"That's what I think too.” It was rare that Nick didn't go along with his roastmaster's judgment. "If you can get it for under a buck-five. You say something, John?"

John shook his head, wiping his chin with the back of a finger; he didn't quite have the others’ knack with the spittoon. He had joined in the tasting-the cupping, as they called has much to be sociable as anything else, but what was there to say to this bunch once they got going on coffee? Like them, he had tasted seven different coffees from seven different countries. Unlike them, he had liked them all. (He had swallowed down the first few until a scandalized Nelson had noticed and made him comply with international cupping conventions.) But if you had told him that all seven samples were exactly the same coffee, he would have accepted it without reservation.

It wasn't that he didn't like coffee; he liked it as well as the next guy. Two cups with breakfast to get the kinks out, and then one, maybe two lattes during the day, from the SBC coffee bar across the street from the federal building on Fourth Street. Great stuff, got the juices going. But buttery, for God's sake? Earthy? What were they talking about, coffee or baked potatoes?

He would have had a hard time taking them seriously, except that he knew how well they were doing. Rudy, in particular, had built Caffe Paradiso, Nick's American retail outlet, from a sleepy storefront business with an ancient, secondhand, one-bag roaster in the basement into the number-three coffee-seller in the Pacific Northwest, and he'd done it largely with his nose and his taste buds.

He certainly hadn't done it with force of personality. Dyspeptic, notoriously caustic, with a sharp tongue that was too quick for its own good, his all-too-ready wit had made him more enemies than friends. Once, for example, he had had a celebrated verbal skirmish with a Seattle Times food critic at a cocktail party for the opening of a new restaurant. That was bad enough, but when questioned about it later that evening on live television, he had said, with mock wonderment: “But I don't understand why she's so upset. I certainly didn't mean to say anything unkind about her. I merely mentioned that she was dim-witted, undiscerning, fatuous, and uninformed. All perfectly verifiable."