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.”
’82 Figeac, 110 bottles. Sam tried to picture the château in his mind while he checked and packed the bottles: stone columns, an allée of fine old trees, a gravel drive. Sophie had told him that the present owner’s grandfather had treated Figeac as a holiday home, coming down from Paris only rarely, and leaving the château closed for the rest of the year. Sam found that hard to imagine. He shook his head at the thought and started work on another empty carton. It occurred to him that it was not unlike packing bullion. How much in dollar value had he shifted so far? A million? Two?
’70 Pétrus, 48 bottles, 5 magnums. As featured in the L.A. Times, Sam thought, putting the first of the magnums into its nest of cardboard. Was this the one that Danny Roth had been cradling in the photograph? Who had shown the article to Reboul? Who had planned and done the job? Whoever they were, Sam couldn’t fault them professionally. Even Bookman had said that it was as close to a perfect heist as he’d seen. A shame, really, that there was no chance of sitting down with Reboul one day over a drink and filling in some of the gaps.
’83 Margaux, 140 bottles. Another question: who had Roth used to buy for him? Someone who knew his stuff, that was sure. There wasn’t a single doubtful bottle in the collection. It was all wine of the very highest quality. When doing his research before leaving L.A., Sam had been amazed at the rise in value of the 1980s vintages of premier cru Bordeaux. Between 2001 and 2006, for example, Margaux had gone up by 58 percent, and Lafite by 123 percent. It was no wonder Roth was climbing the walls. God knows what it would cost him now to refill his cellar.
The cartons were becoming heavier and heavier, the trips in the golf cart offering only brief moments of relief for an aching back. Sam longed for a massage and a drink.
’75 Yquem, 36 bottles. The last three cartons, and a wine that brought out the best (or worst) in wine writers, those whose mission in life is to describe the indescribable. “Fat, rich, and luscious,” or “huge and voluptuous”-Sam had seen the phrases time and time again, and they never failed to conjure up images not of a glass of wine but of the kind of statuesque woman Rubens liked to paint. With a feeling of huge and voluptuous satisfaction, he loaded the final carton onto the golf cart and drove down to the other cartons piled up by the cellar door.
He was nearly there. He turned off the lights and eased open the door. The night smelled cool and clean after the humid cellar air, and he sucked in a deep, welcome breath as he looked down the drive. He could make out the form of the gates silhouetted against the lights of the boulevard. A car passed, going up the hill, and then silence. Marseille, it seemed, was asleep. It was 3:15.