The Grape Thief, Part 2
None for Me, Thanks
(This is part 2; read part 1 here)
Marcella finally finished what had to be the best email of her career. This is the best email of my career, she thought, then added, God, that is the saddest sentence of my life.
She stretched and finished putting on her earrings, brushing away her now-damp hair. She was wearing a simple black dress with a gold pendant necklace and some reasonable heels. She used the hair dryer to finish off the rest of the wetness and then started in on her makeup. Good makeup made you look like you didn’t need any, especially in business. For as far as she had come in this life, a little too much lipstick made everyone in the boardroom stop listening to her. No lipstick had the same effect. Being “business pretty” was a tightrope walk: lean too far to the left and you’re “some mean dyke”; lean too far to the right and you’re “some dumb whore”. When she started whatever business she was going to start, doing whatever it was she was good at doing, she would correct this. How, she wasn’t sure, but she would.
Marcella checked herself once over in the mirror, then grabbed her wrap and clutch off the side table. Atop her purse was a note from Denny:
“I went ahead to make sure we got our reservation. Don’t rush. My cell’s on if anything comes up. -Denny”
Marcella liked his handwriting. He left his cell number just in case she didn’t have it, which she did. She knew so much about him. They hired a private eye to double-check what Randy Claibourne had told them. Why they didn’t use the same private eye to handle this job, Marcella didn’t understand…at first.
She grabbed a cab and went to the restaurant. Nice place, built in an old meatpacker’s hall, some hipster haven that was just now being co-opted by middle class people with taste. The name was either “Cleave” or “Chop”, something too-cute-by-half. Marcella didn’t care, really. Why would she come back to Columbus unless she was sent there to capture some other sneaky foreigner Clayton wanted to destroy?
She walked in and asked the maitre-d about a table for three under “Fox”. He took her to the table where Denny sat waiting. He was wearing a new-looking charcoal gray suit with a blue silk tie and a silver tie bar. He was freshly-shaved and well-coifed. Someone cleans up well, Marcella thought.
“Thanks. I thought it might be a little overkill, but I’m glad I look half as good as you do.” Denny stood and helped her into her chair.
She spasmed, then froze at her chair. Shit, did I say that out loud?!
“Well…maybe a quarter as good.” Denny had a sneaky little smile. He was being sincere and flirty at the same time, a lethal combination.
Marcella regained her composure. “Well…thank you. That suit looks new.”
Denny’s eyes ran down his sleeves. “Yeah, I decided it was time to get a little tailoring done.” He was lying. “Truth be told, the suit I wore to come visit you and Clayton, that was my brother’s suit. Mine was…lost in a fire.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Marcella said. Her file on Denny didn’t say anything about a fire.
Denny rubbed the finger where his former wedding ring had carved a dependable little groove. One hell of a fire, he thought. The ring was in a pawn shop in Falls Church, waiting on its next victim.
“Well, they did a good job on that one. Nice color on you, too.” Marcella looked at her menu to avoid making a comment about Denny’s eyes and how well they played against the gray.
“The sales girl talked me into this one and a blue one. I wasn’t sure about the tie but she was pushy.” Her perfume was subtle but Denny started to feel it breaking his concentration.
The waiter came by and rattled off the specials. Denny ordered a raspberry iced tea and Marcella got a glass of white wine. A silence sat down in the empty chair to their side, only for a moment, when the two realized there would now be alcohol at the table.
“I hope that’s…okay.” Marcella felt like an idiot but didn’t let herself blush.
“No, that’s fine, it’s okay.” Denny knew he had to get used to alcohol being near him without it being in him. He was just glad she hadn’t ordered a whole bottle.
“I don’t usually drink that much, it’s just…after a long flight–”
“It’s totally fine, I understand.” Denny was being a little forceful, but only because he hoped she would get over her discomfort quickly and they might just enjoy their dinner.
The drinks came, followed by a tasting plate. Marcella briefed Denny on what they were supposed to do the following day.
