Blood Wine Page 6

“Yes, of course,” she said. “You were at Miranda’s place.”

  “And what about you, why were you at Miranda’s place?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know how I know her name.”

  “How did you get there?”

  “I don’t know. Where are we going?”

  “Do you recognize where we are?”

  “Yes, sure. We’re on the QEW on the way to Niagara.”

  Morgan glanced over at Miranda, who registered with a rise of her eyebrows that the woman calling herself Michelle did not say Hamilton but Niagara. Most people would say Hamilton; Niagara was down the escarpment, the landscape leading to the Falls. Only someone familiar with the area would call the highway the QEW and see it as the route to Niagara.

  Morgan had waited in the car outside the hospital while Miranda went in to take charge of the young woman. They did not want to intimidate her, but when she got in the car she casually acknowledged him and settled back comfortably, prepared to be driven wherever her custodians might take her. Her blue eyes seemed clear and very dark inside the car; her pupils dilated to bring the interior into focus.

  When she looked out the window to take inventory, her eyes became lighter, the colour of chicory by the roadside. She was hauntingly beautiful, Morgan thought. But she did not seem to have nightmares bottled inside; rather, she seemed almost empty.

  “You sure you’re all right to drive?” he said, turning to Miranda. “I don’t mind.”

  “Morgan, I’m fine. Where are we going?”

  “I told you I talked to Millennium Wines in Rochester last night. I called back this morning and got Forrest Sherwood, the owner. Seriously, that’s his name. He buys the Châteauneuf from a wholesaler in Buffalo. The wholesaler told me he buys only from reputable importers. But in this case he has a numbered company to deal with. Turns out it’s registered in the Bahamas. Dead end to the paper trail. Only when I told the Buffalo wholesaler I was a homicide cop, we leapfrogged into real memory — he recalled having seen the guy who usually drives delivery. Unmarked truck, that’s not uncommon. A jobber. But he said the driver works for Bonnydoon, a boutique winery near Niagara-on-the-Lake.”

  “That’s a boutique town,” said Michelle from behind them. “It’s cute, like a life-sized miniature.”

  “Yeah,” said Morgan, “so I hear.”

  “And we’re on our way to check out Bonnydoon?” Miranda asked.

  “We are.”

  “Is Sherwood Forrest going to change the name of his store?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Millennium Wines. Now that 2001 is here, even the mathematical purists have to admit we’re in a new millennium.”

  “Did you ever see the movie?”

  “What, Kubrick’s 2001? Yes, I had a crush on Keir Dullea, no, on Hal, on the disembodied voice. I found it very erotic.”

  “You are strange,” said Morgan and turned to the woman in the back seat.

  “Why Michelle?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s not your name, why Michelle?”

  “How do you know?”

  “You split the syllables. If it was your real name, it’d be worn, you’d slur it together.”

  “Really? Then what is my name?”

  “Why Michelle?”

  “It’s from Buffy.”

  “What!”

  “Sarah Michelle Gellar, she plays the slayer.”

  “You watch that, too?” Miranda exclaimed over her shoulder.

  “And you can remember who plays which, in relation to what, but you don’t know your own name?” said Morgan.

  “I seem to have been traumatized in a highly selective way, Detective.”

  The Bonnydoon Winery turned out to be mostly warehouses, storage sheds, and a private airstrip running between rows of vines. Set back against the escarpment, looming over the modest vineyard, was a rambling house of extravagant proportions designed for a mountainside on Vancouver Island or the California coastline. Lots of glass, cement columns, cedar beams.

  There was no one around when they pulled up in front of a shed marked THE OFFICE. For a few minutes they sat in the car.

  “Just what is it we’re looking for?” asked Miranda.

  Morgan released his seatbelt and turned to the woman in the back seat.

  “Does this look familiar?”

  She seemed subdued but not frightened. “Maybe,” she said. “I remember an airplane.”

  “Were you on it?”

  She closed her eyes. “I can hear it, I can’t see anything.”

  “Come on, let’s look around.”

