Dieter Bishop was the first to stand up and speak. “Although we probably could use a similar program in Germany, I’d like to leave a thousand dollars here in the United States with Ernest to start this project off. And I challenge all the rest of you rich American bakers to meet my pledge.”
That did it. The celebrity bakers couldn’t let Dieter shame them. One of the clipboard woman stood by Ernest and wrote down the pledges as the crowd streamed by, shaking Ernest’s hand. Ernest looked stunned that the ARTOS crowd had been so agreeable. Heaven figured they all saw the great publicity potential of this. It was a brilliant marketing tactic. Take bread machines to the projects. Get your picture in the newspaper and do good at the same time. What could it hurt?
Pauline pulled at Heaven’s arm. “Can we help?”
Heaven stood up and thought a minute. “We sure can’t give any thousand dollars. But we can give four hundred, which should buy eight or ten bread machines if we get them wholesale. I’m sure one of the small appliance companies will want to get their picture in the paper, too. Pauline, you go up and make our pledge. Find out where to send the check. I’m going to run down Walter Jinks.”
Pauline looked at her boss with alarm. “Run down?” she repeated. “Don’t worry,” Heaven said. “I’m not violent. I just meant find him and talk to him. Now hurry so we can go on to the bread factory. We’ll have to make sure little Patrick Sullivan gives Ernest a check too. BIG BREAD can certainly afford it.”
As Pauline headed for Ernest, Heaven looked around for Walter. He was visiting with one of the Acme Bread people. As the two men shook hands and the Californian walked away, Heaven put her hand on Walter’s shoulder. “How are you?” she asked gently.
Walter still had a twinkle in his eye. “Heaven, it isn’t that bad. You sound like I’m a terminal case of some sort.”
“My, you have high tolerance, Walter. Let’s see, since Thursday, you’ve gotten in a public fight with another scientist who then died, I suspect you’ve been questioned by the police, and the bad guys applied for a patent on something that may render your research moot. Sounds grim to me.”
Walter’s eyes clouded over for a minute, but then he chuckled and looked Heaven straight in the eye. “Heaven, I suspect you have had adversity in your life as well. Don’t tell me a little spot of bad luck would stop you?”
Heaven laughed. “Just in the last few years, since I’ve had the cafe, I’ve had a guest die of poisoning, I was almost asphyxiated by a barbeque murderer, and I almost froze to death in a hotel freezer in Aspen. I guess I see your point. But doesn’t BIG BREAD’s perennial wheat thing the general referred to put your research behind the eight ball?”
“If I thought that was the answer, I would have developed my own strain of perennial wheat. Diversity is the key, Heaven. What if some nasty foreign government, let’s say one that doesn’t depend on bread, one with a rice-based diet, develops a bug that only eats ‘Red Turkey’ wheat? Then what will we do?”
“That’s basically the situation already according to you, isn’t it Walter?”
“The difference is that no one would really bother to develop a poison for an annual. Next year, we start all over, they’d have to send the bugs back.”
“But if it’s a perennial, oh, I get it. It would take longer to replace the wheat. Bread would then be even more expensive than the stuff these celebrity guys bake. So now I have more things to worry about than I did before Thursday,” Heaven said. “In the case of the world grain market, a little knowledge leaves you worried sick. What do you think happened to the general, Walter?”
“Well, as I told the Manhattan detective, he was a man who seemed to be on top of the world. He had a great new mentor in BIG BREAD and he was on the trail of a new discovery. He might have gotten a kick out of getting my goat, but I was no threat to him.”
Heaven and Walter had been heading toward the lobby of the hotel with the rest of the group. Dieter and Ernest were in deep conversation about their new bread-machine foundation and were accompanied by lots of bread-machine foundation groupies. Ernest seemed to be adjusting to celebrity quite well.
Heaven turned back to Walter. “But the general was a threat to you, wasn’t he?”
