The Real Thing (7 page)

‘How sweet, how very touching in fact, but now that we’ve exchanged pleasantries, we have a little business to attend to.’ Brusque and business-like, Candy bustled around the room, handing out pads and pens, while ushering Ralph and Bing to seats on opposite sides of the cabin.

While all this was happening, Bing thought that Candy was quite wrong. About the ferret. It was neither sweet nor touching. He’d read somewhere that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. And so he’d named his ferrets after his two ex-wives, to remind him of his mistakes.

‘I want you each to write out the formula for Coca-Cola,’ Candy said brightly. She’d had another face-lift since he’d last seen her, and the skin was drawn tautly across her cheekbones, giving her a pastiche semblance of youth.

‘When you’ve finished, hand it to me. I’m going to compare each of your recipes with each of the others. If yours doesn’t agree, then Joe here is going to throw you over the side.’

‘And we’re a long, long way from land,’ Joe added, rather unnecessarily.

‘I’m quite sure that as soon as we’ve finished writing, you’re going to tip us over the side anyway,’ said Ralph gloomily. ‘You won’t need us any more.’

Clara and Bing glanced across at each other, the same thought on their minds.

‘Oh, don’t be so silly,’ Candy said. ‘We’re kidnappers not murderers. No, we have a nice little retirement home planned for you where you can all live out the rest of your lives quietly, teaching each other to sing in peace and harmony.’

Nobody smiled at her oh-so-witty reference to the famous Coke ad of the seventies.

‘Well, get writing!’ she said testily.

The first recipe they tried was the one from the scientist in Okinawa. Okinawa is a small island off the coast of Japan where Fizzer’s school of karate originated, but that’s just one of life’s small coincidences and has absolutely nothing to do with this story.

Fizzer took one sip and spat it into the bucket. ‘Are you sure you followed the recipe?’

Ricardo Pansier, who had changed his attitude considerably since the taste test in the boardroom, was sampling the brew also, and he screwed his face up but swallowed the mouthful.

‘To the millilitre. And we’ve mixed up a few variations as well, just for comparison. Increased this a little, decreased that a little. They’re all numbered.’

Rows of small plastic bottles, sealed, with numbers marked on them in black felt pen, covered the tray of a metal lab trolley that had been wheeled in a few moments earlier.

‘Don’t bother,’ Fizzer said, a little unkindly, considering how much trouble they had gone to. ‘It tastes more like soy sauce than it does like Coca-Cola.’

‘What if we added more sugar?’

‘Then it would taste like sweet soy sauce.’

‘Oh.’

It turned out that Ricardo had a whole stack of recipes from all sorts of people who claimed to have deciphered the mystery of the secret recipe. Some were from crackpots, like the one from an old guy in Peru, who claimed he had been given the recipe by the ancient Sun Gods. His recipe included hair oil and alpaca turd, so was quickly discarded.

Other recipes had all manner of other ingredients in them, but because The Coca-Cola Company did not actually order that particular ingredient from anyone, over thirty of them could be rejected. A surprising number of them mistakenly included old tea leaves as a key ingredient.

The story about field trials had long been discarded, and Tupai and Fizzer had joined a small group of people who knew what was wrong within The Coca-Cola Company: the missing executives, who had come to be known as the ‘Coca-Cola Three’; the production deadline; the terrible possibility that the formula for Coca-Cola might be gone forever!

One of the things that most surprised Tupai was how little the staff of the company actually knew about the recipe of their main product, and he asked how this was achieved.

‘Come with me,’ Ricardo said, as the next trolley was brought in.

They left Fizzer wincing with disgust at the contents of the first bottle and took an elevator, as Tupai was getting used to calling them, to the basement of the building. The elevator doors opened on a brightly lit corridor, white walls washed with banks of fluorescent tubes recessed into the ceiling.

The corridor led to a set of huge stainless steel doors watched over by three gargoyles, actually very polite young men in crisp black uniforms, with badges and hats that made them look like the policemen they weren’t. Ricardo’s authority was enough to gain entry for both of them, and they stepped inside a highly computerised control room.

