Anything Considered (19 page)

“What’s their problem?” said Anna.

“I think you may be contravening the Monaco dress code. I expect it’s an indictable offense for a girl to be seen in public wearing a man’s underpants. Keep going.”

The apartment was exactly as they had left it—coffee cups and breakfast plates still in the sink, bed unmade, empty whisky bottle on the table. Anna threw some clothes in a bag, while Bennett spread out the Michelin
map of the coast and the Vaucluse. Where was that place he’d stumbled on by accident last year? Somewhere high, somewhere near Banon.

“OK,” said Anna, “I’m all set.” She had changed into boots, jeans, and T-shirt, slicked back her hair with water, and she showed no signs of having passed a tense and sleepless night. Bennett folded the map and stood up. They’d head west. The place would come to him later.

The sound of the phone made them both freeze, an instinctive, guilty reaction, as though any movement would give them away to the caller. It rang four times, and then the machine cut in with Bennett’s answering message. A beep. Shimo’s voice, tinny and precise: “Mr. Poe would like to hear from you. Immediately.”

Bennett looked at the clock. Twelve-thirty. The auction must be over. “That’s it,” he said. “They’ve found out something’s wrong. Let’s not stop to do the dishes.”

They drove hard, reaching Aix in the midafternoon, hungry, thirsty, and happy to find a table in the cool back room of the Deux Garçons. Outside, on the Cours Mirabeau, an unhurried procession of tourists ambled along under the shade of the plane trees. The seated spectators, mainly university students recovering from their labors, laughed and flirted and tipped their small change onto the table to see if it would stretch to another cup of coffee, another Perrier
menthe
, another hour of café education. Aix had slipped into its summer rhythm, lazy and relaxed.

The beers came, and the
steak pommes frites
, and with
the edge gone from their appetites, they tossed a coin to see who would order coffee, who would call Poe. Bennett lost.

He fed the pay phone, and heard Shimo’s voice on the end of the line. Identifying himself, he asked for Poe.

“I’ve been waiting for you to call, Mr. Bennett,” said Poe. “I hope you have good news?”

“Well, yes and no.” Bennett took a deep breath. “We’ve got the case, but there’s been a slight change in plan. It’s going to cost you a little extra to get it back.”

Silence from Poe.

“We thought a million dollars was about right, actually. In cash.”

Poe laughed, a low, confident, insulting laugh. “You’ve had your joke, Mr. Bennett. Now, where are you? I’ll send Shimo to pick you up.”

“I’m serious. A million dollars.”

“You’re serious, are you, Mr. Bennett? That’s foolish of you. That’s very foolish. Stop playing games now. Where are you?”

“I’ll call again in two days. Have the money ready, or the case gets a new owner.” Bennett put the phone down. Smug bastard. He hoped his voice had sounded convincing.

Anna looked up from the map she’d spread on the table. “How was that?”

“I think it’s the end of a beautiful friendship.”

——

Poe was a man who set great store by self-control, but it was an effort to keep the anger out of his voice as he
called the manager of his Monaco bank to arrange the withdrawal of a million dollars. If that shit Bennett thought he was going to live to spend it, he was in for an unpleasant shock. Sooner or later, he’d have to show himself, and then he’d disappear for good. It might be amusing to have him dropped from the helicopter onto the deck of Tuzzi’s boat, and let the Italian clear up the mess he’d started. Yes, that would be a neat and symmetrical end. Feeling somewhat cheered by the thought, Poe then sent Shimo off to Saint-Martin. It was unlikely that Bennett would be stupid enough to hide in his own house, but one never knew with amateurs.

——

Bennett’s Peugeot crossed the Durance at Pertuis and headed east toward Manosque. As he drove, Bennett told Anna the story of a winter evening the year before, when he’d been scouting for property in the high, sparsely populated country of Haute-Provence. Darkness had been setting in, and after making several wrong turns and bad guesses, he realized he was lost. In a final attempt before giving up, he’d taken a side road. It narrowed, and became a dirt track, but off in the distance he could see a light.

“So I drove toward it,” he said, “and I came to this extraordinary place, surrounded by vines, absolutely in the middle of nowhere. If I can find it again, it’ll be perfect for us. See if you can find l’Argimaud on the map, just above Banon. It’s somewhere round there.”

