The Callahan Touch Read online

  Silence so complete that I could hear my digestion.

  He turned around again, back to the board, and threw the last dart directly at me, hard.

  As it left his hand, a last piece of debris dropped from the hatchway overhead and fell in front of me. The dart ricocheted off it, WOK! and then off a beer tap, CLANG! and then off the ceiling, BOK! and then off the edge of the bar, TOK! and joined the daisy-chain at the target, THUP! The piece of wood caromed off the bartop at an angle and ended up in a trashcan behind the bar, adding KDAP! and FUSH! to the sound effects. I contributed “Eep,” the best I could come up with on the spur of the moment, in a fetching soprano.

  And this silence was so complete I could hear myself think.

  Now, you could think about that and say to yourself, he’s the best dart-thrower I ever saw. But that first shot had been lousy. A good shooter would have planted them all at the center of the target. It hadn’t been extraordinary skill, but extraordinary coincidence…

  The silence lasted a little under ten seconds. Then Doc Webster said, “Nice form. So show us around the place a little, Jake. Is that over there in the corner what I think it is?”

  2

  The Fount of All Blessings

  “Yeah, Doc,” I said at once. “It’s a TV.”

  “Jeeze,” Fast Eddie said. “You watch TV, Jake?”

  “It’s like China, Eddie,” I told him. “If you don’t pay any attention to it, it just gets worse. I’ve got it hooked up to cable, for news and weather and Rockford Files reruns—but its main purpose is to serve that laser disc machine. Up to eight people can watch a movie together if they want—and it can’t be turned to face the rest of the room.”

  I snuck a glance at the Duck—who seemed quite pleased to be being ignored. The Doc’s instincts were sound. A guy like the Duck must get tired of being gaped at and marveled over.

  “Zpeakerss or headphonez?” Ralph asked.

  “It’s rigged for both. But the speakers are directional, and they can’t be turned up loud enough to bother the serious drinkers.”

  “Zlick,” Willard said approvingly.

  The Duck almost displayed interest when Ralph spoke—one eyebrow quivered as if it might rise—but he got it under control within a second or two. Talking dog, big deal. I went on with my spiel. “The house sound system is a Technics CD, a Kenwood logic-controlled cassette deck with Dolby B and C, an AR turntable, Dynaco SCA-35 tube amp with Van Alstine modifications, and Cambridge Soundworks speakers by old man Kloss himself—the woofer’s built into the bar.”

  “Jesus,” said Shorty, who sells and installs custom audiophile gear for a living, “that’s money damn well spent.”

  “And not much of it,” I agreed.

  “That’s what I mean. I’ve sold systems for eight times the price that weren’t as good. No, ten times.”

  “Well, the KX-790-R is the first perfect cassette deck ever made, so naturally hardly anybody bought one, and Kenwood discontinued the model almost at once. I got the AR table twenty years ago for seventy-eight dollars, and in another twenty years it’ll probably need some maintenance. Lots of people are stupid enough to throw away tube amplifiers these days, and old Santa Kloss sells those speakers direct from the factory at a price so low you wouldn’t believe it if I told you. I’ve set it up so everybody can reach the controls—but I get to settle any squabbles.”

  “Let’s hear a taste,” Tommy said. “Crank it up, Jake.”

  “Sure.” I switched on the Dynakit, and waited.

  “What are you waiting for?” Tommy asked.

  I smiled. “Back at the dawn of time,” I explained, “they used to make amplifiers with tubes. They used to take time to warm up. It was worth the wait. Now listen.” I turned up the volume. I already had a CD in the player; I punched the button.

  A horn section vamped three notes, and was answered by a piano. People jumped at the fidelity. Again, the piano answering differently this time. A third time, and then a fourth, completed the intro…and then Betty Carter told us she really couldn’t stay.

  And there was respectful silence as she and Ray Charles sang “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” Digitally remastered from the original 1962 master tapes by the Genius himself. Do you know that track? It’ll make you smile, and sigh wistfully, and nod…

  When Ray and Betty were done, people were smiling and sighing wistfully and nodding. Both the sound system and the track were praised extravagantly. I killed the disc and removed it, put in background music and turned the volume way down. “Now, over there, of course,” I said, pointing to the piano in the corner, “is Fast Eddie’s upright, so we don’t have to live entirely on canned music. I’ve rigged a switch so you can turn the sound system off from there any time you like, Eddie. The box has been tuned, and there’s a pack of thumbtacks on it for the hammers.”

