Cat On A Hyacinth Hunt

Chapter 39

Opium Den Dreams

You know me: I will take the scent of a female over the scent of a flower every time.

Miss Temple Barr and her cohorts are clearly on the trail of the lonesome flora called hyacinth. It is obviously my job to make sure that the lady of the same name is not lonesome, especially if she is in the mood for making any startling revelations.

Some would say that my habitual interest in the female of my species is blinding me to the true clue in this conundrum. Be that as it may, I know where my particular talents are best applied, so I hie back to the Opium Den as soon as I deliver my missive to Miss Temple Barr's coffee table.

By then the late show is underway, and Miss Shangri-La is joined on stage by an array of petite Asian ladies all draped in exotic robes missing their tops. Miss Shangri-La, being the star of the occasion, does not need to go topless, but her black-clad ninja-boys have peeled down to a streamlined version of a sumo wrestler's diaper, only theirs are stretch black satin that leaves nothing to the imagination but X-rated speculations.

I do not understand the difference between family and "adult" entertainment in Las Vegas.

Come the late show, skin breaks out like a raging ebola epidemic.

Perhaps if humans were fully furred, they would avoid this obsession to shed their clumsy clothes in increments. The fair Hyacinth is on stage with her mistress, lithely leaping into and out of various boxes. Except for a ruby and sapphire dog collar, she is dressed only in the hide and hair nature gave her. I am beginning to think that it is this bizarre custom of wearing clothes that has made humans so strange about the rules of taking them off.

I know that I most dislike the discomfort of having hats and collars affixed to my body parts for commercial filming sessions. But now I am utterly unfettered, so before settling down in Miss Shangri-La's dressing room to wait for Hyacinth, I decide to explore the area beneath and behind the stage.

At times like these, I regret that I was not on the Circle Ritz scene when Mr. Max Kinsella was plying his profession and living there with Miss Temple. Perhaps I could have visited him backstage and learned the secrets of the magic trade. All these painted boxes that are wheeled on stage lie around like mummy cases behind the scenes.

I nearly jump out of my hide when I spot a pair of fire-breathing dragons glaring down at me in the backstage dimness ... but these are merely painted on the doors of a wheeled cabinet.

I am so incensed at being taken in by a pair of painted mythical monsters, that I fiddle with one door until it pops open. I leap inside. The interior is plain black, an excellent camouflage color for me. I sniff around, detecting no more than a phantom odor of sulphur. No doubt this is a trace element from the dragons on the door, who probably blow their stacks on cue when some shill vanishes and then appears again inside said cabinet.

From what I can see, everything here is from the same old bag of magician's tricks. Nothing new, nothing truly magical rather than merely mechanical, nothing to write home about or call the police for. I am very disappointed, but do not have long to languish in this state.

Suddenly my painted shelter rolls into rapid motion. We are wafted up together, the dragons and I, on a stage elevator and then rolled swiftly across the hollow-sounding wooden floor of the stage itself. The wheels clatter like a Brobdingnagian baby rattle, but I doubt that they can be heard over the swell of Oriental music, as crisp as water chestnuts and as atonally high-pitched as a tortured water buffalo.

I flatten my ears to my head, then squint my eyes shut as the dragon doors burst open and the spotlights and the whole world glare in at me.

"As you can see," Shangri-La's lilting voice is announcing, "the cabinet is as empty as a gambler's pocket."

Well, I am cowering in one corner of it, but with my eyes and mouth shut, I hope I am taken for the black background. It is all I can do. I never intended to crash a magic act in mid-performance. I keep still as paint and hear the show go on.

"Hyacinth and I will step into this box, and only one of us will emerge."

I hope that three of us will emerge. Also I hope that I am not stepped on, being so at one with my background. Perhaps there is something to this zen stuff after all.

A swirl of flower-imprint chiffon fills the black box. The door shuts, assisted by the ring of an offstage gong that makes my ears sit up and take notice, but by then their red interiors do not show against the black box, because the doors are shut and it is so dark in here even I cannot see my nose before my face.

Therefore, when a spidery drift drags across my whiskers, I get my back hair up. I am not sure if my vibrissae have been impinged upon by an errant fold of chiffon, or by something more chilling.

