Cat In A Golden Garland

Hie thyself, not to a nunnery or a monastery, but to a public library.

Haven owed to rare Ben Franklin, a free retreat to which Emma Lazarus's poor, homeless and huddled tempest-tossed immigrants could turn in illiterate masses yearning to breathe free, to read all about it. In due time they did, unto the Washington Star and the National Enquirer.

Now, it was time that Temple caught up on her reading.

The cab dropped her off right in front of the place. (A Christmas miracle.)

Surely the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue resided eternally in some national racial-memory data bank.

Temple had seen these ranks of serious gray stone steps, with the gigantic and lordly lions on either side, in magazines, books and probably cyberspace. But here and now, for Christmas, they wore bow ties! Red bow ties. If only Midnight Louie could see them now!

Perhaps he would be less uppity about the simple red velvet collar Temple had bought with the holidays in mind.

Of course, the library lions' red bow ties were affixed to the bottoms of huge Christmas wreaths. The entire arrangement gave their fiercely feline meins (manes?) a humorous, holiday air, like seeing Charlton Heston wearing a beanie with a propeller on top.

Temple tripped up the stairs (in the light, airy sense of the verb, not as in tangling in her own feet) and entered a large interior as substantial as she had imagined--light gray limestone, marble and granite combining into a basso choir of stones and surfaces. She chose to walk up the wide staircase suitable for the entrance of a Cleopatra instead of taking the discreet elevator tucked down a corridor.

On the third floor, wood was added to the architectural orchestration, shining, smooth wood, a choir of coloratura sopranos in counterpoint to the solid stone basses of the building's ribs.

A mural-swathed rotunda awaited outside the book section. Temple gravitated to the Public Catalog Room. She was a member of the public. She had a cat, and perhaps even a log, if her diary counted.

First she had to scour the catalog. She discovered that the New York Public Library computerized catalog was called CATNYR a good sign. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my. The subject matter of the Vietnam War scattered far and wide, and she wanted more recent summaries, summations written in the distant third person, overviews that might serve as a map.

Finally, after whole quarter hours of grazing, Temple brought her blue and white call slips to the reference desk.

Now the stern, substantial environment went to war with itself. She was to hie to the South Hall Main Reading Room to wait for her number to appear on a lighted board.

Was this hypertext heaven, or automated hell? She felt as if she were in an intellectual cafeteria, a fast-food-for-the-mind McDonald's. Except that the ceilings were so soaring she thought of cathedrals and shrines and the magical, mystical elevations of the Himalayas. Was anything as satisfying as knowledge? Maybe chocolate. And (shhhh, this is a library) sex with the proper not-stranger.

The Delivery Desk brought her babies to her with twenty-first-century efficiency. Temple finally settled down at a mundane table with her books and notes. She was trying to absorb ugliness in the midst of beauty. She read about officer fraggings and the freak-show talents of Vietnamese prostitutes and the treatment of napalm bums. She read about pot and Pol Pot, and how the world had delved into an adolescent self-mutilating phase before she could speak or walk. She read about CIA schemes and Asian immigrant dreams and an endless cycle of cynicism and self-indulgence and sin in Saigon and San Francisco.

All of which led to motives for murder. Two themes struck her innocent post-sixties mind: the Vietnam War's unprecedented divisive dissension at home: flag-burners versus flag-wavers, American against American, citizen against soldier, and how that ended in veterans coming home to be reviled, rather than honored. The Gulf War, comparatively brief as it was, hadn't been like that, though veteran charges of exposure to chemical weaponry were eerily similar in both wars, a PR ballet of accusation, denial, suspicion and investigation.

The other thing that struck her was drugs, how pervasive they were both at home and abroad, a unifying factor among protesters and protested, both the nihilist's and the idealist's painkiller of preference. Drugs that made dealing death bearable, drugs that made fighting death something one could deal with day after day.

Everyone worried about kids using drugs, in her own generation and the ones before and after it, but she had never seen anything like the drug-nirvana of that part of the sixties that she had lived as an infant, toddler and child.

People--young adults--who had lived through that intense period, that paroxysm of flirtation and fatal engagement with death and drugs, here and abroad, could be capable of anything. Any time. Any where.

Chapter 32

Christmas Party

"I don't know what to say," Matt's mother said in the car on the way to Bo and Mary Margaret's house in the suburbs.

"Now, or later?"

Matt had left the slushy freeway at the proper exit and now drove carefully through the early-dim, snow-packed streets. His mother's older model Honda Civic might be as unpredictable as she.

"Are you going to tell them?" she asked.

"Unless you want to do it."

"Do they have to know?"

"No, but I have to tell them."

"They really were proud of you."

"And won't be any more, because I'm not a priest anymore? How have I changed? Really?"

"Oh, Matt." Like a lot of women, she thought that sufficed.

"Oh, Mother."

"When did it become so terrible?"

"When having a baby was a price a woman paid. And only a woman. You tell me."

"If I'd given you up, we wouldn't have this agony."

"Maybe. Maybe not. I've counseled adoptive children who were sexually abused in their new homes."

"Oh, God! I didn't think it could be worse."

"It can. It is. We really didn't have it that bad; you're right about that, if I put it in context. But I can't put it in context when it's a secret. Secrets kill. They kill love, and hope, and family unity. That's why victims of sexual abuse are advised to admit the abuse, to name the abuser. Frankness frees. Secrets imprison."

"If you say so."

His mother had withdrawn to that inner world that was defined by her own worries and shrunken sense of self-worth. Matt sighed as he drove, wearing the brandy velvet blazer under his sheepskin jacket. It felt tight and confining, unlike the casual clothes he wore in Las Vegas.

Cold climates encouraged confinement and withdrawal. He ached for the wide-open warmth of Sin City. For snow-clear streets, and sun-god days. For neon nights. For Temple and Electra and the Circle Ritz. For Midnight Louie. For Bennie and Sheila. Even for George and Verle. But he was with his mother, and he ached most of all for her.

Thinking of the presents wrapped and tucked into a shopping bag in the backseat gave him colder feet than the poor heat circulation this old car could manage. Thinking of telling the extended family about his new status brought the cold to the level of his heart. This was the most difficult thing he had ever done, except for leaving the priesthood.

"The young people nowadays," his mother said, as if answering his unsaid thought, "don't go into the religious life like they used to. Now the church recruits old, used-up people like me; widows and widowers, people whose children are gone, who can become lay assistants."

"Wouldn't it be simpler to just let women be priests? They're eager to do it, like all of those excluded from something for centuries."

"Women priests? I don't know if women . . ."

"Mom, you are one. You ought to know."

"I've never liked being one. It's brought nothing but heartache. You can hunt Cliff and track him down. What can I do for revenge?

I never want to see him again. I never wanted to hear of him again. Your salvation comes at my cost."

"Your solution is self-abrogating avoidance."

"Your solution is confrontation and violence, just as his was."

"There must be a middle ground."

"It isn't here, in Chicago, at Bo and Mary Margaret's house."

He was silent for a bit. "I think I remember the way. That's pretty remarkable. Maybe what I should do is just enjoy myself. Celebrate Christmas. Would that make you happy?"

"Oh, yes, Matt. No more pain and accusation. I've had enough to last a lifetime."

And it had, Matt thought.

The Belofski house was bigger, higher, peakier than Matt's mother's old southside place in town, which had been bought with the secret wages of sin and guilt. Unshuttered windows brimmed with light and shadow figures moving on the accidental stage of a well-illuminated house on a dark December evening.

The broad walks had been scraped clean to the concrete. Matt helped his mother navigate the frost-slicked path, but she didn't really need assistance in her loafer shoes. He carried the shopping bag overflowing with presents: hers for her family, his for her.

Moving from the ear-crisping cold outside onto the steamy front porch and then through the thronging main rooms felt like a spiritual journey, each step meditated upon many times before being taken in real life.

Matt smelled cinnamon and apples, strongly spiced sausage, beer and eggnog.

The Christmas tree, seven feet tall, commandeered a hall corner. Bo came to collect their coats, then directed Matt and his mother into the living room.

They had just passed under the oaken arch when Krys materialized before them like a rather large elf in a short red velvet skirt, a black leather vest dangling hardware, a white blouse dripping ruffles and the cross earring, among others much less refined. Tonight her lips were painted purple to match her nails.

"Goodness, Krystyna!" Mira Devine said. "You've grown so much this last year; you've grown right out of that skirt."

"No, ma'am, I haven't." Krys grinned and pointed up at the center of the archway.

Matt turned to bump into a cluster of white berries hanging there. No way, he thought. Not with the family politics here tonight. He was a walking catalyst for a lot of people's unacknowledged crises; he understood that.

Bo came back, jovial as a jelly-bellied Santa, his face florid. He clapped Matt on the brandy velvet shoulder and drew him away from the two women. "Let me introduce you around, cousin. Lots of folks here haven't seen you since you were a little shaver or your . .. ah, induction."

"Fine. But don't introduce me as Father anything. I've left the priesthood."

Bo froze in amazement. "You didn't say that at the airport."

"It didn't seem the right time."

"What'll I say here, like to relatives and neighbors?"

"Say I'm your cousin, Mira's boy. Matt Devine."

"They know what you were."

"I want them to know what I am."

"What is that now, if you're not a priest anymore?"

"I'm a hot-line counselor. A mostly honest man. A good neighbor. A bad enemy. A friend. A son. A cousin. A reluctant motorcycle rider. A pretty good martial-arts expert. And, lately, a natty dresser. I could be a ladies' man, but I haven't got the heart for it. Ask your daughter. And I'm a Don Quixote, looking for answers where there are only questions. This family is one of the hideouts."

Bo had paled with every new description on Matt's list. Now he said numbly, "My daughter?"

Matt pointed at the mistletoe drooping from the arch's central post. "She's a great kid. You have to show her that you trust her before she needs to prove to you that you can't. Let her go where she wants to college. She'll learn. That's what it's all about."

"Matt, I ... I don't know what to say."

"Say nothing, then. Just think about it all."

"Jeez. Mary Margaret. . ." Shaking his head, Bo went in search of his better half to share his shock.

Matt retreated to the appetizer table near the fireplace and poured himself a cup of punch. He watched the dynamic of the rooms alter as guest arrived. Couples came in, bundled to the eyeteeth in mufflers and turned-up collars. Coats went upstairs to a bedroom depository. The guests, stripped down to their wannest festive clothes, gravitated to their separate spheres.

Men gathered at the fireplace or the informal bar, talking duck-and deer-hunting, sports and stocks.

Women, dressed in their best and looking their most attractive, clustered around the younger children or hied to the kitchen to "help."

Matt circulated, eavesdropping as only an outsider can. Women discussed recipes and infant care, although a younger cadre gathered in front of the blank TV set and dissected workplace politics with a will. Krys and her age group met in corners to whisper and snicker, unlikely objects gleaming at their ears in symbolic rebellion. He smiled to see Krys sporting his gift cross like it was a tattoo from a punk-rock band.

His mother, he noticed, drifted unnoticed from women's group to women's group. As the only woman among them unaccompanied by a husband, and as once the most beautiful, he could imagine what a threat she had been in her youth. And he had begun to see beauty as a force to be acknowledged, as well as reckoned with. His mother's current drabness, her cultivated invisibility, were the result of decades of abuse, not just from a man named Cliff Effinger, but from her own family and culture and church.

He himself had been inclined to carry on that tradition. And now look at him: tracking a man down on the mean streets of Vegas, flirting with underage semi-cousins in big-city malls, trying to do unto his mother as Temple had done unto him, trying to awaken the sleeping beauty in everyone, including himself, for without self-love, there was only self-hate, and self-hate always looked outward for others to share the burden.

"Matt! I remember you!"

A guy Matt didn't remember had come by, flushed with good cheer and Polish beer.

"Larry. Aunt Marya's boy. Bo said you've rejoined us poor sinners 'washing and sweeping' in this vale of tears, as my four-year-old says. I don't blame you for leaving. The church is pretty messed up these days. I tell you, I'll think twice before I let my little Ashley become an altar girl someday after all the admissions that have come down. No wonder you left."

"Your little Ashley is pretty smart. Washing and sweeping is better than 'wailing and weeping in this vale of tears, 'but its still women's work. Maybe your little Ashley should skip parish work and go straight to seminary after high school. She'll find a lot of women there."

"You're kidding."

"I'm not. Women really want to learn theology. They respect it more because it's been denied them. Maybe they're latecomers, but they're better ministry candidates than most men nowadays."

"But the Pope--"

"There'll be another Pope. And another. In the meantime, I'm really enjoying counseling work."

"Oh, good. You're in California now?"

"Close. Las Vegas."

"Say, what about that place? I'm taking the family there for Easter. I'll look you up. Gotta see that New York-New York skyline hotel. And there's a water park, I'm told by the three water spaniels the fairies switched for my real kids."

"What are you doing?"

"Not much. Wage slave. The economy keeps dipping every time I get a little ahead. Wife's working now. Hey, the kids are almost all in grade school--Catholic grade school--and there isn't enough for her to do at home, now that she's got me and the boys on her chore-doing list." He shrugged. "I thought we'd be traditional, like the old folks." He glanced to Bo and his compatriots across the room. "But things change, huh? Hope you like life in civvies. You know, you could get a job as a model. The family's never been a slouch on good looks, especially the women."

"Thanks. I owe it all to my mother."

"Your mother? Oh, yeah. You're Mira's kid." He nodded. "A nice lady. Kinda quiet."

That was just it. His mother had no reason to be a nice lady. He considered her confession: he had resulted from one night of unconsidered youthful infatuation. Maybe that was more than most people had in their whole lives. Maybe human passion had its own reason and right for being. But was the price always a denial of any passion, then? Or work, for what was right, for each other?

Finally the crowded kitchen countertops were fully loaded, covered with turkey and ham, hot dishes and creamed vegetables (which seemed a contradiction in nutrition), and potatoes of every variety in every form: whipped, mashed, stuffed and sliced.

People shuffled past to fill their plates and settled on any available seat to chow down.

Matt spotted a figure dressed in black like an aging gunfighter, and wasn't surprised when the corner of his eye caught it settling near him, wearing the twin to the formal black suit Matt still kept in his closet at the Circle Ritz.

The old man's eyes were the color of water, faded by age to near translucency, but his handshake was as punishing as ever. Matt recognized that grip as common priestly compensation: an intensity born of little physical contact with others except through these social rituals. Celibacy could be a lonely avocation, spreading beyond the avoidance of one gender to an alienation from everyone.

"Good to see you again, Father Slowik. Do you need anything more? Silverware? Napkins?"

"Only a memory update. But I recall you, Matthias. Quite a squaller at your baptism."

"Maybe I had something to protest."

Father Slowik might be losing his short-term memory, but his instincts were as honed as ever.

"I know you've left, young man. They told me just now. I grieve for you, whatever your reasons. It's hard to get in, hell to get out, and sheer purgatory to have been, and be no more. You haven't left the church, though?"

"Left the church? No. I was released from my vows, that's all."

"That was enough in my day." Father Slowik pushed his ebbing glasses back against the bridge of his nose. "From what I've heard you were a good enough priest, Michael. I hope you'll be a good whatever-else you choose. Your mother's glad to see you, I'm sure."

Matt wasn't sure, but he didn't say that, any more than he would point out the old man's mistake with his name. Matt had switched to coffee, and studied the brown liquid staining the inside of Mary Margaret's best china cups. The old habits had broken down with the old neighborhoods. Bo had married Irish.

