and Eric Feldman’s writing hands—with pomace and blended what you saw, smelled, in the shed.”
“Henri was distilling . . .” he said.
“Richard’s hand that Eugénie brought home. The gift for her mother.”
“And the little bottle you discovered?”
“Le Marc Pitot, Réserve de la Famille? Feldman’s hand, of course. Henri had left room in the bottle for the second batch.”
“Mon Dieu,” he muttered.
“Do you drink marc, Colonel?”
“Too harsh. I prefer this,” he said, lifting the Calvados and taking a sip.
“Yeah, it’s an acquired taste,” I said. “Not that one could ever acquire a taste for marc blended with a dead person’s hand,” I added. “I doubt I’ll ever be able to drink the stuff again.”
“But how did you solve this puzzle?” He looked at me, genuinely curious.
“I kept asking myself, Where are the hands? What the hell can you do with hands? And then, when we were at Pitot’s, it came to me. It’s the same method I applied to the mystery of le collage: to employ les techniques de vinification to the elements of the case. The hands had to be somewhere.”
Sackheim thought for a moment. “You know, this piece of furniture in which you found the bottle today, in French we call this un buffet deux corps.” He paused. “But it contained only one body. It awaited the arrival of the second.”
He stared down at the table. His cigar had gone out. Slowly, meticulously, he relit it, sucked it with relish, blew a long, precise stream of smoke into the thick atmosphere of the café, and looked at me. Then he sipped the Calva and stared at the ceiling.
“They have taken me off the case,” he said.
Smoke swirled in heavy waves around the globe of light ensconced on the wall.
“Jesus, Colonel. It’s my fault, isn’t it?” I felt wretched.
He didn’t answer me directly. “My men will need me, but there is nothing I can do for them.” He signaled for the check. “Give me just one minute,” he said. He pulled out his cell phone and walked away.
“I have made a reservation for you in your old hotel,” he said, returning to the table. “One requires the comfort of the familiar after such a day.”
He had me drop him at the gendarmerie.
“There is no need for one to go back to see the carnage,” he said. “In fact, they will not let me go back. I think perhaps, in the end, I broke a few too many rules.” I started to say something, but he put his hand up. “Get some rest. Tonight I will cook. I need something to keep my mind off this . . . catastrophe. I’ll pick you up at seven o’clock.”
Le Chemin de Vigne was nearly empty after the frenzy of the Hospices, and the owner gave me the same room I’d used the week before. I wanted to sleep, but my mind was whirling and I decided to take a walk.
I stepped out the front door and wandered down the street, passed through the tiny plaza, and skirted the vineyard I could see from the window of my room. I stuck to the road that fronted a walled mansion and passed the hillock that contained the cisterns that fed Aloxe-Corton. They really did look like bomb shelters, their vented chimneys rising out of the earth like ventilation pipes.
The road paralleled the irrigation ditch, a channel I now realized fed the wells from the hills and vineyards of the Bois de Corton. I walked uphill against its current, the water descending the channel in a trickle. At the end of the road, I turned left and crossed a concrete bridge. Brush and weeds all but obscured a modern cabotte dug into the hillside like a pillbox.
As I ascended to the wooded crown of the hill, I passed the ancient stone hut I had seen that morning when Sackheim had driven us to the body of Lucas Kiers. A small van was parked on the side of the road, and workers stood in a vineyard watching me. We nodded from a distance. Mist hugged the hollows of the land that rose and fell in gentle waves across the imperceptible microclimates of Aloxe. At the end of the track where Sackheim had parked, I turned and looked back toward the village, turned again, and headed up the path.
Just beyond where we’d found Lucas Kiers lying on the ground, I saw a sapling with a hand-carved sign set into the earth. It was a beech tree, the plaque