Heavenly Pleasures (10 page)

‘No,’ he said flatly. ‘She is over eighteen. They are not looking for her. Juliette is my employee. Selima is her employee. It is now my problem.’

‘All right,’ I said tentatively. ‘If your instruction is to call you when such a thing happens again, I will call you. Now are you going to stop glaring at me?’

‘That will depend,’ he said.

‘On what?’ Now I was getting angry as well.

‘On whether the delay would have made a difference to her fate,’ he said, and began to walk away.

‘Daniel, that isn’t fair,’ I called after him, hating the quaver in my voice. He stopped for a moment and looked straight into my eyes, quite unsmiling.

‘No, it isn’t,’ he said, and went.

I kicked the machine and swore. How dare he speak to me like that? Who did this Daniel think he was? And why did he think I cared?

I swore again and then became aware that Juliette was hovering just out of slapping distance.

‘Corinna, I’m sorry, I didn’t know …’

‘That he’d react like that? Neither did I,’ I said, getting control of myself. I had been through low spots and bad times before. Even if Daniel never came back, I would, I knew, recover. Eventually. Thirty-eight has few advantages over eighteen, but knowing how strong you are is one of them. And that grief, however deep, never lasts.

‘Talk to us,’ she said. ‘He has a list of questions, here they are, but now he has to go and find Selima. I can’t imagine where she’s gone. She seemed like such a good girl. And imagine, she was trying to ruin the business!’

‘And you don’t know why,’ I asked.

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Well, even if it seems unnecessary, let’s do the questions anyway, then I’ll ask mine. I’ve always wanted to know more about chocolate.’

‘I’ll shut the shop,’ said Juliette.

I was getting my breath back. The quarrel, if that’s what it was, had erupted so suddenly that I felt like I once did in an Irish pub, where someone who had indulged in more Bushmills Black than was good for him had punched me in the solar plexus by mistake. He had been aiming for his friend, who had dodged at the last moment. I had the same feeling that the world had gone out of focus. And it was going to be very bleak without Daniel in it.

I drew in another breath as Juliette came back from putting up the ‘closed’ sign. There was a big shiny metal table, and we sat down at it on metal stools.

The kitchen also contained, reading from right to left, the Adonis-like apprentice George and the unbeautiful sister, Vivienne. They were both wearing white smocks.

I looked around. The manufactuary had several machines of unknown purpose, piles of moulds from little tiny cupcakes to large Easter eggs, several vats of creamy fillings, a huge refrigerator and a strange scent composed of far too many sweet smells from bitter lemon to hazelnut to rosewater.

‘What do you want to ask? Only we’ve got chocolates to make,’ said George.

‘I need to talk to you one at a time,’ I said. ‘Who wants to go first?’

‘Me,’ said George. Both sisters looked at him, Juliette dotingly, Vivienne with some dislike. The women got up and left the room.

‘Name?’ I asked. I had a notebook and took a pen from Juliette’s phone table.

‘George Pandamus.’

‘Any relation to—’

‘Uncle,’ he said. Smart boy, eh? He was so beautiful that it was hard to retain a suitable detachment while looking at the curve of that lovely throat, the arch of that perfect eyebrow, so I looked at the list of Health Regulations on the kitchen wall and made my voice harder. This gorgeous ratbag wasn’t going to seduce me. I had had enough from the male sex lately, what with Daniel and Darren. George didn’t pick up any difference in my manner, which made him very unobservant, very narcissistic, or a sixteen year old boy.

‘How long have you been an apprentice?’

‘Three months. Worked here for a month for free until she agreed to take me.’

‘Vivienne Lefebvre?’

‘Yes. I’m going to be very good. And then I’ll have my own shop.’

‘How long is the apprenticeship?’

‘Four years.’

He wasn’t volunteering any information.

‘How did you get on with the sisters?’

‘All right.’ He shifted in his seat, a little uncomfortable.

‘Very good with Vivienne and not so good with Juliette, eh?’ I asked.

He blushed. He looked like Antinous after a hard night fighting off suitors. ‘No. Good with Jules, not so … why are you asking me that, anyway? You a cop?’