Walter laughed. “Do you think that I rigged that lift to pitch the general off the top of the silo? I guess that’s what the detective thought as well. What would that get me, pray tell? It wouldn’t do away with his research and the folks that financed it, now would it? What you don’t understand about me, Heaven, is that I’m in for the long haul. I believe in what I do, and I have for more than twenty years. Remember Leonardo da Vinci? He had to beg and scam the Duke of Milan, or whoever was paying that year, for every penny he had. He stole into the morgue at night to draw dead bodies, to learn anatomy. But we revere him now, Heaven. Some things take more time than others.”
Heaven gave Walter a hug. “You are philosophical, Walter. I’m going to read your book, soon.”
“A Grain of Wheat? I’ll send you an autographed copy when our lives get back to normal,” Walter said as they walked outside the hotel.
Heaven saw Pauline looking around for her and waved. “So, Walter, you think we will get back to normal after ARTOS?” Heaven asked.
“Remember the long run, Heaven,” Walter Jinks said with a mysterious smile.
Heaven’s Panzanella
1 loaf day-old French or Italian bread, cut into crouton dice and toasted
10 Roma tomatoes, split and sliced
2 red onions, split and sliced
1 cup basil leaves, julienned
1 cup Calamata olives, pitted, or some other good olive
1 cup walnuts, toasted
1 cucumber, split, seeded, and then sliced—I usually peel about half the skin off in stripes
1 red pepper, quartered and sliced
1 green pepper, quartered and sliced
1 cup good Parmesan cheese, diced or 1 cup crumbled Gorgonzola
Options: 1 cup cooked white beans, 1 cup diced cappicola spicy ham, 1 cup sliced salami, 1 tuna filet, grilled and cubed
4 garlic cloves, minced, or 6–8 roasted garlic cloves, smashed
Red wine vinegar
Extra virgin olive oil
Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper
Combine everything down to the vinegar in a large bowl. Drizzle with oil and vinegar, season and let rest for an hour. Add more oil and vinegar as it will be absorbed by the bread. Adjust seasonings and serve.
Eleven
BIG BREAD, INC., a sprawling fenced in complex of tile and stainless steel in the middle of Kansas City, rarely received guests. Today, however, the red carpet was out, literally. A red runner rolled out the front door into the parking lot where the buses pulled up. Patrick Sullivan was standing at the doorway of the plant, like a host greeting guests at a formal party. When everyone was off the buses and gathered around the front door, Patrick spoke.
“I know this is a visit to enemy territory for most of you. But I want you to know how much I admire what you have done for bread in the United States. You have brought bread to a much higher profile than it had ten years ago. Many more people know about pain levain, sourdough, ciabatta, and foccacia in America than ever have before. I think you will find this tour interesting, even if you don’t approve of the final product. Just remember that we, as food professionals, have to feed the world’s population of six billion people. This sometimes calls for assembly-line procedures. So, welcome, to our main bread production facility in the Midwest. We also have a sweet snack cake plant in St. Louis but we have introduced production line flexibility into all our plants, so if the demand was there, we could produce snack cakes here in Kansas City and bread in St. Louis. After the tour, we’ll have a little wine and cheese here in the front lobby. Come on into BIG BREAD. We run a small crew on Saturday. The office staff and operations crew are minimal and the line only runs one shift today,” Patrick explained, pushing his glasses up on his nose. Heaven had to give c
redit to the guy. He was being much more gracious than she suspected his guests would ever be to him, or his employers would be if they had to face ARTOS bakers like Patrick did.
As the group trooped into the lobby Patrick diverted them quickly down a corridor. Dieter Bishop held up his hand. “Patrick, where’s the john?” He still looked excited, like he had while making the rye speech. Heaven thought Dieter had been very generous to share his spotlight with Ernest and the bread-machine idea.
Patrick pointed in the opposite direction. “Down that hall, Dieter. We’ll be over there in the building utilities area.”
Heaven touched Dieter’s hand as he maneuvered through the crowd. “Great speech. Are you all right?” she asked as she noticed the expression on his face.
“Yes, no, I’ll be fine, I … I just have to get to the bathroom,” Dieter said, looking as though he were going to be sick. Heaven watched him practically run down the corridor.
