LACKING VIRTUES (48 page)

Warner lifted the wooden lock bar and pushed on the door with his foot. It groaned and creaked as it swung open. “Give me some light in there,” he said.

Steven crouched and directed the beam through the opening.

Warner stuck his head in. There were pipes, old and new, cobwebs, and a hard earth floor rising at a sharp angle until it leveled off two feet from the ceiling. The rear quarter of the manor had been built without a proper basement. It was perfect. “Pass the cage, please.”

“What’s in there?”

“A crawl space. Made to order.” Warner tossed his rat into the darkness, then let all but two of the others go. He shut the door and lowered the bar. He took the next to the last rat out of the cage and placed it at his feet. He smiled as it scampered off toward the furnace.

“Keeping one for company?” Steven asked.

“That’s right.”

“Do we hit the wine cellar now?”

“First the vent. Wherever you go from now until the search is over, take a circuitous route. No direct lines from point A to point B.”

“Got it.”

They had been walking for less than a minute when Warner heard footsteps overhead. He stopped in his tracks.

“It’s the servants,” Steven whispered. “Michelet sounds like an Angus.”

“Where’s the vent? That needs to be confirmed.”

“A to B?”

“We’ve been weaving around long enough. Pick up the pace.”

Steven twisted open the louvers. Warner peered nervously into the gray afternoon. Rain, fog, no cars, not a soul in sight. The footsteps echoed somewhere in the distance. He heard scraps of a gruff male voice.

“That’s Henri,” Steven said. “He’s in the kitchen with his wife, cooking. These men you’re about to meet are gluttons. If they weren’t knocking down planes, you’d get the idea their goal was to eat themselves to death.”

“All right. You’ve done your research well. Let’s set up.”

“A to B?”

“No, circuitous.”

They walked the maze again. Steven stopped in front of a more attractive door, old but well maintained. Its heavy wood face was polished to a sheen and reinforced with hand-crafted ironwork. He fished out his keys, unlocked the door and reached around the jamb to turn on the light switch. “After you,
Monsieur
.”

Warner stepped inside and suppressed his desire to whistle. Hundreds of crates and boxes lined the walls, stacked three to four high and three to four deep, separated by a few strategically placed aisles.

A segment of one wall was set aside for special vintages. Here the bottles were not in crates but nestled horizontally in individual wooden cubby holes. A wire mesh gate with heavy locks protected the treasure. The cubby holes were labeled. Warner didn’t know much about wine, but he couldn’t help notice vintages dating back to the war.

He didn’t look up; the eye wasn’t naturally drawn that way. Steven had to direct his attention to the ceiling.

The network of overhead heating ducts was complex. A dozen large-diameter pipes ran parallel to the center of the ceiling, then branched off in different groupings and at different angles. Amid the taping and elbow joints Warner, professional investigator, didn’t notice the small rectangular flaps Steven had cut in three of the ducts.

He nodded his approval when Steven pointed them out, showing how the flaps could be pulled out for listening, then folded back in position to disguise their presence. “Excellent,” he whispered. “Now I’d like to prepare a hiding place behind the crates.”

“We’re going to be in here? This is the first place they’ll look.”

“Not if they bring the dogs,” Warner said. “Give me a hand.” He picked up a crate stenciled Château LaFite Rothschild 1964 and passed it to Steven.

“Hey, Frank, hang on a second. We’ve got LaFites from ‘fifty eight to ‘sixty four in this row, the younger Lafites in the next row, and God knows what behind those. Maybe you think Frogs aren’t organized, but when it comes to wine cellars, they’re like Swiss accountants. If we’re really going to do this thing, why don’t we make the bunker over there on that wall? Those are Henri’s wines. They’re all the same.”

“Whose?”

“Henri. The servant. That way we won’t have to worry about getting things out of order.”

“That’s a good thought, Steven. We’ll be sure to keep track of what goes where and put everything back in the right place. But I want to camp out behind the expensive stuff.”

“A matter of taste?”

“Of practicality,” Warner said. “If you were in charge of the dogs, where would you be most worried they might jump?”

Steven grinned broadly. “I think I’m catching on to this rat game.”

***

“I didn’t know you liked Nintendo,” Jules said. “I wish you’d told me last summer. Me and Luc brought the whole system down to Nice.”

Nicole locked the door to her cousin’s room. “Go ahead and play. I’ll watch.”

“Watch? You said you wanted to play.”

“I was kidding. I don’t know how.”

“Hey, no problem. I’ll teach you. If Luc can learn, you know it’s easy.

She grabbed his arm. “Jules, listen, I need you to help me. I brought you here to talk, not to play games. Françoise just told me father’s coming to Grenoble late tonight. I’ve decided to run away.”

