Vintage (3 page)

With those three words, “Clos Des Larmes,” Madeleine was momentarily back home. She could see the Arsenault house, square and solid inside its white-walled courtyard. The dark green painted shutters. The bright red geraniums in her mother’s cherished window boxes. The gates high and wide enough to drive a coach and horses through, painted with the words “Champagne Arsenault” in extravagant curlicued letters. Proud letters. The roses in the garden. The scrawny black cat sunning itself on the steps. Then the Clos itself. The wild strawberries that grew beneath the vines in the summer. She saw
herself as a young girl, playing in the Clos with her older brother. The single apple tree right in the middle … 

“Made your mind up yet?” Freeman interrupted. “I need people who can make quick decisions on my team.”

“I’m sure Madeleine just wants to make sure she makes the
perfect
decision,” said Geoff, rushing to her defense. This business of defending her was a fairly new development in their relationship. She knew it was only because he thought his job depended on the impression that if he went, his entire team went too.

“We’ll have a bottle of the Jacquesson ‘96,” she said to the sommelier as she snapped the wine list shut.

Freeman nodded as though impressed by her decisiveness. “Bring two bottles,” he added.

Madeleine had hoped for an early night so that she might be up in time to catch the seven o’clock train to Paris the next morning, but four hours later they were still at the table.

They had moved from the champagne to a fine Bordeaux. Now the men were finishing off a bottle of port. Madeleine tried to disguise the fact that she had stopped drinking hours before by occasionally raising her glass to her lips and pretending to take a sip.

In Madeleine’s handbag, her mobile phone vibrated like a dying bee. When she got the chance to slip away to the bathroom to check her voicemail, she recognized her father’s number in the list of missed calls. At almost midnight—one o’clock in the morning in France—it was much too late to call him back. In any case, she was too tired to face the telling-off she probably deserved. She’d been promising to visit for months. She swore she would make it that weekend. The last thing she needed to hear
right then was how she had let him down. Again. She would telephone him first thing in the morning.

“You haven’t been keeping up with us,” Freeman bellowed when Madeleine got back to the table. He filled her small glass to the brim, slopping port all over the pristine white tablecloth. “On my team, we work hard. We play hard. We’re the Tartars!”

“That’s the name of our cricket team,” said Freeman’s henchman helpfully.

“Fascinating,” said Madeleine.

“Come on, girl,” said Freeman. “Drink up.”

Madeleine gamely clinked her glass against his.

Beneath the table, hidden in Madeleine’s gray snakeskin-trimmed Fendi, Constant Arsenault’s name illuminated the screen of his daughter’s mobile phone one last time.

M
athieu Randon, head of the eponymous Domaine Randon, was an impressive man. As soon as he walked into a room it was clear he was a force to be reckoned with. His bearing was the very definition of patrician. Though in his mid-fifties, he had the physical strength, grace and agility of a man half his age. He had a full head of silver-white hair, swept back presidentially in style. Naturally, as a Frenchman, he knew how to dress. Everything he wore was bespoke. Handmade shoes, handmade suit, handmade shirts. His ties were the only items
he ever got off the rack. But then again, he did own the racks … 

Mathieu Randon had inherited Maison Randon, the family champagne house with vineyards in the grand cru villages of Le Vezy, Avize and Verzenay, when he was just twenty-one years old. The upkeep of the champagne business alone would have been enough to occupy most people his age. And the results young Mathieu achieved in his first year at the helm would have formed a big enough pile of laurels for most older, more experienced men to rest upon indefinitely. But even in his early twenties Mathieu Randon was not a man who liked to laze about.

In his second year at the head of the family business Randon bought out two of the small houses with vineyards neighboring his family’s land, enabling the expansion of the Maison Randon brand. Ignoring the thought of his father turning in the grave, Randon concentrated on promoting the Maison’s non-vintage champagne. It sold spectacularly well overseas. It was the height of the eighties, when City bonuses were big and everyone felt like celebrating. Randon embarked on an aggressive sales push in the United States and Great Britain.

Prior to his time at the helm, Maison Randon had never advertised. That had to change. Randon employed an advertising agency to help him position the brand just so. An up-and-coming French actress was chosen to head up the campaign. She was pictured in bed, her modesty barely protected by a champagne-colored silk sheet. In her hand, a glass of Maison Randon’s non-vintage Brut. On the bedside, the bottle and another glass. The actress looked toward the camera as though her lover were behind the lens. The sexy image sent sales skyrocketing.

Meanwhile, Randon was still eager for more. He didn’t need the money but if there was one thing Mathieu
Randon needed more than oxygen, it was power. And so Domaine Randon was born.

During the late eighties, it became increasingly difficult to buy more land suitable for champagne. The Champenois knew the value of their property and there was always someone to pass it on to, rather than let it fall into a stranger’s hands. Frustrated, Randon bought in the Loire and branched into quality still wines. Brandy too. All came into the Domaine. After that he turned his sights on a different kind of luxury.

It was easy to convince the bankers that his expertise would work just as well in jewelry or fashion. And so Randon bought up Martin et Fils, a family-owned jewelry business with outlets in Paris, Nice and Monaco. The Martin family business had a reputation for quality but had been resisting expansion for years. Randon changed all that. He took some of the Martin family’s classic designs and mass-produced them. The advertising agency that had taken Maison Randon from a relatively little-known marque to one everyone asked for, ran a similar campaign for the jewelry. It was seen on an Oscar-winning actress. Soon fashion magazines were clamoring to feature Martin et Fils jewelry. Randon bought another small jewelry house and amalgamated it into Martin et Fils to help meet the demand.

