“To be honest, that’s what we’re afraid of, Felix.”
“I think it’s time to get down to proper business, don’t you?” said the rough-voiced man impatiently. “That’s definitely enough wine.” He nodded to the man behind me and I heard him climb to his feet.
Quick as a flash I was out of my chair. I grabbed the empty bottle by the neck and spun around. “By the gods, you touch my wine and you’ll regret it!” The big man had taken a step forward but now stayed where he was, his open hands raised to chest height, eyes flicking between me and our seated companions.
“Everybody, sit back down,” said the woman sharply. The big man slowly lowered his arms and sat cross-legged against the door once more, keeping his eyes on me all the while.
I replaced the bottle on the table and kicked the chair around ninety degrees so I could address my interrogators while keeping an eye on the brooding security man too. I took it as a good sign that they were still listening and that I’d not been hauled to a police station by now.
“We’re running out of patience. We’re not here to hear about your encounters with wild animals and dinners in Italy,” growled the man behind the desk. He flicked the ring-pull on a small can of energy drink and took a swig. I checked my watch, it was well after five. Poor little petal, I thought, he’s flagging. I wasn’t, though – I was on a roll. I lifted my glass and took a sip.
“You mentioned a Mr Rizzo, Felix,” said the woman, tapping on the table. “He’s a person of interest to us. I think you need to concentrate on him, rather than safaris and all-night drinking competitions.”
I replaced my glass on the desk and sighed. “Yes, all right. Things took a darker turn after that, I must admit.”
***
My desk phone buzzed. “Hart, wine department.”
“Ciao Felix! It’s Sergio Morelli!”
“How are you Sergio?”
“Bene grazie. Are you still excited about our big Christmas Asti Spumante promotion?”
“Of course I am. Is everything on track?”
“Yes, everything is fine. Except one tiny thing, but I think it is no problem.”
“So what’s the non-problem, Sergio?”
“No big problem, I promise. We are printing all the labels for the bottles but they will not be quite ready for your very first orders. It is just the first shipments where we have the problem. For the rest we will be fine. But I have a plan.”
“So what’s your plan?”
“The plan is we ship the very first orders to you with the stock already in our warehouse in Milano. This is the wine we usually sell here in Italy. The only problem is the back label – it does not have the proper alcohol health warning in English. So we must ship them to a warehouse we use in England, and there we have a team of people who stick on a new back label over the Italian one.”
“Ok. But why can’t you just stick the English health warning on the wine in Italy?”
Morelli laughed. “Ah, it is embarrassing Felix, but our label printers are lazy here and it will take three weeks to print them. And the people in our warehouse will insist on lots of extra money for sticking on the new labels. In England they will do it much more quickly. We will pay for the whole thing, of course, no cost to you.”
“Ok Sergio, glad to hear it. So we’ll ship the stock from Italy but route the order to your own warehouse? Then when you’ve added the English health warning, we can collect it and move it on to our own Gatesave depot?”
“Exactly Felix! Thank you for the understanding.”
“No problem Sergio. What a pain. If people are worried about the risks of drinking Italian wine, they should bloody well learn Italian.”
“Ha! Felix, you are so right! The problem is your English health warning says that if you drink more than one glass, this wine will kill you! But in Italy the health warning says don’t drink-a too much, you might-a get laid!” Morelli roared with laughter at his own joke. “Your wife will-a kill you!” he added, mirthfully. He continued to laugh for a while longer. He was a funny one all right.
“Thank you Sergio. I’ll get the orders placed.”
“Ok Felix, ciao!’
Replacing the phone, I sauntered over to my logistics colleagues on the other side of the floor. Flaky Fiona, who was in charge of the Italian trade lane, was munching on a bar of chocolate. “Hello Fiona, you look nice today,” I lied.
Flaky Fiona, as no-one called her to her face, had been cruelly but accurately christened. A large, pale lady, who looked to be around forty but was actually much younger, she suffered from a wide variety of self-diagnosed food allergies. These included, but were not limited to, nuts, dairy, gluten, yeast, shellfish, non-free range chicken, oranges, several dozen food additives and all African food.
