Dead in the Dregs (15 page)

“No, never. Impossible,” he laughed.

“How’d they seem to you?”

“Well, Feldman was a bit dour. Rather standoffish, if you know what I mean.”

“The subject of Wilson’s murder didn’t come up, by any chance?”

“Unavoidable,” he said. “I couldn’t help but get the impression that Eric thought Wilson had gotten his just deserts, but he seemed reluctant to discuss it.”

“What about Goldoni?”

“He was different, more as if he needed to talk about it with someone.”

“What did he say?”

“He appeared genuinely distraught. He’s not convinced that he can pull it off, taking on the newsletter, I mean. He knows full well that Richard’s was the reputation. Nor is he sure he can cover the ground. It’s a grueling schedule.”

“He say anything about the murder itself?”

“Only that it’s left him in a state of shock and disbelief.”

“Wilson’s sister suggested he’s actually pretty competitive. You ever get the feeling he resented working in Wilson’s shadow?”

“Not really. But he’s certainly aware of the power accruing to him now.”

“He didn’t trot out any theories as to who he thinks killed his boss, did he?”

“I suppose I should confess that I asked. He seemed quite keen on the state of the investigation. He mentioned somebody named Matson, whose wines he acknowledged they’d thoroughly trounced. And a vineyard manager, a Mexican chap. I don’t remember his name.”

It was obvious Jasper had learned less than I had hoped. We shook hands.

“Take care,” I said.

“You, too.
Bonne chance.
And drop by on your way home. I’d love to hear how it comes out. Cheers.”

 

I grabbed a
taxi and made my jet-lagged way to the Gare de Lyon, where the great board of arrivals and departures clicked and clicked and clicked, the syncopated codes charting the grand metamorphoses of track and gate and train. I bought my ticket, hurried to find my place in a second-class car, and slumped between the window and a businessman working furiously on a spreadsheet on his laptop.

Lulled by the track rattle as the train picked up speed, I dozed, every now and then opening my eyes to the evanescent landscape—the outskirts of the city, the terra-cotta-tiled suburbs, the telephone poles and water towers—and finally slept. When at last I opened my eyes, I took in the rolling hills, the windbreaks, the houses of once-upon-a-time burghers lodged beneath giant oak trees. I closed my eyes again, and when they reopened, I was in the midst of vineyards.

I’d spent my last days in Napa poring over Feldman’s newsletters, correlating the names of winemakers with places on the map, and tried to imagine how he might set his itinerary. I’d done the same with Goldoni. It seemed that the writers could do the Côte d’Or in four or five days, tasting intensively in three or four daily appointments, with another two spent working south from Beaune, the first devoted to the Chalonnaise and the second in Beaujolais. I knew
these guys were brisk. I’d organized the domaines by village, but it was obvious that the writers’ affections, and thus their schedules, favored the north.

I stood at the curb of the train station in Dijon, searching for a police car. Ciofreddi had arranged for his contact to meet me, a man named Sackheim who was a
gendarme
in Beaune, but all I saw were ordinary Renaults, Peugeots, and Fords as people bustled in and out of the station. Across the street a bum swayed, his bottle hoisted in a mad toast, but it was empty, and he smashed it against the pavement. He turned to the shopping cart that held all his worldly possessions, digging furiously through plastic bags, cursing existence. Whatever it was he was looking for, he couldn’t find it.

I hoped this wasn’t a portent. At the same moment, a dark brown Citroën pulled up in front of me, the window slid down, and a man stuck his head, silver haired and flat cut like a marine’s, out the window.

“Stern?” He pronounced it
Shtayrn.
He was older than I’d expected, sixtyish, and elegantly if simply dressed in a dark gray wool suit, matching V-neck sweater, pale blue shirt, and burgundy-colored tie.

“
Oui
,” I said.

“Émile Sackheim. Get in. There’s work to do.”

I tossed my bag in the back and settled into the comfortable leather seat. He examined me with ice-blue eyes.

“But first,” he smiled, “we must have lunch.” He spun out of the station and headed into the old quartier of Dijon.

I like a cop who’s got his priorities straight
, I thought to myself.
He should give Ciofreddi and Brenneke lessons.