"I'd like to visit you at the rectory, Father, before I leave."

"Me? No one wants to see me any more."

"I do. I have some questions about, oh, the old days. You might remember some things. About my . . . origins."

"Old days." He nodded almost happily. "Those I remember, and, believe me, Matthias, skirts were never as short as that, not even in the sixties, and I do remember them quite clearly."

Matt turned to catch Krys watching them. "Short skirts won't destroy the world; shortsightedness might."

"I've got that too. Well, ring me up. I'm almost always there, unless they let me out to give extreme unction. Don't trust me with the words and music any more, boy. Not even at mass."

"After Christmas Day, I will," Matt said. He stood to shake hands with the old man again, despite the risk of instant carpel-tunnel problems.

The priest's stiff, wrinkled hand brushed the forearm of Matt's sleeve. "Nice fabric."

So much nicer than a lifetime sentence of black serge. For a few moments, Matt watched the old man move stiffly from group to group, mangling names and hands, always welcomed but then ignored, like an aging family dog, a black Labrador retriever.

Finally it was time to begin the Christmas Eve present exchange.

Matt found memories of this event as blank as Father Slowik's mental notebook. Had he ever enjoyed Christmases here? He sat quietly on the sidelines as gifts were handed out and exclaimed over.

He and his mother were invisible, mere onlookers to the others' connections and interactions. He felt his anger growing like a cancer. Had his illegitimacy relegated them to the family fringes? He had always blamed Cliff Effinger for everything wrong with their lives, but now he saw a more benign enemy at work. Simple denial. A tacit group resolve to ignore the unsavory facts of Matt's birth that incidentally added up to ignoring Matt and his mother.

Matt vaguely remembered being in this house at Christmas, but the memories weren't vivid, weren't warm. The rage that had refused to tear Effinger limb from limb was building here, on this supposedly safe ground of family. He felt like Samson, eager to pull the pillars down on the Belofskis and Zabinskis and all their houses, not a blinded Samson seeking blind revenge, but a Samson blinded by an ugly truth he suddenly could see.

Then, his own name was called. Startled, he accepted a wrapped package.

Inside were a Chicago-warm muffler and gloves, and a card from Bo and Mary Margaret He nodded his thanks across the room, saw them mellow and beaming. Maybe keeping up traditions was a kind of safety net. Maybe they accepted him and wanted him back. Maybe they'd bought too many muffler/glove sets for too many children.

When his last name was called again, it was for his mother. Matt watched the blouse box pass from hand to hand to her lap. It caused quite a buzz. Apparently, she was seldom in attendance, and seldom remembered.

She opened the box delicately, ribbon and tape dismantled, not torn. When the lid lifted, everyone strained forward to see, even Matt, and he knew what was inside.

The color converted them all on first sight. Women sighed and men nodded. His mother actually held it up to her shoulders and stroked a silky sleeve. But would she ever wear it? There was no question about the earrings, which, being much smaller, were presented unheralded, although Krys hovered to make sure they worked.

"These are ... so expensive," his mother whispered. They lay in one open palm like Christmas candies too decorative to eat.

'Try them on," Krys urged. "I want to see. I helped pick them out.

"Oh, you did?" Mira glanced with open alarm at the pewter implements dangling from Krys's ears, but clipped first one, then the other earring on.

"I'm not used to having something stuck on my ears," she said.

Matt noticed that her every comment was an objection or a subtle criticism. This house reeked with people telling other people what to do, even if the only victim was themselves.

"You'll get used to that," Krys said. "And they look gorgeous with your eyes."

His mother cast those eyes down. Compliments were anathema, and "gorgeous" wasn't in her vocabulary. "Too expensive," she murmured.

But she didn't take them off.

Halfway through the present-opening, the giant box of Ethel M chocolates Matt had brought as a hostess gift was passed to them, half of the brown frilled paper cups empty. Too expensive, Matt thought ironically, mentally toting up his holiday spending spree.

His gift from his mother arrived in a medium-size jewelry box. Inside was a dress watch, department-store designer brand, with a sleek, fashionably unreadable dial and a black leather band.

"You talk about 'too expensive.' "His gentle chiding made her smile at their role reversal. Matt swiftly exchanged the new watch for the clunky twenty-dollar model he wore. "Looks much better than my old one. Thanks, Mom."

He put his arm around her shoulder and kissed her cheek. She smiled as shyly as a teenager, or as a teenager should in olden days, before purple lipstick made shy smiles an impossibility.

Matt wondered if the watch represented Christmases past, and time lost, or Christmases future and time yet to be squandered or savored.

Somehow, with the present-passing ritual, the news about him had become common species too. More people approached him, fascinated as much by what he would do now as by what he had done before.

Matt recognized so many facial types, even in the younger generation. His old neighborhood was inbred, static. But it wasn't just that he was of the rare younger generation who had become a priest, he realized, he was of interest because he had left. Left the neighborhood, the city, the state. And now he had left again, left the priesthood.

Then people he had almost forgotten, puzzle people whose adult faces hid traces of the familiar childish ones, came up to shake his hand and remind him who they were and who he had been in their memories and to ask how he was doing now.

"Phone counseling, huh? Must be tense work, especially in Las Vegas," said an overweight woman with coarse gray hair corkscrewing to her shoulders.

He was horrified to recall her as a grade-school classmate. Time was already sorting people into parodies of their childhood selves, and his generation was only in their early thirties.

"Like endless confessions," she went on, "but with more interesting sins than in your ordinary parish."

"Sins are the same everywhere. What's your line?" Matt had recognized the hearty, no-nonsense manner of a working woman.

"I got a law degree after the kids were in school, and now I run a low-cost legal aid pool for anybody that really needs it--the poor, the handicapped, single mothers, anybody the system is used to stomping all over."

"Now you're the one with a hundred stories to tell, I bet."

"Sure can tell you live in Las Vegas, Matt, but I won't take that bet."

He was amazed by how they remembered him from school: good on the swim team, always studious. Several said they had been surprised when he entered the seminary. They sounded so benign in retrospect, his school days. These people had seen the surface he had wanted them to see. He had always been successful at misrepresenting himself, even to himself.

When the crowd had dwindled to immediate family, Matt checked his new watch, surprised to find it was after eleven.

Mary Margaret, Bo's Irish wife, paused in picking up empty dessert plates and glasses. "We always go to midnight mass at St. Stan's. Want to join us?"

He turned to consult his mother, but she wasn't in the chair she had occupied all evening.

"Kitchen." Mary Margaret's graying head nodded in that direction.

Matt grabbed some empty plates--he knew from several rectory housekeepers that a man entering a women-at-work zone had better bear a token gesture of pitching in--and wended through disarranged chairs to the house's crisis center.

Now the countertops were piled with the disorderly remains of the feast; there was hardly a place to put more plates. The women's duties were winding down; dishes would be done in the morning. So they clustered around the battered kitchen table. Matt was surprised to see his mother there, the new blue topaz earrings twinkling like the exotic eyes of some hidden persona just behind her everyday self.

They were talking hairstyles.

Matt interrupted long enough to find out if she wanted to attend midnight mass, while the other women gazed on him with the fond, interrupted attention he was used to evoking from older women.

She did, and he left, bemused. He had a feeling that she had never been swept into female holiday circles before, that she had been like him, the utter outsider.

Returning to the now-deserted living room, he was waylaid by a purple-lipped vixen.

"You've been ducking that archway all night," she said.

"Darn right. Did you trap anybody else?"

"Only Uncle Stach. This family may eat like the Russian army, but otherwise it's very repressed."

"Maybe that's why everybody eats like the Russian army. Thanks for your help at the mall. Your gift ideas were a hit."

"I had no idea your mother was so . . . shy."

It wasn't shyness, but he saw no need to correct her. She herself was shy, under that brash exterior. Everybody developed a second skin in high school, to keep the first one from being flayed to shreds, he decided.

"You going to come back?" she asked, leaning against the heavy oaken post at the end of the archway.

"My mother lives here."

"She's always lived here, and you didn't come back."

"I will more often now that I have a personal shopper here."

"Hey, that's what I'm good at. I guess I should major in nursing, or something that pays well, but I'd really like to do art."

"Do both."

"That's a tough load."

"It'll pay off when you graduate and can go either way. The time to bear down is when you're young and have the energy. It doesn't last forever"

"Does never knowing what you should do last forever?"

He laughed. "Yeah. That does. Forever."

"I bet this was hard for you. Tonight, I mean."

He nodded. "But easier than I thought. Things we fear are always like that."

"Like the super big roller coaster at a theme park?"

"Roller coasters aren't on my Ten Worst Things list."

"No, you're all grown-up."

She sounded despondent, so mired in Jekyll/Hyde indecision about who she was and what everybody else was. Matt felt a wave of tenderness for her, for himself too, when he had been there.

He put his hands on her arms and kissed the black lips that wanted so desperately to he recognized without being betrayed. It was a high school kiss, sweet and utterly unsexual on his part, just deeply affectionate.

Her eyes were shining. She was bedazzled by her own power in making what she wanted to happen more than by the kiss. An older guy had recognized her. A man who wasn't supposed to like girls that much.

"Can I write you?" The words blurted out, unpremeditated.

He hesitated, not wanting to turn a fleeting moment into an unhealthy obsession.

"Never mind." Her eyes were shifting away, thinking about becoming ashamed.

Matt hated that look more than anything in the world, his mother's look, which he had grown up with.

"Sure you can write me. I just haven't been at my place long enough to remember the address right off. I live at the Circle Ritz."

"That sounds like a dude ranch."

"It's this wild four-story apartment building with condominiums too. Built in the fifties. Round. There's a wedding chapel out front."

"That is wild."

"That's Las Vegas." He gave her the address. "Don't you want to write this down?"

"I'll remember it." Her eyes were shining again.

The women started drifting in from the kitchen.

Chapter: Letter to Louise; Part 3

Being the Meditations of Midnight Louie in New York City

"I am about to impart to you some priceless wisdom, just in case you are my daughter and could use some guidance. Being priceless, wisdom is no doubt undervalued, but here I go anyway: the best place to be on Christmas Eve, I have discovered, is the kitchen. That is where all the eats are, and where the noise level is the least.

"I have unwittingly spent many a Christmas holiday out of doors, aware only that there were a good many more turkey leavings outside my favorite restaurants during the season to be merry. Also, the handouts came with a tad more mercy, but not noticeably so.

"Now I have seen the light. Or, rather, I have seen lots of lights. It is fitting that I am spending my first indoor Christmas in Manhattan, which becomes an island of illumination for the period. The small twinkling lights Miss Temple Barr adores (perhaps because she is more than somewhat small and twinkling herself) bedeck the city's stern gray-granite face like electrified fleas on a dignified Russian Blue grand champion. (I pity these purebreds; they are never allowed to have any fun. There is something to be said for being relatively worthless in the scheme of things.)

"I understood that humans became merry and bright at such a time, but admit that either quality is in short supply around Miss Kit Carlson's domicile this Yuletide. I should report my progress in investigating murder most foul, in the high-rise atmosphere of a Madison Avenue advertising agency, the very place where I am a VIP (Very Important Pussycat). A man playing Santa Claus (he of the red long Johns and white curly whiskers) became entangled in a length of golden chain while exiting the traditional chimney at the company Christmas party It turns out the Santa who was hung by the chimney with care was an actor-type acquaintance of Miss Kit Carlson.

"So she has decided to move her Christmas Eve party to the day after the holiday in deference to Rudy's death, as he was known to most of her acquaintanceship as well. The festivity will instead be a farewell party for Miss Temple -- for myself and Miss Temple, I might point out, were there anybody sensible to point it out to. By then, Miss Kit says, there may be something to really celebrate, such as Miss Temple's and my elevation to feline spokespersons. Or the solution to Rudy's bizarre death.

"Still, Christmas cannot go unheralded. Food is casual but in ample supply, and often left out on the countertop for a little Midnight noshing. Miss Kit has installed a small fir tree atop a living room table and twined it with fairy lights and other glittery folderol. Certain packages wrapped in gaudy paper and ribbon lie beneath it. I even detect an odor of exotic catnip beneath the pervasive stench of pine tree, but try to ignore it, as surprise seems to be a highly valued commodity at these Christmas festivities. (Although the suspense of Santa never emerging from the chimney was not one of those valued surprises.)

"Needless to say, the spokescat search at said advertising agency has ground to a halt, not only for the holiday itself, but until your old man . . . I mean your elder maybe-relative . . . solves the manner, motive and mastermind of Rudy's death, which of course is murder in the first degree. So there is no rest for the hunter of wickedness, not even on Christmas Eve. I suspect I will join my ladies in lounging around and sighing, although I will not be joining them on their Christmas Day outing to St. Patrick's Cathedral, where something known as high mass is to be celebrated.

"I am not even Catholic,'" hear Miss Temple protest lukewarmly.

"'You never know,' Miss Kit responds with that mock severity she is so good at. 'And it never hurts to be well rounded, just in case. Besides, sectarian religious concerns aside, it is glorious theater, and the music makes the latest Andrew Lloyd Webber Broadway smash seem modest.'

"So I will be alone by the phone on Christmas Day, at least for a while, twiddling my shivs while waiting impatiently for my gift weed to cure for a few days longer. It seems present-opening is to be delayed by Rudy's death as well. I do not think the dead dude would begrudge me a little holiday nip, given his own lifelong proclivities, but must abide by others' sense of propriety, which is never as liberal as my own. Since I do not drink... wine, I have plenty of time to leave the ladies to their holiday blues and French reds in the living room and retreat to the computer.

"I find myself in a contemplative mood as I face great changes in my lifestyle and the specter of future fame and fortune (though my fortune will be tied up with the affairs of others and certainly cannot be lavished willy-nilly on remote relatives). Perhaps it is time to let bygones be bygones. I see now that my job as house detective at the Crystal Phoenix hotel was a mere stepping stone to greater things, so it is your world now, and welcome to it.

"Now that I have been altered beyond my wildest dreams (and also have seen dozens of human offspring in mass holiday revelry at the advertising agency), I must admit that your headstrong hieing to the veterinarian for spaying was perhaps not a bad decision for a career woman like yourself. From what I hear, you are doing a good job at keeping the ruder elements in line at the Crystal Phoenix. All in all, you are not a bad kit--though by no means mine beyond a shadow of a doubt; I am no deadbeat dad, only cautious -- and in the spirit of this season that seems to mean so much to humans, I offer you an olive branch (or even some of my imported nip, should I ever get it).

"And you could do worse than to consult now and again with your esteemed grand -- er, grand friend, Three O'Clock Louie, who has traveled widely and seen much of the world that even I might be a tad ignorant of.

"So let us hope that Bastet blesses all of catkind this season, every one, and even a few deserving humans.

"I am sending this whole E-mail file to Miss Van Von Rhine's office, trusting that she will see it gets to the proper party. She is pretty smart for a human. I am in such a mood of reconciliation that I even send Chinese New Year greetings to Chef Song, and fond wishes that his koi remain in the best of health until I get back."

Yours in news, nip and nostalgia,

Midnight Louie, Esq.

Chapter 33

"O Night Devine . . ."

Two in the morning was a strange time of day to be out with your mother.

At 2 A.M., mothers were usually safe and warm at home, waiting for delinquent kids to show up.

