He drank some more wine and closed his eyes. But the codes were still there, etched by light on his retinas. There had to be a simple logic to it. He thought back to his own allusion to the French-English dictionary. Two lists of corresponding words, one of which was in alphabetical order. And something began to chip away at his consciousness from somewhere below the surface. Something nagging, insistent, like a woodpecker drilling holes in trees. His head hurt at the thought, and he wondered irrationally, if woodpeckers ever got headaches. He felt his glass slip in his hand, and he put it down on the floor before he dropped it. There was something there. Something just beyond reach. Something that someone had said. Something right in front of his eyes. A key to unlocking the code. But he was so, so very sleepy.
He was a long way down. It was very dark here, and strange creatures floated through the murk, skulking in the shadows, bulbous eyes staring at him through fronds that waved about in the eddies and currents of cold, cold water. There was a tug on his line, and he realised that there was very little oxygen left. He could hear a voice, from somewhere very far above, calling him back to the surface. He had found something down here, and he wanted to tell them. But he knew he mustn’t make his ascent too quickly, or he would lose it.
He pushed off towards the voice, mud and sand rising all around him. He tipped his head back and saw the light and heard the voice again, and found himself rising at an alarming rate. Too fast. He broke the surface gasping for breath.
‘Papa!’ Sophie glared at him. ‘You’ve been drinking.’
Enzo frowned. ‘Only a couple of glasses.’
The door opened from the terrasse, and Michelle came in. Sophie turned to look at her. ‘Where were you?’
‘I waited in the car until I saw you coming back.’
‘Well, the great mind here, who wanted us to leave him alone so that he could concentrate, drank some wine and fell asleep. That’s what old men do, you know. Fall asleep in chairs.’ She flashed Michelle a very purposeful look, just in case she’d missed the point.
‘What time is it?’ Enzo ignored his daughter’s barb.
Bertrand looked at his watch. ‘Nearly six. You’ve been out for a couple of hours, Monsieur Macleod.’
Enzo stood up stiffly and focused on the whiteboard; then he ripped one of the coded reviews from the wall and blinked at it, trying to remember. And then he did. He turned to find three faces looking at him expectantly, and he smiled and waved the piece of paper in the air. ‘It’s quite simple, really.’
‘What is?’ Sophie took the review from him and looked at it.
‘The code.’
‘You broke it? In your sleep?’
‘Maybe I was asleep, maybe I wasn’t.’ He turned towards the whiteboard and lifted his marker pen. The others watched, filled with sudden curiosity, as he wrote up l, b and j, then turned back to them. A smile split his face. ‘What do these letters mean to anyone.’ They all looked blankly at the board. ‘Okay. Let’s capitalise them. It makes a big difference.’ He wrote up LBJ. ‘Come on. You’ve got to see it.’ Still nothing. ‘Okay, maybe you were too young. But in the sixties, during the Vietnam war, these were initials on everybody’s lips.’ He said them out loud. ‘LBJ.’
Which was when the penny dropped for Michelle. ‘Lyndon B. Johnston. He was sworn in as President after the assassination of Kennedy.’
‘Good girl.’ He turned back to the board and wrote up WJC.
Now Michelle couldn’t keep the smile off her face. ‘William Jefferson Clinton. They’re all Presidents of the United States!’
But Enzo waved a finger of admonishment. ‘Not all of them. There haven’t been ninety-two Presidents.’ He held open palms out towards her. ‘You told me yourself the other night, Michelle. Your dad’s party-piece when he was a kid.’
Realisation dawned on her like sunlight breaking through dark cloud. ‘States!’ she said. ‘Presidents and States.’
Enzo wrote up KY.
‘Kentucky.’
Then NJ.
‘New Jersey.’
He beamed at them. ‘The most common of all codes. Ones that get used by millions of people every day. Post codes. It’s so simple. His parents made him commit to memory all the States and all the Presidents when he was just a kid. He wasn’t ever going to forget them. So every flavour on the wheel got assigned to one of them.’
‘In what order?’ Sophie said.
Enzo shrugged. ‘The States would be alphabetical, the Presidents chronological. All we have to do is figure out where on the taste wheel he started.’
Sophie said, ‘We need a list of States and Presidents.’ And she rounded the table to the computer and tapped a quick search into Google. A smile spread across her face. ‘Fifty States, and forty-three Presidents. Actually, forty- two, because one of them served twice. Isn’t the internet a wonderful thing?’ She clicked a couple of times with her mouse, then hit the print button, and the printer started spewing out a list of US States and American Presidents.
Michelle was looking at the coded scores given to the three wines they had tasted, then glanced up at Enzo’s whiteboard. ‘This doesn’t match, Enzo.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, if the A to F and the 1 to 5, were the last things to be coded, then you would expect them all to be recent Presidents. But they’re not. Look.’ She pointed to the score her father had awarded the Chateau Lastours 2001 Cuvee Special. ‘ALI and CA. That’s got to be Abraham Lincoln and Chester Arthur.’
‘We’ve got them the wrong way round, that’s why.’ Everyone turned to look at Bertrand. ‘Look at the sensory descriptions of the wine in the mouth. WJC. LBJ. GF.’
‘Bill Clinton, Lyndon Johnston, Gerald Ford,’ Michelle said. ‘All right down at the most recent end of the list.’
‘So we work backwards through the sensory descriptions,’ Enzo said. ‘Starting with George W. Bush.’ He wrote up GWB against Thin.
Sophie said, ‘How did Gil Petty describe Thin again?’ She pulled up the page of Petty’s flavour and sensory listings, then burst out laughing. ‘Lacking flavour and body.’ She scrolled up the list. ‘And his father? GHWB? Simple. A sound, drinkable wine of no great distinction. Two Bush presidencies summed up to perfection.’ She looked at Michelle, grinning. ‘Do you think you’re father matched these on purpose?’
‘I doubt it somehow. More like happy coincidence.’
‘What about Clinton?’ Bertrand said. ‘What’s his sensory adjective.’
Sophie put the two together from the separate lists and could hardly speak for laughing. When, finally, she managed to control herself, she said, ‘William Jefferson Clinton comes under the category of Smooth.’ Which brought a spontaneous eruption of laughter from around the room. Braucol woke up and started barking.
‘Maybe your father had a secret sense of humour after all,’ Enzo said. He took the printout of Presidents and States and, starting from the bottom of the board, worked his way back through the list of sensory descriptions, ratings and flavours, putting initials against each. ‘Some of these Presidents had the same initials as States, or each other, so it looks like he’s added the second letter of the surname to distinguish them.’
As he reached the tastes that he had copied down from the flavour wheel, Sophie said, ‘How do you know where he started listing the flavours?’
‘I don’t. But let’s assume that, like me, he started with the biggest grouping, Fruit. We’ll assign the initials to the order in which I’ve written them down, then see how they match up with our own tastings.’
It took several more minutes for him to finish writing State postal codes against flavours, finishing with AL against Apple. He riffled through a confusion of papers to retrieve his notes from the Domenech tastings.
‘Okay, so oak would be NM. We tasted that in the Lastours and the Sarrabelle.’ He checked the two coded reviews and found NM in the taste lines of both. ‘So far so good. We also found vanilla in both the Cuvee Lea and the Sarrabelle Syrah. Which means we should find NJ in their taste lines.’ He checked. ‘And there they are.’
‘And liquorice?’ Bertrand said. ‘We found that in the Syrah, too.’