I do not have long to contemplate the Stirrer of My Whiskers.

The whole bottom of my world drops out so fast that I am plopped with my keister cold-concrete down. Phantom touches web me like spider weavings.

I avoid a shudder, and then one last, airy stroke across my nose pauses to tickle my chin.

"Louie?" a silken voice inquires. "Are you trespassing on my territory? Naughty boy!"

Four at full extension swipe through the blackness, but my trusty vibrissae sense the blow and I rear back.

A hiss tells me the striker knows she has missed.

"I am not angry, Louie. Just reminding you that I am queen of this stage. No unauthorized walk-ons allowed. Follow me."

A nice thought, but it is still darker than the inside of water buffalo's belly down here (no doubt the same water buffalo whose tortured bawls serve as the music still faintly heard from the stage above).

A pair of slanted red eyes glow from the dark. I understand that I am to follow these demonic torches, and do.

Soon we are slipping silently up a narrow staircase, and then it is a short trip down a dim hall to the dressing room I had visited earlier.

Hyacinth turns the instant we occupy the dressing room, shutting the door by stretching up against it until her lean weight pushes it shut.

Her lilac-hosedlorelimbs touch the dressing room's concrete floor for only an instant. She lofts atop the dressing table to gaze down on me through heavenly blue eyes.

"What a dump," she says. "We usually play far better venues than this."

A perfect opening for the alert private operative. I jump up to the empty chair seat. This is a wooden affair with a round seat and rounded back, dating from perhaps the 1930s.

"What kind of establishments are your usual venue?"

"Convention centers, major hotels." Hyacinth lofts her tail left and right as if pointing to these unseen but fondly remembered palaces of entertainment.

"Then why have you been shunted to this joint?"

"I cannot say."

Hyacinth's slightly crossed eyes have a sly and dreamy look. I do not know if she is being coy, or she actually has been forbidden to say.

"A pity that you and your mistress must put up with such second-rate accommodations when you offer a first-rate show."

"Oh, you think so, Louie?"

"Indeed. I have been in Las Vegas for more years than the rings on the tail of a tiger-strip, and I have seldom seen a magic act of such elegance and amazing illusions. It reminds me of the Cirque du Soleil," I add, mentioning one of the top acts in Vegas, a combination of acrobatics, mime, circus, ballet and magic. "No doubt Your Grace's ... I mean your supremely graceful presence accounts for the uniqueness of the act."

"My mistress is rather good, too, do you not think?"

"Oh, she is fine. For a human."

"I think so too, Louie." She tilts her head. It is as narrow and bony as a serpent's, and I cannot say I care for her hyper-elongated looks, but there is no denying their elegant power.

"We have much in common, considering that you yourself are so common. I must mention our vastly different backgrounds. I am a descendent of show cats. You are ... a street person of no notable antecedents."

"Not true," I say, idly grooming a mitt.

"Oh?"

"My ancestors go back to the time of Pharaoh."

"I am sorry, Louie, but your common, coal-black coat; your squat nonaristocratic body; your clubby, ordinary ears and thick, unkinked tail all betray none of the aristocratic qualities of a feline of ancient lineage. That is why there are papers to document such things, not to mention the physical requirements. This is so usurpers cannot claim royal blood."

"Sorry. I heard this news from Bastet herself, during a power-seance to call up Houdini last Halloween. I did not wantXo be the last in line of Pharaoh's private operators--I am not a snob myself--but I cannot duck my destiny. Especially when Bast herself is the message-bearer."

"You do not bear the mark of Bast."

"Oh, the old dame wanted to hang her signature earring on my clubby, ordinary ear, but I do not go for these sissy accouterments. I do not care how many supposedly macho dudes affect earbobs nowadays."

Hyacinth gasps. "You know of Bastet's earring?"

"Nobody punctures one of my extremities and lives to tell of it."

Hyacinth narrows her morning-glory blue eyes and hunches down. She resembles a pile of furred antlers in this position. A guy could commit hara-kiri on her hipbones trying to do the wild thing. I do not go for earrings, nor do I endorse this human fetish for females so skinny they become lethal weapons of the edged variety. However, when I am on a case, I cannot allow my preferences to get in the way of cadging information from a source. The fluffy furred images of the Ashleigh sisters flash before my memory. I guess I go for the pneumatic types. But they are not here and the subject before me is the sinewy Siamese called Hyacinth.