Matt's mother sat beside him in the frosty car interior, waiting for the car to warm up enough to drive. Their ears still rang with the magnificent choir music that had filled St. Stan's to the top of the stained-glass windows. The holiday mass been long and taxing in its way, but inspiring as well. And fighting the cold to get there and back added an element of value that Matt knew he would never find in a Las Vegas church or a warm climate.

Clouds of auto exhaust bounced against the frost-etched windows, while the cold motor throbbed as if its combustible heart would break from the strain of starting in below-zero weather.

Mart grabbed the windshield scraper, left the warm spot his body heat had thawed onto the driver's seal and got out.

Snow squeaked under his shoes as he circled the Civic, scraping portholes of view into all the windows. Matt only remembered now that he hated that particular squeak more than anything; even more than chalk squealing across a blackboard. At least he'd never be near a blackboard again.

Cold chased him back into the car, then made itself at home. Matt's teeth were chattering, but he didn't dare turn on the fan yet. It would still waft in the arctic cold.

The car ties squeaked on the snow too, as they fought free of the side ruts and spun onto the glazed central skating rink of hard-packed snow called a street.

For the first couple of minutes, neither one spoke. Too cold to take large gulps of air into your mouth. The house was only ten minutes away, at normal speed.

Finally his mother broke the silence.

"We can have some hot cocoa when we get home."

After the rich mix of foods at the Belofsky buffet table in the suburbs, something sticky-sweet, milky and marshmallow-topped was the last thing Matt craved. But he didn't say that.

"Sounds good," he said instead.

Silence.

"The choir was lovely tonight."

"Everything was perfect."

Another silence, the silence of socially exhausted people. His mother apparently felt obligated to make small talk.

"I don't know what Bo's middle girl is thinking of."

"Krys?"

"Those clothes! So short and dark and strange. Purple nails and mouth. And those awful earrings, if you can call them that. She looks as if a porcupine had thrown its quills at her. Wearing a cross, of all things."

"All the young girls wear that stuff. And worse."

"Not in my day. I don't understand why you encourage it."

"I don't encourage it. I tolerate it. There's a difference."

"You tolerate too much."

"Are we still talking about Krys, or about something else?"

His mother sighed. Sighs were potent maternal weapons, mute accusations of offspring misbehavior.

"The girl obviously has a crush on you, and you seem to encourage it. You may have left the priesthood, but it's still scandalizing. To the others, I mean.

"Mom, girls got crushes on me when I was in the priesthood. It goes with the territory. Only now I know how to handle it. I used to take it too seriously, like you do. Most teenage girls develop crushes on older unattainable men. To Krys, I'm still pretty unattainable. I used to blame the phenomenon on my looks, but this time I realized that something more serious and less shallow was going on. Krys wants to be an artist; she wants to do something different from the rest of her family, maybe go to college out of town. Heresy for a Belofsky. She is desperately seeking a role model, someone in the family who did something different, and then I showed up, the prodigal ex-priest. Maybe a crush on me far away in Las Vegas will keep her safe from the all-too-attainable guys who can short-circuit her plans to become somebody."

"There are lots of women she could use as a role model."

"In the family? Who?"

"I work."

"At something you love?"

"I work for money, not love. I always have. Even that was looked down on, that I wasn't home all the time. For you."

"Who was to look down on you? Your family? If you hadn't worked, we wouldn't have eaten. Not with Cliff spending all his money on gambling."

Bars of light from the overhead lamps rhythmically rolled up the hood and across the windshield, bathing them in fleeting stripes of light. In one of those rolling lightning slices, Matt saw his mother's expression. Bitter.

By criticizing Krys's blithe immaturity, she castigated herself by proxy. She'd been Krys's age when she'd become pregnant. She'd had one crush, a lightning strike that had been both quick and fatal to those involved.

"I used to draw," she said finally. "In school. I won some prizes."

Matt realized then that he had pasted her bitter expression on his own preconceptions. Krys's burgeoning sexuality didn't bother his mother as much as the younger woman's possibilities, her independence, her choice.

"Sounds like artistic talent runs in the family," Matt said casually. Except for me. I just doodle when I'm on the phone."

"A man in Cincinnati is famous for his doodles. Makes good money for them."

"No, that's not going to be my line, I'm afraid. You'll have to take it up again if you want an artist in the family."

"Do you... really 'blame' things on your looks?"

"Why?"

"I did too."

Matt was silent, navigating the narrow and rutted alley that ran behind his mother's house, passing wooden garages with double sets of sagging single doors that looked exactly like hers, looking for a landmark that would say they had arrived.

He finally spotted the bare snowball bush by the garbage can and turned into the short driveway. The headlights dramatized a blank pale yellow canvas of peeling paint.

Matt got out to pull the door open. Snowflakes falling again danced in the headlights. Like celestial dandruff, it punctuated his coat sleeves with dozens of white periods.

For the next few minutes they emptied the car of presents and leftovers, then navigated the foot-wide path through two feet of piled snow to the back door.

Inside, the house was dark and silent, except for the occasional ping of a radiator. Then the glaring kitchen light snapped on, and by the time the food was put away, the idea of making or consuming anything else had died.

"You know," Matt said as they moved into the living room, his mother going ahead to turn lights on, he following to turn them off behind them, "I've never seen any photos of you when you were young."

"There aren't many." She paused to jerk on the front doorknob to make sure the door was locked, then headed for the back hall to the bedrooms.

"But there are some."

She looked back over one shoulder, the earrings he had given her glistening like her eye whites. The overhead hall light made her face a black-and-white patchwork of planes and angles.

"Some. I can look them up in the morning, if you like."

He nodded and followed her down the hall.

Chapter 34

Back to Base Camp

By Thursday, the day after Christmas, Temple had developed a battle plan.

It was based on hidden suspicions, deception and treachery, but it fit the situation pretty well.

First, she called Colby, Janos and Renaldi and got Kendall on the phone.

"Temple! I'm so glad you called." Kendall sounded feverish.

"There was such a blowup after you left before Christmas. The partners were going at it hammer and tong. They were even throwing their awards at each other.

"But I have a new theory. This is a second-generation scheme. It's Carl. Carlo. My rat ex-husband. He needs money. Daddy hasn't got it. Or ... is that my daddy? No! I'm getting confused. It's so awful here. Everybody hates everybody else. I guess they always did. Can you come over, Temple? It's a real dogfight."

Tempe was not surprised.

Kit watched her bundle up with suspicion, especially when Temple hitched on Louie and his CatAboard with the grim intent of an Old West gunslinger tying Oil the double holster of Colt revolvers.

"Temple, first you go to the library, which almost no one in New York does at Christmastime, except kids, and now you're going back to the weird advertising agency on Madison Avenue. I feel terrible that I've got an appointment and can't go with you. Do you need my Mace spray?"

"I need a flak jacket, Kit. Or maybe that should be 'flack' jacket, since I am one. But I have finally seen the light, and it isn't pretty."

"Temple." Kit hurled herself again the front door, like a protester. "Is this about poor Rudy?"

"It was never about poor Rudy. It was about rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief."

"You need backup," Kit said, squinting without her glasses.

"I have Midnight Louie."

"He's no protection."

"His absence is, for your computer. With you gone, and me gone, think what he might get up to."

"I can't be sure the little devil deleted half of my new novel. Thank God I have a backup on diskette."

"You can't be sure he didn't. Besides, the Shadow knows."

"The Shadow. He's black all right, but what can a cat know?"

"What the nose God gave him can smell. You can call Lieutenant Hansen, if you want."

"I'll call the paramedics--for myself!--if you keep me in the dark like this."

"I don't think anyone's dangerous any more, Kit. Rudy's death was a . . . flashback. The whole thing's falling apart anyway. I just want to be there when a very sad person learns the bitter truth."

"Cut the cliches, okay? Truth is always bitter. Listen. Rudy wouldn't want anyone else hurt, honest. Don't take this further than Rudy would."

"Kit." Temple encased her aunt's hands in her nylon-and-down mittens. "Rudy wouldn't be dead if he had been willing to take this as far as it would go. He died because he really didn't mean any harm. And that's such a dangerous position to take, with the guilty."

Kit put her head in her hands. "What will I tell your mother if anything horrible happens?"

"Tell her I had a good time in New York."

Temple yanked the door open and headed for the elevator.

Louie sneezed once, then growled.

"Keep that sniffer in prime working order," Temple instructed him. "I saw what you did at Rudy's place, and I'm counting on you, and on old habits dying hard."

Temple hailed and got the first cab that she spotted. Kit was right. It was all attitude. She'd found that out when she had tried to out-macho Victor Janos.

She got to Madison Avenue in mid-afternoon. No cat people were scheduled. That whole matter would be settled with phone calls, telegrams and letters after the New Year. Would she and Louie win the endorsement sweepstakes? Temple could not care less. She was really angry. They were lying about Vietnam before she was born, and they were lying about it right now at Colby, Janos and Renaldi.

A few snowflakes were flying, but not enough to cling. The street people huddled over heating grates, trying to be invisible when the police were forced to come and kick them away from the only outside warmth the city of New York offered.

Temple paid the cabbie and walked into the bustling lobby, heading straight for the correct elevator bank. She couldn't believe she had been so ignorant just a week ago.

The elevators were as handsome as ever, but reminded her of escorts whose true selves have shown through the facades, who pale by comparison with reality, who show the skull beneath the skin.

She could see the entire steel spine of the building as the elevator shot her up its empty shaft to the thirty-second floor. Another skeleton was ghosting down the hall on clattering anklebones. Just out of sight.

Louie lifted his nose in the empty hall, and sniffed, nostrils and whiskers trembling.

"Good boy."

The outer office was deserted, the receptionist surprised to see her. "We're about to close; we normally close early all through the holidays, " she said, her jet-black braids glossed into the sheen of India ink. Her nails were shiny, and painted the color of ripe pomegranate.

Temple wondered if they celebrated the Asian New Year of Tet

"You must he here to see Miss Kendall Renaldi--"

"No, I'm here to see Mister Brent Colby."

The receptionist's kamikaze nails hit buttons. Temple was instructed to sit for a while, but was finally buzzed in.

She and Louie passed the almost-closed door of Kendall's office. They headed straight for the corner office, where Brent Colby worked.

You could think Colby, Janos and Renaldi's name was decided according to alphabetical order. Or you could wonder about just what was the underlying order.

"Miss Barr."

He stood when she entered the room, as a gentleman should, but he seemed oddly detached.

"I don't understand why you're here. The trial... that's what we call this audition period, not that it's a dog obedience show. Sorry, Louie. A cat obedience show, although that seems a contradiction in terms. Not as if the trials, er, auditions, are over."

"I'm sorry too." Temple sat on a cushy visitors' chair and unfastened Louie. "I may have given you the wrong impression. This visit has nothing to do with the cat-product auditions."

"No?" He leaned back in his swivel chair, tilted his head, waited.

"I'm afraid it's about Kendall."

"My daughter?"

"She has been distraught about what almost happened to you."

"No, no! She's been distraught over what she thought might happen to me."

"I see. Anyway, I didn't want to leave you out."

"Leave me out?"

"Kendall was excited about my role as advisor to a Las Vegas hotel on an upgraded facility. She trotted me around to meet the partners and make my pitch. But she neglected to include you."

"Daughters. They think you're God, and they sometimes forget you for that very reason. So you wish to make up for her daughterly oversight. Commendable."

"No. In my own interest. My employers would be impressed if I were able to intrigue a major New York advertising agency with their account."

"One hand washes the other."

"Always."

He nodded. "You were right to persist and come to me. Have you seen... the others?"

"Oh, yes. Kendall saw to that."

"Kendall?" He looked disturbed now.

"She is such an adoring daughter, and so fearful that your trusted partners wanted to kill you. She wanted me to see if either of them were unduly greedy over the Las Vegas account."

His steepled fingers had stopped tapping one another. "And were they?"

"Not in my opinion. I'm afraid your daughter has been seriously disturbed by the recent events here. I wanted to warn you, so you could attend to her."

"Are you saying Kendall is crazy?"

"Well, she's been kept in the dark; what else is she to think?"

"Kept in the dark? How?"

"Vietnam," Temple mentioned, bending over to release Louie. "Do you mind? He's getting restless."

"I'm getting restless. You're saying that Kendall isn't. . . normal. Now you're bringing up Vietnam, which was a long time ago."

"Not in your generation's lifetime. Did you know that the murdered Santa Claus was a Vietnam vet?"

"Murdered? I can't agree to that. I still think that some bit of carelessness ... he must have brought in that chain as a sound effect, only it backfired on him."

"First he came to see you. The day Louie and I arrived."

"It's amazing, Miss Barr. The way you keep referring to that cat. Almost as if he were human. Certainly it's a good recommendation for you to get the job. Yes, I think I can strongly advise Allpetco to take on you and your stunningly smart Louie."

"How wonderful. Were you as enthusiastic when you hired Rudy?"

"Rudy?"

"Oh, I'm sorry. That was the name of the Santa Claus."

"I don't remember."

"No. No more than you would recall a certain Air America flight out of South Vietnam during the war. I found an obscure story at the public library. 'Vietnam mystery.' The plane loaded with illegal drugs, that were diverted to China. Wasn't Rudy the pilot.'"

"Rudy? I don't know any Rudy. As for this Air America--"

"An infamous arm of the CIA, according to library sources, which no one would question if it carried contraband. Drugs. Marijuana? A feeble base for a killing, both financial and--years later--physical, but you were all there: I've seen the memorabilia on all your office walls and can picture the rest. The two lowly but heroic draftees, the nobody pilot and the CIA man who wanted to make a financial killing out of Vietnam, to start a business his blue-blooded father abhorred. The library had an article on your Yale-man father, but you weren't like him. You wanted to be an advertising man. A hypester. A manufacturer of smoke and mirrors. The other two men you blackmailed to go along. They became your partners. The third man you lost track of, a pot-smoking zoned-out pilot who hardly knew where he was, much less what he was doing.

"I saw it on Janos's and Renaldi's walls: the Golden Hemp Award. No real trophy, except from the pot-smoking brotherhood. You are the only partner who keeps no war memorabilia on your walls. You didn't want to advertise it, savvy spin-master that you always were. You were a shadow-player. But you played crooked and had to consort with the underlings."

"Who told you this? Who betrayed me? Janos? He always agonized over the deaths."

"No," said Temple. "Your daughter did, because she was searching so frantically for whoever would want to harm her beloved father. Oh!" Temple lifted a leg. "That Louie has snagged my hose. I think he's found something, under your desk."

She bent down and rose with her thumb and forefinger pinched around a tissue paper. "Oh, look, Louie! It's a nasty brown cigarette butt. Do you suppose that it has anything to do with poor Rudy, who could never outgrow sixties habits? Do you suppose the police department will be able to find just this mixture of weed and paper in Rudy's place? No, it's not catnip, old fellow, it's cannabis, as in I'd walk a mile for a Camel.' Would your war partners walk a mile for you, Mister Colby?"

Temple felt them gathering over her shoulder, drawn here by the rising voices. Janos and Renaldi, not innocents, but not murderers three decades after an old war.

"Poor Rudy. You never told your partners he had come here. Your deskside chats were uneasy explorations. You read blackmail into everything he left unsaid. But he never meant to tell, Mr. Colby. He never even remembered that there was anything fishy about one particular CIA drug run, I would bet. Only you remembered."