  The three of them got out and stood together near the front of the car, waiting for someone to come out of the office or down from the house.

  Michelle leaned against Miranda, but Miranda edged away so she had to stand on her own. The young woman closed her eyes and her nostrils twitched. She opened her eyes.

  “I’ve been here. I recognize the smells. Turned earth, gasoline, sulphur, sun-heat on cedar, stewed fruit, gravel, gunpowder, damp cement.”

  “My goodness,” said Morgan. “You’re a wine taster by trade.”

  “You think so?” said Michelle.

  Miranda cocked her nose, trying to differentiate the smells. She had no doubt Morgan was right. For Miranda the various odours ran together in a blur. For Michelle it seemed like a DNA code of the place.

  “I’ve been here,” she repeated. “I remember a small plane. I remember feeling my stomach pitch, I was on board. I must have been blindfolded. I can hear the engine, I can feel the vibration. I can hear shouting over the engine noise.”

  She sat down unceremoniously on the gravel drive with an inelegant and childlike lurch. She was dressed in new clothes that Miranda had bought for her at a funky shop on Yonge Street just over from the hospital. She had insisted on wearing a skirt, although Miranda had provided her with slacks as well. She wore a T-shirt that proclaimed the beauties of Toronto and displayed the CN Tower like a soaring phallic icon rising hard by the clam-shaped SkyDome. Miranda had not shaken it out to see the design when she bought it. She bought three the same, in different colours. The clothes were Miranda’s size. The skirt fit perfectly. The T-shirt was tight.

  “What?” said Miranda, leaning down. “Michelle?”

  “I’m trying to remember. My name is Elke.”

  “Elke?”

  “I am from Stockholm. I have been speaking English since I was a small child. I studied wine in London and New York. I was here last night.”

  Morgan was surprised, not that she had been here before but that she was Swedish. He prided himself on a good ear for dialects and accents. Once she had explained, he could detect a slight Scandinavian lilt, but so vague it might be generational, something picked up from an immigrant parent or even a grandparent.

  “What else do you remember?” said Morgan.

  She did not respond. Morgan and Miranda helped her to her feet. They walked over to the office and Morgan tried the door. It was locked. He gave it a loud thump but there was no response.

  “Let’s walk,” he said. The three of them would have appeared from a distance to be strolling arm in arm. In fact, Miranda and Morgan were supporting the young woman, whose body seemed to be reacting to memory fragments at a visceral level that her mind could not deal with, aroused apparently by the smells and perhaps ambient sounds of her surroundings. Sometimes she would shut her eyes and nearly swoon, so they had to brace her upright, and then she would try to stride out as if they were holding her back.

  By the end of the runway, near the open-sided aerodrome, they wheeled and then walked back to the first of the warehouses. The sliding door was ajar. They slipped into the gloom inside and stood still for a moment, waiting for their eyes to adjust to the muted light.

  There were a series of vast cement cisterns down the centre and large fibreglass tanks or casks stacked high along both side walls.

  “Not here,” said the young woman
suddenly and marched out the open door, with Morgan and Miranda trailing behind.

  “What’s not there?” asked Miranda.

  “That’s where they mix their wines. I wasn’t in there.”

  “Mix?” Morgan asked, struck by what seemed an odd term.

  “Yes. The casks were filled with a Cabernet blend from Lebanon, I imagine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. And the cement vats, that’s where they’re mixing the Lebanese import with local wines.”

  “Is that legal?” asked Miranda.

  “I don’t know, I’m not from around here. I’ve never been to Niagara-on-the-Lake. Maybe I saw it on television.”

  They entered another wine shed, much like the first. The blond woman’s nose twitched. She walked around like a cat sidestepping unseen obstacles, catching odours hovering in layers and channels as she slowly passed through them. Miranda and Morgan watched.

  She returned to their side. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense,” she said.

  “What?” said Morgan.

  “Rhône. They’re simulating a Rhône valley blend, the southern Rhône around Avignon. I’d say they’ve created a Frankenstein monster, an Ontario-Lebanese fake Châteauneuf-du-Pape with the seams and scar tissues disguised.”

