Sweet Bergamasque
Chapter 1
Monpazier, August 1948
Jean-Marc did not realise that he had been followed as he pressed Patrice roughly against the cool stone of Monpazier’s vaulted arcade. He could smell the crisp minerality of the ancient limestone despite Patrice’s sweaty gasps, heavy with garlic and alcohol.
“What the hell are you doing?” Patrice cried out. The baguette he was holding fell and rolled on the paving, leaving a spray of crumbs.
Jean-Marc thrust the pistol harder into his victim’s back, feeling the silencer slide off a rib as Patrice flinched and inhaled sharply. “I have been looking for you for years, you traitor,” Jean-Marc hissed into the unwashed locks of Patrice’s black hair, reeking of Gauloises smoke.
Behind them, projected onto a large makeshift screen, flickering images of Bogart and Bergman captivated the audience gathered in the market square around picnic baskets stocked with bread, cheese and wine as they watched Casablanca under a moonless sky. Having not long before started the second reel on the GBN projector beneath the central market stalls, Jean-Marc knew he had just ten minutes to conclude his business before the next reel change would be due. It was not good form to keep an audience waiting, as he had learnt to his cost when the film had broken during Le Colonel Chabert in Issigeac the previous summer. Enjoying the spectacle was all well and good, but the paying audience demanded a hefty measure of professional attentiveness from his travelling Fauvette Cinema plein air.
“What do you want?” Patrice said.
Jean-Marc tensed his body and leaned into his victim. “Revenge, you bastard. This is for Monique.”
Patrice tried to look around nervously, the deep creases in his brow briefly evident, illuminated by Rick Blaine’s white suit glowing brightly from the screen as Humphrey Bogart’s voice vibrated across the medieval bastide town.
At the sound of a click from the pistol Patrice’s eyes widened suddenly and his mouth fell open slackly. “I didn’t do anything to Monique,” he protested, raising his hands helplessly against the limestone wall, dirty fingernails splayed.
“The hell you didn’t, you killed her – all of you – killed her!” Jean-Marc felt himself grimace, baring his teeth like a predator preparing to strike.
Patrice seemed frozen against the stone, unsure what to say, swallowing, blinking rapidly. Jean-Marc glanced around at the screen to see Bogart talking to Claude Rains. There wasn’t much time before he would need to make the next reel change.
“I didn’t kill her, I swear!”
“No, you got the Germans to do it for you, didn’t you?” hissed Jean-Marc.
“No!”
“Goodbye, Patrice,” Jean-Marc whispered icily.
“No, wait!”
As Jean-Marc’s finger tightened against the scored surface of the trigger he felt something hard press against his spine.
“You are under arrest, Monsieur Valadie. Give me your weapon,” said an assured, husky female voice.
Jean-Marc froze and turned his head, pressing his pistol ever more firmly into Patrice to discourage any attempts at escape. “You?” Jean-Marc gasped, surprise rippling through his body as he recognised the intruder. “Who the hell are you?”
Patrice breathed in rapid, shallow gasps, sweat beading on his skin, his eyes wide and frightened.
“I am Inspecteur Balletty from the Sûreté in Paris. I have been on your trail for months, monsieur, and I am placing you under arrest, Jean-Marc Valadie, on suspicion of the murders of Anton Caumont, Nicolas Renard, Gregoire Sabron and Louis Lafargue, not to mention the attempted murder of this gentleman, whose name I do not know.”
Patrice emitted an anguished wheeze. “It was you who killed all of them?” he said. “In God’s name, why, Jean-Marc?”
Jean-Marc laughed derisively. “You know perfectly well. Revenge, my old comrade, for what you all did to Monique.”
“No! You have got it wrong,” Patrice said, his voice rising in desperation.
“Monique was executed, that’s what I know, and it was you and all of them, my so-called friends, who were responsible. You betrayed her to les Boches.”
“Jean-Marc, listen…”
“How could you?” Jean-Marc hissed, grinding his teeth. “Was it because she loved me and not you?”
“Monsieur Valadie!” Balletty said firmly. “This is your last warning.”
“Enough!” Jean-Marc shouted. “It ends, now.”
He felt Balletty’s pistol press into his back even harder. “Monsieur, give me your gun and I will not have to shoot you,” she said in a calm but firm voice, leaving Jean-Marc in absolutely no doubt about her conviction. “The epuration legale is a matter for the police, not vigilantes.”
Behind them the screen blazed brilliant white as the film reel ended abruptly. People stood up and began to whistle, turning their heads left and right as they called out.
“The reel has ended, I have to change it,” Jean-Marc urged, craning his neck to meet Balletty’s eyes.
“Give me your gun, monsieur.”
Jean-Marc breathed hard and swallowed ineffectually, his mouth dry and sticky. “This is absurd,” he protested, briefly lifting his left arm off Patrice in a frustrated gesture.
“Not from where I am standing, monsieur. Now, very slowly, give me your—”
A loud explosion burst in Jean-Marc’s ears, echoing around the Place des Cornières.
Chapter 2
June 1940
Gathered around the wooden kitchen table on which the black Bakelite Radiophone Français took centre stage, Jean-Marc, his wife Isabelle and their son Claude listened intently. The unhurried flicker of an amber candle flame reflected on their taut faces was the only suggestion of animation. Crumbs were scattered across the table, vestiges of a meal long forgotten, eaten during a time of peace and normality, well before the impossible news had shattered their lives.
Jean-Marc listened to the tense voice on the radio, distorted by static interference, relaying news of the German Wehrmacht having crossed the Maginot Line, the French army in disarray, tens of thousands dead, hundreds of thousands more taken prisoner. The drôle de guerre was finally over. It was all over. Jean-Marc’s hands were clasped together tightly, digging dirty fingernails into his knuckles. Isabelle held one hand up to her pale face most of the time, except when she occasionally touched her forehead with a trembling finger and swept back tousled locks of auburn hair. Claude nursed a thirteen-year-old’s glum stare, biting the inside of his cheek, a pimple on his nose glistening like a volcano in the candlelight.
“Mon Dieu,” Jean-Marc said every few minutes, his lips barely moving.
Claude’s eyes flicked apprehensively to his father, whose calloused hands covered his unshaven face, and then flicked back to the radio. The Germans were advancing on Paris and it was estimated that millions of ordinary French people were already on the move in a mass exodus heading south.
Isabelle made a strange little whimpering sound and Jean-Marc looked up at her sharply, conscious of the boy’s bewildered eyes beside them. The broadcast ended and the strained sounds of La Marseillaise filled the tense silence. Jean-Marc lit a Gauloises and dropped the extinguished match onto the table as blueish smoke curled around his face. He leaned back in his wooden chair, which creaked like the remnants of the free French republic.
“What will happen, Papa?” Claude asked. The boy looked ashen.
