Bread on Arrival

by Lou Jane Temple

  2 pounds fresh cherries

  ½ cup sugar

  2 cups rosé wine

  1 cup orange juice

  2 cinnamon sticks

  1 bay leaf

  2 cloves

  2 cardamom seeds

  2 T. lemon juice

  1 cup sour cream or crème fraîche if available

  Pit the cherries and reserve 1 cup. Combine the rest of the cherries in a medium sauce pan with the sugar, wine, orange juice, and seasonings. Simmer until the cherries are very soft, 20–30 minutes. Strain out the spices and puree the mixture in a food processor. Return to the sauce pan and add the reserved cherries and simmer for five minutes. Cool and add the sour cream and lemon juice. Chill and serve.

  Seven

  “What happened next?” The question was directed toward Pauline. It was eight-thirty Friday morning and a powwow that normally would take place at Sal’s was convened in the kitchen of Cafe Heaven so Pauline could participate and make bread at the same time.

  Mona Kirk would give Sal a blow-by-blow later as he always had early customers and couldn’t get away from the barber shop. Heaven had called the restaurant the night before and told Murray and Joe and Chris to show up bright and early.

  Heaven and Iris had stopped for bagels on the way to work. Iris had agreed to come and do prep work so both her mother and Pauline could go to the conference. She wasn’t a cook but she could follow instructions and a prep list.

  “Then we came home,” Pauline said. She looked around the table at the disappointment on the eager faces and decided she needed to add a little more detail. She was a novice at these crime-scene descriptions. “I mean hours later after the medical emergency team had been there and the police and the coroner and all that.”

  “Did they question you?” Mona asked as she inhaled a Black Russian bagel piled with cream cheese. Crime made Mona hungry.

  “They took everyone’s name and address and asked each person for their version of what they’d seen. I told them I was staring at Walter Jinks and didn’t even see the actual fall,” Pauline explained.

  “And Mom thinks that’s important,” Iris added.

  The three women had told the story like a rotating Greek chorus. Murray had tried to organize the material, writing down the cast of characters on a legal pad. Now he started looking through his notes. “Let’s see, I’ll find Walter Jinks. He’s the…”

  “Former peacenik, experimental farm, perennial polycultures. The police were going to question Walter further,” Chris said like the kid who always had the answers in math class. Chris hadn’t tried to write and listen at the same time.

  “And,” Heaven threw in with high drama in her voice, “the one who had to be escorted from the building when the general dropped his big announcement. Walter said the general had to be stopped in front of all of us!”

  Joe held up his hand. “I know, I know. The general stole Walter’s thunder by doing perennial wheat instead of diversifying the way Walter thinks the world should do.”

  “Very good, Joe,” Heaven said as she helped Pauline shape some dough into loaves. Pauline was keeping a nervous eye on Heaven’s loaf formation.

  “Of course Mother isn’t sure the general has any perennial wheat. She thinks the general just said that to get Walter’s goat,” Iris said.

  “The general doesn’t have anything now, that’s for sure,” Murray said. “Did the police say anything about it being, you know, foul play?”

  Heaven shook her head. “Well, someone ratted out Walter right away, and they did ask him to come down to the station. But I don’t think there was enough time for Walter to rig an accident between their argument and the general’s fall. Walter would have had to know in advance what the general was going to say, pretend to be surprised, and rig the elevator between lunch and the general’s announcement. And how would Walter know that the general would be going up the elevator vis-à-vis the demonstration, even if he was crazy enough and angry enough to kill him? I asked the investigating officer if it was possible that the general committed suicide. ‘Highly unlikely’ was all the Manhattan detective would say.”

  “So this Walter Jinks pitches a fit and says ‘you must be stopped’ to the general and gets thrown out and then you all go outside and the general takes a swan dive off a silo. Pauline, you just happen to be staring at this Jinks character right at the moment of impact, not his of course,” Mona said as she paced around the kitchen. “This could be big, Pauline. How’d he look? Did he have a little gadget he was fiddling with, a timer or something?”

