Heavenly Pleasures (3 page)

I had done all the veggies and was putting them into the big pot with my shanks when I heard Daniel stir. Then he sniffed. Then I heard him laugh.

Presently a man attired lightly in my Chinese silk gown came padding out to the kitchen and said, ‘Chicken soup, ketschele? I’m sure I can smell chicken soup.’

‘Have some,’ I invited. He sat and sipped. He smiled.

Daniel’s smile is a smouldering thing in dark light which is probably powered by some sort of biological laser.

‘As good as my mother’s,’ he told me. ‘Chicken soup cures everything but a broken heart, she used to say. I never tried it on the broken heart but it’s very good for bruises. I do not deserve you. But I’m very glad I have you.’

‘Want some aspirin?’ I asked breathlessly.

‘A couple. But you should have seen the other guy,’ he told me. The gown fell open to reveal a red splotch on his chest where someone had aimed for his heart. And missed.

‘What did he attack you with?’

‘A hockey stick. Makes a good weapon, a hockey stick. I had to take it away from him. Someone might have got hurt.’

Daniel drank soup and took his aspirins. He was aching. I could tell by the way he moved. Usually Daniel moves with an easy grace. Now he was being careful.

‘In view of the weather, let us omit travelling to the roof garden today and instead sit on the balcony with our gin and tonic,’ I said. ‘Admiring the sort of tall leafy green things which Trudi has planted in those big pots.’

Botany is not my strong point. Trudi had given me the plants, swearing that unless I actually watered them with weedkiller or sprayed them with napalm, they would survive on rain and complete neglect. Which was what they were going to get. I am on record as the only person who killed a plastic hoya and who regularly ruins silk orchids. Of course, Horatio helps me in this. I think he likes the smooth feel of real silk in his claws. He had inspected the new plants, tried one delicately with a canine tooth, spat, sniffed the pot and approved of the fine, dark blue Chinese glaze, and ignored the plants thereafter. Trudi must have chosen green leafy things which cats did not find palatable.

Horatio accompanied Daniel and me onto the balcony, perched himself on the iron Pompeii table, and watched the street below. There is a fascination about being the only idle person amongst a crowd of workers. It was three in the afternoon and the street was crowded; women with shopping bags, messengers, couriers, shoppers, men in suits with important briefcases. Calico Alley is a short cut into two arcades which open onto main streets and is rarely empty, except at four in the morning. And no one ever looks up so the pleasures of idleness are augmented by the pleasures of voyeurism. My gin and tonic tasted more tonic than usual and my company could not have been better. I stretched happily.

Now, however, a truck was pulling up at the front door of our apartment house. This required a lot of backing and filling and obscenity as shoppers dived between fender and walls in the manner of chickens into whose yard a fox has nonchalantly wandered.

‘Someone moving in?’ asked Daniel.

‘I’ve got the residents’ group newsletter here—yes, a Mrs Sylvia Dawson. She’s moving into 4B, Minerva. Next to Cherie and Andy in Daphne. That’s been empty since old Mrs Prince died. Nice furniture,’ I commented, looking at the sheen of the table being hauled inside. ‘That’s mahogany. Lots of bookshelves.’

‘Lots of books,’ said Daniel, equally fascinated, as box after box was carried inside. I read the legend on the truck.

‘They’re the expensive movers,’ I noticed. ‘You don’t have to do a thing. They come to your house, pack everything, take it to the new place, unpack everything, put it all away, make your bed, put the kettle on, and remove all the boxes. They’ll be a while. Madame will probably only put in an appearance when it’s all done.’

An apartment in Insula is expensive. The shops are cheaper but even so it had taken all I had from my settlement to buy Earthly Delights and I had been a bit squeezed for the first couple of years until the shop began to pay. I was now in the delightful position of being debt free and making a profit. For the moment. Until, for instance, a cheap hot bread shop opened up in my near vicinity. But that hadn’t happened yet. I didn’t know why I was being so snippy. Mrs Dawson was a woman of some wealth and refinement, and why should she unpack boxes if she didn’t feel like it?

