But no one had ever said he didn't know everything there was to know about the coffee business.

His office was still here in this eighty-year-old white frame building, a onetime feed store near Coupeville on rural Whidbey Island, two hours from Seattle by car and ferry. Now, however, there was a spanking-new twenty-thousand-square-foot warehouse and processing plant a few hundred feet up the highway, with eighteen employees and a big, shiny, three-bag roaster that held 335 pounds of beans and was fired up and roasting eight hours a day, five days a week.

In short, things were going like gangbusters. From what they'd told John earlier, they were now selling more than half a million pounds a year. There were sales to gourmet shops and restaurants, there was a thriving mail-order business, and now there were two Caffe Paradiso coffee bars in downtown Seattle department stores, one at the airport, and another two about to open in Portland, every one of them upscale and pricey. Only twenty percent of the beans that went into their numerous varieties came from the plantation in Tahiti these days; the rest were bought from other coffee growers around the world, mostly on Rudy's say-so. It was Rudy too who supervised the roasting, created the blends, and ran what Nick approvingly referred to as a highly innovative marketing program.

It seemed pretty innovative to John too. Who would have thought you could make money with slogans like “Paradiso-The World's Most Expensive Coffees” and “Pure Tahitian Blue Devil, the Highest-Priced Coffee in the World…Bar None.” But make money they did. Blue Devil, not a blend but solely their own plantation's product, was Paradiso's chief claim to fame.