The Real Thing

by Brian Falkner

  Mr Pansier started to say something but stopped as Fizzer continued firmly, ‘Also, you served them in plastic tumblers. You should have used paper. You can taste the plastic. However …’

  He looked around the table, then back down at his notes.

  ‘You have also lied to me, saying that only one of these drinks was Coca-Cola.’

  Mr Pansier looked indignant, but caught a menacing glare from Tupai, whose menacing glares would frighten a wild animal, and said nothing.

  Fizzer continued. ‘They’re all Coca-Cola, except for the last one which is Diet-Coke. The first three are out of a can, the first two of which were poured quickly, but the third one was left to sit in the can for a while before it was poured. Number four is from a small plastic bottle, about a half litre bottle, I’m not sure if you use the same sized bottles here as we do in New Zealand. Number five is from the same sized bottle, but not the same bottle, as number four. Six, seven and eight are from a larger bottle, at least two litres, and number nine is from a post-mix dispenser like a soda fountain.’

  There was general surprise around the table, and Mr Pansier in particular looked absolutely flabbergasted, but Fizzer hadn’t finished.

  ‘I wouldn’t stake my life on any of this, however, because the drinks all taste a little strange to me. I suspect you might use a different sweetener here in the States than we do back home. Maybe corn syrup instead of cane sugar. Something like that, I can’t be sure.’

  He put his notes down and looked a little guiltily around the room. ‘Sorry.’

  Mr Fairweather looked at Mr Pansier. ‘Well, Ricky, how did the lad do?’

  Mr Pansier looked stunned. As a pretext for delay, he opened a folder in front of him and pretended to scan a few sheets. Eventually, just when the wait was getting embarrassing, he said, ‘I think he’s right, pretty much, although it was a sixteen-ounce bottle, numbers four and five.’

  ‘Fraser did say about half a litre,’ Anastasia reminded him. ‘And half a litre is five hundred mil, which is near as dammit to a sixteen-ounce bottle.’

  Mr McCafferty was more direct. ‘Let me get this straight. This kid can tell the difference between the taste of Coke from a big bottle, and Coke from a small bottle, and you’re quibbling over a few mil! Hell,’ he tossed his pen down on the table in amazement, ‘I couldn’t tell Coke in a can from Coke in a bottle, and I work for the company! What kind of a test was this anyway?’

  ‘I … er,’ Mr Pansier started, but Mr Fairweather held up a hand and cut him off.

  ‘He was right about the sweetener too. So does anyone have any doubts about Fraser’s ability to help us out of our little … difficulty?’

  There was a unanimous shaking of heads.

  ‘OK, Fraser,’ he said, ‘let’s talk money.’

  It turned out to be just as well that Tupai was there, as Fizzer, never having had much money, had no real idea how to negotiate financially. Also, he believed that if you did good in this world, then good came back to you through unexpected ways, so he would have done it for nothing if it came to that. Karma he called it, (although, actually, Karma is a much more complicated concept than that).

  Tupai, on the other hand, found the negotiation process a little like a street fight and jumped in boots and all. Helped, no doubt, by the fact that, unknown to him, the people at that table were desperate enough to have mortgaged the company if they’d had to.

  The actual amount they arrived at is highly confidential, and there are several severe penalties for revealing it. But suffice to say that Fizzer and his dad would no longer be living in a caravan park by a smelly mangrove swamp, and Fizzer would not have to pay his way through university. He could also have purchased a brand new convertible Italian sports car if he’d wanted to, but he didn’t have a drivers’ licence and, anyway, he wasn’t into that sort of ostentatious display of wealth. Money had very little meaning for Fizzer.

  Tupai also accepted a modest fee, for no other reason than that they offered it. There was even the prospect of a job at Coca-Cola for Fizzer, after he had finished university, but that was too far ahead in the future to think about.

  So Fizzer was appointed as a Coca-Cola taster on a short-term contract, and Tupai was appointed as his assistant.

  Fizzer possessed good, almost uncanny intuition. But he was not psychic; he could not see the future. And that’s a real shame, because, if he had known what was in store for him, he might have turned the job down.

