Heavenly Pleasures (12 page)

‘I’m going back to the shop,’ he said. ‘I need to collect the tapes and get the customers identified, though that may not be necessary now.’

‘You aren’t convinced that Selima did it?’ I asked.

‘I still can’t imagine why she would.’

‘Not even to attract the gorgeous George’s attention? That was Vivienne’s theory,’ I commented. We were still treating each other very carefully, Daniel and I. Words can wound. I never believed that coda to ‘sticks and stones’, not even when my grandma sang it to me.

‘Crazy,’ said Kylie. ‘No girl with a job’d do that. I mean, what does it matter to George that the shop goes under?’

‘It matters a lot to George,’ I said. ‘Because otherwise he’s going to be up every morning cooking the trucker’s special for Jason. He’s a Pandamus.’

‘I know,’ said Kylie, which was a marginally more polite version of her usual ‘D-uh.’ ‘I talked to her a bit. She was a quiet girl, you know? Real scared of her father.’

‘Because?’asked Daniel, alert to any smell of abuse.

‘He wants to send her back to Turkey to marry some— erk—old man. And she’s said, no way, and her dad’s yelled at her a lot. So, like, of course she’s run away. I’d run away if my dad tried to marry me to some old man.’

‘Who else knew Selima?’ I asked urgently.

‘Goss talked to her a bit but Cherie knew her better.’

Daniel made a broad gesture and slapped himself quite hard on the forehead.

‘Jason, you were right, I am a dickhead. Quick, anyone know, is Cherie home?’

‘Haven’t seen her go out,’ said Kylie. ‘Did you call Daniel a dickhead?’ she demanded of Jason as Daniel raced up the bakery stairs and thus through my flat and into Insula en route to Daphne and Cherie Holliday.

‘Yair,’ said Jason, proudly. ‘A dude needs another dude to tell him when he’s being a dickhead. I’m going back to my muffins,’ he said hastily, and Kylie and I were alone.

‘Corinna, what’s the haps?’ asked Kylie. ‘Has everyone gone, like, mad?’

‘It’s a long story and I’ll tell you all of it,’ I promised. ‘It began when I bit into a Heavenly Pleasures chocolate and found it was full of chili sauce …’

I had trailed through the whole story, much interrupted by comments like ‘Gross!’ and ‘Ooh, yuk!’ Kylie inspected a sparkling purple fingernail.

‘So if it isn’t Selima, who is it? And why?’ she asked, both good questions to which I presently didn’t have any answers.

Business was agreeably brisk. Just as the lunch crowd was rushing away, to be chained once more to their rowing benches, Jason said, ‘Aha!’ and then, ‘Shit, yes!’ and emerged from the bakery a strange figure. He had streaks of chocolate through his hair, chocolate all over his apron, and chocolate sauce dripping down his chin. But the light of joy was in his eyes and he held forth a warm chocolate muffin dish in much the same manner as Arthur must have held Excalibur or royal nurses used to produce the heir to the throne.

‘Here,’ he said. I took one from the tray. It was not very heavy but rich chocolate in colour. It had no icing but a scatter of powdered chocolate on the top. I bit.

Instantly my mouth filled with a rich, full taste. It was, in fact, filled with chocolate sauce. I could not imagine how he had done such a thing. None of that raw cocoa taste, no grains of partially melted compound, no flicker of flour which had marred all the previous chocolate muffins of my acquaintance. It was, in short, a wonderful muffin. I gestured to Kylie to try one, and she squeaked something about her diet as she took it. But she took it. And ate it. And almost swooned.

‘Jason, the only thing I could call this is chocolate orgasm,’ I told him. ‘Now, while you have a shower and put on some clean clothes, I am going to get paper and pen and you are going to write down how you produced this miracle.’

Jason looked down at himself, brushed his hands through his chocolate-stiffened hair and went to have a shower in the little bathroom attached to the kitchen. Presently I also heard the washer going. I wondered whether my laundry liquid, which was supposed to remove all stains, would cope with that much chocolate. If so I ought to write the manufacturer a commendation. Kylie was licking chocolate sauce off her chin.

‘He’s really good, isn’t he?’ she asked in a subdued voice. Neither Kylie nor Goss had approved when I took Jason in off the street, a starving ex-junkie with quite a few problems, like bad men trying to kill him.

‘He certainly is,’ I said. ‘The only trouble is that we might find that the ingredients are too expensive to sell them at a profit.’

‘Call them “super-deluxe death by chocolate” and make them five dollars,’ said Kylie. ‘I’d pay five dollars for one of them. If I ate muffins. Which I don’t. Unless someone tells me to,’ she said, conscious of her devout adherence to the ‘famine’ diet.

‘Wow,’ I said, sitting down. Whatever it was that chocolate was supposed to enhance, it had enhanced it.

