Sal brushed off the Elvis look-alike’s neck and took off his cloth wrap. As he always did between customers, he took a quick sweep at the floor around the chair with a broom and long-handled dustpan while Elvis fished for his eight bucks. Sal’s was the cheapest haircut in town.
“You’re not making sense, H. A patent for what? Some new bread machine?”
Heaven got up and poured more coffee. “Sorry, I’m not telling the story very well. A wheat clone. They’re patenting a wheat clone.”
Sal looked up with disgust. “Heaven, you must have got some of that LSD. You can’t patent food for God’s sake. You just said it gives the patent holder exclusive rights. So no one but BIG BREAD could make bread, for God’s sake? Don’t try that one on me.”
“I never said BIG BREAD, Sal. Did I say BIG BREAD, everybody?” Heaven asked the room. Everyone became very interested in the month-old magazines. One young guy in a denim workshirt mumbled no and leered at Heaven. She turned back to Sal.
“Well, the rest of the world couldn’t use this particular wheat clone, only the, uh, bread company that will remain nameless could do that. And this wheat clone might turn out to be very valuable. So they would definitely have an unfair advantage over the rest of the world. Maybe. Its complicated. Sal, do you know any patent attorneys?”
Sal had his next customer ready to go, a neighborhood gentleman in his seventies. He walked up to Sal’s every Saturday for a trim, which he usually didn’t need. It was his exercise, he said. Sal also knew it was his way of getting the neighborhood news. He was sure getting his eight bucks worth today. “What makes a patent attorney?” Sal asked from the back of the chair.
“You have to be a lawyer with a degree in engineering or physical science as well.”
Sal shook his head. “Doesn’t sound familiar but some lawyers usually come in on Saturdays, I’ll check it out.”
Heaven got up and reluctantly put her coffee cup in the extra sink and rinsed it out. “I just touched the surface of the subject of patents last night and I have to go to this damn lunch at eleven. Before that I have to spend the rest of the morning in the kitchen, so I can’t even go to the library. I have a feeling this is important so if you find out anything, let Murray know. He’ll be in around four.”
Sal grabbed his first cigar of the day and stuck it, unlit in his mouth. “What’s the damn world coming to if you can patent something like wheat? That can’t be right, H.”
“Sal, you and I both know that big companies don’t spend millions of dollars on research to make a product better if they can’t earn their money back, even if the product is food. So don’t be surprised that you can patent something you shouldn’t be able to patent.”
Sal reluctantly agreed. “Okay, I get the drift. I’ll ask around.”
Heaven went back to her side of 39th Street. She felt better. When Sal said he’d ask around, he always got results.
* * *
Dieter Bishop couldn’t get out of the shower. He knew if he did, he would die. The hot water had been gone for a while now. Dieter was shivering with the icy cold water that was cascading off his face, his back. The monster that was waiting for him outside the shower doors knew he was freezing, that he had to be downstairs in an hour, that he had to give a speech. It knew everything.
Dieter had a brilliant idea. He would bargain with the monster. “Yoo-hoo,” Dieter called, as he slid the shower door open a crack and peeked his head out “I’m coming out now. If you just let me go make my speech, I’ll do everything you want. Please, everything you want.”
There was a roar that made Dieter put his hands up over his ears. Then the bathroom was empty.
Dieter made a stumbling beeline for the bedroom. He was blue from the cold, his body shaking. He fumbled through his suitcase until he found what he was looking for. He removed the syringe and filled it quickly.
* * *
Heaven walked into the meeting room at the Ritz-Carlton hotel. The ARTOS bakers had the morning off. Most of them had gone shopping on the fancy Country Club Plaza, right across from the hotel. Heaven and Pauline had been working their butts off so they could have time off for this lunch and for the tour of BIG BREAD that was coming up in the afternoon. They had gone together to the hotel and Heaven let Pauline out at the door and then parked the van. Once inside the conference room she spotted Pauline talking to Dieter and Nancy Silverton from La Brea Bakery in Los Angeles. When the two celeb bakers both moved toward the speaker’s table, Pauline found Heaven. They started cruising for a good seat.