Jean-Marc leaned forward and turned the radio off. He shrugged as he blew smoke out through his nose and mouth. “I don’t know, my boy. But you must not worry, we will be safe down here in Bordeaux. They are not interested in us.” Jean-Marc tried to sound reassuring.
“How can you say that?” Isabelle said, her face twisted as though in pain, her head angled to one side, glaring at Jean-Marc accusingly.
Jean-Marc glanced at his son, whose concern boiled over in his eyes, and shook his head just a fraction, as if to say, Not in front of the boy.
“Look at what they are doing to the Jews in Germany, look at what happened in Berlin. Now that they have invaded we are not safe anywhere in France!” Isabelle was becoming hysterical, her eyes widening like a cow with bloat.
“Do you want to go up to bed, Claude?” Jean-Marc said quietly, placing a hand on the boy’s shoulder.
“No, Papa. I want to know what is going to happen,” he said, his chin trembling. “We will be alright, won’t we?”
“We have to leave,” Isabelle said, panic in her eyes as she looked from Jean-Marc to Claude and back again.
Jean-Marc exhaled in disbelief, his hands grasping at the air around him. “And go where, Isabelle? Take Claude and little Odette out of their home, onto the road. Where to, huh?”
Isabelle stared back, wide-eyed. “I don’t know – Spain? I have a cousin…”
Jean-Marc leaned back and made a guttural sound, drawing on his Gauloises. He stared at his wife and shook his head.
“And what of the vineyards, mmmh?” He swept an arm around, leaving a circular trail of cigarette smoke hanging in the air. “This was my father’s land, my father’s father’s, and his father before him. It is our home, Isabelle, it is our livelihood.”
Jean-Marc and Isabelle glowered at each other, he with a smoking Gauloises clasped in front of his face, she with her chest heaving and her moist, bulging eyes seemingly at bursting point.
“Will the Germans kill us?” Claude asked.
“No,” Jean-Marc said quickly, turning to the boy. “They will not.”
Isabelle bit her knuckles and wailed. “These are your children, Jean-Marc. Would you risk their lives so glibly?”
He leaned forward. “We have nothing, Isabelle – the last nine summers have been so poor nobody is buying our wine. We need this vintage to turn it around. The spring has been good, the vines are healthy and full of promise. What would you have me do? Abandon the grapes on the vines now? Flee with nothing but the clothes on our backs?”
Isabelle glared back at him.
“Please don’t fight,” Claude whimpered, on the verge of tears.
“I am not going to wait until the Germans are here in the streets and we have to hide like animals. I am leaving with our children, going somewhere safe,” Isabelle declared, pushing her chair back to stand up.
“No, Mama, please,” Claude wailed, tears streaming down his face, looking to his father for intervention.
Jean-Marc pressed a balled fist against his mouth, staring at the flickering candle. Merde. What a mess this was. Unbelievable. He had been Claude’s age when war had broken out last time – the war to end all wars – and yet now, just twenty-six years on, it was happening all over again.
“Can we just sleep on this and see what happens tomorrow?” Jean-Marc pleaded in a subdued voice. “Maybe the English—”
“Maybe the English!” Isabelle scoffed. “Open your eyes, Jean-Marc. You are a Jew in a Europe now controlled by the Germans. First it was Czechoslovakia, then Poland, then Denmark, then Norway, and now it is France.” She paused, her chest heaving with vented emotion. “We must leave, for the children’s sake, can you not see that?”
Jean-Marc stared at his wife and son. Did they know what they were asking of him? The Valadie family had made wine on this sacred land outside Saint-Émilion for two hundred years. One did not scamper away from this like a frightened dog. The Valadies had stayed on through the Great War and he would do the same again now.
“They are not even in Paris yet, Isabelle. They may never come this far south.” Jean-Marc spoke softly, as though trying to convince himself as much as her.
“What will they do to Jews?” Claude asked, strings of mucous now hanging beneath each nostril.
Isabelle moved over to embrace her son, encouraging him from his chair, glowering at Jean-Marc. “Nothing, my boy, you will be safe in Spain – far away from the Germans,” she said.
Jean-Marc lowered his head and sighed.
“We leave in the morning,” Isabelle announced before marching out of the room with Claude under her protective wing.
Claude turned to look at Jean-Marc, tears in his puffy eyes. How does one explain war and hate to a boy? Jean-Marc thought. How does one explain love and devotion to one’s land and vineyards, the heritage that runs in a family like blood in one’s veins, only thicker, sweeter?
As though sensing his master’s torment, the brown Basset Hound that had been lying in front of the crackling hearth clipped its way over to Jean-Marc and began to lick his hand where it hung limply off the end of the armrest.
He stroked the dog’s head for several minutes, staring expressionlessly at the quivering candle flame, then picked up the pewter candleholder and walked through to the salon where he placed it on top of the grand piano. Jean-Marc stood beside it without moving, reaching out to trace a finger along the copper inlay set into plum pudding mahogany. The inconsistent candlelight revealed its boxy outline atop intricately turned and carved legs, standing like ballerinas on brass castors.
Sitting down at the keys he stared at the faded gold leaf Pleyel lettering and then began to play Debussy’s Clair de Lune, sorrowfully, slowly, pausing often; his thick, dirty fingers producing surprisingly delicate and melancholic cadences. His dog sat beside him quietly, his tail swishing on the oak flooring. How could he leave all this behind? This piano was nearly as old as Château Cardinale itself, bought by his great-grandfather Ignace when Cardinale’s wines were the toast of high society and money flowed decadently.
Isabelle’s words echoed in his ears: We leave in the morning. He stopped playing. How could this be happening? Yesterday life was idyllically normal; tomorrow… He shut his eyes.
Chapter 3
One week later
Jean-Marc paused as he gently fondled the fragile new vine shoots between calloused fingers. The air was perfumed with the optimism of new growth, of strawberries at the end of each row, of a new season’s harvest in its infancy, fuelled by warm days and mild nights. Pulling out a pair of secateurs from the depths of earth-stained, capacious trousers, he began to clip off the excess growth at the tips, cutting back twenty, thirty, sometimes even forty millimetres, as his experience suggested. He worked mechanically, willing his thoughts away from his family: where were they, were they safe?
The dog was lying at his feet, facing the sunshine, panting as though he had been chasing a rabbit. Suddenly his ears pricked up and he closed his mouth, turned his head and appeared to focus his eyes.
Jean-Marc glanced down at his dog. “What is it, Pascal? Do you smell something?”
The dog looked at him and sat up, emitting a rumbling sound from his throat. Jean-Marc cast a perfunctory look across the expanse of his vineyards and continued to prune. Then, moments later, he heard the sound of horses’ hooves. He recognised the horse long before the rider, who waved from a distance. It was someone from his neighbour’s property, Château Millandes. Jean-Marc’s distance vision was poor. It ran in his family but he never bothered with glasses because all his work was at arm’s length.