Colby watched Temple loosen the tissue, and the marijuana butt rolled onto his pristine desk surface like a rat turd.

Behind her, Janos spoke, and he spoke to her.

"You can do point for me anytime. You and that roach-sniffin', rat-rousin' cat of yours."

Chapter 35

The Last Twist of Hemp

"I ... I don't know what to say."

Colby looked beseechingly from one partner to the other, but they were looking at Temple.

"So Rudy came here," Renaldi asked, "to interview for a Santa Claus job and that started it all?"

Temple eyed her prey, still genteelly sweating behind his desk.

"You recognized Rudy," she said, "and Rudy recognized you."

"I . . . suppose so."

"You talked about old times."

"Rudy talked about old times. I've never been sentimental."

"Rudy wasn't sentimental, he just didn't get it. Easy-going Rudy, who paid the biggest price, just didn't get it. That's why he had been the perfect pawn."

Janos cut in without asking to dance. "I always figured he'd been paid off."

Temple shook her head. "Only in weed, right, Mr. Colby? Feed his head and he was happy. Story of his life. Story of his death."

"Listen!" Colby half-rose from his desk. "I didn't kill him."

"Are you sure you want to say that?" Temple was stern, and the partners kept quiet. They recognized a prosecuting attorney when they heard one.

Colby collapsed back in his chair. "I . . . don't know what you mean. Rudy was affable, as always. Grayer, thinner, but affable. He seemed to regard the coincidence as some kind of reunion."

"A reunion. What did he say?"

"Only how amazing it was that we should hook up like this, after all these years. How he couldn't wait to see Vic and Tony again. Imagine us three, big shots on Madison Avenue, and he was just an itinerant Santa Claus."

"You thought he was blackmailing you, didn't you?"

"Blackmailing?"

"All those genial comments, loaded with unspoken darts. Rudy tell you where he lived? Down in the Village in a rent-controlled railroad flat."

"He ... mentioned it. Him downtown. Us uptown. Him still dealing in rats and roaches. Us dealing in the varieties of both that wore Brooks Brothers suits."

"So you hired him on the sly, outside the agency."

Colby nodded unhappily. "That way I could pay him more."

"Aw, how magnanimous." Janos had grown quiet with rage. "How much more, Brent?"

"A couple thou."

"A couple thou." Janos's voice dripped sarcasm. "We each cleared a couple hundred thou from the drug deal and that was big-time lettuce in the sixties. Why were Tony and me honored with partner-ships, and not Rudy?"

"Maybe you had better memories," Temple said. "Maybe you'd have been harder to get rid of."

Renaldi nodded, and beneath the stainless steel exterior Temple glimpsed yesterday's pig-iron. "We weren't nobody's stooges, Vic and me. Not in 'Nam, not anywhere."

"So you killed the poor asshole." Janos had taken on the role of prosecuting attorney now. "You booby-trapped the chimney, like the gook tunnels that undermined the whole damn country. You set it up so he'd hang himself. Out of sight, out of mind."

Colby was silent, and sweating profusely.

"It's worse than that." Temple stroked Louie, who sat on her lap with a prickly suggestion of slightly protruded claws. His entire body was thrumming, not with a purr, but with tension, as if he understood the seriousness of this confrontation. "After his death, you destroyed his ID. Erased him. If my aunt hadn't known Rudy, he'd still be listed as missing in action.

"The innocent died for the wrong reasons, and the innocent killed for the wrong reasons," she went on. "Just like in 'Nam. Just like everywhere else."

"No!" Colby burst out, half-standing. "I plead guilty, not innocent. I was . . . afraid. I had so much to lose now. Everything I had built."

"We built it too," Renaldi put in. "Just because you were CIA didn't mean you were the mastermind. You were just ambitious beyond the pipe-dreams of us grunts, so we followed you."

"We could have as easily fragged you," Janos put in. "Maybe we should have. This whole . . . scam ... up here on the thirty-second floor isn't worth Rudy's life. He was innocent, man, you know? He was the most innocent guy among us. We owed him. We owed him more than a rat-hole in the Village."

"I've seen Rudy's rat-hole in the Village," Temple said. "Louie has too. Pretty grim. Even so, he played Santa Claus for a living. Ho-ho-hoed at children for hours. He never meant to blackmail anybody, he was just glad to run into old war buddies. Wasn't he, Mister Colby?"

Colby put his face in his hands. "No," he said. "He had to have had an angle. Everybody has an angle."

"You killed him for nothing'." Janos's rage was white-hot by now.

"No," Colby murmured to his own sweaty palms.

"No." Temple agreed with him. "Mister Colby meant to pay him off, to buy him off. If two thousand didn't do it, twenty would. Maybe even the original two hundred thousand. But he didn't get a chance. Neither did Rudy."

"What are you savin'?" Now Renaldi was hot. "That our trusted partner isn't a murderer? One of us other guys is? Do you really think we'd turn in another grunt over money? Rudy was a pothead from Day One. We figured Rudy had been offered the partnership gig, but we weren't surprised when he didn't go for it."

"But the deal kept you quiet, didn't it?" Temple asked.

"Sure." Janos was calmer, more dangerous. "That's why we were brought in. We knew too much. But... this don't make sense. Colby here put up with our rough edges, babied us along, found places where we could contribute to the firm in our own ways. Why would he suddenly turn to cold-blooded murder after all these years? Especially when Rudy, poor bastard, could have been bought off with a song? Or, as you say, a lunch with war buddies?"

Temple looked at Brent Colby, Jr., who, after a long, focused silence, finally parted his fingers and lifted reddened eyes to face the room.

He shook his head.

Temple had mercy on him. "I don't think he did turn to murder. But someone overheard Rudy talking to him and jumped to the wrong conclusion. Assumed the worst. Blackmail. Someone else killed Rudy so Colby and the firm wouldn't suffer."

"Not me!" Janos was truculent. "By God, not me."

"Not me," Renaldi was as fast to swear. "We would have known Rudy. We would have known he was harmless, but, of course, we hadn't screwed him out of a share all those years ago, so we wouldn't have that guilt on our backs."

"That guilt is nothing like Mr. Colby will have to bear now." Temple warned. "Let the punishment fit the crime, old as it was. It does."

"What punishment?" Janos, confused, was now ready to turn his wrath on the messenger, Temple. "This stuff is pretty tough to prove. All based on supposition."

"Maybe you three could tough it out, like you did in the old days. But I doubt the killer can. The killer is cracking already, madly trying to point even an amateur like me in the wrong direction. It was a spur-of-the-moment murder, a desperate move. I'm sure the police will find supporting evidence once they know where to look."

"Where? Not here! You finally admitted yourself that Colby's clear." Renaldi was fighting back too, for the cause, for the ill-gotten gains, for the firm. They were still the three musketeers from the sixties.

" A' Colby's clear. And 'a' Renaldi's clear, as is 'a' Janos. But Kendall Colby Renaldi is not clear, and I doubt she ever will be."

"Kendall?" Renaldi sounded incredulous, even contemptuous.

"Are you surprised a woman masterminded this? Don't be. Kendall was a rock-climber in college. She could have rigged the trap easily."

"But she was devastated when the body was found and everyone assumed the victim was her father," Janos put in eagerly, too stunned to stay furious.

Temple nodded "She acted out the fears that drove her to destroy Rudy. Those same fears made it easy to point hysterically in directions away from her father when she was aghast to realize that the very man she had killed to protect might be suspected of killing Rudy himself."

"But--" Colby had found his voice again, and a measure of authority. "It was all a mistake, a misapprehension, if it happened the way you said. Janos is right. It's going to be hard to prove."

"Maybe. But this roach under your desk isn't the only piece of evidence Midnight Louie found."

"What else is there?" Colby sounded defiant.

"Something he found on the floor of the chimney and batted around. I picked it up, but I didn't realize what it was until yesterday when I dug it out and turned it over: a broken-off fingernail, a ragged, pretty big hunk. That's one thing I noticed about you gentlemen after the death: your fingernails. None were missing, and rigging that step and chain in the narrow dark chimney would probably have shown on the culprit's hands. When my aunt and I went to the ME's office to identify Rudy's body, none of his nails were broken, not that he had much fingernail to lose; they were chewed down.

"Kendall's fingernails, though, are perfect salon models, exquisite. It's her trademark."

"So?" Janos was unimpressed. "She's always beautifully groomed. So what?"

"Yes, but women get to don false claws. I keep seeing her that night, so distraught, her fingers tightly curled over each other, only the thumbs visible. I took it for a sign of extreme stress, and it was, but it was also a form of concealment until she could repair the broken nail, which has traces of the same bronze enamel she wears."

"But Kendall--" Renaldi was still unconvinced. "Granted the death-trap was a simple rigging job. A loosened rung on the way up, the chain anchored to the top brace. Rudy could have slipped and the noose could have failed to have tightened on his neck. He could have grabbed it to save himself. The whole scheme might have failed."

"But it didn't. If it had, the chain could have been dismissed as it almost was: a jingly prop someone had added to the traditional routine without mentioning it to anybody. A miss wouldn't have been significant enough to investigate."

"And then?"

"I don't know. I don't know if Kendall would have tried again. Maybe the delay would have encouraged her to talk to her father."

Janos sighed and Renaldi echoed him, but Renaldi spoke first. "I think Kendall should talk to her father now."

Colby didn't disagree, but he glared at his two partners. "She's been taking her divorce from Carl hard, feeling she let down the firm and the family. I guess I'm all the family she's got left, and when she thought I was in trouble ... if my daughter's involvement in this comes out, so will our self-serving drug deal in Vietnam."

"That was only money, Brent, money made off a killing ground." Janos shook his head. "This is murder."

"Rudy didn't have much of a life."

"It was his life," Renaldi said. "You know, Brent, it's pretty ironic. We all killed in Vietnam, and tried not to put faces on the dead. You did your share, and I bet we could all kill again, given extreme enough circumstances, but I never thought a kid of ours would ever grow up to do the same thing. I thought that's what we all went through 'Nam for . . . for the future. Nothing we bought, or stole or made of ourselves afterwards is worth protecting the past at the cost of one goddamn more death."

And that was that.

They rose and went into the hall, the men's feet dragging as they neared the ajar door of Kendall's office. They could hear her on the phone, her voice animated with the unflagging energy of an advertising account exec making a call.

Temple began hooking up the CatAboard for Louie.

"Aren't you coming in?" Renaldi asked.

She shook her head. "Too many people for a small office. Besides, it's not my job; this is private firm and family business."

Chapter 36

Louie's Last Laugh

Well, I never expected to be renowned for my superior snout.

That is such a canine characteristic.

Nevertheless, I am carried in triumph back to Miss Kit Carlson's digs, where she is much gratified to see Miss Temple and me return no worse for wear.

Rudy is revenged, and Colby, Janos and Renaldi are facing a troublesome reorganization.

Unless, as Miss Temple tells her aunt, the surviving partners can conceal the ancient skullduggery.

"Poor Kendall," Miss Temple sighs.

"Poor Rudy," sighs Miss Kit.

They are a devoted pair of sighers. I wish we sniffers would get more credit.

"How did Louie know that there was a roach ... I mean an unfortunate remnant of an old habit . . . under Brent Colby's desk?"

Miss Kit Carlson asks in all innocence. "I did not think that cats were sensitive to that sort of thing."

"Oh," says Miss Temple in reply. "Cats are sensitive to all sorts of things. I noticed that Louie was well aware of roaches of both the insect and vegetable variety when we visited Rudy's apartment."

"You did not say anything."

"I did not wish to embarrass you about the circumstances of your friend's lifestyle," Miss Temple concedes.

Miss Kit nods with heavy head. "You are right. Especially in regard to Midnight Louie's inestimable nose. Cats are indeed sensitive to all sorts of things."

"Except the human heart." Miss Temple sighs again. "I can solve everyone else's problems, except my own."

Well, I would cry buckets over that, but I do not see how nailing another murderer is going to have a quelling effect on my Miss Temple's love life. Mr. Max Kinsella is still in the same business, so to speak, and Mr. Matt Devine is hardly one to criticize her penchant for crime and punishment, being off on peculiar missions of his own half the time.

"Well," says Miss Kit, with great energy. "We girls will have a fine time on our own celebrating the coming New Year at my party tomorrow night and toasting Louie and your forthcoming media career--"

"You really think we have a chance in hell of snagging the Allpetco assignment after our role in exposing the advertising agency by solving the Santa slaying?"

"Well," Miss Kit begins gamely, "It does establish that you both have exceptional crime-solving tendencies ... oh, Temple!"

"Oh, Kit! What?"

Miss Kit Carlson is laughing so hard she is sliding to the floor. Again. I look around for wine bottles, but none are visible. "I know I should be sober and saddened into the New Year, but. . . what you just said!"

"What did I just say? Tell me!"

"Santa . . . slaying."

"So?"

"Santa sleigh-ing."

"Is nothing sacred?" Miss Temple demands as she comprehends Miss Kit's meaning and begins laughing hysterically and sliding to the floor as well. I sense that I am in for one of those girl-talk evenings again.

Is nothing sacred? Obviously not. How sad to see the state into which two grown single women can descend when the only male influence on the premises is feline. I plan an early retirement to the bedroom and the word processor. Hey! Maybe I can write a happy ending to Miss Temple's love life.

Chapter 37

Merry Maximus Christmas

"A mouse must be stirring," Temple called to Kit as she raced for the apartment door. "No one else would still be out and about this soon after Christmas."

She swung the door open wide, infected by the season and perhaps a bit too won over by the idea that New York City was a village.

What was out and about wasn't a mouse; it was a man. And not just any man, like a milkman or a rent collector or an IRS agent; it was Max Kinsella.

Temple felt her face freeze in astonishment. With a red muffler, a fake -fur-lined brown duster, arms full of packages and melting snowflakes dewing his sleek dark hair, Max looked like a recent escapee from Minnesota--or a Dickens tale--not from Las Vegas.

"Ma-ax--" Before Temple's inflection had committed to ending in cither an exclamation point or a question mark, Max had swept her into the warmth within on an invisible current of icy outdoor air. Temple shivered as she was enveloped in coat, packages and a cold-lipped kiss of greeting that quickly turned subtropical.

She might have stayed in this cozy, tented atmosphere indefinitely, except that a parrot high in a balmy palm tree atop snowcapped Mount Everest was screaming for attention.

"Temple!" Kit's voice was a delighted screech. She loved surprises, and this looked like a good one. "You're being assaulted by outerwear on my very doorstep. Desist, you rogue London Fog!"

Max's encumbered arms (Temple still in one's custody) spread wide in a show of innocence and greeting. "Merry Christmas! You must be the cousin Temple is visiting."

"Flatterer," Temple growled beneath her breath, trying to elbow out from under cover of the voluminous coat.

Max's smile never faltered as Kit closed in to inspect him.

"You must be--" Of course she knew; she had glimpsed him and Matt Devine at the Crystal Phoenix casino, and an ex-actress never forgot an interesting face, let alone two.

"A bottle of Dom Perignon for the charming hostess." From his bottomless folds of coat Max produced the usual oversize bowling-pin shape wrapped in silver foil and tied with scarlet ribbon.

"The Mystifying Max," Kit pronounced after unwrapping the gift and eyeing the bottle's ornate label.

The label must have impressed her, for she found her widest, warmest smile and added her blessing to the obvious.

