Perfect Blend: A Novel (30 page)

“Did you see that?” Amy hissed at Brian. “The jerk patted my bum. I’ve a good mind—”

“Amy, calm down. It’s not worth it. The man is an idiot.”

“I know. So why were you brownnosing like your life depended on it?”

“What was I supposed to do? I was just trying to be polite.”

“You didn’t have to be quite so obsequious.”

They were interrupted by Sophie the PR girl clapping her hands for attention. She gave a flick of her shoulder-length hair and explained that before the unveiling of the new coffee machine, there was to be a guided tour of the coffee-roasting plant. Apparently, huge demand for Crema Crema Crema meant that the staff now worked through the night.

Amy could almost hear the silent groan from the hacks. From experience she knew that all they wanted to do was get as much champagne and food as they could, grab their information packs and goody bags, and head off home.

Sophie led the reluctant group down the hall and through several sets of double doors. The smell of roasting coffee grew even stronger, to the point of being overpowering.

The final set of doors was guarded by two uniformed security guards carrying walkie-talkies. Sophie presented her ID card to one of them. He and his partner held the double doors open to let everybody through. Somebody asked about the guards.

“Oh, we’ve had a couple of break-ins over the last few months,” Sophie explained cheerfully. “Crema Crema Crema has become a hot commodity on the black market. So we’ve had to beef up our security.”

They found themselves in an echoey tiled space with a high corrugated ceiling. Machinery buzzed and whirred in the background. Along one wall there were a dozen cast-iron roasting drums. They were painted dark green and looked like old-fashioned steam engines. Instead of a chimney, there was a wide funnel-shaped hopper where the beans were loaded. Amy looked at the mostly young male workers—recent immigrants from Eastern Europe at a guess—loading the hoppers and checking the temperature of the drums. A dozen or more, dressed in white coats and hairnets, sat at tables sorting the roasted beans and packing them by hand.

“Okay, ladies and gentlemen,” Sophie said, clapping her hands again. “It’s now my pleasure to hand you over to Gordon Pettifer, our chief coffee roaster at CremCo.”

The applause from the group was distinctly halfhearted.

Gordon Pettifer, a short, stocky chap with a particularly bad comb-over, exuded the life and enthusiasm of an anally retentive librarian. “Hello … my name is Gordon Pettifer, and I am the chief coffee roaster at CremCo. I have been chief coffee roaster for twenty-five years, taking up my post in October 1984.”

“Oh, for the love of God,” somebody murmured.

Amy found herself watching the workers going about their routine and thought what tedious menial work this was. She wondered how much they were paid. It occurred to her that a sleazeball like Hugh Cavendish might well be paying below the minimum wage. Maybe she should try to speak to them and find out.

Gordon Pettifer droned on in the background.

“By the time the beans get to the roasting stage, they have been cleaned and cleared of debris. They are then poured into the hoppers and roasted. The roasters you see here typically operate at temperatures between 370 and 540 degrees Fahrenheit; that’s 188 and 282 degrees Celsius …”

Very slowly Amy backed away from the group and dipped behind one of the roasting drums. She headed toward the sorting table, shielded by more drums.

It was then that she noticed Hugh Cavendish walk in. She could hear him raging into his cell. “I don’t give a fuck about your workers’ rights … This is Indo-fucking-nesia. They don’t have any rights. I need this consignment yester-fucking-day. Just make it happen … Do whatever you have to do. I don’t care if things get violent. Just deal with it.”

Amy watched him stab his phone off. His expression suitably rearranged, he ambled over to join the tour. It seemed pretty clear that Cavendish had been on the phone to one of his plantation managers in Indonesia. By the sound of things, the workers were up in arms, most likely about pay and conditions. It seemed likely that CremCo was abusing both its domestic and its foreign staff. She could have a good story here.

She waited a minute or so and then made her way back to the group. She decided that with Hugh Cavendish there, it would be far too risky to confront the workers.

“… and the beans are roasted for a period of time ranging from three to thirty minutes.”

“Omigod,” Brian said. “Somebody shoot me.”

Amy laughed. “By the way, I may have found a story.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Tell you later.”

