Death at the bodega, p.5
Death at the Bodega, page 5
Inés, also sweeping, nodded in agreement.
“Fernando would approve if Imago branches out,” Gustavo said now, “If that’s what it takes to continue vinting our País. Many of those old fields originally supplied the bodega anyway. It would be like putting things back to sort of how they used to be.”
“Can we buy grapes from the outside and turn a profit?” Gael asked.
“We can if we do it right. It’s all about marketing and awareness. It is interesting how País is finally getting some respect in the wine world. País for export! Who would have thought?”
Gustavo didn’t need to mention, nor did anyone else, that turning a profit was a moot point as long as the bodega continued operating at such a reduced capacity, and grapes from the outside were pretty much the only near-term solution. The burnt vines weren’t going to regrow overnight.
“The Count wants to talk to the farmers?” said Felipe. “Pasqual is already doing that. Why doesn’t he leave it to Pasqual, who understands these people and knows better how to talk to them?”
“Pasqual is a Galáz,” said Gustavo, referring to the long estancia family lineage and the baggage entailed. “And Pasqual is Pasqual,” he added. Gael felt a wave of amusement move up and down the table, because he could just as easily have said, “And Pasqual is always high.”
“Ah, the Count,” said Osvaldo, shaking his head and chuckling. “With his ‘Imago my love’ this and ‘Imago my love’ that, and ‘I was Corucalílean in a previous life’ stuff.”
Gustavo’s voice crackled in an agreeing laugh. “It’s amusing to us, but rescuing País is his passion, his personal project. He told me his heart would break if another old vineyard got uprooted and given over to plums and cherries.”
Martina spoke. “Imagine how he would feel, if the uprooted vines were the bodega’s own. What remains of them, that is.”
Voices emerged from across the courtyard. The office door opened and the pudgy man came out, turned, and walked swiftly to his SUV with his fists clenched. Alexandra followed, and stood watching him with her hands clasped behind her back.
Again the table fell silent.
Gael felt a tickle in his throat. “Uproot the bodega’s vines? Fernando says no!”
This alleviated the tension as intended, and people laughed. He turned to Felipe and saw his grin for the first time since early morning.
“When did you say his damn highness arrives?” Tomás asked Gustavo.
“Friday. Good Friday.”
“How did the Count react when you told him the, uh, news?” asked Osvaldo, motioning again to the bodega and the compost beyond.
“He was upset. Upset it happened, and that it happened to Eder. The Count took quite a shine to Eder last year, as you may know. Today he said he’d never understood how his little Peruvian friend could have betrayed him so, and that he’d never believed it.”
“Nor did I,” said Inés, speaking her only words of the lunch. As she said them, she placed her knife and fork on her plate. She had completed her second pork chop.
The team rose to go.
Late in the afternoon, as Felipe hot pressure-washed the castle, Gael walked partway down to compost and peered at the windrows. The vehicles were gone and there was a yellow-taped-off section he and Felipe would have to maneuver around when they went to dump the load in a few minutes.
Felipe was still spraying the castle when he got back. To pass the time, he wandered into the barrel storage room.
He didn’t often enter this space, even though it was literally the centerpiece of the bodega: the facility’s large, highest-roofed middle chamber where wine was aged in oak barrels. This dim and enormous room always spooked Gael a little with its mausoleum vibe and towering racks of barrels. He could imagine becoming lost among the racks, or getting crushed by barrels as they toppled and rolled in a domino effect during, say, an earthquake.
The room itself was called the “bodega”, meaning “cellar”, even though like the rest of the facility—also referred to as the bodega—it was entirely above ground. Nearly two centuries ago, the structure had been ingeniously built to take advantage of the environmental controls Mother Nature had on offer. It was oriented with its massive doors facing the river, one kilometer distant, which allowed the prevailing breeze to flow in and through, caressing each barrel stacked beneath its towering centrally-pitched roof. This airflow combined with the room’s generous volume and meter-thick walls to create near ideal conditions for wine aging, no machinery or power source required. It never got too warm in here in the summer, never too cold in the winter.
