Nightmare in Burgundy (3 page)

“Hello, Virgile?”

“Yes, boss. Is something wrong?”

“Why do you ask?”

“You told me you would call tomorrow afternoon. I am surprised to hear from you so soon.”

“Do you know Burgundy, Virgile?”

“Not really, boss. Not at all, in fact. Just what I’ve read in books.”

“Okay, then come and get a taste of it,” Cooker said. “I’ll expect you tomorrow.”

“How do I get there?”

“Figure it out. Ask my secretary to get you a ticket.”

“By train? I’ll have to route through Paris. That’s a long way, boss!”

“And stop calling me ‘boss.’ You know how much that irritates me.”

“Yes, bo... uh, sir!”

4

He was dressed in a fine linen tunic and had Roman sandals on his feet as he climbed Mount Sinai on the back of a mule. Two shots rang out. In the distance, the half-nude Jesus, a chastely veiled Mary Magdalene, the faithful Emmaus, and half a dozen apostles were assembled in the shelter of an olive tree. The violent echo of the explosions faded into the night.

Cooker sat up suddenly in his bed, felt around for the light switch, and knocked the Bible off the night table. Outside, he could hear shutters banging open and several piercing screams.

Wearing a bathrobe made of wool from the Pyrenees and a pair of kidskin slippers, he walked down the steps of the annex, crossed the courtyard, and found himself on the main road of Vougeot. A group of villagers were gathered a few feet from the post office. An elderly man with a moustache was yelling from a window and brandishing a hunting rifle.

“Don’t mess with the Mancenot brothers! Don’t mess with us!”

Cooker cautiously approached the circle of people gathered on the sidewalk. He recognized the woman with the triple chin and her husband, as well as the owner of the Rendez-vous des Touristes, who was kneeling by a body. A rather lost-looking woman stood apart from another group of people he didn’t know, all motionless in the freezing wind.

“Go get a blanket!” a small bald man shouted to a young girl with a frightened expression. “The checkered one at the back of the linen closet! Hurry!”

Cooker drew closer. A boy was lying on the asphalt, his body curled on its right side, his eyes rolled upward, legs twitching and trembling. Blood from his abdomen was streaming slowly through his jacket. The steady flow was beginning to form a thick shiny puddle on the pavement.

“He’s done for, the little bastard!” the man with the moustache continued to yell, shaking his rifle.

“Have you called an ambulance?” Cooker asked as he leaned over the injured boy.

“Yes! They are coming from Nuits-Saint-George!” someone answered.

“It’s better not to move him,” one of the women said as she averted her eyes.

“Goddammit, is that blanket coming or not?”

“What happened?” Cooker asked, pulling his bathrobe tighter.

“One of the Mancenot brothers fired,” replied the café owner. “It’s that moron, Ernest!”

The man with the gun was still standing in the frame of the window, his weapon at arm’s length. He had the crimson face and bewildered look of lonely old men who drown their celibacy in cheap liquor and hatred of the world. Behind him, a furtive silhouette was pacing under the halo of a bare lightbulb.

“And Honoré does not dare show his face. Look at that!” shouted the fat woman’s husband.

“That’s the end of them pissing us off, those assholes!” the shooter yelled, sticking out his chest. “Two buckshots full blast. I didn’t miss!”

“Shut your mouth, Ernest!” the café owner yelled, his jaw tense.

Then Cooker saw another body lying a few yards away from the group. He approached the second victim, whose left cheek had been blown away by the volley of lead. The other side of his face was intact, his open eye looking dazed. The kid could hardly have been eighteen. His long hair was soaking in a bloody pile of flesh and bone shards. No one else dared to look at him. He was lying there, his head mangled, abandoned to the cold and wind. Cooker suppressed a gasp of disgust.

The girl arrived with the checkered blanket. Someone grabbed it to cover the boy whose blood continued to pool on the pavement. His legs were shaking faster and faster; a red dribble was beginning to flow from his nose.

Cooker heard the wail of sirens. An ambulance with a flashing blue light turned from the highway to cross the bridge and was speeding toward them. It was closely followed by a police car. Everyone moved aside when the paramedics and police officers leaped from their vehicles. Ernest Mancenot had disappeared from the window. The police officers walked around the victims without hiding their revulsion. The paramedics quickly decided to transport the wounded boy to the hospital in Dijon and to call for a second ambulance to take the dead boy to the medical examiner’s office. They carefully slipped the curled-up boy, his legs still shaking, onto a stretcher. As the speeding ambulance disappeared, the police officers started questioning members of the crowd.