  Pauline looked down. “Well, I don’t really know. I didn’t look at his hands, or at least I don’t remember his hands. I was just thinking about how sorry I felt for him and I didn’t even think it was strange that he had hung around after the argument. I guess I’d gotten used to his being around all day. But if he’d been doing anything really weird, I think I would have noticed. But you know how it is when you’re day dreaming and then someone startles you? All you remember is what startled you. Suddenly Iris grabbed my arm and made this funny noise and I looked up for the general and well, he was on the ground. I didn’t think about Mr. Jinks again until the police asked me for my version of the, ah, accident.”

  Mona didn’t let Pauline’s sketchy and vague descriptions daunt her. “This is like one of those locked-room murders, you know? Where no one could get in or out yet the victim turns up with a dagger in his back. A hundred people were watching one man go up the side of a grain elevator. No one else was near him and he falls to his death, and yet it doesn’t seem like an accident. I love it, don’t you, Heaven?”

  Heaven nodded her head toward Mona as she worked. “It’s like an outdoor locked-door mystery. If you could have seen the look on his face you’d know why this is so puzzling. It wasn’t a look of oh, my God, I slipped, or oh my God, the lift broke. It was very strange. I can hardly wait to compare notes with some of the ARTOS folks. There was no chance yesterday because the police asked us not to talk to each other while we waited to give our statements, and then everyone left as soon as possible.

  “I really wanted Pauline to ride back on the bus and try to listen to what the bakers had to say about the accident,” Heaven explained. “But Pauline said she wasn’t good at eavesdropping and excitement always made her sleepy.” Heaven’s eyebrows shot up but she stopped herself from calling Pauline a wimp. “She said she’d just fall asleep as soon as the bus started moving and so I let her come with Iris and me in the van. And sure enough, they both fell asleep.”

  “I’m not ashamed. Hanging with Mom is too much for me. There’s never a dull moment. Even in supposedly bucolic Kansas, we turn up in the middle of a police investigation,” Iris murmured with a bagel in her mouth. Pauline said nothing but looked apologetic for being such a lightweight on the investigative team.

  Joe glanced at both of the young women with an expression that said “what sorry excuses for amateur detectives you two are.” Joe and Chris had helped with several little problems at Cafe Heaven and they imagined themselves just one step from opening a private investigating agency. “Heaven, what do we do next? Do you really think it was a fluke accident?”

  Heaven looked at her watch and then reluctantly at the assembled group. She had flashed on the general’s black tongue while they were going through the events of yesterday. Should she tell everyone now and ask someone to … no. She wanted to do the research herself. She slipped off her apron and washed her hands as she talked. “Next, Pauline and I have to be at the Board of Trade by ten. This conference is still going on. A fatal so-called accident won’t stop the bakers. After all, the general wasn’t a member of ARTOS and really wasn’t even very nice to us. And he was doing terrible things with this evil biogenetic research. If we weren’t booked every minute of this weekend and if it wasn’t Iris’s last weekend in town, I might go back out there and poke around.

  “I will say this, the general didn’t seem like the type to A. kill himself, B. let the
equipment fall into disrepair, or C. make a silly mistake and step off into space. But since I don’t have the time we are just going to have to let the authorities do their jobs.”

  The room was quiet. They couldn’t believe Heaven had just said what she said. Heaven always wanted to explore what was around the next corner, authorities be damned, and the staff expected to be part of that. This time she seemed oblivious to all the possibilities for interference. “Murray, your stuff is on the bar in the same manila envelope you left it in. I made comments on all your articles with post-its and I marked the three I think you should send to New York. See you guys later.”

  The whole crew looked as if they had just had a big candy bar taken away. They were used to Heaven handing out assignments when they got in the middle of trouble. If Heaven didn’t have time, that didn’t necessarily stop everyone else, did it?

