Various Flavors of Coffee (51 page)

Both men looked at me blankly.

“They will starve,” I said.“Some of them will die.”

“Robert,” Pinker said easily, “this is . . . This is a great undertaking we are embarked on. Just as, a generation ago, British men of vision and industry freed slaves from the yoke of tyranny, so we today have an opportunity to free the markets from the grip of foreign control.Those people you speak of—they will find better crops, more efficient ways to make a living.They will prosper and thrive. Liberated from the impossible constraints of an artificial market, they will turn to new enterprises and endeavors—some of which may fail, but some of which will transform and enrich their countries as coffee never could. Remember your Darwin: improvement is inevitable. And we—we three, in this room now!— are privileged to be its instruments.”

“There was a time when I might have swallowed that nonsense,” I said.“Not anymore.”

Pinker sighed.

“You could make a fortune when this market correction happens,” Sir William said sharply.
Correction—
how neatly the word implied the inevitable rightness of what they were about.“Only a handful of people in the world know what you know now. If you were to take a short position on coffee tomorrow . . .”

Pinker shot him a warning glance. “It is not just the money.

Robert, think what this opportunity could mean for you. Imagine the respect in which you will be held in the City! Sir William and I—we are old men; our time will soon be over, and then a new generation will come to the fore. Why not you amongst them, Robert? You have the aptitude—I know you do.You are like the two of us: you understand the need for bold gestures, big decisions. Oh, you are young, and sometimes misguided, but we would be there to steer you; you would profit from our hands on your shoulders, but you will make your own decisions, find your own adventures—”

“And then there are the investors,” I said. “All those who have put their savings into coffee bonds.They will lose everything, too.” “Speculation involves risk. They have profited handsomely from our labors in the past.” Pinker shrugged.“It is not them I am

thinking of. It is you.”

They looked at me, waiting. For a moment I thought they resembled nothing so much as two old dogs, their fangs bared, waiting for me to roll over and show them my neck.

I thought of Emily, prepared to defy her own husband to do what she thought was right. I thought of Fikre, bought and sold like a sack of beans, simply because of where and what she had been born. And I thought of my villagers—my age-clan—picking coffee berries, handful by careful handful, in the cloud forests of the Abyssinian highlands; coffee that would soon be almost worthless.

“I cannot help you,” I said.

“You cannot stop us,” Sir William said.

“Perhaps not. But I will not be part of this.” I got to my feet and left the room.

[
seventy-nine
]

walked back to the station, down that long, elegant
drive; past the grazing sheep, the gardeners and the gamekeepers— that idyllic English scene, paid for by the sweat of a hundred thousand peons. Pinker had my return ticket: I traveled back to London third class, amongst men who smoked cheap cigarettes, on seats

that stained my fine suit with coal dust.

The plan
Pinker was executing was remarkably simple. In the parlance of the Exchange, he was taking a short position. He would sell not only the coffee he had, but coffee he did not have— making contracts to supply it in the future, in the expectation that by then the price would have fallen and he would be able to buy it at a lower price than he had committed to sell for.

But short selling is not simply a bet on which way the market will go. In large enough volumes, short selling itself creates an over-supply, which in turn puts more pressure on the price. The over-supply is not real, of course—rather, it is the
expectation
of over-supply: there is no more coffee in the world, but suddenly

there are more sellers than buyers for it; and traders, who after all owe money themselves, will take whatever they can get to close their positions—that is, to balance their books.

If that pressure combined with others—such as a market panic, when ordinary investors rush to sell—not even a government could buy enough to maintain the price. Pinker’s plan would bank-rupt the Brazilian economy, along with any other country foolish enough to stand alongside them. And the world price—the price coffee sold for, from Australia to Amsterdam—would tumble.

