The Sourdough Wars (8 page)

“How’d you know?”

“Oh, just a thought. So winning the toss gave him the right to buy you out, is that it?”

“Right. He even offered to lend me money to start a new bakery, but I wouldn’t take it. I didn’t want to owe him anymore. In fact—I guess you know this—we don’t talk much anymore.”

“We heard that.”

“It’s no big fight, really. He’s asked me to lunch a few times, and every now and then I’ve gone. It’s just that I find him so damned…”

“Arrogant?” asked Chris.

“Exactly! You’re reading my mind.”

She smiled modestly. “Just a good guesser.”

“Well, anyway, what I was getting to—I’ve been pretty scared, starting Palermo and all.” His wife reached out and took his hand. He paused, as if he’d lost his place. Then he said, “You know? Real scared. It’s the toughest thing I’ve ever done. And I’m doing good. I’m doing real good. I’ve got this house and a beautiful wife and all the nice clothes I could want and a Mercedes. And I’ve got the second most successful bakery in San Francisco and the best bread.” He was sweating, speaking slowly. “But I’m still scared. I’m afraid I’m gonna lose it all. I’m afraid one day I’ll wake up and it won’t be there. Somehow, it just doesn’t seem like it was written for the younger Tosi kid—the dumb one—to make it like this. You know? It’s like I can’t quite believe it; like I’m afraid I’ll wake up someday and find it all gone.” He stopped and looked at us with pleading eyes. “You know?” We nodded on cue.

“So, listen, I really need that starter. It might give me just the little edge I need—I mean, if I had it, I
know
, I just
know
that would take care of things.”

“Take care of things?”

“Then people would believe, see? I mean, I already have the best sourdough, but nobody realizes that because they think ‘Tosi Bakery, Tosi’s tops.’ But if I had that starter, they’d
have
to believe, you see what I mean?” He kept talking, fast, not even giving us time to nod. “So, listen, could you possibly give me a break? Just a little break? I’m willing to pay top dollar—no one’ll get cheated, that’s the last thing I want. But please sell me that starter. Please?”

I felt embarrassed, as if we’d misrepresented ourselves. “Tony, I’m awfully sorry,” I said, “but Anita Ashton will almost certainly inherit it—you’ll have to deal with her. We didn’t mean to give you the impression we actually had any power in this. All we wanted to do was let you know there was a second batch of starter.”

He looked crestfallen. “Oh. I guess I should have realized that. I got kind of carried away.”

“We certainly have all the sympathy in the world for your position. But we also should tell you that we’ve just come from telling Clayton Thompson. He sounded as if he intends to make Anita an offer.”

“Thompson? Oh yeah—the Conglomerate Foods guy.”

“And I’m afraid,” said Chris, “it’s our job to tell the others as well.”

He sighed, and when he spoke, he sounded bitter. “Ah, yes,” he said. “The rest of the family.”

“And Sally Devereaux, of course.”

“She’s family.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Tony looked surprised. “Didn’t you know? She’s Bobby’s ex—the former Mrs. Robert Tosi. Listen, I really do bake better bread than Bobby. Why don’t you ladies come to the plant for a tour—tomorrow, say? Or next week maybe. Whenever you like—I want to show you what I can do.”

We said we’d try to make it.

Nothing now was going to keep us from Sally. I let Chris out to get us a snack to keep our strength up. She came back with two loaves of bread, a Tosi and a Palermo. “For the taste test,” she said.

“But Wednesday’s no day to buy French bread.”

“What do you mean?”

“Didn’t you know? The bread truck drivers take Wednesdays and Sundays off. So the bakeries close down on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Ergo, any bread you buy on Wednesday or Sunday is a day old.”

“Let’s try it anyway. It’s an hour’s drive to Sonoma.” She handed me a hunk. Day old or not, it held up nicely. Good dark crust, nice tangy interior. I asked for a second piece and wolfed that one down, too.

“Good,” I said. “Whose bread was it?”

“Both.”

“You mean I had bread from both loaves? I’d have sworn both pieces came from the same bakery.”

“So much for Tony’s secret ingredient.”

* * *

Sally lived a few miles outside Sonoma, in the Valley of the Moon near Glen Ellen. In the daytime we could have seen the vineyards that take up every inch of available space in the wine country, but it was nearly nine and long since dark by the time we arrived.