The café owner spoke up and explained briefly that the two boys had been shot down by one of the Mancenot brothers while they were getting ready to spray paint the wall of the post office. Cooker turned and then saw the black inscription on the facade, near the mailbox: “In V...” in round, thick letters. The victims had not had the time to write any more than that. Old Ernest had shot them down in the middle of the act. The can of spray paint had rolled into the gutter. An officer recovered it and wrapped it in a plastic bag.

“Do you know the victims?” the captain inquired.

“Cedric and David Bravart, two cousins,” replied the woman with the triple chin. “One of them is from Vougeot, and the other is from Gilly. That one there is David.”

The policeman glanced at the body, frowned, and raised his head in the direction of the window, where Ernest was now standing again.

“Mr. Mancenot! Put down your gun, and get out here!”

“I did my job!” the old man barked.

“I am waiting for you, sir! Do not make us come and get you!”

All eyes were focused on the Mancenot brothers’ house, an austere and charmless building weighed down by its granular and graying stucco. Minutes ticked by. The police officers were waiting near the entrance. Cooker sneezed and crossed his arms to warm himself. His feet were freezing. He was thinking about going back to the hotel and putting on something warmer when the Mancenot brothers stuck their drunken faces through the half-open door. Ernest spat on the ground and looked around defiantly.

“Two cartridges, two targets! Gotta have balls, that’s all!”

He was summarily handcuffed and pushed into the police cruiser, while Honoré, looking even more stunned than his brother, began to whimper. “Don’t worry, Ernest. I’ll take care of everything.”

While a police officer went upstairs to recover the gun and the cartridge cases, the second ambulance arrived, just ahead of a rattling Citroen 2CV. Out of this climbed a man in his fifties with salt-and-pepper hair in a ponytail. He was wearing a mauve scarf and had a camera around his neck. A reporter from
Le Bien Public
. He snapped a few photos of the stretcher as it was sliding into the van, the Mancenot’s still-open window, and the graffiti just barely begun. Then he questioned several of the bystanders he seemed to know well. Each one gave him more or less the same version of the story, some of them reveling in describing the state of the bodies in minute detail and reporting the old man’s deranged behavior.

Cooker was about to return to his room when he heard a man call out, “Mr. Cooker?”

The winemaker jumped and turned to see who was talking to him. “To whom do I owe the pleasure? Do we know each other?”

“Well, I know you,” the man responded. “My name is Bressel, I wrote the article on your induction into the brotherhood of the Chevaliers du Tastevin.”

“Ah, so you’re the one.”

If the moment had not been so tragic, Cooker would have smiled and commented on the ridiculous headline and unflattering photo.

“Yes, I’m the one who covered the Chapter of the Tulips,” Robert Bressel confirmed. “Do you intend to stay in the region for long?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“I’d love to do an interview.”

“I’m supposed to leave in four or five days.”

“It would be great to have the opinion of an expert like yourself on the latest Tastevinage.”

Shivering, Cooker suddenly realized the incongruity of the situation. Here he was, standing in the middle of the street at five in the morning, in pajamas, bathrobe, and slippers.

“Maybe this is not the best time to discuss this,” he said, holding back a sneeze. “I need to get some more sleep.”

“I live in Saint-Bernard,” Bressel insisted. “Last house on the way out of town. You can’t miss it. If you feel like it and have the time, stop by and see me.”

“I’ll think about it, sir.”

Cooker nodded a good-bye and walked quickly toward the hotel annex. Once in his room, he ran a scalding hot bath and soaked in it for more than an hour while reading the first thirty Psalms of David.

§ § §

A waft of patchouli incense assailed his nostrils even before he had crossed the threshold. Cooker wiped the soles of his Lobbs on the horsehair doormat, took in one last lungful of fresh air, and dove into the vestibule. Dozens of little candles twinkled on a shelf that ran all along the wall and seemed to come alive under the haunting undulations of an Indian sitar.

