Death of a Wine Merchant (18 page)

‘Francis, there’s a man behind us. I think he’s following you. He’s been behind us all the way from the railway station.
You can recognize him from the teeth, or rather the lack of them. He can’t be more than twenty-five but he’s hardly got any left. Teeth, I mean.’

‘Would you say,’ said Powerscourt, ‘that his intentions were friendly or unfriendly?’

‘Unfriendly, Francis, definitely unfriendly.’

‘I’d better see if I can give him the slip,’ said Powerscourt, peering about him for ways of escape. Years of experience told him that there was little point in waiting for meetings with unfriendly powers. ‘You stay put here, my love, no point in the two of us falling into enemy hands. If it takes some time I’ll see you back at the hotel. It’s just round the corner.’

Some ten feet to his left there was a large double door. One half of it was slightly ajar, as if people inside were trying to keep an eye on the auction. Firing a fusillade of
excusez-
moi
s and
pardon
s, Powerscourt slipped through the people in front of him and shot through the door. He disturbed a flock of nuns who had obviously taken temporary leave of their charges to watch the auction. He started to run. After a moment or two he heard another pair of boots behind him. He shot round a corner and almost collided with another nun, dressed in sober grey like the others, helping a man on crutches. Then round another corner and he was in one of the most extraordinary rooms he had ever seen. His impressions of the Grand Salle passed in a kaleidoscope of size and colour. An enormous room well over two hundred feet long. Fifty feet high and fifty feet wide. A great timber roof in the shape of an upturned keel. Gargoyles and monsters in green at the end of the beams. Ranged along the sides, fourteen to a row, long wooden compartments with beds covered in red blankets and white sheets, set back a couple of feet from the walls. In the beds, some sitting up, some asleep or dozing, some with their curtains drawn closed, the patients of the biggest ward of the Hospices de Beaune, the Salle des Pauvres, the Room of the Poor. Moving quietly around the
huge space, the nuns, one or two carrying medicines, others helping the sick to the bathrooms, the lucky ones waiting in attendance on the doctors who sat by their patients and reviewed their treatment. Powerscourt thought it was the most unlikely place for a chase he had ever been in. But the footsteps were behind him again. The nuns at the double doors couldn’t have held the man with no teeth up for very long. He shot behind the left-hand row of beds and tiptoed slowly up the ward. An elderly lady peered at him indignantly from what he thought must be bed number seven or eight and was about to speak when he held his fingers to his lips and made the sign of the cross. That seemed to keep her quiet for the time being. He heard the footsteps, slower now. A man with both arms in plaster turned slowly in his bed and stared at Powerscourt. Powerscourt resisted the urge to write another message on the man’s plaster and tiptoed on. Halfway up the line of beds there was a break and sufficient room to let Powerscourt or a nurse through into the main thoroughfare. He tiptoed quickly into the gap and wished he hadn’t.

The man following him was walking quite slowly up the Salle des Pauvres, peering behind the beds on either side. Powerscourt could stay where he was or he could run. He ran. He shot up to the ends of the row, behind the beds with the red blankets, inspected in astonishment by the patients, one reading her missal, another inspecting herself in a mirror, then out past a painting of the Last Judgement on his left and into the next ward. This was much smaller, with half a dozen beds and some very ill patients indeed. Two of them were chalky white in the face and looked as though they might not last the day. Two more were asleep or dead already. Powerscourt sprinted on. Advancing towards him now was an elderly nun in the regulation grey carrying a tray of medicines. The tray seemed to be rather large and she was holding it well in front of her. When she saw Powerscourt she opened her mouth as if she was going to speak or perhaps to scream. Then, almost
in slow motion, the tray slipped from her grasp and a whole flotilla of medicines fell to the floor, pills white and pills red, lotions, potions, mixtures, medicines of every shape and size. They slithered across the floor, forming a slippery sheet that might cause anybody coming her way to fall into this viscous soup of medicines. Powerscourt didn’t stop to find out if his pursuer retained his grip on the floor. He was almost through the next room which seemed to be filled with elderly women when he saw a phalanx of nursing power advancing towards him. In the lead, resplendent in white, was a formidable woman of about forty years of age. Powerscourt thought she must be a sister at least, maybe the Matron herself. She stared in disbelief at the running man come to invade her hospital and disturb the repose of her patients and then she began to speak in one of those imperious voices that have grown used to being obeyed.