Maxwell Freiherr von Schenck would be arriving the following day after a layover in Atlanta. He would come in with the wine in one of those indestructible metal cases and offer the bottle after an evaluation of the exterior by Frederick. If possible, they were going to insist on a “sample pull”, which required the wine to be opened. Rare wine dealers didn’t like doing this because you can get much, much more money for an unopened bottle. In the case of von Schenck, he was already opening the bottles to replace the old wine with the new. The goal was not to prove that the wine was fake; the goal was to prove that von Schenck had the intent to sell fake wine and pass it off as real. They had to catch him in the act, to be dead-certain that he was promising one thing and delivering another. His dealings with Clayton were never witnessed by anyone other than Clayton himself, at von Schenck’s insistence. Therefore, Clayton could only testify to what he’d witnessed, but that wasn’t a clear indicator of guilt.
von Schenck was getting bolder after his last few sales, so his stop-over in Columbus was merely a gateway to Chicago, and after that, Denver. He would be carrying three separate bottles, one to sell to Marcella and Denny, two more to screw over some other rich dopes. Those rich dopes had been contacted by Clayton in advance. They were thankful that Clayton had talked them out of being “robbed”, a word rich people really love to throw around. They agreed to continue correspondence with von Schenck so that he wouldn’t get antsy, and so that when Denny and Marcella pulled the cork on the bottle they were buying from von Schenck, there would be two “unopened” bottles, plus a paper trail leading to two more counts of conspiracy to defraud.
They would entice von Schenck into a sample pull by offering him a sweetheart deal: they would pay for the bottle up front, and if they hated the wine, they would re-cork it, hand it right back to him, and he could re-sell the wine at the “previously opened” price. They would simply rip up the first check, write a new one (less the price of an opened bottle), and he’d be on his way. This would be too sweet for von Schenck to pass up. If he believed he could pull the same trick twice, using the same bottle twice, he’d be that much richer, and for little effort. After all, the bottles weren’t fake…the wine was. But he wasn’t promising the bottles.
“So, Joe and Sandra Fox must be pretty wealthy.”
Marcella smiled. “Yes. Joe’s a contractor and Sandra is an oncologist. They’re an unlikely pair.”
“Especially since Joe’s so ugly,” he said.
“Sandra’s not hung up on looks,” she said like a well-established fact. “But Joe’s not that bad looking. Sandra’s dated some real cavemen in her day.”
“Oh?” Denny was a tad astonished. She was beautiful, objectively so.
“Two boyfriends ago. He was as ugly as sin but I didn’t see it, or couldn’t…or didn’t want to.”
“What was so special about him?”
Marcella looked off. “He was ambitious. Temperamental. I had it in my head that I could find the honey in the lion’s head, like maybe he just never tried sweetness before so he didn’t quite know what to do with it.”
“Didn’t work, though? What, he had a Napoleon complex?”
Marcella chuckled. “No, not quite. He wasn’t that short. Just kinda…brutish looking. He’d been teased a lot in his youth and he never got over it. Nobody told him that if you’re gonna be ugly, you better have some kind of personality to make up for it.”
Denny raised his eyebrows and took a bite of salami off of the tasting plate. “What finally broke it?”
Marcella breathed out a long, flowing yoga breath. “He got in a shouting fight with my mother at Christmas. I didn’t see how gruesome he was until then. All the things I liked about him got swallowed up like tiny rocks in a lava flow. Who yells at their girlfriend’s mother?”
Denny quickly flashed back to the last Christmas he spent at his in-laws’ house. There wasn’t an argument but the tolerance her parents had built up for him and his drinking had subsided. Her father didn’t even speak to him when they were leaving, he just stood in the backyard, tamping down mole tunnels with his foot.
“Some people are…some people go looking for trouble. He probably wasn’t accustomed to decency.”
“Maybe my mom wasn’t being decent.”
“Maybe,” Denny said. “But this isn’t a story about how you don’t talk to your mother anymore.”
“True.”
The waiter refilled their water glasses.
“So, Joe. What do you know? What was Joe’s love life like before he met the brilliant and tragedy-prone Sandra?”
Denny ate a little bread out of the basket. He summoned the necessary dignity to tell the story correctly, and not from his point of view.
“Cops make lousy spouses. I was just one of hundreds that goes through the same thing.”
“What made you so lousy?” Marcella sipped her wine.
“I didn’t manage my stress very well. I kept letting it beat me.”
“You worked violent crimes for a while. That’s the beat to have, right? If you’re a detective?”
“It’s certainly the least boring,” Denny said. “You feel like you’re doing the most, catching the worst of the bad guys.”
“And the trade-off is…” Marcella was pulling back the curtain on an area Denny still wasn’t quite comfortable showing people.
“The trade-off is you have to see their handiwork to know who they are. Like with this von Schenck guy, we know his M.O., we know his motives, we even have a decent name and face. But his work is non-violent. Violent guys have messy signatures.”
