Vintage (19 page)

“B
runo! There's my favorite poet!” Marcy rushed him, engulfing him in a plush, sweaty hug. She was a thickset woman with a pink, expressive face, freckles and a mischievous sparkle in her eyes. She held Bruno at arm's length, sizing him up. “Let's have a look at you, then.” She hooked her fingers in his belt with a
mixture of alarm and disgust. “You've lost a few kilograms, what? Let's get a meal in you, and quickly!”

Marcy shouted to her waiter for a table and the day's menu. She disappeared into the kitchen, barking orders in her heavily accented French, and then emerged again to join Bruno with a plate of charcuterie and a bottle of local Pinot Blanc.

Marcy Cooper was an English expat, chef and owner of Petit Écureuil, a tiny bistro on the Rue des Tonneliers (there seems to be a “Barrelmaker Street” in every wine town) in Strasbourg, where Bruno was completing his tour of Alsace before moving on. She'd been a good friend since he'd first eaten there during a brief stint as an inspector for the
Michelin Guide
, a gig that didn't last long since giving Bruno a limitless expense account was like teaching a toddler to use matches.

“Tell me your troubles,” Marcy commanded, leaning on her elbows while the waiter brought out bowls of her traditional cabbage soup, which featured slabs of bacon and salted pork, thinly sliced apples and Munster Alsacienne cheese. It had legendary restorative powers, which Bruno needed after a detour of several days on the Alsatian wine road, and it smelled like a farmhouse kitchen.

As Bruno unfurled his story, Marcy listened intently, her eyes flickering. She furrowed her brow and patted his shoulder when he described the implosion of his marriage (Marcy had been through a number of her own) and she refilled and clinked glasses when he talked about the Trevallier, somehow ending with Claire's intention of following in his culinary footsteps. Marcy cracked her knuckles, a tattoo of a bulb of garlic on the underside of her wrist poking out of her chef's whites. “Good for Claire! We need more strong girls in this business. I'll give her a
personal recommendation to LBC London. She can come work for me and I'll teach her a thing or two.”

She shouted for a second bottle of wine, followed by a pair of expletive-laden commands to her sous chef, prepping for the evening rush, and Bruno wondered if Claire really knew the sort of life she was in for.

At that very moment, back in Chicago, Claire had just received the postcard he'd written to Anna on the train. Instead of sharing it with her mother, she spirited it up to her room and read it several times over, searching it for signs of progress on the book. His thoughts were coming together nicely, and it was time that he started working on an outline. She knew that her mother had doubts about his ability to ever finish a new manuscript, but Claire was counting on it. She wanted to attend culinary school, and if Bruno published again he'd have some influence and could use his connections and credibility to smooth her admission to one of the more selective institutes. Anna, though, would be devastated, and Claire was bracing herself for the eventual confrontation. To Anna, forgoing a standard four-year college degree was a waste, especially for a star student from a modest-household income that made her easy scholarship bait. Passing up that opportunity was a risk, but wasn't spending your life doing something you loved worth it? Kitchens had always thrilled Claire, and she used to accompany Bruno through the back doors of the best of them: the smells, energy and noise stopping her in her tracks, the cooks and chefs pausing to offer Bruno a greeting before jumping back to their tasks. Everyone moved at such a brisk pace, rushing about with a clear sense of purpose. The sounds were music to her. The chopping and clatter of pots. The shouts and muffled slam of
the cooler door. The deliverymen slaloming around her with crates of raw goat's milk and fresh feta or chèvre, sealed cases of seafood rushed to the cooler, packaged like organs heading into a transplant operation. Claire figured that she'd entered as many restaurants through the loading dock as she had through the front door, and, unlike her father, she knew she wouldn't be happy as just an observer. Was she crazy? Her mom probably thought so.
Claire, honey, how can you possibly know what you love at sixteen?
Mom, how do you know at forty?
Honey, I just don't want you to have any regrets.
If I don't go for this, I'll always regret it.
We've spent years saving, and that won't even cover your first year of culinary school . . . I can't let you spend it all only to find out that you don't like it
. But Mom, I
know
that's what I
want
to do . . .

