Spiced to Death (24 page)

I nodded in understanding. Gabriella looked sympathetic.

“Listen,” he said, “come and eat with us sometime. Get to know African food.”

I nodded again.

“Good.” He looked pleased. “Just give me a call.”

We shook hands and left him. He was heading for the absinthe counter.

“Biggest man I ever saw,” she said. “I’m glad he didn’t turn out to be in charge of this operation.”

“We still haven’t found out who is. Or anybody who knows anything about Ko Feng. Let’s move on.”

The next stand was easy to find. It was spaced well away from its neighboring stands and the reason became very obvious when we got closer.

“Whew!” Gabriella said. “Are they ever high!”

Venison carcasses dangled from hooks and a man with the skin coloring and prominent cheekbones of an American Indian was extolling their qualities. I thought they had been hanging too long.

“Will he able to sell those?” asked Gabriella.

“Probably. I know they don’t smell that good but well cooked and with a red currant sauce or one equally tangy, they’ll be edible.”

“For how much longer?”

“If he’s smart, he’ll sell them today.”

A knot of people was untangling from a nearby stand and for a second, I thought I saw a face I recognized. I was telling myself it couldn’t be as I didn’t know anybody here when I saw her again. She was visible only for two or three seconds but I knew her—it was the mysterious woman I had seen in the Spice Warehouse just before Don Renshaw’s murder.

“W
HAT’ S WRONG?” ASKED GABRIELLA
.

The woman had disappeared in the crowd of people and try as I might, I couldn’t see her.

“I thought it was someone I knew,” I said, “I must have been mistaken.”

But I knew I wasn’t. I kept looking but there was no sign of her. I watched the crowd flow past us and break up as small groups went on to other stands.

Gabriella looked at me strangely but said nothing.

At one end of the massive building, an entire area was devoted to wine. Here were some incredible bargains.

“Look at those!” I said to Gabriella in astonishment.

Cases of red Bordeaux were being offered at $150 a case.

“Doesn’t look like such a knock-down price.”

“That’s the Pomerol 1990, the Certain de May, anything under a thousand dollars is a great price.”

Another Pomerol, the Petrus, a year older at 1989, was being offered at $1,100 a case. “Worth nearly ten times that on the normal market,” I told Gabriella in amazement.

There was a rare Sauternes, the Chateau de Suduiraut, one with a rich creamy texture. Cases offered at $250 were worth at least $2,000 and even a Santa Maria Chardonnay from California, a 1993 and market priced at about $250 a case, was selling fast at $50.

I relayed these figures to Gabriella.

She shook her head in dismay. “Hot, every one of them.”

“Hm,” I said, “not this one, though.”

“Austrian wine?” Gabriella looked at the label. “Nineteen eighty-four? How do you know it’s not hot?”

“Maybe it didn’t get as much publicity here as it did in Europe. The story began a year later when a sharp-eyed inspector in Austria’s tax office noticed that a wine producer was claiming high added-value refunds on diethylene glycol. That’s antifreeze and it’s also used as a disinfectant. But when the inspector did some calculating, he found that the quantities consumed by this vineyard were excessive and he began investigating.

He went so far as having some of the wine analyzed, and to his horror the wine contained three times the lethal dose of antifreeze, which is a deadly poison.”

“Smart investigating,” commented Gabriella.

“It really was. Further testing showed that more than five million liters of adulterated wine were known to be out on the market. Two hundred different brands were affected and fifty companies were blacklisted by the Health Ministry.”

Gabriella looked at the wine bottles on the stand with a new respect.

“And you think this is some of it?”

“Most of it had already gone to Germany, Austria’s biggest customer. Most of it was never traced.”

“The importers held on to it, waiting for the furor to die down,” guessed Gabriella.

“Without a doubt. Every once in a while, a few bottles are reported. And one dealer, intent on preserving his image, poured several hundred bottles into the local river.” I paused and Gabriella looked at me, waiting.

“Go on,” she urged, “I have a suspicion there’s a punch line coming.”

“All the fish in the river died and the water treatment plant broke down.”

“But what about all those experts who taste wines when they first come on to the market? Didn’t they notice anything?”