  His monkey face split in a grin. “Tanks, Jake.”

  “In that corner,” I went on, “is the house computer. It’s a Mac II. It’s got 5 megs of RAM, and a 40-meg hard disk. A crazy friend of mine named Jon Singer gave it to me; all I had to put into it was the extra RAM, the hard drive and the monitor. I’ve got software in it for both beginners and power users.”

  “Modem?” Tommy asked. He fancies himself a power user.

  I nodded. “Pay as you go. That cigar box next to the mouse is for settling up; same policy as the one on the bar.” Which meant, honor system: no one would watch with beady eyes to make sure people paid for time used. “Which brings up an important matter, jadies and lentilmen. Uh…” This was one of the parts I had fretted over for days; I braced myself for the storm. “I’m still accepting nothing but dollar bills, like always—but I’m afraid the price of a drink has tripled, and the change-back has only doubled.”

  A few nods, a few shrugs; not one protest. “Three bucks a drink, a buck back if you don’t bust the glass?” Les asked, but he was just making sure he understood me. I nodded, and he nodded back. “Like we figured,” he said philosophically.

  I ought to have known my friends would understand inflation.

  But the Duck was finally showing mild surprise. “You mean to tell me drinks used to be a buck apiece at that other place? And you got fifty cents back just for turning in your empty?” A talking dog, okay—but cheap drinks?

  There was a chorus of agreement.

  “Jesus,” he said. “No wonder the place got bombed. Excuse me—‘got nuked,’ I mean.”

  “No apology necessary,” I told him. “We tolerate punning in here.”

  “As a matter of fact, we encourage punning in here sometimes,” Noah Gonzalez said. There was a rumble of general agreement.

  “Not all the time,” Maureen hastened to assure the Duck. “Only on days ending in ‘-y’.”

  He closed his eyes and sighed deeply. “Naturally. My luck.”

  “As a matter of fact,” I said, “in honor of your arrival, I’ve been giving some thought to changing the name of the place—”

  “—to the Dude Drop Inn, right, I’ve been holding my breath praying that nobody would think of that one since I sat down.”

  “Nobody had,” I told him. “I’d been thinking of ‘the Fall-In Shelter.’ But yours is rotten too.”

  He shrugged with his mouth. “Thanks.”

  “Wait, let me introduce you to the champ. Hey, Doc!”

  “Yes, Jake?”

  “How bad did you say that movie was?”

  The Doc knows a straightline (the shortest distance between two puns) when he hears it. Glancing ceilingward in perfunctory apology to Johnny Mercer, he sang, “Mack Sennet ate the positive, and Jack Lemmon ate the negative—”

  Groans arose, and several handfuls of peanuts or pretzels bounced off the Doc, who ignored them. “Talk about a movie that turned to shit,” Long-Drink said, grinning.

  The Duck regarded the Doc. “Say,” he said, “have you read the new Tony Hillerman novel?”

  “Which one?” the Doc asked cautiously.

 
“THE HEMMING WAY,” the Duck said. “Or was it THE SEG WAY…? Anyway, Officer Jim Chee becomes a Navajo narc—and plants a recording device on a pot smoker.”

  “So?” the Doc asked incautiously.

  The Duck buffed his nails. “Makes him the first policeman to wire a head for a reservation.”

  I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. Every single morsel of food thrown at him happened to bounce into one of the free-lunch bowls it had come from.

  “Stop the presses: Duck Decks Doc!” Long-Drink crowed. The Doc smiled with genuine pleasure, and made a little bow of respect as the general groan subsided. But his eyes were sparkling, and I knew this contest was not over yet.

  “Hey Jake, what the hell is that?” Tommy Janssen asked, pointing behind me. “It looks like that thing Alec Guinness built in The Man in the White Suit.”

  “It looks like a stereo makin’ love to a soda fountain,” Eddie said.