  THE SECRET RECIPE

  The lock on the far doors of the yacht’s lounge snicked loudly, and the twin handles began to turn.

  A man and a woman entered. He was holding a menacing-looking pistol in his right hand, while she carried a clump of small, spiral-bound notepads and a handful of pens. In truth, any pistol looks menacing when it is pointed at you, and this one was pointed unfalteringly at the three of them seated on the pink couch.

  Clara Fogsworth’s first thought on seeing the weapon was, ‘How rude,’ for it is certainly not the height of decorum to aim a gun at another person, especially an elderly, unarmed person. But then she looked at the man’s face, and she was no longer surprised.

  Ralph Winkler just grunted, as if he had been expecting this all along, and the sooner they got it over with the better. He did think, though, that he might have seen the gentleman with the gun somewhere before, but he couldn’t quite remember where.

  Bingham Statham sat with his lower jaw touching his chest in total shock at this latest turn of events. He didn’t know the man with the gun from a bar of lavender-scented soap, but he recognised the woman all right.

  ‘Hello, Bingo,’ she said, using her private name for him that he’d always thought was a bit silly. ‘It’s a real pleasure to see you again, considering the circumstances.’

  ‘Hello, Candy,’ Bing said, thinking maybe he should have mounted her head on his trophy wall while he’d had the chance.

  Clara still said nothing. She was quite determined not to, in fact. The absolute curmudgeon! Tall, handsome and athletic he might be, but Mr Joseph Sturdee was nothing more than an amoeba on the scale of worldwide evolution as far as she was concerned.

  Then Ralph finally clicked. ‘You’re that actor,’ he blurted out, as if it were a crime in itself. ‘You play Doctor Messenger on The Beautiful Years.’

  Joseph Sturdee’s smile was as menacing as the gun. ‘Used to play.’ He had given that smile daily, terrorising the other characters in the soap opera for over fifteen years, just to be dumped, unwanted by the network, booed and pelted in the street by fans. All because he had left his real-life wife, the popular and charismatic Pepper Green, to have an affair with Candy Statham, the wife of the Coke millionaire.

  And to top it all off, Pepper had sued him and won millions! Not that she needed the money. Her star shot up like a comet after the affair, and her character on the program became one of its hottest properties.

  All Bing could think of to say to Candy was, ‘I had a ferret named after you. It died.’

  ‘How sweet, how very touching in fact, but now that we’ve exchanged pleasantries, we have a little business to attend to.’ Brusque and business-like, Candy bustled around the room, handing out pads and pens, while ushering Ralph and Bing to seats on opposite sides of the cabin.

  While all this was happening, Bing thought that Candy was quite wrong. About the ferret. It was neither sweet nor touching. He’d read somewhere that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. And so he’d named his ferrets after his two ex-wives, to remind him of his mistakes.

  ‘I want you each to write out the formula for Coca-Cola,’ Candy said brightly. She’d had another face-lift since he’d last seen her, and the skin was drawn tautly across her cheekbones, giving her a pastiche semblance of youth.

  ‘When you’ve finished, hand it to me. I’m going to compare each of your recipes with each of the others. If yours doesn’t agree, then Joe here is going to throw you over the side.’

  ‘An
d we’re a long, long way from land,’ Joe added, rather unnecessarily.

  ‘I’m quite sure that as soon as we’ve finished writing, you’re going to tip us over the side anyway,’ said Ralph gloomily. ‘You won’t need us any more.’

  Clara and Bing glanced across at each other, the same thought on their minds.

  ‘Oh, don’t be so silly,’ Candy said. ‘We’re kidnappers not murderers. No, we have a nice little retirement home planned for you where you can all live out the rest of your lives quietly, teaching each other to sing in peace and harmony.’

  Nobody smiled at her oh-so-witty reference to the famous Coke ad of the seventies.

  ‘Well, get writing!’ she said testily.

  HUBBLE, BUBBLE, TOIL AND TROUBLE

  The first recipe they tried was the one from the scientist in Okinawa. Okinawa is a small island off the coast of Japan where Fizzer’s school of karate originated, but that’s just one of life’s small coincidences and has absolutely nothing to do with this story.