‘What on earth do you think you are doing, charging round our hospital in this way?’ she began.

Powerscourt felt the time for serious discussion with nursing sisters or even Matrons was not now. Maybe another time.

‘Terribly sorry, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Chap following me, you see. Very bad teeth. Maybe you could do something for him now he’s here. Can’t stop at the moment. Terribly sorry.
Au
revoir
.’

And with that he was gone. He fled through a room where the walls were lined with tapestries and a sombre couple on the wall in Renaissance costume who were, he presumed, Chancellor Rolin and his wife, still keeping watch over their hospice after four hundred and fifty years. Behind him he could hear voices raised in anger. Maybe the man with no teeth had been arrested by the nursing sorority and was even now having his mouth examined. But he didn’t wait to find out. On he sprinted through the kitchens and here lay disaster. Lunch was being carried to the wards by a group of six nurses lining up two abreast to take delivery of the meals and carry the trays to the wards. Powerscourt noticed
that chicken with roast potatoes and vegetables was on the menu today for those with the will and the teeth to eat it. But there was scarcely any room to move past the nurses. A grey stove was in the way with a steaming double oven between him and the wall. This was no time for dignity, Powerscourt said to himself. There was only one way out. He dropped to the floor and crawled through between the legs of the nuns, reciting the Lord’s Prayer as he went. He thought it might provide a diversion and stop them screaming. It wasn’t completely successful. A volley of Hail Marys followed him out of the kitchen and into a corridor. He thought he might have come round in a circle and emerged on the other side of the courtyard. He could hear the noise of the auction growing louder, punctuated by the enormous bangs of the auctioneer’s gavel and the cheers of the crowd who might, he thought, have been sampling the wares on offer. One small room at the end that might have been an office was dominated by sacred paintings on the walls and a trio of nuns writing things in enormous dark ledgers at high desks. They too looked as if they were about to speak but they were too late. Powerscourt was already opening the door. I’m through, he said to himself. Whatever was going on with that toothless youth is over. I can find Lucy at the hotel and we can do what we came for.

But Powerscourt was not through. He came out at the very back of the courtyard, closest to the door into the street. He couldn’t see Lady Lucy. The crowd were concentrating on the auction, many of them rather tipsy by now. He hadn’t known it but he was up against two or maybe more enemies on this day. As he emerged, blinking slightly in the sunshine, an enormous man seized him by the arm. Looking at him for the first time Powerscourt thought he was shaped exactly like a barrel with an enormous chest. He could have done sterling work in the front row of a rugby scrum. Powerscourt wondered if he had in fact been manufactured by some master cooper in his quarters in Santenay or Pommard and brought to life by the patron saints of Burgundy.

‘You’re to come with me,’ said the barrel, ‘and don’t make any trouble.’ Powerscourt felt what he presumed was the point of a knife jabbing into his ribs. He knew he could never win in a fight with this man. He would be crushed. As he was guided out of the courtyard he wondered where they were taking him.

Lady Lucy felt rather lonely when her husband disappeared through the double doors. She watched as the man with no teeth set off in pursuit. At this stage she was not particularly worried. She had seen Francis go off so often on strange missions but he always returned. She wished Johnny Fitzgerald was with him. He always served as guardian angel on these occasions. She had two indices of anxiety that she carried with her. One was the level of danger for Francis, rated on a scale of one to ten. Today in Beaune didn’t count for much more than a two or a three. There was another index, totally out of her control. This was the knot of anxiety that formed in her stomach when she felt he was really in peril. It grew tighter and tighter when she was really scared for him. So far the knot had not put in an appearance. There was another reason for feeling lonely here in the beautiful courtyard. Most of these people were countrymen. Their hands were calloused from working in the fields or hauling bottles and barrels around the cellars and the storerooms of Burgundy. There were one or two more sophisticated clients here, men in elegant suits with buttonholes who might have come from Paris or Lyon to bid for the great hotels and restaurants. But they were all male. The voices of the suffragettes and the marching protesters demanding equal rights for women did not seem to have reached Beaune yet. Everybody here this morning was male, every last one of them. As the shouts of the bidders grew louder and traded insults with their rivals, Lady Lucy slipped away to their hotel, the Ducs de Bourgogne tucked away in a little square
a couple of hundred yards away. Francis would find her there.

