Bruno 02 - The Dark Vineyard

have misfiled. Could we receive some distinguished businessman who wants to discuss a possible investment in our region?”
    “What kind of investment?”
    “They didn’t say. But I’d be glad of anything. We need the jobs. The meeting is here in my office, tomorrow at 9 a.m. I’d like you to be there, along with Xavier.” Xavier was the
maire-adjoint
, as well as one of Bruno’s tennis partners, and probably would be the next mayor when Gérard Mangin eventually stepped down.
    “Did we get a name?” Bruno asked.
    “Only if Claire finds that letter.”
    “If the meeting is at nine, they’ll be staying in a hotel near here. I’ll call around, find out the name and see what I can dig up.”
    “It could be just some big political donor looking to buy a château,” the mayor speculated. Bruno knew him to be an old-school politician who had learned his skills as an aide to Jacques Chirac around the time Bruno had been born. “Still no progress on the fire?”
    “Only that we got the lab report confirming the presence of gasoline. It was arson, all right. But we’re no nearer to knowing who or why. The staff all seem to be in the clear, so J-J is working on possible competitors, and I’m supposed to make discreet inquiries among the locals, starting with the
écolos
and then the nearby farmers who might have been worried about contamination of their crops. But first I want to find out a bit more about the anonymous call alerting us to the fire. It came from the phone booth at Coux. It’s a long shot, but somebody may have seen or heard something.”

6
    Back in his office, Bruno tracked down the American businessman at the Centenaire in Les Eyzies, the grandest hotel in the district, with a restaurant that boasted a Michelin rosette. Thérèse at the hotel’s reception desk had a daughter in Bruno’s tennis class. He took hasty notes as Thérèse told him everything she knew. A young man named Fernando Bondino had arrived in a big Mercedes and taken the presidential suite, at a cost of nearly a thousand euros a night. He had demanded an Internet connection the moment he checked in, then had ordered the
menu dégustation
and a bottle of Château Pétrus, followed by the best Armagnac. The booking had been made by the Dupuy consultancy in Paris, on the avenue Monceau. Bruno checked his notebook for the names he had scribbled down at the wine shop. The address and the phone number were the same. Monsieur Dupuy had booked a room at the hotel that night.
    Bruno fired up his computer, typed in Google.fr and looked up the name Bondino. A flood of page references came up, starting with Bondino Wines, Inc., in English and in Spanish. He understood enough to see that they ran vineyards in California, Chile, Australia and South Africa and were clearly a verylarge and rich company. He turned back to the main Google page and found articles in French from
Figaro, Marianne
and
Les Echos
, the business paper. The
Figaro
piece was an interview, which he printed out, marking the passage in which the head of the company, Francis X. Bondino, was asked if his global wine empire would ever spread to France.
    “France and Italy are the homes of great wine, and our ambition will not be satisfied until we return to the source of our craft in these great countries,” Bondino was quoted as saying. His son Fernando had added: “And frankly, the wine industry in these countries is suffering from too many small vineyards overproducing too much indifferent wine. They have not yet followed the United States and Australia into a rationalization of the industry with new techniques and modern marketing. Opportunities for reorganization are enormous.”
    Bruno read on in
Marianne
about a family feud that had split the business a generation earlier, with prolonged lawsuits and much bad blood, and a brother and sister disinherited.
Les Echos
had a story about the company’s buying new vineyards in South Africa the previous year, along with some figures that startled Bruno. Bondino had turned down an offer to sell the company for six hundred million euros; he had nearly three thousand employees worldwide—roughly the population of Saint-Denis—and had made a profit the previous year of thirty-eight million euros. Marveling at the amount of instant information that the computer brought to his desk, Bruno printed out the story from
Les Echos
and prepared a small dossier of his research for the mayor, while wondering what exactly a firm