Next he took a side step into clothing. Once again he swooped in on small family-led companies: brands with reputations for quality but little real presence in the market. He took an Italian brand renowned for its cashmere and moved production to China. The goods were shipped back to Italy for hand-finishing, thus benefiting from the best of both nations: the cachet and quality of Italian design combined with cheap labor. Randon copied the formula with six other labels.

Three decades after his father’s death and his rise to the head of the family business, Mathieu Randon had taken his family name global. His was the company behind almost any quality luxury goods brand you cared to mention.

“You must be about ready to retire,” said the journalist who interviewed him on his fiftieth birthday for
Forbes,
the business magazine.

“Only when I’m dead,” said Mathieu Randon.

That Monday afternoon, Randon was in his office on the Avenue Des Champs-Élysées. Back when the building was a private house the room had been the ballroom and the setting for scenes of legendary debauch, according to the real estate agent. Randon had kept the space largely empty, as though he were the kind of man who might leap to his feet and waltz the full length of the beautiful hardwood floor at any moment. He wasn’t that kind of man.

Randon was studying an article in one of the British Sunday papers (naturally, he was fluent in English, German and Italian as well as French). The article reported on the “most expensive champagne in the world.” It named one of Maison Randon’s rivals: Champagne Brice. They had produced, they claimed, a fabulous single vineyard grand cru. It was available in such small quantities that its retail price would be $645 per bottle.

Randon snarled. The idea that anyone else could produce something worth more than the best bottle at Maison Randon irked him. He pulled out a map of the Randon vineyards in the Champagne region and leaned over it on his desk, studying closely where his land lay in relation to that belonging to Brice. So close. Bordering in many instances. Why did they think they had so much better results? As he studied the extent of the Brice vineyards, Randon kept his right hand over a part of the map
he’d outlined in black (a few hectares in Le Vezy), as though to spare his eyes that other horror right then.

Having somewhat neglected the maison during the late nineties, lately he had been concentrating on the champagne house at the heart of his empire again. The fashion and jewelry departments of DR were pretty much running themselves, but Maison Randon had seen the first small slip in its market dominance in twenty-nine years. It didn’t make Randon happy.

Randon approached the problem like a true dictator. He sacked all the high-level staff at Maison Randon and replaced them with younger, keener men and women. People who had reputations to make. Hungry people who worked harder and had better ideas. He’d promoted Stefan Urban to head up the new team. Stefan had worked at Randon’s operation in Napa for the previous decade. He brought his young protégé, Axel Delaflote, from California with him. The two men were full of enthusiasm and energy. Still, Randon was not comforted by knowing that he had the best team possible on the case.

He would have to do something about that very soon. But first he had other business to attend to. He picked up the phone and barked at his assistant, “Get me my coat.”

“Yes, Mathieu,” said Bertille.

Randon’s sigh said it all.

“I mean, yes, Monsieur Randon. At once.”

Randon put down the phone and looked out of one of the five floor-to-ceiling windows onto the street.

He saw a van pass by with the legend Ruinart painted on its side. The reminder of yet another champagne brand didn’t improve his mood.

Moments later, there was a gentle knock at the door and Bertille appeared. She was a petite brunette with a tiny waist who, nonetheless, was well endowed enough to make the buttons on her shirt look endangered when she
took a deep breath. As the first point of contact most business associates had with Domaine Randon, Bertille was an excellent ambassadress for the brand. Now she leaned against the door frame in a manner she probably assumed looked coquettish. She had Randon’s coat draped over her arm.

“Your car is here,” she told him.

“Thank you.”

Randon strode across the room. He took his coat from Bertille. He didn’t let her help him into it as he usually did. She looked a little affronted at that. Hurt.

“Bertille,” he said softly.

“Yes,” she murmured back.

Bertille would have to go. It was a pity. She was an excellent assistant but lately she had become far too familiar. Randon knew he shouldn’t have slept with her. It had been an unfortunate case of his loins getting the better of him and now, of course, Bertille thought things were different. Randon cursed his lack of discretion. He was normally very careful about these matters.

She looked up at him with soft, loving eyes. Dark brown. Doe-like. Or cow-like, thought Randon, less generously. He knew that she, like him, was remembering their single night together. But he also knew that, unlike him, she was remembering it with a pleasure that went beyond the physical. Hers was a look of love.

“I think it’s time you took a vacation, my dear. In fact, I think you need to take a permanent vacation from Domaine Randon. I’d like you to clear your desk before I come back to the office tomorrow morning. I will have the personnel department arrange for a proper settlement.”

“But … ” Bertille began to protest.

“Sweet girl, one shouldn’t mix business and pleasure,” he reminded her. He reached out and touched her cheek lightly with the back of his hand. Bertille suddenly beamed.
Randon knew she’d misunderstood him, that she thought he wanted her to leave the company so they could see more of each other privately. When she realized her mistake, Bertille would protest against her dismissal, of course, but he didn’t let that worry him. There was nothing that couldn’t be sorted out if you threw enough money at it. Even French employment law.