Powerscourt was pleased to see, but did not show his pleasure, that the man with no teeth, who he now gathered was called Jean Jacques, must have fallen foul of the nurse with the medicines back at the hotel. His trousers were stained in a strange medley of colours, red and green and a chalky white. A strange smell, a compound of dispensary and chemical factory, rose from them. And he must have twisted his leg as he fell, for he was limping painfully. Powerscourt thought of suggesting that he should have stayed in the hospital but thought better of it.

They were joined by a third man, in his early thirties, with a mean face and a vivid scar on his right cheek. The others referred to him as boss at all times. Powerscourt felt sure that his rule was maintained through fear rather than brotherly love. ‘We’re taking him to the barn first of all,’ he said. The two others, No Teeth and Barrel as Powerscourt mentally referred to them, maintained a discreet guard through the streets of Beaune. Powerscourt noticed that one enterprising wine merchant had already filled his windows with bottles whose labels had Hospices de Beaune on the top with the titles of the particular wines, Corton Charlemagne or Beaune, underneath. The citizens, barred from the auction by the high entry fee or the lack of space, were making up for their loss in the shop, carrying off bottles by the dozen in enormous panniers on the front of their bicycles.

They were on the very outskirts of the town when Scarface took them off the main road and on to a little track that led through the fields. Half a mile away there was a farmhouse with an enormous barn fifty yards or so behind it. Just inside the doorway they halted while instructions were given. In the shadows at the back of the barn Powerscourt could see a very strange device. It was very old and looked as though it
had survived from some earlier times. It was in the shape of an H or the goal posts at rugby except that the section above the cross bar was quite short and there was another beam of the same size just above the ground. And the beams were far thicker. At the top was a long beam, six or seven feet long and three or four feet wide. This beam was attached to the lower one, of similar size, running along the bottom of the H. Linked to the two vertical columns that joined the top and bottom were a series of short wooden arms that could be used to raise and lower the upper beam until it could touch the lower one if required.

‘
Pressoir
!’ said Barrel with a note of reverence. ‘
Ancien pres
soir! Formidable
!’

Then Powerscourt understood and he was terrified. The device must have been used to press the juice out of the grapes in the olden times. The grapes would have been held in some sort of container, probably made of cloth rather than wood, and arranged on the lowest horizontal beam. The top section would be lowered further and further down to crush the fruit until all the juice was extracted. There must have been a series of buckets or other containers by the sides to hold the grape juice. Or, in a less peaceful world, a man could be squeezed or pressed between the two beams until all the blood had run out of his body.

‘Tie him up,’ said Scarface. ‘On the lower beam, naturally.’

In less than a minute Powerscourt found himself lying on the bottom beam, secured to the contraption with thick rope. He wondered what they proposed to do with the upper beam. He did not have long to wait. There was a series of grunts and curses as the two men tried to work the levers that would lower the upper section.

‘They’re stuck,’ said Jean Jacques. ‘Nobody’s oiled the damned things for a couple of hundred years.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Barrel, ‘they were working earlier this summer. Damn it, I saw them myself.’

With that he gave a tremendous heave. Powerscourt could
see the muscles straining in his face. With a thick squeak the left-hand lever began to work. Looking at the beam descending towards him Powerscourt began to pray. Then, as if working in sympathy, the other one limped slowly into action. The two men looked on as the upper section of the press grew closer and closer to Powerscourt’s chest.

‘Hey, boss,’ said Barrel cheerfully, ‘do you want any juice this morning?’