me aside after Juliette excused herself to settle up with Dominique and her staff.

“I explained to Luc where the lodge is located,” he said. “It’s only half a mile down our private road, easy enough to find. Make yourself at home and I’ll be along shortly.”

“Charles.” Juliette returned from the kitchen, lightly touching his sleeve. “Do you have the check to pay the caterers? I thought I had it, but I don’t.”

“It’s in the library,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.”

He disappeared, leaving the three of us alone. I waited, hoping the floor would open up so I could drop through, rather than witness the anguished looks that passed between Pépé and Juliette.

“When will I see you again?” Juliette held out her hands to my grandfather, who clasped them without taking his eyes off her face.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I leave for California on Sunday. After the trip, I’ll be returning to France.”

“Can’t you stay a day or two longer?”

“I don’t know.”

“Please try. We could see each other again.”

Even now I don’t like to remember the look of loss and longing that passed between them. I cleared my throat and turned away, pretending to have a coughing fit. When I finished, Pépé was kissing both of Juliette’s hands.

She blinked rapidly. “Good night, Luc.”

“Good night,
ma chère
Juliette.”

“Thank you for dinner,” I said.

Juliette gazed at me like she had no idea who I was. “Yes, yes, of course.”

I followed my grandfather outside, where one of the valets had the Mini waiting in front of the entrance. We got in the car without speaking. I believe Juliette came to the door and watched us drive off, but I couldn’t be sure because I kept my eyes glued to the road so I didn’t have to see the utterly bereft look on Pépé’s face.

The lights from the Thiessmans’ house glittered in my rearview mirror until I turned down the side road where Charles’s lodge was located and we were swallowed up in darkness.

What Charles wanted to talk about and why we had to retreat to his private eyrie to talk about it was anybody’s guess. Now it wouldn’t be long before we found out. Hopefully by then my grandfather would have composed himself. Charles’s wife was in love with him. And after tonight, it seemed Pépé was at least a little bit in love with her, too.

My grandfather’s silence filled the car until I felt so claustrophobic I had to roll down my window. The night air rushed in, sharp and stinging, as though summer had evaporated in the past few hours. The unexpected smoky tang of autumn scented the breeze and whipped my hair in my eyes. I shivered and rolled up the window again, but at least now my alcohol-buzzed brain felt like it had been jolted out of its stupor.

As soon as I drove beyond Juliette’s gardens and her greenhouse, the gravel road plunged into a thicket of woods that closed around the car. I put on the brakes because I had been speeding, and in the murky swirl of fog my headlights turned trees, underbrush, and impenetrable black holes an unnatural yellow-green. Overhead the canopy of trees wove together and blocked out the night sky so it felt like we were winding through a tunnel or a cave.

“Are you sure this is the right way?” Pépé asked after a few minutes. “Maybe you should have turned left at that fork in the road beyond the house.”

“I thought you told me Charles said right.”

We rounded a corner and he said, “I think I see a light up ahead.”

“I wonder what he wants to talk about. He said it was life or death.”

“Juliette knows he’s upset about something,” my grandfather said.

“She has no idea about what?”

Pépé tilted his head, as though he were weighing his answer. I wondered if he was thinking about Juliette or me. “She says she does not.”

“You don’t believe her?”

“I think she has her suspicions,” he said. “She asked if I would do what I could for him.”

“And you said yes.”

“I said I would try. But Charles specifically asked for you to come this evening,
ma belle
, and you’re the one he asked for help.” He gave me a sideways glance. “I don’t know what, if any, role he has in mind for me.”

“Mick Dunne got me to agree to fly out to California to sample some wine Charles talked him into buying,” I said. “Mick knew you had business out there, too, so he figured I could accompany you and, um, we’d … be together. And Charles was the one who set you up to talk to this Bohemian Grove group.”

“How interesting. Obviously it’s no coincidence. I wonder what Charles has got up his sleeve.”

I rounded another bend in the road and the light grew larger, winking like a wicked eye between the tree branches.

“I guess we’re about to find out,” I said. “I hope that’s the lodge, or else we’re really lost.”

I parked in front of a rustic cabin that sat in a clearing surrounded by Charles’s smallish vineyard. The cloudless blue-black sky was star filled and serene. A scuffed-silver half-moon hung high above the trees and brushed the tops of the vines so they looked frost rimed. The luminescent clock on my car dashboard showed ten minutes to midnight.

“Should we wait for him?” I asked.

“He said to make ourselves at home.” Pépé was already starting toward the front door. “And he left the place unlocked.”

The hinges creaked as he pushed open the door, and for an instant I expected the Big Bad Wolf or a wicked witch disguised as a kindly grandmother to appear and bid us to come inside. The room could have been the reading room in a gentlemen’s club, with a pair of black leather wing chairs and a matching sofa pulled up
around a polished granite coffee table, all grouped in front of a large stone fireplace. The walls looked like old barn wood that had been beautifully refinished. The sconces and matching chandelier in the middle of the room were made of antlers. Tiny red shades over the candlesticks muted the light so it seemed almost viscous, except for the warm pool of spreading color that came from a Tiffany lamp hanging over the bar. A rug in the center of the room was a dead animal skin—a zebra. Something dark and furry I couldn’t identify lay in front of the fireplace.