The last of these, apparently, was added to the list on her honeymoon in Egypt, where a romantic Nile cruise degenerated into a saga of liquid bowel movements and projectile vomiting. Her diet, so far as I could tell, consisted of fizzy cola and raw carrot sticks, although she kept a large supply of vegan chocolate bars for particularly stressful occasions, one of which I had clearly interrupted.
“Don’t hassle me please,” pleaded Fiona dramatically. “I have got so much on, I’m in the middle of a meltdown, I don’t know how I’m going to, like, get through this day!” She took a bite of her grey-coloured, dairy-intolerant chocolate bar.
“I just need you to place some orders, today, for my little Asti Spumante adventure, please Fiona.”
Flaky Fiona chewed her chocolate and stared at her screen.
“Here’s the order sheet Fiona. If you could just place these orders, please?” I placed the sheet next to her keyboard. “They need to be dispatched tomorrow. The destination is a Coventry third-party facility rather than our normal depot…” Still no response. I considered pushing her flabby, chocolate-filled face into her screen.
My eyes slid to the framed picture on her desk. It was a close up of Flaky Fiona’s face, smiling weakly, no doubt recovering from a colonic injury at the hands of a stray clam. She was accompanied by, I assumed, her husband, a man even more massive than herself. His face was so wide that only two thirds of it had made it into the photo, the remainder lost off the left-hand edge of the frame.
“Oh my GOD,” shrieked Fiona. A dozen colleagues looked round as Flaky stared, horrified, at her chocolate bar. “Oh my God, OH MY GOD!”
I sighed and looked up at the ceiling, waiting for the hysterics to pass.
“What’s the matter dear?” asked Deirdre, the kindly old logistics planner sitting at the next desk.
“I. Have. Just. Eaten. A. Fruit and NUT!”
“Shall I get you some water, dear?” enquired Deirdre, patiently.
“Oh my God. I can feel my throat swelling up!”
I pushed the order sheet slowly from the side of her keyboard until it covered the keys. “When you’ve recovered, I’d be so grateful if you could place these orders, Fiona. We wouldn’t want to miss Christmas, would we?”
Flaky had grasped her throat and was making Darth Vader noises while squinting at the ingredients list on the back of her chocolate bar.
“I’ll be back at the end of the day to check you’ve done it.” I turned to return to my desk. And if you don’t, I thought, I’ll swap your morning slice of vegan, gluten-free fucking fruit cake for a nut-stuffed badger’s liver.
When I returned, at quarter to five, there was no sign of Flaky.
“Fiona had to go home,” explained Deirdre. “She started sweating dangerously. Oh, she was in a right state Felix.”
“Bugger. I really needed those orders placed!”
“Don’t worry, I did it for you,” winked Deirdre.
“Ah, you are a darling Deirdre,” I gushed, winking back. What a star! Bet she was a goer in her day, I thought.
***
I was sprawled on a sofa at the flat in Little Chalfont a couple of evenings later when my laptop pinged. The automated email was brief:
/> Asti Spumante ex-Genoa. 40ft container x24.
09:35 Customs cleared.
14:50 Departed Felixstowe Port bond.
16:25 Goods received: Braintree Container Depot.
“Sod it.” I said, staring at the screen. I clicked ‘print’ and my little inkjet machine in the corner of the room sprang to life, noisily disgorging my request.
Wodin was filling two large glasses with a fabulous Sancerre I had been given by a prospective supplier, while Fistule assembled a little pile of hashish on his water pipe. Mercedes was stretched out on another sofa, reading a book.
“What’s up?” Wodin asked.
“The good news is that my first containers have arrived. You are looking at the owner of the largest shipment of Asti Spumante in recorded human history. The Christmas sparkling wine market is mine!” I was aiming high. After a market coup like this I would be lavished with praise by management, receive a special end-of-year bonus, and the Head of Execution might even pull his punches for a month or so.