Still, it struck me as extravagant. Leftover from Grandma’s Presbyterian work ethic, I expect. I drank some more gin and tonic to suppress it and kept watching. That’s how I saw my favourite police officer, Letty White (known to me as Lepidoptera) following a man with a suitcase into the building. From the ground, it would not have been obvious that she was following him. But I noticed how she looked around to see if she had been noticed. I didn’t know the man. From above he was ordinary, with brown hair and a dark grey coat and a big navy blue suitcase with wheels. He went inside. So, after a moment, did she. Daniel had been looking at the unloading and didn’t see either of them. But I’m sure it was Lepidoptera. I knew her steady, back-on-the-heels way of walking and her neat cap of hair. What was going on? The residents’ newsletter didn’t mention anyone else moving in today.

It took an hour for all of Mrs Dawson’s things to be carried inside. They were taken up in the freight elevator, a temperamental beast which has to be treated with respect. We heard it groaning up past us. Only Trudi really understands that elevator and only she would dare to use it. I hoped Executive Luxury Removals were treating both of them with respect or they’d be contemplating their lack of manners between floors for eternity. Still, they’d have plenty to read.

Horatio leapt off the table. Daniel yawned. I finished my drink and put us all to bed for the rest of the afternoon. No one had hit him in the face so it was safe to kiss him, and I did, and then we all went byes, and it was so warm and cosy and lovely that I really didn’t want to get up when the sun crossed my face at six.

So we didn’t. We had some more soup and bread and opened Heavenly Pleasures’ test chocolates for a treat. Daniel took one and allowed it to melt in his mouth. An expression of rapture settled on his face.

‘Raspberry,’ he said. ‘Essence of raspberry.’

I bit into mine and then spat it out in sudden, jolting shock. Daniel stared at me.‘Sorry!’ I jumped up, washed out my mouth under the kitchen tap, and then did it again, spitting vulgarly into the sink. ‘There’s something really wrong with that one. I just got a mouthful of chili sauce. Ooh, yuk,’ I added, swilling and spitting again.

Daniel retrieved the spat-out chocolate and put it on a saucer to examine it.

‘It’s been filled with raspberry cream,’ he said, lifting the saucer to catch the scent. ‘Then—yes, ketschele, chili sauce it is. How funny,’ he said grimly.

‘I wonder if Juliette Lefebvre is laughing,’ I answered.

At that, my bell began pealing, as though someone was leaning on the buzzer. I pressed the intercom.

‘It’s Juliette!’ said a frantic voice. ‘Corinna, let me in!’

C
_HA
PTER THREE

I released the door and waited. I did not hear the lift. Juliette must have run up the stairs, which is more than I could do, even under the impetus of panic. She knocked at my door seconds later and fell inside, gasping.

‘Don’t open those chocolates!’ she said very quickly. ‘I’m, I’m going to change the recipe.’

Then she noticed the open box on the table and the bitten chocolate on the saucer and stopped dead with her hands to her mouth.

‘So that it doesn’t include chili sauce?’ I asked, still shocked. It’s like missing a step. Expecting a delicious taste and getting another, like that salt in coffee trick which the humour-impaired used to perform to Amuse Their Friends while they had them. Daniel had taken the other chocolates out of the box and was examining the undersides with my magnifying glass (I use it for splinters and fine mending).

‘Sit down, Juliette, let me make you some coffee, tell us all about it,’ I said.

‘No, I …’ She was poised for flight. Her face was the colour of vanilla cream.

27

‘Have they demanded money yet?’ asked Daniel in that voice which suggested infinite understanding and compassion. It worked on homeless heroin addicts and it worked on Juliette. It worked on me, too, incidentally.

