All the driving I had done today was beginning to make me a little logy. I rolled down the window another couple of inches, to let in more of the cool night air, and yawned, and the yawn triggered a series of small dry coughs that brought a tightness into my chest. When the coughing stopped I took several slow deep breaths. The tightness eased then, but a dull ache lingered in the region of my left lung.
There was a lesion on that lung. It was benign, as I had learned after an agonizing week this past summer, just prior to my fiftieth birthday; but there was still the possibility that it would turn malignant, or that other malignant lesions would form on one or both lungs. That was what a doctor named White had told me — and he had also told me that if I wanted to keep on living, I had to give up smoking cigarettes.
So I had given them up. Cold turkey. I had consumed an average of two packs a day for thirty-five years, and had tried to quit several times with no success; but when a doctor tells you point-blank that you’re going to die if you don’t quit, you do it and you stick to it. I had not had a single cigarette in five months. Every time I thought about having one, which was less and less frequently now, I reminded myself that it would be like putting a knife in my own chest. And the craving would go away.
The lesion, and the specter of death, had changed me in a lot of ways over these past five months. In the beginning, while I was waiting for the pathology report on whether the lesion was malignant or benign, I had been obsessed by death — so obsessed by it that I was having difficulty functioning. But then, as a result of a complicated case I had been on in the Mother Lode, I had finally come to terms with my own mortality. I was no longer afraid of the specter of death; I had made peace with myself and with the world around me. I was no longer inclined to view certain things and certain people with cynical eyes. I was no longer inclined to care too much and too deeply about the lives and the suffering of others — what the unemotional and intellectual types like to label dismissively as weltschmerz, as if it were some sort of curious affliction. Not that I have stopped caring; it is just that human pain and human folly do not hurt me so much anymore.
When I got to the top of the low hill beyond the bottomland, the winery buildings appeared in another shallow valley below. What looked to be the main cellar was off to the south, built before a cut in a limestone ridge; nightlights shone across its stone facade and its huge domed roof, illuminated part of a wide gravel yard and a parking area for visitors. Vineyards stretched away on its far side, and at an angle beyond the cellar’s north side were a couple of smaller stone buildings that probably housed bottling and shipping facilities and some of the winery’s smaller cooperage. A stand of oak trees and two hundred yards of open ground separated those buildings from an old stone house, shaded by more oaks, that had the appearance of a nineteenth-century Italian villa. There were lights visible in some of the house’s facing windows.
I took the car down there, past where the road made a loop toward the main cellar and a gated lane branched off it and led up to the house, and pulled it into one of the slots in the parking area. There was no sign of activity around there; pick-up trucks and a big diesel rig and a handful of empty gondolas sat dark and silent around the north side of the yard. If this were the height of the crush, or if the harvest yield had been a good one, there might have been some nighttime work going on. As things were, it did not seem that anyone was collecting overtime pay tonight.
I got out and walked across the yard to the cellar. The cool air was pungent with the heady odor of crushed grapes and fermenting wine, and I had the thought that maybe I ought to change my drinking habits too, learn how to enjoy good wine. Wine, at least, did not give you a belly that was starting to hang over the belt, the way beer had with me.
The only doors in the front wall of the cellar were a pair of brassbound black-oak jobs, set into an archway, that looked as if they had come off a church or a European castle. Above them was a redwood sign that gave the winery’s name, and beside them was a bulletin board that told you the tasting room was inside and what the hours were. I looked for a bell-push of some kind, but there was nothing like that set into the stone wall. So I reached out and tried the doors, and one of them swung inward beneath my hand.
Inside, the temperature was several degrees colder and the fermenting-wine smell several degrees sharper. There was a dankness too, created by the stone floors and walls and the high stone ceiling. A pale light burned in the tasting room straight ahead, and another glowed in the foyer where I stood, and there were still others spaced at wide intervals along corridors that extended the width of the building on both sides; but they were only diffused pockets of light that made the shadows around them seem deeper, that gave heavy old wood casks and tables and beams an unreal cast, like half-formed lack ghosts.
I moved forward a couple of paces. From somewhere in the building I could hear the faint hum of machinery; otherwise there was nothing but silence. The corridor to the south, I saw, led into an area filled with huge redwood aging tanks. The one to the north went past a dark enclosure with windows on two sides and rows of wine bottles glistening dully on shelves inside — a sales room — and then past another enclosure that had a palely lighted window, as though from a desk lamp inside. That was probably the office, I thought, and when I glanced up at the foyer wall an arrow sign there confirmed it. I took a step in that direction.
And something made a scraping sound down there, the kind of sound a person makes when he drags a heavy object across a stone floor.
I hesitated, listening, but the noise was not repeated. Sounds in the night, I thought, and shrugged, and started down the corridor. My footsteps echoed on the floor, were magnified by the stone walls until they reverberated like the hollow clopping of wood on wood.
The light in the office went out.
That brought me up short again. A faint uneasiness began to work inside me, an intimation of something being wrong. Why would Alex Cappellani shut off the light when he heard someone approaching? Unless he planned to come out and greet me — but the office door remained closed.
I listened. Silence. All right then, he was waiting in there, or somebody was. For what? To find out who was out here?
“Mr. Cappellani?” I called. And identified myself.
Silence.
The uneasiness grew stronger, but the need to know what was going on carried me forward, on the balls of my feet now, until I was standing just beyond the dark office window. It was pitch black in there; I could not even make out the shapes of furniture.
“Mr. Cappellani?”
Nothing but the echo of my voice.
With the hackles coming up on my neck, I eased forward to the door and put a hand on the knob and turned it. It opened inward an inch or two. I shoved it wide with the tips of my fingers, tensing, looking inside but not moving my body.
Breathing — somebody breathing just inside the door.
The scuffling of a shoe sole.
Those sounds warned me, but not in time to do anything more than take a half-step backward. The dark shape of a man lunged into the doorway, and I had a fleeting perception of something upraised in his hand, something swinging down toward my head, and got my arm up in panicked reaction — and the object glanced off my wrist, glanced off my right cheekbone, brought a bright flash of pain and confusion and sent me sprawling backward across the cold stone floor.