What Time Devours (25 page)

“Pinot Noir?” said Thomas. “But that’s red.”

“Did you not read the display in the cellar?” said the other with a touch of hauteur. “Many kinds of champagne are made with a blend of grapes, including red, but the skins are separated from the juice. It is the skins that make red wine red.”

“I see,” said Thomas, looking suitably humbled. “But other than following the recipe of Saint Evremond . . . ?”

“There is no connection,” he shrugged. “It is a tradition that we are proud to hold.”

“Is it true that the English invented modern champagne?”

“Of course not,” he said, as if nothing could be more ignorant. “No one invented champagne by themselves, not even the monk Dom Perignon, no matter what they tell you at Moët et Chandon. Saint Evremond, like Dom Perignon, was important in blending grape varieties, but his contribution to the drink came from popularizing it in sophisticated society. What the English contributed was a market that enjoyed champagne as a sparkling wine, and the bottles to store it.”

“The bottles?”

“Many champagne producers—including Dom Perignon—tried to prevent champagne from being gassy. They tried many things to stop the second fermentation. People who liked it gassy did the opposite, but when the wine moved from cask to bottle, and the sugar was added, the fermentation was so . . . what? So
fierce
that the bottles would burst. It was common to lose two-thirds of the champagne in storage for this reason. The English, who are primarily a beer-drinking nation, were used to this problem and developed a stronger bottle, and a method of wiring on the cork so that the gas was trapped inside. It is important, but it is not the invention of champagne. Champagne is French.”

“My other question is about an account of yours,” said Thomas, moving on. For all the young man’s languid good humor, this debate seemed close to rekindling the Hundred Years’ War. “An English lady. She receives crates of your Saint Evremond brand periodically.”

“A single woman? Not a company?” he shrugged, the smile now genuinely confused. “I don’t understand.”

“I’m acting on her behalf,” Thomas improvised. “Or rather, on behalf of her estate.”

The young man’s brow creased as he considered the word.

“She died,” Thomas inserted. “I’m just trying to clear up some details of her arrangements.”

“Certainly. Come this way, please.”

Thomas followed him through the lobby to an imposing door that opened into offices of a less public kind. They passed several, wordlessly, until they came to what seemed to be the rear of the building. The young man took a seat at an immaculate desk and tapped his fingers on a computer keyboard, nodding to Thomas to sit. After a moment, he asked for the name on the account and Thomas spelled Blackstone’s name. The Frenchman typed some more and then grunted with puzzlement.

“What?” said Thomas.

“Daniella Blackstone,” the other read off the screen. “One crate, per year.”

“For how long?”

“Life,” said the man at the computer.

“Would that be expensive?”

“Not for her. She has never been charged.”

“Is that common?” asked Thomas.

“Not at all. I have never seen such a thing.”

“How long has she been receiving the champagne?”

“It does not go to her precisely,” said the young man, turning to Thomas. “It goes to her family. It has done so since 1945.”

“Do you know why?”

The other shook his head.

“There is no information in the file and we have no paper records that go back so far.”

“Why 1945? Something to do with the end of the war?”

“Indirectly,” he said. “The deal, I suspect, goes back further in time. It begins in 1945 for Taittinger because that was when we bought up certain smaller champagne houses in Epernay. The arrangement with the Blackstone family seems to have come from one of those houses: Demier.”

 

Thomas walked past where he had parked and up to the cathedral. It had been one of the most extraordinary medieval churches in Europe, a rough counterpart to Westminster Abbey in terms of royal coronations and age, but it was brutally shelled during the First World War and had been heavily restored. Even so, much of the statuary around the outside was headless or otherwise fractured, and Thomas could only imagine the hell that must have been unleashed when the building had been hit by—according to his guidebook—285 shells. It was said that of the forty thousand houses that had surrounded the cathedral, only forty survived the devastation.

In many ways it was a very different kind of place from Westminster. It was sparer inside, uncluttered by monuments, so the overall impression was of air and vast stone, and flashes of color from the windows. It was also quieter. Thomas wandered its cool, massive transept, admiring the immense columns with their decorative vine-leaf carvings, then sat staring at the deep cobalt blues of the Chagall stained glass. It was like being under deep water and looking up toward the sun, a shifting and vivid color that seemed to extend into infinity. The more he gazed at it, the more he felt himself floating on undulating currents, drifting like a spirit cut free from the body.