The house was modern and ordinary, with aluminum window frames and no shutters. Apparently, Sally didn’t live there alone—there was a bicycle out front. A small voice answered our ring: “Who’s there?”

“We’re here to see your mom.”

The door opened, displaying one of the prettiest children I’d ever seen—a boy about eight years old—but then, I’m a sucker for dark hair and blue eyes. Sally came up behind him. “Hi, I wasn’t expecting you.”

“We have some good news for you.”

“I could use some. I just turned on the radio and heard about the starter disappearing. Would you like some pâté?” Within seconds, Sally had laid a small feast on her long smooth pine table—pâté, butter, cornichons, a little white wine, and her own sourdough. I tried the bread with a little butter first, not polluting it with pâté. It was like candy.

I can’t explain it exactly—it wasn’t sweet or anything, but so melt-in-your-mouth perfect that that’s what came to mind. I said, “Chris. Try this bread. You won’t believe it.”

As Chris did, Sally leaned forward, hands twitching. She watched Chris taste and hardly gave her time to swallow before she spoke: “Do you think it’s okay?”

“It’s the greatest,” said Chris. “Nobody else is making anything like it.”

I helped myself to more, this time with pâté. “Is it because the other bakeries are so big? You have better quality control?”

Sally shook her head. “I could bake just as good a bread if I had to do it in million-loaf batches. If only I had the opportunity.”

“Why on earth,” asked Chris, “do you want the Martinelli starter? You honestly think you could improve on this?”

“You really think it’s that good?”

“You know it is.”

Tears stood in her eyes. “The way things work in this country, a thing is good if people think so. You’ve got to have a gimmick. A scam, to get their attention.”

“You feel you haven’t had the recognition you deserve,” I said. “Is that it?”

“I can barely afford to pay my gas bills—Bob and Tony are millionaires. Or Bob is anyway, and Tony’s got a Mercedes.”

“And you think if you had the starter other people would think your bread was special?”

She nodded.

“What we came for,” I said, “is to tell you there’s a second batch of starter. Whoever stole it didn’t get it all.”

She looked like a woman who’d just been told her child wasn’t on that wrecked school bus after all. While I explained the situation, tears ran down her face. “There’s a chance,” she said. “Oh, God, there’s still a chance.”

“You want that starter in the worst way,” I said. I’ve often noticed that if you just say what you’re thinking about people, they somehow get the idea they owe you an explanation.

The kid came in for a bite of
pâté
and saw his mom crying. “Mommy, what’s wrong?”

She wiped her eyes. “Nothing, Bobby—go watch TV, okay?” She turned back to us. “Or nothing new, anyway. You’re right, Rebecca—I really do want that starter in the worst way. I want to be the biggest, best, most important sourdough baker in the history of the world. I want to go down in history that way.”

“You’re probably already the best.”

“Not good enough. No one knows about me. Do you know where I learned to bake?”

“You were married to Robert Tosi, weren’t you?”

“That’s right. He taught me the business. I think he thought it was cute, or I was doing it to be supportive or it was a hobby or something.” She broke off another piece of bread for herself. “I guess it was at first. I was an ace cook—I mean I still am. I made the pâté as well as the bread, by the way. I was a good little wife who always did the wifely thing, and cooking was wifely. But I was really
good
at it. So I thought it might be fun to learn to bake sourdough. Bob gave me a job—actually paid me to work at the bakery till I’d learned what I wanted to. When we split up, I
had
to be a baker. It was the only trade I had.”

Chris asked, “Did you plan it that way?”

“In a way I did. I wasn’t very happy married to Bob—I mean, after Bobby was about three. I needed something else. I have a degree in sociology, but—I don’t know—being a social worker didn’t appeal to me. I needed something I could do on my own—and I was already a great cook. Bob was a baker, and it was just sort of
there
.”

She looked down at the floor. “I don’t suppose I was consciously thinking about leaving him then, but I guess it was in the back of my mind.”

“You were the one who left?”

Sally nodded. Her eyes filled up again. “It was awful. He wanted me to do nothing but stick around the house. He had no sense of my needs at all.”

Chris patted her hand. She had all the sympathy in the world for anyone who’d suffered at the hands of the Dread Tosi Monster. “You’re nice,” said Sally suddenly. “Were you seeing Peter?”

“Yes. I was very fond of him.”

“I guess he told you about me?”