“Ah.” Marcella was bubbling inside. She wanted to hear something gruesome. Did that make her a bad person?
She wants the details, Denny thought. He had something to tell her but he didn’t want to.
“What was it that finally turned you off to the work?” Marcella finally probed. Denny hated himself because the truth was disgusting and he was going to tell her because she asked and god this would be so much easier if he was drunk. Waiter! I find myself having to tell an ugly truth. Please bring me all the gin in this restaurant…and a straw!
Denny drank all of his raspberry tea, let out a brief sigh, and spit it out.
“A sixteen-year-old kid beat his kid sister to death with a roofing hammer.”
Marcella let the sentence ring out in her brain once or twice, waiting as the echo came back around, then recoiled. Good God, she thought. Why did I ask?
Denny took a sip of water. “He was screwed up on some kind of street drugs and some ADD medicine, something like that. His sister did something to upset him and he went berserk. When we came for him, he didn’t seem to register any emotion about it at all. He didn’t bat an eye during his trial. I figured maybe after he sobered up he’d start to realize what he’d done and how horrible it was, but he was stone faced the entire time. They tried him as an adult, sentenced him to twenty years. While he was inside he shanked another inmate and put out his eye. That kicked it up to life, no parole. Said the guy ate some of his breakfast one morning and he didn’t like it. After that, I didn’t have the stomach for it anymore.”
“And so you quit?” Marcella said, regaining her capacity for speech.
“No, no. That’s just when I started drinking.”
“Oh,” Marcella said. She was suddenly feeling bad again.
“I’m sorry, I’m bumming you out.”
“No, I mean, I asked.” I should not have asked, she thought.
“Well…what hurt the worst in all of that was my wife. She ordered me, from the night we got engaged, she said I was never supposed to tell her anything gruesome about the job.” Denny stared off.
“So you didn’t have anyone to talk to,” Marcella said.
“Exactly. I had to just suffer through. When that kid killed his sister, I was really badly shaken but I just thought that meant I needed to drink harder. You can’t keep that kind of thing bottled up, you know?”
“Sure,” she said. He was being honest and vulnerable. She thought it might be time to come clean herself.
“My dad…my dad was a good guy but he was an addict. I think he could’ve used some of that, too.”
“Really.”
“You don’t sound surprised,” she said.
“I’m not. Don’t take this the wrong way, but you haven’t exactly been warm. This is the longest we’ve talked thus far. I figured you weren’t too keen on addicts, which a lot of people aren’t, but especially people who have been burned by one in the past. Your dad didn’t stop at booze, did he? He had a substance abuse issue.”
Marcella was caught off-guard. She felt a tingle, like Denny had just guessed her card in a magic show.
“You’re right. How did you figure that?”
“You seem smart. You work for a guy that casts a long shadow. You don’t mind being kept late. That means you don’t date much and there’s no one demanding your attention at home. You’re married to work because you can always work and work is easily managed for you. Men aren’t. Your dad wasn’t.”
“No, there was no managing him,” she said, looking aloof. “He blew out his liver a few years ago. He went downhill fast.”
“I’m really sorry about that,” Denny said. He thought about pulling out a few of the bon mots he picked up in rehab but talked himself out of that just as quickly. Not everyone needs a cute little zinger to get them through a rough night.
Marcella waived off her sorrow. “I’m good. Honestly. And I’m glad you’re good, too, or at least you want to be. To you.”
“To you,” Denny said. They toasted with water glasses and gave each other a polite chuckle. Suddenly, there was another body nearby.
“If you’re waiting for that to turn to wine, I have some bad news.”
Marcella stood up and greeted Frederick with some quick European kisses, one on each cheek. He chuckled and held her hands. “It’s good to see you, kiddo. Clayton hasn’t worked you into that nervous breakdown yet?”
“Not yet, but tomorrow might be where we tip over the line. Frederick Aucoin, Denny Palantino.”
Denny stood and shook Frederick’s hand. “Heck of a grip,” Frederick said. “It’s a pleasure Mr. Palatino.”
“Oh, sorry, it’s ‘Palantino’, with an extra ’n’.” Denny had made this correction for people many times in his life.
“Forgive me, I’m used to the former, but I understand many people picked up an extra letter at Ellis Island. Are you one of those?”
“Not Ellis Island, but certainly after a long boat ride. Spelling wasn’t Immigration’s strong suit. It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Aucoin.”