‘No,’ I told him.

‘Then lay off me,’ he ordered. Butter-fed boy, I thought. No one has said anything but ‘yes’ to him since early childhood. His mother and sisters do all the work and the little prince reclines on the sofa and waits for someone to hand him the remote control. I decided to disconcert him.

‘Well, if you wanted to talk to the police, you only had to say,’ I said. ‘I’ll just ring them now. I’m sure that Senior Constable White will—’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Hey, be cool, eh? Ask me another,’ he said, leaning back. He was not at ease. His hands, clutching the edge of the metal table, were white to the knuckle.

‘Did you ever see anyone interfering with the chocolates?’

‘No. I would have said. This is my way out of Cafe Delicious. If I don’t work here I’ll have to work there. I like it better here. But Selima was quiet. I wouldn’t have thought she’d have the nerve,’ he said admiringly.

‘Do you have any chili sauce in this kitchen?’ was the next question.

‘No. Only sweet things in here,’ said George.

I sent him into the shop and Juliette came back. I asked her the same questions. She told me that she and her sister owned the shop jointly, that George had been a satisfactory apprentice as far as he had gone—and blushed when she said it, looking like the perfect English rose—and that she and her sister got on well with Selima, who was a good girl and very quiet. She came from a Turkish family who weren’t very happy about her working in a shop where everyone could see her. She was always picked up from work on Thursdays and Fridays, when the shop closed at nine, by an aunt or cousin who worked in the city. She had never had a sick day or a holiday and had never just not turned up. She had been working for Heavenly Pleasures for seven months and seemed happy in the chocolate trade. To Juliette she had confided that she wanted to go to trade school once she had saved the money and ultimately to become a hairdresser. No boyfriends that Juliette knew about. She had no reason to want to harm the business.

Further, Juliette said that the shop was turning a healthy profit which was split 50/50 with her sister. They had no other siblings and their parents were dead.

I let Juliette go and Vivienne stalked into the room, bumping into the corner of the table and swearing.

‘They always make tables just at hip height,’ I said. ‘Tell me about Selima.’

‘I hardly saw her,’ snapped Vivienne. ‘Front of shop is Juliette’s business. Kitchen is mine.’

I asked the rest of my questions.

‘George is a good enough apprentice. He’ll be better when he spends less time thinking about how beautiful he is. I had to take the mirror off the wall because he’d spend all day gazing into it.’ She gestured at a wall with a light patch on it. ‘But he’s learning fast. He has good hands for sweets. Do you know how we make chocolates?’

I confessed extreme ignorance. Vivienne rose and began to show me round the kitchen. As she did so her voice, which had been strained, dropped to a conversational tone and she was good at explaining things. She had an accent, unlike her sister. It was not like Trudi’s, so I assumed it was Belgian. Trudi, it seemed, had spent longer in Belgium.

‘Chocolate is a strange substance,’ she said, in much the same tone as I talked about yeast. ‘In the original bean it is very bitter. In the eighteenth century people used to dry, roast and grind it and make a drink as black as ink, stuffed with cocoa butter and bitter as gall until they added a lot of sugar to it. Then the Belgians—the Swiss have tried to say it was them, and so have the French, but my family comes from Belgium so for me it was the Belgians—found out how to solidify it so that you could make sweets out of it.’

‘And you never looked back?’

‘No. Chocolate is terribly important. It’s the thing which most people would say is the supreme luxury: not like fast cars and cocaine and holidays in Monaco, but a little bit of luxury you can call your own.’

‘I was just thinking the same thing. Chocolate and coffee—both bitter beans. Both terribly comforting.’

She gave me the first friendly look I had seen since entering the shop. When you got used to the fact that she was not beautiful despite looking like her sister, Vivienne was not bad looking in a haggard way. She had a very genuine smile.

‘Just so. It is curious. There are those who consider that the chocolate-coated coffee bean is the highest of culinary pleasures. We make sweets using only the best couverture, which is chocolate with the highest amount of cocoa butter.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘The stuff in your cheap Easter egg,’ she said scornfully, ‘is compound chocolate. It is chocolate with the cocoa butter removed and replaced by vegetable oils. It sets easily at room temperature and is used for children’s sweets. This, I think, is unfair to the children but it is cheap.’