Chris shook her head. “Peter wasn’t like that.”

“How could I forget? Of course he wasn’t. He wouldn’t tell you his name if he thought he could avoid it. We hardly ever saw each other, the last year or so, but he was a wonderful person. Who’d want to kill someone like that?”

She sipped some wine and went into a little reverie. “Peter was the reason I left Bob. I mean, I needed to leave. I wasn’t happy with Bob. But I just didn’t have the courage. Peter courted me. He took me on picnics and things, at first just acting like a good friend, and then we became lovers. He simply took me away from Bob. He wouldn’t be stopped.” Chris looked as if she was about to lose consciousness. “I guess I used him, in a way, to give myself the courage to leave—I leaned on him. But he fell too much in love with me.”

Obviously Chris couldn’t speak, so I did: “You didn’t love him?”

“Oh, I guess I did, in a way. But not—you know—the way I’d really like to love somebody. I just couldn’t open up to him. And I always thought it was silly the way he fought with Anita. I like Anita a lot, and I didn’t think it was right, a brother and sister being estranged like that. I tried to get him to make up with her, but he wouldn’t.”

“That was why you couldn’t fall in love with him?”

“It sounds odd, doesn’t it? But I think it had something to do with it. He just wasn’t emotionally mature.”

Chris sighed and nodded. Apparently, she identified with Sally.

“So I had to let him down gently,” Sally continued.

“But surely that wasn’t all,” I said. “Did Peter seem slightly cold to you? I don’t know how to ask this gently, but did you get the feeling he might have been bisexual?”

“Peter?” Sally laughed. “Never. He was crazy about me and showed it in every way. I mean,
every
way. He took it kind of hard when I stopped seeing him. I don’t think he had another girl friend until you, Chris. I think you must be a very special person.” She gave Chris a very warm smile. “It wasn’t easy to get Peter’s attention.”

Chris started puddling up, so I changed the subject. “If Anita decided to sell the starter, you’d want to bid, is that right?”

“I don’t think she’d want to sell it. But maybe, just maybe—”

“Well, going back to the original auction—the others must have stacks of money at their disposal. I don’t mean to be rude, but could you really have hoped to outbid them?”

“I’d have tried, anyhow.”

“You’re awfully brave,” I said, and meant it.

“Thanks.” Sally smiled. “It’s hard to keep my nerve up. I don’t think I could have done it without support.”

“Support? You mean from your friends?”

She looked flustered. “I have someone who believes in me.”

“Ah. A backer.”

Her cheeks were slightly pink and she smiled like a teenager. “You might call it that. But if I didn’t believe in my product so much, I couldn’t possibly have accepted help. It’s so hard for me—it’s something I have to learn. Anyway, this is a good friend, but our arrangement was also a good business deal for both of us—I believe that or I wouldn’t have been in it.”

Bobby came into the kitchen, dragging an old worn blanket and rubbing his eyes. “Hi, young man,” said Sally. “Time for you to go to bed.”

Chris and I stood up, recognizing our exit cue. “Did you really like my bread?” asked Sally.

“It’s wonderful,” said Chris.

“Well, you must take some with you.” Sally went to a cabinet and produced two loaves. “One for each of you. Fresh-baked.”

Headed south in the Volvo, Chris said, “I like her.”

“She’s disarming, isn’t she? Tony was honest, but he seemed on the ragged edge. Sally just seemed kind of confused and not very bright. Things seem to pour out of her because that’s the way she is.”

“I felt very sorry for her when she talked about Peter.”

“If I were you, I don’t think that would have been my reaction.”

“She’s kidding herself, Rebecca. I think she’s remembering Peter as a great deal more ardent than he could possibly have been—remember, I knew him pretty well. Sort of.”

“Maybe she was lying. Bob Tosi said Peter dumped her—maybe she’s telling it the other way around because she doesn’t want us to know she’s got a murder motive.”

“Listen—knowing Peter, he’d never have told anybody who dumped whom—it just wasn’t his style. And Bob would assume Peter dumped Sally because he’s macho and macho men always dump their women.”

“But Sally dumped
him
.”

“Well, he’d like to think men dump women. It’s pretty odd, don’t you think, that of the four potential bidders he’s the only one who’s really accepted the fact there’s probably not going to be a new auction? I think he’s got what he wants. The auction’s stopped and the Tosi Bakery remains on top.