"Come in, and don't import any more of that icebox air than necessary." She peered at Temple still lurking in custody with intent to dither. "So nice of you to keep my niece warm on the threshold. If you close the door behind you, I believe you will find her nicely thawed."

Temple glared at Kit. "Don't promise anything you can't deliver personally."

But her aunt was already floating down the long gallery, bearing the champagne to the kitchen. "She'll hang up your coat."

Temple had already sprung open the almost-hidden door in the foyer wall.

"White cliffs of Dover, with a secret door. Interesting." Max, eyeing the lofty rooms, shrugged off the heavy coat.

" 'Cousin.' " Temple shook her head.

"Never hurts to ingratiate oneself with the relatives. Especially when one comes bearing immoral propositions."

"They look like ordinary Christmas presents to me."

"Very ordinary. No magic tonight."

"You? Resist the casual sleight of hand? Hah. What are you doing here, anyway?"

"It's Christmas. We're both out of town. I thought a formal call wouldn't be out of order."

"I meant in New York. I know how you found me here. You asked Electra where I was staying."

"My trade secrets--useless." He sobered. "I had business. . ."

Temple, silent, stretched to push the bulky coat onto the lone unoccupied wooden hanger. Max, who was good about helping with small struggles like that, didn't.

He did lean a hand on the closet wall, penning Temple into a tete-a-tete. "Almost New Year's. I think it's time we discussed the future."

She backed into the huddled coats.

"I don't."

"Champagne-cracker needed!" Kit's impressive stage projection called from the living room. "Raffles, are you available?"

Max, unlike himself, snapped to attention to obey the call of masculine social duty, leaving Temple stuffing his coattails into the clustered mass of dangling outerwear.

"I hate winter," she muttered to the abused coats, punching them into place.

By the time she emerged, red-faced but calm, Kit and Max were in the living room holding flutes of champagne in which bubbles twined upward like crystal strands of DNA.

A lone flute sat atop the Lucite coffee table for Temple to claim.

Midnight Louie reclined on the broad windowsill to the left, artistically arranged between two pots of pink poinsettias. On a side table, Kit's small gilded Christmas tree twinkled against the silent night's billions and billions of kilowatts making a private light show of upper Manhattan.

"Killer location." Max turned to lift his untouched glass to Temple's. "To the New Year."

Temple stood numbly by as he and Kit chimed glass rims in turn.

At last she understood what had seemed different about Max, what had made him an almost-stranger, and had turned her strangely shy--and even abrupt.

He wasn't wearing his evergreen contact lenses. His eves were paler, and their true color, which she had never glimpsed before, blue.

She turned to confirm this astounding fact with another witness to the preblue Max: Midnight Louie, who was tonguing a forefoot while giving Max an evil eye of authentic emerald-green. He looked as dubious as she felt, but then, he always did. That "Oh, yeah? You and what other Doberman?" look was a patented feline expression donned with the first fading of kittenish baby-blue eyes. Cats learned early, it seemed, that the world is mean and man uncouth.

"Temple? How do you like it?"

Her aunt's question reminded Temple to sip the champagne. Her opinion was pointless. She couldn't tell a bottle of Andre's from a Dom Perignon. "Fine."

Max had sat on the low sofa at Kit's invitation, legs akimbo. His usual black had brightened for the holidays: he wore a cable-knit burgundy sweater over a black silk turtleneck and slacks. Temple smiled at this somber concession to the holidays and took the last seat left on the sofa, beside Max.

Kit's white walls, golden floors and black leather sofa felt harsh and coldly modern for the first time. The bare windows seemed as bleak as a factory's, and the light extravaganza beyond them a cheap trick, a chintzy set, a mere advertisement for the real New York-New York: the hotel and casino about to open January 3 in Las Vegas.

Temple had no reason to find Max's natural eye color unsettling, or significant, except that it was the sole thing about himself he had always controlled religiously. The one small secret that had seemed the biggest betrayal of all. The theatrical green eyes were a key part of his philosophy of "loud" being a better disguise than naked. Why had he discarded the contact lenses now? More disguise? Or was he making a statement, and, if so, what and to whom?

Ah, Max.' Thy name is eternal question mark.

"I want to borrow Temple," Max told Kit. He sounded as if he were talking in a rain barrel. He turned and took Temple's hand, still addressing Kit. "Do you have anything planned that I'd interfere with?"

"Only a cocktail party tomorrow night at six. They're in again, even among the younger set. A farewell party for Temple. You must come."

"Of course. But this evening--?"

"Temple is as free as a rolling stone."

"Dinner?" he asked Temple directly at last. "I know a little restaurant.

Max always knew a little restaurant and now Temple knew why. Undiscovered, out-of-the-way places were the natural haunts of secret agents, counterspies and moonlighting magicians.

She nodded. Her right hand was wanning nicely in his, and, in her left hand, the champagne tasted like ginger ale. She set it down on the thick plastic tabletop.

"Come on, I'll get you a good warm coat." Kit rose, took Temple's free hand and led the way to her bedroom, whispering all the way.

"Why on earth are you acting like a zombie? If that had appeared on my doorstep as a post-Christmas surprise, I'd be doing the mazurka on the ice rink at Rockefeller Center. As a matter of fact, he just did. Heck, I'll go out to dinner with him if you won't."

"There are buried issues," Temple said cautiously.

"There are always buried issues. But not between Christmas and New Year's, sweetie pie. Please! Perk up. Smile. It can't hurt that much to look at him. Try not to be crabby to the man, at least. It looks too eager."

"Too eager?"

"Here's my best holiday coat." Kit wrapped a circle of sheared acrylic around Temple like a mother dressing a child for the skating rink.

"Kit! It's red! I never wear red. My hair--"

" 'Tis the season to never say never. And wear these fluffy little earmuffs. Won't hide your hair. Nothing is less romantic than hidden hair. You have gloves, don't you? In that awful quilted down thing in the closet?"

"I didn't have much notice to buy anything warm, and the down thing isn't that bad."

These gloves go with the earmuffs. See. The same white fake fur on the cuffs. Don't you look adorable. Little bunny rabbit! Too bad you have nothing but this monster tote bag to drag around. No matter. Have a great time. Don't worry about keeping me up too late. I'll have Monsieur Louie to keep me warm. Ooh-la-la!"

"Kit! I'll put the damn gloves on myself, thank you."

"Good. Snapping out of your malaise, I see. Be crabby with auntie. See if I care. But be kind to Max."

"I am always kind to animals."

"Grrrr. Off you go."

Kit propelled her back to the main room where Max was waiting at the prow of the view, blending into the night's black velvet backdrop, his back to them.

"Here she is. I'll get your coat."

He turned at Kit's voice, his expression still abstracted from thought. "I left a few things under the tree. House gifts."

"We'll open them tomorrow night." Kit shepherded her charges to the foyer, then whisked Max's heavy coat from the closet as if it were made of thistledown and held it up for him like a very short butler.

He dipped deeply at the knees to accept her unneeded assistance and straightened so quickly the coat whirled around him like a cape. "Shall we go?" he asked Temple, his eyes still blue.

So they went into the cold, snowy night. Temple was glad she was so bundled up that virtually nothing--and no one--could get to her. Not even a magician.

Nobody on wheels in New York City had ever noticed her when she stood six feet out in the slushy winter street and beckoned frantically for a cab. Max hesitated near the curb and lifted one arm like a rather lazy conductor. Six cabs topped by unlit signs sped toward them like a racing field of greyhounds exclusively clad in yellow.

Somehow one always sank down into New York City cabs. Down into a slick worn seating surface polished by rear ends covered in Givenchy fur coats and polyester pants and worn blue jeans and designer leather. Long-gone occupants had left an aura of stale, backstage fumes behind them, along with a melange of Brut and Poison and Opium and the sweetly nauseating hint of the occasional double-malt scotch vomit.

Max didn't bother with gloves, even in winter, yet his hands never cooled. Maybe he didn't want to hamper the tools of his trade, those magically nimble fingers. Now they clasped Temple's icy, gloved hand.

"There's no place like New York," he said. "The energy, the crowds and the rush. It's the toughest audience on the planet."

"I didn't think you were performing anymore."

He leaned back in the lumpy seat. "I'm always performing. You know that."

"Yes, and you were very good tonight with Aunt Kit. She practically pushed me out the door into your clutches."

The mention was mother to the reality. Max's clutches tightened around her.

"Temple, don't pout. It doesn't become you. I've told you more about myself than anyone outside the network knows."

"Max, I'm afraid! Of what happened to you, of what could happen to you. I've never known a professional wire-walker before."

"Yes you have. We all are that at times. Molina, the deceptively ditsy Madame Electra, your friend the good father, even Midnight Louie."

"Deceptively--? The good father--? Max, what have you done now? That was privileged information."

"Nothing's privileged, only private for a time. I had him checked out. Needed to know."

"That's despicable. Unfair. Vile. I mean it!"

"That's my job, Temple, and part of my job is to protect you."

"Not at other people's cost."

"Always at other people's cost. If finding out happens to explain just why you're so protective of his past, why you can swear that 'nothing' happened, so much the better for me."

"Max. I don't know what to say."

"Don't say anything for a while. I came to New York to see some people, find out if there was any realistic possibility of my withdrawing safely."

"From your . . . situation?"

He nodded, glancing at the cab driver beyond the battered grille. "We'll talk about it later. For now, let's just enjoy the ride."

A more unenjoyable ride she could not imagine, but Max pulled her against him and she couldn't resist the pull he exercised on her whether it was literal or not.

Temple surrendered to jostling along in the back of the fender-brushing, barreling cab, her head on Max's chest, even through the earmuffs hearing the thrum of his heart. She thought about them, Max in winter, with no hat, no gloves and an open coat. Herself, booted and bundled and gloved and earmuffed, and still cold.

She examined the chasm between them, more than style or temperament, and tried to gauge whether its depth and width had changed now that the burden of Matt Devine's priestly past was not hers alone. Through no fault of her own. Mea culpa. Mea Maxima culpa. Look at how she mixed metaphors now: Max was showing up in the fragments of religious ritual she had learned from Matt. Max the Inevitable. Matt the . . . Unforgettable.

Enjoy, Max had said, and she finally decided, quite deliberately, to do just that.

Temple smiled as her head bounced on the hard-muscled pillow of Max. Now getting overheated by outerwear in inner angst, she was also getting sleepy, very, very sleepy. That old Max magic was at it again.

The cab had stopped and Max had paid before she stirred to her surroundings.

"I said enjoy." Max was teasing her. "I meant relax. I didn't mean go comatose. Some date. Come on, sleepyhead."

She didn't bother telling him that this was the first time she had felt utterly secure in New York, but let him pull her across the cracked leather seat and out onto the sidewalk. There, the night cold revived her like refrigerated smelling salts.

The restaurant was a picture window of plate glass with one word scrawled across it that she couldn't read. Max swept her in a narrow door beside the window into a broom closet of a place crammed with tables and chairs knocking legs. Temple had a sense of being yet lower in Greenwich Village, maybe in some discreetly hidden yuppie soup kitchen.

No reservations; the aproned waiter led them to a tiny table for two slammed against the wall between thronging tables for six, both full of animated, preppie diners.

"Drink?" asked the waiter without preamble.

Temple thought she should be careful not to order anything too heady. But she wanted something warming, and exotic. She almost wished this were a touristy Oriental place, where she could order a Tokyo Typhoon with three kinds of rum and two kinds of liqueur, which came flaming with skewered fruit and a combustible paper umbrella.

"Gin, scotch, vodka, wine or beer," the waiter clarified with impatience.

Max was waiting for her.

"A martini," she decided. The quintessential New York drink. "With an onion."

"No onions," the waiter pronounced with the same absolute indifference at being found lacking that all service people in New York share.

Temple shrugged good-naturedly and waited to see what exotica Max would come up with.

"Scotch on the rocks." He was not asked if he preferred something other than the house brand. Temple was sure that he did.

They had to hunch across the tiny table to hear each other because of the racket. The slight wooden chairs threatened to tip over under the burden of their heavy outerwear. Despite the crowding and the din of many voices percolating into the air, the restaurant seemed chilly. They kept their coats over their shoulders. Besides, where would they have put them?

Temple gazed around happily. She had expected a slick, upscale restaurant with "decor" and a wine list and "nouveau" plates of next-to-nothing in the food department. This was infinitely better. It felt like ducking into a neighborhood restaurant on Lyndale Avenue in Minneapolis, where they had met and courted, if people still called it that.

Their drinks only came after the table of six near them got their entrees, and then the waiter lingered, pencil poised, hungry for their food order. And there was a wine list. A wrinkled half-page listing surprisingly pricey by-the-glass offerings.

Temple asked for the shrimp alia something or other, a pasta dish.

Max requested the chicken Parmesan and was firmly told that he would much prefer something other of the chef's invention. He shrugged.

"That's so rude," Temple whispered across the foot of space separating them. "Who does he think he Is?"

"The chef."

"The chef?"

"And the owner."

"He wait! tables and tool

"Not simultaneously."

"And for this we have to pay eight dollars for a glass of wine we never heard of before?"

"It's sure to be excellent."

"Sure!"

Temple toyed with the short stem of her wide mouthed martini glass. The martini glass's very silhouette had been an icon of sophistication since the twenties. A dozen Art Deco graphics featuring its rigorous sculptural form, so geometric, flipped through her mind. And no onion, just the usual salty green olive. New York City, where they seemingly had everything, was the one place where they made a point of not giving it to you.

Max was reading her Midwestern mind, and laughing at her.

"It's called chutzpah, and it was invented here."

"Like the martini?"

"Not like the martini. Not in a bar. On the street and out the window and up your avenue."

Temple lifted her precariously filled glass in a toast. "To the unexpected joys of not getting what you want."

"I hope not," Max muttered into his scotch.

"Is it safe to tell me what kind of a deal you worked out with the network? Gosh, it sounds like you toil for CBS or something."

"Not a bad cover. Well, I saw Uncle Walter," he added with elaborate caution.

"The gray eminence."

"Retired, but still active. Our founder. He was quite sympathetic to my ultimate goal, and thought it possible, even though it's never been done before."

"Leaving the network."

"Not alive."

Temple winced and chugalugged gin as smooth as French perfume, and about as pungent. "God, Max--You're not kidding, are you?"

His eyes glittered across the table, bright as swords. "I never kid. We agree that the only way is to clear up these casino deaths. Mine, and your friend's."

"He's got a name."

"Matt. Sort of flat and predictable, isn't it?"

"Rather like Michael. An archangel. I'd think you two would have something in common."

"Yes, but she's a bone of contention. A rag and a bone to pick and a hank of red hair of contention."

"I hate that expression."

"Good. Now we're off the subject of the late Father Devine."

"He's not dead."

"To hear you tell it, he is, or weren't you being absolutely frank?"

"I was, and he isn't. Can we talk about. . . Uncle?" She giggled, thanks to the martini. "Remember that old show that's on in reruns, like Mary Tyler Moore. The Man from Uncle. That's what we can call you. The man from Uncle Walter."

"Glad you're enjoying yourself." Max picked up the table knife, which was oddly oversize, like all the silverware. He cut along the padded white tablecloth, a phantom incision with a dull blade, but precise nevertheless.

"Uncle suggested that it may be necessary to work with... Matt. No full disclosure, of course. And he agreed that you will have to be kept informed, might even turn up something on your own, as a liaison between myself and Matt."