“How do you know we can stay?”

“I spent the night there, and the abbot and I hit it off. He recognized a fellow believer. Said I could come back anytime.”

“You and an abbot? Are you kidding? You don’t seem like the religious type.”

“Nor is he. But he runs this monastery. You know, cloisters, monks, habits. You’ll like him. He’s an old rogue, sees himself as a kind of Dom Perignon reincarnated, carrying on a long tradition.”

Anna shook her head. “What’s that?”

“Monks and booze. These boys take it pretty seriously. The Brotherhood of Bacchus, they call themselves. With a bit of luck, we might get there in time for cocktails at Evensong.”

AFTER the crowded streets of Aix, Haute-Provence seemed to Anna like another planet, empty, harsh, and beautiful. This was unforgiving country, the soil thin and rocky, trees scarce and stunted from the winds that swept across from the Rhône valley. They drove past fields striped with lavender, the squat clumps huddled together in long, perfectly straight lines; past a herd of goats, their bells giving off a hollow clatter as they were chivied along by two rangy dogs; past faded signs advertising long-vanished aperitifs; past mile after mile of vines.

Traffic dwindled, then all but disappeared, except for tractors grinding home after a day in the vineyards. Figures in the fields straightened their backs and stopped work to watch the car go by, a slow, deliberate turn of the head, eyes slitted against the flat evening sun, an inspection that Anna found uncomfortable and faintly hostile. She tried waving at one of the figures, who stared back without acknowledgment.

“What’s the matter with those guys?” she asked. “Haven’t they ever seen a car before?”

Bennett shrugged. “That’s the way they are in the country. Anything that moves across their patch is their business. It’s lucky we’re not in Poe’s Mercedes. They’d have been talking about it in all the local bars tonight. When you live in a village round here, you can’t scratch yourself without half a dozen people saying you’ve got fleas.”

“You like that? Everybody’s a stranger in Manhattan. I don’t even know my next-door neighbor.”

Bennett thought for a moment, about Georgette and Anny and Léon, the petty swindles of Monsieur Papin, the matrimonial ambitions of Madame Joux for her daughter, the café gossip, the endless curiosity. “Yes,” he said, “I do like it. I feel as though I’m living with a slightly eccentric family.”

Anna touched his arm lightly. “I’ve screwed that up for you, haven’t I? I’m sorry.”

Bennett shook his head. “Not at all. You’ve introduced me to a life of glamour and adventure, meeting fascinating people who probably want to kill me.” He braked as the car approached a fork in the road. “I think we’re getting close.”

The surface changed abruptly from tarmac to rutted dirt as they followed a track up a gentle slope, through clumps of pine and scrub oak that were deformed, seeming to crouch, their backs bent by years of mistral. The car was heading directly into the sun, and their first view of the monastery was a low, silhouetted mass at the end of the track. Bennett pulled in and stopped by a group of dusty cypress trees. Above the tick of the cooling engine, he
could hear the insistent, rustling chorus of a thousand invisible
cigales
.

The monastery had been built four hundred years before, in the form of the letter H. “Those are the cloisters over there,” said Bennett. “The other side is the dormitory. The big building in the middle is for everything else—kitchen, dining hall, offices, tasting room, distillery, the abbot’s apartments. Huge cellars underneath. It’s quite a place, isn’t it?”

Anna looked at the long, tiled roofline, devoid of crosses or spires. “Is there a chapel? Or do they just pray as they go?”

“Well,” said Bennett, “it’s not exactly an orthodox religious order. More like a little business, really.”

“But they call themselves monks, right?”

Bennett grinned at her. “That’s because they get what Father Gilbert calls celestial dispensation from the authorities. He’ll tell you all about it.”

They walked up a wide path of coarse, pale gravel. On either side, dense rows of lavender filled the area between the two wings of the monastery with a blurred haze of color. Ahead of them, a short flight of stone stairs, the center of each step worn to a shallow groove by the passage of centuries of feet, led up to an iron-studded door of blackened oak. Carved into the deep stone lintel was the credo of the monastery:
In Vino Felicitas
.

Bennett pulled at the handle that hung from a chain next to the door, and heard the double stroke of a bell, muffled by thick stone walls. “Have you ever met a monk before?”

Anna shook her head. “Are they anything like rabbis?”

