turned left at that fork in the road beyond the house.”
“I thought you told me Charles said right.”
We rounded a corner and he said, “I think I see a light up ahead.”
“I wonder what he wants to talk about. He said it was life or death.”
“Juliette knows he’s upset about something,” my grandfather said.
“She has no idea about what?”
Pépé tilted his head, as though he were weighing his answer. I wondered if he was thinking about Juliette or me. “She says she does not.”
“You don’t believe her?”
“I think she has her suspicions,” he said. “She asked if I would do what I could for him.”
“And you said yes.”
“I said I would try. But Charles specifically asked for you to come this evening,
“Mick Dunne got me to agree to fly out to California to sample some wine Charles talked him into buying,” I said. “Mick knew you had business out there, too, so he figured I could accompany you and, um, we’d … be together. And Charles was the one who set you up to talk to this Bohemian Grove group.”
“How interesting. Obviously it’s no coincidence. I wonder what Charles has got up his sleeve.”
I rounded another bend in the road and the light grew larger, winking like a wicked eye between the tree branches.
“I guess we’re about to find out,” I said. “I hope that’s the lodge, or else we’re really lost.”
I parked in front of a rustic cabin that sat in a clearing surrounded by Charles’s smallish vineyard. The cloudless blue-black sky was star filled and serene. A scuffed-silver half-moon hung high above the trees and brushed the tops of the vines so they looked frost rimed. The luminescent clock on my car dashboard showed ten minutes to midnight.
“Should we wait for him?” I asked.
“He said to make ourselves at home.” Pépé was already starting toward the front door. “And he left the place unlocked.”
The hinges creaked as he pushed open the door, and for an instant I expected the Big Bad Wolf or a wicked witch disguised as a kindly grandmother to appear and bid us to come inside. The room could have been the reading room in a gentlemen’s club, with a pair of black leather wing chairs and a matching sofa pulled up around a polished granite coffee table, all grouped in front of a large stone fireplace. The walls looked like old barn wood that had been beautifully refinished. The sconces and matching chandelier in the middle of the room were made of antlers. Tiny red shades over the candlesticks muted the light so it seemed almost viscous, except for the warm pool of spreading color that came from a Tiffany lamp hanging over the bar. A rug in the center of the room was a dead animal skin—a zebra. Something dark and furry I couldn’t identify lay in front of the fireplace.
“I didn’t know Charles was a hunter,” I said. “It’s cold in here.”
“He’s hunted for as long as I’ve known him. When he lived in France he used to go off to Scotland with a group of friends every year,” Pépé said. “Juliette loathes blood sports so I suspect that is why he has this place in the woods, so far from the house. Here,
“I can’t. You’ll freeze.”
He draped his navy suit coat around my shoulders. “I’ll be fine.”
I walked around the room, examining the signed photographs that lined the walls. Pépé did the same from the other direction. Each one showed Charles, with practically every American president since Harry Truman or with sober-suited men I didn’t recognize, with the exception of Winston Churchill. All the pictures looked official; there were no candid snaps of him and Juliette on a vacation cruise, at Christmas, a special dinner somewhere. I wondered why there had been no children.
I scarcely recognized Charles in the early black-and-white pictures: smooth-faced and dashing, reed slim, clear-eyed, with a pompadour of wavy dark hair and a slight grave smile befitting the seriousness of the moment. What hadn’t changed was that cocky self-confidence in his eyes, the lack of self-doubt. No wonder Juliette had fallen for him after living with a troll who beat her.
One picture that had particular prominence showed Charles shaking hands with the then president of France, Georges Pompidou, on what looked like the day he presented his diplomatic credentials as ambassador to France. Juliette, ethereal and as lovely as she’d been in the portrait in their library, stood behind him looking radiant. It was the only picture in the room in which she appeared. Behind me a door opened and closed with a quiet click and I spun around.
It appeared as though Charles materialized out of nowhere, until I noticed the door set into a wall that had been camouflaged to look like a bookcase. He was holding something partially obscured in his hand. For a wild moment I thought it might be a gun. Maybe I’d been right after all: He had come to have a man-to-man talk with Pépé about his wife’s infatuation with my grandfather. But when he raised his arm I saw that it was a wine bottle, dark like the color of old blood.
“I didn’t mean to startle you both. I went in through the cave to get the wine and came through the back door.” He opened and closed it again so we could see the neat trick of how it disappeared into the wall. “Clever, isn’t it?”
He crossed the room and flicked a switch next to an oil painting of a pair of foxhounds. Instantly a fire blazed to life in the stone fireplace.
My grandfather looked surprised and Charles grinned. “Gas,” he said. “I know it’s a lazy man’s way of getting out of building a real fire, but I enjoy it. No need to wait for it to burn down at the end of an evening.”
So this was the refuge he retreated to when he wanted to get away from … what? Or whom? I wondered if Juliette had even seen the inside of this place.
“Do you spend much time here?” I asked.
He gave me an indecipherable look and said, “Depends on your definition of ‘much.’ ”
I decided not to ask the obvious follow-up.
“Please, come and sit by the fire,” he said, “while I pour the wine. I had it opened about an hour ago. I’d like to see how it’s developing. It might need a little more time.”
He handed me a glass and I nearly dropped it. Silk-screened on the wineglass was the logo of the openmouthed alienlike figure that had been on the broken glass in Paul Noble’s studio. He handed Pépé a similar glass and took a third for himself.
“Is anything wrong?” he asked.
I looked into his eyes and saw a shadow pass behind them. What-ever his reason for bringing us here, now it seemed it had something to do with the death of Paul Noble. Somehow Charles had learned that I’d found Paul hanging in his studio and he knew about the wineglass, too. I wondered who had told him and when this game was going to end. I was tired of being played.
“I saw a wineglass with the same design on it the other day, but you know that already, don’t you?” I said in a curt voice. “Where did you get these? They look like old glasses, not the inexpensive ones we give out as souvenirs at the winery.”
“Lucie—” Pépé cautioned me.
“They are,” Charles said. “I haven’t used these glasses in more than forty years.”
“Why tonight? A celebration? Or is it in memoriam? And shouldn’t we be drinking Sauvignon Blanc?”
Charles’s mouth tightened. “You’re right,” he said. “The Margaux will have to do. It’s from the correct year.”
I looked at the bottle. “What happened in 1970?”
“I’ll get to that. Now, please, have a seat.”
He waited until Pépé took one of the leather chairs and I sat on the sofa before he sat down in the other wing chair. The fire flickered merrily.
“Do you mind if I smoke?” My grandfather indicated a large glass ashtray on the coffee table.
I’d noticed it earlier. The White House logo was etched into the glass, probably a souvenir from another era, in the days when nobody minded if the president lit up and dinners ended with brandy and cigars in one of the formal state rooms.