"Me, in the middle? And no full disclosure for me either, right?"

He nodded. "Can't be. Trust me."

"Ah, you must be working for the government, after all. In Max we trust."

His warm fingertips touched her cold ones on the foot of the martini glass. "Look into my eyes. What do you see?"

"They're so different. That color. You don't look like yourself."

"Sometimes the truth is less attractive than the illusion."

"It's not that blue doesn't become you ... it hasn't become you yet. Do you know what I mean?"

His fingers tightened on hers. "That I'm a stranger, again. I'm trying to be as honest as the laws of survival allow me."

"If things are as dire as you say, then you shouldn't have anything to do with me, for my own sake."

"That's true. That's why I want you to keep going to the mat with Father Matt. Get good at self-defense, Temple. Take it seriously. I suggest a pistol range too."

"What do you want? A mini-Molina?"

"I want you as tough on the outside as you are on the inside. If we're to be together, you'll have to be."

"Together?"

"That's another thing I've tried to work out. We can't... live together as we did before, but we can come darn close. I want it back, Temple. I want back everything we had before I had to leave. I'd never had that before, and I don't want to give it up."

She sighed, and gazed at her half-empty martini glass. Or half-full, as the popular philosophy insisted on looking at it. The gin had slightly blurred the edges of her senses and sensibilities. A murmur of voices around, the warmth of the encroaching tables and chairs and sagging coats made Temple feel both oddly safe and oddly removed. Was this Max's immoral proposal? Clandestine cohabitation instead of openly living together, as before? Yet he was offering her more honesty in the truly closed portion of his life and past, where danger intersected desire at a perilous angle.

"I told you I was faithful all the months that I was gone," he said softly. Yet his voice carried all the way to her heart.

"You don't seem to doubt that, and I thank you. But I have to admit that it wasn't as difficult for me to be true as for most men. I've lived whole stretches as celibate as a priest, an honest priest anyway. Too dangerous, for me and for the woman. Why do you think James Bond has his Bond girls, a new one for every novel? They don't last, Temple. And in real life, Bond wouldn't either. And if he did, he wouldn't keep seducing some pathetically gorgeous girl to her inevitable end. When I broke the rules and took you with me to Las Vegas, it was because what happened between us was so true and powerful, I finally couldn't say no. I'm weary of being on the edge alone. I want a partner. I've had it with performing solo. In my magic act, in my life and in my secret profession. You're involved, whether you wish it or not, whether you still love me or not. We might as well make it semiofficial, and fight for what we both want. If we still both want it."

His eyes were searching hers, not the hypnotic green eyes of a cat, but the clear blue eyes he was born with. Changeling, she thought, how will I ever know the real colors of you?

During the silence of that searching moment, the waiter-cum-chef appeared beside Temple, wafting heavy pasta dishes in front of them both. Steam curled up in waves, like heat from a chill wet street. It was a curtain, a tissue of illusion between them, but it would soon cool and dissipate. Did anyone really want to see too clearly?

The magician of the menu announced a roller coaster of Italian syllables, the name of each creation.

Temple sampled her dish, surprised by the perfect yet elusive taste. "And yours?" she asked Max.

"As sublime as he said. Chefs are the most eccentric of geniuses."

"No, just temperamental. We aren't used to that, so we think it's eccentric. Tell me about your life . . . before."

They concentrated on eating, while Max doled out details between bites. It added up to a lifestyle Temple could only imagine.

"The first eight years, when I was young and foolish, it was like living in a computer-game world designed just for me. I was like the Little Prince to them, in peril, but also invaluable. I traveled in Europe, free of charge. My interest in magic was heaven-sent for my new role. I saw and studied with the best magicians the Continent had to offer I traveled off-Continent, eastward. I was taught . . . everything I wanted to know and a great deal that I didn't know enough to want to know."

That was when Temple's expression had grown skeptical.

"Yes, even that. I had my Mata Haris. I was a blank slate, possessed by guilt and vengeance. They shaped me into a perfect weapon."

"Did you kill people?"

"The whole point was to keep people from being killed. I saved hundreds, I know, from bomb plots and hijackings and more personal mayhem. What I learned and passed on might have resulted in people's deaths. But these were people who'd be facing death penalties if they were caught."

"Should you be talking about this here?" The table was so tiny that their faces practically met over their empty plates, but still, Temple thought.

"Too noisy, too small. Besides, I'm wearing a powerful listening device; I'd hear anyone who said anything suspicious, or who was suspiciously quiet. Instead they're all discussing the best preschool in Manhattan and their post-Christmas cruise. Hardly matters of international interest."

"You're wired?"

"I'm used to listening in two directions at once."

"I guess. Tell more about the Mata Haris."

Max couldn't keep from grinning. "Pretty heady for a teenager. It took my mind off my dead cousin and the pretty colleen who had divided us. I had a field day, and then AIDS began creeping in from Africa, and I grew up and discovered that I was a kind of plague carrier myself, and lonely besides. The glamour was gone. I was no longer coddled, but expected to earn back the investment in me. It wasn't a game, after all, but life and death. My life and death too. I was cut off from everything I had known, my family, my country, my culture. I became what was necessary, a magical mystery machine, remote from everything and everybody, playing a role. Those were my monkish years, and a good thing too, or I'd have never passed those Minnesota AIDS tests."

Temple shivered. "What a weird, empty, excessive life."

"They sent me to the U.S. on sabbatical, figuring I was about to crack from the strain. I did, but not in the way they were worried about."

"I was the crack?"

He nodded. "Want dessert?"

"No, I couldn't--"

"We'll share," he decreed.

Max was very good at decreeing, the Little Prince grown up.

The surly chef appeared to collect their plates and promised to return with "some" dessert. Of some sort.

Temple threw up her hands. "I'm beginning to think mystery menus are natural."

"Only in New York. What else do you want to know?"

"More about the Mata Hari types."

"And yet you are the soul of discretion on one lone ex-priest."

"I don't have exotic bedroom habits."

"You remember."

"That is not your problem, Max. My memory."

"No. My problem is what it always was, the moment I decided that the IRA had to pay for my cousin's death." He absently moved the empty drinking glasses aside, though that would no doubt infuriate the waiter/chef. "You know those two thugs who accosted you? The ones whose rap sheets I brought up on the computer at Gandalf's house?"

She nodded.

"I've been trying to track them down. They were known around Vegas, but they haven't been seen since. My out-of-state sources come up blank. I don't think they'll ever hurt anyone again."

"They're dead?"

"And buried out in the Mojave, I'd bet. Whatever is going on in Las Vegas, someone wants a lid kept on it, at any cost. Do you feel safer?"

"That those men are dead?" Temple looked around, but no one was wearing a spy trench coat. "I don't think so. I don't need them dead. I hope you didn't--"

"No. Execution is not my specialty. Information is."

"Max, that's, ummph, so cold."

He nodded.

An entity appeared between them, naming, and landed as softly as a chocolate UFO on the tabletop. Drizzles of white chocolate and raspberry sauce latticed the central core of white-and-dark-chocolate-checkerboarded cheesecake.

"I can't believe," Temple said, "that we're going to eat this exquisite gazebo of chocolate and discuss what we're discussing."

"We're not." Max's clenched fist on the table relaxed suddenly. Temple hadn't noticed it before, but as his fingers parted she spied a small black-velvet box beneath them.

"You said no magic." Her tone was accusatory, but just barely.

"No magic. I had it in my coat pocket and brought it out while you were distracted by Mata Haris."

Well, what woman, no matter how thoroughly modern, no matter how un-Mata Hari-like, is going to ignore a small square jewelry box?

Temple's icy fingers edged it to her side of the tiny table, then she pressed the catch so the lid flipped up.

The lighting in this nameless (to her) restaurant left as much to be desired as the specifics of the menu, if not the skills of the chef.

Still, a ring is a ring and hard to mistake. But it was not just a ring. It was a free-form flow of pink gold guarding a low-profile opal of incredible fire and subtlety. Diamonds stood guard, flashing their own more obvious fire.

"Max, this is exquisite, but what is it?"

He understood that she wasn't asking about the ring's components, but its meaning, to him, to her.

"A friendship ring?" Mischievous. "A pre-engagement ring?" Testing. "A what-the-hell, it's-gorgeous, I'll-grab-it-and-let-the-guy-think-what-he-likes ring?" Cynical. "It's my ring, to you. I hope you like it. I hope you'll wear it. I hope it means we have a future." Bottom line.

Temple lifted it off the small velvet tab that held it upright. Although made like lace molded from hot lava, it was a strong, solid design, broader than she would think a small hand could carry off. The dying light of the cheesecake (or whatever) flambe made it into a glimmering raw vein of ore: fugitive, elusive, like Max himself.

She lifted it between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand. Which finger should she try it on? There was only one; even recognizing that was a commitment she hardly dared think about.

She slid the band over the first knuckle of her third finger, left hand.

It fit like magic. Not too tight or too loose. A Cinderella shoe of a ring. She would expect nothing less from Max. She showed him her hand, which he took, his face a textbook picture of anxious concentration. He hadn't been sure it would fit (though he knew better), he hadn't been sure she would like it (though he hoped so). He certainly hadn't been sure she would wear it.

He glanced up, and in this dim restaurant, his eyes were light, but of no color, as water nullifies the hue of whatever it reflects into a translucent memory.

"Will you come home with me tonight, Temple?"

She never even thought to ask where home was.

Chapter 38

Encore! Encore!

"It reminds me of the Algonquin," she observed as they moved past the cozy lobby to the old-fashioned front desk with its pigeonholes of room keys behind the clerk.

"So would a lot of small hotels of this age in New York," Max said. "This one is quieter than the Algonquin."

He asked for the room key, standing on her left, her bare, beringed hand in his, as it had been since they had left the restaurant in a cab.

Temple's fingers weren't cold any more, heated in the furnace of Max's grasp. He took the room key and its old-fashioned wooden plaque in his left hand as smoothly as if it had been his dominant right; eerily flexible, Max Kinsella, and in moments they were huddled before the gingerbread brass grille of the elevator, waiting for the single car to waft them upward.

"Still cold?" he asked, bending his head so she could hear him.

"Not exactly," Temple answered with admirable understatement.

The elevator grille, and then the doors, opened. A wizened old man in a uniform, a hunchback, a wizard, opened the grille tor them.

Max filled the small elevator like a giant, and their separate and entwining emotions suffused it like an aphrodisiac, Max crushed her into a long, tortuous kiss against the back wall. The old man's neck was too stiff to turn and see, but Temple sensed him smiling into closed wooden doors.

Max thrust a tip into his hand as they left the car. Temple had never heard of anyone doing that, but the operator said "Thank you, sir and missus. Merry Christmas to you too," right out of Dickens's A Christmas Carol.

"Poor man thinks we're married," Temple said, feeling fraudulent and anxious to get reality on record.

"I don't think so."

The room wasn't far down the narrow hall with its ancient brocade-pattern paper in gilded trellises that gave a sense of greater vistas beyond, and yet of confinement.

"I've got to call Kit and tell her I won't be coming back tonight."

"She knows."

"How do you know she knows? Yes, she's pretty hip for an aunt, but she might worry."

"She might worry more if you did go back tonight."

"Oh, really. That sure of yourself?"

"Of me, maybe. Of you, never. Just of her."

"I'll call."

"Fine. Now do you want to come in, or not?"

"Of course I do." Temple turned around when she was in the room. Small, high ceiling, high bed, lots of mahogany furniture from the forties, once splendid, and still pretty spiffy. A narrow door to a closet. A narrow door to a bathroom. And probably a hundred and eighty dollars a night, as a single. Oh! She was an illegal guest. A smuggle-in. A New York wetback.

"Temple. We've been here before. This is nothing new. Calm down."

"Where's the phone?"

He pointed to the bedside table, and to one of the closed doors.

"A phone in the bathroom? In a place this small?"

"They pride themselves on modern conveniences."

"I'll dash in, then."

She dropped her tote bag on the floor, and her coat and earmuffs and gloves, or Kit's rather, and vanished through the indicated door.

All white tile, with that ancient octagon-of-white-tiled floor grouted with black. Twenties. The phone was a wall model. Brand-new. She punched in Kit's number, glancing at her watch. Almost midnight. Going to get the old girl up . . .

It was answered on the first ring. "Hello." Kit, no doubting that husky contralto.

"It's Temple."

"No kidding."

"I just wanted to let you know that I. . . we .. . wouldn't be making it back to your place tonight."

"No kidding."

"Kit! You're my aunt."

"That doesn't make me dumb, does it? Don't answer that."

"Oh, Kit. I... I don't know. I'm not ready ... I just have the dopey clothes I had on at your place and--"

"Tut-tut. Look in that ludicrously large tote bag of yours, Cinderella."

"Tote bag?"

Temple opened the bathroom door an inch. "Max," she said sweetly, "can you just hand in my tote bag? Thank you." Temple grabbed it and kicked the door shut. "What do you mean 'look'?" she demanded of the phone.

"Just look."

Temple pawed through the usual flotsam of her bag and felt something filmy snag on her fingernails. She dredged out a great deal of sheer black chiffon.

"Kit! What is this?"

"An example of a postmenopausal woman's optimism. Don't do anything in it I wouldn't do. I expect a full report whenever. Within the bounds of good taste, and close relatives, of course. Bye, dear. Sweet dreams."

The phone droned at her. Temple pulled and pulled and pulled black chiffon out of her bag until she felt like a magician doing the scarf trick. Well, Kit and she were the same size, and this certainly had to be better than second-best undies . . . and who knows what those European Mata Haris had worn just to the beauty parlor?

She peeked out a few minutes later, relieved to hear the homely drone of the television set on low. Only one small bedside lamp lit the room besides the eerie glow of the TV screen.

She ankled out, casual, aiming a comment at the man in the bed.

"It's all yours. The bathroom, I mean!"

Why did resuming a love affair after an interim feel so much like starting one all over again?

A hand stretched out from the bed. She mounted it, and this high, narrow, old-fashioned bedstead required mounting.

"Guess what's on?" Max's profile was directed toward the TV. How . . . domestic. How . . . easy.

"What's on?"

"Mary Tyler Moore reruns."

"Really? It must be weird to be an actor and see yourself as you were thirty years ago."

"Must be."

Max had one hand on the remote control, and one hand on her. Men! God bless 'em.

Temple snuggled down next to him, and sighed.

His free hand trailed through a stupendous excess of sheer black chiffon at her hip. "Must have caught something exotic in there."

"From the forties, probably."

"Forties noir."

"Exactly."

The remote control clicked, and the TV went black, forties noir black.

Temple woke up in the night, hearing the mechanical wail of an ambulance or a police car. For a moment she panicked, not recognizing the shape and shadows of the room. Everything was dark except for a blot of white shadow at the big old window. She reached out in the bedclothes, touched a figure, sleeping.

The white blot of window was a spotlight. Temple stretched in the comfortably rumpled covers, realized she was missing something, and finally found a heap of black chiffon on the floor.

She yawned.

The bathroom door was closed.

She stretched out an arm.

And stretched.

And stretched and found only empty bed linens.

Temple frowned for a moment, then relished her unexpected privacy. She felt wonderful, all over. Body, mind, soul. Like an unused instrument that had performed a very private concerto. In the muted daylight, the alien ring gleamed on her left hand. A band, winding like a road. A stone, glittering like a rainbow pond. Diamonds like dew. Everything was. . . like, groovy.