“Jean-Marc!” called the rider.
Dropping the secateurs into his baggy trousers, Jean-Marc petted Pascal and rubbed his ears. The dog licked him enthusiastically. As the rider neared Jean-Marc finally saw who it was. “Bonjour, Gregoire. What brings you over here?”
Gregoire dismounted and pulled the reins down over the horse’s head. He was young, puce-faced, the heir to Château Millandes, ink-black hair as wiry as a Quercy sheep. “Your vines look good,” Gregoire said, fingering the foliage as he approached. “We have been lucky, eh? No frosts, no pests.”
“Yet,” Jean-Marc retorted.
Gregoire chuckled. “God surely will not serve us with a summer like last year – again. Even He likes good wine, don’t you think?”
“Your father lets you ride his horse?” Jean-Marc remarked, gesticulating towards the chestnut stallion.
Gregoire planted his hands on his hips and contemplated Jean-Marc. Both men wore soiled dark trousers held aloft by braces over loose-fitting linen shirts, heavy leather boots on their feet. But Gregoire wore something else: the superiority of the heir apparent.
“Something has happened, Jean-Marc. My father wants to speak to you.”
“What is it?” Jean-Marc said quickly, placing both hands on the taut wire used to train the shooting vines, Guyot-style.
“He will tell you. Come over when you have cleaned up.” Gregoire paused, casting an eye across Jean-Marc’s vineyards. “Have lunch with us,” he said, turning back to Jean-Marc and then studying the vines beside him. “Are you not trimming back too much so early?”
Jean-Marc bristled. Gregoire might well come from Château Millandes, but he had been pruning vines on his property since the boy was in nappies. “Tell your father I will be there at one o’clock,” he said irritably, returning his attention to the vines.
“Doesn’t Isabelle usually help you with the pruning?” Gregoire said once he had mounted the horse.
Jean-Marc looked up cautiously and stroked his bushy moustache. “She is not here today.”
Jean-Marc walked over to Château Millandes with Pascal following him eagerly. Millandes adjoined his land and it was quicker and more pleasant to walk through his vineyards to access it than to take the Renault out onto the road. Château Millandes was grand by Bordeaux standards: a double-storeyed stone house with gabling, wrought iron balconies and clusters of chimneys, quaintly wrapped in a tangle of colourful ivy. Around the cobbled courtyard numerous outbuildings complimented the main house’s imposing character. Much to Jean-Marc’s chagrin, Château Millandes had been widely tipped for impending Grand Cru status by the Syndicat Viticole in 1930, enabling his neighbour to capitalise on the publicity and demand a higher price for his wines. As he cast his eyes about enviously the benefit of money was evident wherever he looked.
“Jean-Marc!” A portly man with meaty forearms and warm brown eyes, full around the midriff, tousled grey hair and matching moustache, walked towards Jean-Marc, his cream linen shirt unbuttoned enough to reveal a chest of silver hair.
“Alphonse,” Jean-Marc returned with restrained warmth.
The two men embraced and kissed on each cheek. Alphonse smiled and pointed to Pascal. “Do you go anywhere without that dog?”
“What has happened?” Jean-Marc asked.
Alphonse wrapped an arm around Jean-Marc’s shoulders and guided him into the château. Pascal followed, his claws clipping the cobbles, tail wagging contentedly.
“As if enough has not happened,” Alphonse said, twirling his free arm in the air. “It is enough to make a grown man weep.”
“Twice in one lifetime is too much,” Jean-Marc said, glancing around at Alphonse’s fine mahogany furnishings and painted cream walls.
“We are sounding like our grandparents, aren’t we?” Alphonse said, attempting levity. “Do you remember Federico and Angelica Masi?”
Jean-Marc detected the seductive aromas of freshly prepared food within the château: onion and lemon and coriander. His stomach rumbled. He had not eaten a square meal in days and Alphonse was always a good host. “Winemakers from Tuscany?” Jean-Marc ventured.
Alphonse nodded, but sombrely. He sighed. “They are here with me.”
“Why?”
Alphonse stopped, just paces away from the stone patio that nestled beyond French doors where Jean-Marc could see the elderly Italian couple talking to Marthe, Alphonse’s wife, and his two sons, Gregoire and Olivier. He looked into Jean-Marc’s eyes intensely for a moment, long enough to unsettle Jean-Marc.
“You will want to hear what Federico has to say, my friend,” Alphonse said before making a grand entrance onto the patio, pleasantly shaded beneath a venerably gnarled mauve wisteria.
After formalities Alphonse lavished them with goblets of his blood-red Grand Vin as conversation covered the promising spring bloom, the fruiting of the vines and hopes for a good summer. Inevitably talk drifted towards the humiliation of defeat at the hands of the Germans. They bemoaned the politicians who would not take responsibility. Alphonse showed them an editorial in Le Figaro ridiculing the French response to attack.
“Listen to this,” Alphonse said, folding the broadsheet into a square on the table. “The soldiers blamed their officers; the officers pointed the finger at politicians; the Left blamed the Right and the Right blamed the Left.” He shook his head. “Marshal Pétain blamed the Popular Front, who blamed the military. Many blamed the Communists and they all blamed the Fascists – and the Fascists blamed the Jews.”
Federico sighed heavily when he heard this. “Just like Mussolini in Italy.”
They ate freshly baked fougasse, duck liver, and wild mushroom omelettes, all washed down with quantities of Alphonse’s delicious Grand Vin 1928. One thing they all agreed about: Bordeaux badly needed another vintage to match that one.
“These are the last of my ʼ28s,” Alphonse announced to murmurs of dismay. “I still have more, but I have hidden the rest behind false walls in the caves.”
Jean-Marc stared at Alphonse. “Why?”
“Have you not heard the stories of looting and theft by the Wehrmacht?” Alphonse said bitterly.
Jean-Marc felt his mouth dry up and quickly gulped at his wine.
“In Champagne they behaved like hooligans, plundering cellars and feasting like drunken teenagers. In Paris they have emptied entire wine stocks from the top restaurants, all those not quick enough to hide their best wines. The same down through the Loire and Burgundy. We have everything to fear, Jean-Marc, and I am calling a meeting of all local vignerons to warn them.”
Jean-Marc felt nauseous, Isabelle’s prophetic warning now ringing in his ears. “I will brick in my ʼ28s as well.” He wiped his hand across his moustache. “Even my ʼ34s, they are probably worth protecting.”
“I have done the same,” Alphonse concurred. “Nothing else worth hiding from the ʼ30s. If you have anything older, the ʼ26 or ʼ24, hide them too.”
“No,” Jean-Marc said, unable to stop himself from looking down. His wines did not keep quite as well as Alphonse’s.