‘And you wouldn’t use couverture for chocolate crackles,’ I said. I had liked chocolate crackles. The luxury of a childhood that had not heard of cocoa butter content. Vivienne contrived not to sneer. Just.

‘Then there is cooking chocolate, or bittersweet chocolate, an in-between product used for cooking. Couverture is not used for cooking as it burns easily.’

‘As in
pain au chocolat
,’ I said intelligently. She smiled again.

‘Of course, you are a baker, you would use bittersweet in cooking, cakes, and so on. To make sweets we need to temper the chocolate.’ She showed me the machine which burbled. ‘This melts the block to 45 degrees Celsius, then cools it to 26 degrees, and then raises it to 36 degrees, massages and rolls it. Only then will the couverture set glossy, shiny as chocolate should be. This is our most important trade secret.’

‘And I wonder how on earth anyone discovered it,’ I marvelled, thinking of all those poor Belgians with notebooks, saying ‘44 degrees doesn’t work, Hans, try 45,’ for weeks and weeks. Vivienne shrugged.

‘Probably it was done by accident,’ she told me. ‘Then they back-engineered it. Most important discoveries are done by accident. Lindt discovered conching, by which chocolate is melted and refined and then has more cocoa butter added, which makes chocolate fondant—melting in the mouth as it does.

‘Now, suppose that you want to buy a filled chocolate. Here we have fondant.’ She showed me the vats. ‘In this is just sugar and water, stirred until the sugar dissolves, and then it is flavoured and various things are added’—she did not tell me what these were but every trade has its secrets—‘and then the couverture is formed into little moulds, as you see, or rolled and cut, depending on the shape of the sweet. Some of the moulds belonged to our ancestor. This is a tropical truffle, which is rolled and cut like this.’ She slapped a handful of fondant onto the table, rolled it between her palms, chopped it rapidly into bits and rolled them in a flat dish full of grated chocolate. She offered me one. I put in into my mouth without hesitation.

Oh, what a burst of chocolate, pineapple, coconut, then the chocolate again.

‘Superb,’ I said. She smiled again.

‘If it is a formed sweet then we make the couverture into the right shape, and then fill the shells.’

She took a big spoonful out of another vat and smoothed it into little round moulds like oven trays, which she had almost rinsed with couverture—the movement was just the same, a sliding swish and a slam as she slapped the mould down onto the table.

‘The air bubbles—they must be removed,’ she told me as I jumped. ‘These must set,’ she said. ‘But I have some that are ready.’

She dragged a large knife across the mould, levelling the shells. Then she slid a filled mould into a rack which went back under the machine, which capped the sweets with chocolate and, I noticed, stamped the bottom with a grid pattern.

‘I cannot give you one of these as it is not set,’ she said. ‘The liquid fillings are no different. The mould is done the same way and the filling is poured in.’

‘Not injected?’ I asked. Her lips thinned.

‘No. No syringes here. You must look elsewhere for your saboteur. And when your friend finds that girl I will skin her alive. Before Juliette sacks her. I know why she did it,’ said Vivienne with a vindictive snap of her teeth.

‘Why?’

‘Because of my apprentice,’ she said. ‘She was attracting his attention. Because she is in love with him,’ said Vivienne. ‘And he wouldn’t even look at her.’

C
_HA
PTER EIGHT

After that there didn’t seem much else to say. Daniel’s note said that he would call and ask them to sit through the surveillance tape and identify all the visitors, but that could wait until he got back, if he ever did, and if I ever spoke to him again.

I took my notes and a free box of sweets and went back to my bakery to find that all was well and I had time to consider the history of chocolate. The website Ask Jeeves was, as always, informative. Chocolate was sacred to the Maya and the Aztec. However, I was not going to lightly adopt the preferences of a society whose citizens showed their piety by ripping the hearts out of prisoners on top of pyramids. They made it cold, thick and unsweetened and, frankly, it would need to be an aphro
disiac for anyone to drink the stuff. The name, which I had always wondered about, came from combined words: Mayan xocoatl and an Aztec word for water.

