Spiced to Death

by Peter King

  Our eager clusters of onlookers stood there as the underbelly of the huge craft hinged down and a slide emerged. The motors were down to an idling whisper. I heard Karl Eberhard behind me saying, “Our three shipments will be unloaded here. The aircraft will go on then for normal unloading.”

  He went over to the tow truck and started it up. Arthur Appleton was on the phone again, this time to the crew chief in the aircraft. Someone from the Chicago Museum asked him a question and he nodded. “We do it this way with high-security shipments. Minimize the number of persons involved.”

  Two crewmen emerged from the aircraft and the slide was positioned. Down it came a wooden case, a teak chest and an aluminum case bound with reinforcing strips. Eberhard revved up the tow truck and came slowly back toward us. Over a dozen pairs of anxious eyes watched as the truck came nearer.

  Michael Simpson pushed a button to open the vertical sliding door and Eberhard drove in. We all followed. Eberhard went first to the Sushimoto bay where two of their people lifted down their wooden crate. Simpson and Appleton joined them. Eberhard drove on to ours where Cartwright and Sam Rong took off the teak chest and then he went on to deliver the Chicago Museum’s aluminum case full of ivory carvings.

  But those of us in our small group had already lost interest in the vehicle for our attention was fully on the chest before us. The teak seemed strangely out-of-date compared with the smart wooden crate and the aluminum case carrying the other two shipments. Cartwright and Rong set the chest by the back of the gray truck. Sam Rong came forward, smiling still. He had a small briefcase and took from it a bunch of keys. He selected one and unlocked the padlock. Cartwright lifted the lid and we crowded closer.

  Cartwright pulled out a sack of gray coarsely woven canvas and Don brought a two-wheeled trolley from inside our bay. The sack didn’t look heavy but Cartwright put it on the trolley and brought it in to stand it by a bench.

  “Go ahead,” Don told him.

  Cartwright opened the sack, which was tied at the neck with thin rope. Inside was another sack of the same material. He opened that too.

  The fabled Ko Feng didn’t look like much. Stringy pieces of blackish gray stuff with a dull texture that wouldn’t merit a second glance ordinarily. The aroma though—ah, that was a different matter entirely. It came as a fragrance like cloves at first, then it seemed to be more like cinnamon but no, more like cardamom. A mustard odor lurked behind it but that was too harsh a judgment—it was closer to the licorice component of fennel.

  “Anise,” said Don huskily. “Chervil too but then there are hints of orange and a fragrant tobacco—but then …”

  We became aware that Cartwright and Rong had stepped back. Don and I probably sounded to them as if we were running through the gamut of smells and would soon be arriving at kerosene and week-old tennis socks.

  Sam Rong smiled, noting our return to reality after moments of rapture—but maybe that was just another version of his perpetual smile. I thought not though—I believed he genuinely understood how we had been temporarily carried away.

  “Is wonderful aroma. Not like any other.”

  We agreed with him. Willard Cartwright pushed forward.

  “Aroma,” he said. “You’re satisfied, then?”

  “I know I’ve said this before” said Don, “but if this is Ko Feng, it has been lost for centuries. We have no standards to judge it by. We don’t know what it did smell like and we can’t—”

  “I know,” Cartwright said brusquely. “I know all that. But you’re happy with the aroma?”

  Don looked at me. I nodded.

  “We see no reason to doubt but we’ve only just—”

  “Okay,” said Cartwright. “What next?”

  Don went to one of the benches and brought back a pair of tweezers and a glass flask. He took a few stamens and carefully dropped them into the flask. He took the flask over to the bench and poured in some alcohol. He shook it and held it up to one of the fluorescent lights.

  From the next bay came the sounds of splintering wood—presumably they were removing the lid of the wooden crate to examine the circuit boards. Don shook the flask and held it up again. Cartwright started to say something but Don shushed him with an angry wave of his hand. He turned to get a better light behind it and motioned for me to take a look.

  Arthur Appleton walked in. “All clear with Sushimoto,” he announced breezily. “The merchandise is as advertised and conforms to the documentation. How are you doing in here?”