"So where did you two last perform?" I ask casually.

"Hong Kong."

I am impressed and allow it to show. 'That must be some flight from here to there."

"Oh, we stopped over in Paris first."

"Paris."

"Have you been there, Louie?"

Yeah, sure. Every other day. "Not. . . recently."

"It is a bit overpopulated with poodles, who are allowed an extraordinary freedom of the city, but it is a lovely metropolis. I have been to Caracas, Quito, Katmandu, Rabat, Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney and Amsterdam."

My flattery has gotten me everywhere, I see.

"Quite an itinerary. I just got back from New York myself."

"Oh, New York! We never stop over there. Too dirty, too noisy, too American."

"I can see that you are an international kind of girl."

She hunches down, leans her narrow face toward me, hisses through her fangs, "You ever had any Panama Purple?"

"Not to my knowledge."

"I have some in my treat bag. Want to try a sniff?"

Doing hallucinatory substances is not a requirement of my job, but I am curious about what this dame is into. And I can sniff the best of them under the table, if I have to.

So I look the usual curious and follow her as she leaps down to the floor and minces over to a purple-velvet bed. Sure enough, there is a drawstring bag beside it, a silk-floral affair (I believe the flowers are hyacinths), and Hyacinth herself is soon sticking her long aristocratic nose into it.

A whiff like medicinal marijuana puffs into the room. I am not much for either medicine or marijuana but it is not polite for a guest to turn up his nose at his hostess's best dishes.

So soon I am rolling in it. It is the weirdest nip I have ever encountered, and the dried leaves do indeed have a purple cast. Panama Purple, huh? I am not about to admit my ignorance of this primo stuff. But it is strong. Soon my head is in the clouds and my feet are in the air.

Miss Hyacinth is in the same state, but I am sorry to say it is not shared by her mistress when she comes into the dressing room.

I am aware of a cloud of floral chiffon floating above my eyes-- my slightly crossed eyes--of a perfume of distilled hyacinth that is distinctly floral and human, not feline. Long, daggerlike nails probe my underbelly under the guise of scratching my stomach.

"What have we here, Hyacinth?" a honeyed voice inquires.

Human voices, when honeyed, are more dangerous than the growl of a mountain lion.

"I believe that this pussycat was at the scene of a recent crime. Perhaps we should hold him as a material witness, hmm? Would you like that, my little beauty? Your very own personal playfellow?"

The four-inch-long blood-red shivs jab into my gut. "Of course you may keep him, my darling girl! What else are these foolish boys for? But we will put him away for the moment. We have work to attend to. Playtime later, my pet. Playtime later."

***************

Everything here is dark, but then there is nothing here.

I am flat on my back, in utter blackness, on a hard surface.

My ears and toes buzz. Actually, my ears ring and my toes tingle.

That Panama Purple stuff was more potent than a bull matador in mating season.

Of course I wake up alone. You can be sure that the treacherous Hyacinth is coming to in much softer circumstances, although the idea of being caressed by those artificial shivs that last I felt makes my skin crawl.

In fact, my skin crawls so much I almost think I could slip right out of it and through some crack in this box like smoke. But that delusion is just an aftereffect of the alien catnip. I stand, shakily, and nose the limits of my prison. As I suspected, it is one of these breakaway magician's boxes, but that does not mean I can wave my way out using my tail as a magic wand!

These devices are meant to deceive witnesses with their apparent integrity. I am well and truly trapped. It is a nasty feeling. Usually when one of my kind is trapped, we worry about the bored bean-counting ways of the local animal pound. (The beans they are counting are no doubt the heads of the doomed departing as they are admitted into their doors. I also think that they are called "pounds" in honor of the multitudinous pounds of flesh they do away with. Do you know that they actually keep track of how many victims they dust off in a year?) But evil as the animal pound is to all my kind, I fear I face a greater evil: the unknown villainies of Hyacinth and her magician mistress.