The Vintage Caper

selection of brushes, a flat black box, and a small plastic canister. He sucked his teeth and flexed his fingers. “On fait toutes les bouteilles?” He looked at Sam. “All of the bottles?” Sam nodded. “And do you need DNA?” Another nod. Philippe was busy taking notes. He could see his scoop taking shape and, at this crucial stage of the story, the more detail he could pick up the better. He moved closer to Grosso to get a better view of what he was doing.
    “Monsieur Grosso,” he said, “I don’t want to distract you, but I’m fascinated. Could you tell me a little about how you do this?”
    Without looking up at Philippe, Grosso beckoned him closer. He had laid the first magnum on the ground and was shining his flashlight over it. “First, I do the visual examination,” he said, “to check the surface for prints.” He adjusted the angle of his flashlight. “Some of them can only be seen by the use of oblique light.” He grunted, put the flashlight down, and unscrewed the lid of his canister, tilting it to one side so that Philippe could see the contents. “Metallic flake powder. The flakes are aluminum—they’re the most sensitive, and they lift nicely.” He took one of his brushes, and began to dab on the powder, sparingly, and with a light circular motion. “This is what we call a Zephyr brush; carbon fiber, with a mop head, which is less likely to disturb the print deposit.” He finished with the brush and opened his black box, taking out some strips of clear adhesive tape. “Now I’m going to use this to lift the prints.” Fingers moving with delicate precision, he applied tape to the scattered prints and then peeled off the strips before placing them on a sheet of clear acetate. “ Voilà . You see? With this technique, there’s no need to take photographs.” The first magnum was replaced. Grosso moved on to the second.
    Sam had been watching the ritual. It seemed to him agonizingly slow. He tapped Philippe on the shoulder and said, in a whisper, “Is there any way you can get him to speed things up?”
    Philippe knelt on the floor next to Grosso to ask him. Sam couldn’t hear what he said in response, but it sounded more like a growl than an answer, and Philippe was grinning as he looked up at Sam.
    “He said, ‘I can’t dance faster than the music.’ I think that means we should leave him alone to get on with it.”
    Sam told himself that Grosso’s painstaking progress would seem even slower if he just stood there watching, and so he wandered off, down to the far end of the cellar. His eye was caught by a big pile of cartons neatly stacked in a corner and half-hidden behind Vial’s golf cart. The cartons were marked with the ornate script he always thought of as vineyard copperplate: Domaine Reboul, St. Helena, California . He remembered Vial referring without any great enthusiasm to a property in the Napa Valley, and opened one of the cartons to see what kind of label he used for his American wine. But the carton was empty. So was the next one, and the one after that.
    He called the hotel to see if he’d received a delivery from FedEx. Nothing yet. Doing his best to be patient, he retired to the impressive surroundings of the Rue de Corton-Charlemagne and turned over once again the questions that had been occupying a corner of his mind for the past few days: If the prints matched, what would he do? Confront Vial? Get the police officially involved? Pass the problem on to Elena and the people at Knox Insurance? All of the above? None of them?
    The minutes passed; on leaden feet, but they passed. The next time he looked at his watch it was still not quite two o’clock. He went back to see how Grosso was getting on among the magnums. Only four to go.
    Sophie had said she’d duck into the ladies’ restroom and call when she and Vial were about to leave the restaurant.
    Grosso continued; cool, calm, methodical.
    “But this is quite delicious,” said Sophie, after her first sip of Beaumes-de-Venise. “Halfway between sweet and dry. Lovely.” She raised an appreciative glass to Vial, who was nodding and smiling at her reaction. Not surprisingly, he had some comments to make about the wine’s pedigree.
    “The name of the grape, so the historians tell us, comes from the Italian moscato . That is to say, musk. Now, musk is very highly thought of among deer.” Vial permitted himself a roguish twitch of the eyebrows. “It is the scent with which they—how shall I put