But I was going for the big gig. Ever since The Director’s unfortunate public demise beneath the hooves of the Welsh dairy herd, there had been rumours flying that a restructure was overdue, and they were planning to swap the heads of department around. Patricia Hocksworth, the Head of Wine, had been in her job for quite a while and had been quite open that she fancied a move to Fruit and Veg – which meant there might be a vacancy for Head of the Wine Department in the New Year. If I pulled off this Christmas promotion, it would put me in pole position. Joan wasn’t interested – she was perfectly happy as a Wine Buyer – and I doubted whether gammon-faced Bolus or slimy little Timmy had anything as sexy as this up their sleeves.
I raised the ambitiously large bucket of Sancerre, and Wodin crashed his glass into mine, a fat cone of a joint pinned between his enormous forefinger and the bowl of wine. “Nice one Felix. But you just said ‘sod it’. What’s the bad news?”
“It’s a long and boring story, but my logistics colleagues have sent the wine to the wrong depot. It was supposed to go to the suppliers’ warehouse for re-labelling first.”
Fistule exhaled a long stream of hashish smoke, his Speyside-whisky-filled bong smouldering gently in concert. “Is your Asti Spumante fair trade?”
“No it isn’t. It’s from Italy, not bloody Rwanda. Don’t worry Fistule, all the grape pickers drive Maseratis, nobody’s being oppressed.”
Fistule nodded and turned his attention back to the pipe, poking at the glowing embers.
“I’d better drive down there tonight,” I said. “I want to see the shipment before it moves onto Gatesave’s main distribution centre. Check whether I need to send in a team to glue politically correct health warnings on the bottles. Fancy coming along, Wodin? You can pretend to be my Compliance Manager.”
My actual Compliance Manager, a weaselly little shit called Pete, liked nothing better than running covert lab analyses on my wines. If he spotted a product that deviated from the specifications he would send a round-robin email to the entire Gatesave management, broadcasting that the alcohol level exceeded the figure declared on the label. I would then have to withdraw the wine from stores and have the lot destroyed for breaching EU labelling law. Worse still, the costs were deducted from my profit, earning me a kicking from the Head of Margin – not a pleasurable experience, as I wasn’t allowed to kick back.
There is a circle of hell reserved for jobsworths like Pete. As if anyone cares that a wine turns out to be stronger than the proportion of alcohol quoted on the label. That’s not a candidate for product withdrawal, it’s a fucking free gift.
“Fantastic, sounds like a mission,” agreed Wodin. “It’s like you’ve just had a baby. Let’s take a good bottle and wet the new-born’s head.” He fetched a bag of ice cubes from the freezer and emptied them into a cool box. I extracted a bottle of vintage Bollinger from the wine rack and buried it in the ice. We descended the stairs to my Vauxhall Cavalier parked outside. Not the raciest of numbers, but as a Senior Buyer I now qualified for a company car, and it was a Cavalier or nothing.
An hour later, as evening faded into night, we arrived on the outskirts of Braintree and the depot’s razor-wire-topped fence emerged from the gloom. There was a light rain and the skyscrapers of metal shipping containers, stacked ten high, glowed golden in the floodlights. Wodin flicked the stub of his joint out of his window and I wound mine down as we approached the security barrier.
A young Indian guy in a high-vis jacket and a peaked cap took my Gatesave ID and the printed email with the particulars of the shipment.
“Here for quality control, hygiene inspection,” I said. “This is my Compliance Manager, Pete.” Wodin smiled and waved. Without a word, the guard walked back to his office, an old shipping container repurposed as a guardhouse. He scanned the bar code on the email and compared my ID against his screen. His printer disgorged a sheet and he walked back, pushing his cap up for a second, squinting at my face then back to the ID.
“You’re in satellite zone 6,” he handed back my ID and both sheets and, rather rudely, dropped two crumpled hi-vis vests into my lap. “Wait there for Bob, he’ll accompany you,” he pointed at a small parking area beyond the barrier. He lifted the bar and we nosed through, pausing for our escort.
Wodin moved to the back seat as an older guy in a hi-vis jacket and woolly hat appeared. He slung a holdall into the foot well and climbed in. “Evening lads. Let’s take a look.”