“They said it had a rounded smooth sweetness and they praised its body.”

“So much for experts,” she said. “Is a ten-year-old Austrian wine valuable?”

“It sure is,” I told her. “Not only that but there are those who speculate that as adulteration of wine in Austria had been going on for years, the amount of wine spiked with diethylene glycol might be nearer to ten million liters.”

“All lethal!”

“All dangerous. As the spiking was done in vats before bottling, the amounts probably vary. Some may be very lethal, some less so—some of it may even be harmless. Want to try some?”

Gabriella shuddered. “Not me. You say that this isn’t the first time the Austrians have been known to do this kind of thing?”

“Sweet wines can be very, very expensive. Adding diglycol, as it’s called, is a cheap and easy way of turning an ordinary white wine into an expensive sweet wine. Then too, lots of artificial wine has been produced there.”

“Artificial how?”

“Made in the laboratory from all-chemical products. And here’s a story you’ll love—in 1985, an Austrian was arrested and charged with adding gunpowder to his wine.”

“Gunpowder? What on earth for?”

“To make it sparkle.”

“And sell it as champagne?” asked Gabriella in astonishment.

“Right.”

“The wine industry in Europe is a fertile field for criminal investigation, isn’t it?”

“With good reason. The president of the German Wine Association was brought to trial for illegally adding liquid sugar to wine. Politics comes into the picture sometimes.”

“That happens here too,” Gabriella said, straight-faced.

“So I’ve heard.”

We successfully resisted the blandishments of a doll-faced Japanese girl selling cases of sake and a brown-skinned young man with gold earrings who was promoting several unusual liqueurs in strangely shaped bottles. According to the attractive labels, they were made from various Asian fruits with bizarre names. Gabriella was trying to make out the ingredients on one label when a face at a distant stand caused me to do a double take.

I looked again, hard. There was no mistaking the close-cropped gray hair, the tan, the lithe athletic carriage. It was Tom Eck.

What was he doing here? I wondered. Well, this place seemed to attract a wide clientele and if I knew more people in New York, I’d probably see a lot more faces that surprised me.

He was talking now to someone I couldn’t see, someone hidden from my sight by the crowd at that particular stand. All of them were moving, some coming, some pushing their way out in search of another bargain and as positions shifted, the person talking to Tom Eck came into view.

It was the mysterious woman I had seen at the Spice Warehouse again.

Gabriella was still marveling at the weird names of the fruits on the liqueur bottles. I grabbed her arm.

“Let’s go over there.”

“Where?”

She put the bottle down and came willingly enough.

“What’s over there?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, “but it must be terrific. Look at the crowds.”

The place was nearly packed now. Even the spaces between stands and stalls, previously ample, were filled and it was difficult to follow a desired course. Elbowing, jostling, people of both sexes, a dozen nationalities and even more ethnic backgrounds crammed the church in quest of food and wine bargains.

Muttering complaints about being pushed and shoved by others, we pushed and shoved our way through but when we got close to the stand, neither Eck nor the girl could be seen.

“What is it now that we’re here?” grumbled Gabriella. “Hope it was worth all these bruises.”

“If it was Italy, you’d have more bruises from pinches.”

The attraction was of historical interest rather than practical. Still encased in ice and kept frozen by slabs of solid carbon dioxide, were what looked like slabs of meat. We listened to the spiel of the seller, a hoarse-voiced elderly man whose smoker’s cough caused him to break into hacking fits. The tale he was telling was an extraordinary one and described the terrible ordeal of an Arctic expedition which ran out of food and, unable to find any game, was fortunate enough to find the corpse of a mammoth, frozen into the ice.

The way he told the story, they had hacked enough ice away to be able to reach the corpse, which they had promptly torn into pieces and eaten. Their hunger temporarily assuaged, they had built a fire and eaten more of the mammoth flesh the next day, proclaiming it quite tasty.

“Liven up your next dinner party,” the man wheezed. “No need to serve the same old filly mignons—give your guests something they’ll talk about for years—serve them mammoth meat.”

“What do you think?” I asked Gabriella.

