Flambé in Armagnac (2 page)

“What would I do without you?” Philippe sighed. His ruse had fooled no one.

Benjamin was taking two cigars in silky wrappers from his leather case when Philippe disappeared behind the double doors to the office. He knew his friend was a big fan of Havanas. The Cubans guaranteed an hour of sheer pleasure. No doubt Jean-Charles de Castayrac’s Armagnac would make the occasion even more memorable.

He was about to imagine them raising a glass to the deceased cellar master when an ear-piercing crack pulled him out of his musings. Beatrice, Virgile, and Benjamin ran to the window. A peach tree had snapped under the weight of the ice. The winemaker glanced at Beatrice and saw that she was shivering.

No sooner had they absorbed the sight of the felled peach tree than the sound of breaking glass rang out behind the door. “Damn it all!”

“Oh, that doesn’t sound good,” Beatrice said, pushing back the lock of blond hair that seemed to have a mind of its own.

When Philippe opened the door, the exquisite fragrances of honey, pear, and orange preserves wafted into the kitchen. A long silence ensued.

In a cloud of smoke, Benjamin finally looked Philippe de Bouglon in the eye. “Now I know why you were envious of Lord de Castayrac’s Armagnacs. And if you weren’t my friend, I’d almost suspect you of having broken the bottle to avoid comparison.”

“Benjamin, I think my subconscious got the better of me.”

“That’s exactly what I was thinking, you old scoundrel!”

3

Château Blanzac was low and squat. No pointed towers, no mullioned windows, much less tall chimneys. The building’s elegance lay in its symmetry and simplicity, along with the lovely tiling that ran beneath the vertigris roof.

A pair of two-hundred-year-old oak trees and three tall cedars dominated the grounds. Their branches caressed the sleepy country manor and its lichen-covered stones. Calling it a “château” was clearly deceptive. As for the titles of nobility claimed by its proprietor, there was no trace, aside from a wrought-iron coat of arms on the front-step railings, whose rust offset any hint of pretention. In the way of assets, the Castayracs owned only this home, with its few acres of vines and one-story outbuilding, along with the family title, which the baron liked to flaunt at the Biarritz casino on special occasions.

Benjamin pushed the doorbell. Its shrill ring set loose three large dogs, whose muzzles appeared at the windows. Benjamin scanned the surroundings. The vines hadn’t been pruned. An antique Citroën DS 19 Pallas was parked in a garage, and on the right, a short distance from the outbuilding, four immense blackened walls stood silent. Burned beams, barrel hoops, and staves littered the frozen ground. Shards of glass, vestiges of the demijohns that had been turned into large Molotov cocktails, were everywhere. Benjamin could almost make out wisps of smoke amid the ruins. It had been less than two weeks since the catastrophe. Could the fire still be smoldering under this rubble? Its acrid vapors were stinging his throat.

The door remained hopelessly closed. Benjamin rang the bell again, more insistently this time. An imposing figure, despite the cane, finally appeared. Jean-Charles de Castayrac fit the image of a country squire that Benjamin had formed on his way from breakfast at the Bouglons. Minor provincial nobility, apparently bankrupt but intent on maintaining his status, even if it meant deluding people with window dressing, such as an old but shiny car, a tweed jacket missing a few buttons, a green felt hat, and a fine shirt frayed just a bit at the collar. Baron Castayrac stepped toward his visitors, shooing away the three Labradors.

“Don’t worry, gentlemen. They don’t bite. Athos, Porthos, Aramis: get lost! Go lie down! Down, I say!” The dogs ignored him and bounded out the door to greet the visitors. “Whom do I have the pleasure of speaking to?”

Benjamin introduced himself and his assistant. Right away, the baron’s tone and expression became more gracious. A smile crossed his face.

“Please come in,” he said. The cold was already turning his cheeks and hairy earlobes pink. “These dogs don’t have enough sense to stay inside.”

“No, it seems that they don’t,” Benjamin said, petting Porthos’s black rump.

Virgile attempted to give the two other dogs a friendly pat, but they scooted past him and ran toward a building where a young man in a fur hat was watching from behind a Massey Ferguson tractor. He looked like a Russian peasant.

Without warning, the timid January sun seemed to dissipate entirely in the freezing weather. A thick cloud of condensation escaped from the baron’s thin lips as he pointed his cane at the ruined wine cellar and lamented, “The work of a lifetime up in smoke. A damn shame.”

Was it the cold or a surge of emotion that brought the tears to his eyes? Once in the shelter of the entryway, the baron removed his broad-rimmed hat and hung it on a hook next to a long dark coat. He did the same with his cane. He invited Benjamin and Virgile into his library without offering to take their coats. Two dueling embers were struggling in a tiny fireplace. Benjamin noticed that the bronze clock hopelessly showed twelve-thirty. Its pendulum was motionless. Had the baron deliberately left it unrepaired in the hope of banishing all notion of time from his home?