“Dieter says hi and so does Nancy. She couldn’t believe we drove the rat van here today,” Pauline said as they sat at a table near the front of the room.
“Gosh, I’m sorry. The Rolls is in the garage,” Heaven replied with a sniff. “Speaking of the rat van, thanks for your help last night. Making me slam that shot of tequila was brilliant. At least I stopped whimpering. I was a mess. I hate rats. I hate mice. I’m deathly afraid of them. Remember last winter when we had mice in the basement of the restaurant?”
“I remember, all right,” Pauline said. “We had enough pest exterminators around to delouse all of 39th Street. It was overkill. But what was all that about last night? Why would someone put rats in your van?”
“If they knew me at all, to scare me, I guess.”
“Even if you weren’t rodent phobic, what was the point? There was a loaf of BIG BREAD, a big old bread knife, fake blood preserves, poisoned rats, and a note that said, what was it?” Pauline was finally getting into the Cafe Heaven investigator mode.
“STOP THEM. That’s what the note said.”
“And did that mean stop them, the bread company or stop them, the ARTOS bakers, or stop them, the Cafe Heaven crew?”
“Exactly,” Heaven said with a smile. “Now you understand why Murray and Chris and Joe and everybody always ask more questions than we give answers when we get on these cases. The note was attached to a BIG BREAD loaf, Pauline. Let’s take it at face value and assume that’s who has to be stopped, in the opinion of the jolly prankster.”
“Then I would say that Walter Jinks is the prime suspect. If BB, that’s what I’ll say from now on so no one will know who we’re talking about, if BB paid for research for the general, and the general beat Walter at his own game, then Walter is the prime suspect.” Pauline smiled her superior bread-baker smile.
Heaven smiled her “oh brother” smile back. “The obvious is sometimes the best, eh Pauline? But calling BIG BREAD BB, I think, is a little too obvious. On, the other hand, you are certainly correct about Walter being the obvious choice. That’s three things obvious in one fell swoop. Something’s wrong.”
Pauline frowned. “But Walter wasn’t at the ARTOS meetings yesterday.”
“It isn’t very far from GRIP to Kansas City. Just because he didn’t come to the meetings doesn’t mean he wasn’t in Kansas City. Now hush for a minute and let’s try to enjoy lunch.”
“Okay, but there he is now, and Ernest too,” Pauline said, pleased to get the last word for a change.
Sure enough, Walter Jinks was walking in the door, deep in discussion with Ernest Powell. Why, Heaven wondered, were they always talking to each other when they were on opposite sides of the wheat question? Was it just because they were both from Kansas, both farmers? Another thing to worry about.
The meeting was called to order and lunch was served. The Ritz went a little overboard with the bread theme, but everything tasted good. First there was an onion soup served in a scooped out French roll. Then, panzanella, Italian bread salad of chopped tomatoes, onions, bread, lots of basil, and garlic. The Ritz put a grilled chicken breast on the top of the panzanella to make it an entree salad. Heaven liked her version better. She added olives and chopped cucumbers, walnuts, and sometimes roasted red peppers and white beans, but never chicken breasts, which Heaven thought the most overused item in American restaurants. Dessert was bread pudding, of course.
After lunch it was time for Dieter�
�s treatise on rye. Heaven had watched him push his food around on his plate, not eating. It was cute that he was nervous. The hotshot American bakers could be daunting. As far as she was concerned, he could say anything and she would believe it, she knew so little about rye. Heaven was restless. She was missing vital information, and it wasn’t about Dieter’s favorite grain.
“My family has been making rye bread for 800 years. For 400 years we have baked professionally in the same bakery I now work in every day,” Dieter explained. “Of course we have made quite a few improvements over the years, but the grain, the water, the yeast, they have remained constants. We have had the same coal-burning oven for 200 years. This is a great joy and a great responsibility. I feel my grandfather and his father before him looking out for me and also looking to me to carry on the family tradition. No male in our family has ever turned his back on the baking profession.”