 

The restaurant was
fancier than I’d expected. We were seated at a corner table discreetly isolated from the other diners, and it was clear my companion was a habitué. The maître d’ handed me a menu and Sackheim a menu and wine list. Sackheim donned a pair of reading glasses, looking more like a professor than a
flic.

“They have an excellent cellar,” he remarked and then, swiftly to our waiter, “A bottle of the ’91 Lafarge Volnay, Clos des Chênes.”

A cop ordering a bottle of Volnay.
No, Toto
, I said to myself,
we’re definitely not in Kansas anymore
.

Over a ripe fig stuffed with foie gras and a perfectly roasted partridge carved tableside and served in a
verjus
sauce with white grapes, he asked me to lay out the case as I saw it. I told him what had occurred; the several theories I had developed; that I thought Francisco Fornes had too quickly been tagged as the logical, and easiest, suspect.

“Yet Lieutenant Ciofreddi contacted me, pleased to put us at lunch together, and asking me to offer you what assistance I can during your stay.”

“What does he expect you to do?” I said. I was genuinely curious. I wasn’t sure what was supposed to happen.

“Feldman, Goldoni, they are well known here. They tour the region almost continually, it seems, as I suppose they must. The Napa sheriffs, they want us to watch them. This is, of course, impossible.”

“I don’t get it,” I said. “Forgive my naïveté, but why is it impossible?”

“First of all, we have no such thing as a ‘detective’ in the
gendarmerie
on the Côte d’Or. Paris, certainly, but not here. And who has time? There’s work to do. Stolen cars, a burglary, the endless stream of drunks driving up and down the
nationale.
Secondly, no crime has been committed in France. You cannot follow people around waiting for them to do something.” He shrugged and held up his hands as if this were obvious.

“But how do you think I should work this? I thought maybe you could tag along—you know, come with me.”

“‘Tag along,’
c’est drôle
.
Non, comme j’ai dit, c’est impossible
.”

He explained that locating Feldman and Goldoni would be straightforward. Both men had their predictable routines. Appointments were set. A few inquiries would quickly establish their starting points on any given day. I told him what I knew, that Feldman tended to follow the same winemakers vintage to vintage. The names were all in the newsletter.

“Yes, I’ve read a few issues. And Goldoni?”

I said that, though I’d focused my attention on Feldman, their
paths appeared to intersect all over Burgundy. I wondered how they managed to avoid bumping into each other.

“Ah, you have Feldman in your sights?” He smiled and took a sip of the Volnay.

“It’s just that, in terms of motive, Feldman had more reasons to want Wilson dead.”

“Are you sure?” Sackheim said. “Subordinates can be vindictive, too,
non
? Goldoni may have resented Wilson.”

“Maybe. The problem is, there’s no evidence that either of them was in Napa.”

Sackheim shrugged. Clearly, it was going to be my problem to sort out their itineraries. Then I told him about Pitot.

“Piteau?” he asked, spelling it out.

“No,
P-i-t-o-t.
Jean.”

Sackheim frowned. “I don’t know. But you will find him, I’m sure.”

He pulled a card from the breast pocket of his jacket. “If you see something you think I should know, if something serious should happen, you call me,” he said, scribbling a number on the bottom of the card. “My cell phone.”

My curiosity was piqued.

“Do you mind if I ask you why you agreed to this? Why you’re helping me out?”

“I am not helping you, I’m buying lunch.” He smiled. “But I am intrigued by this case, not to mention that we received a call from the American consulate in Lyon. If I could accompany you legally, I would, but I can’t. Besides, you, you will get near to them, whereas I, I am a little obvious,
non
?” He cleared his throat. “There is something else.”

