What Time Devours (24 page)

Reims itself was—a little disappointingly—newer than he had expected, and more industrial, and Thomas doubted that much of it predated the Second World War. He parked in the rue de l’Université, a hundred yards or so from the cathedral where in 1429—and in Shakespeare’s
Henry VI, part 1
—the dauphin had been crowned Charles VII, in defiance of England, by Joan of Arc: Saint Joan for George Bernard Shaw, the enigmatic and unsettling “La Pucelle” for Shakespeare. Thomas didn’t remember the play well, and hadn’t especially liked it.

He parked and slid out of the car. The drive had stiffened up his shoulder, but he couldn’t stretch for fear of reopening the wound. He pressed it with his left hand and rolled it a few times, but didn’t dare do more than that.

He walked up toward the cathedral first, not because he wanted to see it, but because he knew there’d be guidebooks to the region in English in the stores that clustered the surrounding square. He found a shop nestled between a patisserie and a bank. He bought a
Rough Guide
to France without comparing it to the others, and a
pain au chocolat
at the patisserie next door, and then he walked back to the car, munching, thinking about his wife, who loved good pastry.

He hung a left and then walked briskly down the Boulevard Victor Hugo till he reached the Taittinger headquarters, an oddly triangular, modern building with its main door in the apex and the walls crowded with windows. Inside was an imposing model of the equally imposing Saint Nicaise Abbey, which had sat on this spot since the Middle Ages but was now gone, destroyed, not—as Thomas had assumed—during one of the world wars, but by the French Revolution. Again he found himself struck by the density and violence of the region’s history. It was no wonder Americans felt so rootless by comparison that they craved a historical dimension to their lives and families. In Europe that history was everywhere, stacked deep like piles of well-cut stones, many of them bloody.

He paid a seven-euro admission fee to an appropriately bubbly hostess who suggested that he “feel free to wander inside” and descended into the cellars, passing phalanxes of empty bottles bearing the Taittinger name and stacked wooden barrels. The bottles were racked at steep diagonals, base end up, like banks of dusty rocket launchers. As he went down he entered the past and, at least in some places, the distant past. As the displays made clear, Taittinger had bought the remains of the abbey and its cellars comparatively recently, returning them to the purpose to which the monks had dedicated them. It was chilly, and the air felt slightly moist, and Thomas—who had never liked dark, enclosed spaces, felt a tremor of unease.

CHAPTER 47

Champagne requires storage for years underground as it matures, the bottles being periodically tipped and rotated to clear the sediment that collects in the neck. When ready, the bottle is dipped into icy brine, then uncorked, and the frozen plug of sediment is deftly removed. A little sugar is added to the bottle and it is resealed. The method, a time-consuming, skilled, and labor-intensive one, was still performed in the traditional manner to this day, said a guide, when he asked. A man in a sharp stone-colored suit snorted dismissively, and the guide shot him a look.

“These cellars date from Roman times,” said the guide, redirecting the attention of those who were still watching the suited man. “They were cut out of the chalk in the fourth century, around the time that Attila the Hun was battling the Roman legions to the north . . .”

Thomas turned to the man and gave him a quizzical look.

“They all say that,” said the man, clearly an American, “but these days it’s BS. It’s picturesque, you know, this everything-hand-done-as-it-was-back-in-the-day. Quaint. Makes for good footage: nice long dolly shots of some old dear turning the bottles in soft light. But if it were true, it would be wasted time and money. These days everyone does it mechanically. It’s faster and more efficient and you don’t lose anything in terms of flavor. The flavor is all about the grape blend, additives, yeast, and such. The disgorgement process doesn’t matter a damn. They just like to pretend they still do it that way to keep the tourists happy.”

He grumbled the entire speech, but Thomas found his iconoclasm amusing.

“They say they do it the traditional way,” he remarked.

“They would,” said the American. “But what do you see here: a few thousand bottles at most? These guys must be producing in the order of six or seven million units of product a year. Maybe more. You think they’ve got some guy who walks the cellars with a candle in his hand like some medieval monk in a docudrama, twisting each bottle a few inches, one at a time? They’d have to be nuts.”

