Peter Mayle - The Vintage Caper

Sam followed him inside, where there were more curses while Philippe looked among festoons of cobwebs for the fuse box and the main power switch. With a grunt of triumph, he turned on the electricity, which produced a dribble of light coming from a forty-watt bulb hanging from the ceiling.

“ Voilà! Welcome to the family château.” He wiped a strand of cobweb from his nose and clapped Sam on the shoulder. “You slept well?”

“Like a baby.” In fact, Sam felt surprisingly fresh after his nap: clearheaded and cheerful, as he always was when a job had gone well. He followed Philippe through a series of small, low-ceilinged rooms carpeted with dust, empty except for the odd ramshackle chair or table pushed into a corner.

“What happened to the furniture?”

Philippe had come to a stop in what had once been a kitchen, now stripped of anything useful. A bird’s nest had fallen down the chimney and into the hearth of the stone fireplace. Propped on the mantelpiece was a faded, stained calendar from the Cavaillon fire department, dated 1995. “Ah, the furniture,” Philippe said. “There were one or two really nice pieces. But the minute the old lady was in her coffin, the relatives came with a truck and cleaned the place out. I’m surprised they left the lightbulbs. They’re probably still arguing about who gets what. But at least they couldn’t take the cellar.” He pushed open a low door in the corner and reached for the light switch, causing whatever it was in the cellar to scurry back to its hole. “We’ll have to put rat poison down, or they’ll eat the labels off the bottles. I think it’s the old glue they like.”

As in the rest of the house, the cellar had been subjected to the acquisitive attentions of the relatives, and not a single bottle remained. After the vast magnificence of Reboul’s cellar, it seemed decidedly humble. A short flight of steep stairs led to the storage facilities, which were no more than shelves made from old planks resting on iron bars driven into the walls. The surface of the walls was black with mold, and the coating of gravel on the floor had worn thin, exposing patches of beaten earth. But, as Philippe pointed out, it was cool, it was humid, and it was the last place in the world one would expect to find three million dollars’ worth of wine.

Bringing the cartons in from the van was a slow business, made awkward by doorways and ceilings which had been designed, it seemed to Sam, for dwarves. Were people that much shorter and smaller two hundred years ago? By the time the last carton had been put in place, both men had skinned their knuckles against the rough stone edges of the narrow doorways, and their backs ached from stooping. They had hardly noticed that while they’d been working a new day had arrived.

“What do you think?” said Philippe. “I’m not a country boy, but this is special.” They were standing outside the house, looking east, where the first splinter of sunlight had just appeared above the horizon. Sam made a slow, 360-degree turn. There was no other house in sight. They were surrounded by fields that would turn purple later in the year, the clumps of lavender looking like rows of green hedgehogs. Behind them was the mass of the Luberon, misty blue in the early light.

“You know what?” said Sam. “It’ll look even better after we’ve had breakfast. I haven’t eaten since lunch yesterday.”

They drove down to Apt, found a café with a terrace in the sun, and raided a nearby bakery for croissants. Big, thick-rimmed cups of café crème were set in front of them. Sam closed his eyes and sniffed the fragrant steam. Only in France did it smell like this; it must have something to do with French milk.

“Well, my friend,” he said, “we have a rich, full morning ahead of us.” Philippe, his mouth busy with croissant, raised an eyebrow. “First, we’d better check out of that hotel before Vial discovers that he’s suddenly five hundred bottles short, and we need to find someplace else to stay-not in Marseille. So I’m going to need to rent a car. Then we have to find some unmarked cartons, come back to Grandma’s house, repack the wine, and get rid of the other cartons. After that, we can celebrate.” He checked the time and reached for his phone. “Do you think Sophie will be awake yet?”

She was. Not only that, she had anticipated a swift exit from the hotel and had already packed. She went up even further in Sam’s estimation.

Philippe dropped him outside the Hertz office at the airport. He told Sam to meet him in the parking area at the entrance to the autoroute and went off in search of wine cartons. A friend of a friend was a vigneron . He would have a barn full of cartons, Philippe was sure.

In his rented Renault, Sam joined the early-morning traffic going into Marseille. He had forgotten that inside every self-respecting Frenchman lurks the soul of a Formula One driver, and he found himself in the middle of an amateur Grand Prix-tiny cars hurtling along, wheels barely touching the ground, the occupants conducting animated phone conversations while smoking and, if there was a hand free, steering. When he arrived intact at the hotel he offered up a silent prayer of thanks to the patron saint of foreign drivers, and went to find Sophie.

She was finishing breakfast, looking remarkably relaxed for someone who had just conspired in the execution of a crime. “Alors? How did it go?”

“Great. I’ll tell you in the car. Let me get my bag and pay the bill, and then we’ll take a drive. You’re not going to believe this place.”

By 8:30, well before Vial’s working day started at the Palais du Pharo, they were on their way out of Marseille.

It was turning into one of those spring days that Provence does so well: not too hot, a sky of flawless, endless blue, the fields speckled scarlet with poppies, and the black skeletons of the vines softened by a green blur of new leaves. The atmosphere in Sam’s rented Renault, as it followed Philippe’s van through the countryside, was as lighthearted as the weather. The job was done.

“Now you can go back to Bordeaux,” said Sam, “and get married to Arnaud, and live happily ever after. When’s the wedding?”

“We’re thinking about August, at the château.”

“Do I get an invite?”

“Would you come?”

“Of course I would. I’ve never been to a French wedding. Any plans for the honeymoon? I could show you a good time in L.A.”

Sophie laughed. “What about you? What are you going to do next?”

“Finish up here. Then I guess I’ll go to Paris to brief the people in the Knox office.”

“Are you sure about that? What are you going to tell them?”

“Well, I certainly don’t want to confuse them with the facts. So I thought I’d stick to Philippe’s story. You know, the anonymous tip-off, the fearless reporter following up the clues that lead him back to Roth. The people at Knox won’t ask too many questions once they know they’re not going to have to pay out three million bucks.”

Ahead of them, Philippe’s van was wheezing around the final steep hairpin bend in the mountain road that led up to the plateau and the old house. Sam was looking forward to seeing him when he came to L.A. to interview Roth. They could rent a World War II jeep, hit the army surplus stores, and maybe take in one of those testaments to red-blooded virility, a gun show. It would be interesting to hear a Frenchman’s logic applied to the question of why Americans think it necessary to have a semi-automatic assault rifle to hunt squirrels.

For the second time that morning, Philippe led the way through the house to the cellar, a large canister of raticide under one arm, a stack of cartons, folded flat, under the other. With three of them sharing the work, it took no more than an hour to repack the bottles. When the others had left the cellar, Philippe scattered a generous coating of lethal pellets on the floor, wishing the rats bon appétit before closing the door behind him.