  Fizzer took one sip and spat it into the bucket. ‘Are you sure you followed the recipe?’

  Ricardo Pansier, who had changed his attitude considerably since the taste test in the boardroom, was sampling the brew also, and he screwed his face up but swallowed the mouthful.

  ‘To the millilitre. And we’ve mixed up a few variations as well, just for comparison. Increased this a little, decreased that a little. They’re all numbered.’

  Rows of small plastic bottles, sealed, with numbers marked on them in black felt pen, covered the tray of a metal lab trolley that had been wheeled in a few moments earlier.

  ‘Don’t bother,’ Fizzer said, a little unkindly, considering how much trouble they had gone to. ‘It tastes more like soy sauce than it does like Coca-Cola.’

  ‘What if we added more sugar?’

  ‘Then it would taste like sweet soy sauce.’

  ‘Oh.’

  It turned out that Ricardo had a whole stack of recipes from all sorts of people who claimed to have deciphered the mystery of the secret recipe. Some were from crackpots, like the one from an old guy in Peru, who claimed he had been given the recipe by the ancient Sun Gods. His recipe included hair oil and alpaca turd, so was quickly discarded.

  Other recipes had all manner of other ingredients in them, but because The Coca-Cola Company did not actually order that particular ingredient from anyone, over thirty of them could be rejected. A surprising number of them mistakenly included old tea leaves as a key ingredient.

  The story about field trials had long been discarded, and Tupai and Fizzer had joined a small group of people who knew what was wrong within The Coca-Cola Company: the missing executives, who had come to be known as the ‘Coca-Cola Three’; the production deadline; the terrible possibility that the formula for Coca-Cola might be gone forever!

  One of the things that most surprised Tupai was how little the staff of the company actually knew about the recipe of their main product, and he asked how this was achieved.

  ‘Come with me,’ Ricardo said, as the next trolley was brought in.

  They left Fizzer wincing with disgust at the contents of the first bottle and took an elevator, as Tupai was getting used to calling them, to the basement of the building. The elevator doors opened on a brightly lit corridor, white walls washed with banks of fluorescent tubes recessed into the ceiling.

  The corridor led to a set of huge stainless steel doors watched over by three gargoyles, actually very polite young men in crisp black uniforms, with badges and hats that made them look like the policemen they weren’t. Ricardo’s authority was enough to gain entry for both of them, and they stepped inside a highly computerised control room.

  You would be forgiven for imagining big banks of machines with flashing lights and spinning discs, but this was nothing like that. There were just seven computer monitors, no different from your home PC, with ordinary keyboards sitting in front of them.

  There were three on the left of the control room, three on the right, all occupied by busy looking people with earnest expressions and too many pens in their top pockets. The other keyboard and monitor was unattended and by itself on a table in the centre of the room.

  Ricardo gestured for Tupai to sit in the high-backed leather office chair that faced the empty monitor, and perched himself on the side of the desk.

  He swept his hand around the room. ‘You’re in Coca-Cola Central. From here we monitor the huge vats that mix and boil the ingredients in various combinations to get the final syrup. There are factories in Africa, Ireland and Puerto Rico, all linked up to this central command station right here.’

  Tupai glanced around. One petite Asian lady in a white coat gave him a small smile, but the others concentrated on their screens.

  Ricardo said, ‘I am the Vice-President in charge of Production here at Coca-Cola, which means that I know more about what happens in those vats than anyone else in the company, and yet I still have no idea what’s in the formula.’

  He pointed to the screen, and Tupai saw a list of ingredients, each with a blank field beside it. ‘Isn’t this your list of ingredients?’ he asked. ‘Surely with this list you’re halfway home!’