I handed him the newly printed docket and he held it up to catch some illumination from the floodlight. “Satellite zone 6, area H. It’s at the back end of the park, that way.” He inhaled conspiratorially. “And I’ll have a bit of what you boys are smoking, if there’s any left.”
“There certainly is, my friend.” Wodin snapped open his spectacles case and extracted a large joint.
“Give it a minute – let’s get clear of Hamas first. He’s a bit of a puritan.” He inclined his head towards the guardhouse, into which his colleague had disappeared.
We cruised slowly past vast towers of containers, stencilled in giant letters with the names of Chinese shipping companies. Wodin lit the joint, took a deep draught and passed it to the warehouseman, who did the same.
“Grotty bloody night,” he gasped. “Nice grass though. Turn right here.” After a few minutes of crawling along the canyons of metal, Bob pointed ahead. “Area H. That’s your shipment there. Park in the yellow striped area.”
I turned off the engine and wound down the window. My twenty-four containers lay in two neat lines of twelve. “I need to check a couple of the loads. We might have a problem with the label.”
“Take your pick,” waved Bob as he slowly exhaled smoke from Wodin’s roll-up. “Got a job-lot did you? Bet you did. You bastard buyers drive a hard bargain, I’m sure.”
The rain had slackened to a fine drizzle so I left the car and walked along the row of forty-foot containers. I couldn’t help smiling – there were another 392 of these beasts leaving Italy over the next few days, destined for Gatesave stores across the length and breadth of Britain. The trade would be flooded with Asti Spumante, at an unbeatable price, and market domination would be mine!
The Head of Margin should be giving me a knighthood – surely I’d get the Head of Wine gig after such a coup? Christ, think of the travel, not to mention another tasty salary hike. And think of the young saleswomen across every wine producing region in the world, from Argentina to New Zealand, desperate to gain a listing with one of Europe’s largest supermarkets. What wouldn’t they do for a sniff of a listing with the mighty Gatesave?
“You beauties” I grinned and gave a double knock of joy against the nearest container door. There was a double knock back. I jumped out of my skin and gave a little yelp of horror, my stomach churning.
A heavily accented, anxious voice shouted “Hello?” from behind the steel door.
I looked back at my car, a few yards away. The orange glow of the joint shone brightly for a moment as Bo
b anaesthetised himself against the night shift. I turned wildly back to the container. “Who’s that?” I mouthed into the crack where the container doors met.
A pause. “I am Galad. Help please.”
“What the fuck are you doing in my container?” I demanded, aghast. I looked at the bolt securing the container doors. It was intact. Shipping containers are usually sealed with a metal bolt, requiring heavy-duty cutters to remove, particularly when they contain something worth stealing – like booze. There was no doubt about it. Whoever my squatter was, he’d been there since the container was loaded and sealed.
“Hello?” the deep heavily accented voice again. “Please, we need water.”
I caught my breath. We? There’s more than one? And then the penny dropped. My beautiful shipment of Asti Spumante had hitchhikers. They must have sneaked on board at the winery before the container was shut and sealed. The security would have been fairly lax and it was much easier than scaling the fence at Calais and trying to board a lorry. Cheeky bastards, I thought, although you can’t criticise them for lack of determination.
“Wait there. We’ll have you out in a minute.” Stupid thing to say, I thought. They’re going nowhere unless they’ve got a welding torch handy.
“Bless you sir. Please, are the others ok? We have your package.”
The others? My package? I walked slowly back to the car, my mind starting to race. Bob, the warehouseman, wound down the window a few inches and a fug of smoke rolled out.
I tried to sound nonchalant. “We need to check a couple of these loads. Happy to do it ourselves. Done it enough times.” I peered into the car and looked Wodin in the eye. He was still lounging across the back seats. The radio was tuned to a classic eighties rock channel and Genesis warbled from the speakers.
“Wod… Pete, how about we save Bob from getting wet and sort him out with another toot?”
“Well gentlemen, that’s the kind of offer I can’t refuse,” smiled Bob. He opened his door and nudged his holdall towards me with his foot. “Bolt cutters are in there. Replace the metal seals with plastic ties and note the number down boys. There’s a torch in there too.”
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