A Series of Failures in Hierarchy

The call came in at 8:45am. It had, since the start of his shift at 6am, been a run-of-the-mill day for Officer Jones, if not relatively quiet, with only two nuisance complaints near the Northern Beaches.

“52 Noodler Street, in the shopping junction,” the woman on the line had told him, in a very bored voice, “man’s reported a B and E at the bakery, but won’t say what’s been taken.”

Jones took a long sip of his coke. “I’ve got it.” Five minutes later, he pulled up to the small (yet rather thoughtfully decorated, he thought, for if he hadn’t been a police officer he would have been an interior designer. Many a sleepless late night would have him questioning his ultimately chosen career path), inoffensive nook situated between two larger retail outlets on Noodler. He got out of the car, tossed his coke into the nearby bin (and nearly missed, which would have been embarrassing for someone in a position of such authority) and stepped into the store.

“Responding to a report of a breaking and entering.” He stated, making eye contact with the disheartened looking, grey-haired man of around fifty behind the counter. “Are you the one who called it in?”

“Yes,” The man said sullenly, “I’m the proprietor of the bakery … Officer, something terrible has happened.”

“Alright, calm down,” Jones said, fearing this would be nuisance number three and taking out his notepad, “what time do you think this break-in occurred?”

“It had to be some time during the night.” The man said. “I close up at around 9pm and open back up again at 8:30am … that’s when I realized what was gone.”

That’s just great, Jones thought, only a 12-hour window to work with. This should be a piece of cake. Jones chuckled under his breath at the unintentional pun. It was the little things that made the job bearable. “Okay, sir, and what was taken? Money from the cash register? Baked goods? Baking equipment?”

“No, no, none of that.” The man waved dismissively, seeming not to realize his relative good fortune. Jones stared at him incredulously.

“Then … sir, what was taken?”

“The most important thing of all …” The proprietor lamented. Jones waited patiently as the man put his head in his hands, and then looked abruptly back at the officer. “Well, I can’t tell you, obviously.”

“What?”

“Well, it’s secret.”

“What’s secret?”

“The ingredient which was stolen. I use it for my signature cake. I’m the only one who knows the exact recipe.”

Jones furrowed his brow. “Then, sir … how do you expect me to conduct an actual investigation?”

“What you usually do. You know, dust for fingerprints, take samples back to your lab, interview suspects.”

“Sir, without knowing what was taken I can’t even corroborate your claim that there was a break-in at all. Do you have security cameras?”

“You think I get enough revenue for security cameras?”

“How do I know you’re not just trying to get some kind of damages insurance claim then?”

The man wailed, unexpectedly and cartoonishly. Jones took a step back and looked away awkwardly towards a nearby shelf of lemon meringue. The soft-looking yellow tarts reminded him of the sweet marzipan desserts his late mother would make him as a small child, as he would wait patiently at the table and smell the gentle wafting of baked sugar and butter through the house. He longed to be back there, even just once more, for a past that now only existed in his memory and no one else’s. He longed for something more, something profound –

“Fine!” The proprietor snapped. “Don’t help me, then.” And then, under his breath, “I thought the law was supposed to stand up for the little man. That’s what Roosevelt said. I wish Roosevelt was still alive. He’d help me ...”

Abruptly and inconsiderately snapped out of his nostalgic recollections, Jones thought, I’m pretty sure Roosevelt had better things to do than find a lost baking ingredient. Much like me that way. “I’m sorry sir,” Jones said politely, “but there’s nothing I can do to help you if you don’t cooperate with me.” He stepped back out of the shop, got into his car, and drove away, as the distraught proprietor laid his head down on the counter.

One business week later, the proprietor’s voice over the phone to the manager of the bakery sounded beyond inconsolable.

“Jimmy, nobody has seen you in a week. When are you coming back to the store?” Asked Jackie, the store manager, who was not paid nearly enough to put up with this.

“I won’t return … I can’t … not until I receive the next shipment of the ingredient and find out who the hell had the audacity to– ”

Jackie rubbed her temple. “Jimmy, that cake is our bestseller. I just need to know what it is, so I can pick some up at the store and we don’t have to wait for the shipment. You don’t even have to come in if you don’t want, I can handle it.”

“No, Jackie. I’ll take this secret to my grave.”

“All right, well, they’re your lost profits, not mine.” Jackie said, more thankful than ever that she didn’t work on commission. Jackie hung up the phone and thought hard about what, now, she had to do. Upon the arrival of the three other employees to work that day, she composed a stirring speech.

“As you know,” she began, “tragedy struck last week. Ever since, sales have dropped, and it now up to us to remedy this issue.” A couple stray coughs from the meagre crowd did little for Jackie’s confidence. “Each and every one of you will compose your own recipes to attempt to recreate this signature piece given that Jimmy won’t tell me what the secret ingredient is, and we won’t have access to more of it for two weeks yet.”