“Can I offer you anything?”

Benjamin picked up a begrudging tone in his voice. He sounded like a stingy host who had no more than a drop of port or cherry to share. There was no mention of Armagnac. Benjamin declined. Their meeting today was a formality, an initial contact. They would begin their review tomorrow, and Benjamin wanted to give Jean-Charles de Castayrac a heads-up. No doubt, he was still reeling from the nasty business of the fire and the loss of his salt-of-the-earth cellar master, Francisco.

“What a sad end, Mr. Cooker. Can you imagine? Perishing under such circumstances. It’s all my fault.”

“You have no reason to blame yourself, Mr. Castayrac,” Benjamin said.

“And to think that I asked him to distill on Christmas Eve.” The proprietor of Blanzac angrily grabbed the fireplace tongs to poke the few embers dying in the ashes.

Benjamin couldn’t help thinking of his dear friend Eve, a television producer and classical music expert who had bought a magnificent château in Gers. The château had once belonged to the marquise of Montespan, and it had only one flaw. It was impossible to heat on the coldest days of winter.

“My dear Benjamin, all the forests of Gascony would not have enough lumber to keep my home warm with those high French ceilings,” she joked. Benjamin had affectionately nicknamed her the Marquise de Shivering. That gave them both a good laugh, but at the time, it was summer, and they were sitting on the pleasantly warm terrace of Château de Beaumont.

It was just as bad in the baron’s chilly library, which Benjamin figured was bearable only in the warmest months of the year. The
toile de jouy
wallpaper, with its repeated pastoral scene on a beige background, was slipping off the moldy plaster walls. The books and encyclopedias lining the shelves offered their musty edges to the notarial décor. Benjamin, who took pride in being something of a bibliophile, cast a wry look at an original edition of
Dictionary of Daily Life in the City and the Countryside
. Virgile had turned up the collar of his leather jacket.

“It’s freezing in here,” he whispered in his boss’s ear.

If Jean-Charles de Castayrac heard Virgile, he didn’t let on. “Please excuse the mess, but Blanzac is sorely lacking in women,” he said. “Since the death of my wife, Elise, I have no interest in anything.”

“Not even in bridge?” Benjamin asked, pointing to a card table where the baron had evidently enjoyed winning a game.

“Very rarely,” he sighed. Benjamin thought he detected a hint of evasiveness in the old man’s answer.

“You’ve never thought of remarrying, Mr. Castayrac?” Virgile asked.

Benjamin couldn’t believe how socially clumsy Virgile could be sometimes. He couldn’t tell the difference between a business client and a friend.

The baron had sunk into a decrepit Voltaire armchair. After blowing his nose on a muslin handkerchief, he stared long and hard at the cheeky assistant.

“I don’t think either of my boys would have forgiven me. But my private life is my own business, and no one has the right to make judgments about what I’ve done or should have done.”

“Please be patient with my assistant, Mr. Castayrac. Virgile Lanssien has all the candor of youth. Tact and diplomacy are sometimes optional, as far as he’s concerned, and on this occasion, he dispensed with both,” Benjamin quipped.

“That’s regrettable,” the petty noble responded.

Before Benjamin could say anything else, the man stood up and excused himself. He left the room and came back a few moments later with a bundle of vine shoots, which he tossed into the fireplace. The flames had no effect on the room’s temperature. The baron turned on a lamp. Its shade smelled moldy. A cup of tea would not have been unwelcome, but the baron was clearly refraining from any superfluous hospitality. Benjamin and Virgile would have to make do with the quickly waning sparks.

On a white marble pedestal table, the face of a plain woman was encased in a garnet-colored velour frame. Lady Castayrac looked smug in her three-strand pearl choker. Her large forehead and slightly flat nose bespoke peasant origins. Blanzac owed its prosperity to her. The Armagnac cellar, the central heating—when the boiler was still functioning—the Citroën DS 19, the tractor, and much more had all been purchased with her family’s money. That very noon, Beatrice and Philippe de Bouglon had given Benjamin and Virgile a detailed account of how this family had enriched itself.

In the seventeenth century, the Riquets de Lauze had made a fortune in water. A gift from God had sprung up from their land. On the wild fields of the Quercy, a region north of Gascony covered with dense forests and dark rocks where goats and sheep roamed in the junipers, a diviner had come upon waters whose curative powers were said to be astonishing. After drinking just one cup, the diviner managed to completely detoxify his system and relieve his chronic constipation. This place, called Alvignac—more specifically Salmière—quickly became a destination for pilgrims from the nearby regions of Corrèze, Aveyron, and even Cantal, all of whom arrived with bottles and flasks to hold this body-cleansing nectar.