  * * *

  The Board of Trade was used to big groups visiting. They had a visitors’ gallery over the trading floor and a visitor guide who gave a snappy lecture about what goes on in futures trading. According to the guide, the impetus behind commodities futures trading was to stabilize the price of wheat or any other commodity, such as corn, soybeans, minerals, or petroleum products. A futures contract was an agreement to take delivery of the commodity for a specific price at a specific future date. By buying an option on a futures contract, the traders offer the right to take possesion of wheat in, say, March of next year, without requiring the other traders to actually take posession of the wheat. Options provide protection against adverse price movements without eliminating the potential for profit.

  The guide was pointing at various parts of the trading floor where grown men in brightly colored jackets were yelling and shouting at each other and waving their arms wildly. These were the futures traders engaged in the highest stress profession in Kansas City.

  The ARTOS group, however, were less than high energy, subdued after the excitement of the day before. The Board of Trade was full of drama however, each transaction meant thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars were trading hands. The air was charged with the same kind of excitement you felt when images of the New York Stock Exchange appeared on TV. As they got the idea of what was happening down below, the bakers were warming to the task at hand, asking lots of questions and making notes. Heaven spotted Dieter Bishop. He was standing by Pauline, holding forth, as usual. Heaven slid over, hoping to get a reading on what the out-of-towners thought about the accident.

  Dieter turned to Heaven with a smile. “So this is how you maintain the price of your flour with some stability. Very interesting.” Then Dieter was reminded of his own lofty position. “Of course, a lot of the bakers that are members of ARTOS use specialty mills or grind their own flours like I do. I even grow my own rye,” he said proudly.

  Heaven grinned. These artisan bakers sure didn’t want to be mistook for a regular Joe. “Of course. This futures thing is just for the common run-of-the-mill user of flour, not boutique guys like you. There are not only futures contracts for wheat but futures for flour. Lots of large cereal companies and people like BIG BREAD contract months in advance for a price on their flour. It’s called “forward flour buying.” Sometimes they win and sometimes they lose at this because there isn’t the option clause for “forward flour buying.” The price can go down from what they’ve promised to pay, so they can hedge their potential losses here as well. It turns out that this whole world of grain-based foods is full of gamblers. It wasn’t until yesterday that I knew how exciting it really was,” Heaven said, trying to get the subject back to the accident.

  Dieter appraised Heaven. “So, what do you think? Did Walter go out and jimmy the lift on the grain elevator?” he asked.

  “Oh, Dieter, I don’t know. There wasn’t much time for that. How would Walter know, hours beforehand, that the general would announce some competing scheme that would make him angry enough to kill and that we were all trooping outside for Wheat 101, part two? How would he know the general was the one that would go up the lift? Some underling of the general’s could have gone up after the grain. Couldn’t it have just been an accident?”

  “Anything is possible, Heaven, but the general reminded me of my grandfather. A place for everything and everything in its place, my grandfather used to say. He had official inspection tours of his own house, for Christ’s sake, where he marched through the rooms with his housekeeper looking for a speck of dust or a chair out of place. Men like that rarely let equipment break down,” Dieter said, echoing Heaven’s own assessment of the situation.

  Before Heaven could pump Dieter for any more theories, the trading floor broke into high-pitched pandemonium. The usual yelling had gone up several decibels. Heaven peered down at her friend, David Gibbs, who was right in the middle of all the flurry. All the floor clerks, the people who weren’t brokers but assisted with the trading on the floor, were busy on the phones, talking to their counterparts on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. The brokers that took care of cash trading, the actual sale of wheat and soybeans and corn instead of futures contracts, had all gotten up from their desks and were watching the frenzy in the pit with interest. The Board of Trade tour guide went out in the hall and came back moments later, her eyes shining with excitement.

  Heaven moved towards the guide, anxious to get the scoop. “What’s going on down there?”

  “BIG BREAD,” she said breathily. “They’ve, they’ve applied for a patent for a genetically engineered wheat seed. Nobody has ever done that before.”