I had no doubt there was even more to it than that.Those currency speculators, and the other City men, would all be in on it, too: doubtless there were derivatives and swaps, loans and lever-ages, all the armory of modern financial tools trundling toward this little battlefield—but in essence it was as beautifully straight-forward as a game of poker. Pinker and his allies would sell coffee they did not own: the Brazilian government would buy coffee they did not want. The winner would be the one who held his nerve the longest.

Back at
Castle Street I found Emily preparing a banner.“Your fa-ther is going to crash the market,” I said bluntly. “He is in league with Sir William Howell.Your husband, too. They are conspiring to cause a panic on the Exchange.”

“Why would they do that?” she said calmly, continuing to tie up her banner.

“They will all make fortunes. But to be honest, I think that’s only part of the reason.Your father is obsessed with making his mark on history: he doesn’t care what happens if he can only do that. It is like an addiction for him.Whether he destroys or creates, does good or evil, makes money or loses it—I don’t believe anything really matters to him except that it is Pinker who is behind it.”

She rounded on me.“That is wholly unfair.”

“Is it? When I first met you it was Temperance he claimed to champion—how will crashing the price help that? And then he used to talk of Africa, and how coffee would turn the savages to God—when did you last hear him speak that way? They were just ideas, to be plucked from the air and squeezed dry of whatever en-ergy they might have. He never really believed in anything except himself.”

“Do not tar him with your own brush, Robert,” she said furiously.

I sighed. “Emily, I know that I have not been much use to the world—but neither have I done it much harm.What they are do-ing now—it is a terrible thing, it will cause untold misery.”

“The markets must be free,” she said doggedly.“If it is not him, it will be someone else.”

“Is destroying people’s lives freedom—or the abuse of it?” “How dare you, Robert! Just because you have achieved nothing, you try to belittle him. I know what you are trying to do— why you are undermining him to me.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“You have always been jealous of my admiration for him—” We quarreled then—not argued, but quarreled: both of us saying things that were designed to wound. I think I told her that she was only able to carry on with her campaigning because of money made out of other people’s suffering; she told me that I was not worthy to clean her father’s shoes; I think I might even have hurled some insults out of Freud. But what hurt her the most, I think, was the accusation that her father was acting without any moral thought or scruple.

“I will not stand for it, do you hear? He is a great man, a brilliant man—”

“I am not denying his brilliance—”

“He cares. I know he cares. Because if he did not—” And then she was gone, the door slamming on its hinges as she went.

• • •

I thought:
She will come back soon enough.

I had not reckoned with her stubbornness.

Pinker, so
Jenks told me later, went back to Narrow Street after my departure as if nothing had happened. He gave Howell’s figures to Jenks and instructed him to call the newspapers in my stead. The journalists were only too happy to help spread the rumors that would destroy the market; in many cases they had taken short positions themselves, on my own advice.Were Howell’s figures true? The more I thought about it, the more I doubted it— but as he had said, they would bear what cursory scrutiny they needed to.

Jenks told me that when Pinker had taken care of that, he went into his warehouse. It was empty by then—every sack, every bean he owned had already been committed to the battle. He walked into that vast echoing space and called,“Jenks?”

“Here, sir.”

“Sell them, will you? Sell them all.” “Sell what, sir?”

“All this, man.” Pinker raised his hands, and his spinning gesture took in every last empty corner of the store.

“There is nothing here, sir.”

“Can’t you see them? My invisibles! My hypotheticals! Every alliance and future, every cent we can borrow, every contract we are good for. Sell them all.”

On the day
of the march, it rained—not a light spring shower, but a downpour such as you rarely get in England, rain so heavy that it was as if the gods were hurling great armfuls of marbles

down at London’s streets.Westminster was a quagmire of stinking mud.The endless ranks of bedraggled women set off anyway, but everyone had their heads bent against the slashing rain. In those conditions friends were soon separated, unable even to call to each other over the noise of the deluge, every marcher blind to everything but the churning, clinging mud around her own feet. . . .