The family began offering their water with miraculous laxative powers the same way they did their aromatic truffles: for cold, hard cash. To promote the spring, they invited the exquisitely elegant Marquise de Pompadour, King Louis XV’s chief mistress, to Alvignac. Immediately, Versailles and Paris were abuzz with talk of this water, which was fortified with calcium, sodium, and magnesium, according to the scientists from the Sorbonne.

Louis de Rouvroy, the duke of Saint-Simon, wrote in his memoirs that if there were one boring place on earth that he would gladly visit, it was Alvignac, because he could overeat and not get fat, thanks to the water. Three centuries later, the French writer Pierre Benoit wrote the same thing in his colorful
Lunch at Sousceyrac
. The reputation of the waters of Salmière never waned, and it continued to draw famous writers and even quite a few politicians. Like gas in a stomach, the Riquets’ fortune swelled. They wouldn’t have been able to stuff all the cash under their mattresses or into their wool stockings even if they had wanted to. It went into the bank and finally fell into the hands of Elise Riquet de Lauze.

As cupid’s game of love would have it, she married a Castayrac, whose specialty was trading in eau-de-vie. The dowry was much more beautiful than the bride, and the groom was more talented in manners than business. The couple experienced a few years of happiness and had two sons, Alban and Valmont, three or four good vintages, and then a rash of disappointments, serious breaches in the marriage contract, and finally the agonies of illness. Breast cancer claimed the miraculous springs heiress. She died on a Good Friday at the age of forty-four without having embraced her two children one last time. The whole town of Labastide-d’Armagnac accompanied her hearse to the Castayrac family vault on a dismal spring day.

“Mr. Castayrac, how much eau-de-vie would you say you lost in the fire?” Benjamin ventured, barely looking at the baron.

“That is difficult to judge, sir. Only Francisco would have been able to tell you to the exact liter,” Castayrac said, rubbing his fingers along the moth-eaten armrests. “He kept the books.”

“Nevertheless, you’re the one who takes care of the accounting, taxes, and the administrative details, aren’t you?”

“Or maybe it’s your sons?” suggested Virgile.

“Mr. Lanssien, I’d prefer to answer your superior. It’s a matter of principle. In this house, only the elders have the right to speak.”

“So it’s Alban we’d need to—”

“That’s enough, Virgile,” Benjamin interrupted.

The baron smirked, apparently pleased to have established his authority.

“Francisco was—how can I put it—part of the family,” the baron said, looking only at Benjamin. “My father, Jean-Sébastien de Castayrac, thought the boy had an honest face and hired him. Francisco wasn’t even sixteen when he walked through the gate. He came from the foothills of the Pyrenees, from Jurançon, where he had been a farm boy. His parents had fled Franco’s Spain.”

Benjamin nodded. “Do you know anything else about his background?”

“Francisco Vasquez was a private man. He rarely confided in anyone. He had a saying: ‘All I know, I put in a bottle!’ Even now I can hear him speaking those words with his Aragonese accent.”

“He became your cellar master, and no offense intended, I believe he crafted your best eau-de-vie.”

“I am indebted to him for many things,” Jean-Charles de Castayrac said and sighed. “And one of them is the quality of my Armagnacs.”

“Did he live in the château?”

“A few months after he arrived in Blanzac, my father gave him a shack near the old stables that the day workers had used for their breaks during haymaking season and the grape harvest. He never paid any rent. That’s how it was. Francisco was family. He often ate lunch with us. That is, when my wife was still alive, because after… After, we made other arrangements.”

“He never married?” Benjamin asked, reading his silenced assistant’s mind.

“No,” the baron said. “But he was never short on girls. They all flocked around him. He was good-looking. Well, that’s history now.”

“I heard he sowed his seed all over Labastide,” Benjamin said with a touch of mischief.

“That’s what they say, all right. But people exaggerate. If you believe everything that’s said in town… I’m sure some people are whispering that I started the fire in my own wine cellar to collect the insurance.”

Virgile spoke up again. “And what were you doing on December 24th?”

The baron crossed his legs, revealing mismatched socks and hairy white calves. He stared at Benjamin without blinking.

Benjamin broke the silence. “As far as the insurance is concerned, the fire was an accident. I’m here to get things moving, Mr. Castayrac. I am counting on your cooperation.”

“You’ll have it, Mr. Cooker.”

“I don’t doubt it. I suggest that we meet tomorrow morning to draw up an initial assessment of the reserves that were burned.”

“Don’t come at the crack of dawn. I like to stay under the covers when it’s this cold outside.”

“I understand. How about ten o’clock? Will that do?”

“I’d prefer eleven,” the baron responded. He then sprang nimbly from his chair and headed toward the vestibule.

The winemaker wondered what use the cane could possibly served, other than that of pompous accessory. Evidently, the proprietor of Blanzac was a better actor than vintner. Was it possible that the fire was not an accident?