  Ricardo sighed. ‘I wish it were that simple. We buy a lot of ingredients. I’m not even sure that we use all of them; some might be purchased simply to throw our competitors off the scent. The actual percentages of the ingredients are entered here, by one of the Coca-Cola Three. They have to do that at the end of each mixing cycle, about once a week. All waste, including any unused ingredients, is incinerated, so there’s no way of knowing what is or isn’t used.’ He tapped his finger on the screen, leaving a print. ‘Look here. Lime Juice. Vanilla. Do we actually put lime juice in Coca-Cola? I don’t know. Maybe they enter zero in that field and all the lime juice goes to the incinerator. But even if we knew the exact ingredients, and the exact percentages, we’d still only be halfway there. The next stage of the process is combining them all. I know that some of the ingredients get mixed together, boiled, and cooled before being added to the other ingredients. But I don’t know which ones. That’s the job of the recipe holders. They program it all in here as well.

  Right now we’re at the end of the mixing cycle. The computer is sitting here waiting for the numbers to be entered.’

  ‘What if they stuffed it up?’ Tupai asked, and seeing the blank look, rephrased himself. ‘Got the numbers wrong.’

  Ricardo nodded as if it had been an intelligent question. ‘It takes two of them, you know. One enters the data, then another one comes in and re-enters the same data. If the numbers don’t match perfectly, the machines won’t run.’

  Tupai pursed his lips. ‘Smart system.’

  Ricardo laughed bitterly. ‘Maybe too smart for our own good.’

  ‘Why isn’t the recipe written down somewhere, for safekeeping, for an emergency such as this?’ Tupai asked.

  ‘It used to be. It was held in the company safe. But there was a court case in ’96, part of a divorce proceedings, arguing over the ownership of a written recipe that may or may not have been old John Pemberton’s, that’s the guy who invented Coke, his original notes. I think then the board realised that if it was written down on paper, it was bound to show up somewhere before too long, or get published on the Internet. So all written copies were destroyed. Now it’s only held in the brains of a few selected employees. Never fewer than three of them.’

  Tupai looked up at the dark eyes of the Vice-President (Production). They were filled with a passion, a pride in the company and the product that was famous throughout the world. Here in the control room, the central nervous system of a creature that reached tentacles out into the furthest corners of the globe, he could begin to feel the same excitement. Over a hundred years of history and an enterprise so colossal it beggared imagination.

  And in feeling the passion, for the first time, he felt the fear. The fear that it could soon all be over.

  ‘How long have we got?’ he asked
, surprising himself by using the word ‘we’.

  ‘If we don’t get these vats churning in about eight weeks,’ Ricardo said quietly, ‘a can of Coke is going to become a collector’s item.’

  When they arrived back, Fizzer was reading a football magazine and idly blowing a few tuneless, discordant notes on his harmonica. He looked bored.

  ‘We’ve been through three batches,’ he said. ‘Apparently that’s all they can do today.’

  Ricardo nodded. ‘They’ll have to clean and sterilise all the equipment now. Start preparing the next batches. They’ll work on it through the night, taking it in shifts. We’ll have another try in the morning. I’ll call a car to take you to your hotel.’

  Staying in a flash hotel seemed like a pretty cool thing to both Fizzer and Tupai, neither of whom had ever done it, but they both managed to act quite nonchalant, as if it were an everyday occurrence for them.

  ‘The car will pick you up again tomorrow morning at seven, so we can get an early start on the tastings,’ Ricardo said.

  ‘What about dinner?’ asked Tupai, despite the fact that he had eaten a full meal on the plane just a few hours ago, and, thanks to the different time zones, it was actually getting closer to breakfast time than dinner.

  ‘Room service is great at the hotel. And you’ve got a huge TV in your room.’

  ‘Cool!’ Tupai said.

  ‘How many channels?’ Fizzer asked.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Fifty or so, I guess.’

  ‘Cool!’ Tupai said.

  Ricardo said, ‘So just relax. It’s all paid for. Unless you’d like to have dinner with the board tonight?’

  ‘Actually,’ said Fizzer, ‘I’d just like to get some sleep.’

  733-23-A

  The next day was much the same as the previous, as far as the tastings were concerned. Fizzer eliminated three batches in the morning, and they both received a personally guided tour of the Coca-Cola World interactive museum, by no less than Reginald Fairweather, while the scientists mixed up the afternoon’s batches.