  Cartwright glowered at him, and Don gave a look of annoyance at being interrupted. Sam Rong’s smile had been reduced to its minimum dimension. I tried to look neutral.

  “We’re doing some sensitive testing,” I told Appleton, hoping he’d read me. He didn’t.

  “Looks a lot more fascinating than those dreary circuit boards,” he said. He peered into the open sack. “So that’s the fabled lost spice, is it? Paperwork okay?”

  We had all been so excited that we hadn’t given it a thought. Sam Rong walked out of the bay and pulled away the plastic folder fastened to the outside of the crate. He brought it back in and Appleton gave us an amused smile but said nothing. He took the papers and spread them out on the bench. Don shook the flask and stared intently at it again.

  “Well?” asked Cartwright impatiently.

  “We could probably do this better if you didn’t keep interrupting,” said Don in what I thought was a tolerant tone of voice.

  “I want to know what’s happening,” Cartwright said, and his voice grated.

  “Every minute?”

  “Yes,” said Cartwright, “every minute.”

  “Tempers become warm when big decisions hang in balance,” Sam Rong said. It sounded like a line from a Charlie Chan B movie. He went on, sensibly enough, “Perhaps Mr. Renshaw could tell us briefly what is purpose of each test and what is result. This way, not necessary to ask questions.”

  He smiled urbanely at Cartwright, who glared back. Arthur Appleton had momentarily shifted his interest from the papers before him to the minicrisis here and he tried his hand at smoothing the waters.

  “I’m only a bystander at this stage, I know, but I’d be interested too in knowing—in layman’s terms—what you’re doing. After all, each of us is involved in this to some degree.”

  “I think we can do that, can’t we, Don.” I put it as a statement rather than a question.

  He shrugged. “Sure. Want to tell them what we just did?” He sounded slightly irritated but the unique nature of the moment was bound to be raising tensions and his irritation was exceeded only by Cartwright’s impatience.

  “Don put the Ko Feng into alcohol because it will dissolve any adulterants or coloring agents that might have been added,” I explained. “No color is visible in the alcohol.”

  Don was already busy with the next test.

  “He’s now soaking a stamen in distilled water—” I caught a puzzled look from Appleton. “Stamen is a common term with botanists—it’s the male reproductive organ of a plant where pollination takes place. Now he’s rolling it between two sheets of absorbent paper. Any water-soluble contaminants will show up at this stage … No, there aren’t any.”

  The commentary seemed to be working. Cartwright looked marginally more composed but I realized how great a strain he must be under. Simpson was walking by. He called in cheerily, “Making progress with the ivory. Be with you in a while.” He went on to the Sushimoto bay.

  Don was now switching on the microscope. He gave me a nod to say he would take over. I nodded back, glad his humor was restored.

  “I’m looking at the stamen at a hundred magnifications…” He waved to us to approach and we crowded round to look at the screen. “Now I’m zooming to five hundred … looks normal … this is a thousand.”

  There was a silence while the watchers wondered exactly what they were looking at. Don went on, “It looks just like a plant stamen. Of course, we have no way of knowing what a Ko Feng stamen looks like. All I
can say is there is no reason to suppose that this is not Ko Feng.”

  He looked at me. The others followed suit. “I agree,” I said.

  Don took one more of the stamens with tweezers and laid it on a plastic board.

  “He’s cutting a cross-section so as to look at the internal structure of the stem. It might be possible to breed a hybrid which would look different from any plant we know and thus it might be passed off as Ko Feng …” The significance of what I was saying suddenly occurred to me and I turned to give Sam Rong an apologetic grin. He interpreted it with impeccable intuition and widened his smile in understanding.

  “… but a cross-section reveals the botanical structure and would be almost impossible to change.”

  Don was unrolling a chart showing graphic illustrations of sections of various plants. He ran through them, frequently stopping to compare with the image on the screen. Finally, he nodded.

  “Looks good.”

  A few exhalations of breath might have been sighs of relief all around. Arthur Appleton excused himself. “Better go check on the ivory carvings. More exciting here, though.” He walked off and his voice could be heard echoing as he hailed the museum people.