Daniel came back. Kylie and I sat him down and fed him coffee and one of the chocolate muffins. He reacted in much the same way as we had.

‘What a wonderful thing,’ he said. ‘How on earth did he do it?’

‘When he gets out of the shower I am sure that he will tell us,’ I said. ‘How did you go with Cherie?’

‘She didn’t want to tell me much,’ said Daniel. ‘If only I had thought to ask her first before flying off the handle like that. She knows where Selima is, I am sure. Cherie survived very well on the street on her own, you know. I suspect that Selima has told Cherie about her father. But all she will do is get a message to Selima and ask her if she wants to talk to me. That might be enough. But Cherie says very firmly that Selima had nothing to do with the sabotage. I think I had better go on with the investigation.’

‘If you still have a client,’ I said. ‘Juliette thinks this is all solved.’

‘Well, if it isn’t Selima, then soon Juliette will find out …’

A scatter of footsteps, a frantic woman on the other side of the counter. Juliette, with a handful of chocolates, all of which had been cut in half. They dripped bright red contamination on my clean floor.

‘That she still needs us,’ concluded Daniel.

C
_HA
PTER TEN

Daniel went with Juliette, I went into the bakery to hear a lecture on ‘the chocolate muffin, its physics and chemistry’ by Dr Jason. He was clean and dressed in a clean apron. He had even got all the chocolate out of his hair.

‘Trouble with them other choccie muffins,’ he said, ‘was that you had to use cocoa powder to make them chocolatey because ground chocolate won’t melt smooth, or if it does melt, it burns,’ he said. ‘And muffins have to be done quick, it’s no use beating them for long enough to get the chocolate smooth or they go tough.’

‘Agreed,’ I said. ‘Until yours, I have never tasted a satisfactory chocolate muffin. Go on, Jason.’

‘So. I thought about how I made my jam doughnut muffins, with the jam in the middle. I thought maybe if I could put chocolate in the middle of the muffin then what I’d have is like your
pain chocolat
or one of them self-saucing puddings. But there the chocolate is dull because it has to cook as long as the pudding or the bread. But a muffin only takes ten minutes. So I asked Vivienne to give me some samples of

135

the different choccies that Heavenly Pleasures makes. The couverture was too easily burned. But the bittersweet was perfect. I made a chocolate sauce with cream to flavour the muffin then I put a glob of it into the middle of each muffin. It holds together long enough to melt just right when the muffin is cooked. And it stays glossy. And it tastes …’

‘Ace,’ said Kylie.

‘Glorious,’ I said. ‘Write down your proportions and make a copy and put the original somewhere safe. I think you have made a breakthrough,’ I told him. He smiled his happy-baby smile, which always tugged at my heart. ‘When you move on to your pastrycook’s destiny, you can use that muffin as your masterpiece. It’s new, fresh, superb, and I bet it isn’t hard to make. You’ve just thought of something which no one has thought of before. A genuine invention and it’s your master
piece. Kylie will help you write it all down,’ I told him, as someone cleared their throat meaningfully in the shop. I was neglecting my trade.

The customer, however, was not in a hurry. He was engaged in stroking Horatio, who had actually elevated the royal chin for a scratch, a great mark of favour. That cat gets stroked so much it’s a wonder he isn’t bald.

He was an ordinary looking middle-aged man in a suit. He looked like someone who didn’t wear a suit much. ‘Nice cat,’ he told Horatio. ‘I’m Selima’s Uncle Adrian,’ he told me. ‘Is Daniel Cohen here?’

‘Just gone out,’ I said. ‘You’re Selima’s uncle?’ I didn’t mean to sound incredulous, but he sounded Australian and looked fair rather than dark. I really don’t know anything about Turks.

‘By marriage,’ he explained. ‘She calls me Uncle. I married her elder sister Mirri. You Daniel’s partner?’

‘Yes, I suppose so,’ I said. The shop was otherwise empty. Adrian settled down for a confidential conversation.

‘Look, I know that Selima ran away, and I know why. Her father’s an old-style Turkish father and he wanted to arrange a marriage for her. He’s an old bloke so he yelled and raved and she got scared. She’s the last child at home and all the others got away—Mirri even married a Christian,’ he said. ‘He hasn’t spoken to her since. But her mum sneaks out to visit now that we’ve got the two kids.’

‘So he wanted to make sure that Selima, at least, did as she was told, because none of the others did,’ I prompted.

‘Yeah. I didn’t see her much because the old man kept her on a very short leash. But Mirri, my wife, she thought that Selima had a boy she wanted. She says that women know these things.’

‘They do,’ I told him, and he smiled.