“But leave a few bottles from the good vintages out, so as not to arouse too much suspicion.” Alphonse shrugged and made a face. “And don’t forget, you must cover the new wall with spiders to make cobwebs. Gregoire and Olivier collected dozens of spiders and they have already spun webs all over the fresh brickwork.” Alphonse chuckled. “It looks so old now, as if it’s always been there.”
Jean-Marc stared open-mouthed at Alphonse as his two boys sniggered like adolescents. Olivier was barely out of school, still lanky and undeveloped, always to Jean-Marc’s mind copying his older brother.
“We also piled firewood against the new wall, don’t forget that – anything to make it seem old and permanent.”
“Is this really necessary?” Jean-Marc said sceptically, thinking of all the work that lay ahead of him.
Alphonse leaned forward and placed an elbow on the starched white tablecloth. “Do you want les Boches to walk in and take your best wines, to loot your hard-earned cellars as they have the great Champagne houses?” Alphonse paused and raised an index finger. “And another thing, Jean-Marc: you need to think about Isabelle and the children.”
Jean-Marc clenched his teeth. Was Alphonse now to tell him what to do with his family as well? Was it not enough that he already basked in the promise of Grand Cru status? Beneath the table Jean-Marc passed pieces of liver to Pascal, who licked them out of his hand with a warm, wet tongue. “What of them?” he said, irritably.
“Listen to what Federico has to say,” Alphonse replied, leaning back in his creaking chair as he folded his arms.
Federico, wearing a straw Panama hat over grey hair, bushy eyebrows and a pressed black suit, his olive skin lined and worn by the Tuscan sun, told them how Mussolini was persecuting the Jews in Italy. Ever since Kristallnacht, Jews in vulnerable countries were fleeing for their lives. With tears pooling in his veined eyes he described his heartbreaking decision to abandon their vineyards around the medieval hilltop town of San Gimignano, with berries already formed on the vines, as the Fascist and anti-Semitic grip tightened on Italy. After a bracing gulp of wine he faced Jean-Marc and told him that he feared the German occupation would visit the same persecution on France.
“You abandoned your vineyards?” Jean-Marc said in disbelief.
Federico nodded, his face melancholy and drawn. “I have loved and tended those vines since I was a boy beside my father. To leave them was the hardest thing… I have ever done.”
Angelica placed a gnarled hand on top of his and squeezed until her knuckles blanched. She began to weep into her starched napkin and Jean-Marc, regretting his choice of the word ‘abandoned’, feared that Federico might cry too.
“You should take your family away from here,” Alphonse said, “to safety.”
Jean-Marc hesitated, fearing judgement from his friends, unsure now whether he had made the right decision with regard to his family. Vivid reminders of that final emotive exchange with Isabelle surfaced suddenly, like rising vomit.
“I do not know where she is,” Jean-Marc mumbled, searching blindly beneath the table for the warmth and comfort of Pascal’s muzzle. “She has gone.”
Alphonse’s face slackened. “And Claude, Odette?” he asked, leaning forward, frowning.
“She has taken them with her,” Jean-Marc said without looking up.
Gregoire and Olivier straightened and Jean-Marc did not miss the exchanged glance, as if to say, I knew it, as though they had placed a wager on it.
Alphonse creased his face. “Where has she gone?”
“I don’t know,” Jean-Marc sighed. “She spoke of Spain.”
“When?”
“The day after the Germans invaded.”
“You should have gone with them, my friend,” Federico said. “She was right to fear.”
“But les Boches are not even in Bordeaux,” Jean-Marc protested.
Alphonse blew air through his lips. “They will be by the end of the week from what I hear. I have spoken to Rothschild.”
Jean-Marc unfurled his hands briefly, suppressing the urge to say, ‘So what?’
“He knows Marshal Pétain,” Alphonse said.
Jean-Marc bristled at the glib mention of Bordeaux’s elite circles that Alphonse now frequented while he himself merely looked in from the outside, from a humbler social circle.
“We are not going to be spared any of the occupation’s miseries,” Alphonse continued. “It’s all about collaboration now.”
Jean-Marc felt his blood pounding in his ears, and both hated Isabelle for being so right, and regretted not believing her sooner. “What did Rothschild say?” he asked.
“He asked Pétain to intervene in the persecution and detention of French Jews in Paris, to negotiate a settlement for them as French citizens,” Alphonse began, pausing as the silence around the table lengthened. In the background a clock chimed pointlessly.
“And?” Federico prompted.
“Pétain said he could not.”
“Che palle!” Federico said in dismay, rubbing his worn face roughly, stretching the skin away from his bleary eyes. “Now that France has fallen Hitler controls all of Europe. He will hunt down the Jews here too.”
Angelica’s eyes brimmed with tears again and Federico placed a consoling hand over hers. Jean-Marc replayed Isabelle’s words over and over in his mind. He had not wanted to believe her; for that matter he still did not want to believe Federico. It was surely just the usual rumours and rhetoric. After all, nothing had happened yet.
Alphonse looked up with heavy eyes, directing his gaze towards Jean-Marc. “You should get out, my friend.”
“I cannot go now,” Jean-Marc said. “I will not abandon our family vineyards to les Boches. This vintage will be good, I feel it, and I need it to save the farm. If I go now I will have nothing. Cardinale will be ruined.”
“You will have your life, and your family,” Alphonse said. “You can always start again.”
Jean-Marc put his glass down on the table. His appetite, even for the delicious 1928 Château Millandes Grand Vin, had expired. Looking down, he was met by Pascal’s liquid eyes and nuzzling wet nose.
“I will hide if necessary. I have a cellar under the house.” Jean-Marc paused. “Isabelle will be safe with the children, I’m sure, and return when the war is over.” Jean-Marc was aware of Alphonse exchanging looks of disapproval with Marthe and Federico. “What about you, Federico?” Jean-Marc challenged, meeting the old man’s judgmental gaze. “Where will you go?”
Alphonse got up to refill glasses and Marthe offered an olive-wood platter of cheeses, aromatically perfect at room temperature.
“I am going to shelter Federico and Angelica in my caves. I have miles of tunnels with wine, barrels, equipment and so on stored in them,” Alphonse said. “There is plenty of room for you too, Jean-Marc, and Pascal.” He glanced down at the dog pressed against Jean-Marc’s thigh.
Downing the last of his wine, Jean-Marc stood up suddenly. He felt disorientated for a moment, conscious of all eyes staring at him.
“Thank you for a delightful lunch, Marthe, très bien, but I have much work to do in my vineyard.” He called the dog. “Come, Pascal, we must go now.”
“Wednesday night, Jean-Marc, 6pm,” Alphonse called after him. “Rothschild asked me to call a meeting in the Mairie in Saint-Émilion. Tell everyone you see.”
