“Another amazing dinner at La Pistache,” said Pixie, the gentle half of the Corey and Pixie roadshow, married friends visiting from Ottawa. We were in Aix-en-Provence at the metal dining table on the terrasse, on a warm, magical night. The dishes from Carol’s soupe au pistou and tartiflette had been cleared, but the table was cluttered with slabs of cheese and bowls of olives and baguette crumbs and many glasses. Only two months into my adventure, (more accurately, escape), I felt at that moment complete and all-consuming contentment. It was the perfect combination for me: great food and wine, good friends, excellent wife, beautiful setting, and the knowledge that I wouldn’t pretend to be a lawyer for at least nine more months.
“Yeah, that was awesome Carol,” I said, popping an olive in my mouth. “Like it always is. There’s just one thing wrong with this dinner.”
“You’re so predictable, Billy,” said Carol. “You’re going to say we need more wine.”
“Right you are, babe. Let me get another bottle from our wine cellar.”
When I returned with a red Bandol, Pixie asked, “Do you really have a big wine cellar here? I’d love to see it.”
“I was joking,” I said. “The wine cellar is just a shelf in our kitchen, and I can’t seem to keep it filled. I restock once a week. But I told you about Nickipedia’s cellar didn’t I?”
“You told us about his whorehouse,” said Corey.
Nickipedia’s Paris office was at the bottom of what I called the whorehouse building. He entered a key into a small grey box mounted on the pockmarked stone façade. The graffitied, horizontal metal panels of the garage-like door disappeared with a motorized whine above a glass entrance. The office was a jumble of computers and desks and postcards and maps and guidebooks and dictionaries and bike parts and luggage. A framed poster showed a 19th century dandy riding a pennyfarthing, a bike where the front wheel is five times larger than the back. On a whiteboard were written dates and schedules and to-do lists. Bungee cords hung from the walls everywhere. It was a cramped, cluttered office, and nothing special except for the ancient stone walls.
“Since he owned the ground floor office of his building,” I said, “he also owned everything beneath it. His basement served two crucial purposes: storing the company’s bicycles and housing Nickipedia’s wine cellar. He took me down these steep, stone steps. Narrow. And all the steps had concave middles, worn from hundreds of years of feet.”
“Hundreds?” asked Pixie. She cocked an eyebrow and tore a tranche from a baguette.
“Hundreds. Listen. Anyway, the cellar was long and thin, and it held about a thousand bikes.”
“A thousand?”
“You know what I mean, Pixie. Lots.” I poured her another glass of wine, sloshing some on the table. “Oooops. Anyway, think of a skinny stone room with a curved ceiling. The bikes were hung by their front wheels, vertically on each side, leaving only a narrow path to walk down the middle. All the bikes were squished together – it was a mass of intertwined handlebars and wheels. We squeezed through the dangling bike curtains to the end of the room, where Nickipedia showed me his naturally climate-controlled wine cellar; it was a series of cubby holes cut right into the rock wall. Many of the bottles were so thick with dust that their labels were unreadable. If they had labels.”
“I’ve seen it, and it’s perfect,” said Carol. She stood up and starting clearing some dishes. “Even in the summer the rock is cool and the wine stays the right temperature. You can always trust Nickipedia to look after his wine.”
“The weird thing about the cellar,” I said, “besides its old age, was its high, arched ceiling. Interlocking stone. It didn’t seem cellar-like, unlike any other cellar I have ever seen in France. Nickipedia read my mind and said, ‘It wasn’t designed as a cellar. I own this little part, but this is only part of a tunnel. A series of tunnels, actually. See that bricked over part of the wall there?’
I saw a stone archway on one wall, with the same curved top as the cellar’s ceiling. The old stone framed what would have been another tunnel meeting Nickipedia’s tunnel at a right angle. It was sealed off by newer bricks.
‘So I did some research at the archives,’ said Nickipedia, ‘and I discovered that this tunnel was part of a secret underground escape route. It lead from the Île de la Cité to the outskirts of Paris, so the royalty could escape in times of insurrection. The ceiling is high enough for the king to ride through on his horse.’
I smugly reminded Nickipedia, who reportedly knew everything, that the kings lived at Versaille, not downtown Paris.
So Nickipedia said, ‘Not a thousand years ago they didn’t.’
I looked at Nickipedia and said, ‘You’re telling me that you bought a tiny office and now you own a 1000-year-old tunnel?’
Nickipedia smiled and said, ‘This basement is older than Nôtre Dame cathedral. Pretty cool, huh?’ ”
I looked over at Corey, who was watching me with intensity. “I want a 1000-year-old cellar too, Will,” he said. “I so want that.”
“You may have to relocate from Ottawa,” I said.