‘Anyway, if Daniel or you find Selima, tell her she can come and stay with us and we won’t give her away to the old man. She’s a good, hard-working girl. She can see her mum when she comes over to visit the grandkids. We’ve got room. In fact, I don’t know why she didn’t come to Mirri instead of going to those bastards in Frankston. They rang up and told the old man that she’d been there and he’s breathing fire. Silly old bastard,’ said Adrian tolerantly. ‘That’s how I found out about Daniel, he left them his card. Sel knows the address but I’ll write it out.’ I pushed over the brown paper bags and a pen and he wrote out an address and a phone number. ‘You can call me any time. Mirri’s real worried,’ he said. ‘Bye, cat,’ he said to Horatio, and went away, letting his breath out in a sigh of relief as he went.

Kylie was still in the bakery so I leaned on the counter, looking with satisfaction at my denuded shelves. Just enough bread left for the afternoon tea crowd and the Soup Run. And today had brought a reconciliation with Daniel and the invention of a truly new muffin. I felt we should celebrate.

But before I could decide on a suitable celebration, I noticed that the newspaper lay on my counter. Another company crash had made the front page—one of those pyramid ones, where the main losers aren’t the expensive executives with their huge houses carefully stashed away in their wife’s name, but the small investors, the people with less than a hundred thousand dollars which was all that they had in the world. Their superannuation payout, a redundancy package, even a mortgage on their house—now all gone with the wind, on fact-finding trips to Bangkok resorts and handmade leather suitcases. All gone in speculation on the riskiest Silver River Oil Shares, which might return tenfold or nothing at all. Wicked. People talked about getting tough on crime, when what they meant was getting tough on visible street crime, which hurt and damaged a few, whereas these bastards were hurting, ruining, hundreds or thousands of people and when caught would get a few years in a comfortable low security prison, if that. And come out to find their wife’s assets untouched.

The paper was bringing me down—too sad even for a Wednesday—so I folded it up and read my horoscope and the comics. No sense in getting cross about something I couldn’t help. But I really must ring Janet Warren, I thought. I didn’t have any significant portfolio now, I had sunk all my money into Earthly Delights, but not knowing what the editorial was talking about was still slightly annoying me. Anyway, it would be nice to see Janet again. She had many good points, one of which was that she had always detested James. I rang her mobile and got Janet right away, which always amazed me.

‘Janet, it’s Corinna.’

‘Back from the bread!’ she said. She was always good at puns. ‘How are you?’

‘I’m well, my business is flourishing, and I’d like to catch up with you.’

‘Tonight? Only time I have, I’m flying to Singapore tomorrow.’

‘All right, anywhere suit you?’

‘How about your place? Mine is all packed up. You’re lucky you caught me, I’m going to be away six months. Mel is going with me and I was going to be alone tonight—she’s gone to say farewell to the girls.’

I gave her the address and hung up. She sounded exactly like she always had. Upbeat, confident, together. Of course, I always thought that being a lesbian gave one the freedom to deal with men on non-sexual terms and a clear-eyed view of their failings. Far too clear eyed for some of her colleagues, who found her strangely impervious to their practised charm.

I looked down at the horoscope. It said ‘a good day for charming coincidences’ and I laughed.

Kylie came back into the shop. The afternoon tea crowd came in. We sold the rest of the bread and, as an experiment, I put a sign on the remaining chocolate muffins—‘superdelicious orgasmic chocolate muffins $5’—and sold all of them. We were in the chocolate muffin business.

From where I was standing, I could see the bakery reflected in the glass on my Hieronymus Bosch painting ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’. Jason was starting the scrubbing and I thought I would go and help him.

‘How much did the ingredients of your muffin cost?’ I asked him, getting out the mop and bucket.

‘Dollar fifty,’ he said. ‘I know that’s expensive.’

‘No problem, we’ve just sold the rest of them at five dollars each,’ I told him.

‘Ace,’ he said. Then he took the mop out of my hand. “You go and help Daniel,’ he told me. ‘Me and Kyl can close up. She’s even got the hang of the bank deposit.’

Horatio left the shop, which was no fun without devotees in it, and preceded me up the stairs to my apartment, where I had a shower and dressed again, leaving him to catch up on his sleep. I pottered around a bit, making my bed, washing the breakfast dishes, reading the mail—all bills—and then I went out into the street.

Heavenly Pleasures was open. Vivienne was serving in the shop. She pointed to the manufactuary and I went through into that thick, sweet scent. You wouldn’t have to eat in this place. Just breathe deeply.

Daniel, Juliette and George were looking at the surveillance video on a small TV and identifying people. Daniel was amending his notes.

‘I know that’s Mrs Dawson,’ he said. ‘But who’s the man with the eloquent hands?’

‘Uncle Max,’ said Juliette. The silent film showed the man being given tastes of various chocolates before he selected a box from the stack on the display case. ‘He comes in quite a lot. He’s got a sweet tooth.’

‘Who is Uncle Max?’ asked Daniel.