You would be forgiven for imagining big banks of machines with flashing lights and spinning discs, but this was nothing like that. There were just seven computer monitors, no different from your home PC, with ordinary keyboards sitting in front of them.

There were three on the left of the control room, three on the right, all occupied by busy looking people with earnest expressions and too many pens in their top pockets. The other keyboard and monitor was unattended and by itself on a table in the centre of the room.

Ricardo gestured for Tupai to sit in the high-backed leather office chair that faced the empty monitor, and perched himself on the side of the desk.

He swept his hand around the room. ‘You’re in Coca-Cola Central. From here we monitor the huge vats that mix and boil the ingredients in various combinations to get the final syrup. There are factories in Africa, Ireland and Puerto Rico, all linked up to this central command station right here.’

Tupai glanced around. One petite Asian lady in a white coat gave him a small smile, but the others concentrated on their screens.

Ricardo said, ‘I am the Vice-President in charge of Production here at Coca-Cola, which means that I know more about what happens in those vats than anyone else in the company, and yet I still have no idea what’s in the formula.’

He pointed to the screen, and Tupai saw a list of ingredients, each with a blank field beside it. ‘Isn’t this your list of ingredients?’ he asked. ‘Surely with this list you’re halfway home!’

Ricardo sighed. ‘I wish it were that simple. We buy a lot of ingredients. I’m not even sure that we use all of them; some might be purchased simply to throw our competitors off the scent. The actual percentages of the ingredients are entered here, by one of the Coca-Cola Three. They have to do that at the end of each mixing cycle, about once a week. All waste, including any unused ingredients, is incinerated, so there’s no way of knowing what is or isn’t used.’ He tapped his finger on the screen, leaving a print. ‘Look here. Lime Juice. Vanilla. Do we actually put lime juice in Coca-Cola? I don’t know. Maybe they enter zero in that field and all the lime juice goes to the incinerator. But even if we knew the exact ingredients, and the exact percentages, we’d still only be halfway there. The next stage of the process is combining them all. I know that some of the ingredients get mixed together, boiled, and cooled before being added to the other ingredients. But I don’t know which ones. That’s the job of the recipe holders. They program it all in here as well.

Right now we’re at the end of the mixing cycle. The computer is sitting here waiting for the numbers to be entered.’

‘What if they stuffed it up?’ Tupai asked, and seeing the blank look, rephrased himself. ‘Got the numbers wrong.’

Ricardo nodded as if it had been an intelligent question. ‘It takes two of them, you know. One enters the data, then another one comes in and re-enters the same data. If the numbers don’t match perfectly, the machines won’t run.’

Tupai pursed his lips. ‘Smart system.’

Ricardo laughed bitterly. ‘Maybe too smart for our own good.’

‘Why isn’t the recipe written down somewhere, for safekeeping, for an emergency such as this?’ Tupai asked.

‘It used to be. It was held in the company safe. But there was a court case in ’96, part of a divorce proceedings, arguing over the ownership of a written recipe that may or may not have been old John Pemberton’s, that’s the guy who invented Coke, his original notes. I think then the board realised that if it was written down on paper, it was bound to show up somewhere before too long, or get published on the Internet. So all written copies were destroyed. Now it’s only held in the brains of a few selected employees. Never fewer than three of them.’

Tupai looked up at the dark eyes of the Vice-President (Production). They were filled with a passion, a pride in the company and the product that was famous throughout the world. Here in the control room, the central nervous system of a creature that reached tentacles out into the furthest corners of the globe, he could begin to feel the same excitement. Over a hundred years of history and an enterprise so colossal it beggared imagination.

And in feeling the passion, for the first time, he felt the fear. The fear that it could soon all be over.

‘How long have we got?’ he asked, surprising himself by using the word ‘we’.

‘If we don’t get these vats churning in about eight weeks,’ Ricardo said quietly, ‘a can of Coke is going to become a collector’s item.’

When they arrived back, Fizzer was reading a football magazine and idly blowing a few tuneless, discordant notes on his harmonica. He looked bored.

‘We’ve been through three batches,’ he said. ‘Apparently that’s all they can do today.’