  “It looks like something in the Science Museum in Boston,” Marty said.

  “Someday it will be,” I told him. “But not until we’re done with it. Tommy, you asked, so the honor is yours.” I looked Tommy over, checked my memory, made one small adjustment of a dial, touched three solenoids, and pushed the go-button. There ensued a curious sequence of sounds. The overall effect was indeed vaguely reminiscent of the Guinness-movie gadget Tommy had mentioned. First a brief soft rattling noise. Then for about twenty seconds the softer sounds of a small fan and a tiny turntable. Then another short rattling, slightly louder and higher in pitch than the first. Then a much louder rattling for twelve seconds, followed by a chuff, a huff, and what sounded like someone blowing bubbles in mud. As if cued by that last sound, a small conveyor belt started up at the bottom of the device, entering on the left and exiting at the right, and briefly visible in a cereal-box-sized alcove in the center. An oversize mug slid into view, stopped when it was centered in the alcove—just in time to catch the dark fluid that began to drip from above.

  Nostrils flared all along the bar. “Holy shit,” Eddie breathed. “It’s—”

  “—the Ultimate Coffee Machine,” I agreed. “Notice how fast it’s dripping. The brewing module is mildly pressurized. Not enough for espresso, but enough to speed things up. Watch, now.”

  The mug had filled enough for its weight to restart the conveyor belt. The mug slid to the right and disappeared into the machine again…reemerged at its right side with a lumpy white hat on. I picked up the mug and handed it to Tommy. He stared at it, looked around at the rest of us, and took a tentative sip.

  Then he took a big gulp.

  Then he drained the mug, and looked up at me with an oddly stricken expression. He groped for words.

  What he finally came up with was, “For this Blessing, much thanks.” And then his features relaxed into a blissful grin. “That was the best goddam Irish Coffee I ever drank in my life.”

  The Doc broke the silence that ensued. “Jake, what did we just see?”

  “The apotheosis of technological civilization,” I said. “At least until someone invents a good sex robot. Watch.” I leaned over and reset the parameters, pushed the go-button again. I pointed with my index finger to the source of the first rattling sound. “That’s the raw coffee beans dropping into the roaster. Wet-processed. Hear that fan? Microwave dry-roasting. Default setting is American roast, but I can do anything from pale to Italian. Now the roasted beans are dropping into the grinder—hear it? Ground, not chopped: a chopper heats them too much too soon. Now the grinder’s cleaning itself. And there’s the water entering the brewing chamber at just the right temperature and pressure—and there’s the pre-heated mug, just in time.” A second mug of coffee appeared, filled, and whisked away to be adulterated to taste. It too emerged snow-capped with whipped cream, and I handed it to the Doc.

  He took a sip—then held it away from him and gaped at it.

  “Yours isn’t brewed as strong as Tommy’s,” I said, “and I gave you a darker roast, and you’ve got half as much sugar, just the way you like it.”

  “God’s Blessing, indeed,” he said reverently, and finished the mug in one long slow savored draught. He licked his lips.

  “The machine self-cleans constantly, and when you shut it down for the night it autoclaves itself.” I took the empty mugs back from Tommy and the Doc, and set them down to the left of the machine, upside down, on a turntable the size of an extra large pizza, speckled with draining holes. Their weight activated it: it delivered them both onto the conveyor belt where it entered the machine at the lower left. “It washes the mugs, dries them, and flips them right side up.” I opened the right-side access and showed them the hoppers for cream and sugar and the rack that held a quart of the Black Bush upside down. “I can vary the roast, the brew, and the amounts of booze, sugar, cream or whipped cream. It whips its own cream. I feed it with raw beans and additives before I open, and for the rest of the night all I have to do is put dirty cups in this side and take full ones out this side. The inventor says it’s fully automatic, but actually you have to push this button here.”

  Like a grenade. Five seconds of silence, and then, rooba rooba rooba.

  I preened. I had been looking forward to this moment with keen anticipation for a long time. Even the nagging weight of the big unsolved problem I was still carrying around didn’t spoil my pleasure: it may have enhanced it.

  “Jake,” Doc said, “am I crazy, or was that the McCoy?”