Robert Bressel offered him a cup of green tea and invited him to sit in a heap of cushions with batik covers that looked particularly uncomfortable. The winemaker preferred a carved African stool. Several naively sculpted snakes were crawling along its base. The living room was rather large, but the motley decor devoured the space. Cooker’s eyes widened at the dozens of bouquets of dried flowers, numerous oriental knickknacks, terra-cotta reproductions of Aztec gods, ivy dripping from macramé suspensions, an enormous plastic elephant painted gold, tourist posters of Sumatra tacked on the walls among yellowed posters of Che Guevara, Jimi Hendrix, and Romy Schneider, a Balinese armoire, a yellow-straw Mexican hat, a Napoleon III–era china cabinet, precariously stacked books, CDs strewn everywhere, a copper bowl full of moldy cereal, and a laptop on the floor, which was covered with oriental rugs and hemp mats. The sinuous sitar music irritated Cooker’s auditory passages.

The journalist poured the tea in Chinese cups while imitating the sweeping ethereal gestures of North African Tuaregs. The mauve scarf knotted around his blond hair was hanging over a mohair sweater that bore a geometric pattern of lamas. He sniffed his cup and raised his eyes toward the ceiling.

“It’s a gyokuro from Japan. The best!”

“Thank you very much,” Cooker said politely from his Congolese stool.

“I prefer it to the bancha from China, which is too fibrous, and the oolong from Taiwan, which is too pale.”

“I tend to stick with Grand Yunnan, like my father. Or else I make do with any Earl Grey or Darjeeling.”

“It’s true that it’s the national drink in England,” Bressel said. Cooker noted that Bressel looked a bit disappointed by his placid ignorance of fine teas.

“Yes, I drink almost as much tea as wine. That tells you how hopelessly Franco-British I am!”

“Speaking of which, I need some biographical information for a note at the beginning of the interview.”

“My secretary will send you a whole press kit,” Cooker said, cutting him short. He didn’t care to expand any more on his personal history.

They spoke quietly, mostly about wine production. Slumped in his pile of cushions, Robert Bressel did not have a tape recorder for the interview, but instead used a big spiral notebook. Cooker gave his cautious opinion on the samples he had had the honor to taste at the Château du Clos de Vougeot. Of the eight hundred and nineteen wines from the 2000, 2001, and 2002 vintages, he admitted that he had tasted only a dozen. But the experience of the Tastevinage had convinced him that he needed to spend part of his visit in the Morey-Saint-Denis area, which he regarded as one of the finest terroirs of the world.

“No kidding?” the reporter marveled.

“I rarely joke when I’m talking about wine, unless I’ve drunk too much of it, which, of course, is a hazard of the trade.”

The interview continued in a more or less relaxed, almost friendly tone. The sitar had ceased its soporific whirling, and Cooker poured himself a second cup of green tea. He expounded on the state of the wine business, the problems of exportation, the specificity of pinot noir—the flagship of the Burgundy grape varietals—the need to age the best wines and the care exercised in decanting, the unfairly underrated communal appellations, the heterogeneous nature of the wine-growing region of the hautes-côtes, climatic variations, the parceling of terrain, the rising values of the Mâconnais, and the new decrees of the agricultural regulatory agency INAO. After all that, Cooker could not resist the urge to ask a few questions of his own. He had talked enough about wines and the wine business. Before the interview ended, he intended to steer the discussion toward other things that were on his mind.

“And I must also say that there is no lack of excitement in the area,” he ventured.

“Do you mean what happened last night?”

“Since my arrival, some very disturbing things have occurred. This graffiti on the walls, the two kids who were shot. Usually this region is rather peaceful and—”

“Pardon me for contradicting you, but Burgundy has never been a peaceful place. Admittedly, it’s a good life, and I agree that people envy the apparent tranquility, but that’s not the whole picture.”

“Oh, really? What are you trying to say?” Cooker asked as he poured himself a third cup of tea.

“I wasn’t really surprised to see that graffiti yesterday morning.”

“Were you expecting it?”

“Not at all. I just think it is one more mystery among so many others here,” Bressel said.

“A rather quickly solved mystery at that, mind you.”

“Frankly, I find it hard to believe that the two kids could have scrawled those inscriptions, especially in Latin!”

“And yet they were interrupted while spray painting the walls.”

“So? What does that prove?”

“Not much, really,” Cooker said. “Have you heard anything about the injured kid?”

“He died around eight o’clock at the hospital in Dijon. I found out just as you were arriving.”

“That’s awful,” Cooker sighed.

“Absolutely horrible. Ernest Mancenot is in custody now, but he may very well be released on his own recognizance. He had a .10 blood-alcohol level.”

“That didn’t keep him from shooting straight,” the winemaker said without a hint of sarcasm.

“They’re a family of hunters. The two brothers are old hardened boys who have nothing else to do but hunt down game, go mushroom picking, and spend their pensions on booze.”