Trick or Treat Read Online Free PDF Page A

accompany our German food.
    Uncle Solly was right. His potato salad was creamy with just the right amount of fresh dill, his green salad with the thousand island dressing was delicious, and his sausages did make a good meal. Our constraint vanished when Horatio, whom Daniel had been ignoring while he asked politely, grabbed a piece of bratwurst which Daniel was using to emphasise a point about the war in the Middle East and took it under the table where he could be alone with it.
    We laughed as though George had never appeared in our lives and ate more sausage and drank more wine. Then we went to bed, to make love slowly and sleep sweetly, until the alarm shattered the peace and it was four in the morning again.
    I woke more abruptly than usual and listened, once I had thumped the alarm into silence. If I had been a cat, I would have said that my whiskers were tingling. Something in the world was subtly wrong, and I did not like it. But I heard nothing and a search of the apartment revealed nothing amiss, if one did not count a starving tabby who was about to expire of inanition unless that milk which I had taken out of the fridge was for him, in which case he could hang on for a few minutes longer. I left him with a bowlful and tried the door and the balcony French windows but everything was locked up tight, just as I had left it the night before. Daniel was sleeping as though stunned, and he had Israeli-army trained reflexes. I was just nervous, that’s all. As any woman would be whose livelihood was threatened by one rival and whose relationship was threatened by another, and who had probably eaten too much weisswurst the night before.
    Shaking my head, I made coffee, drank it, toasted the leftover rye bread and ate it with slightly failed microwaved blood orange marmalade. Then I dressed in my tracksuit and carried the next cup of coffee down into the bakery.
    My apprentice, Jason, now lives in one of the upstairs flats, so he always gets to work late. The principle is the same everywhere: children who live across the road from the school are always late at first, as are housemaids who live in the hotel or conductors who sleep on the train. It’s a passing thing until you work out that even if you are on the spot, you need at least ten minutes to find your glasses or keys or have a quick last minute pee, and still descend the stairs on time. I was letting this go for a few weeks. Jason wasn’t used to having a permanent home. After that, he was going to refine his last second arrivals to last minute arrivals or I would start docking his pay. I could easily do this by cutting off his credit at Cafe Delicious, run by the Pandamus family of happy Hellenes and his primary source of nutriments.
    I dead-heated Jason. I heard the outer door clang open as my foot touched the bottom step. Jason flung himself inside and dragged on his baker’s overalls, ramming the cap down on his curls, flipping switches so that the machines rumbled into life and trying to look like he had been in the bakery for an hour, whiling away the time by reading cookery books and waiting for his boss to rise from her couch. It wasn’t a bad imitation and I let him get away with it.
    ‘Good morning, Jason. Better open that new sack of rye flour, we’ve got a big order for rye bread. Also, you promised chocolate orgasm muffins today, have we got enough chocolate?’
    ‘Yep,’ said Jason, all snap and polish. ‘Checked it yesterday. And the new packet of caraway seeds.’
    ‘Number of vermin removed?’ I asked, as he gathered up the dead mice from their designated place and bunged them in the bin. The Mouse Police were enthusiastic hunters, bless them. They were sitting at attention before a small scene of rodent massacre, tails twitching in anticipation of breakfast.
    ‘Five mice, no rats, and a bloody big spider,’ reported Jason. The lid of the bin clanged. I heard the rattle of dry cat food hitting the Mouse Police ration tins. ‘Cat food