All at once, whatever had been sustaining her gave out. Juliette sagged down into a chair and put her decorative blonde head in her perfectly manicured hands.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what they want.’ She raised her head. ‘I don’t know who they are. And I don’t know what to do,’ she added.

‘Not so much coffee,’ said Daniel to me, ‘as coffee and brandy, and probably something to eat.’

I supplied the last of the chicken soup, a large cup of coffee and a small glass of brandy and slices of bread with cheese. Daniel put the spoon into Juliette’s hand and sat there willing her to drink her soup. She did. Then she ate some bread and cheese and drank the brandy. By the time she was onto coffee and apple muffins her cheeks had warmed to rose cream, if not strawberry. She drew a deep breath. I had never seen her with a hair out of place, and now she was distraught she still didn’t have a hair out of place. Some people are like that and it is not an endearing trait. But her eyes were haggard, even if her face wasn’t.

‘That was very nice,’ she told me. ‘Thank you. I feel much better. I must have forgotten to have lunch. And maybe breakfast.’

‘You’ve been worrying,’ I said.

‘I’ve been panicking,’ she returned. ‘Daniel, can I em
ploy you?’

‘To find out who is poisoning your chocolates?’

‘That’s the thing, they aren’t poisoned, just ruined with chili sauce or soy sauce,’ she said, lacing all her fingers together and pulling on them. ‘No one would get sick eating them, just disgusted and shocked and deciding that they are never going to buy another Heavenly Pleasures chocolate again. The cops would say, no one’s been killed, malicious mischief, tut tut, and I would get all the bad publicity and they wouldn’t really be putting my shop high on the priority list, not with all these burglaries round here lately.’

‘True,’ said Daniel. ‘When did it start?’

‘That’s just it, I don’t know,’ she wailed. ‘The first one I found out about was when a customer brought back a box last Tuesday and told me that one of them had tasted foul, and I gave her some more, and I thought it was just an oversensitive person. You get that sometimes, Corinna, you know?’

I nodded. I knew. Not only did I have to make sure there were no peanut traces in any products that I used, because people with a peanut allergy are prone to die if they eat the stuff, but I had sometimes had customers complaining that their bread tasted of, for example, walnuts, when the only trace of walnut in the bakery had been in a mixing tub which had been thoroughly scrubbed. Two days before. I always apologised and handed over a replacement. Some people have very sensitive tastebuds. And some, of course, are insane. In all cases it is better just to give them a new loaf and not worry about it.

I couldn’t help noticing that Juliette had grabbed Daniel’s hand as she talked. I was struck with a pang of rampant, green-fanged jealousy. It hit me like an electric shock. I was amazed. I had never been jealous in my life. Then Daniel stretched out his other hand and took mine and gave me a look compounded of such amused understanding that jealousy lowered its head and retired abashed from the scene like a cat which has been out-cooled by Horatio. I had seen the poor things, slinking, utterly crestfallen, off the roof and retiring into private life, making feline resolutions never to cross that gentleman’s path again. Jealousy went off just like that and I hoped it wasn’t going to come back. I was shocked at myself.

Horatio leapt neatly onto the table and curled up under Juliette’s other hand and she started to stroke him. I could practically feel her blood pressure going down. Unless they are diving into the washing-up or bouncing on your chest at three am, cats are very soothing companions.

‘Nice cat,’ she murmured. ‘Then another customer returned a box, and when I offered to replace it she just wanted her money back, said she’d never be able to eat my chocolates with confidence again. I went through the boxes and found that three of them had been contaminated. Then I remembered that I had given one to you and … oh, what am I to do?’

‘First, tell me about your shop. Tomorrow I will bring some gear and we will set up some electronic surveillance. Have a look at this,’ he said, offering her the saucer and the magnifier. Juliette peered at the bitten chocolate.