Ricardo nodded. ‘They’ll have to clean and sterilise all the equipment now. Start preparing the next batches. They’ll work on it through the night, taking it in shifts. We’ll have another try in the morning. I’ll call a car to take you to your hotel.’

Staying in a flash hotel seemed like a pretty cool thing to both Fizzer and Tupai, neither of whom had ever done it, but they both managed to act quite nonchalant, as if it were an everyday occurrence for them.

‘The car will pick you up again tomorrow morning at seven, so we can get an early start on the tastings,’ Ricardo said.

‘What about dinner?’ asked Tupai, despite the fact that he had eaten a full meal on the plane just a few hours ago, and, thanks to the different time zones, it was actually getting closer to breakfast time than dinner.

‘Room service is great at the hotel. And you’ve got a huge TV in your room.’

‘Cool!’ Tupai said.

‘How many channels?’ Fizzer asked.

‘Oh, I don’t know. Fifty or so, I guess.’

‘Cool!’ Tupai said.

Ricardo said, ‘So just relax. It’s all paid for. Unless you’d like to have dinner with the board tonight?’

‘Actually,’ said Fizzer, ‘I’d just like to get some sleep.’

The next day was much the same as the previous, as far as the tastings were concerned. Fizzer eliminated three batches in the morning, and they both received a personally guided tour of the Coca-Cola World interactive museum, by no less than Reginald Fairweather, while the scientists mixed up the afternoon’s batches.

One of the afternoon mixes showed some promise, and there was considerable excitement when Fizzer suggested a few alterations that might help bring it closer to the actual recipe itself. But it turned out to be a bit of a red herring as, no matter how they played around with the recipe, it just kept getting further and further away.

The first week went by, and spirits never flagged. Each new recipe was brewed with the wide-eyed enthusiasm that this might just be the one. Each variation that Fizzer asked for was seized upon with a religious fervour, as though it might prove to be the holy grail of cola making.

But the week ended up as a lot of activity for absolutely no gain.

The second week was much the same, and the third week. The main difference on the fourth week was that the buoyant mood of hope and expectation, that Fizzer was the solution to all their woes, was starting to disappear.

The mood wasn’t helped by the fact that the investigations into the disappearance of the three executives had gone precisely nowhere. There had been no clues left behind, no carelessly dropped book of matches with a phone number conveniently written inside. No cigarette butts of a foreign kind sold in certain shops by store owners with photographic memories for their customers.

Life wasn’t like the movies, it seemed, and the location of the executives was proving as elusive as the secret formula itself.

Fizzer was beside himself on the Wednesday of the fifth week, jumping around the room, knocking things over. ‘483,’ he kept shouting. ‘Number 483.’

483 was the batch number of the bottle he had just tried. Fizzer could hardly contain himself, but Tupai wondered why the others were all so unexcited by the discovery.

It turned out that 483 was in fact Coca-Cola. Ricardo had sent a bottle filled with the real thing along amidst a bunch of other batches, just to make sure that Fizzer would actually know the stuff if he fell over it.

As a test of Fizzer’s ability it was a success. But it got them no closer to finding the recipe, and when Fizzer finally realised the reason for all the glum faces, he was so depressed they took the rest of the afternoon off.

It was the last batch on the Friday of the sixth week that finally started unravelling the mystery.

Fizzer handed a capful of the dark liquid to Tupai to try. He did that occasionally, perhaps to keep Tupai involved in what was going on, although he said it was so that Tupai could educate his tastebuds.

‘It’s just a matter of perception and focus,’ he’d said on more than one occasion.

Tupai washed the liquid around in his mouth, then swallowed it.

‘What do you think?’ Fizzer asked.

‘Not quite,’ Tupai said, ‘but not too far away.’

‘I’ve got a feeling about this one,’ Fizzer said. ‘It tastes right. Well, not right, exactly, but it tastes as though all the ingredients are there, just not quite in the right amounts.’

He scribbled some notes. Batch 733 it was. Three was his lucky number, but that had nothing to do with his feelings about the brew.

The next day, Saturday, they didn’t have to work, and they’d been given some tickets to a football game, but Fizzer wanted to go in anyway. They’d have tried some of his suggestions on 733 by then.