The conquistadors brought it back to Spain and the nobility made pigs of themselves by mixing it with sugar and a variety of spices, worth their weight in gold—cloves, vanilla, allspice, cinnamon. The French court began to drink it. Then

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the English. Someone, around the seventeenth century, turned it into cakes for easy transport. Probably the Belgians. Except that the inventor of the chocolate bar seems to have been Fry, the English Quaker who got out of brewing alcohol because of its bad effect on the poor and decided to give them something almost as addictive and twice as comforting. God bless his heart. So it was the English. I decided not to tell Vivienne Lefebvre. She might cut off my supply.

I shut down the computer after I deleted a hundred messages about penis enhancers from my email account. Spam. I almost admire their nerve, but not really. I made a mental note to investigate spam filters some day when I had a lot of time on my hands. That is, never.

I decided to wander the halls and see if I could find the small black kitten who, by now, must be hungry and cold and missing her mother. I was feeling rather desolate myself. Like might attract like.

I took the lift to the roof garden and there found Trudi, grubbing up roots and hacking them to bits with a big knife. The sky had, as Mrs Dawson predicted, clouded over and it did look like it was going to rain.

‘Hello,’ I said disconsolately. ‘Seen a black kitten?’

‘Only orange one,’ she said, raising the knife again. I looked for Lucifer. He was digging industriously.

‘He tries to help me,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to get these irises back in the ground before it rains. You take little one, eh? And sit in temple.’

I did that. Lucifer finished his excavation and trotted along on his leash, pausing occasionally to sniff at an unusual scent. When we were inside the temple he sat down for a good wash and forgot all about me.

Soot might easily be in the garden. This was, after all, where she had been born. But trying to find her in the thickets would be daunting and she might not want to be found. Lucifer washed very diligently until he got to the hard bit, where a cat has to balance on the tail in order to raise the leg and wash under it. This takes practice. He toppled over and decided to give washing a miss for the moment.

And I didn’t even chuckle. Even though he was a very cute kitten and there is something irresistible about the way kittens fall over when learning that manoeuvre. I was definitely depressed.

So when Trudi came back and Lucifer squeaked with delight and ran up her overalls to her shoulder, rubbing his hard little nut of a head under her chin and purring, I went back down, calling for Soot at every floor, listening hard for a mew, and hearing nothing. Nothing like a cat, that is. I met plenty of people. On the seventh floor the door of Pluto, 7B, cracked open and our recluse looked out.

‘I’m looking for a kitten,’ I explained. It sounded lame, even to me. ‘I’m Corinna, the baker.’

‘Sorry,’ he said politely. ‘I haven’t seen a kitten.’

‘I hope you are feeling better,’ I said, seeing that he had a very juicy black eye and one arm was in a sling.

‘I’ll heal,’ he said shortly, and shut the door. So much for him. I worked my way downwards. Jon and Kepler in Neptune, 6A, were either not in or not investigating strange voices in the corridor. Mrs Pemberthy of 5B, Juno, pounced on me on the fifth floor. She was, as always, accompanied by her rotten little dog, Traddles, a creature who combines the charm and appetite of Hannibal Lecter with the appearance of a decayed mop head.

‘Kitten? No. There are too many cats in this building as it is. I’m complaining to the residents’ council about it. Poor Traddles had his nose scratched by one of your cats, Corinna. One of them has stolen his blue squeaky toy, too. He misses his Squeaky, don’t you, darling? And I can only take him for one walkies a day.’

‘Hire a walker,’ I suggested. Traddles was eyeing my leg with undisguised hunger. Unfortunately he had recovered completely from the pesticide poisoning which had nearly killed his mistress a month or so ago. Mrs Pemberthy squealed and dragged him up into her embrace, from which heights he managed to sneer at me.

‘No, I couldn’t trust my little sweetheart with anyone but his Mumsie, could I, darling?’