‘See, someone has punctured the bottom with a syringe, drawn off some of the cream, and put in some chili sauce. You can see how far it has penetrated. Then they have plugged the little hole by melting the chocolate.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘the crosshatch pattern is smeared. And the chocolate is dull,’ she went on. ‘I use best quality couverture for these. Unless it is heated properly and cooled and heated again—tempered—it won’t dry glossy. All right. That is how it was done. But why? And who?’

‘And how?’ I added to the questions.

‘That, too,’ said Daniel. ‘Who works in your shop?’

‘You can’t be thinking …’ Juliette began hotly, then subsided. ‘Of course you can,’ she said sadly. ‘I own the shop with my sister Vivienne. It was our inheritance from our father, who was also a famous chocolatier. Viv does most of the manufacture. I do most of the selling. Then there’s Selima who helps in the shop and Viv’s apprentice, George. He’s Greek. That’s all. I can’t imagine why any of them would want to do this. We all depend on the shop for a living.’

‘How do you get on with your sister?’ asked Daniel.

‘Fine,’ said Juliette. ‘We get on fine!’

There was an element of defiance in that exclamation.

‘Good,’ said Daniel. ‘You go along home, now, have a night’s sleep. I’ll be along tomorrow with the gear. That may be enough to stop this person’s tricks. Nothing like knowing that you are being watched to regulate behaviour.’

We saw her to the door. She ran down the stairs, seeming happier than when she had run up them, which is the most you can hope for from most human interaction.

‘We never seem to get any time, do we?’ he asked sadly.

‘I’ll just pull up the drawbridge,’ I said, ‘arm the crocodile swamps and take the phone off the hook. You release the moat monsters and feed the cat.’

‘Moat monsters released, check,’ he said, more cheerfully, and went into the kitchen to feed Horatio.

We spent the rest of the evening watching Buffy meet Giles, and then slept the night away in perfect peace, until the four am alarm shattered the silence. I got up to find Daniel had already made coffee and was down in the bakery, washing his filthy clothes. I don’t deserve him, either. I toasted extra rye bread for him, loaded a tray, fed Horatio his morning milk and left him to his devotions.

Jason was already starting the mixers on their first load of my mainstay, pasta douro. This means ‘hard crust’ and needs to be sprayed with water while baking but it really is delicious and most hot bread shops can’t make it. Partly because it is labour intensive to make and partly because they didn’t start out with my graduation present, old Papa Pagliacci’s mother of pasta douro, a venerable yeast which had come—he said— with his great grandfather into Australia, nurtured in his great grandmother’s bosom to keep it warm. A strain of yeast can indeed go on forever if properly cared for, so it might be true.

I looked at the orders and ate rye bread toast and cherry jam and drank coffee. Daniel sat in the baker’s chair by the washer, nibbling rye toast with cheese. I noticed that Jason had brought his washing also. It was very domestic and pleasant. No one was talking, the radio was not on. Bliss. It was a household interior worthy of Vermeer, very quiet and soothing, throbbing slightly with rising dough.

When I opened the door at six for the Mouse Police it was one of those perfect autumn mornings, chill and clear, the sky above the alley as blue as blue could be. And along the alley came a lady wearing sensible walking shoes, a tweed jacket, a flame orange silk shirt and dark brown Fletcher Jones trousers. She was carrying a newspaper and a shoulder-slung brown leather handbag. She was an unusual sight for Calico Alley at that hour. She moved with perfect self-possession, as if there were no such things as muggers in the world. The Mouse Police skidded to a halt at her feet and she bent to pat each furry head.

‘Good morning, cats,’ she said in well-modulated tones. ‘A beautiful morning, isn’t it?’

‘Hello,’ I said from the doorway. ‘That’s Heckle and that’s Jekyll.’

‘And you must be Ms Chapman,’ said the lady. ‘Sylvia Dawson.’ We shook gloves. Mine were thin plastic and hers were bitter chocolate Italian glacé kid. ‘I moved in to Minerva yesterday afternoon. A charming building. I’m sure I can be very comfortable here. Are you always up this early?’