Chapter 1
Monpazier, August 1948
Jean-Marc did not realise that he had been followed as he pressed Patrice roughly against the cool stone of Monpazier’s vaulted arcade. He could smell the crisp minerality of the ancient limestone despite Patrice’s sweaty gasps, heavy with garlic and alcohol.
“What the hell are you doing?” Patrice cried out. The baguette he was holding fell and rolled on the paving, leaving a spray of crumbs.
Jean-Marc thrust the pistol harder into his victim’s back, feeling the silencer slide off a rib as Patrice flinched and inhaled sharply. “I have been looking for you for years, you traitor,” Jean-Marc hissed into the unwashed locks of Patrice’s black hair, reeking of Gauloises smoke.
Behind them, projected onto a large makeshift screen, flickering images of Bogart and Bergman captivated the audience gathered in the market square around picnic baskets stocked with bread, cheese and wine as they watched Casablanca under a moonless sky. Having not long before started the second reel on the GBN projector beneath the central market stalls, Jean-Marc knew he had just ten minutes to conclude his business before the next reel change would be due. It was not good form to keep an audience waiting, as he had learnt to his cost when the film had broken during Le Colonel Chabert in Issigeac the previous summer. Enjoying the spectacle was all well and good, but the paying audience demanded a hefty measure of professional attentiveness from his travelling Fauvette Cinema plein air.
“What do you want?” Patrice said.
Jean-Marc tensed his body and leaned into his victim. “Revenge, you bastard. This is for Monique.”
Patrice tried to look around nervously, the deep creases in his brow briefly evident, illuminated by Rick Blaine’s white suit glowing brightly from the screen as Humphrey Bogart’s voice vibrated across the medieval bastide town.
At the sound of a click from the pistol Patrice’s eyes widened suddenly and his mouth fell open slackly. “I didn’t do anything to Monique,” he protested, raising his hands helplessly against the limestone wall, dirty fingernails splayed.
“The hell you didn’t, you killed her – all of you – killed her!” Jean-Marc felt himself grimace, baring his teeth like a predator preparing to strike.
Patrice seemed frozen against the stone, unsure what to say, swallowing, blinking rapidly. Jean-Marc glanced around at the screen to see Bogart talking to Claude Rains. There wasn’t much time before he would need to make the next reel change.
“I didn’t kill her, I swear!”
“No, you got the Germans to do it for you, didn’t you?” hissed Jean-Marc.
“No!”
“Goodbye, Patrice,” Jean-Marc whispered icily.
“No, wait!”
As Jean-Marc’s finger tightened against the scored surface of the trigger he felt something hard press against his spine.
“You are under arrest, Monsieur Valadie. Give me your weapon,” said an assured, husky female voice.
Jean-Marc froze and turned his head, pressing his pistol ever more firmly into Patrice to discourage any attempts at escape. “You?” Jean-Marc gasped, surprise rippling through his body as he recognised the intruder. “Who the hell are you?”
Patrice breathed in rapid, shallow gasps, sweat beading on his skin, his eyes wide and frightened.
“I am Inspecteur Balletty from the Sûreté in Paris. I have been on your trail for months, monsieur, and I am placing you under arrest, Jean-Marc Valadie, on suspicion of the murders of Anton Caumont, Nicolas Renard, Gregoire Sabron and Louis Lafargue, not to mention the attempted murder of this gentleman, whose name I do not know.”
Patrice emitted an anguished wheeze. “It was you who killed all of them?” he said. “In God’s name, why, Jean-Marc?”
Jean-Marc laughed derisively. “You know perfectly well. Revenge, my old comrade, for what you all did to Monique.”
“No! You have got it wrong,” Patrice said, his voice rising in desperation.
“Monique was executed, that’s what I know, and it was you and all of them, my so-called friends, who were responsible. You betrayed her to les Boches.”
“Jean-Marc, listen…”
“How could you?” Jean-Marc hissed, grinding his teeth. “Was it because she loved me and not you?”
“Monsieur Valadie!” Balletty said firmly. “This is your last warning.”
“Enough!” Jean-Marc shouted. “It ends, now.”
He felt Balletty’s pistol press into his back even harder. “Monsieur, give me your gun and I will not have to shoot you,” she said in a calm but firm voice, leaving Jean-Marc in absolutely no doubt about her conviction. “The epuration legale is a matter for the police, not vigilantes.”
Behind them the screen blazed brilliant white as the film reel ended abruptly. People stood up and began to whistle, turning their heads left and right as they called out.
“The reel has ended, I have to change it,” Jean-Marc urged, craning his neck to meet Balletty’s eyes.
“Give me your gun, monsieur.”
Jean-Marc breathed hard and swallowed ineffectually, his mouth dry and sticky. “This is absurd,” he protested, briefly lifting his left arm off Patrice in a frustrated gesture.
“Not from where I am standing, monsieur. Now, very slowly, give me your—”
A loud explosion burst in Jean-Marc’s ears, echoing around the Place des Cornières.
Chapter 2
June 1940
Gathered around the wooden kitchen table on which the black Bakelite Radiophone Français took centre stage, Jean-Marc, his wife Isabelle and their son Claude listened intently. The unhurried flicker of an amber candle flame reflected on their taut faces was the only suggestion of animation. Crumbs were scattered across the table, vestiges of a meal long forgotten, eaten during a time of peace and normality, well before the impossible news had shattered their lives.
Jean-Marc listened to the tense voice on the radio, distorted by static interference, relaying news of the German Wehrmacht having crossed the Maginot Line, the French army in disarray, tens of thousands dead, hundreds of thousands more taken prisoner. The drôle de guerre was finally over. It was all over. Jean-Marc’s hands were clasped together tightly, digging dirty fingernails into his knuckles. Isabelle held one hand up to her pale face most of the time, except when she occasionally touched her forehead with a trembling finger and swept back tousled locks of auburn hair. Claude nursed a thirteen-year-old’s glum stare, biting the inside of his cheek, a pimple on his nose glistening like a volcano in the candlelight.
“Mon Dieu,” Jean-Marc said every few minutes, his lips barely moving.
Claude’s eyes flicked apprehensively to his father, whose calloused hands covered his unshaven face, and then flicked back to the radio. The Germans were advancing on Paris and it was estimated that millions of ordinary French people were already on the move in a mass exodus heading south.
Isabelle made a strange little whimpering sound and Jean-Marc looked up at her sharply, conscious of the boy’s bewildered eyes beside them. The broadcast ended and the strained sounds of La Marseillaise filled the tense silence. Jean-Marc lit a Gauloises and dropped the extinguished match onto the table as blueish smoke curled around his face. He leaned back in his wooden chair, which creaked like the remnants of the free French republic.
“What will happen, Papa?” Claude asked. The boy looked ashen.