  I grinned. “Neither. But if I told you it was, you’d believe it, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes, I would,” he stated.

  “Naw, I stopped buying Blue Mountain when the price became unreasonable. How anybody can say that the people who cornered the world market in Jamaica Blue and keep nearly all of it for themselves are a polite race is beyond me. But if Blue Mountain is a 10, and Kona Gold is an 8.5, what you just drank is at least a 9—at a third of the cost of the Blue, half the cost of Kona. And if we can just keep it a secret, it’ll stay that way for a while.”

  “What is it?” Tommy asked.

  I looked around for imaginary Japanese importers, and said conspiratorially, “Celebes Kalossi. From the island of Sulawezi, in Indonesia. But don’t tell anybody you don’t love.”

  “Huh,” the Doc said. “Never tried it.”

  “It’s the best-kept secret in the world,” I agreed. “At the moment I’ve also got the machine fed with Kenya Double A, Tanzania Peaberry and a custom Australian from Queensland—but there’s an extra hopper for special requests, with an option to bypass the roaster module on that one. You bring the beans, raw or roasted, I’ll serve you the coffee. But no flavored crap.”

  People stared at the thing with expressions of awe. I knew just how they felt. The first time I’d ever seen it, I’d spent the next six hours just staring at it, studying it—and drinking its output, of course.

  “This one’s on the house too, Doc,” I said. “You’ll want a toast with your round, and these mugs are kinda dear to bust.” I began punching up mugs for everyone present and passing them out. I had to ask Susie and Suzy Maser and Willard and Maureen to remind me how they took theirs, and I had to find a bowl for Ralph…

  Pretty soon there were a lot of smiles in the house, with whipped-cream mustaches.

  Pyotr wandered in late (being a vampire, he never gets up before dark), admired the place extravagantly, and was made welcome; I poured him a distilled water while the others brought him up to speed. It was he who suggested that since our name for Irish coffee is “God’s Blessing,” the machine should be called “The Fount,” as in, the fount of all blessings. The name was adopted by acclamation.

  “Why is the cup accessible there in the center before it’s ready?” Willard asked. “So you can get it faster if the customer wants it black?”

  “Nah,” I said. “The cup exits the moment it’s full anyway. That opening is just there so you can smell the coffee dripping.”

  Willard smiled, and finished his Blessing.

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nbsp; “My god, Jake,” his wife Maureen said, “The thing must have cost a king’s ransom.”

  “It cost me about two days of talking,” I said.

  “How?”

  “Did any of you ever hear of a guy up in Syracuse called The Slave of Coffee?”

  Blank stares, except for the Duck, who just nodded, and Fast Eddie, who said, “I hoid of him, sure—are youse tryin’a tell me he really exists?”

  “He sure does,” I told him. “Retired now though, God have mercy on us all.”

  Everyone looked to Eddie. “‘The Slave of Coffee’?” Doc Webster asked, with the air of one resigned to hearing something amazing.

  “He’s this whackadoo,” Eddie said. “Inherits a shitpot o’ dough, and decides ta start his own cult. Coffee woyship.”

  “He used to have a little hole-in-the-wall shop off Spadina,” I told them, “called The Slave of Coffee. Half a dozen chairs, a couple dozen opaque vacuum jars, a roasting drum, a hand mill, two single-cup Brauns with gold filter baskets, a sink, fifty gallons of spring water, and a little beer fridge for cream. You go in there, he’d sit you down and ask you to describe the perfect cup of coffee. What, by you, an ideal cup should taste like. He’d explain the terminology if you didn’t know it. Then he’d listen to what you said, nod, crack three or four jars and take a few beans from each one, roast ’em and grind ’em, and brew you up a cup. Then he’d ask you to tell him, precisely, in what particulars it fell short of absolute perfection. So you’d try, and pretty soon he’d nod again and assemble a new blend, change one or two of the jars, vary the proportions. In those jars he had all the great coffees of the world, and the cream of every crop. This process continued until he’d brewed you a cup of coffee that you felt was perfect—or at least the best the planet could provide for your taste. Then he’d write down your prescription for you, file a copy—and sell you a pound at cost.”