“Sounds like you know your subject,” Thomas smiled.

“Let’s just say I’m in the trade,” he said, with a private grin. “But we should probably keep that to ourselves. You?”

“Teacher,” said Thomas. “Kind of a vacation. You done many of these tours?”

“Oh yeah,” he said, ticking them off on his fingers with a mixture of bravado and boredom. “Martel, Piper-Heidsieck, Mumm, Pommery, Veuve Clicquot-Ponsardin, Lanson. And those are just the ones here in Reims. I did Bollinger in Ay, and tomorrow I’ll be in Epernay: Mercier, Perrier Jouet, Castellane and Moët et Chandon. Anything you need to know about making fizzy wine, I’m your guy.”

Thomas thought the guide was listening in discreetly and that she scowled at that reference to fizzy wine. Maybe it was the cool, softly lit alcoves in the pale stone, the hushed air of seriousness in the tourists, or some holdover from the place’s monastic origins, but it felt oddly like being in church, a house of eternal mysteries not reducible to fizzy wine. The American grinned, enjoying himself.

He was middle aged and slim faced, with a strong, sinewy build. His hair was thinning on top and he had a habit of running his fingers through it, as if estimating the day’s loss, but there was a brassy confidence to the man that Thomas found appealing.

They moved off together, drifting from display to display, admiring the vaulted arches with their stone ribbing and the endless side passages of racked and crated champagne.

“The locals will tell you it’s the squid fossils in the chalk beneath the vineyards that make the flavor,” said the American, unimpressed. “Or the climate. Or the pruning techniques. Or the centuries of tradition and the way the grapes have evolved. More BS so far as I can tell.”

“So what is it?” said Thomas, taking the bait.

“Depends which ‘it’ you mean. I’m not talking about flavor, nose, bubble distribution, and all that stuff because I think you can simulate that stuff in a lot of places. I’m talking about what makes champagne
champagne
.”

“I don’t think I follow,” said Thomas.

“To call it champagne, according to international law, it has to come from here, did you know that?”

“I think I’d heard it.”

“Champagne is defined by the region,” said the American, overtly scornful now, and loud enough that Thomas was aware of those around watching them. “Make the same product anywhere else and it’s just sparkling wine made according to ‘the method champenoise.’ That’s all you can call it. The champagne method. God forbid you should call the stuff in the bottles
champagne
unless you are one of the grand old U.S. companies who managed to get themselves a loophole in the law.”

He snorted again as if to punctuate the remark.

“You work for a U.S. wine company?” said Thomas.

“A U.S.
champagne
company,” he replied, pointedly.

“Right,” said Thomas. “A new one?”

The man nodded, but looked away as if he didn’t want to say more. He might have been fifty, though he moved like a younger man. His voice—a wine-soaked cannon, rich, dry, and loud—breezed with style and a command that seemed habitual. Only this almost-question about who he worked for seemed to silence him.

“I don’t know anything about champagne,” said Thomas, backing off.

“Do you like it?”

“Sure,” said Thomas, shrugging.

“Then you know enough.”

“But how do you tell the really great ones from the . . . less so?”

“Oh, they’re all pretty much the same,” he said, and this time he looked away so that the confidence sounded like bluster. “Is this the only cellar you are visiting?” he added.

“Not sure yet,” said Thomas.

“Looking for something in particular?”

Thomas immediately felt himself tighten.

“Not really,” he said. “Why?”

“Weird,” said the winemaker. “Someone who doesn’t drink champagne vacationing around here and touring cellars. Seems like a—what’s the word—a blind? Yeah. Like one of those things you hunt in. No?”

“Just a tourist,” said Thomas, conscious that he was withdrawing, conscious that the other man’s brash and opinionated persona didn’t quite square with the careful eyes that now held his. “What would I be looking for here if not wine?”

The other man paused for a second or two, his gaze level, and then the smile snapped back into place and he threw open his arms expansively, bellowing, “Search me.” He laughed then, too loudly, back in character.