  Karl Eberhard came in. I had forgotten him. He looked curiously at the microscope screen but said nothing. He seemed to have temporarily concluded his security patrols and he stood and waited to see what was happening next.

  Don now took a ceramic crucible and dropped a couple of stamens into it. He placed the crucible into an infrared heating coil and turned the switch. The digital readout flickered, numbers climbing. Don adjusted the switch to slow the heating rate and we both sniffed, then sniffed again.

  “No obvious aromas that shouldn’t be present,” I reported.

  Don pulled over another piece of equipment. A hood mounted on a pedestal fitted over the crucible and a duct led to a square black box. Several dials on the front of the box showed zero. Don turned switches and a red light glowed.

  “This is a smoke-analyzing probe,” I explained. “It’s being used here first, to look for constituents that shouldn’t be here, and second, to see what constituents are present that would indicate a specific botanical family or group.”

  “Looks good,” Don said again. He activated an adjoining device which clattered and then spat out a sheet of paper. “A readout for the records.”

  Even Cartwright looked more relaxed now and Don continued with the testing. Occasionally, he explained what he was doing and when he didn’t, I took over. Eberhard walked off briskly, as if he were going somewhere vital but it was probably another of his patrols. Simpson came back and stood watching. At a lull in the proceedings, he said apologetically, “None of my business but some of the special goods that come through customs have to be accompanied by an analysis. They use a piece of equipment called a quantometer which does it real fast. I was wondering—”

  “No,” Don said. “You can’t analyze plants that way. They contain mostly the same elements and in the same approximate percentages. An analysis would tell us nothing.”

  “Sorry,” murmured Simpson. “Just a thought …”

  “What we do have, though, is this,” Don went on, patting an instrument that looked like a small hi-fi unit. It bristled with gauges, needles, knobs and digital readout displays, and was connected to a computer next to it.

  “It’s called an HPLC. That’s high pressure liquid chromatograph. It can separate the components of the plant, some of which fluoresce. It exposes this fluorescence to a light beam which … well, you’ll see in a minute.”

  Don took the sample in the alcohol flask and carefully set it in an opening in the machine. He pushed a button and a shutter snapped closed as the sample disappeared. He twisted a couple of knobs, pushed some buttons and a pattern flickered into view on the computer screen. It looked like a seismograph—all peaks and valleys.

  “There,” Don said. “That’s the pattern which represents this sample. Now, we superimpose”—he pushed more buttons—“the pattern of the plant that the Mecklenburg Institute examined.”

  Everyone crowded closer for a better look.

  “As you can see, they’re almost identical.”

  One or two sighs sounded, a blend of relief and approval.

  Arthur Appleton rejoined us with a Did-I-miss-anything? look but no one moved to enlighten him.

  Don had recovered his usual good spirits and he went through the remaining tests with just enough comments. At last, looking around like a lecturer, he said, “Now, Ko Feng could easily become the most valuable food flavoring ever used by man. So it’s important that we establish now”—he spread his hands—“how does it taste?”

  He brought over a sealed container and set it on the infrared heater, adjusting the temperature. He removed the lid and looked at us with a half smile.

  “Looks like spaghetti,” muttered Arthur Appleton.

  Karl Eberhard came into the bay, sniffing. “Something burning,” he said. “Hasn’t triggered the smoke alarms, though …” A couple of grins must have informed him because he looked at the crucible and the heater and nodded acceptance.

  Don was chopping a few of the stamens in a portable blender. He squeezed the button and the machine whirred. Over the gentle noise, Don said, “The trick is to use only a very tiny quantity. Many of the spices we use today are like this—you need to use only a minimal amount to generate the maximum taste, use more and it will taste bitter. Saffron, cardamom, ginger, cayenne and the chile spices are all examples.”

  He shook out a little finely ground powder, separated a microscopic quantity and sprinkled it carefully into the now steaming spaghetti.

  “Pasta is a suitable medium as it’s bland and acts only as a means for carrying the taste,” he explained. He stirred a few times.

