Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

Cat’s Cradle

Triage is not a skill you usually find in PIs, or the apparently humble pussycat.

But I gaze down from the lip of the Big Cats staging area about as horrified as I have ever been in memory.

Shangri-La lies there, a mangled white butterfly on the white marble floor, a small pale form, framed by pieces of black platform that circle her like flotsam from a shipwreck. A shipwreck in the sky.

What to do? Where to go?

The Cloaked Conjurer is stirring at the mouth of his staging area where Mr. Max deposited him with superhuman strength. For even he cannot fool Midnight Louie. I would know those moves anywhere.

I glance at the Big Boys, who have realized that the act has turned deadly wrong.

“Return to your cages and sit tight,” I tell them. “Someone will come for you when they think of it.”

They retreat as meekly as the Cowardly Lion after Dorothy has slapped his nose. I am afraid I had to unsheath my shivs and do a little nose whacking myself to force them back from the deadly, drop-off edge.

I dash around their cages and to the connecting hall, taking a left and another left in the ill-lit maze all backstage areas are, the better to keep audiences from seeing in.

I have guessed right. CC is pushing himself up to his knees and leaning over the edge in an attempt to view the same horrible sight I have seen. He is shocked and groggy, so I am forced to take a stand in his path. I hiss and growl and slash him back, as if I were the trainer and he the cat act.

“I must be hallucinating,” he mutters during his retreat. “Lucky and Kalúha have shrunk? And Shang and Hyacinth too?”

When I have herded him ten feet back from the edge, I hear the scrabble of rescuing hands and feet in the maze of service chutes honeycombing this sky-high stage.

Not Mr. Max’s. He is long gone and that is one party in this tragedy I feel no need to follow. Worry about is something else. He tried for a two-fer save. Had not the misguided Hyacinth scourged his back, he might have made it. I sincerely hope her boast of curare-painted nails was all bravado. I watch her struggling in her bungee cord cradle. I shall never hear the truth from her lips. Shangri-La has made her eternal peace with solid marble, but Hyacinth will never make peace with me. I cannot help but think that they were two of a kind: unhappy, scrappy souls. Only Hyacinth remains now, but for the intervention of a few threads, and Shangri-La perhaps has brought her end upon her.

Still, my Miss Temple is somewhere far below, by herself, trying to salvage order from tragedy.

I duck into the entrance/exit tunnel designed for Hyacinth . . . and nearly swallow my own tongue to see her silhouette waiting for me.

Maybe nine lives are literal with her kind of cat. Maybe she is some immortal emissary of Bast and I have failed to save her. Maybe I too will soon be floating like a butterfly and landing like the QE II. . . .

“Louie! We must get to the floor below.”

The silhouette says Hyacinth but the voice says Squeaker.

“Are you okay?” I ask, astounded.

“No, of course not. I witnessed everything, as you did. Hyacinth, as you saw, felt strong enough to perform herself. And then some. Poor misguided creature! She had no idea her interference was what doomed her mistress. If only there was something we could have done.”

“Not without leaving our hides on the exhibition floor.”

“I saw you warn Lucky and Kahlúa. And the Cloaked Conjuror is safe?”

“Yes.”

“Who was that masked man?”

I am certain that Squeaker, fresh from a shelter experience, has not logged the hours I have in watching high-number cable channels with ancient TV show reruns, so I only say the truth.

“I think he came to steal the Czar Alexander scepter but discovered that someone had got here before him and rigged the whole suspended performance area to collapse.”

“We all could have been killed then, if he hadn’t been here?”

“Sure as shootin’,” I cannot resist saying, thinking of the Lone Ranger’s silver bullets.

“At least CC and the Big Cats are safe.”

I nod modestly. Mr. Max and I work well together, even when we do not know about it beforehand.

“That masked man would have saved Shangri-La too, if Hyacinth had not gone postal.”

Squeaker is not as sheltered as I had suspected.

“Louie, I do not wish to be found up here!” she says. “I am very sensitive about facing humans. I was not treated well by them. Call me a coward but I must find a way out of here. Quick! Before they catch me and put me in a cage again.”

“No problem, Princess.”

I peer out Hyacinth’s entrance niche. Everyone below is focusing on the emergency personnel who have made a circle around Shangri-La’s form. The rescue parties are swarming up the tunnels behind us.

“We will have to risk a little Tarzan swing up to that tangle of bungee cords under the ceiling.”

“I fear man but not the works of man,” Squeaker says. “You know where you wish us to go. Lead and I will follow.”

Suits me. This leap is kit’s play compared to the acrobatics I use to scale the Circle Ritz most nights. I lunge, hang over empty air for a split second, and tangle sixteen shivs in Mr. Max’s special ceiling cradle of bungee cords. It still holds firm.

Squeaker glances over her pale cream shoulder at the approaching hordes of inquisitive humans, then blinks her baby blues at me. Or maybe she winks, but I personally think that she is too shy.

She launches her lean form like an Olympics gymnast and in a moment my webbing trembles from the impact of another sixteen-point landing.

“Unlatch yourself and follow me,” I say, swinging into the barely visible open black mouth of Mr. Max’s escape hatch.

She manages the transfer like one running for her life.

When we are both safely situated, I lean out and slash a key bungee cord free. The whole mess falls free, then snags on a piece of dangling platform twenty feet below.

Squeaker’s velvet gray muzzle wrinkles with puzzlement at my action.

“The masked man is a sort of friend of mine. Besides, the longer they do not find his escape tunnel, the longer we will have to escape.”

With that we turn and make our easy way through an anaconda-size twist and turn of giant piping. Sometimes, even I wonder how Mr. Max Kinsella does it.

But I am glad he did it.