Aaron Elkins: Twenty blue devils

"Rudy…” Maggie glowered at him, her head lowered like an irritated bull's. Painted, hand-carved wooden earrings shaped like tiny tropical fish swung against plump cheeks. “…I know you think you're the be-all and end-all of anything that has to do with coffee, but-"

"I?” Rudy said. "Au contraire. I have an absolute and unequivocal lack of belief in my own judgment. Thereby,” he added without losing a beat, “confirming the perspicacity of my opinions."

And there was Rudy in a nutshell: droll, biting, double-edged-but ultimately even-handed in his barbs, digging them into Maggie, or Nelson, or himself with equal relish. John had been on the receiving end for his share too. Even Nick had. And other than Nelson, they all laughed now-except for Rudy himself, whose dry, dour expression rarely changed very much.

"Come on, Rudy,” Nick said, “what about the Excelso?"

Rudy decided to be serious. “I don't taste any groundiness,” he said. “There is a little woodiness, but it has a nice, nutty, buttery finish. Definitely not for one of our premiums, but I was thinking it would be all right for the Weekend Blend."

"That's what I think too.” It was rare that Nick didn't go along with his roastmaster's judgment. "If you can get it for under a buck-five. You say something, John?"

John shook his head, wiping his chin with the back of a finger; he didn't quite have the others’ knack with the spittoon. He had joined in the tasting-the cupping, as they called has much to be sociable as anything else, but what was there to say to this bunch once they got going on coffee? Like them, he had tasted seven different coffees from seven different countries. Unlike them, he had liked them all. (He had swallowed down the first few until a scandalized Nelson had noticed and made him comply with international cupping conventions.) But if you had told him that all seven samples were exactly the same coffee, he would have accepted it without reservation.

It wasn't that he didn't like coffee; he liked it as well as the next guy. Two cups with breakfast to get the kinks out, and then one, maybe two lattes during the day, from the SBC coffee bar across the street from the federal building on Fourth Street. Great stuff, got the juices going. But buttery, for God's sake? Earthy? What were they talking about, coffee or baked potatoes?

He would have had a hard time taking them seriously, except that he knew how well they were doing. Rudy, in particular, had built Caffe Paradiso, Nick's American retail outlet, from a sleepy storefront business with an ancient, secondhand, one-bag roaster in the basement into the number-three coffee-seller in the Pacific Northwest, and he'd done it largely with his nose and his taste buds.

He certainly hadn't done it with force of personality. Dyspeptic, notoriously caustic, with a sharp tongue that was too quick for its own good, his all-too-ready wit had made him more enemies than friends. Once, for example, he had had a celebrated verbal skirmish with a Seattle Times food critic at a cocktail party for the opening of a new restaurant. That was bad enough, but when questioned about it later that evening on live television, he had said, with mock wonderment: “But I don't understand why she's so upset. I certainly didn't mean to say anything unkind about her. I merely mentioned that she was dim-witted, undiscerning, fatuous, and uninformed. All perfectly verifiable."

His hangdog appearance didn't help either. Balding, stoop-shouldered, and naturally woebegone-looking, with dark, droopy bags under his eyes, he was nobody's idea of the driving force behind a burgeoning and aggressive coffee empire. The fact was, amazingly enough, that he didn't even like coffee and wouldn't have been able to drink it if he did because the acidity gave him gas, or so he claimed.

Rudy's father-Nick's much-loved, long-dead kid brother, Jack-had been a vintner in California, and Rudy had grown up at his father's small winery in the Simi Valley. From the beginning, wine had been his passion, or the closest thing to a passion that he'd ever had. He had majored in enology at the University of California's Davis campus and returned to manage the winery's production process, expecting to take over the business eventually. But his father, drowning in debt, had sold out to one of the conglomerates that were then gobbling up the vineyards of the Pacific coast.

Shattered, Ruby had fled California for Tahiti, seeking a job with his uncle. The always-generous Nick had come through, putting him to work on the plantation (and, by the by, bailing his father out of his not inconsiderable remaining debts). Hardworking and intelligent, Rudy had learned the coffee business and had eventually taken over management of day-to-day operations. Later, when Brian Scott had arrived on the scene with a sackful of ideas for improvement and expansion and a knack for implementing them, Nick had asked Rudy to return to the States to see if he could turn the struggling Caffe Paradiso enterprise into something worthwhile. And here he had been ever since, successful beyond Nick's dreams, let alone his own, but in his heart of hearts never ceasing to regard coffee as a poor substitute for his beloved wines.

But no one had ever said he didn't know everything there was to know about the coffee business.

His office was still here in this eighty-year-old white frame building, a onetime feed store near Coupeville on rural Whidbey Island, two hours from Seattle by car and ferry. Now, however, there was a spanking-new twenty-thousand-square-foot warehouse and processing plant a few hundred feet up the highway, with eighteen employees and a big, shiny, three-bag roaster that held 335 pounds of beans and was fired up and roasting eight hours a day, five days a week.

In short, things were going like gangbusters. From what they'd told John earlier, they were now selling more than half a million pounds a year. There were sales to gourmet shops and restaurants, there was a thriving mail-order business, and now there were two Caffe Paradiso coffee bars in downtown Seattle department stores, one at the airport, and another two about to open in Portland, every one of them upscale and pricey. Only twenty percent of the beans that went into their numerous varieties came from the plantation in Tahiti these days; the rest were bought from other coffee growers around the world, mostly on Rudy's say-so. It was Rudy too who supervised the roasting, created the blends, and ran what Nick approvingly referred to as a highly innovative marketing program.

It seemed pretty innovative to John too. Who would have thought you could make money with slogans like “Paradiso-The World's Most Expensive Coffees” and “Pure Tahitian Blue Devil, the Highest-Priced Coffee in the World…Bar None.” But make money they did. Blue Devil, not a blend but solely their own plantation's product, was Paradiso's chief claim to fame.

They were always leaving a few pounds of it with John and Marti when they came. It wasn't bad, John thought, but at $38 a pound? At $4.50 a cup in the coffee bars? You'd have to be out of your mind. Which showed how much he knew about it.

"Look, people,” he said, “about these accidents-"

"Johnny, will you shut up?” Nick said amiably. “What else is there, Rudy?"

"One more, from the Celebes. This is a first issue from a Rantepao plantation that was revived four or five years ago."

"I vote no,” Maggie said.

Nick laughed. “We haven't tasted it yet"

"We don't have to taste it. If it comes from the Celebes, it was processed with slave labor."

"Oh, for God's sake, Maggie, they don't have slave labor in the Celebes,” Nelson said disgustedly.

"Well, they don't pay them a living wage. It's the same thing."

"It's not the same thing."

"And what's more, they don't go in for organic processing on the Rantepao plantations. They use chemical nitrogen replacement."