Gael recalled standing here in February, when Pasqual gave him an introductory tour. “A while ago we considered tearing this bodega down and building a new one,” Pasqual had said. “But then we thought, why? Why replace something that isn’t broken?”
It was true. Though aged, the building stood grand and serene, almost impervious to time. No earthquake in one hundred and seventy years had been able to take down this bodega. A closer inspection revealed it was not invincible, however. Gael stepped forward and looked up to see worrying cracks high in the walls, close to where they met the wood-beamed underbelly of the soaring clay-tiled roof.
Stepping farther in, proceeding to the center, he breathed through his nose to take in the scent of wine-filled oak barrels. Hundreds sat on their sides, racked eight-high and four-deep on each side of the passage. Turning slowly, he looked back to where he had entered. There, daylight streamed in through the tall, red-painted double doors off the dock. Through them a cheerier scene shimmered, one of bright green vineyards bathed in sunshine and backed by a sinewy line of tall, deeper-green trees along the distant river. Perhaps it was this contrast that made this room feel so ominous to Gael. Outside appeared exotic; a biblical garden of Eden. Inside felt somber and lifeless.
As Gael admired the view through the doors, he watched Inés plod by in silhouette on the dock, her small lean body bent forward as she made her way to her finished product room. Steam from Felipe’s pressure washer followed her, billowing, and the sounds of its blasts continued.
Gael turned around and gazed through a second set of doors which led to the covered, low-bay area where bins of harvested grapes were staged overnight prior to crushing. No grapes had yet been delivered that afternoon, so he was able to see past their space to some of the small, opened-topped fermentation vats that populated the area, covered in white cloths to ward off insects.
His feeling of eeriness ramped up, along with the distinct sensation of being watched. He lifted his gaze, and stared into the piercing eyes of the Count.
He sucked in a breath and took a step back. Never could he get used to the large framed portrait that hung high on the wall, centered beneath the opposing pitches of the roof! There, Count Vidal Luzzago presided over the barrels, rendered in black and white and grayscale.
In the painting, the Count stood between two sideways-turned barrels and leaned into them, with an elbow resting on each barrel. He gazed across his vault-of-wine with a look of regal serenity, charcoal brows arched over calm but penetrating eyes. Silver hair was slicked back from his widow-peaked forehead, and his broad Romanesque face was framed and defined by a manicured white beard and mustache. He wore a white collared shirt, unbuttoned two-down, beneath a black tapered sports jacket with its sleeves opening to white-cuffed wrists. His hands rested between the barrels in a relaxed but confident fashion, knuckles and fingers dangling, almost tickling the wine.
Gael took another breath and studied the man some more.
“What are you like, Mr. Luzzago?” he asked.
The overall effect of the portrait was elegant-casual, conveying the essence of a refined and powerful man who was nonetheless personable. A man of the Earth and its people. Looking at this portrait always made Gael think, “Oh wow. Wine lord.”
All was quiet now, which meant Felipe was done spraying and it was time to go to compost. As Gael’s ears adjusted to the newfound quietness, other sounds emerged: a murmuring of voices in low-bay, some water being splashed, the distant rumble and clank of something being rolled.
He looked again at the portrait.
“Well, Mr. Count. I’m glad I get to meet you.”
Chapter Four
EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, Gael’s eyes flew open to pounding on his door.
“Gael!” came a voice sounding something like Osvaldo’s.
“What the heck?” he muttered. No dawn light seeped past the curtains, so he knew he wasn’t late. He tossed off the covers and stumbled across the cold stone floor to open his door a crack, switching on the light in the process.
It was Osvaldo, in his blue baseball cap and work clothes. His square face and bushy eyebrows peered in from darkness. “We’re starting early today. Can you come?”
“Sure thing. Be right there.”
“Mmmph,” he said when he shut the door. He held a hand to his forehead and teetered in his bare feet. How much had he had to drink last night? He recalled finishing his flask of Indominable down by compost as yellow police tape became hauntingly backlit in the sun’s last rays. Later he’d gone up to the breakroom, where some crates containing old bottles of País that had been set aside for lab testing sat forgotten in a corner, still near-full after having their samples withdrawn, waiting for someone to drink them as long as they hadn’t turned to vinegar.