“Frederick, please, Denny. Marcella, what are we eating?”
“Some amuse bouche to get us going.”
“Ooo, kinky.” The world was one big dinner party to Frederick Aucoin, the 46-year-old wine expert and dog show judge. Frederick was quite brilliant and helped curate Clayton’s wine cellar, as well as his art collection, and a small pack of well-heeled retrievers from a breeder Frederick had Thanksgiving with every year.
The three went back over the details again, this time stopping to let Frederick ask a few pertinent questions and add his thoughts on proceedings. They ordered dinner, a nice array of steaks with beautiful marbling and some delicious fall veggies to complement. Frederick ordered a Chateau L’Ondeaux ’03, a year he said was underrated for that particular vineyard. He proffered a glass to Denny, who politely declined, citing allergy medicine as the cause of his reluctance. Frederick didn’t bother nudging or asking again after that; he wasn’t a bad detective, either. He simply ordered another for Marcella.
“Chateau L’Ondeaux is located in an area of France that suffered a rather trying drought that year. They were uniquely situated, however, in the lee of a nearby mountain. The wind barely blew there. When the rain finally did come, it stayed for days at a time. Their grapes got sufficient water without being oversaturated. Perfect harmony is so rare in nature, but L’Ondeaux got lucky. Or, perhaps, they were blessed. They say all Frenchman are agnostics. Well, I say that.” Frederick rolled the wine around his glass and watched the legs streak down into the pool of beautiful purple wine beneath. He peered across the top at Marcella. “How do you find it?”
“It’s exquisite. Clayton’s given me quite a few glasses of some really great stuff, but this beats them all, for my money.” She wasn’t flattering him, she really was enjoying it. Suddenly, it occurred to her that enjoying the wine might be a little insulting to Denny.
Denny never cared for wine. He kept telling himself as much.
“I have to admit, I’m not thrilled about being put in harm’s way. I’m relieved Clayton has put people he can trust between me and von Schenck,” he said, eyeing Denny, “but I’m not the ‘action/adventure’ type. Level with me, Denny. Do you think he’ll do something drastic?”
Denny took the first sips of a refilled glass of tea and thought hard. “Honestly, no. This guy is running a low-risk scam; how many of these rich guys ever open their wine, even if they spend thousands of dollars on it? Few, I’m betting.”
“Very few,” Frederick said. “They tend to hoard it and only pull it out on special occasions. Most of the time, they die before they can do anything with it. Wine can live for centuries; its owners don’t have the luxury. One rich man will die and another rich man will take his claim and they’ll keep circulating the bottle for thousands of dollars and dozens of years until someone takes the time to pull the cork.”
“Right. So the odds of discovery are low.”
“And if you don’t have a professional to tell you different, you might think you are drinking the world’s best wine. Clayton keeps me around for my palette. I almost didn’t go to his wife’s party that evening. If I hadn’t been there, they might think they were enjoying exactly what they’d paid all that money for and von Schenck…”
“…would keep right on doing what he does best,” Marcella said.
“You never had any doubts about von Schenck? I mean…no intuition? No suspicion about the quality of the bottles and the frequency with which he could produce them?” Denny pulled out his notebook again.
“Well, not at first. See, you mostly get into the wine trade because you have a decent palette, a head for dates and connections to rich people with dark, dry basements. You have a much better chance at being a rare wine dealer if you’re European. Chances are, if you’re rich and care about wine, you’re also related to someone important. Maybe a viscount or a laird or a…whatever. Not a king or anything, but some aristocrat who might see the value of selling off a two-hundred-year-old wine cellar to make a little extra money.”
“So you thought von Schenck might be some kind of royalty? Or connected to some member of the ruling class?” Denny jotted “possible relations?” in his pad, then ordered a coffee.
“Well, his middle name, Freiherr – that’s a German word for Baron, so his family might have had some noble or royal connection before World War I or II. He’s a mutt, though. He might be one of a few nationalities. He speaks fluent French, as do I. He also speaks Italian and German and a little Farsi, which I do not. He has friends in certain circles…people I’ve met before. I don’t know if he’s duped them or if they’re in his corner or what. I get the sense he’s well-connected but I have no clue as to how.”
“So it’s not unreasonable to think that, if he’s connected to the right people and the right people are willing to empty their cellars, he could lay hands on sought-after bottles,” Marcella queried.
“It’s within reason. He’s pretty good about spacing out the rate of his ‘finds’, too. He hasn’t overplayed his hand, to date.”