He straightened the tablecloth, brushing the bread crumbs off before the waiter had the chance. “You have heard the name Gaston Laurent?” I nodded that I had heard of the three-star chef. Laurent’s death had made news even in the States the year after I left Seattle. “I was assigned to that case. It was a suicide, obviously. He put a gun to his head. There was no question as to what transpired. He was in debt; he had done too much too quickly. The restaurant outside of Beaune, the bistro in Paris, his plans to conquer New York. But when they took away his third star, it killed him.” He surveyed
the dining room. “I was a regular at his place. I knew him well. We shared many Cognacs late at night. He was a madman,
fou.
He spent too much, was obsessed with his
produits: petites courgettes
, the perfect
loup de mer
, everything. He could talk for hours about linen and wineglasses. The smallest details.” He paused. “These critics—it doesn’t matter if they’re French or American—they hold a person’s fate in their hands as if it were nothing. Their arrogance is . . . too much.” He shook his head in disgust.

“No, I understand,” I said. And I did. I’d felt the same way for years.

“They destroy people
très cavalièrement.
How do you say?”

“‘Very cavalierly,’ it’s the same.”

“So, this case. It is interesting,
non
? Somebody kills a critic. Who? Why? This interests me. And Richard Wilson . . .
en France . . .
” Sackheim curled his lower lip and nodded gravely. He clearly understood the power Wilson had come to wield, how revered he was, and how despised. “Now, this drama, it moves to France. Lieutenant Ciofreddi believes so, and I, too, fear that this is so. I wish that I am not constrained by the law. But you, you have more freedom. You must do this, Monsieur Stern. But you must find the killer before he finds you.” He smiled again, though there was nothing gentle or friendly or humorous in his expression.

“I am serious. There are people here who hate,
hated
, your Richard Wilson. They count themselves as his enemies, but, of course, he has made some
vignerons
very rich. For every winemaker he ruined, there is another he made a wealthy man. Here, I have to tell you, we can be quite ruthless. You will need to keep your wits about you and to tread carefully.”

I pondered the warning, and our conversation lagged. We ordered coffee.

“I know it probably seems a very American thing to do, but would you mind telling me a little about yourself? Your English is incredibly good,” I said.

“No, my friend, my English is proficient. This partridge paired with the Volnay was incredibly good.”

His story transfixed me.

He was, he admitted himself, a curiosity: There weren’t many Jews in the
gendarmerie.
Studious and scholarly in his youth, he found himself almost rabbinical in the fastidious way he tackled criminal cases. He credited this, ironically, to a Jesuit education and the fact that his father had been a lawyer and had trained him to ask questions and split hairs, and had always adopted an adversarial posture to get to the heart of whatever they talked about when Émile was a boy.

“The Talmudic school of criminal investigation,” he smiled.

His father held small interests in a number of domaines, miniscule and insignificant shares, really, given as payment for legal work he had performed on behalf of the
propriétaires.
But these had entitled him to help in the harvest—a yearly event Sackheim
père
had looked forward to as a welcome distraction from the staid practice of law—and to small amounts of wine annually that he greatly enjoyed.

Banned from practicing law under the Statut des Juifs in 1940, Émile’s father had been cheated out of his vineyard holdings a year later. A gentile
négociant
and friend had convinced him to sign over his shares, “until all of this is over, to keep them safe.” His parents barely eluded deportation to the death camps and managed to survive, eking out a living in a series of ever more menial jobs, moving from place to place. Young Émile was born in the aftermath of the war, and though the conditions of their family life remained precarious, his memories were reasonably happy. Still suffering from a residual paranoia, they even found a parochial school that had agreed to accept the young Jewish student as a gesture of atonement for the Church’s complicity in Vichy. Offered conversion by a particularly assiduous priest, Sackheim had graciously declined.

“I know where I come from. Now I am nothing—neither Jew nor Catholic. I am a true child of the Republic, a practicing member of the Church of Justice. But you see, when I describe the French as vindictive and vengeful, I know what I’m talking about.”

The waiter served coffee, and Sackheim waited for him to leave the table before continuing.

His father, nonetheless, despite his family’s survival, died a bitter
man
.
To honor his memory, his mother insisted Émile go to law school, but Sackheim was restless and quit after his first year.

“Why practice law if they can pass laws that make it illegal?” he asked sardonically. I had no answer. His mother died when she heard the news. “That’s a joke,” he said. “A Jewish mother dying when her son, how do you say, ‘drops out’ of law school. In fact, she had all along been ill, never completely recovering from her ordeal.”