Claire had rehearsed the conversation over and over again, and in each case it didn't turn out well. Her mom was capable, reliable and composed . . . everything her father was not. But on this matter, Bruno was her only ally. It hurt because while both her parents loved her, her mother was the one hovering in the doorway each night, a faint smile on her lips as she watched her daughters drift to sleep. And Claire was determined to break her heart.

Postcard stowed, Claire went to the kitchen and took out a stockpot and some round steak that she proceeded to cube. She was making a simple
boeuf bourguignon
out of
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
by Julia Child, losing herself in the myriad details of the craft, trying to push the imagined argument out of her mind.

Back in Alsace, Bruno and Marcy shared a smoke on the street in front of the restaurant. “Well, I can't wait to read your next book,” she said, crushing out the cigarette beneath her toe.
“It sounds wonderful. Oh, and your mate Parker Thomas is pretty excited about it, too.”

“He's no mate. And when did you talk to Thomas?”

“Stopped by last week on his way from France to Germany. Seemed to know something about what you're up to. Well, back to the kitchen for me.”

They embraced, but Bruno left with a sinking feeling that Parker Thomas was beating him to the punch. He'd been ambling through the Alsatian countryside for far too long, and it was with a renewed sense of urgency that he left the Vosges Mountains behind him and headed for the border. As he stalked across Marc Mimram's lovely pedestrian bridge into Germany, he was too flustered to enjoy the view or even notice the strapping figure in the unseasonably warm, dark coat shadowing him across the border as he headed for the train station.

*      *      *

Bruno spotted the four towers of the cathedral first and watched them grow in the darkening sky as his train squealed to a halt in Naumburg. It was late evening, and the town felt empty, which was probably why he noticed the footsteps in the darkness behind him now as he headed toward the city center. He pulled his head out of the stack of maps and pages he'd printed in Beaune and turned around slowly. Somewhere a small dog barked, and a gust tumbled a newspaper down the street.

He shrugged and squinted again at the pages in his hand, realizing that he should have studied them more carefully on the train. He wandered past a wine shop, but it was closed. He scanned the bottles in the window. He wasn't certain he'd ever tried Naumburg wine before, though he vaguely remembered a bottle of
sekt,
what the Germans called sparkling wines, on the
shelves of his mother's deli. The quality of the glass and label paper in the window samples showed that the winemakers were proud of their product and invested in their presentation: a good sign, though it didn't always translate to good wines, and some wonderful wines were packaged quite poorly.

It was then that he noticed a reflection in the shop window from the street behind him, a fellow in a long dark coat and black hat pulled low over his face like the clichéd figure of a thug from a film noir. He turned to get a better look, but just as he did a city bus rumbled past and the man was gone. Bruno wasn't ordinarily given to bravery, but the fear of losing his story to someone else, whether it be Parker Thomas or some oligarch's henchman, suppressed concerns for personal safety as he trotted across the street. There was no one in sight, but then he spotted a narrow alley between buildings and decided to investigate.

Of course there was no light. Bruno reached into his pocket for the only weapon he carried . . . the silver eagle corkscrew Aleksei had given him. He folded it out and gripped the handle so that the spiral extended between his middle and index fingers. He held his breath and plunged into the tight alley, his suitcase brushing the stone walls on one side to help guide him. His eyes slowly adjusted, but still he couldn't see any farther than a few feet ahead. His foot slurped and then sucked as he stepped into something foul.

There was a shuffling sound ahead, and he froze.

“Thomas!” Bruno whisper-shouted into the darkness. He edged forward. “Thomas, is that you?”

His hand gripping the corkscrew began to shake in anger, or maybe angst, as he thought about losing this story to his rival. He took another step and heard more shuffling ahead.

“Thomas? Or whoever you are. This is my story. You hear me? So hands off!”

Another step. He could hear breathing now, a rapid snuffling. His heart pounded, adrenaline surging.