  “Disguised by what?” Morgan was intrigued. If this is what he had been drinking, Carter’s ChâteauNeuf-du-Pape, it had seemed superbly blended.”

  “Chemicals. And a master blender. It’s like having perfect pitch, there’s not a formula, it’s instinct.”

  “So, if it fools the experts,” said Miranda, “then what’s the difference?”

  “But it doesn’t, that’s just it. When is a Rembrandt not a Rembrandt? Simple, when it’s recognized to be by someone else.”

  “Well, thank you,” said Miranda. “I think there’s no doubt you’re in the wine trade. It shouldn’t be too hard to track you down —”

  “When is Elke not Elke?” said Morgan.

  The other two ignored him.

  The end warehouse was different from the others. It had a loading dock on the side and there were power lines running in, suggesting industrial machinery. On the outside, it had the same asphalt shingle siding. Probably all these buildings had been used for apples and cherries, peaches or pears, before the orchards were torn up to plant vines.

  Inside were stainless steel tanks and pipes and a complex of belts and wheels, racks and tracks, for bottling, labelling, packing wine in wooden cases, each clearly stencilled with the imprimatur of Baudrillard et fils, Avignon, designating the contents as ChâteauNeuf-du-Pape, with the vendage, 1996, stamped on neck collars in washed-out ink.

  “So this is the set-up,” said Morgan, fascinated. He picked up a loose label lying on a bench and examined it closely. It had a serial number in blue ink stamped under the sketch of the generic chateau. “Were these bottles individually numbered?”

  “Yes, of course,” said the blond woman. “That would confirm their value, especially in the New World, where individuality is at such a high premium.”

  “What do you think they’d sell for?” asked Miranda.

  “Maybe eighty or ninety dollars a bottle, American.”

  “So, a thousand dollars a case. A thousand cases, a million dollars.”

  “I would imagine they sold many, many more,” said the young woman with authority. “Thousands upon thousands, in the American market — I think if you check out lading bills for Bonnydoon Winery we’ll find they exported far more than they could produce from a paltry vineyard like this.”

  “So why is no one around?” said Miranda.

  “I think maybe they’ve had a shake-up in management,” said Morgan.

  Michelle, or Elke, as she now chose to be called, walked over and stood near the base of a giant stainless steel vat. She moved a little to one side, as if trying to catch an elusive sound floating in the air. She closed her eyes and opened them several times, then she smiled almost shyly.

  “I was right here, I was taped to a chair. Duct tape, I can hear it being stripped from the roll. Nothing over my mouth. My eyes were covered. I didn’t scream. I could hear the steel tank, listen, you can hear the faint pulsing of fermentation, no, not fermentation, this would be the final product ready for bottling. You can hear the air pressure against wine on steel … something, I can hear something.”

  Miranda stood close beside her but could distinguish no sound emanating specifically from the stainless steel.

  “My name is Elke Sturmberg. I know everything now. I work in New York. I work for an auction house. I know who I am. I know I was here, strapped in a chair. There is a disconnect. I was in Rochester, then Buffalo, then a small plane, then I was here.”

  Morgan retrieved a chair from the edge of the scene and set it down beside her. She lowered herself onto the chair with her eyes closed, almost as if she were enacting the role of a clairvoyant. Suddenly she shivered and slumped down in the chair, overwhelmed by her vision.

  “What is it?” said Miranda, the sharp rise in her voice betraying her close identification with the woman’s overwhelming anxiety.

  Elke Sturmberg reached up without opening her eyes and grasped in the air for Miranda’s hand. She seemed to be jolted from within by a series of graphic revelations.

  Gradually, she sat more upright in her chair. They waited. She opened her eyes and began to speak. “There was screaming. At first I thought it was me. I might have screamed too. No, I was silent, trying to block out the sound. It was penetrating, a man screaming. There was a loud crash, like an axe against wood, then the screaming stopped. I think he passed out.”

  “And what happened to you?” asked Miranda.