‘I’m a baker,’ I said. ‘Bakers start at four. But surely you didn’t need to be?’

‘I find early morning refreshing,’ she said decisively. ‘I went for a bracing walk through the Flagstaff Gardens. The leaves are turning. Well, I mustn’t keep you from your work. Your bakery smells delightful. Would there be a loaf, perhaps? Or am I too early?’

‘I can do you pasta douro,’ I said. ‘Fresh out of the oven.’

‘Splendid,’ she said. She paid me in exact coins, accepted the wrapped bread, and walked away. Her back view was as neat as her front view. Perhaps seventy, coiffed and trim and determined. I wondered about her. A widow, perhaps?

‘Nice lady,’ thus Jason. ‘Can I do sour cherry muffins today? Only I ate the rest of your toast and that cherry jam is real nice.’

I should have known better than to leave anything edible near Jason. Daniel, whose clothes had graduated to the dryer, asked, ‘Shall I go and make some more?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Jason.

‘As soon as it clocks onto seven, you can go and buy breakfast at Cafe Delicious,’ I told him. ‘You know, that trucker’s special which takes two strong men to eat? You won’t starve to death before then. Have you got enough filling for your muffins?’

‘No,’ said Jason from the storeroom. ‘Damn. I’ll put cherry jam on the shopping list and today … tah dah! … we shall have blueberry. Bo-oring.’

‘But sells well,’ I reminded him. ‘Get on with it, eh?’

I do not like too much talking in the morning. Ma’ani turned up for the bread. The day went on. I wondered how Meroe was progressing with the taming of Lucifer. She would need industrial strength spells to curb his enthusiasm for extreme sports. I was distracted by a picture of a bungee-jumping kitten when Daniel, re-dressed in clean clothes, put his arms around me from behind and kissed the top of my head.

‘Got to go and get the electronic stuff for the chocolate shop from my stash at The Open Eye,’ he said. ‘Should be finished by this afternoon. Can I come back then?’

‘Please,’ I said fervently. He was walking with more freedom; a night’s rest had loosened all those bruises. Bungee-jumping kittens faded and were replaced by much warmer speculations. Daniel left, Jason made muffins, I made bread. Outside it got almost warm. I made more bread and Jason went to eat his breakfast, the preceding meals having been more in the nature of little snacks.

There is always good money to be made at Cafe Delicious by betting how long it is going to take my thin scrap of a Jason to eat his way through three eggs (fried), three sausages, three rashers of bacon, two grilled tomatoes, a stack of toast and two hash browns or potato pancakes, depending on whether Grandma Pandamus or the Hungarian relief cook Kristina is dishing out the food. His record is three minutes, which I would have thought was barely enough time to physically shovel all that food into the mouth, without fiddling refinements like cutlery. Or chewing.

Still, it is well known that a boy of fifteen has the digestion of an ostrich. I took his very good blueberry muffins out of the oven. While I encouraged his experimental streak, there was still nothing like a good hot blueberry muffin with sifted icing sugar. Jason came back. Five minutes, but he had also had a free piece of baklava, a present from the patriarch Del Pandamus (who had probably won his wager). Jason learned to make French plaits. Bread made, I went into the shop to admit Goss.

Because of their frequent changes of hair colour, eye colour and even stature, the only way I can tell my assistants apart is by their navel rings. Goss’s is gold and her navel has a little lip on the upper edge. She had what I would have called day-glo green hair this morning and a top to match.

‘Good morning, Gossamer,’ I said. ‘How was your ad?’

‘It was, like, gross!’ she replied candidly. ‘It was a new chocolate bar and I had to eat, like, hundreds of them! Well, bite them. Lots of times.’

‘I thought you liked chocolate,’ I said. I should have known better.

‘But, duh, Corinna, my diet?’ she said. ‘There must have been a thousand calories in every bite. I had to keep spitting it out. And I won’t be able to eat anything till tomorrow.’