At two-thirty, in the House of Commons, Arthur Brewer rose to ask a question. In his hand were Sir William’s crop figures. Apparently, even in the House the rain made it almost impossible to be heard without shouting.When the lobby journalists realized what he was saying, that the rumors were confirmed, they rushed to the telephones, and then they rushed outside. . . . The honorable members, too, those with investments in coffee, were frantic trying to reach their brokers; when they could not, they joined the desperate exodus as well. Pinker had wanted a panic, but even he could not have predicted how swiftly it would grow.

She should not have been there. That much was obvious to everyone, in hindsight.When she collapsed in the mud no one noticed at first: they were all falling over, slithering and slipping in their boots and petticoats, and the streets were coming to a stand-still in the confusion.

Perhaps if she had been more careful she would not have lost the baby. But we can never know.

At Castle Street,
I watched the weather turn from sunny to stormy—black clouds, the color of a dark roast, gathering over the City. It may seem fanciful, but when the deluge started it seemed to me as if it was not rain but coffee beans that poured down on us from the heavens, drowning us all.

• • •

I had no desire
to witness Pinker’s victory in the Exchange, but the importer, Furbank, went. He told me later that when it was over—when the Brazilian government finally admitted defeat, and the numbers went into freefall—he was watching Pinker’s face. He had expected to see the merchant exultant. But there was nothing in Pinker’s expression at all, Furbank said: only a mesmerized, po-lite interest as he watched the numbers plummet, as if he were in a kind of trance.

A sound rippled through the public gallery. Those who had made fortunes rather than lost them—those who had seen which way it would go—were clapping; standing and applauding Pinker’s astounding coup. But even then he seemed not to hear.There was only that intense, flickering focus on the blackboards below.

[
eighty
]

“Tarry”—a taste fault giving the coffee an unpleasant burnt character.

—lingle,
The Coffee Cupper’s Handbook

*

he rain had stopped at last. As Furbank and I crossed
the river by Tower Bridge, the ships at Hay’s Wharf were unloading their cargoes. But instead of taking the sacks of coffee into the warehouse, the porters were making a vast pile in the open

area in front of the buildings.

“What are they doing?” Furbank asked, puzzled.

“I am not certain.” As we watched, we saw a twist of smoke coming from the far side of the pile.

“They have set fire to it. Look!” The stack must have been doused in petrol: within moments, the flames were encircling it like a giant Christmas pudding.“But why are they burning it?”

With a sickening sensation I realized what had happened.“The new price—it is not worth the cost of storing it now. It is cheaper

to burn it, and free up the ships for other goods.” I looked down the river. From other quays along the bank—Butler’s Wharf, St. Katharine’s Dock, Bramah’s, even Canary Wharf—came similar plumes of smoke. I smelled coffee on the wind: that bitter, beguiling perfume I always used to associate with the roasting ovens in Pinker’s warehouse, spreading now like a thin, fragrant miasma over London.

I said, wonderingly,“They will burn it all.”

It was not
just in London. Fires were being set across Europe— and South America, too, as governments bowed to the inevitable and instigated mass burnings of plantations that no longer stood any chance of being profitable.The peons stood by and watched, helplessly.

In Brazil, a journalist smelled the aroma of roasting beans from the inside of an airplane, nearly half a mile up.The smoke from the fires formed great clouds trapped by the mountains, and when the rains finally came, what fell from the sky still tasted of coffee.

I will never
forget that smell, or those days.

I walked the streets of East London hour after hour, unable to tear myself away. It was like something out of a nightmare. Gorgeous aromas of fruit and citrus, of woodsmoke and leather, filled the air. My lungs were so crammed with it that after a while I could not even smell it anymore—and then the wind would tease you, a new gust whipping it away, clearing your palate, flood-ing your senses again with the fragrance of roasting coffee.

And behind the fragrance, something darker and more bitter, as the beans went from roast to charred, and charred to burnt— crackling, melting, fusing together like hot lumps of coal.