She eyed the hunks of meat in their shell of ice. She looked doubtful.

“I don’t think I’d like it.”

“I don’t mean that. I mean, is it genuine?”

“In a place like this—who knows?” she said.

“Something wrong with this place?” asked a hard voice.

His face was as hard as his voice. Thin-lipped, cold-eyed, he studied us suspiciously. He wore a dark suit with a black shirt.

With so many people in there, I didn’t know how he had heard us. Gabriella might have spoken slightly above a normal tone so as to be heard over the hubbub of voices but he must have had very sharp hearing.

Gabriella was cool as the ice that had allegedly come from the North Pole.

“Kinda crowded,” she said disparagingly. “Hard to get around.”

He nodded, assessing us both.

“Regulars here?”

“No,” said Gabriella. “Our first time. You the guy who runs this show?”

“Who sent you?” he asked, ignoring her question.

“Whistler.”

“Who?”

“Whistler,” she repeated.

Whistler seemed to be a character who was recognized by no one the first time around.

“He couldn’t have sent you,” the man said and I felt a slight chill.

Gabriella shrugged a take-it-or leave-it shrug.

“He’s still inside,” the man said.

Gabriella stared insolently back at him. “So? He hasn’t been struck dumb, has he?”

The man said nothing at first then he asked, “See anything here you like?”

“Lotsa things,” Gabriella said, “but the prices are too high.”

“Best in town,” the man said.

“What we were hoping to find,” said Gabriella, “was some Ko Feng.”

I hadn’t been expecting her to be that forthright. The man hadn’t either. He gave her a quick glance and his expression changed.

“That’s that spice that went missing?”

She nodded.

“You call these prices high and you’re looking to buy some of that?” he asked.

She looked uninterested. “Have any?” she asked casually.

He shook his head. She wasn’t going to give up.

“Know where we can get any?”

He gave a noncommittal grunt.

“We can raise the cash,” she said.

He shook his head again. “The word is that that English guy snatched it.”

“He was shot,” said Gabriella.

“Then the other English guy’s got it.”

“Is that a fact?” Gabriella drawled. “Know where we can find him?”

The man’s eyes were on me but I didn’t think there was any significance in it. I hoped I was right.

“Shouldn’t be hard,” the man said.

He eyed me a moment longer, then gave us a nod and walked away.

This time I waited until he was out of earshot—and everyone else in the place too.

“Don’t believe a word he said,” I advised Gabriella.

“Maybe he knows something,” she said.

“He’s wrong.”

She half smiled.

“Is Whistler still inside?” I asked her.

“Who?”

“Now, don’t you start with that!”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know!” I said, appalled. “You don’t know and you risked our lives!”

“Police work occasionally entails risks,” she said carelessly. “What’s on that stand over there?”

It was more hot merchandise, large restaurant-size cans of oysters. We listened to the presentation being repeated by a heavy, overdressed woman who Gabriella thought was moonlighting from her regular job in a brothel.

The numbers of cans she was offering brought a further comment from Gabriella. “Just about a twenty-ton trailer load.”

It was then that I saw another face I recognized. Gabriella saw me looking. “Know him?”

“His name is Lennie Rifkin. He has a restaurant called Phoenicia. It prepares and cooks dishes of the ancient world—Greece, Rome, Egypt and so on. He’s hoping for some Ko Feng.”

His course brought him directly into our path. He stopped when he saw me. He stared at Gabriella, then looked her over again, more slowly. Tearing himself away from that pleasurable action, he gave me a curt nod.

“Might have expected to find you here,” he said.

“You too,” I said. “Come here often?”

“Just like to look,” he retorted.

He looked Gabriella over again appreciatively, waiting for me to introduce him. When I didn’t do so, he said in a surly voice, “Haven’t seen any Ko Feng here, have you?”

“Not yet.”

“Expect to?”

“Going to keep looking until I find it.”

He sniffed, either unconvinced or disbelieving, and went on by.

“Not one of your admirers,” commented Gabriella.

“Not even a supporter,” I admitted. “Yet another of the legion who doubt me.”

“Speaking of doubters,” said Gabriella, her voice changing, “look who we have here.”