“Roasters are typically horizontal rotating drums that are heated from below and tumble the green coffee beans in a current of hot gases …”

Twenty minutes later, Gordon Pettifer’s talk was over and everybody was given bags of freshly roasted Crema Crema Crema to take home.

“Right, if we could all reassemble back in the conference room,” Sophie said, “because we have reached the high spot of the evening, the unveiling of the CremCo Caffeineissimo espresso machine.”

Back in the conference room Hugh Cavendish assumed center stage. “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Crema Crema Crema Caffeineissimo.” With that Cavendish pulled a velvet cloth off what Amy would have described as a perfectly ordinary-looking espresso machine. He delivered a dry technical speech about the machine being a revamped piston espresso machine based on the models that had been popular in the sixties. There was limp applause. Cavendish introduced the two engineers who had worked on developing the Caffeineissimo, and the journalists began scribbling halfheartedly in their notebooks.

Amy turned to Brian and said she was off to find the loo. Brian said he wanted to take a brief look at the Caffeineissimo and then they might as well go. He said he would meet her back at the car park.

She had no idea where the loo was and there was nobody to ask, so she walked down the corridor toward the roasting room. One of the guards would be able to direct her.

When she got there, the doors were open and unguarded. As she stepped inside, she noticed that the workers were dressed differently. Previously they had been wearing hairnets and white coats over their normal clothes. Now they were in zip-up overalls with hoods, face masks, and surgical gloves. They were also wearing white rubber boots. They looked as if they were in the middle of a lethal biohazard rather than a few coffee beans.

“Ah, Ms. Walker, we meet again.” The familiar oily upper-class voice came from behind. Amy spun around to see Hugh Cavendish. He offered her a thin-lipped smile that she couldn’t help finding rather threatening. “Come back for a second look, I see. Or is it more of a journalistic snoop?”

“I wasn’t snooping,” Amy said, keeping her cool. “I couldn’t find the ladies and was looking for somebody to ask.”

“I see. Well, you turned the wrong way out of the conference room. Go back down the corridor and it’s on your left.” He opened one of the double doors, inviting her to leave. “After you,” he said. Another slimy smile.

She stepped back into the corridor, and Cavendish followed. “I don’t understand,” Amy said, deciding that since he already had her down as a snooping journalist, she had nothing to lose by asking a few questions. “Nobody was wearing protective gear when we did our tour of the roasting plant.”

“That’s true. We find that visitors tend to get anxious when they see the staff in their usual uniform. They assume there’s some sort of biohazard, which there isn’t. So now we always get them to change.”

“So if the staff aren’t coming into contact with dangerous chemicals, why do they need to wear protective clothing?”

“Microfibers.”

“Microfibers?”

“Yes. Billions are produced during the roasting process. They irritate the lungs. It’s called coffee roaster’s lung. Very common in South America.”

“Is that so?” Amy said, her voice heavy with sarcasm. “I never knew that. You learn something new every day.”

“Don’t you? Now, if you would excuse me, I have some urgent business to attend to in the roasting room.”

“Of course.”

Cavendish went back inside. Amy stood staring at the door, which had just closed in front of her. “Coffee roaster’s lung … yeah, right.”

She headed back down the corridor. There was a reason those people were wearing protective clothing, and it had nothing to do with coffee roaster’s lung.

Eventually she found the ladies. She was just about to open the door to one of the stalls when the main door opened. A young woman walked in. She was wearing overalls, but she had removed her hood and face mask.

“Are you journalist?” she said. Amy picked up on the East European accent.

“Yes.”

“You tell in newspaper that coffee beans no good. They are bad poison. Very bad poison. People here know. Everybody knows, but peoples too scared to speak. We lose jobs if we speak.”

Amy frowned. “What do you mean poison? What sort of poison?”

The woman shrugged. “Bad poison. I go now.”

“Okay, but maybe I could meet you somewhere. I’d like to discuss this some more. Have you got a mobile number?”

“No. I go. You tell in newspaper. Please. Very, very important. These bad mens. Cavendish very bad man.”

“Before you go, can you tell me what the poison does?”

But the woman was gone. It didn’t matter. Amy was pretty sure she knew the answer.