He remembered the lines from the XTC song about God making disease and the diamond blue . . .

He had to force himself to get up and return to the world, which seemed darker by comparison. He lit a candle in a rack for Kumi and walked back to the car. It was cold outside now, breezy and on the point of rain. He felt reflective. What sense of progress he had had was dulled even when he imagined scooping a lost Shakespeare play from some crumbling and forgotten cellar under Epernay. In this reflective mood he was surprised to notice the man at all.

He had been behind Thomas in the cathedral, a young man with close-cropped hair and a long, drab coat, and Thomas suspected he had seen him before that as well, perhaps in the Taittinger cellars. He had been walking briskly only a few yards behind Thomas when he reached the Peugeot, but had faltered as Thomas paused to fish for his keys. The young man had turned to a shop window as if arrested by something he’d seen there. As Thomas pulled away from the curb, the man in the long coat turned back to the road and stuck out his arm as if hailing a cab. Thomas watched in his rearview mirror as a green, low-slung sedan—a Citroen, he thought—that had been idling at the corner sped up, and the man got quickly in. He couldn’t be sure, of course, but Thomas was prepared to bet that the sedan was no taxi.

CHAPTER 49

Thomas took the N51 south to Epernay, through broad flat expanses of fields and vineyards in meticulous array on the sides of low chalk hills. He came off the highway and took at least one wrong turn that took him through quaint villages of antique farmhouses, markets, and war memorials, some Napoleonic, some First or Second World War. One, where he got out to check a road sign masked by a heavy plane tree, was located in what seemed like the middle of nowhere. He assumed it had been a battlefield of some sort and climbed the few steps to the monument with its faded French flag, brick obelisk, and surrounding slabs covered with names. Flowers had been laid recently. It was only when he considered the inscription and saw how many of the surnames repeated that he began to wonder if there had once been a village here that the war—in this case, the First World War—had overtaken and destroyed. Many of the names were women. Was it possible that whole villages could have been wiped out, their buildings and people eradicated in the entrenched four-year horror that had been the War to End All Wars? He checked the map in his guidebook and decided that it
was
possible. Epernay sat squarely on the river Marne, the site of major battles at the beginning and end of the war. In the meantime, the land around the river had shifted from Allied to German control, and the region had been utterly decimated.

He stood at the top of the steps and looked back along the road he had come. There was nothing more than fields and the curious round towers with slated, conical tops that might have been silos, and a few isolated trees. There was no sign of the green Citroën he had thought was following him when he left Reims, and he couldn’t be sure he had even seen it on the highway once he was out of the city.

Getting paranoid, Thomas,
he thought.
Not a good sign.

He got back into the car and turned it around.

Epernay, once he found his way, was a picturesque town of tree-lined avenues and large, square-fronted buildings with steeply pitched tiled roofs. It was getting dark fast and Thomas was tired. He found a small, anonymous hotel where he dined on a rich venison stew and an assortment of local, Brie-like cheeses and then went up to his spartan room. The bed was hard and narrow, but Thomas fell quickly asleep, waking only once before it was completely light. He did not remember his dreams, but woke anxious, sure there was something he was supposed to do that he could not remember.

Thomas thanked his slightly officious landlady for his breakfast of bread, cheese, and café au lait; studied a map of the town center; and decided to leave the car at the hotel.

Epernay seemed almost wholly geared to champagne, and one broad street was lined on both sides with the gated mansions of the famous houses: Perrier Jouet, Mercier, and, of course, Moët et Chandon, with the statue of the monk after whom their most famous label was named, Dom Perignon. There were other, smaller houses, all backing onto vineyards that rose above the town, and among them, close to the end of the street, Thomas found Demier.

It was not as impressive as the other champagne houses, less elegant, resembling something between an overgrown farmhouse and a small and poorly maintained château. But as with many of its neighbors, there was a gravel drive behind ornate wrought-iron railings, painted black and trimmed with gold. The gate itself was open and a sign welcomed the public to its cellar tour. Halfway down the block, a green Citroën was parked by the curb, empty. Thomas strolled casually by it and into a
tabac
on the corner, but couldn’t be sure the car was the one he had seen in Reims. In the shop he bought a small plastic flashlight, which he stuck in his pocket before returning to Demier.

