Looked around at the chaos. People shouting, screaming, punching, kicking, falling, bleeding. The Odessa Steps from Potemkin in real life. Thankfully no baby carriages in sight.

What was wrong with these guys? Who were they and why were they acting like a Mongol horde? None of them seemed to know when to quit. But what disturbed Jack more was their willingness to hurt. You don’t see that in the average person. Most people have a natural reluctance to do damage to a fellow human being. Jack had had that once. Took him years to overcome it, to clear an area within so he’d have a space where that reluctance didn’t exist, a place he could step into, a mode he could enter when necessary and find a willingness, an enthusiasm almost, to inflict damage before it could be inflicted, and do so without hesitation. Hesitate and you’re lost. Maybe dead. Better to give than receive. Always.

These guys showed none of that natural hesitation. Good thing most of them were doughy and didn’t know how to fight; otherwise this would have been a truly scary scene.

Jack took Gia’s arm and led her and Vicky to the side and then down. He glanced back to his right and saw Porky at the base of the steps, near the fountain; he was screaming curses as he crawled toward the sidewalk, dragging one leg behind him. Jack wanted to go down there and break a few more of this particular jerk’s bones, but no way he was leaving Gia and Vicky alone in the middle of this riot.

When they reached the sidewalk he took the sobbing Vicky from Gia and hustled them downtown. He noticed an adrenaline tremor in his hand as he raised it to hail a cab.

How had such a nice evening turned so ugly?

2

“The bid is eleven-five,” the tuxedoed auctioneer said. “Do I hear twelve thousand?”

Dr. Luc Monnet fought the urge to turn and glare at the other bidder; he kept his eyes on the auctioneer. Others around him, elegantly dressed, perched on well-padded chairs arranged in neat rows on the red carpeting, had no such compunction. They craned their necks this way and that, enjoying the auction spectator sport: a bidding war.

Luc did not have to turn to know what was happening. Two rows behind and slightly to the right, a dark-haired man in a blue suit was holding a StarTac to his left ear, receiving instructions from whomever he was bidding for. Luc closed his eyes and sent up a little prayer that $2,000 a bottle was too rich for the other bidder’s blood.

He’d come to Sotheby’s for the sole purpose of buying the half-case of Château Petrus 1947 Pomerol Cru Exceptionnel offered by the Gates estate. Not simply because it was a fine, fine wine that he wanted for his collection and not because Petrus happened to be his favorite Bordeaux, but because the vintage year had special meaning: nineteen-forty-seven was the year of his birth.