But he said nothing as he assessed the situation. What if the other bidder had set his own limit at $2,000 per bottle? That was a nice round figure. So if Luc went to twelve-five, that would exceed his own preset limit, but not by much. The price per bottle would be less than twenty-one hundred—exorbitant, but still shy of absurdity.
Luc nodded to the auctioneer and was rewarded by his own chorus of "Ahs" and appreciative clapping.
"And you, sir?" the auctioneer said, looking beyond Luc. "Will you go to thirteen?"
Another pause as his competitor, his foe, his mortal enemy, conferred with the mystery bidder. Luc continued to stare straight ahead.
A loud clearing of the throat and then a voice two rows back said, "Time to separate the men from the boys: fifteen thousand."
Gasps, then applause. Luc could feel his face turning red.
"Sir?" the auctioneer said, looking at Luc with raised eyebrows.
Crushed and embarrassed, Luc could only shake his head. Twenty-five hundred dollars a bottle? The vintage had never gone for that price and he refused to be suckered into topping such an outrageous bid. May the corks be dry and crumbling and leaking air, may the wine have oxidized to vinegar, and may the swine on the other end of the line drown in it.
But Luc knew the wine would be perfect. He'd studied the bottles, how the wine rode high in the necks, how one capsule had been cut to reveal the firm, tight, branded cork.
He rose, placed the paddle on his seat, adjusted the cuffs of his charcoal gray suit jacket, and walked down the center aisle. The weight of the combined gazes against his back from the audience propelled him toward the door.
Time to separate the men from the boys.…
Indeed… and at the moment he felt as if he were back wearing knickers.
As he passed the grinning winner, yammering into his cell phone, the pig had the bad taste to wink at him and say, "Better luck next time."
Die, Luc thought, ignoring him. Fall down and die.
He pushed through the door onto York Avenue. He took a deep breath of the evening air and consoled himself with the certainty that more bottles of Chateau Petrus 1947 Pomerol Cru Exceptional remained unopened somewhere and that some of those eventually would come to auction and find their way into his cellar.
Yet he still felt a residue of humiliation. He had vied for a prize and was coming away empty-handed. He could afford three thousand, four thousand, five thousand dollars a bottle, but money was not the point. The point was winning. And he had blinked.
He didn't feel like going home right now, so he began walking. He was about as far east as possible without being in the river, so he headed west, walking up stately Seventy-second Street. And he thought about his father. Wine always brought back memories of Papa.
Poor man. If only he had found a way to hang on to the ancien domaine in Graves or at the very least cached his wines somewhere before fleeing to America, life would have been so different.
Chateau Monnet's vineyard had been among the smallest in the Graves district of Bordeaux, but it had provided a respectable living for generations. His ancestors had bottled small lots of their own wine for the family and sold most of the harvest to other vintners. But they'd never quite recovered from the Phylloxera vitifoliae plague that attacked the vineyards of Europe in the 1860s. The plant louse wiped out all—not most, all—of Chateau Monnet's vines. Like its neighbors, Monnet had had to replant its acreage with Phylloxera-resistant rootstock imported from, of all places, California.
It took years before they were harvesting grapes again. The family fell into debt. Worse, the grapes were never as good as before the plague, so the debt grew. During World War Two, with the Germans in Paris and moving toward Bordeaux, Papa decided to abandon the place—it already belonged more to the bank than to him—and flee to America.
Luc was born in New York and thus a citizen. And by then the bank had auctioned off the Monnet domain to a neighboring chateau. Unable to face the ignominy of losing the ancestral home, Papa never set foot in France again.
Luc had visited the property a few years ago. He'd found the elegant stone structure that had been the ancestral home still standing, but now converted to an inn. An inn! He'd felt degraded.
Luc had stood in its front hall and sworn that he would buy it back someday. All it would take was money. And someday—soon, he hoped—he would have enough. Then he would drive the money changers from the family temple, move his wine collection back to the land of its origin, and take up where his father had left off.
He looked up and noticed Central Park across the street. Surprised that he'd already walked to Fifth Avenue, he turned uptown. As he reached the Eighties he noticed a blaze of flashing red lights ahead. Curious, he joined the crowd of gawkers gathered behind the yellow tape across the street from the Metropolitan Museum.
Ambulances and police cars blocked Fifth Avenue. Jammed traffic was being diverted. Emergency workers were tending dozens of injured people while cops dragged bloodied well-dressed men into blue-and-white paddy wagons.
"What happened?" Luc said to the Hispanic-looking fellow next to him.
"Some kind of riot." He wore a Mets cap and a Rangers sweatshirt. "Bunch of preppies, I heard."
"Preppies?" Luc said. "I don't see any preppies."
"Not kids. Older guys. Some prep school class was having its twenty-fifth year reunion tonight and decided to go on a rampage."
A premonitory worm of unease began to wriggle in Luc's gut. "Anyone… killed?"
"Not that I know of, but I—oh, shit! What's that guy doing?"
Luc squinted toward where the man was pointing. He spotted what must have been one of the rioters—disheveled, bloody, but the crest on his blazer certainly looked preppyish—handcuffed to the door handle of one of the police cars. He squatted there with his face against his handcuffed wrist.
"Oh, Christ!" Luc's neighbor said. "Is he doing what I think he's doing?" He began shouting to the nearest policeman. "Officer! Yo, Officer! Check out that guy over there! By the unit! Oh, man, stop him before he kills himself!"
Luc spotted a growing pool of blood by the handcuffed man's feet. His gorge rose as he realized the man was gnawing at his wrist, as if trying to chew it off.
The cop went over to him, saw what he was doing, and called the EMTs.
"Shit, I heard of trapped animals doing that," said the man in the Mets cap, his voice tinged with awe, "but never a human."
Luc could not reply. His throat felt frozen.
The preppy started kicking and screaming when the EMTs converged on him and tried to restrain him. As they surrounded the handcuffed man he continued to struggle and shout. Luc couldn't be sure but he thought he saw the cop's nightstick rise and fall once, and abruptly the man was silent. One of the EMTs signaled for a stretcher.
Feeling sick and weak, Luc turned and staggered away. What an awful, tragic scene.
And he was to blame.
3
"I think she's asleep," Gia whispered.
She sat on the bed next to her sleeping daughter, holding her hand. Jack stood on the other side.
"About time," he said, looking down at the skinny little form curled under the covers of her bed. He reached out and smoothed her dark hair. "Poor kid."
Vicky had huddled between Jack and Gia in the back of the cab, shaking and sobbing all the way home. Even the safety of her own bedroom hadn't calmed her.
"What kind of human garbage would frighten a child like that?" Gia said.
She hadn't actually seen what had happened, so she didn't know that the guy hadn't been trying simply to frighten Vicky—he'd been on the verge of tossing her down the steps and possibly to her death. Jack saw no point in enlightening Gia. She was already furious. Why make her sick?