The Sauvignon Secret

said with the weariness of someone who had been over this ad nauseam and was tired of defending it. “We only did what was absolutely essential, took no unnecessary risks. You may have studied all this in your history books, my dear, but you’re forgetting these were the Cold War years when kids hid under their school desks during drills to prepare for a nuclear attack. It’s a cheap shot to look back and condemn; it was different living through those times.”

He got up and poured the last of the Margaux into our glasses.

“Charles, you took none for yourself,” Pépé said.

“I’m switching to brandy. Care to join me, anyone?”

“Non, merci,” my grandfather said, and I shook my head.

He walked behind the bar, setting a bottle of Rémy-Martin on the counter. “In 1969, Nixon bowed to ethical and moral pressure to stop the program. He signed orders that all chemical and biological weapons development and testing was to cease. They dismantled the lab at Wilton, let people go, moved equipment, animals, everything elsewhere.”

He splashed cognac into a snifter. “You can probably guess what I’m going to say next. A small group of biochemists, brilliant young scientists who’d been hired as contractors, thought it was insane to shut down our program when other countries were forging ahead.”

He came back to his chair, swirling the burnished liquid in his glass with the practiced ease of habit. I wondered why he wasn’t drunk yet. My own head was spinning. Writhing figures, like the sinewy one on my glass, danced in the flames of the fire and waved their arms.

Charles resumed his talk as he sat down. “It was easy enough to keep them off the grid. Wilton was the perfect place to do it. Plenty of other stuff went on that no one talked about. They were a tight-knit group, all good friends. They hadn’t wanted to split up anyway.”

“What did they do?” I asked.

“Mostly the same thing they’d been doing before.”

“Including experimenting on humans?”

“I’m getting to that,” he said. “Don’t rush me.”

Pépé caught my eye and made the universal gesture with one hand that meant Calm down.

“Sorry.”

“First you need to know about these young people,” Charles said. “Who they were. It’s important.”

Pépé nodded and exhaled a stream of smoke. I settled deeper into the cushions of the sofa.

“They used to get together on weekends after work. One of the girls’ families had a beach house on Pontiac Island in Maryland. Beautiful place, that island. Only a few hundred inhabitants. A two-lane bridge from the mainland and then you’re transported to another time where life moved more slowly. In the beginning it was idyllic.” A ghost of a smile flickered across his face.

“You, also, went to the beach house?” I asked.

“Once, for a birthday party, and one other time, but I didn’t socialize with them. There was a lot of drinking, weekends got a bit wild.” He paused, a distasteful expression on his face. “It led to some rather casual and open sexual activities, not my thing at all. Besides, I was married to my first wife.”

I waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t.

“One of the girls, Maggie Hilliard, decided their little group needed a name—you know how girls are.” He gave me a tolerant smile and I bit my tongue, resisting the urge to ask him for his own interpretation of how girls were. “Some folderol invented one night when everyone was in their cups at the cottage. But it stuck. They called themselves the Mandrake Society.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Mandrake was a plant that had been used as long ago as the ancient Greeks,” he said. “It’s a deliriant causing hallucinations. Used to induce sleep. It’s part of the nightshade family. The Greeks used mandrakes in war, scraping the bark and putting it in wine that they left for the enemy to discover. The foreign troops drank it and, once drugged, their captors easily overcame them. It was one of the earliest biological weapons. The name was sort of an inside joke among the five of them.”

“I’ve heard stories about mandrakes,” I said. “If you pull one out of the ground it starts screaming. Anyone who hears the sound will die.”

“I see you know your mythology,” Charles said.

“More like my Harry Potter.”

“How amusing,” he said in a dry voice. “There is another legend, a bit of folklore, that a mandrake will only grow where the semen of a hanged man has dripped to the ground.”

He steepled his fingers, and I shuddered.

“Do you mean Paul Noble?”

“I heard one of the stories about the possible cause of Paul’s death,” he said. “It is a bizarre coincidence, you must admit.”

Pépé pointed to the figure on his glass. “So this creature was the symbol of the Mandrake Society?”

Charles nodded. “Maggie had the wineglasses made for everyone. I used to have a set of six. These three are the only ones left.”

I set my glass on the coffee table with a sharp little clink. Charles stared at me.

“Do continue about this group,” Pépé said.

Charles leaned his head against the back of his chair like he was contemplating what to say. “They needed to continue field testing,” he said finally. “On humans. So they advertised for volunteers. Offering money.”

“You mean discreet ads in newspapers?” I asked. “Like they used to do before the Internet?”

“Of course not.” He sounded annoyed. “It was easy enough to find people who needed spare cash if you knew where to look … people sleeping in the rough. Homeless individuals.”

“Oh, my God,” I said. “They got people who were desperate for money to volunteer to be experimented on?”

“It happens all the time. How else do you think they test new drugs? Don’t judge, Lucie.” Charles sat forward and shook his finger in my face. “They were protecting you. The people who volunteered were patriots. They wanted to help.”

I kept my mouth shut. Drug testing was one thing. This was about creative ways to kill people.

Charles sat back again. “There was, well, an unfortunate incident. One of the volunteers, a homeless man who said his name was Stephen Falcon, was also mildly disabled. Autistic, I guess, is how you’d describe him today. Unfortunately, he died during one of the experiments. It happened in the lab, very traumatic, upset the hell out of everyone.” He held out his hands palms up as though entreating us to understand the small setback. “There was nothing anyone could do to save him. A tragedy, obviously.”

I couldn’t tell if he meant for the Mandrake Society or for Stephen Falcon. Neither Pépé nor I spoke. Pépé’s lips were pressed together and his face was the color of ashes.

“Of course, we took care of his burial. Actually, he was cremated. We didn’t find a next of kin.” He looked rueful. “That was our undoing, where we went wrong. His real name was Stephen Falcone. He wasn’t homeless; he’d run away. At the time he was living with his sister in D.C., Elinor Falcone. She found out that he’d volunteered for our program from someone who knew Stephen and tracked us down. I went to see her.”

He gave an elaborate shrug. “I told her that her brother had died serving his country and she should be proud of him. After all, he was autistic—what kind of future could he have? She was well compensated for her loss, spared his future medical expenses, what have you. In return, of course, she couldn’t talk about what happened to him.”

Blood money. I blinked hard listening to Charles’s description of the “favor” he had done Elinor Falcone.

“Did she keep her word?” Pépé asked.

He waved a hand. “Oh, yes, she did, indeed. But it didn’t end there. Stephen’s death … I don’t know … it changed everything. The Mandrake Society got together one night at the cottage and, from what I heard, everyone got stinking drunk, really crazy out of their minds. Theo Graf, the head biochemist, said he was done with the group, the experiments, everything. He planned to quit, leave Fort Wilton and go somewhere else. Maggie was so upset that she said they ought to come clean about what really happened to Stephen. Aside from the fact that they were