Jean-Marc leaned forward and turned the radio off. He shrugged as he blew smoke out through his nose and mouth. “I don’t know, my boy. But you must not worry, we will be safe down here in Bordeaux. They are not interested in us.” Jean-Marc tried to sound reassuring.
“How can you say that?” Isabelle said, her face twisted as though in pain, her head angled to one side, glaring at Jean-Marc accusingly.
Jean-Marc glanced at his son, whose concern boiled over in his eyes, and shook his head just a fraction, as if to say, Not in front of the boy.
“Look at what they are doing to the Jews in Germany, look at what happened in Berlin. Now that they have invaded we are not safe anywhere in France!” Isabelle was becoming hysterical, her eyes widening like a cow with bloat.
“Do you want to go up to bed, Claude?” Jean-Marc said quietly, placing a hand on the boy’s shoulder.
“No, Papa. I want to know what is going to happen,” he said, his chin trembling. “We will be alright, won’t we?”
“We have to leave,” Isabelle said, panic in her eyes as she looked from Jean-Marc to Claude and back again.
Jean-Marc exhaled in disbelief, his hands grasping at the air around him. “And go where, Isabelle? Take Claude and little Odette out of their home, onto the road. Where to, huh?”
Isabelle stared back, wide-eyed. “I don’t know – Spain? I have a cousin…”
Jean-Marc leaned back and made a guttural sound, drawing on his Gauloises. He stared at his wife and shook his head.
“And what of the vineyards, mmmh?” He swept an arm around, leaving a circular trail of cigarette smoke hanging in the air. “This was my father’s land, my father’s father’s, and his father before him. It is our home, Isabelle, it is our livelihood.”
Jean-Marc and Isabelle glowered at each other, he with a smoking Gauloises clasped in front of his face, she with her chest heaving and her moist, bulging eyes seemingly at bursting point.
“Will the Germans kill us?” Claude asked.
“No,” Jean-Marc said quickly, turning to the boy. “They will not.”
Isabelle bit her knuckles and wailed. “These are your children, Jean-Marc. Would you risk their lives so glibly?”
He leaned forward. “We have nothing, Isabelle – the last nine summers have been so poor nobody is buying our wine. We need this vintage to turn it around. The spring has been good, the vines are healthy and full of promise. What would you have me do? Abandon the grapes on the vines now? Flee with nothing but the clothes on our backs?”
Isabelle glared back at him.
“Please don’t fight,” Claude whimpered, on the verge of tears.
“I am not going to wait until the Germans are here in the streets and we have to hide like animals. I am leaving with our children, going somewhere safe,” Isabelle declared, pushing her chair back to stand up.
“No, Mama, please,” Claude wailed, tears streaming down his face, looking to his father for intervention.
Jean-Marc pressed a balled fist against his mouth, staring at the flickering candle. Merde. What a mess this was. Unbelievable. He had been Claude’s age when war had broken out last time – the war to end all wars – and yet now, just twenty-six years on, it was happening all over again.
“Can we just sleep on this and see what happens tomorrow?” Jean-Marc pleaded in a subdued voice. “Maybe the English—”
“Maybe the English!” Isabelle scoffed. “Open your eyes, Jean-Marc. You are a Jew in a Europe now controlled by the Germans. First it was Czechoslovakia, then Poland, then Denmark, then Norway, and now it is France.” She paused, her chest heaving with vented emotion. “We must leave, for the children’s sake, can you not see that?”
Jean-Marc stared at his wife and son. Did they know what they were asking of him? The Valadie family had made wine on this sacred land outside Saint-Émilion for two hundred years. One did not scamper away from this like a frightened dog. The Valadies had stayed on through the Great War and he would do the same again now.
“They are not even in Paris yet, Isabelle. They may never come this far south.” Jean-Marc spoke softly, as though trying to convince himself as much as her.
“What will they do to Jews?” Claude asked, strings of mucous now hanging beneath each nostril.
Isabelle moved over to embrace her son, encouraging him from his chair, glowering at Jean-Marc. “Nothing, my boy, you will be safe in Spain – far away from the Germans,” she said.
Jean-Marc lowered his head and sighed.
“We leave in the morning,” Isabelle announced before marching out of the room with Claude under her protective wing.
Claude turned to look at Jean-Marc, tears in his puffy eyes. How does one explain war and hate to a boy? Jean-Marc thought. How does one explain love and devotion to one’s land and vineyards, the heritage that runs in a family like blood in one’s veins, only thicker, sweeter?
As though sensing his master’s torment, the brown Basset Hound that had been lying in front of the crackling hearth clipped its way over to Jean-Marc and began to lick his hand where it hung limply off the end of the armrest.
He stroked the dog’s head for several minutes, staring expressionlessly at the quivering candle flame, then picked up the pewter candleholder and walked through to the salon where he placed it on top of the grand piano. Jean-Marc stood beside it without moving, reaching out to trace a finger along the copper inlay set into plum pudding mahogany. The inconsistent candlelight revealed its boxy outline atop intricately turned and carved legs, standing like ballerinas on brass castors.
Sitting down at the keys he stared at the faded gold leaf Pleyel lettering and then began to play Debussy’s Clair de Lune, sorrowfully, slowly, pausing often; his thick, dirty fingers producing surprisingly delicate and melancholic cadences. His dog sat beside him quietly, his tail swishing on the oak flooring. How could he leave all this behind? This piano was nearly as old as Château Cardinale itself, bought by his great-grandfather Ignace when Cardinale’s wines were the toast of high society and money flowed decadently.
Isabelle’s words echoed in his ears: We leave in the morning. He stopped playing. How could this be happening? Yesterday life was idyllically normal; tomorrow… He shut his eyes.
Chapter 3
One week later
Jean-Marc paused as he gently fondled the fragile new vine shoots between calloused fingers. The air was perfumed with the optimism of new growth, of strawberries at the end of each row, of a new season’s harvest in its infancy, fuelled by warm days and mild nights. Pulling out a pair of secateurs from the depths of earth-stained, capacious trousers, he began to clip off the excess growth at the tips, cutting back twenty, thirty, sometimes even forty millimetres, as his experience suggested. He worked mechanically, willing his thoughts away from his family: where were they, were they safe?
The dog was lying at his feet, facing the sunshine, panting as though he had been chasing a rabbit. Suddenly his ears pricked up and he closed his mouth, turned his head and appeared to focus his eyes.
Jean-Marc glanced down at his dog. “What is it, Pascal? Do you smell something?”
The dog looked at him and sat up, emitting a rumbling sound from his throat. Jean-Marc cast a perfunctory look across the expanse of his vineyards and continued to prune. Then, moments later, he heard the sound of horses’ hooves. He recognised the horse long before the rider, who waved from a distance. It was someone from his neighbour’s property, Château Millandes. Jean-Marc’s distance vision was poor. It ran in his family but he never bothered with glasses because all his work was at arm’s length.
