Perfect Blend

by Sue Margolis

  He turned to Amy. “The clinic just got the results of my blood test. Turns out my estrogen level is above normal. Shit. What do I do now?”

  Amy took his arm. “Come on, take it easy,” she soothed. “The doctor already told you it could take years before the estrogen causes any real harm. I know it’s worrying, but there will be an answer to this thing. It’s just a matter of time.”

  “I hope you’re right. Meanwhile, I’m going back to the doctor to talk about having some liposuction to reduce the size of my moobs.”

  “Hey, maybe he’d give us a twofer and do my hips and thighs while he’s at it.”

  As soon as they got in the car, Amy phoned Ruby to make sure Charlie was okay. She had arranged for her to give him supper. Afterward, Lilly would collect him, put him to bed, and wait for Amy to get home. Ruby said that everything was fine and that Lilly had phoned to say she was on her way. “Fab,” Amy said. “Give him a kiss from me and tell him I won’t be too late.”

  The traffic was by no means light, but there were no actual holdups and they managed to keep moving.

  At one point Bel phoned Brian to say she was filling out her insurance claim form and how much had he paid for his MacBook Pro, as she’d lost the receipt and she knew they’d both bought them around the same time.

  “Look, I’m driving. I’m with Amy; we’re on our way to Luton to this CremCo gig I told you about. I’d have to check what I paid. Why don’t you take a look online … okay, sorry, yes, of course … you don’t have your laptop … What? No, Amy didn’t tell me you were auditioning for a part in the new Bond film. That’s amazing …” Then he said he had to hang up because there was a police car behind them and he didn’t want to get a fine for being on the phone.

  Amy brought him up to speed re Bel’s latest audition and the moneymaking possibilities if she got the part. Brian said he often worried about Bel.

  Amy asked him why.

  “She’s had a rough time of it over the years, what with that scumbag father of hers. I really hope she makes it. I’d love nothing more than to see her do well.”

  Oh, he so had feelings for Bel, but Amy wasn’t about to tackle Brian on the subject again. He’d made his position clear. Plus, they were just pulling into the CremCo car park.

  AS THEY got out of the car, they were greeted by the powerful aroma of roasted coffee. Brian inhaled deeply. “Wow, don’t you just love that smell?” Amy said what she always said about coffee aroma promising more than it delivered, and Brian called her a philistine. As they made their way over to the CremCo building, they continued to exchange good-humored insults.

  A jolly, hair-flicking PR girl named Sophie welcomed them at the reception area. She referred to her guest list, crossed off their names, and directed them to a large conference room on the ground floor. Inside, waiters were hovering with trays of champagne and canapés.

  Amy and Brian helped themselves to champagne and miniature portions of piping hot fish and chips.

  About forty people had shown up. Judging by the snippets of conversation Amy was picking up, most of them were food writers. Others ran Internet businesses or shops selling upmarket tea and coffee. A few, like Brian, owned cafés and restaurants. As they waited for a few latecomers, Brian spotted a face he recognized. He nudged Amy. “See that bloke over there, working the room? That’s Hugh Cavendish. He’s the head of CremCo UK.”

  An excessively tall, forty-something chap with slicked-back hair that was a particularly unnatural shade of chestnut was chatting earnestly to a group of journalists. Amy took in the chalk-stripe suit, the pink shirt and white collar, the gold signet ring on his little finger. Had she been asked what the CEO of CremCo might look like, she would probably have said übertrendy, thirty to forty-something, with an edgy haircut and slightly weird German specs.

  “He looks like one of those upper-class types you read about in the papers,” Amy whispered to Brian. “You know, the ones that claim to be a lord and then con unsuspecting women out of their life savings.”

  Brian laughed. “It’s the hair. My gran always used to say you could never trust a man with dyed hair.” He broke off. Hugh Cavendish was coming their way.

  “Good evening to you,” he brayed like an off-duty master of the hunt. “I am Hugh Cavendish from CremCo. Welcome to our little soiree.”

  “Thank you for inviting us,” Brian said. He went on to introduce himself and Amy.

  “And I’m assuming that you and the delightful Ms. Walker are members of the press.”

  “I’m a freelance,” Amy said. “Brian owns a coffee shop called Café Mozart. It’s on Richmansworth Common.”

  “Fascinating,” he said. Cavendish, who couldn’t have looked less fascinated if he’d tried, took Amy’s hand in his and didn’t so much kiss it as slobber over it. Amy shot a look at Brian to let him know that she thought the man was a complete sleazeball.

  “We’re all looking forward to seeing the new espresso machine,” Brian ventured.

  “Ah, yes. It’s been several years in development, and I have to say that all of us at CremCo are immensely excited. We’re confident it’s going to claim the majority of the market share over the next couple of years. And of course sales of Crema Crema Crema coffee are continuing to soar. We are struggling to keep up with demand.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Brian said. “It is quite exceptional … that smoky top note with a hint of caramel. Then there’s that citrusy insouciance and a really complex finish that is quite—”

  “Yes … well, if you’ll excuse me.” With that Hugh Cavendish took his leave, but not before he had patted Amy’s rear.

  “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.

&n
bsp; 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 c
offee 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.”