Traddles did not reply and I made my excuses. Cherie Holliday asked me in for a coffee on floor four, where she and her father lived in Daphne. She promised to keep a look out for Soot and to search her apartment. Mrs Dawson in 4B, Minerva, invited me in to search, as Soot had gone missing on the same night as the bomb threat when all the doors had been open.

‘I don’t bend like I did, dear,’ she said affably. ‘You’ll need to look under things. Here, you can use my flashlight.’

Mrs Dawson had been reading. She had a large armchair, a footstool, a bright reading light, a small table with a box of chocolates on it, a pile of library books and a good view, as she had said, of the weather. Rain started spattering the windows. She had kicked off her shoes and was wearing her Russian leather boots. A generous wrap patterned with books had been cast aside. I hated to disturb her and said so.

‘The poor little creature might be hiding and she will be hungry by now,’ she said. ‘Search everywhere and I will make us a drink. The nice thing about being a widow is that one always has time for interruptions. Mothers and wives never do, they are always doing two things at once. And that is on good days,’ she told me. She went into her kitchen and I searched for Soot.

There were a lot of nooks and crannies and I looked into every one. At the end of my search, I knew two things. One, that Soot wasn’t there. Two, that Mrs Dawson had excellent taste and very nice furniture.

I gave her back the flashlight. She gestured me to a chair at the table. Then she poured me a drink from a heatproof jug. I sipped. It was mulled wine, spicy and fragrant. The perfect thing for a cold day. I said so.

‘The important thing is to use good wine,’ she said. ‘What is wrong, Corinna?’

I looked into her clear blue eyes and told her all about Daniel.

‘Oh dear,’ she said. She sipped more wine. ‘The trouble with people who believe that everything is theirs to fix is that they also believe that it is all their fault,’ she said musingly. ‘He was guilty that he had slept while this girl was in trouble. That’s why he was angry. He wasn’t angry with you, but himself. He’ll get over it. Have some more?’ she asked.

I held out my cup. ‘Why not?’

My bakery was working fine without me. I wasn’t doing anything useful. And it was very good wine. Mrs Dawson didn’t say anything else about Daniel. When she spoke again, it was in praise of Jade Forrester, and we had a soothing conversation on her admirable oeuvre, and how on earth she was going to get Avon and Roj together.

I felt much better when I left and descended to the next floor.

Professor Monk in 3, Dionysus, was at home, and agreed to allow me to search his apartment, too. He also had a flashlight ready to hand.

‘Leftover from the Blitz,’ he explained. ‘And reinforced by all those Queensland towns where the lightning was attracted to the power lines. In London you might step on a mine and in Queensland you might step on a taipan.’

‘Both deadly,’ I grunted, crawling under his Roman couch. No Soot. I gave the rest of the apartment the once-over and found no sign of a kitten. No dust, either. Professor Monk was a tidy man and his cleaner did a good job.

‘How about some lunch?’ he asked. ‘I’ve got some rather good lasagna from Cafe Delicious.’

‘I ought to get back to the bakery,’ I said, my will visibly weakening.

‘Call Jason and see if he needs help,’ he suggested. I did that, from the Prof ’s un-Roman telephone, which was concealed in a cupboard. Jason told me, with that scornful edge of ‘What—don’t you
trust
me?’ in his voice, that he and Goss were managing perfectly well without me.

So I sat down to a Cafe Delicious lasagna, which was very good, and a glass or two of wine with Professor Monk, the sexiest seventy-six year old in captivity. He talked soothingly about how much he couldn’t stand Apollonius Rhodius, a librarian who had written the compilation album Argo
nautica, about Jason and—duh—the Argonauts.

‘The kindest thing I can say about him,’ he concluded, ‘is that he wore a beige toga, probably with leather patches on the sleeves. His depiction of Medea as a delicate fawn trembling in the pussy willows would sicken both Mills and Boon.’

‘Wasn’t she a famous witch?’ I asked.

‘Able to draw the moon down in her hair. And outface giant serpents,’ he agreed. ‘Not the sort of person to tremble and blush and turn white and go weak at the knees. Can you see our friend Meroe doing that at any time in her life?’

I thought about it through two glasses of mulled wine and another of good pinot.