Patrick was a great tour guide. He made utilities systems positively fascinating. “In this vast room, we have two 275-horsepower screw compressors for the air handling system, a steam boiler, and a separately housed ammonia refrigeration system. We have the capacity to handle twice the current demand. All utility lines are labeled and color coded according to their contents, gas, water, electricity. The layout separates the facility into two zones. The central corridor houses offices, training rooms, and maintenance. On one side are the bays containing the production areas, proofing rooms, raw materials, and the ingredient-delivery system. The other side, where we are now, houses the building systems and receiving and distribution. We have two incoming docks and ten outgoing docks,” Patrick explained as they strolled over to the dock area. Today being Saturday, there was nothing happening on the receiving side, but the outgoing docks were about half full of bread trucks loading up.
“The air handling system allows us to control ambient conditions throughout the facility. The makeup and packaging areas are air conditioned, while the oven areas are not. Baking is still a hot job in the summer, even at this sophisticated level.”
As the troop straggled down the hall to the other side of the building, Heaven looked around. The group was behaving pretty well. Most of them had never worked in bread factories, as opposed to bread bakeries. It was impressive even if you hated the product it produced.
“We have the most sophisticated ingredient delivery system in the world, bar none,” Patrick said proudly. “There are three liquid tanks and four dry bulk silos mounted outside the building. Inside we have these six 8,000-pound major ingredient tanks, then twelve 500-pound minor ingredient tanks, as well as these 25 micro-ingredient bins. They are all equipped with pneumatic feeders and are computer-operated. The minor and micro ingredients are fed into the system through two bag dump stations, networked with the main ingredient system to insure delivery to the proper bin. These color screen terminals on the production area floor provide operator access to the ingredient system.” Sure enough, operators were tinkering with dials all over the room. Patrick walked over to one of the screens. “These terminals display current system conditions, showing real-time activities by changing the display color of pipelines and fill levels in the bin diagrams.” He walked over to a row of the biggest mixers Heaven had ever seen. “Wet and dry ingredients meet here in these 1,300-pound mixers. When fully mixed, the dough is released from the mixer and dumped in a waiting trough. When the trough is full, a hoist engages it, carries it up and dumps it in a large, wide-feed hopper, right here.” Patrick patted a cement mixer–sized hopper, and they watched as a worker brought a trough full of dough over with the hoist and dropped it with a loud splat. “The dough moves down by gravity onto a slow moving conveyor belt that forms the bottom of this feed hopper, as you see. The unstressed dough travels through a series of gauge rollers, then into the next room where the first proofing occurs. We’ll go in there in a minute, but because of the heat and humidity, I’ll describe the next two processes in here. After approximately eighteen minutes in the primary proofing room, the dough goes on a slow-moving belt through a guillotine cutter and comes out in individual pieces. It is then transferred to a quickly moving transfer conveyer that pulls the dough over and then to a transpositor that drops the dough, piece by piece, row by row, into proofer bread pans on trays. The bread travels on a serpentine path through a Belsaw proofer for another eighteen minutes. The system automatically controls the temperature and humidity within the proofer as well as the speed of the chain carrying the proofer trays.”
No wonder these bread companies couldn’t be bothered with sourdough. I know it takes hours for sourdough to proof, Heaven thought, and this stuff just takes thirty-six minutes total.
“So we’ll peek in the primary proofing room and then pick up the line as it goes through the secondary proofer,” Patrick said as they started down the hall. When they opened the doors to the initial proofing room, the heated, humid air hit them, yeasty smelling, with alcoholic overtones, like a brewery. Stainless steel bins like mini dumpsters were lined up in two rows down the middle of the room. When the timer went off, the eighteen minutes were up, and the batch of dough was deposited on another conveyor belt by the whole bin tipping over onto the line.
Patrick pointed up at the air. “The reason this room is entirely automated is the obvious heat—plus the problem of ‘dough drunks’. When this much dough is fermented, enough ethanol is produced and released to make the air quite alcoholic. If you worked in here very long, you would have a serious dough drunk. The ethanol, of course, is released every time the dough is effectively ‘punched down’ by it being released from the bin.” The bakers all nodded knowingly. Heaven guessed being dough drunk was something most of them had experienced.
