of eyebrow pencil drawn on his upper lip with a steady hand, and a perfectly bald head. He was wearing a light grey suit and one of those bootlace ties you occasionally see on senators from Texas.
“Um,” Theo said.
“My key.”
It made no sense; until, quite suddenly, Theo remembered that this was a hotel. In which case, Grendel’s big brother here was a guest. Which made him –
“Mr Nordstrom.”
The monster grunted. “Key,” he repeated. “Now.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know—” Then he remembered the two rusty iron keys he’d found in the desk drawer. He yanked it open and chose one at random. “There you are, Mr Nordstrom,” he said, with a degree of composure he found quite remarkable in the circumstances. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”
Mr Nordstrom nodded. “Get me a bottle of Château d’Yquem 1932. Now.”
“Certainly, Mr Nordstrom,” Theo said politely, and ran.
Through the door that led to the stairs; instead of up, towards his room, he went down. The down staircase was improbably long, straight and pitch dark; he could feel it getting steadily colder as he descended, and when he put his hand out to steady himself against the wall, the surface he touched was damp and rather sticky. He could smell mould, saltpetre and something else he couldn’t quite identify. Eventually, though, the stairs ended in a door, which he discovered by walking into it. He turned the handle, took a step forward and groped until he found a light switch.
He’d found the wine cellar, no doubt about it. He also understood at once why there had been so many stairs. It was like being in an underground cathedral. The ceiling, supported by a forest of fluted marble pillars topped with Corinthian capitals, was so high he hurt his neck looking for it. He didn’t want to guess how big the room was. If you were into model railways, you could probably have fitted in a 1:1 scale replica of the Gare du Nord, but you’d have had to move an awful lot of stuff out of the way first. The room was crammed to bursting with wine racks, whose top layers reached almost to the roof. And all the racks were full; not an empty slot to be seen.
His first impression of Mr Nordstrom was that he probably wasn’t the most patient man ever to see the light of day. Tough. Unless there was a catalogue of some sort, and there was no sign of one, he was going to have to wait a while – years, possibly – while Theo searched for a 1932 Château d’Yquem in all this lot.
He picked a rack at random and squinted at the labels, but they were thick with dust and illegible. Theo didn’t know very much about wine, but he clearly remembered getting yelled at by his father for picking up a bottle and thereby disturbing the sediment; it was something you weren’t meant to do, he knew that much. So he leaned as close to the bottles as he could get and gently wiped at the dust with his forefinger. Château d’ Yquem, he read. 1931.
Too easy. He tried a few more bottles and found the 1930, the 1933, the 1934, the 1935. Would it matter so terribly much if he was a year out? He pictured Mr Nordstrom in his head and decided that, yes, it probably would. He tried the next row down, which proved to be 1936 to 1941. The three rows above were all 1929. He remembered his mother giving his father an incredibly hard time over a wine merchant’s bill, and it occurred to him that the contents of the cellar must represent an absolutely colossal sum of money. Ah well.
At the far left end of the next row, a solitary bottle of the 1932. He sighed with relief and, as tenderly as he could, he picked it up, trying his level best to keep it at the same angle it had been lying on the rack. It felt curiously light.
A thought tore across his mind like a light aircraft making a forced landing in a maize field. The hell with it; he shifted the bottle upright and held it up to the light. The cork and the foil were intact, but the bottle was empty.
He stared at it. What was most surprising, however, was how relatively little he was surprised. He put it carefully down on the floor, then pulled out another bottle at random. Also empty.