She bent over the bed's edge to fish up the fallen chiffon. Might as well see in daylight what this thing had looked like last night.

Max should be out of the bathroom soon. She didn't hear the shower spattering . . . She got up, wriggled into the nightgown and tiptoed to the bathroom door.

A small desk crouched against the wall beside the bathroom door. An oblong of stationery caught her eye. An oblong of written-upon stationery.

She stopped, braced her arms on the desk and read the bold, left-leaning script.

Temple darling,

The salutation stopped her heart. It could only lead to one thing.

I hate this, but the call came last night and you were dead asleep. Somethings happened in Las Vegas I need to look into right away. I thought of taking you with me, but remembered you and Louie may still have business at the advertising agency. I'll tell you everything as soon as you get back, and call you at your aunt's this afternoon. This isn't the way I planned to wake you up in the morning, believe me.

All my love, Max

"Max!" Temple repeated aloud, making a fist and hitting the paper.

On her white-knuckled hand, the broad gold ring looked like a weapon.

She relaxed her fingers. What else could he have done?

Max.

Chapter 39

The Billie Holiday Blues

"How did it go?" Kit wasted no time in greeting Temple at the door. She peered beyond her, hopefully, into the hall.

"Mixed reviews," Temple said shortly, barreling past her in the warm red coat and bunnie-cute earmuffs and gloves.

Inside, she ripped them off and tossed them on a chair.

"Mixed reviews?" Kit collapsed atop her discarded outerwear on the chair. "You surprise me. Max surprises me."

"Me too. Oh, the main event was fabulous. It's just that the encore was sadly lacking."

"Encore?"

"He's gone. Left last night. Sometime. I was sleeping. Called back to Vegas."

"A magician is on call?"

Temple cast her aunt a quelling look. "Oh, it's not his fault. I understand. It's just that it was a teeny bit anticlimatic, you might say." Her smile felt wan, even to her. "Thanks for the radical gown. I really needed that."

"But the performance was . . . adequate?"

"Auntie Kit, your best gown did not serve in vain, that I can assure you. I just like to wake up next to the man I slept with the night before. Like I said, it's not Max's fault. He has. . . obligations

"I went out with a fireman once. Don't laugh, I did. Sweet man, sexy man, but he did keep odd hours."

"Odd hours. That's the way to put it." Temple glanced down at her left hand. "My Christmas present."

"Oh, honey! That's gorgeous. And very promising."

Temple nodded. "You're right. I'm being immature. The evening was wonderful, the restaurant, the food, the hotel, Max. I needed every bit of it too." Temple leaned against the wall. "It all just happened so fast. My emotions feel like they've been on a roller coaster."

"I can understand that. How long since you and Max have been together?"

Temple calculated. "Almost ten months."

"Sounds like things went better than most people would expect after all that time."

"He's going to call this afternoon."

"But he won't be here for your party tonight?"

"No. What did you really think of him, Aunt Kit?"

"Oh, my. Don't ask the deprived. Of course, I've been smitten ever since you reported that he told you that going to bed again would resolve all your doubts. I do like a confident man. Did it?"

"Yes, and no."

"Hmm. You're wearing the ring."

"I loved him, and he loved me, but I don't know if we can work out what needs to be worked out."

"Past tense?"

"Past tense bleeding messily into present and future, especially now that we've tumbled into bed again. I can't really explain what stands between us, Kit. It's very serious, and not either one's fault. We're caught by past circumstances. Nobody to blame. But sad just the same. For now, there's hope. I guess that's what I should concentrate on."

Temple shrugged. "Do you want your, uh, thingamajiggy back?"

"It's your memory now. Keep it and wear it in good health."

"It's not wearing it that's so good for one's health, Aunt."

"Whatever," Kit said coyly, looking pleased.

The day would have been anticlimactic, like any morning after the night before, except that at 4 p.m. Kit's phone rang.

She dashed to get it, then stretched the cord as far as it would uncoil to check on Temple's location: brooding at the Manhattan cityscape for one of the last times this trip, a slick magazine lying open and unread on her lap.

Kit laid down the receiver and ran to get Temple.

"It's a man," she whispered like any roommate.

"What man?"

"I didn't ask, but who do you suppose? Who said he was going to call from La Vegas?"

Temple checked her watch as she rose and clomped over to the phone in deliberate contrast to Kit's hush-hush manner.

"It's only one P.M. there." She was about to point out to her aunt, who like most Easterners had a very vague idea of where time zones changed and what that meant, that Max would barely have had time to get to Las Vegas and tend to whatever was so urgent by now, much less call her. But she was at the phone, so she picked it up and said a slightly less perky than usual "Hello."

"Yes?" she repeated, as if something was wrong with the line.

"Oh!" She went on, aware that her whole tone had changed. "I didn't recognize your voice at first. Must be the long-distance lines. No, I'm not disappointed. Just. . . tired."

Kit came racing over on her even noisier scuffs, primed for eavesdropping, even if the act was fated to be one-sided. She leaned against the window ledge and concentrated so much Temple feared she could hear through long-distance lines.

Temple sat slowly on one of the tall kitchen stools, feeling bemused.

"Not too tired to talk, no. You are? This afternoon. How did everything go?

"Oh, really.

"That's. . . good. I mean, wonderful!

"Yes, I am pretty tired out." Here Temple glanced at her aunt with a significant look. "Yes. Up late. Maybe that's why I sound a little .. . 'down.'

"Well, I can't wait to hear the details.

"Yes?

"Yes?

"No!

"All right. I'll be back about noon tomorrow. No, don't meet me at the airport. Really, I mean it. It's such a hop, skip and jump home, and my luggage arrangement worked great, even with Louie the pouch potato aboard.

"Think we got the job. Pretty solid. Yeah, I'm excited. Solved the murder too.

"I'm sure you are too. And I'm glad, I'm really glad that your trip was so productive.

"Yeah. That's wonderful."

Kit had come nearer with every answer, watching Temple's face contradict her words all the more the longer the conversation continued.

"I'm so happy for you. Can hardly wait.

"Yes.

"Yes, I do."

By now Temple's face looked as empty as a deserted parking lot, but her voice had increased enough in energy and an upbeat volume with every answer to fill a Broadway house. Then suddenly that booming optimism failed. Her face crumpled.

"Bye," she whispered into the phone at last, her voice starting to shatter like a crystal metronome.

"Honey!" Kit took the phone from Temple's limp fingers, and checked for a dial tone, which there indeed was. She hung up the receiver, still warm from Temple's death grip.

"Temple, what's the matter? I've never heard such an inane half-conversation outside a post-modern play, but you look as if you'd gotten your own death notice."

Temple shook her head no, but let her aunt guide her back to the living nxnn couch.

Kit sat her down, not releasing Temple's hand until she sat beside her.

Tell me, Temple. Who was it? What was wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong." Temple sighed abruptly, as a dog will sometimes do for no reason. Temple had a reason. "It was Matt, calling from Chicago."

"Something must be wrong."

Temple shook her head in a dazed way. "No. His trip home was not a cakewalk, but he resolved a lot, learned a lot. Now he's ready to go back to Las Vegas and take care of a lot, including any leftover problems with his stepfather. He feels his phone-counseling job is a dead end, that he needs to find something more in keeping with his education level, even his earning level."

"That's sensible. That's great."

"Oh, yeah. Terrific. I hardly recognized his voice. It was so sure, so happy. He sounded like another ... person. He has so much to tell me. He can hardly wait. He can hardly wait--well, I don't have to go into everything. But he can hardly wait to see me again. Tomorrow. Kit. I've never heard him so up, so high, so . . . committed."

"Committed to what?"

Temple swallowed and finally looked at her aunt with truly tragic eyes. "To . . . life. To . . . love. To . . . us."

"Oh, honey."

Kit just took her hands again, and held them.

Chapter 40

Stompin' at the Algonquin

I cannot explain it. Karma is not within three thousand miles of this place, yet my conscience is bothering me. Some may think that one of my ilk cannot have a conscience, but I assure you that mine is in exquisite working order.

Much as I am pleased that the Sublime Solange is likely to partner me in a continuing series of film endeavors, I am not pleased by the shabby treatment meted out to the Divine Yvette. Sisters they may be under the skin, but the Divine Yvette was there first, both in my heart and on the television screen. I cannot let her think that I am a party to the cowardly way she has been victimized, betrayed and cast aside in a maternal condition. A certain once-royal British princess comes to mind.

So I must leave the cozy nest Miss Kit Carlson has fashioned for herself down in the Village, and travel uptown (as far as midtown, anyway) to my love's current hostelry, the Algonquin Hotel. I have heard Miss Savannah Ashleigh boasting of her address to the advertising personnel, though how one who is about as high-brow as a Barbie doll would appreciate staying at a joint famed for hosting the Mount Olympus-browed Round Table wits of the thirties is beyond my Ken.

Such puzzles of human misbehavior aside, this small jaunt uptown is sure to be no cakewalk on a catwalk. Yet I am an intrepid as well as an inventive soul, and I figure if I can do Las Vegas blindfolded, I can certainly manage Manhattan with my eyes wide open and all four sets of shivs on intruder-alert.

Frankly, I am more concerned about traffic plain and simple than such evil elements as drug traffickers, gangs, personal electronics salesmen and predatory street people (as opposed to just plain street people, who are usually in no condition to prey on so much as a stray cat, more's the pity). I decide to make my trek at dusk, when nature conspires--even in such an urban center as New York City-- to render my natural coloring an advantage.

My escape from Miss Kit Carlson's Shangri-la in the Sky will be my first challenge.

Luckily, Miss Temple and her aunt are consumed by the problem dujour: which Las Vegas swain is the more promising for Miss Temple's future happiness? Miss Temple has also grown complacent after having successfully carted me to New York and about Madison Avenue. She now views me as a furry pouch potato. Something she can tote here and there. I can see that ground transportation in this town is hell, but I am not ready to give up locomotion for life.

So I work my way to the front door, sit down facing it, and contemplate my options.

They are "poor" and "none."

I have seen neither hide nor hair of the vaunted "super" for this building, and from what I have heard of building superintendents in New York City, they definitely have both hide and hair, and probably two-inch fangs to go with them.

Such an individual would not willingly help out one of my kind.

My entry to this residence was effected by a visitor opening the front door, an easy invitation for one of my subtle tendencies to eel in, or out, unnoticed. However, this poor bloke is as dead as Christmas's hottest gift item will be in return lines next week. I am forced to reinvent the wheel, or, in this case, the hinge.

I am so discouraged that I leap to the window ledge. I often do my best thinking while reclining artistically between two potted poinsettias. By "potted" I do not mean polluted in a liquid sense, although these two could use some watering. I gaze on the building across from me. If I could only dream up some little act that would alarm a friendly, voyeuristic neighbor and send him or her rushing over to warn the ladies of an impending danger.

Then I look up. This apartment is strangely made, with high pointed ceilings and high shelves underneath them fit only for gathering dust or holding ugly large-scale decorative objects and innumerable small spiders. In some ways Miss Kit Carlson is living in a fish bowl and I am on Candid Camera. What can I do to inspire a stranger to rush over and ring the doorbell?

Locking a leg behind my neck and conducting some delicate personal grooming in plain view might enrage a few envious pussycats, but I cannot see a human coming all unhinged at such a display.

I could knock the rather unfortunate Santa Fe vase off the upper shelf, but the noise would draw the attention of my darling ladies, the eventuality I most desire to avoid.

I study a small, star-shaped metal object embedded in the ceiling. I believe it is a sprinkler system, a precaution against fires. In my experience, that is, in Las Vegas, Nevada, such escapees from Asian martial arts films are usually to be found in major buildings, like offices or hotels, but apparently New Yorkers are unusually safety-conscious, especially in old buildings that have been renovated recently.

Is there any way Midnight Louie could start a fire other than by coming on to some new girl in town? I leap onto a countertop to paw open a drawer, though hardly anybody keeps matches around any more.

Pity. The humble matchbook cover used to solve many a crime in the olden days, especially when used as a memo pad. Now, hardly anybody at all even smokes, except oysters and herrings, of which I am exceptionally fond. Still, my groping limb overturns one of those short stubby votive candles. And where there is wax with a fuse, there is usually a matchstick to light it.

Finally I work out a matchbook, but it is not one of those cheapie, flip-cover, old-movie jobs, but a tiny little box with tiny little wooden matchsticks in it. How adorable! Nonetheless, I take this worthless object in my teeth and hop from counter to espresso-machine top to distant shelf.

Now. To add flames to the fire. It takes my sharpest shiv to break into the box, then mondo maneuvering to work out one crummy miniature match. My next problem: providing enough friction to ignite the match, and enough of the proper kindling to set off the fire alarm. The entire job might have been easier if I had cracked Miss Kit's pantry door and broken into a can of Texas chili. Power to the pepper and the pussycat!

I cannot think of anything useful to burn around the place ... until I remember the pile of papers Miss Kit Carlson keeps beside her computer in the room Miss Temple is sleeping in, when she is not sleeping out. They are only typed on one side, so I figure Miss Kit keeps them there for scratch paper. Pleased, I hop down to the floor by stages to implement the next, and most tedious, part of my plan.

Anybody dumb enough to have trained their eagle eye or telescope on these windows will be getting a most mysterious eyeful over the next couple of hours. Like a bunny rabbit, I hop out of sight, and then I hop back into view and up to the high shelf. My return trips are notable for the roll of paper clutched in my incisors.

In due time I have a nicely mounded pile of pages, each one titled "Siege of Sighs."

Finally, I drop-kick a match to the pile and scratch kitty litter until something ignites. (You must understand that I am not literally scratching kitty litter. I only use the stuff when there is not so much as a potted plant around as a substitute. But I use the same friction-laden movements with my hind feet that would burn litter, were it at all combustible.)

Finally a lucky kick slides match head against striker. I hear a sound of many wings beating, but it is only the leaves of paper that are curling as a cutting edge of bright fire eats away at them.

I skedaddle before any random spark catches my heels, and hunker down by the front door.

Not long afterward, an ear-splitting beeping goes off, accompanied by inmate shrieking, frantic phone dialing, downward drifting clouds of smoke and an urgent knock at the door, followed by a scrabbling sound of a passkey in the lock.

Above it all, the sprinkler system hisses to life and a gentle chlorinated rain falls on everything within range. Now the Leo the Lion at the MGM Grand hotel in Las Vegas is not the only one with a spraying problem.

But despite the hullabaloo, I keep my post by the door, springing forward to freedom when it bursts open and an excitable super spouting a language of the Indian subcontinent rushes through into the rain and the shrieks.

I am on my way to the fire exits, which are being thronged by nervous folk in nightclothes. The doors bat open and shut as tenants seek safety below. I thread through their legs on the dark, steep stairwell and am soon in the small lower lobby.

From there I am an ankle away from the freedom of the city.

In the distance, another of those annoyingly frequent New York sirens carries on like a banshee.

Everyone on the ground floor and the sidewalk outside looks up, so when I leap out fur to femur with an oblivious human, no one tries to stop me.

I sniff the evening air, which is much brisker than it is in Las Vegas. A pity. Scents do poorly in colder climes. I will have to use my other senses to follow the map route I have lain upon all afternoon. Luckily, Cornelia Street walks right into the Avenue of the Americas, otherwise known as Sixth. I take off down the street at a brisk trot, glimpsing Washington Square a block away. These pads were made for walking, but I have a long way to go up the spine of Manhattan before I hit the hostelry I seek.