‘No,’ I decided. ‘Never.’

‘My point exactly,’ said Professor Monk.

By the time I bade the Professor farewell and descended to the lower levels I was tired but not as discouraged as I had been. Mistress Dread, home from the leather shop for lunch in Venus, 2B, agreed to search her apartment for Soot, who she said would make a nice contrast with her red leather. I already knew that Kylie and Goss in 2A, Pandora, did not have her. I went down to see the boys in Nerds Inc, who lived in Hephaestus. They promised to tell me if they found her as they didn’t like cats or indeed mammals of any sort. She wasn’t in the bakery and she wouldn’t be anywhere near Del Pandamus of Cafe Delicious, because he hated cats. I had searched the whole building and hadn’t found Soot, but I had found my self-esteem.

I did a few business things in my own apartment, like ordering the flour and seasonings, checking the GST returns and the invoices from the suppliers, and then went down into the bakery. Goss was cashing up and filling in the bank deposit slip. This involved listing the numbers of notes in each denomination—such as 12 $50 notes = $600; 23 $20 notes = $460 and adding it up at the bottom. This task had always stumped my assistants but now Jason was helping.

‘It’s a calculator,’ he said patiently. ‘You enter the number and then you write down the result. Here, let me.’

He showed Goss how to fill in the form and, amazingly, she not only let him explain but filled in the slip correctly. I let her stuff the money into the bag and take it to the bank. Jason shut the shop and said, ‘You all right?’ and when I said I wasn’t, he said soberly, ‘You go and get some sleep. You could use a nap. That’s what the Prof says. And he’ll be back, that Daniel. The dude was just upset that you didn’t call him. He always thinks he has to save the world. I didn’t mean to get you in bad with him, Corinna, honest.’

He looked so contrite that I hugged him with one arm.

‘Never mind, Jason. Clean up and I’ll see you tomorrow.’

I got to my apartment, carrying Horatio, who demanded to be carried, some bread, and my notes. I stripped and bathed in scented hot water. Then I lay down in my bed for a few moments just to rest my eyes, and woke only when the alarm went off at four to tell me that I had slept through the whole night and that it was morning once more.

As always, I wished it wasn’t. But there it was. Jason was downstairs by the time I had placated Horatio (no dinner! no
DINNER!) and we mixed and baked and mixed and made muffins. Or, at least, Jason made muffins and I watched. He was making my favourite so far, ginger muffins, and his hands almost blurred as he chopped glacé ginger. I drank coffee and listened to bread rising. This was my life, and it was a very good life, one I had chosen for myself, and I was pleased with it.

The Mouse Police raced out into the wet alley—they would swim rivers for raw tuna scraps—and I watched the dust of the summer being washed away at last. The cobbles were as slick and clean and shiny as Juliette’s chocolate. I like rain and I only retreated when it began to drip on me. The overhead balconies tended to collect water and let it go in sudden and surprising showers. Five thirty am and very nice to come back into the warmth of the ovens.

‘Shit, it’s freezing,’ shivered Jason, tucking into his first baguette of the day. I was just shutting the door when Ma’ani appeared and I handed over the sacks.

‘Last run,’ he said. ‘Been a bad night.’

‘Oh?’ I asked.

‘One drowned,’ he said. ‘Face down in a gutter, poor bugger. Thanks,’ he said, and carried the bread away. I was ashamed of my discontent when people were dying in misery. I shook myself.

‘Let’s do something different,’ I said to Jason. ‘Let me show you how to stone olives.’

Jason rather enjoyed stoning olives. If you don’t need them to stay in shape, you just crush them under a flat blade. It’s very therapeutic. We made olive bread, a salty, tangy bread that goes well with Italian cheese and makes the definitive tomato sandwich when the end-of-summer tomatoes are perfectly ripe, with just a smear of olive oil and lots of fresh basil. Otherwise it just reminds people of Venice, which is a nice place to be reminded of.

The rain was really pouring down now. I wondered where Daniel was and if he was getting wet and shut the door. The Mouse Police belted in through the cat-door a moment later, soggy but well fed, and lay down to wash themselves on their flour sacks.