“What?”

“Turn on the Nintendo. Make it loud. I don’t want Françoise to know we’re talking if she comes up here.”

“Okay, all right. Run away? Why?”

Nicole waited to speak until a weird character started his nerve-jangling trek across the screen. “Can you keep your mouth shut?”

“If that’s what you want.”

“It is.”

“This is just between you and me, is that understood, Jules?”

“I said I’d keep quiet. What’s wrong?”

“Steven, that’s what. The tennis instructor from last summer. Why the bizarre look? You remember him, don’t you?”

“Sure I remember him. You were doing it, weren’t?”

“Jules!”

“Well?”

“Yes, we were doing it. We still are.”

“I thought he’d gone back to the States.”

“So did father and Françoise. Then we got photographed in a café. We turned up in one of those disgusting tabloids Françoise reads.”

“
Merde
.”

“
Merde
is right. She showed it to father. That’s why I’m in Grenoble. Some sort of pre-punishment. Only I’m not supposed to tell anyone.”

“You mean all that stuff you gave mother about spending more time with the family was bull?”

“Not exactly. I would like to spend more time with you. But this visit was ordered by father. It’s his idea of house arrest. He’s holding me here with Françoise as jailer until he decides what to do with me. I know it’s going to be awful.”

“Excuse me, Nicole, but your father is a real prick. Even my parents think so.”

“No disagreement there.”

“So what are you going to do when you run away? Head for the States?”

Someone on the screen blew up.  Silence followed the video-game death knell.

“Don’t let the noises stop,” Nicole said. “I’m going to go somewhere that isn’t France, but I’m not sure where. I know father. He’ll try to have Steven deported or arrested – or worse. We’ve got to get out of his reach. Steven promised he would take me away if things got really bad. They’re bad, Jules. There’s no reason to wait around.”

“Doesn’t sound like it.”

“Then let’s make a plan. I’ve checked the train schedule. There’s a TGV to Paris at ten o’clock. I want to be on it, Jules. Will you help me?”

“Sure, no problem. Luc and I go out at night all the time. We’ve got this rope around the radiator we toss out the window.” He made a fist and showed her his muscled arm. “That’s how I got these, climbing back up that rope. I’ll put another rope in your room. You go to bed early. I’ll get sick after dinner. Then I’ll meet you down below with the moped. It’ll be simple.”

She hugged him again.

“Now listen,” he said, “we’ve got a twenty minute ride to the station. You can buy your ticket on the train and pay the fine if you have to. Do you have money?”

“Yes, thanks.”

“Good, I won’t have to get into mother’s purse. Try to be out by nine thirty. And don’t worry about Françoise. She didn’t come upstairs last night until eleven. If she peeks in on you, I’ll be asleep in your bed wearing your slinky nightgown.”

He tugged on his long hair, which was the color of hers. “She’s half blind. She’ll never know the difference.”

“You’re a saint, Jules.”

“A saint? Be glad I’m not.”

“Teach me how to play Nintendo, cousin,” Nicole said, feeling frightened and exhilarated at the same time. “It looks like a fun game.”

***

Steven had begun to worry that the meeting might not come off in the proper fashion. He’d been holding vigil at the vent for the last hour and a half. Night was coming on fast, and fog swirled around the yellow lights on the gate.

The temperature was dropping, too. Every time a puff of air came in through the louvers, he felt another degree or two of wind chill. Bad travel weather – and getting worse.

Impossible to say where the three conspirators would be coming from. Michelet and Delors had probably not left Paris. But what about Haussmann? He might have flown to an obscure country in Latin America or Asia to get the money. This fog could delay him for hours, especially if all of Europe was socked in.

And God knew where Claussen was, where he had to come from.

If the man with the money
or
the man scheduled to receive it couldn’t get here, the meeting might turn out to be a
grande bouffe
rather than a source of what Sophie and Frank called conclusive evidence.

What if Michelet and Delors sat around all night talking about pussy and Cuban cigars? Frank might decide his partner had been hearing voices the other night, the kind lunatics hear.

Well, at least someone was coming to dinner. He had heard Henri building fires in the library and dining room, and the smells that had begun to work their way down into the basement were even more aromatic than they had been on Wednesday night. He could say one thing about these bastards: they didn’t let crime spoil their appetites.

He was ready to go give Warner an update when he heard the purr of an engine muffled by the fog. He waited until a Citroën stopped at the gate. Delors, who had driven himself, flashed his lights several times.

Footsteps boomed overhead in response. Henri walked out the front door waving his arms, his peasant pant legs brushing within a few feet of Steven’s eyes. By the time the hobbling old servant made it to the gate, the rest of the convoy had arrived.