“Jean-Marc!” called the rider.
Dropping the secateurs into his baggy trousers, Jean-Marc petted Pascal and rubbed his ears. The dog licked him enthusiastically. As the rider neared Jean-Marc finally saw who it was. “Bonjour, Gregoire. What brings you over here?”
Gregoire dismounted and pulled the reins down over the horse’s head. He was young, puce-faced, the heir to Château Millandes, ink-black hair as wiry as a Quercy sheep. “Your vines look good,” Gregoire said, fingering the foliage as he approached. “We have been lucky, eh? No frosts, no pests.”
“Yet,” Jean-Marc retorted.
Gregoire chuckled. “God surely will not serve us with a summer like last year – again. Even He likes good wine, don’t you think?”
“Your father lets you ride his horse?” Jean-Marc remarked, gesticulating towards the chestnut stallion.
Gregoire planted his hands on his hips and contemplated Jean-Marc. Both men wore soiled dark trousers held aloft by braces over loose-fitting linen shirts, heavy leather boots on their feet. But Gregoire wore something else: the superiority of the heir apparent.
“Something has happened, Jean-Marc. My father wants to speak to you.”
“What is it?” Jean-Marc said quickly, placing both hands on the taut wire used to train the shooting vines, Guyot-style.
“He will tell you. Come over when you have cleaned up.” Gregoire paused, casting an eye across Jean-Marc’s vineyards. “Have lunch with us,” he said, turning back to Jean-Marc and then studying the vines beside him. “Are you not trimming back too much so early?”
Jean-Marc bristled. Gregoire might well come from Château Millandes, but he had been pruning vines on his property since the boy was in nappies. “Tell your father I will be there at one o’clock,” he said irritably, returning his attention to the vines.
“Doesn’t Isabelle usually help you with the pruning?” Gregoire said once he had mounted the horse.
Jean-Marc looked up cautiously and stroked his bushy moustache. “She is not here today.”
Jean-Marc walked over to Château Millandes with Pascal following him eagerly. Millandes adjoined his land and it was quicker and more pleasant to walk through his vineyards to access it than to take the Renault out onto the road. Château Millandes was grand by Bordeaux standards: a double-storeyed stone house with gabling, wrought iron balconies and clusters of chimneys, quaintly wrapped in a tangle of colourful ivy. Around the cobbled courtyard numerous outbuildings complimented the main house’s imposing character. Much to Jean-Marc’s chagrin, Château Millandes had been widely tipped for impending Grand Cru status by the Syndicat Viticole in 1930, enabling his neighbour to capitalise on the publicity and demand a higher price for his wines. As he cast his eyes about enviously the benefit of money was evident wherever he looked.
“Jean-Marc!” A portly man with meaty forearms and warm brown eyes, full around the midriff, tousled grey hair and matching moustache, walked towards Jean-Marc, his cream linen shirt unbuttoned enough to reveal a chest of silver hair.
“Alphonse,” Jean-Marc returned with restrained warmth.
The two men embraced and kissed on each cheek. Alphonse smiled and pointed to Pascal. “Do you go anywhere without that dog?”
“What has happened?” Jean-Marc asked.
Alphonse wrapped an arm around Jean-Marc’s shoulders and guided him into the château. Pascal followed, his claws clipping the cobbles, tail wagging contentedly.
“As if enough has not happened,” Alphonse said, twirling his free arm in the air. “It is enough to make a grown man weep.”
“Twice in one lifetime is too much,” Jean-Marc said, glancing around at Alphonse’s fine mahogany furnishings and painted cream walls.
“We are sounding like our grandparents, aren’t we?” Alphonse said, attempting levity. “Do you remember Federico and Angelica Masi?”
Jean-Marc detected the seductive aromas of freshly prepared food within the château: onion and lemon and coriander. His stomach rumbled. He had not eaten a square meal in days and Alphonse was always a good host. “Winemakers from Tuscany?” Jean-Marc ventured.
Alphonse nodded, but sombrely. He sighed. “They are here with me.”
“Why?”
Alphonse stopped, just paces away from the stone patio that nestled beyond French doors where Jean-Marc could see the elderly Italian couple talking to Marthe, Alphonse’s wife, and his two sons, Gregoire and Olivier. He looked into Jean-Marc’s eyes intensely for a moment, long enough to unsettle Jean-Marc.
“You will want to hear what Federico has to say, my friend,” Alphonse said before making a grand entrance onto the patio, pleasantly shaded beneath a venerably gnarled mauve wisteria.
After formalities Alphonse lavished them with goblets of his blood-red Grand Vin as conversation covered the promising spring bloom, the fruiting of the vines and hopes for a good summer. Inevitably talk drifted towards the humiliation of defeat at the hands of the Germans. They bemoaned the politicians who would not take responsibility. Alphonse showed them an editorial in Le Figaro ridiculing the French response to attack.
“Listen to this,” Alphonse said, folding the broadsheet into a square on the table. “The soldiers blamed their officers; the officers pointed the finger at politicians; the Left blamed the Right and the Right blamed the Left.” He shook his head. “Marshal Pétain blamed the Popular Front, who blamed the military. Many blamed the Communists and they all blamed the Fascists – and the Fascists blamed the Jews.”
Federico sighed heavily when he heard this. “Just like Mussolini in Italy.”
They ate freshly baked fougasse, duck liver, and wild mushroom omelettes, all washed down with quantities of Alphonse’s delicious Grand Vin 1928. One thing they all agreed about: Bordeaux badly needed another vintage to match that one.
“These are the last of my ʼ28s,” Alphonse announced to murmurs of dismay. “I still have more, but I have hidden the rest behind false walls in the caves.”
Jean-Marc stared at Alphonse. “Why?”
“Have you not heard the stories of looting and theft by the Wehrmacht?” Alphonse said bitterly.
Jean-Marc felt his mouth dry up and quickly gulped at his wine.
“In Champagne they behaved like hooligans, plundering cellars and feasting like drunken teenagers. In Paris they have emptied entire wine stocks from the top restaurants, all those not quick enough to hide their best wines. The same down through the Loire and Burgundy. We have everything to fear, Jean-Marc, and I am calling a meeting of all local vignerons to warn them.”
Jean-Marc felt nauseous, Isabelle’s prophetic warning now ringing in his ears. “I will brick in my ʼ28s as well.” He wiped his hand across his moustache. “Even my ʼ34s, they are probably worth protecting.”
“I have done the same,” Alphonse concurred. “Nothing else worth hiding from the ʼ30s. If you have anything older, the ʼ26 or ʼ24, hide them too.”
“No,” Jean-Marc said, unable to stop himself from looking down. His wines did not keep quite as well as Alphonse’s.