  “Why that’s ridiculous, you can’t patent food crops, something the whole world uses,” Dieter Bishop said with his usual confidence.

  Heaven shook her head. “I don’t know Dieter. I read a newspaper article a few months ago about some scientist in Colorado patenting quinoa and I think she got away with it.”

  “The South American grain?”

  “The very one. It’s causing a big to-do at the United Nations. Are scientists robbing native peoples of ancient knowledge, will these scientists have a monopoly over our food supply, questions like that. I remembered the article yesterday when Walter and the general started talking about their perennials.”

  Dieter looked down on the trading floor and then at the baking guild members. “Scientists? Of course, it would not be the scientists who would ultimately have control. You know that, Heaven. It would be the food companies, people like BIG BREAD.”

  “And the whole world would eat white bread and like it,” Heaven commented wryly.

  There was an intense round of yelling from the trading floor, then a bell sounded. It was one-fifteen in the afternoon and business closed for the day with a bang.

  Hot Hacked Chicken

  1 large whole frying chicken

  ¼ cup sesame oil

  ½ cup Thai sweet chili sauce

  1 cup sherry

  ¼ cup good-quality soy sauce, medium body

  ½ cup chunky peanut butter

  ¼ cup Rooster sauce, a chili and garlic sauce available at most Asian stores

  ¼ cup minced fresh ginger

  Cilantro leaves and black sesame seeds for garnish

  Rinse your chicken and pat it dry with paper towels. Put the bird in a shallow baking dish on a rack and start the roasting process. Bake for 30 minutes at 400 degrees. This will crisp up the skin so it won’t stick to the foil in the next step.

  Combine all the other ingredients in a bowl. Take the chicken out of the oven and baste with the sauce. Spoon about ¼ cup sauce in the cavity of the bird. Cover with foil and bake at 350 degrees for 40 minutes. Remove the bird and baste again. Bake another 20 minutes, basting often. Many of the ingredients have sugar in them so the bird will turn a dark brown. This is good, even a little black won’t hurt a bit. Any sauce you have left over you should bring to a boil, simmer 5 minutes and serve with the chicken.

  Now, how to hack: With a Chinese cleaver or large French knife cut across the bird in the middle. Then on e
ach half, cut across again, near where the legs and wings meet the body. Separate the front and back of the bird, as well as the 2 legs and wings. Garnish with cilantro leaves and black sesame seeds.

  Eight

  Murray pulled up in the parking lot of the Milling and Grain International Studies Laboratory. He had never been in Manhattan, Kansas, before but it had been easy to find.

  Murray left Cafe Heaven with every intention of going home. The next thing he knew he was on I-70, heading west. He remembered Pauline saying it took about two hours to get there, so after he sped through Topeka, he watched the names of the Kansas towns on the exit signs. Soon enough, a sign said Manhattan exit, two miles. Now that he was here in the pretty college town, he wasn’t sure what he could accomplish. But he was tickled pink he had followed his hunch and hit the road.

  Something had happened to Murray after he accepted the writing assignment from the Times. It was like his fairy godmother had waved her magic wand and, poof, he was an investigative reporter again. Today that meant he couldn’t go home and forget about the strange story Heaven and Pauline and Iris had told. The circumstances around the death of the general pointed to a good story, and even if the general’s fall wasn’t murder, there were still lots of good angles that now seemed to be calling out to Murray.

  The business of the genetically engineered crops was a potentially interesting story line. So was the annual wheat versus perennial wheat idea. Murray also wondered how much topsoil actually was lost in America each year. Did New York Times readers even care about topsoil? One thing Murray knew from his past experience was that, topsoil or no, New York Times readers did like to find out yet another way the world was going to hell in a handbasket. They’ll love this, he thought, as he got out of the car.

  Murray entered the building and went up to the receptionist. “Hi there, I’m Murray Steinblatz. I write for the New York Times and I have an appointment with General Mills.”