The Marseille Caper

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Shock has a chilling effect, particularly when it takes the form of an unexpected meeting with a man from whom you have recently stolen three million dollars’ worth of wine. Sam Levitt shivered and pulled his terrycloth robe closer around his body, still damp from an early-morning dip in the Chateau Marmont pool.

“Here.” The man on the other side of the table-smiling, tanned, immaculate-slid a cup of coffee across to Sam. “Drink this. It will warm you up. Then we can talk.” He leaned back and watched as that first infinitely welcome cup went down, then another, while Sam tried to gather his wits.

Sam was sitting with Francis “Sissou” Reboul. The last time they had met had been in Marseille, over a glass of champagne at Le Pharo, Reboul’s clifftop palace with a billionaire’s view of the Mediterranean. Sam, on assignment from an international insurance company, was hunting for several hundred bottles of vintage Bordeaux that had been stolen from the Hollywood home of Danny Roth, an entertainment lawyer with a weakness for fine wines. After a search that had taken him from L.A. to Paris to Bordeaux to Marseille, Sam had discovered the stolen bottles in Reboul’s vast cellar. And, being a man who preferred direct action to long and tiresome negotiations with the authorities, he had stolen them back. That, he had thought, was that. A nice, neat job, with no complaints likely from the victim. But here was the victim himself, in the garden of the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, behaving for all the world like an acquaintance who was trying to be a friend.

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