The shy hand of the newest employee, gently and reluctantly raised. “Yes, Charlotte?”

“What happens if we don’t figure it out?”

“Well, Charlotte, then sales dip, and if sales dip, people get fired.”

“And what type of cake was it again?”

Jackie looked at the petite, mousy-haired girl with a look of disappointment, but not surprise, as all superiors look at their subordinates even when they do not have justification, simply at being a higher rank. “It’s a red velvet cake, Charlotte. Red velvet. The signature cake of this store. The poster on the storefront window? What color is that, Charlotte? The window you walk by every day?”

“Red.”

“And a red cake is indicative of which flavor, Charlotte?”

“Red velvet, ma’am.”

“Good work, Charlotte. You may just yet be a cunning observer in the making.” And then, looking at the group as a whole once more, Jackie said, “All right people. I’ll provide with a list of the basic ingredients which I know for sure are used in the making of the cake. It’s up to you to figure out the rest. Come to me when you believe you have something.”

Thirty minutes later, Jackie found Charlotte standing in front of her in the backroom as Jackie sorted the flours, bringing them from the freezer to the cooler. “Um, ma’am, I think I have something.”

“Charlotte, you can’t possibly have come up with something that fast.”

“Well, I’ve been studying these basic ingredients you’ve given us for half an hour, and it doesn’t seem to me that it’s anything to do with the cake.”

Jackie sighed. “What?”

“Well, it seems to me that rather, um –” Jackie stared into the poor girl’s eyes with a doubting glare. “Well, I think it’s something in the frosting, um, the icing. The icing frosting.”

“The icing frosting.” Jackie repeated.

“The frosting.” Charlotte said, more confidently this time.

“I see. And what do you suggest is the secret to this frosting?”

“Um, well …”

“Sometime today, Charlotte.”

“Table salt, ma’am.”

Jackie stared at Charlotte in disbelief. “Table salt, Charlotte? Have you lost your mind?”

“Well, see, it offsets the sweetness of the cream cheese and thus better complements the cake itself– ”

Jackie laughed. “But we have salted butter that we use for the frosting.”

“But the salt added on its own works better, you see,” Charlotte explained, “because you have more control over the amount of salt and therefore the ultimate taste.”

“Charlotte, it can’t possibly be that.” Jackie said.

“Why not?” Charlotte said, recoiling once again after her brief splash of confidence.

“Because, don’t you see, it’s too bloody mundane. It’s not particularly ground-breaking, is it? I need ground-breaking, Charlotte. Get back to the baking room and come up with something better. I’m handling all phone orders and customers while you’re back there, after all. Get to it.”

Charlotte and the two other employees, Bobby and Clare, continued to form inventive new theories for the missing ingredient in the famous red velvet cake into the afternoon and for two weeks to come, yet to no avail. Nothing tasted quite the same.

The shipment arrived early on a Tuesday morning, three weeks after the burglary. No success had been had in the attempts to recreate the cake recipe, and Jackie, now thirty-one, had found her first grey hair. These two events were likely unrelated, though she had convinced herself that there was a strong causation link between the two.

Jimmy, ever-protective of the secret ingredient, had instructed Jackie that he would be opening the store Tuesday morning, as he always had when there was a new shipment. This would be the first time he had been back in the store since the burglary, and as relieved as Jackie was that there would be no more recipe shenanigans, she had gotten no sleep the night before, exacerbated at the injustice of it all. She had been the one who had lost sleep over this bloody recipe, she had been the one putting in the hard yards to get the store back on track with the dip in sales. And she still wasn’t allowed to know what she had been missing for three weeks?

As Jackie knew, the shipment arrived at 6am, and Jimmy would arrive at 6:05am on shipment days to make sure he got to it first and made the first batch of cakes with it in solitude, putting the rest of the ingredient in the bakery’s safe to which only he knew the code. Thus, Jackie had five short minutes to get to the box first, open them, and then close them once again in such a way that they would look as if they had not been opened. She came prepared to the bakery at 5:55am that Tuesday morning, box-opener and tape in hand.

The delivery man dropped off the shipment at 6:02am, much to Jackie’s dismay. She considered waiting for the next shipment when this one should run out, but she simply had to know today. So she rushed toward the large, cardboard box, with scissors and tape at the ready, the moment the delivery truck had left the curb.

Three minutes later, Jimmy arrived at the bakery for the first time in almost a month. As he got out of his car, he was greeted with the scene of the usually very kept Jackie, half crying, half laughing, over a large cardboard shipment box filled full to the brim with 100 containers of table salt.