At 6:51 p.m., twenty minutes before his guests were due to arrive, Carter Holbrook came down the curving stone stairs into the cellar, told the young host at the door that he needed to make a private call, and walked off down one of the long brick passages that branched off the main dining room, looking for a quiet place. He found one, in a narrow, dimly lit corridor lined with old wine racks, where it was cold and silent and there was nobody around except, far down at the very end, half hidden in the shadows behind a rack of bottles, a young woman in a black vest kneeling on the stone floor beside a candle, doing something with a bottle and a glass decanter. She did not look up. She was a waitress, or something. He barely registered her. He did not lower his voice.
He called his general counsel, a man named Phil Danziger, who had been with the company for twenty-two years and who had been growing more and more nervous over the past four months.
"Phil. Carter. Listen, I'm at the restaurant, they'll be here in twenty minutes. I just wanted to tell you to stop worrying. It's done. Tomorrow at ten they sign and it's done."
He listened for a moment. His face hardened.
"No. No, absolutely not. We are not putting the Phase II in the data room tonight. Are you out of your mind? I don't care what your conscience says. Your conscience can retire to Florida on its severance like everybody else's." He laughed. "Phil. Phil. Listen to me. They've been through every document we gave them. They asked about environmental. We told them the truth. We said we're not aware of material liabilities that haven't been disclosed. We are aware of them. They've just been disclosed to the five people who matter, which is me, you, the consultants, who signed an NDA, and nine families in Lindenwald who took five grand and signed releases. That's disclosure. That's legal." He paused, listening. "The other two families? The Garcias and the old lady on Hobart Street? Phil, who are they going to call? They've been drinking that water for thirty years. Nobody's sick. And if somebody does get sick in five years, guess whose problem it is? Not ours. Kanazawa's."
He turned, pacing, his expensive shoes clicking on the stone floor. His voice echoed down the brick corridor, off the curved ceiling, down into the cold, dark, silent depths of the cellar.
"You want to know the beautiful thing about the Japanese, Phil? They're too polite to ask the hard question twice. They asked. We answered. They bowed. Mori speaks maybe sixty percent English, and the old man speaks about ten, and Tanaka just sits there taking notes she can't read half of. They're not going to dig. They trust us. That's their culture. They do business on trust." He laughed again. "And trust is the cheapest thing in the world to buy."
He listened for a moment more.
"Phil. It's three hundred and forty million dollars. It's the whole company. It's your pension. It's eleven hundred jobs. You want to blow all that up for an old lady on Hobart Street with a well? Grow up. Tomorrow at ten, they sign. Then we fix it. Quietly. With their money. Everybody wins." He checked his watch. "I've got to go. They'll be here any minute. Just keep your mouth shut and show up tomorrow with a pen."
He hung up. He stood for a moment in the cold, dim corridor, straightening his jacket, smoothing his slicked-back hair with one hand. Then he walked back up the passage toward the main dining room, past the young woman kneeling at the far end in the shadows with her candle and her decanter.
She still had not looked up. He didn't look at her either. Why would he? She was the help. And even if she had heard him, which she probably had not, what would it matter? A waitress in a cellar. She probably didn't even know what trichloroethylene was.
Asha Reynolds finished decanting the 1996 Domaine Leroy Musigny at 6:56 p.m. She stopped pouring at exactly the right moment, as the first thin, dark thread of sediment crept up toward the neck of the bottle. She set the empty bottle down on the stone floor beside her. She blew out the candle. And then she knelt there in the dark, cold passage, with the decanter of eleven-thousand-dollar wine in her white-gloved hands, for almost a full minute, without moving.
She was thinking about a woman on Hobart Street with a well.
She was thinking about the Garcias.
She knew Lindenwald. Everyone in Butler County knew Lindenwald. It was the kind of neighborhood where people worked at the plants and drove pickup trucks and kept their lawns cut and flew flags on the Fourth of July. Her father's oldest friend from the Navy, a retired machinist named Eddie Pruett, lived there. Asha had been to his house for cookouts. She had drunk the water from his kitchen tap.
And she was thinking about Mr. Shimizu, at the tofu shop in Yokosuka, who had made tofu with the water from a well behind his building for fifty years, and who used to say that the most important ingredient in anything was the water, because you could not see it, and you could not taste it, and you could not smell it, and so you simply had to trust that it was clean.
They do business on trust. And trust is the cheapest thing in the world to buy.
She stood up. Her knees were stiff from the cold stone. She carried the decanter out of the dark passage and into the warm, candlelit main chamber of Vault 1887, where the tables were filling up and the soft murmur of conversation was rising under the brick arches, and she set it down carefully on a small walnut side table near the alcove at the far end, beside Table One.
Then she went to find Mr. Okada.
She found him in his tiny office at the back of the cellar, a stone room the size of a closet with a desk made from an old wine barrel. He had his reading glasses on his nose and was going over the evening's reservations. He looked up when she came in, and saw her face, and took off his glasses.