  “Most spices and flavorings need to be cooked for some time to generate their taste,” I added. “We can investigate that later—right now, we just want to confirm the identity of the Ko Feng.”

  “True,” Don agreed. “If this is really Ko Feng and if it is the wondrous spice that myth, legend and history say—then tasting will put the crowning seal of verification on it.”

  I added a comment. “Testing equipment keeps getting more and more sophisticated but human taste is still amazingly sensitive. The tongue can detect a flavor in a solution of more than a million times its volume.”

  With all three of the JFK officials back with us now, we must have been a strange sight—seven men all eagerly dipping plastic forks into a bowl of pasta. Some went back for another forkful but Don and I were still moving that first one around in our mouths.

  Arthur Appleton was the first to comment.

  “Beats anything I’ve ever tasted,” he said, adding hastily, “not that I’m a connoisseur.”

  Sam Rong and Karl Eberhard looked at each other and nodded enthusiastically. Willard Cartwright was savoring a mouthful. He raised his eyebrows to me questioningly.

  “Magnificent,” I said. “Not like anything I’ve ever tasted before. Don, don’t you agree?”

  “Wonderful,” he nodded, his eyes bright. He looked at Cartwright. “I believe we can say that as far as we can determine—this is truly Ko Feng.”

  Something like a subdued cheer arose. It was also a vast sigh of relief, and the tension that had existed before went down like the temperature when going from a hot kitchen into a walk-in deep-freeze.

  Sam Rong clapped Michael Simpson on the back and his smile reached record dimensions. Arthur Appleton pumped Cartwright’s hand and told him he was delighted. Cartwright still looked tight-lipped but a hint of a smile was there. Don beamed at Karl Eberhard, who simply nodded his satisfaction and hitched up his military belt as if to say he was glad that job was out of the way and what was the next one.

  Cartwright retied the inner sack and then the outer one.

  “Our property now,” he said to Sam Rong, who beamed and handed him the keys. Cartwright put the sack on to the two-wheeled troll
ey and took it to the van. He unlocked the back door, rolled it up, carefully set the sack inside the chest and we watched him lock it and then the van.

  “We complete documents now?” Sam Rong asked.

  “Sure,” said Appleton. He spread out what looked like the air waybill, the bill of sale and a couple of other documents. Simpson took out his customs documents and contributed to the paper chase.

  “Certificate of authentication,” said Appleton and held out a pen for Don and me to sign.

  A squawk sounded from the bench. We all looked for the source. It was a timer that Don had been using during the testing. He pushed a button to silence it. “Sorry. Must have forgotten to shut it off.”

  Printed forms moved to and fro, some blue, some yellow, some white. Duplicates and triplicates were torn off and distributed. Papers begat more papers. Signatures were applied and dates added. Appleton and Simpson worked smoothly, making it clear that they did this kind of thing every day.

  All went well until—

  “Hold everything!” said Michael Simpson. He was staring at the form in front of him. “This is wrong!”

  CHAPTER SIX

  EVERYONE FROZE. THEN WE crowded around the desk where Simpson was tapping his finger on the thick Customs and Excise manual, which listed every conceivable product and gave its commodity code. Alongside the manual, the receiving documents were opened at a page where the code number was ringed in red.

  “They’re different,” Simpson said. “See, we’re classifying Ko Feng as ‘Spice, Oriental, Code 174.67,’ but on your receiving document, you’ve got the code as 176.47.”

  “Clerical error,” said Arthur Appleton dismissively. A voice shouted his name from the Chicago Museum bay and he excused himself and walked off. Simpson went into a discussion with Cartwright and Sam Rong. They found another minor discrepancy which prompted further debate but the points were finally resolved to everyone’s relief.

  Papers packed, hands shaken, farewells said, we prepared to leave. Don had told me that we had to go to the New York and Asian Bank in Manhattan, which had provided the financing and was handling the escrow. Cartwright climbed into the driver’s seat of the van, telling us he didn’t trust anyone else to drive, not even a professional. The vehicle had been modified so that it had an extra row of seats. Sam Rong sat with Cartwright, and Don and I sat behind.