Heaven tried to pay attention but her mind had a different idea. When was it that things started going wrong, Heaven wondered? The first thing we did with the ARTOS bakers was the tour of GRIP. Walter told everyone what he was working on and implied that the Mennonites had brought disaster with them in the form of ‘Red Turkey’ wheat, which grew too well, as well as the disaster of annual crops that stripped the topsoil, according to Walter. Then there was the disaster of depending too much on one type of wheat, if we had to depend on wheat.
Dieter forged ahead. “We have already discussed using a chef, or mother, to create sourdough. The same method is used for rye sourdoughs. The initial chef takes four days to create. The sourdough made with the chef takes eight to ten hours to develop. Then you are ready to make rye sourdough. I have a computer handout with the measurements to give you later.”
Heaven looked around the room. She barely knew most of these folks. Oh, of course, she had read about many of them, and read their cookbooks, and even eaten at their restaurants and cooked with them. But she didn’t know them, really. She could be looking in the wrong direction for a villain. All of these bakers had been at the scene of the general’s so-called accident. As far as she knew, none of them had been at her restaurant or in her car. And by the time the rats were added, they all were at the same place again. A hundred and twenty artisan bakers were too many lives, stories, alibis to deal with. Back to Walter.
“Let’s take a moment to talk about rye,” Dieter was saying with gusto. “For me in my country, rye is more prominent than wheat as a bread ingredient because rye grows in the wet climate that we have. In the north, breads are still made with one hundred percent rye flour. The closer to Italy, the lighter in color the bread, usually with less than fifty percent rye flour. I make most of my rye sourdough breads with a ratio of sixty percent rye and forty percent wheat flour. Why do I use a rye sourdough at all? Why not just straight yeast breads? Because the rye sourdough adds elasticity and firmness that the bread would not have without it. As you all know, rye does not have gluten.”
Heaven looked over at Ernest Powell. He was listening intently to Dieter. Heaven still seemed to remember that the Mennonites had been kicked out of Germany before they went to Russia. Didn’t some Russian queen—was it Catherine?—get them to settle in some remote part of Russia? Maybe Ernest was so pro-wheat because those awful old Germans were mean to his people. But Ernest hadn’t mentioned hating rye, had he? He did seem a little testy about Walter and his native grasses though. Of course Walter had thrown the first punch on that front.
“Now, a word about enzymes. Enzymes develop in living organisms and function to alter them without altering themselves. In our case, enzymes destroy starch and convert it to sugar. Enzymes are heat sensitive and die at 80 degrees centigrade. In rye flour, the enzymes are active longer than in wheat flour. The enzymes need water to work so many of these enzymes collect in the shell of the grain where the moisture is. So what happens? Enzymes ‘chop’ water and starches into dextrin. Then the enzymes chop dextrin into maltose sugar. One, two, three,” Dieter said briskly. “Because rye flour absorbs water at a lower temperature than wheat flour, rye at 50–60 degrees centigrade as opposed to wheat at 70–80 degrees centigrade, we must add some acidity or sourness to inhibit enzyme activity. Thus, another need for sourdough in rye bread.”
Heaven was fascinated with all this rye knowledge. She had actually been sucked into listening by the time he got to the enzymes. If she ever learned to make a decent sourdough with wheat flour, which sounded much easier, she’d give rye a try. Could Dieter be behind all this, sent on a mission from God to destroy the wheat juggernaut? Maybe what she mistook before lunch for stage jitters—Dieter not eating or talking constantly—was actually guilt. It seemed totally ridiculous but the more she learned about the bread game, she saw more worldwide implications and more money involved. People have been dosed with LSD for lesser reasons than a share of the world market for rye flour—if the LSD was actually what killed the general, what made him take the leap.