“
IF YOU
ask me,” Brian said, pulling out of the car park, “there’s some pay dispute going on between CremCo management and the coffee roasters and this woman is simply trying to discredit the company.”

“Maybe. But she seemed really genuine. Plus Hugh Cavendish is an oily creep who exploits his workers.” She recounted the conversation she’d overheard between Cavendish and somebody she took to be one of his plantation managers. “I don’t trust him farther than I can throw him. Look, I could be barking totally up the wrong tree, but something has occurred to me.”

“What?”

“Do you remember me joking about how it was only rich people who could afford Crema Crema Crema and that the coffee could be the reason men are growing breasts? What if I was right?”

“Amy, we Googled coffee and estrogen. There’s no link.”

“Yes, but what if CremCo was adding the estrogen for some reason?”

“What reason?”

“I have no idea.”

“But it’s meant to be organic.”

Amy laughed. “The hell it is.” She paused. “Look, it all makes sense. Who buys Crema Crema Crema? Rich or middle-class people like you. What sort of men are growing moobs? Men like you. When did they first appear?”

“Soon after I started drinking Crema Crema Crema … Shit.”

“My nuts in a thoughtshell … You know what you said about me possibly uncovering a story tonight? Well, I think I may have done just that. I would put money on Crema Crema Crema containing estrogen. God, Brian, if we have discovered the cause of the moob outbreak, this is huge. Every newspaper in the Western world will cover it. Can you imagine?”

“It’s just like that episode of
Seinfeld.”

“You’re telling me there’s an episode where they all become reporters and get a world exclusive that launches them as journalists?”

“Not exactly. What happens is they get addicted to this supposedly no-fat yogurt. Only they start putting on weight. In the end they get it tested at a lab and discover it contains fat, after all.”

“So the health of thousands of men is never at stake?”

“Look, I never said the two scenarios were precisely identical.”

Amy laughed and said she was just teasing. “We do have to get the beans analyzed, though, and not just here. To make our case really watertight, we should get them tested in the United States as well.”

“Okay, I’ve got this friend Melissa in New York who is a big Crema Crema Crema fan. She also happens to be a doctor. She’ll know exactly how to get the analysis done over there. But suppose it all turns out to be rubbish and this woman of yours is nothing but a fantasist?”

“So I’ve wasted a few hundred quid getting the coffee tested.”

“Hang on, shouldn’t you be selling this story to a newspaper and getting them to pay for the testing?”

“Ideally, but I’m just not established enough. No newspaper would be prepared to spend money based on some apparently wild fantasy from a reporter they don’t know. No, the only way I can approach an editor is with the lab results.”

“Okay, then I’m paying,” Brian said. “I am not about to let you lay out for this. You can’t afford it.”

“Brian, I can manage a few hundred quid. Thanks for the offer, but this is my story, my responsibility. I want to do it.”

“Okay, if you insist,” he said. “You know, if you’re right and it is the Crema Crema Crema that has been causing men to grow moobs, this will make your journalistic career. God, you could find yourself up for a Pulitzer.”

“Let’s just take it one step at a time.” Amy laughed. “Right now, this is nothing but conjecture. We will know nothing until we’ve had the beans analyzed.”

“I know, but just imagine …”

“I am, but I’m scared I’ll jinx it. All we can do is wait.” She paused as a thought occurred to her. “Hey, I left without getting my Prada bag.”

“Don’t worry,” Brian said. “I got you one.”

“You did? Fantastic. Where is it?”

He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a six-inch-long pouch made of light brown suede. He handed it to Amy.

“A comb sleeve?” She pulled out a cheap tortoiseshell comb. “That’s what they were making all the fuss about?” She started searching for the Prada logo.

“I’ve looked,” Brian said. “There’s no logo. It’s just a bit of old junk.”

“Why am I not surprised?”

AMY GOT
home just after ten. Lilly said Charlie had been as good as gold. He’d gone to bed exactly at eight and hadn’t stirred. “Oh, by the way,” Lilly said, “some flowers came for you. I took them into the kitchen and stood them in a bucket of water.”

Amy went into the kitchen and found a bunch of the most glorious white orchids. There was a card attached: “Thank you so much for having us and for being so wise. Love, Victoria.” There were two kisses.