“I doubt it. Not this lot.”

With a squeal from the hinges, the door opened a few inches to reveal a brown face under a frill of white hair. It peered out cautiously, like the head of a tortoise emerging from its shell. “Are you lost, my dears?”

“Actually, no,” said Bennett. “We’ve come to see Father Gilbert.”

“Oh?” The face registered surprise, as though Bennett had revealed some secret knowledge. “Father Gilbert, whom God preserve, is tasting. He always tastes before the evening meal, sometimes for many hours. Such is his dedication. But I’m sure you’ve traveled far to see him.” The monk opened the door wider and beckoned. “You must come in.” They could now see that he was dressed in a plain, dark-brown robe of heavy cloth, belted around the middle, with a silver tasting cup hanging by a leather thong from his neck. His sandals slapped on the flagstones as he led them through a wide arch and into a long, classically proportioned room, the setting sun throwing bars of light through a row of high, slim windows. The monk stopped Anna and Bennett with an upraised hand.

A dozen brown-clad figures, looking like great hooded birds, were seated around a refectory table. Their heads, completely obscured by the cowls of their habits, were bent over large, bulbous glasses. Groups of unmarked bottles were arranged at intervals along the table. All was silent, except for the sound of air being drawn into a dozen pairs of nostrils.

Anna whispered to Bennett, who whispered to the monk. “What’s going on?”

The monk leaned closer to them. “Father Gilbert is leading the brothers in deep inhalation.”

“Why are they wearing their hoods?”

The monk put his cupped hands together, lifted them to his nose, and raised his eyes to heaven. “All the better to trap and concentrate the divine effluvium, my son, as it rises from the glass.”

“The bouquet,” said Bennett to Anna. “They’re sniffing the bouquet.”

“In pixie hoods? I don’t believe it.”

Murmurs then began around the table, a litany of comments as the monks reported on the findings of their noses. Bennett was able to pick up snatches, which he passed on to a bemused Anna. “Undertones of vanilla …”

“Well balanced in fruit …”

“A certain precocity, don’t you think, brothers? Quite forward for a wine of its age …”

“Spices, brambles, yes … unsophisticated, but promising.”

Father Gilbert, at the head of the table, picked up his glass. “Very well, brothers. Hats off, and let’s taste the little rascal.” He swept the cowl back from his head, and was about to drink when he noticed Anna, Bennett, and the monk.

“But wait. What have we here?” He stood up and put a finger to his chin as he looked at Bennett. “Do I recognize the thirsty traveler from last winter? The Englishman of many bottles? So it is. Come here, my son, come here. Let me welcome you.”

Bennett was encircled by an aromatic embrace, in
which wine fumes mingled with fertilizer and warm wool, and kissed vigorously on both cheeks. Gilbert’s face—large, round, and baked to the color of vintage terra-cotta—was radiant (with pleasure, Bennett hoped, although the lunchtime liter of wine may have contributed to the good father’s vibrant complexion). Anna was introduced, welcomed warmly, and taken with Bennett to meet the other monks sitting around the table.

The assembled brethren shared Father Gilbert’s ruddiness, some even surpassing him in the high level of color around the nose and cheeks. As they nodded and beamed and raised their glasses, Father Gilbert described their monastic responsibilities. “Brother Luc here is our export sales manager—we do a very respectable fortified communion wine for third-world countries. Brother Yves looks after new-product development, mainly cordials and liqueurs, although he keeps trying to slip in a premium absinthe. Wicked fellow.”

Anna looked at Brother Yves, a birdlike little man with a benign expression and a twinkling eye, the very antithesis of wickedness. “What’s wrong with that?”

Father Gilbert did his best to look grave. “It’s illegal, my child. Has been for many years. But I must admit it’s
quite
delicious. If there’s any left, we might have a drop after dinner. It settles the stomach and promotes the most delightful dreams.”

The introductions continued. There were brothers in charge of everything from packaging and financial planning to marketing and public relations. There was, so Father Gilbert explained, a centuries-old link between
monastic orders and the blessings of alcohol. He was merely carrying on the noble work, with the minor difference that he had dispensed entirely with spiritual requirements. This was an equal-opportunity monastery, open to all denominations. Or, to put it another way, a small corporation comfortably installed in a religious tax haven.