before they can produce, another ten before they produce good wine. In the great historical regions of wine-making, the cost of the land, as well as of the vines, is more or less sunk. All of it was paid for so long ago that it's no longer a cost factor. Same thing happened in Napa and Sonoma. The land is paid for, the vines are in. As you know, great wine is in the grapes. And before that it is in the soil. There is only so much we can do in the winery. So then, where was I?'
'You love to come to New York City,' prompted Miss Allana, her voice throaty and moist. 'You love to be here.'
'Yes. That is right. And I come and am hearing about the North Fork vineyards and naturally I am curious and ask my driver to take me out there and see the land and I come back with mud all over my shoes and maps and-!' He tempered himself. 'It is spectacular. It is a special gift we are only just starting to understand. And the farm that we have just purchased or exchanged with Mr. Rainey is excellent, too. The location is very good because we find that, yes, on a statistical basis, there are about four more degree days, four more days of warm weather, in the fall than there are even fifteen miles to the east. This is important to get the grapes ready for harvest. Every extra degree day decreases our risk, increases our potential yield before the first frost. And there are about two inches more rain. Forty-four inches a year instead of forty-two. To make a truly great Merlot, you do not irrigate. You drop your extra fruit and then use what is left. It takes self-discipline. But that is how the French have done it for a thousand years. It is against the law to irrigate grapes in Bordeaux, did you know that?'
He waited for an answer. 'Uh, no,' I said.
'We looked at all the weather data, too. Only five days a year above ninety degrees Fahrenheit and less than one day per year below zero degrees, on a historical basis. No prolonged heat, no deep freezes that kill the roots. This is very good!' He nodded in excitement. 'And the soil data is good. The soil is loam- porous, sandy, and friable. Very, very good. Some of the best in the world for growing grapes, did you know that? We have a soil laboratory in Chile, with eight thousand soil samples. Our soil is volcanic, very different. But we study all soil. We had our agronomist look at the site, and we did our own gradient calculations, yes? If the slope of the land is more than eleven degrees, we find that the water vapor lingers in the low areas and we don't get the drying of the leaves that we like. We can get fungus, we get terrible black rot. So grade of land is very important. We examined the whole area, Mr. Wy-eth. We looked at nine different large properties. Frankly there was one that we liked a little more but a French company bought it before we could. But Mr. Rainey's property was larger and slightly cheaper by the acre and so we decided to acquire his. Our broker, she let us know about it.'
'Hallock Properties?' I asked, remembering the sign on the field.
'Yes.' Marceno looked at Miss Allana, then smiled at me.
I realized I'd just made a mistake.
But he continued. 'When we buy acreage, we like to enter the community on very good terms- that makes sense, yes? We want the local people to be glad that we came. We try to build relationships, we try to have people feel good that the Marceno family has arrived. After all, we hire local labor, rely on local merchants. We need goodwill.'
'Sounds reasonable.'
He leaned forward. 'It is reasonable. It is also reasonable to suppose, Mr. Wy-eth, that when we buy a piece of land, yes, we expect that what we see is what we get.'
I said nothing, thinking, of course, of Herschel atop the bulldozer.
'Do you understand me?'
'So what did you see?'
'We saw a lovely piece of farmland with good drainage fronting Long Island Sound, the kind of place where you could put in a wonderful winery and have a tasting center looking out over the ocean.'
'Isn't that what you got?'
'We don't know what we got, Mr. Wy-eth. We did soil tests, but those are random. Yesterday after we signed the copies of the contract to buy Voodoo LLC, but before Mr. Gerzon finalized the deal last night, we took a drive out to look at the land. Somebody had been out there with a bulldozer.'
'A bulldozer?'
'Yes, moving topsoil around. It looked to me like he was filling in a low area but it was starting to snow. I couldn't quite tell. But I could see the bulldozer tracks.'
'This was yesterday?'
'I told you, yesterday afternoon, Wednesday.'
Yes, in the daylight, which matched what Mrs. Jones had said. 'What time?'
Marceno twisted his head. 'Midafternoon, just after four o'clock. This wasn't just a few tracks, Mr. Wy-eth. I myself worked a bulldozer on our family vineyard when I was young. Someone had spent hours moving the soil around.'
The chronology wasn't quite clear, but it sounded as if Herschel had already gone over the cliff when Marceno had inspected the land. Marceno hadn't actually seen a bulldozer.
'Mr. Wy-eth, I know what goes on in an agricultural operation. Soil gets moved around, holes get dug, this kind of thing. But this land had been undisturbed for a while. I myself had been over that property by foot six times already. And then, the day we are finishing the deal, I see bulldozer tracks everywhere. What does this mean, I think. Why are they moving earth? What are they hiding from us?'
I didn't have an answer for him, of course, but it occurred to me then that whoever had moved the soil around might have timed his activity in respect not only to the falling darkness but also to the coming snowstorm. If he- Herschel, it seemed- had begun at, say, 1 p.m., and the snow had started to fall at 3 p.m., with darkness descending about ninety minutes after that, then the discoverability of the bulldozer work prior to the deal being done that night was shrinkingly brief. 'What happened then?' I said vaguely.
'It was getting dark and our driver said a bad storm of snow was coming and perhaps we should try to get back to the city soon.' He looked at the woman and said something in Spanish quickly. She blushed and turned away, her lips pressed together in amusement. I got part of it. Something along the lines of, When I'm done with this gringo idiot you and I will… 'So I did not get enough time to look around.'
Right. He did not get enough time to see Herschel dead and frozen forty feet down the sea cliff.
'Why didn't you stop the deal if you had a question about the land?'
'I tried to call your client, but he was unresponsive. I called the real estate agent and she said if we stopped the deal, then another buyer was ready to step in. I didn't want to risk that. So I let the deal go ahead.' He stared at me without blinking, his mouth sucked small with fury. 'This morning my foreman tells me he finds new tracks and also potatoes in the snow. I am thinking I did not see potatoes in the snow yesterday afternoon, and they are in the snow the next morning?'
I was close to urinating in my pants, but instead I quietly bit the tip of my tongue, as hard as I could stand it.
'I would like to know what is being covered up, Mr. Wy-eth! I would like Jay Rainey to tell us! He knows the land. He grew up on it. It's eighty-six acres, Mr. Wy-eth. Not so big. But we could spend a very long time and lots of money trying to find out. The snow will be gone soon, maybe tomorrow. We want to know what we are dealing with here. Underground gasoline tanks? Buried herbicide? I know that the potato farmers used arsenic for many years and that many of the old barns still have bags and bags of it. It could be many things. Water moves under the ground. Sideways, up and down. I am worried about planting vines and in three years the roots find some kind of poison. The vines die, maybe. Or, worse than that, we find herbicide in our wine, we find trace elements. We use Roundup, this is very good stuff, breaks down to water. We like that. But other farmers in the past used very bad stuff. You can get terrible things in the wine. You have to tear out vines, Mr. Wy-eth! A terrible thing. Expensive, and very painful. So we are careful. We are thorough.'
'Yes.'
'It looks to me like the bulldozer was trying to add some soil over about a two-acre area, okay? The till depth to establish the vines is twenty-four inches, in your measurements. This is standard out there and is well known. Deeper than potatoes. I suspect, yes, that he was trying to be sure our tillers did not hit anything. You see, when the ground freezes and thaws, things come up. But if you add soil on top of them, they might stay hidden longer. We want to know what the problem is, Mr. Wy-eth. We want to take care of the problem in such a way that it doesn't attract the interest of the local residents. The environmental officials, okay? I have heard that when the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation gets involved, the delays are usually measured in years.