A large, dark shape loomed ahead of him now. He could barely make it out in the grayness. It was only a few feet away. It was the color of stone, and it had to be the man in the black coat. Too big, probably, for Thomas. But maybe it was the Spetsnaz henchman. There was a twittering in the shadows, and Bruno thought the man was now laughing at him, mocking him. It was a high-pitched, sniggering laugh.

Bruno had had enough. He always thought of himself as a poet and lover, and not a fighter. He hadn't been in a fight since a fifth-grade altercation with Mary Soblesky, who'd called him a “porky Jew-Kraut,” after which Bruno rushed at her, only to be socked squarely in the nose.

The squeaky laughter continued.

“Fuck you, and hands off my story!” Bruno shouted, channeling his eleven-year-old self. He dropped his suitcase and swung forward with a punch, cocking back the other hand with the corkscrew in preparation to deliver the coup de grace, and he felt his hand crunch as it met something impossibly solid. And cold.

In such situations you hear people talk about experiencing a sequence of events in slow motion, but that's not quite what happened here. It all was over in an instant, and it was only on a careful deconstruction at the mouth of the alley as Bruno sat on his suitcase and sucked on his sore knuckles that he was able to piece together what had happened.

The massive, wall-like structure at which he had swung hadn't been a wall-like thug in a dark coat, but the actual wall-like wall of the bricked-over end of the alley.

The squeaking laughter hadn't been human, either, but instead a panicked rat that he had chased into the corner. It exploded between his legs with a squeal after Bruno struck the wall and shouted pained curses when his hand connected with the stone. Luckily it had been a feeble punch . . . otherwise he would have broken bones. His whole hand ached, and his knuckles were bleeding.

Bruno doubted whether he'd seen the man's reflection in the shop window at all. Perhaps the paranoia was getting to him. Maybe it was the guilt over the slowly dwindling bundle of Anna's cash he kept in his breast pocket that was nagging his conscience. Thinking of her pulled him out of his funk and he returned to the task at hand: finding Von Speck.

Naumburg wasn't so large a town that he couldn't locate the first address on his list after a pair of wrong turns and some quick directions from fellow pedestrians. But nobody answered the door and when he peeked in the window of the flat he saw there was no furniture. He crossed the name off his list.

The second Von Speck was a college student originally from Hamburg. But within the hour he found himself standing at his third door of the evening on the landing of a shabby, three-flat, half-timbered house. The third-floor buzzer had a handwritten tag in dignified but shaky script that read
H. Speck
.

He buzzed and waited. In the lower flat, a dog yipped. Bruno scanned the street in both directions, expecting to see his phantom pursuer again, but he was alone. He reprimanded himself for his delusion and buzzed again. He was worried. If he turned up no leads, then what would he do?

He buzzed one last time for good measure and was turning on his heel when the handle in the center of the heavy wooden door began to turn. It swung slowly inward and Bruno
found himself facing a small, white-haired woman in a pressed flower-print dress looking up at him through thick glasses.

“Yes?” she asked, her voice cracking as if it hadn't been used in some time.

Bruno bowed ceremoniously, suddenly self-conscious of his German language skills despite having grown up speaking it at home with Greta. “Frau Speck?”

“Yes?” Magnified eyes blinking behind the thick lenses.

“I'm looking for a Herr Von Speck, who served in France during the war.”

“My husband?”

“Yes, your husband. Is he available?”

“No. He is deceased.”

Bruno took off his Cubs cap and held it against his chest. “I'm so sorry to hear that. Might I come in and ask you some questions about him?”

She thought for a moment. And then she began to slowly turn around with mincing shuffles as she ascended the steep stairs. “Of course,” she said, “please follow me.”

Bruno creaked up the steps after her and in a moment he found himself in a cozy apartment with faded wallpaper. Decorative plates hung on the walls and porcelain figurines stood at attention on shelves or arranged in a glass corner display case. He sat down at a polished walnut table and Hilda Von Speck lifted the crystal lid on a cake plate beneath which was a fresh
pflaumenkuchen
.

“I just made it this morning,” she said. “Would you like some coffee?”