Again, Thomas bought his tour ticket—twelve euros this time—and browsed the lobby materials as he waited. Unlike Taittinger’s fairly casual arrangement, Demier’s tour was regulated and—he learned—automated. He had assumed Demier to be a minor producer, hardly worth the attention of tourists spoiled by the delights higher up the road, but the place was full of people, almost all of them French. Demier was indeed a small champagne house with a tiny output compared to juggernauts like Moët et Chandon, but it produced what was regarded, at least domestically, as champagne of excellent quality. The company owned less than forty acres of vineyard and produced only a few hundred thousand bottles per year, but—they claimed—they were alone in adhering absolutely to traditional methods of champagne production, and their prices reflected as much. Thomas strolled through their extensive store and didn’t see a single bottle priced at less than one hundred fifty dollars U.S., with many reaching several times that. Thomas wondered if people could really tell the difference, if they could really like—really
want
—something so outrageously expensive—a thousand dollars a bottle? Two thousand? Five?—or if it was all a ruse to lure those with more money than sense.

As the tour group was herded into a pair of stainless-steel elevators by three attendants, Thomas scanned the crowd and saw two familiar faces. One was the suited American he had seen in Reims; the other was the young man in the coat who had followed him in the green Citroën. The driver was probably there too, but Thomas hadn’t gotten a good look at him.

“Step inside, please, sir,” said the attendant.

Thomas gave the huddle in the elevator a worried look and said,

“I’ll wait for the next one.”

He turned away as the door began to close, unsure if his pursuer had seen him, but pretty sure the American had not. The attendant, a hard-faced woman with streaks of gray in her black braided hair, gave him a polite nod that didn’t bother to mask her displeasure.

Tourists
, she was thinking. Or—worse—
Americans
.

Thomas bobbed his head apologetically and smiled. She didn’t thaw, but stood there clicking her fingernails together as she waited for the second elevator. As soon as it arrived, she motioned him in and began the speech her colleagues had done for the larger group as they descended.

“When we reach the bottom, please proceed to the train on your right . . .”

“Train?”

She stared at him.

“Yes. It is not a
real
train. It is . . . joined-up electric cars. When you get there, move to the right and take a seat. The train is guided by lasers, so if you take flash pictures, please shoot them to the sides, not directly ahead, or this can confuse the directional controls and produce an accident.”

Thomas, unable to stop himself, grinned. The attendant glared. The elevator slowed and stopped.

It was cold in the stone passage, and almost all vestiges of the modernity and luxury of the lobby were gone. Here were only tunnels carved out of the rock, dimly lit by softly glowing strip lights that ran overhead. The train—more like a sequence of square golf carts—was waiting. He took a seat at the very back, two empty rows behind the last passengers, and sat as low as he could. No one in front turned, their attention on the guide. She was sitting at the front of the train on a raised, rear-facing seat. No one was driving and she couldn’t see where they were going: hence the laser guidance system, visible as pinpricks of red light in the tunnels ahead.

The woman who had escorted Thomas down gave a nod to the guide and returned to the elevator. The guide brightly gave final safety notes in a very English English—all long
a
’s and precise little final
t
’s—and set the train in motion. It moved with a faint electric
whir
, gliding down the passage and snaking around the corner past a dozen arched alcoves of bottle racks. The guide talked constantly in her practiced, lilting way, presenting the obligatory facts on soil conditions, the properties of chalk, an abbreviated history of champagne before the seventeenth century. Then came biographies of the monk Dom Perignon and his fruitless attempt to rid the wine of gas, and the Veuve Clicquot, the widow who industrialized nineteenth-century champagne production and perfected the riddling rack by which the yeast plugs were collected and disgorged. Thomas had heard or read most of it before, but there was something pleasingly cryptlike about the cellars, and their sheer scale was impressive enough to keep his old claustrophobia at bay. The place was a maze of interconnected tunnels, each both a storage area in its own right and a way of getting somewhere else.