“I didn’t know Charles was a hunter,” I said. “It’s cold in here.”

“He’s hunted for as long as I’ve known him. When he lived in France he used to go off to Scotland with a group of friends every year,” Pépé said. “Juliette loathes blood sports so I suspect that is why he has this place in the woods, so far from the house. Here,
chérie
, take my jacket.”

“I can’t. You’ll freeze.”

He draped his navy suit coat around my shoulders. “I’ll be fine.”

I walked around the room, examining the signed photographs that lined the walls. Pépé did the same from the other direction. Each one showed Charles, with practically every American president since Harry Truman or with sober-suited men I didn’t recognize, with the exception of Winston Churchill. All the pictures looked official; there were no candid snaps of him and Juliette on a vacation cruise, at Christmas, a special dinner somewhere. I wondered why there had been no children.

I scarcely recognized Charles in the early black-and-white pictures: smooth-faced and dashing, reed slim, clear-eyed, with a pompadour of wavy dark hair and a slight grave smile befitting the seriousness of the moment. What hadn’t changed was that cocky self-confidence in his eyes, the lack of self-doubt. No wonder Juliette had fallen for him after living with a troll who beat her.

One picture that had particular prominence showed Charles shaking hands with the then president of France, Georges Pompidou, on what looked like the day he presented his diplomatic credentials as ambassador to France. Juliette, ethereal and as lovely as she’d been in the portrait in their library, stood behind him looking radiant. It was the only picture in the room in which she appeared.
Behind me a door opened and closed with a quiet click and I spun around.

It appeared as though Charles materialized out of nowhere, until I noticed the door set into a wall that had been camouflaged to look like a bookcase. He was holding something partially obscured in his hand. For a wild moment I thought it might be a gun. Maybe I’d been right after all: He had come to have a man-to-man talk with Pépé about his wife’s infatuation with my grandfather. But when he raised his arm I saw that it was a wine bottle, dark like the color of old blood.

“I didn’t mean to startle you both. I went in through the cave to get the wine and came through the back door.” He opened and closed it again so we could see the neat trick of how it disappeared into the wall. “Clever, isn’t it?”

He crossed the room and flicked a switch next to an oil painting of a pair of foxhounds. Instantly a fire blazed to life in the stone fireplace.

My grandfather looked surprised and Charles grinned. “Gas,” he said. “I know it’s a lazy man’s way of getting out of building a real fire, but I enjoy it. No need to wait for it to burn down at the end of an evening.”

So this was the refuge he retreated to when he wanted to get away from … what? Or whom? I wondered if Juliette had even seen the inside of this place.

“Do you spend much time here?” I asked.

He gave me an indecipherable look and said, “Depends on your definition of ‘much.’ ”

I decided not to ask the obvious follow-up.

“Please, come and sit by the fire,” he said, “while I pour the wine. I had it opened about an hour ago. I’d like to see how it’s developing. It might need a little more time.”

He handed me a glass and I nearly dropped it. Silk-screened on the wineglass was the logo of the openmouthed alienlike figure that had been on the broken glass in Paul Noble’s studio. He handed Pépé a similar glass and took a third for himself.

“Is anything wrong?” he asked.

I looked into his eyes and saw a shadow pass behind them. What-ever
his reason for bringing us here, now it seemed it had something to do with the death of Paul Noble. Somehow Charles had learned that I’d found Paul hanging in his studio and he knew about the wineglass, too. I wondered who had told him and when this game was going to end. I was tired of being played.

“I saw a wineglass with the same design on it the other day, but you know that already, don’t you?” I said in a curt voice. “Where did you get these? They look like old glasses, not the inexpensive ones we give out as souvenirs at the winery.”

“Lucie—” Pépé cautioned me.

“They are,” Charles said. “I haven’t used these glasses in more than forty years.”

“Why tonight? A celebration? Or is it in memoriam? And shouldn’t we be drinking Sauvignon Blanc?”

Charles’s mouth tightened. “You’re right,” he said. “The Margaux will have to do. It’s from the correct year.”

I looked at the bottle. “What happened in 1970?”

“I’ll get to that. Now, please, have a seat.”

He waited until Pépé took one of the leather chairs and I sat on the sofa before he sat down in the other wing chair. The fire flickered merrily.

“Do you mind if I smoke?” My grandfather indicated a large glass ashtray on the coffee table.

I’d noticed it earlier. The White House logo was etched into the glass, probably a souvenir from another era, in the days when nobody minded if the president lit up and dinners ended with brandy and cigars in one of the formal state rooms.