“But leave a few bottles from the good vintages out, so as not to arouse too much suspicion.” Alphonse shrugged and made a face. “And don’t forget, you must cover the new wall with spiders to make cobwebs. Gregoire and Olivier collected dozens of spiders and they have already spun webs all over the fresh brickwork.” Alphonse chuckled. “It looks so old now, as if it’s always been there.”
Jean-Marc stared open-mouthed at Alphonse as his two boys sniggered like adolescents. Olivier was barely out of school, still lanky and undeveloped, always to Jean-Marc’s mind copying his older brother.
“We also piled firewood against the new wall, don’t forget that – anything to make it seem old and permanent.”
“Is this really necessary?” Jean-Marc said sceptically, thinking of all the work that lay ahead of him.
Alphonse leaned forward and placed an elbow on the starched white tablecloth. “Do you want les Boches to walk in and take your best wines, to loot your hard-earned cellars as they have the great Champagne houses?” Alphonse paused and raised an index finger. “And another thing, Jean-Marc: you need to think about Isabelle and the children.”
Jean-Marc clenched his teeth. Was Alphonse now to tell him what to do with his family as well? Was it not enough that he already basked in the promise of Grand Cru status? Beneath the table Jean-Marc passed pieces of liver to Pascal, who licked them out of his hand with a warm, wet tongue. “What of them?” he said, irritably.
“Listen to what Federico has to say,” Alphonse replied, leaning back in his creaking chair as he folded his arms.
Federico, wearing a straw Panama hat over grey hair, bushy eyebrows and a pressed black suit, his olive skin lined and worn by the Tuscan sun, told them how Mussolini was persecuting the Jews in Italy. Ever since Kristallnacht, Jews in vulnerable countries were fleeing for their lives. With tears pooling in his veined eyes he described his heartbreaking decision to abandon their vineyards around the medieval hilltop town of San Gimignano, with berries already formed on the vines, as the Fascist and anti-Semitic grip tightened on Italy. After a bracing gulp of wine he faced Jean-Marc and told him that he feared the German occupation would visit the same persecution on France.
“You abandoned your vineyards?” Jean-Marc said in disbelief.
Federico nodded, his face melancholy and drawn. “I have loved and tended those vines since I was a boy beside my father. To leave them was the hardest thing… I have ever done.”
Angelica placed a gnarled hand on top of his and squeezed until her knuckles blanched. She began to weep into her starched napkin and Jean-Marc, regretting his choice of the word ‘abandoned’, feared that Federico might cry too.
“You should take your family away from here,” Alphonse said, “to safety.”
Jean-Marc hesitated, fearing judgement from his friends, unsure now whether he had made the right decision with regard to his family. Vivid reminders of that final emotive exchange with Isabelle surfaced suddenly, like rising vomit.
“I do not know where she is,” Jean-Marc mumbled, searching blindly beneath the table for the warmth and comfort of Pascal’s muzzle. “She has gone.”
Alphonse’s face slackened. “And Claude, Odette?” he asked, leaning forward, frowning.
“She has taken them with her,” Jean-Marc said without looking up.
Gregoire and Olivier straightened and Jean-Marc did not miss the exchanged glance, as if to say, I knew it, as though they had placed a wager on it.
Alphonse creased his face. “Where has she gone?”
“I don’t know,” Jean-Marc sighed. “She spoke of Spain.”
“When?”
“The day after the Germans invaded.”
“You should have gone with them, my friend,” Federico said. “She was right to fear.”
“But les Boches are not even in Bordeaux,” Jean-Marc protested.
Alphonse blew air through his lips. “They will be by the end of the week from what I hear. I have spoken to Rothschild.”
Jean-Marc unfurled his hands briefly, suppressing the urge to say, ‘So what?’
“He knows Marshal Pétain,” Alphonse said.
Jean-Marc bristled at the glib mention of Bordeaux’s elite circles that Alphonse now frequented while he himself merely looked in from the outside, from a humbler social circle.
“We are not going to be spared any of the occupation’s miseries,” Alphonse continued. “It’s all about collaboration now.”
Jean-Marc felt his blood pounding in his ears, and both hated Isabelle for being so right, and regretted not believing her sooner. “What did Rothschild say?” he asked.
“He asked Pétain to intervene in the persecution and detention of French Jews in Paris, to negotiate a settlement for them as French citizens,” Alphonse began, pausing as the silence around the table lengthened. In the background a clock chimed pointlessly.
“And?” Federico prompted.
“Pétain said he could not.”
“Che palle!” Federico said in dismay, rubbing his worn face roughly, stretching the skin away from his bleary eyes. “Now that France has fallen Hitler controls all of Europe. He will hunt down the Jews here too.”
Angelica’s eyes brimmed with tears again and Federico placed a consoling hand over hers. Jean-Marc replayed Isabelle’s words over and over in his mind. He had not wanted to believe her; for that matter he still did not want to believe Federico. It was surely just the usual rumours and rhetoric. After all, nothing had happened yet.
Alphonse looked up with heavy eyes, directing his gaze towards Jean-Marc. “You should get out, my friend.”
“I cannot go now,” Jean-Marc said. “I will not abandon our family vineyards to les Boches. This vintage will be good, I feel it, and I need it to save the farm. If I go now I will have nothing. Cardinale will be ruined.”
“You will have your life, and your family,” Alphonse said. “You can always start again.”
Jean-Marc put his glass down on the table. His appetite, even for the delicious 1928 Château Millandes Grand Vin, had expired. Looking down, he was met by Pascal’s liquid eyes and nuzzling wet nose.
“I will hide if necessary. I have a cellar under the house.” Jean-Marc paused. “Isabelle will be safe with the children, I’m sure, and return when the war is over.” Jean-Marc was aware of Alphonse exchanging looks of disapproval with Marthe and Federico. “What about you, Federico?” Jean-Marc challenged, meeting the old man’s judgmental gaze. “Where will you go?”
Alphonse got up to refill glasses and Marthe offered an olive-wood platter of cheeses, aromatically perfect at room temperature.
“I am going to shelter Federico and Angelica in my caves. I have miles of tunnels with wine, barrels, equipment and so on stored in them,” Alphonse said. “There is plenty of room for you too, Jean-Marc, and Pascal.” He glanced down at the dog pressed against Jean-Marc’s thigh.
Downing the last of his wine, Jean-Marc stood up suddenly. He felt disorientated for a moment, conscious of all eyes staring at him.
“Thank you for a delightful lunch, Marthe, très bien, but I have much work to do in my vineyard.” He called the dog. “Come, Pascal, we must go now.”
“Wednesday night, Jean-Marc, 6pm,” Alphonse called after him. “Rothschild asked me to call a meeting in the Mairie in Saint-Émilion. Tell everyone you see.”
