Phần I
The phone in the guest suite of the Meadowood rang at ten past one in the morning, and Grant Holloway, who had not been asleep, picked it up on the first ring.
"Walter's boy," said Victor Bellandi.
He sounded perfectly clear. He sounded like the man who had shaken Grant's hand on the crush pad in 2006 and said, Welcome to the hill, son, try not to fall in anything.
"You want the wine," Victor said. "Twenty-three bottles. Come to the caves at half past one. Come alone. Or at dawn I pour them into the creek with the rest."
The line went dead.
Grant sat on the edge of the bed in the dark for a long time with the phone in his hand. Then he got dressed.
Victor was waiting for him at the cave mouth in his bathrobe and slippers, holding a lantern and an iron key. He didn't say anything. He just turned and walked into Tunnel Three, and Grant followed him, the way he had followed him everywhere that harvest twenty years ago.
The library. The dusty racks. A folding chair in a swept corner. A small, empty wooden rack with twenty-four slots.
"Where are they?" Grant said.
Victor smiled. He opened a wooden door at the far end of the room, and the old tank room was on the other side of it, and Victor walked through it and climbed the iron steps to the catwalk, slowly, one hand on the rail.
He knelt by the hatch of Tank 7 and pulled it open.
"Where they belong," he said. "In Seven. Go and look."
Grant stood at the bottom of the steps.
He should have walked away. He knew that, later, in the hospital, with a plastic mask over his face. Any sane man would have walked away. But he had spent twenty years standing at a bunkhouse window in his mind, watching a flashlight go up those stairs, telling himself Vic will open it, Vic will hear him. And now Vic was holding it open. For him.
He climbed the catwalk. He swung his legs over the rim. He went down the iron ladder into the dark, into the smell of dry old wine and concrete, looking for black bottles that weren't there.
There was nothing at the bottom but a stain.
Above him, the hatch slammed. The bolt slid home. A small, smooth, oiled sound.
And then, from somewhere near his feet, from the little sample valve at the base of the tank, a hiss began.