He dropped his underwear, stepped out of them, and stumbled to the second of his two rooms, which was identical in size but renovated as a spacious modern bathroom. Reaching past the shower curtain, he rotated the spigot and heard the comforting “whoosh” of the gas flame heater lighting up outside. One of the best things about his ancient pair-of-rooms was its generously gushing, very hot shower.
Except when it wasn’t. Midway through rinsing, the water went cold. He finished quickly and got out.
Within minutes he’d donned his blue bodega-issue polyester work pants, snapped the elastic around his waist, and tightened the built-in belt. Hobbling one foot at a time, he got into his steel-toed boots without having to sit down, and reached for his black, plastic-palmed work gloves on the window sill. Exiting, he walked beneath the courtyard vines using his phone glow for guidance, and continued through the low-bay area past bins of incoming grapes and cloth-covered fermentation vats. Other than the hot shower, the best thing about his digs was the thirty-second commute to work.
He rounded the corner and arrived at the receiving area where Osvaldo was zooming around in the forklift, organizing grape bins in the yard. The de-stemmer was already rolled into position at the edge of the covered area beneath the peaked roof. Through the dimness, Gael was surprised to see Gustavo wrestling with the anaconda, muscling the long, semi-rigid fat hose to get it to uncoil and lay out into a huge arc. Normally it was Felipe and Gael who heaved and hefted the anaconda each morning.
“Sopapilla?” asked Martina, emerging from the murk. She held a tray of round, fried pumpkin breads Florencia had prepared the day before. Her voice carried a tentative congeniality, but her expression in the sparse light was solemn. Nearby, Inés stood in her neck scarf and striped sweater, chewing a sopapilla.
Gael looked around. “Where’s Felipe?” He looked some more. “And Tomás? And Joaquín?”
“They are in cells!” exclaimed Martina. “In Socovos! Each received a visit from the constable in the night, and was arrested!”
“Oh no,” said Gael.
“And Bastián,” said Inés, chewing. “They took Bastián too.”
“Who’s Bastián?”
“One of the field hands,” said Martina. “Do you know him? He is a very large man with a black beard. He comes and helps here sometimes, when we are short of workers. I do not think he has worked here yet this year, but he is the one who was called in to help last year, when Eder disappeared and we needed more staff.”
Gael lifted a sopapilla from the tray and leaned against the compost trailer. He felt dismayed. “It couldn’t have been all four of them,” he said to Martina, in a low voice.
She met his eyes and nodded. Placing the tray next to him, she said, “There is grape syrup here if you want some. I need to go and begin sampling.”
Osvaldo was poetry in motion with the forklift, zipping around and operating it like an extension of his own body as he retrieved one-ton, gray plastic cubes of grapes from low-bay and stacked them two-high in the receiving yard. Why, Gael wondered, in arresting the others, had they not also arrested Osvaldo? It was true the foreman didn’t normally drain and shovel tanks himself, but he was intimately involved with every pressing as it was he who delivered the empty castle to the tanks, and then returned the full castle to the press using the forklift. Perhaps sparing Osvaldo had been a temporary accommodating gesture given to the bodega by the authorities? It would be difficult, if not impossible, to continue the vintage without him.
A darker thought then emerged in Gael’s mind: perhaps Osvaldo had connections with the police.
He closed his eyes and bit into the sopapilla, which was mushy and cold, nothing close to a freshly fried warm delight crispy on the edges. The greasy clammy thing caught in his throat and he coughed.
“Gael!” came a piercing voice. It was Gustavo.
The Head Winemaker, inappropriately dressed in office attire, had manhandled the anaconda across receiving and along the outside wall of the fermentation hall, where he’d dragged it up to one of the barred windows.
“Take this to the top of tank fifteen!”
Gael entered through the translucent doors and walked the passage between the largest of the stainless steel fermenters. Five towered on the left, set against the wall shared with barrel storage, and five more lined the right along the exterior wall with the windows. He squeezed between tanks fourteen and fifteen, something Gustavo would have had a hard time doing, and retrieved the metal-flanged end of the hose the Head Winemaker had fed through the bars.