A bell went off and a bin on the opposite side of the room started rising in the air. To everyone’s surprise and horror, Dieter Bishop was lying face down in the dough. His blonde hair was unmistakable. Dieter’s limp arm and hand hung out of the bin full of dough and dangled over the edge of the conveyer belt. Before anyone could figure out what to do, Dieter’s body started moving down the line toward the cutter which came down with a sharp whap every time the dough was sliced into individual loaf size pieces.
Heaven was the first to come out of shock. She reached out as the dough and Dieter passed by, grabbed Dieter’s hand and yelled, “Help me get him off before he gets to the guillotine.” Patrick had just talked about dough drunks, and she hoped Dieter had just passed out. But if he turned up in the second proofing room in two pieces, they would never know. Heaven wrapped her left arm around Dieter and the mass of dough that held him. She stuck out her right arm and waved her hand wildly. “Grab me. QUICK!” Pauline came running as soon as she realized what was going on. She took Heaven’s hand and yanked as hard as she could. Dieter and the dough started to tip over and the next thing Pauline knew Heaven was going down. Pauline let go. Dieter and the sticky mass he was part of fell on Heaven who landed on the floor, just twenty feet short of the dreaded guillotine cutter.
“Help, I’m suffocating,” Heaven yelled. All at once everyone was on top of them. Patrick Sullivan had run out into the hall to call for help and several production workers arrived with plastic tarps and pails of water. Patrick himself grabbed Dieter around the waist and pulled him off Heaven, then tried to pull the dough out of Dieter’s nose and mouth. One of the other workers started CPR, as Patrick went back in the hall and yelled for someone to call 911. Pauline helped Heaven to her feet, and one of the other bakers brought a wet towel over to wipe her face.
“Are you OK?” Patrick Sullivan asked anxiously.
“I’ll be fine,” Heaven said. “I just had a panic attack with all that sticky dough everywhere. What about Dieter? Is he…”
“Not breathing,” Patrick said tersely as the paramedics made their appearance. A plastic box was clutched tightly in Dieter’s hand—the hand that Heaven hadn’t grabbed a hold of. Heaven leaned down and slipped it loose, knowing that if she didn
’t get it before the trained professionals got there, she might not ever know what it was. She grabbed it in plain sight without any attempt to conceal her actions.
Pauline pointed at the box. “What’s that?”
Heaven opened it up. A syringe fit in one side of the box, three vials of liquid were on the other. “I better give this to the medics,” she said as they bent over the victim.
“Insulin,” one of the men said. “He must be a diabetic. Thanks, but I don’t think it will make a difference now.”
Out of habit, Heaven looked around to see where Walter Jinks was. She saw him bending over the other side of the still body of Dieter Bishop. Right beside him was Ernest Powell, on his knees, praying.
* * *
“You’ve got to be kidding.” Detective Bonnie Weber said, shaking her head. She had arrived at Cafe Heaven a few minutes before. It was early, about 6:30 P.M., and Heaven had asked her friend, a homicide detective, to come by before the rush. Bonnie was off duty so she was drinking a beer, a Boulevard, the local favorite.
Heaven had gone home, showered, and changed after the disaster at the bread factory. Luckily, no one else was there. She would have hated to tell Iris and Hank how close she had come to the dreaded guillotine blade. Of course, she could have jumped to safety but Heaven would only admit to herself that once she grabbed Dieter and wrapped her arm around that sticky dough, she had felt trapped, just as trapped as poor Dieter had been.
“So let me get this straight,” Bonnie said. “On Thursday some general jumps off the top of a grain elevator out in Kansas.”
Heaven whisked olive oil into a mixing bowl in a steady, slow stream. She and Bonnie were having their little tête-à-tête in the kitchen where Heaven was helping with the final prep before another busy Saturday night. “We don’t know that he jumped, Bonnie. But he definitely ended up on the ground, dead. And he was a retired general.”
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