Dieter had really warmed to his subject. A sheen of sweat covered his face. His eyes glistened with zeal. “Let us sum up the advantages of sourdough in rye bread baking. Number 1, it provides leavening that rye does not have by itself. Number 2, it retains moisture in the finished product. Number 3, it provides the acidity that controls enzyme activity, and Number 4, it adds flavor and aroma. But enough of all this dry talk. Eating is believing. I brought some of my beloved chef, or “mother” as I like to call it, with me to America. I have already baked a few loaves to get the lay of the land here, the water, the native yeasts in the air. And Daniel Leader, of Bread Alone Bakery in upstate New York, has agreed to assist me in making bread for our little party tomorrow night at Cafe Heaven. We will make a complete complement of sourdough ryes including dark pumpernickel with raisins, rye with caraway seeds, rye with potato, a 100 percent whole rye, and the bread I won the Coupe du Monde with, Vollkornbrot, a traditional German bread with whole rye berries. Any of you may join us tomorrow at Home and Hearth bakery for this hands-on workshop.”
The audience clapped as if they were at a rock concert, and Heaven looked around for Ernest. He was the encore.
* * *
Ernest Powell grinned shyly at the crowd. But his voice was anything but shy. It was strong, confident. “I guess you have been wondering why a wheat farmer from Kansas has to get his two cents worth in at this meeting. I want to tell you my story. My whole life, I woke up to the smell of fresh-baked bread. It symbolizes the home and family to me, and something more. It is a gift from God that the first human fermented grain and water, threw it in the fire and realized that grain could be transformed into this miracle that is bread.”
Heaven looked around the room at the heads nodding in agreement. So far, so good. The ARTOS bakers obviously agreed with Ernest.
“Now you all know the chemistry better than me. All I know is, if God hadn’t wanted us to have bread, we would still be eating parched corn or gruel. God surely was with that first wife who didn’t throw away that piece of sour smelling grain paste but instead baked it on a hot rock. From way before the time of Moses, bread has meant nourishment. I guess they found some evidence of bread in Egypt 4,000 years before Christ. Jesus himself said he was the bread of life. Why, I bet you would agree with me that domesticating cereal plants, my life-long profession, brought us civilization. Those old hunters and gatherers didn’t wander so far once they planted a little field of corn.”
Ernest was sure up on his grain history, Heaven thought. She looked at Pauline. Rapt attention. Maybe he stood a chance of pulling off this bread-machine project without getting laughed at after all.
“It’s kind of funny, that for years, folks thought white bread, made with refined flour, was superior. Those European kings and queens felt the kind of rustic breads that you folks work so hard to make were just for the peasants. Now they’re just for those that can afford four and five dollars for a loaf of bread. Nowadays the white bread is for the poor folk.”
Heaven saw the troops shift uncomfortably
in their chairs. Baking artisan bread had an elitist rep, there was no getting around it. The people who bought artisan breads were hip, savvy, with disposable income.
Ernest continued. “Of course, we know poor folk can’t afford four-dollar bread, but they could afford twenty-cent bread. Twenty-cent bread that they could bake in their own home. How in the heck could they do that, you say? With your help, that’s how.
“Three years ago I realized we weren’t baking bread at our house anymore. My wife is a schoolteacher and, just like in every other busy family, home-baked bread had just fallen by the wayside. So I went out and bought one of those bread-maker machines. Now, hear me out. I know that’s not your way of doin’ things,” Ernest said just before the groans began.
Heaven saw a few eyes rolling, but Ernest was so knowledgeable that he didn’t lose the crowd entirely. They were still intrigued. Where was this farmer going with this topic?
“I learned to make bread with this gadget, although I can tell you some of the first attempts were kinda pitiful. But you can’t hardly mess up too bad, and the next thing I knew, we had home-baked bread every morning, and for supper, too, if we wanted. I started adding different ingredients, herbs, wheat berries, things like that. To make a long story short, I won the national bread machine contest this year,” Ernest said with a proud grin.
The ARTOS bakers clapped appreciatively.
“So I’ve come to you with an idea, I love bread, but I see how the little guy lives. What if we join together, those of us who grow the wheat, and those who make their living turning it into blessed bread. What if we buy bread machines and give them to those families who may never have smelled that wonderful smell of home-baked bread, who now can set the timer and come home to something they can be proud of. Welfare mothers, single parents, children, will be blessed and so will you if you help me start this foundation.” Ernest lowered his eyes, ducked his head and blushed. “I reckon I’ve talked too long. I thank you for listening,” he said quickly and then turned around looking for a way to avoid being the center of attention.
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