In no time at all I am passing Fourteenth Street. Only thirty more blocks to go, but they are shrimp appetizers compared with the whale-length extent of blocks in Las Vegas. I pass churches and bars and office buildings. I am almost scuttled at Thirty-first when a bag lady decides that I am worse off than she is and tries to run me down with her shopping cart in the name of saving my soul. I dodge the squeaky wheels and take my chances underfoot, pausing to catch my breath at the Empire State Building. I am tempted to join the lines snaking to the top for a look-see at the Big Apple from the worm-on-top's point of view, but decide a tourist jaunt could blow my cover.

By then I am in Herald Square, where Broadway crosses Sixth on its way to the seamy environs of Times Square. I sigh and head for more respectable realms, straight north, past Macy's department store. There I pause to offer suitable honor to the late Rudy, with whom I share a certain weakness for a certain weed, although my kind is legal. While I am paying my respects to a dead veteran, wouldn't you know some dude emerges from a building with not one but two Russian wolfhounds in tow. Or rather, the Russian wolfhounds have him in tow.

They eye me as one, launch a keening duet and tangle their leashes as they streak after me. Their owner has just become a boat anchor with nothing to snag onto.

I take off flat out, ears flat, feet flat, hair slicked to my back for maximum speed. I zig and zag, targeting tourists and other slow-moving pedestrians. On an even, unpopulated playing field I would be black caviar for those ancient hunters, but this is dysfunctionally chaotic New York City, boys, and I do not have any fancy harness holding me back.

I leave them entwined with a fairy-light bestrewed tree and a lady walking a toy poodle behind the New York Public Library. I give a small roar of greeting and triumph to the unseen Big Cats keeping guard on the building's Fifth Avenue entrance and pussyfoot the last two blocks to Forty-fourth.

Unfortunately, people in this city are more used to dog doo-doo by the curb than to the sight of an independent feline (and waste-management expert) on the move. They cry out and point to me, but I keep trotting and do not look back. It is lucky that my national commercials for Allpetco are not yet reality. It would really slow me down if I had to stop and sign autographs.

By the time I get to the Algonquin at Sixth and Forty-fourth, I am pooped, but only in the sense of being tired. I have not littered once upon the streets of New York, despite the stress of the chase. However, my breath blows frosty smoke rings and my sides are heaving. I collect myself outside the Blue Bar next door before attempting the final stage of my mission.

The Algonquin doormen are attired in long, full winter coats like the Wizard's guards wore in Oz. But I can work with long full coats. My wits and stamina gathered, I dart under the longest model on the shortest doorman. Within seconds I am within inches of the opening double doors. It is nothing for an old Las Vegas hand like myself to calculate the odds down to a whisker's breadth. I leap between the closing pincers of glass and brass without losing a tail-hair, then sprint through the inner set unscathed.

I am spit out into a lobby of the old school . . . say the library of Princeton University.

Luckily, the lobby resembles Mr. Robert Frost's wood: lovely, dark and deep. Age-darkened wood looms all around, providing excellent camouflage for a swarthy fellow like me. The carpeting, tastefully worn to a dull red, is less amenable, but no one seems to find my feline presence remarkable.

"Oh, look," says a lady with a Southern accent. "The famous house cat."

I bow and stroll into the eighteenth-century ambiance of the lobby-bar, moving among wing chairs and tea tables, head and tail high. At last, no hubbub. No dogs. No doo-doo. Just the tranquility so dear to the feline soul, and a smidgen of respect.

I am so pleased to be recognized despite the fact that none of my ads have run yet, that I fail to scan the ambience with all of my senses. Imagine my surprise to scent an odor of the most delicate feline nature.

A female of my species is very near.

Naturally, I cannot resist discovering if the Divine Yvette has accompanied her mistress for a cocktail, yet the scent is . . . foreign, if no less intriguing. I reconnoiter, arriving finally near a mahogany niche, a bookcase with the doors removed, which has been remodeled into a cat accommodation.

"Matilda's Suite" reads a plain brass marker. I study the decor beyond the red-velvet curtain held back by a golden rope. For a moment, the golden rope reminds me of recent unpleasantness, then I focus on the charming scene: rose-striped wallpaper, four-poster bed, a handsome parquet floor covered with scattered throw rugs, including a Persian of impeccable pedigree, a hanging candelabra, and the piquant touch of sock toy with a bell affixed lying on the parquet.

This Matilda must be one pampered pussycat. I sniff around trouser legs and pantyhose-clad ankles until I find the missing minx of the house.

There she lies, curled fast asleep on a tapestry-upholstered chair, a petite gray and buff tabby clad in an aqua leather collar.

"Pardon me, miss," I say in my best out-of-town manner. "I hesitate to disturb you, but I am a stranger in town."

Her golden eyes slit open, then she sits up, yawns and widens her pupils to take in my appearance.

"Well, I do not meet many of my kind here. Are you just stopping in for a drink or thinking of registering at the hotel?"

"I am visiting guests."

"Oho," says she, settling on her haunches. 'Those high-fashion models on the ninth floor, no doubt. I have only glimpsed them coming and going. I doubt that you will get an audience with such snooty celebrities."

"My dear lady, I am a sort of celebrity myself."

"Oh? You do not look like Maurice."

"Him. He is dead meat. The name is Louie, Midnight Louie, and you will see more of me."

"I would not think that could be possible," she says, surveying my girth.

Well, she is a scrawny thing, and no doubt jealous. So I take my leave, knowing at least what floor to seek. Still, I do not wish to attract untoward attention, and the bellmen, at least, would recognize me for an unauthorized interloper, even though I only need to stroll in this relatively feline-secure environment. So once again I am forced to duck behind potted palms and semi-potted persons to make my way to the elevators.

Here I am served by my nose. Speaking of potted this and that, I am sorry to say that the Divine Yvette's many stresses have led to a relaxation of potty procedures. And one of Miss Savannah Ashleigh's spike heels has managed to step into the scene of the crime.

I would be ready, willing and able to follow my Fair One's scent over the far Himalayas.

Tracing it to the proper elevator and then up to the proper floor is merely a matter of dogged persistence. By the time I am sniffing along the ninth-floor hall carpeting, I am reeling a bit, but still game. Or is that gamey? Certainly the spoor has hardly become cold. Or dry. I wobble down the hall until my nose directs me to a certain doorway.

The French are great believers in Nose. A well-trained Nose can discriminate between various vintages. A persnickety nose can tell a rose from a radish. A fine old feline Nose can follow a queen to her castle.

Number 917 it is. I pause to give the accomplishment of my quest a proper moment of reverence. I pause another ten seconds to gird my loins for a delicate mission. Wherever the Divine Yvette goes these days, so go the scurrilous offspring of the now-fixed Maurice. And also so goes the Sublime Sister Solange.

The average nomadic hero usually has only twain terrors to survive, like Scylla and Charybdis. I get Solange and Yvette and unknown offspring. It will take all the diplomacy and experience at my command to avoid playing favorites.

I decide to cut the suspense down to a reasonable time limit, and paw the door.

True, I have in times not far enough past felt the wrath of She Who Must Be Dismayed. But I am ready to face anything in hopes of putting things right with the Ashleigh girls.

At last my pathetic pawings are answered, but by nothing human.

A petite paw slips under the door to play padsie with my own. I am much encouraged that this is a "claws-in" pursuit.

In time, our machinations are jiggling the door in its frame. Then there is a mighty crack! And the door pops open like a jack-in-the-box.

I enter, the lion king in basic black, to discover Miss Savannah Ashleigh out, and both ladies at my beck and call.

"Oh, Louie," cries the Divine Yvette, who is on a first-name basis. "We have been robbed."

Robbed? Have some little kittens lost their mittens? I look around for the beastly little rug rats. I spy the offspring of Maurice treading carpet toward me with their needle-sharp nails. Cowards breed cowards. I catch the one in the lead by the nape.

"Slow down there, Sport," I mutter between my clenched teeth. "Did you see the perp?"

A flat-eared little head turns to mine, and comes back spitting.

"I am only five weeks old," she squalls, "and no 'Sport.' I cannot see shinola, you big bullyboy. Now release me before I scream kit abuse."

Obviously, she is blind if not unprimed in politically correct defensive systems. I drop her like a hot coal. Sheesh. What a grouch.

"I meant by 'robbed,'" the Divine Yvette explains, "that I fear that Maurice and my sister will be the Allpetco spokescats."

"Neither one should count their kittens before they, er, hatch. Chin and whiskers up, my lovely. It is not over until the fat lady sings."

"What fat lady? My mistress would have a fit if she heard you use that phrase. It is true that she has been hitting the chocolate bonbons lately, but--"

I extricate myself diplomatically to pay my respects to her sibling and my likely costar, but first I trip over an encroaching youngster. I am fast deciding that Miss Savannah Ashleigh deserves a medal rather than a law suit for her actions toward myself and my now-impossible progeny.

I spy these hellions' aunt taking refuge under a dressing table. So I shake them off and ankle over to the Sublime Solange on my belly, complimenting her with purrs and licks all the way. It takes a handy fellow to handle a female.

I explain that I look forward to many happy film shoots with her, but that my first loyalties must remain attached to the Divine Yvette.

"How sweet of you, Louie." The Sublime Solange opens her citrine-green eyes until they seem to be suns going nova. "I like loyalty in a tom. I understand that you have taken a brave position to avoid polluting the planet with excess kits of checkered background."

"Well, I would not consider myself checkered, or even slubbed silk. Let us say that I recognize that a time must come when even the tommiest of Toms must take a position of responsibility in the community."

"Is that your position of responsibility?"

I look back to ascertain my form. It is perfect, as always.

"Yes, ma'am," say I.

"Aye, aye," says she.

It might be the beginning of a beautiful friendship, except that one of the tiger-stripe kits lurches over at a critical moment. I am forced to halt all operations (would that I had been able to do so a couple of weeks ago!), to pick up the miscreant by the scruff of its neck, and deliver the little bastard (a friendly figure of speech, I am sure) to its mama.

"Oh, Uncle Louie!" cries the interloper. "How big and strong you are!"

Flattery will get them longevity.

And so it goes in cat heaven. My harem of houris (two in number) lounge and purr benignly, while I am sore beset by Maurice's castoffs.

Some days it is not worth busting out of or breaking into a hotel, much less a nursery. Uncle Louie indeed! And we are not even related. I can hardly wait to return to Las Vegas.

Chapter: Tailpiece

Midnight Louie Bites the Big Apple

Wait a minute! I was under the impression that my new, politically correct status would be a lot more fun than it is turning out to be. So far. And all I have done so far is cry Uncle! But I must admit that I was not able to get around in my usual devil-may-care manner in my latest adventure.

I was beginning to feel distinctly like Nero Wolfe during this episode.

Not that I have developed a taste for orchids, although I am always ready to sample any bit of wild greenery that may cross my path, even if it is the cultivated variety. (I prefer feral flowers, myself. Wild game has a better flavor.)

No, it is just that the vicissitudes of the Big City being what they are, I can see why the super-intelligent Mr. Wolfe chose not to dirty his foot leather with the grit of Gotham.

Me, I like to do my own footwork, and I am still light enough on my tootsies to manage it, if allowed to.

So I sincerely hope that the purple sling is a thing of the past in my future. Although, if Miss Temple Barr and I do win the purrsonal appearance contract, I will have to train her to walk on a leash. It does not suit a dude of my talents to be toted hither and yon, and once I demonstrate that I can lead Miss Temple in precisely the direction that is best for her, we should get along well, although she may find it a bit demeaning being attached to me by a latter-day umbilical cord for the sake of her own safety. Some might think that she would not know where to go without a guide-cat, and in certain cases, especially criminal, that is indeed so.

I am pleased, however, that my long fondness for a particular weed has justified itself by proving useful in a murder case.

I am also pleased to have been introduced to a new leading lady. This is pure indulgence on the part of the author--not on my part (which is doing just fine, thank you), but on the part of Miss Carole Nelson Douglas. The Sublime Solange is no more than a pale imitation of a cat of my collaborator's acquaintance, one Secret in real life.

Even the name is secondhand, appropriately so considering that Secret and her mother, Victoria, were adopted as adults. Queen V (and she does act every inch the role, down to her flashing fangs) is a shaded silver Persian of the Divine Yvette stripe, but Victoria's Secret (who should definitely be in a lingerie catalog) is one of these shaded-golden throwbacks. If this is a throwback, you can fling me right back to wherever that is. I guess these golden girls and guys are considered a separate but equal breed now, but for a while they were in the doghouse, which is a terrible place for a cat of any color to be.

Such surprises as luscious new lady-friends are the few rewards in the otherwise dangerous game of cat and mouse as played on the streets of Las Vegas or Manhattan by us detective dudes. It is all in a day's work for your trusty gumshoe-with-spikes. So is a well deserved nap. Happy Christmas to all and to all a good nighty-night.

Very best fishes,

Midnight Louie. Esq.

P.S. You can reach Midnight Louie on the Internet at:

http://www.catwriter.com/cdouglas

To subscribe to Midnight Louie's Scratching Post-Intelligencer newsletter,

write: P.O. Box 331555, Fort Worth, TX 76163

Chapter: Carole Nelson Douglas 's New York

The first time I saw New York City was on the high-school class trip, which was probably when most Americans were introduced to this quintessential metropolis. We saw a Broadway show: Camelot with Roddy McDowell, Robert Goulet and Julie Andrews. Richard Burton had already left the cast to hie to Italy to make Cleopatra with what's-her-names.

We must have walked all over Manhattan, because I remember our exuberant group dining at a steakhouse. My feet were so hot, sore and swollen that I discreetly smuggled some of those square little ice cubes from my water glass into my gold suede shoes.

Yes, it was damp. We adjourned to Radio City Music Hall, and while the Rockettes kicked up their heels, I slipped my aching dogs Out of my damp flats. At departure time, my feet would qualify as balloons in Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. I couldn't put my shoes on again.

That was the first of many lessons learned traveling to exotic places. Never, ever take off your shoes! Especially on an international flight, I learned later.

My Second New York trip tame two Years later, a theater tour. We saw several Broadway shows (including the musical version of Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit with Tammy Grimes and the late, great Bea Lillie as Madame Arcati), and an Off-Broadway how. The highlight of that trip was sipping Manhattans in a Greenwich Village bar and being driven back uptown by a black-cape-clad but charming Khigh Dhiegh, the wonderfully villainous Yen Lo from The Manchurian Candidate.

I was back the next year, a stopover for a smaller class trip to Europe. Our girlish trio o{ Midwestern college girls were impressed to say "Hello, Dolly" to Carol Channing when she made a grand post-show entrance at Sardi's, and to spot attorney Melvin Belli (almost as silver-blond as Carol Channing) checking in at the Sheraton Russell. We went dancing at a Village disco and walked dozens of blocks at midnight back to our midtown hotel with our high heels dangling from our hands, cutting through Grand Central Station. Try that in the nasty nineties!

Now I'm a veteran New York visitor and the memories are far more mundane. Nothing compares to the Big Apple's bite, but each year the siren sound of the night's many emergency runs keeps me up longer and the cabs get harder to slide in and out of fast enough to keep traffic flowing at the usual manic rate. New York, New York: it's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to lug a twenty-pound cat around midtown in a kitty knapsack. Sometimes reality is better than fiction.