As he placed the hose over his shoulder and hefted it between the tanks and out into the passage, Gael pictured Inspector Cuevas with his hand over his mouth in a yawn, reaching for his thermos. This image was more than disconcerting, along with the accompanying thought that others, in addition to Osvaldo, might have connections with the police. Determining who really killed Eder was going to require some serious and nonbiased effort, along with professional care and dedication, and Gael hadn’t felt these elements present in the room when he’d gone for his interview. With the trail a year cold, it wasn’t likely to be an easy case. Why would the police be motivated to go an extra mile for an undocumented migrant, especially one who had no one following up on his behalf and insisting on justice?
Especially if the real killer could just pay them off.
A green piece of rope with a noose tied in one end displayed itself, conveniently hanging from a side port on tank fifteen. Gael snatched it, fitted the loop over the end of the anaconda, and held the hose to his shoulder as he climbed nine ladder steps to the platform. There, he fed the hose through the open manway on the tank’s domed top while sliding it through the noose. When the hose dangled about halfway down inside the tank, he cinched the rope tight and tied its free end to the manway hinge. Now the anaconda was secure, and wouldn’t work its way out of the manway while they weren’t looking to spew crushed grapes all over the hall.
Placing his hand on the top of the hose, he gazed across the tank tops, squinted, and sighed.
Regardless of what kind of job the police were going to do, as a fellow migrant, Gael owed it to Eder to try to figure his murder out. He, with no formal detection skills, and with more than enough to figure out already in his own turbulent life.
As he began descending the ladder, more images came: of Felipe’s intelligent, lineless face. Joaquín’s beaming, handsome one. And yes, Tomás’s crusty, yet endearing scowl.
As a fellow bodega worker, he owed it to those guys, too.
Gustavo had donned rubber galoshes by the time Gael got back outside and was standing next to the de-stemmer, fitting himself with the red tie-off belt they used while pitching grapes overhead. He motioned for Gael to come over. “I need you to get on the pushdowns and remounts right away. Then drain tank nineteen into tank eleven and remove the skins. Osvaldo will bring the castle when you are ready.”
“Marvelous,” said Gael, wincing at the idea of moving the skins into the castle by himself. “You’re going to crush?” he asked, rhetorically.
It would be interesting to see the boss perform the most basic and menial task of the bodega: pitchforking ton-bins of grapes into the roaring teeth of the de-stemmer while standing in said bin on top of said grapes, two meters off the ground. Of course Gustavo had to be an old hand at this, of course it was no big deal for him. Regardless, pitching grapes was not a job for one person—not one who wanted to have muscles and joints that remained functional at the end of the day. The task was always shared by two or three people, trading off every two bins. In addition to shoveling, someone had to operate the equipment, as well as scoop up the rejected stems from the floor, and someone else needed to hot-pressure-wash the empty bins before they sat in the sun too long and got cooked in sticky grape goo.
Gustavo nodded. Of course he was going to crush.
“You and who else?” Gael asked.
“Inés. And Fausto when he gets here. Fausto will help you load the castle when you are ready.”
“Yay,” said Gael, half sincerely and half not. He wouldn’t be loading the skins by himself, but he’d be doing it with Fausto.
He’d worked with the guy earlier in the season, when he’d been sent to the field to harvest grapes prior to things getting cranking at the bodega. Fausto was Pasqual’s head field hand, in charge of three or four other men, and he was old-school Chilean huaso to the max. He owned no motorized vehicle and traveled only by horse, while wearing the iconic poncho and wide-brimmed hat, accompanied by a pack of white dogs. To say that Fausto embodied toxic campo hyper-masculinity was an understatement. His bearing, gestures, and every utterance exuded it. And these utterances came at only one volume: loud. Gael figured he’d had the hairs of his cochlea rubbed off years ago by chain-sawing and other noisy campo activities, performed without ear protection. This didn’t mean that Fausto wasn’t a chatterbox, however; quite the contrary. On the day they’d harvested, Fausto had been an unceasing fount of gossip and commentary, clucking on and on like some old lady, his voice carrying across the grapevines from seven rows away.