  “I waited. I could hear the sounds of a body being dragged.”

  “What does that sound like?” asked Morgan.

  “It just does,” she responded. “Breathing, voices, scraping, rustling —”

  “Could you make out what they were saying?”

  “Not much English. It was another language. Not European, nothing distinguishable.”

  “And then?” said Miranda.

  Elke seemed to retreat inside herself, then flinched. “A shot, there was a gunshot.”

  “A pistol? The gun you were carrying?” Morgan asked.

  “No, a rifle.”

  “Not a shotgun?” He wondered if she knew the difference.

  “A rifle,” she said.

  “Okay. Then what?”

  “A man rubbed his hands all over me.”

  “How do you know it was a man?”

  “You know! He touched my breasts, ran his hand up my skirt —”

  “Did you scream?”

  “No, I was frozen. Then he stopped.”

  “Did he go inside your clothes?” Miranda asked. Swabs had been taken in the psychiatric ward, but there was no evidence of sexual assault.

  “No. It wasn’t — it was, there was something cold about the way he touched me, clinical. Like he was doing a gender inventory. He was detached.”

  “Did you think you were going to be killed?” Morgan asked.

  “No, I did not think I would die. I thought they would hurt me. I wanted to die.”

  “But instead, what happened?” said Morgan.

  The young woman got up and walked around.

  “We’d better call in the Provincial Police,” said Miranda. “And Spivak, he’ll need to know what we’re up to.”

  “What are we up to?” said Morgan.

  “Good point,” she said.

  “No point,” said Morgan. “No point in bringing in reinforcements just yet.”

  Miranda realized, as far as Morgan was concerned, that this was their case.

  “Okay,” she said. “We’ve got a villain copping a dispassionate feel, we’ve got a chopped-off hand, that was the sound of the axe. We’ve got a rifle shot. What about the pistol? You said it had been fired recently. Maybe not here.”

  “Sounds of a body being manhandled be
fore the gunshot, not after — is that right, Elke?”

  “Yes, it echoed but it was like a dull ‘thunk.’ I couldn’t tell where it was coming from.”

  “And did you hear clambering?” Morgan asked.

  “What?”

  “On metal?”

  All three of them looked at the steep steps leading up the side of the largest stainless steel tank, following them to the top with their eyes, where they could see a closed hatch.

  Miranda was first to start up. The other two stood back. When she got to the top, she leaned down and tried the hatch.

  “It’ll open,” she announced.

  She hesitated, then swung the hatch up and reeled back from the fumes bursting free. She squatted down to look in, letting her eyes adjust to the darkness. The tank was half full. She reached around and found a measuring rod, then extended it down until it touched a shadow. As she prodded, the rod broke in half, and the shadow shifted. A dead man’s face drifted slowly into the disk of light below her.

  She gazed at the corpse turning in the murky darkness, struggling to make sense of her conflicting responses. The stump of a wrist protruding from a shirtsleeve confirmed this was the man with the gold ring. Her assailant, he was dead. But she did not feel vindication or relief, only anger and a vague sense of renewed violation.

  “What you got up there?” called Morgan.

  There was a large bullet hole in the dead man’s forehead. A humane gesture? she wondered. To stop him from drowning? Not through the chest, he would have sunk. Was it to relieve the pain of his amputation? Or was it someone guaranteeing his death? The work of a professional? An expression of contempt? Redundancy born of indifference or hatred?

  She stood up and took a deep breath. “I think we’d better call in the appropriate authorities,” she said.

  “My phone’s in the car,” said Morgan as she rejoined them on the ground.

  “Mine too,” she said, “in my purse.”

  The three of them walked to the door and as Miranda stepped into the sunlight a rifle shot rang out and the wood in the doorframe exploded into splinters at the level of her heart. Morgan reached past Elke and dragged Miranda off balance, back into the tangled shadows as all three lay sprawled on the floor. There was another shot, then another. Then there was a resounding silence as each listened to their own breathing, to the pounding in their chests, as they tried to assimilate what was happening.