‘He’s our only living relative,’ said Juliette. ‘Our father’s brother.’

‘Corinna thought he was a relative,’ said Daniel. ‘Relatives never pay.’

Juliette laughed uneasily. ‘No, he never pays. But he was helpful when we had all that trouble about the lease last year. It’s a forty-year lease and they wanted to cut it short. He went and talked to the landlord of the building for us and he extended the decision on the lease for another twelve months. Uncle Max knows lots of people.’

‘Is he a lawyer?’

‘No, he isn’t anything, I don’t think. I never heard he ever had a job. He’s always been just Max. He calls himself a gentleman of leisure. He was kind to us when we were children. He used to throw marvellous birthday parties, with magic and clowns and jelly cake. And balloon animals.’ It sounded like those parties had been the high point of Juliette’s childhood. ‘Our father was a very dedicated man, you see, always at the shop, and mother was, well, a bit sour, to tell you the truth. Max always said she should have married him instead.’ She laughed again. On the screen, Uncle Max bowed elaborately.

‘And this old lady?’

‘Comes in every week. Or used to. I haven’t seen her this week.’

‘What about the guys in the overalls?’

‘Don’t know them, they look like tradesmen.’

‘So they do. And the old gentleman?’

‘Henry,’ said Juliette. ‘He used to flirt with Selima. Perfectly nicely,’ she added.

‘And—do you see someone outside the shop?’ Daniel froze the image. Selima was putting out her hand to touch the window. Another hand met hers, on the outside. A slim Asian man in a suit.

‘I never noticed him,’ said Juliette. George shrugged.

‘Now can we get on with the sweets?’ he demanded. Politeness, I observed, had not been amongst George’s acquired skills. But it was hard to look away from him, even so.

‘Juliette, would you mind if I had a word with George?’ asked Daniel, and Juliette, glancing back doubtfully, went out.

‘Do you know why I am asking all these questions, George?’ asked Daniel.

‘Yeah, you want to find out who’s sabotaging the sweets.’

‘And to do that I have to understand how this shop works,’ said Daniel. ‘You’ve been holding out on me, George, and I don’t like that.’

I slipped out of my chair and planted myself against the back door, in case George might intend to flee that way. He was looking hunted. But if he ran into the shop, he would have to explain why he was running. He glared at me. I smiled at him. Daniel drew his attention by slamming his hand, palm down, on the table. George jumped. All the beauty of his face had leached away.

‘You know something, and you’re going to tell me, right now,’ said Daniel very quietly.

‘All right!’ said George. ‘I know about that dude. The chink. Came by every day. Selima was stuck on him.’

‘What else?’ Daniel’s face might have been carved out of marble.

‘She saw him at lunch. When she went out.’

‘Did anyone else know?’

‘No,’ said George.

‘And what did you do with your knowledge of her secret?’

‘Me?’ asked George. ‘Nothing. I didn’t want her. I’ve got …’

‘You’ve got?’ pressed Daniel.

‘Plans,’ said George, and sneered. ‘I got my plans. She’s not too bad, even though she’s older than me.’

‘Juliette or Vivienne?’ asked Daniel. I contained my shocked gasp.

‘Juliette’s all right,’ said George brutally. ‘But Viv knows how to make sweets.’

Daniel lifted his hand and George cringed. That did my heart good.

‘If you’ve lied to me,’ said Daniel coldly, ‘I shall tell Del Pandamus. And I shall tell Yai Yai. And your life won’t be worth living,’ he concluded. ‘I’ve finished with you. Come on, Corinna, let’s get some fresh air.’

‘It is rather stifling in here,’ I said.

Daniel packed the tapes into his satchel and we got out into the street.

‘Phew!’ he said.

‘The little monster!’ I cried.

‘A fine specimen of what they used to call a cad,’ said Daniel. ‘But I don’t think he’s ruining the chocolates. Now I need to go and talk to Jon and Kepler.’

‘Why?’ I asked, almost running to keep up. Everyone has longer legs than I do.‘Because that Chinese boy has turned up at one pm on every tape,’ he said, ‘and I want to catch him tomorrow. He must work in the city. He’s wearing a suit. And if ever there were star-crossed lovers, it would be a respectable Chinese boy and a traditional Turkish girl.’

‘If he doesn’t turn up?’

‘Then he knows that Selima is missing. I don’t think we’ll be able to find him otherwise. The city is full of well-dressed Asian youths. Are you coming with me?’

‘I am,’ I said. ‘Then I am hoping to decoy you to the roof by luring you with gin and tonic.’

‘A wonderful idea,’ he said.

Jon answered the door. 6A has a mosaic of a rather contented Neptune, crowned with seaweed and pearls, leaning back in his chariot and ogling a bosomy blue lady who is probably meant to be Thetis.