“Until this trip,” Denny added. “Hitting three buyers in one go? That feels desperate to me.”
“You think he’s overestimated his skill?” Marcella was picking up a spoon to help herself to a bite of cheesecake.
“Well, he’s doing it for one of two reasons: one, he feels like he’s getting better and he wants to put himself to the test; two, he needs the money and he’s less worried about the chance of getting caught here than he is about being broke.”
“Desperation makes people do crazy things,” Frederick said.
“Like I said, I don’t paint him as violent. That’s no guarantee he won’t do something stupid, but like most burglars, he’s interested in keeping himself alive and out of trouble, not in hurting other people.” Denny could tell that Frederick was shaky. If anyone was more interested in self-preservation than von Schenck, it was Frederick.
Marcella finished her cheesecake and the rest of her wine. She flagged down the waiter for a check and leaned on her elbows.
“Let’s say we get in the room with von Schenck. He gives us the sample, like we want, and we take a sip. Obviously, we can’t lab test the wine right there, so it’ll be up to you to tell us what we’re dealing with. Is there anything you can tell us in a kind of code? Some tell that will let us know we’ve got him?”
Frederick scratched his chin. His eyes twinkled when the idea finally hit him.
“Yes. That’s perfect. The wine he’s presenting is a ’44 Michel de Saint Paul. In collector’s circles, it’s called ‘The God Wine’. It’s the last batch produced by the monks of the Saint Paul monastery, particularly, Pére Michel, the winemaster who had personally brought the monastery to prominence. The monastery was bombed by the Germans and the monks fled, eventually making their way to the Swiss Alps. Pére Michel stayed at the monastery until the bitter end. When they found him, his body was protecting a small collection of bottles, about twenty in all. Before the Germans could make off with their prize, the French Resistance and the Americans cornered them and took them all as POWs. The wine was collected by the Resistance, though two were taken by the assisting American soldiers. God knows what they did with them, probably pulled the corks with their teeth and slugged them down with some k-rations, the ingrates…”
“As much as I feel for Father Michel, could you tell me what that has to do with the plan?” Denny prompted.
“I was getting to that,” Frederick said wryly. “The wine that survived is described by those who’ve tasted it as the sweetest, purest wine they’ve ever had. It’s hearty, jammy, robust, playful…it’s a red wine lover’s dream. But one word they never use to describe it? ‘Oaky’.”
“Because they never used barrels?” Denny took a shot.
“Précisément!” Frederick exclaimed. “You don’t pick up the flavor of oak when your wine’s never touched a barrel. It was all aged in dark glass, deep down in the bowels of a monastery Hitler blew off the face of the earth. Sad fact: the war in that region was basically over, the bombing of the monastery is thought to be one last ‘Fuck You’ to the French.”
“May Hitler burn in Hell!” Marcella said, raising a glass.
“Yeah, Hell with Hitler!” Denny said, hoisting his coffee cup high.
“Amen to that!” Frederick chuckled. The three of them drank a toast to the death and eternal damnation of history’s greatest monster. None of the three seemed to mind any odd looks they may have been given.
Marcella and Denny went to the borrowed apartment and checked their phones for messages before preparing for bed. Denny lay still a while as he heard Marcella work her way through a business call or two, then heard her door click behind her as she went to bed. He got up and peeked from his door down the hallway to her room. The light under the door was soft and yellow, throwing long beams across the wooden floor. Go knock on the door and tell her goodnight. Tell her you appreciate her help. Touch her hand. Smell her hair. Rub your fingers up the small of her back.
Denny couldn’t tell which voice was compelling him to go try a hand at romance. Was it the devil that sat comfortably on his shoulder, often nudging him toward a bar? Was it God’s voice? Was it his own? Eventually, he pushed those thoughts out of his head and crawled back into the double bed in his room. Another night alone. Nothing new.
Marcella sat on the edge of her own mattress, waiting, hoping, that Denny might find some dumb excuse to knock on her door. When she heard his door click shut again, she simply doused the light and slid between the linen sheets. She didn’t go to sleep for a half hour, thinking about his clean, rounded fingernails, his funny smile, the way he smelled like soap. He’s born to be trouble, Mars. Let him be trouble and let you be you.
She repeated this to herself once or twice before finally letting her eyelids get heavy, taking an even breath, and plunging into sleep.
Tomorrow was the day. Tomorrow was the moment.
