Florian Vial put the finishing touches to the jaunty upward sweep of his moustache and walked down the cellar to the stairway leading into the house, passing within six feet of the crouching figure inside the dumbwaiter. He was looking forward to seeing Sophie again, all the more after receiving her call to say that Sam wouldn’t be able to join them. A pleasant enough young man, of course, but Vial much preferred the intimacy of a tête-à-tête with Sophie, and there was the added advantage that they could speak French, a language made for gallantries.
Sam heard Vial’s footsteps on the flagstones of the cellar floor, and gave him another few minutes to get up the stairs and into the house. He was by now beginning to suffer from mild claustrophobia and the onset of a cramp. His thigh muscles felt as though they had been stretched to the snapping point, and he was sure he’d picked up a splinter in his backside. But he’d made it. The cellar was his for the night, and the hours of physical labor ahead of him would come as a relief after his ordeal in the dumbwaiter.
The pulley rope gave a final creak as he hauled himself out, and he stood for a few moments in the darkness, stretching the kinks out of his body. Even though the risk of being detected was minimal, he had decided to wait for a couple of hours before turning on the cellar lights and starting work. By then, just about everyone in Marseille would be observing the sacred ritual of dinner.
Guided by the thin beam of his flashlight, he made his way down to the far end of the cellar, where he found everything as he had remembered it. The golf cart was parked in its place by the door, and the empty cartons from Domaine Reboul were piled up in the corner. These would have to be replaced with unmarked cartons, but there would be plenty of time later for that. He went into Vial’s office, settled himself in Vial’s chair, and put his feet up on Vial’s desk. Philippe answered his call after the first ring.
“So far, so good,” said Sam.
“You’re in the cellar?”
“I’m in the cellar. I’ll be starting to pack up the wine in a couple of hours. Let’s just go through the drill again.”
“Bon. When all the wine is packed, you will call me. The van’s parked by the Vieux Port. At that time of night, it will take me three minutes to reach the Palais.”
“Good. Now, I’ll make sure the gates are open. Remember to switch off your lights just before you turn into the drive. I don’t want anyone in the house to see any headlights. Take the left fork off the main drive. I’ll blink my flashlight to guide you into the delivery area. The cases will be stacked up outside the cellar. Loading them into the van will take five minutes, tops. Then we’ll be out of here.”
“Roger that.”
“Roger what?”
“It’s army talk. I heard it on a TV show.”
Sam rolled his eyes in the darkness. He’d forgotten Philippe’s fondness for all things military. “Oh, one other thing. How long will it take to get where we’re going?”
“The van isn’t built for speed, but we’ll be on the autoroute for a lot of the way. I think an hour and a half, not much more.”
“OK. We’re all set. See you later.”
Sam’s confidence was increasing now that he was getting close to the finish. Something could go wrong, of course; something always could. But he allowed himself a few moments of optimism as he considered facts and possibilities.
The most encouraging of these was his almost total isolation from the outside world. There were no windows in the cellar, so there would be no chinks of light to give him away. There was no chance of anyone hearing him, thanks to the soundproofing provided by massive walls, massive ceilings, and, above them, several feet of earth. And best of all, the alarm system, which he’d checked during previous visits, was activated only by someone trying to break in, not by someone letting himself out. That made two cellars-this one and Roth’s-where electronic protection wasn’t all it should be. He made a mental note to tell Elena. She’d welcome any excuse to read the riot act yet again to Roth about his sloppy security arrangements.
Elena occupied his thoughts pleasantly as he sat in the darkness, and he started to think ahead, beyond the night’s work. How would she react to criminal methods being used to solve a crime? Personally, she might turn a blind eye. Professionally, she’d have a few problems, and she wouldn’t hesitate to give him a hard time. But not for long. In the insurance business, as in most other enterprises involving large amounts of money, the end tends to justify the means. A healthy bottom line excuses most sins. It’s a wicked old world, he reflected, as he leaned back in Vial’s chair and waited for the hours to go by.
He must have dozed. When he next looked at his watch it was just before ten; time to go to work. He stood up, rubbed his eyes, and found the switch by the main door. The cellar looked bigger and more mysterious at night than it had during the day, when sunshine had flooded in through the open doors. Now the vaulted ceilings were thick with shadow, and the pools of light cast by the hanging lamps seemed to stretch away forever.
Sam loaded a batch of empty cartons into the golf cart and set off, the tires thrumming on the flagstone pathway that separated the reds from the whites. His first stop was the Rue des Merveilles, that distinguished address where Château Lafite rubbed aristocratic shoulders with Château Latour. He took the list of Roth’s wines from his pocket and smoothed it out on the passenger seat:
’61 Latour, 98 bottles. He went along the rows of bins, looking at the slate tickets marked in chalk that identified the vintage years until he came to 1961. There must have been at least three hundred bottles, he calculated, as he started to fill the empty cartons, and there was no means of knowing if the ninety-eight bottles he took were actually Roth’s. But, as he told himself, Roth wasn’t going to complain. He settled into a rhythm: take two bottles from the bin, check the vintage on each label to make sure, slide the bottles into their individual compartments in the carton, straighten up, go back to the bin. As each carton was filled it was placed on the flatbed behind the seats of the golf cart.
He paused to look at his watch. It had taken more than thirty minutes to pack fewer than a hundred bottles of Latour. At this rate, he had about three hours to go, plus the trips back and forth in the golf cart. That would see him finished sometime between two and three a.m. He wondered how Philippe was managing to contain his impatience.
’53 Lafite, 76 bottles. As he bent and straightened and shuttled between the bins and the golf cart, some of the comments of Florian Vial came back to him. When describing the Lafite, his extravagant compliments had been partially muffled by the frequent kisses he applied to his fingertips. Even so, some gems that Vial had taken from his fellow wine experts’ overblown descriptions had come through loud and clear. Sam remembered one purple patch in particular that had started off quietly enough with “firm yet supple, soft and yet assertive,” going on to “finesse, fragrance, and depth of flavor” mixed with “elegance, authority, and breeding that unfolded splendidly in the mouth,” and ending with this rousing climax: “so grand and sublime as to afford a symposium of all other wines.” All of this Vial had quoted, in English, from memory. At the other end of the prose scale had been his own more down-to-earth opinion that “in the end, the best wine is the wine you like.”