Thomas wasn’t sure about this man, with his easy dismissals of champagne and his facility with a language that sounded more akin to TV and film than it did the wine industry. What the hell was a dolly shot or, for that matter, a docudrama?

“So, if it’s all a shell game,” he said, “a ruse, this myth of French champagne’s greatness, what are you here for?”

The man smiled and looked away.

“Oh, I’m just here to see what I can learn,” he said. “Maybe grease the transatlantic gears a bit, you know? See if we can strike up a first-look deal on some import-export, maybe.”

First-look deal,
thought Thomas
. More movie-speak.

“But,” the man in the suit concluded with a last panoramic gaze around the stone arches, “I’ve seen enough. Have fun, mister teacher. Don’t drink too much.”

Thomas gave him a nod, but he was already striding out, moving quickly, the side buckles on his shoes ringing slightly in the stone hall. Thomas wasn’t sure if it was the abruptness of the parting, but he considered following him out, just to see where he went. He didn’t, but over the next few minutes he kept checking over his shoulder to make sure the guy had really gone.

Thomas approached the guide. She was a pretty girl, no more than twenty, with pale skin and blue eyes that turned frosty when she realized who was speaking to her.

“I said, I was wondering if I could ask a question,” he repeated.

“Of course,” she said, unsmiling.

“Well, it’s not about the champagne method or anything like that. I wanted to find out about a particular account.”

“An account?”

“Yes. Taittinger has a relationship with a friend of mine and I need to ask some questions about it.”

The blue eyes grew harder still.

“If anyone could tell you that, I do not think they would,” she said. “It is confidential, no?”

Her English, superb when she was comfortable, seemed to have slipped fractionally. She was suspicious.

“Could you, perhaps, ask someone?” he said, smiling.

She bit her lip, her eyes never leaving his, then said, “Wait here,” and walked quickly away. As she was about to climb the stairs up to the lobby, she turned.

“That man you were with,” she said. “The American. Is he a friend of yours? A business colleague, perhaps?”

“I’d never met him before he spoke to me a few minutes ago,” said Thomas.

She gave him a long, hard look, then turned and went up the stairs without comment. She didn’t believe him. Stranger still was Thomas’s nagging sense that she might be right not to.

CHAPTER 48

Thomas was just starting to get used to the scale of the cellars. He had assumed that such places would occupy roughly the size of the building above them, but he was way off. The cellars were actually a network of tunnels and passages, stacked on top of each other and reaching far out into the chalk and limestone like serpentine burrows. The major champagne houses had literally miles of such cellars.

Good place to hide something you wanted people to forget about
, he thought. Could that be what the man in the stone-colored suit had been hinting at? Surely not. But there had been something about the man, something almost familiar that Thomas couldn’t quite place . . .

“Sir?” It was the girl with the ice-blue eyes.

“Yes?”

“If you go back to the lobby, one of the officials is waiting for you.”

Thomas wasn’t sure what she meant by “officials,” and though he assumed it was an inaccurate translation, he thought there was a touch of pink to her cheeks, and both the smile she gave him and the way she turned away seemed hurried and deliberate. He felt immediately cautious.

The man at the top of the stairs who was so conspicuously doing nothing seemed similarly wary.

“You had a question, monsieur?”

He was a young man, businesslike and slick in his immaculate, stylishly slim-fitting suit, but Thomas couldn’t help feeling that his casual manner was feigned.

“A couple, actually,” said Thomas, opting to lead with the one that sounded more like general research. “The Taittinger house makes a Saint Evremond brand, named after Charles de Saint Denis, the marquis of Saint Evremond who was exiled from the court of . . .”

“Le Roi Soleil,” inserted the other. “Louis the Fourteenth.”

“Right. I was wondering what the connection was and if the house possesses any of Saint Evremond’s books and papers.”

“The Saint Evremond champagne is made by the Irroy company, which we own. It is made according to Saint Evremond’s own principles, with thirty percent Chardonnay grapes, sixty percent Pinot Noir, with Meunier and others for balance. It is aged for three years . . .”