Tails of Wonder and Imagination

THE BURGLAR TAKES A CAT Lawrence Block

Look, it wasn’t my idea.

And it happened very quickly. One day back in early June Carolyn brought pastrami sandwiches and celery tonic to the bookstore, and I showed her a couple of books, an Ellen Glasgow novel and the collected letters of Evelyn Waugh. She took a look at the spines and made a sound somewhere between a tssst and a cluck. “You know what did that,” she said.

“I have a haunting suspicion.”

“Mice, Bern.”

“That’s what I was afraid you were going to say.”

“Rodents,” she said. “Vermin. You can throw those books right in the garbage.”

“Maybe I should keep them. Maybe they’ll eat these and leave the others alone.”

“Maybe you should leave a quarter under your pillow,” she said, “and the Tooth Fairy’ll come in the middle of the night and chew their heads off.”

“That doesn’t seem very realistic, Carolyn.”

“No,” she said. “It doesn’t. Bern, you wait right here.”

“Where are you going?”

“I won’t be long,” she said. “Don’t eat my sandwich.”

“I won’t, but—”

“And don’t leave it where the mice can get it, either.”

“Mouse,” I said. “There’s no reason to assume there’s more than one.”

“Bern,” she said, “take my word for it. There’s no such thing as one mouse.”

I might have figured out what she was up to, but I opened the Waugh volume while I knocked off the rest of my own sandwich, and one letter led to another. I was still at it when the door opened and there she was, back again. She was holding one of those little cardboard satchels with air holes, the kind shaped like a New England salt box house.

The sort of thing you carry cats in.

“Oh, no,” I said.

“Bern, give me a minute, huh?”

“No.”

“Bern, you’ve got mice. Your shop is infested with rodents. Do you know what that means?”

“It doesn’t mean I’m going to be infested with cats.”

“Not cats,” she said. “There’s no such thing as one mouse. There is such a thing as one cat. That’s all I’ve got in here, Bern. One cat.”

“That’s good,” I said. “You came in here with one cat, and you can leave with one cat. It makes it easy to keep track that way.”

“You can’t just live with the mice. They’ll do thousands of dollars worth of damage. They won’t sit back and settle down with one volume and read it from cover to cover, you know. No, it’s a bite here and a bite there, and before you know it you’re out of business.”

“Don’t you think you’re overdoing it?”

“No way. Bern, remember the Great Library at Alexandria? One of the seven wonders of the ancient world, and then a single mouse got in there.”

“I thought you said there was no such thing as a single mouse.”

“Well, now there’s no such thing as the Great Library at Alexandria, and all because the pharaoh’s head librarian didn’t have the good sense to keep a cat.”

“There are other ways to get rid of mice,” I said.

“Name one.”

“Poison.”

“Bad idea, Bern.”

“What’s so bad about it?”

“Forget the cruelty aspect of it.”

“Okay,” I said. “It’s forgotten.”

“Forget the horror of gobbling down something with Warfarin in it and having all your little blood vessels burst. Forget the hideous spectre of one of God’s own little warmblooded creatures dying a slow, agonizing death from internal bleeding. Forget all that, Bern. If you possibly can.”

“All forgotten. The memory tape’s a blank.”

“Instead, focus on the idea of dozens of mice dying in the walls around you, where you can’t see them or get at them.”

“Ah, well. Out of sight, out of mind. Isn’t that what they say?”

“Nobody ever said it about dead mice. You’ll have a store with hundreds of them decomposing in the walls.”

“Hundreds?”

“God knows the actual number. The poisoned bait’s designed to draw them from all over the area. You could have mice scurrying here from miles around, mice from SoHo to Kips Bay, all of them coming here to die.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Maybe I’m exaggerating a tiny bit,” she allowed. “But all you need is one dead mouse in the wall and you’re gonna smell a rat, Bern.”

“A mouse, you mean.”

“You know what I mean. And maybe your customers won’t exactly cross the street to avoid walking past the store—”

“Some of them do that already.”

“—but they won’t be too happy spending time in a shop with a bad odor to it. They might drop in for a minute, but they won’t browse. No book lover wants to stand around smelling rotting mice.”

“Traps,” I suggested.

“Traps? You want to set mousetraps?”

“The world will beat a path to my door.”

“What kind will you get, Bern? The kind with a powerful spring, that sooner or later you screw up while you’re setting it and it takes off the tip of your finger? The kind that breaks the mouse’s neck, and you open up the store and there’s this dead mouse with its neck broken, and you’ve got to deal with that first thing in the morning?”

“Maybe one of those new glue traps. Like a Roach Motel, but for mice.”

“‘Mice check in, but they can’t check out.’”

“That’s the idea.”

“Great idea. There’s the poor little mousie with its feet caught, whining piteously for hours, maybe trying to gnaw off its own feet in a pathetic attempt to escape, like a fox in a leg-hold trap in one of those animal-rights commercials.”

“Carolyn—”

“It could happen. Who are you to say it couldn’t happen? Anyway, you come in and open the store and there’s the mouse, still alive, and then what do you do? Stomp on it? Get a gun and shoot it? Fill the sink and drown it?”

“Suppose I just drop it in the garbage, trap and all.”

“Now that’s humane,” she said. “Poor thing’s half-suffocated in the dark for days, and then the garbage men toss the bag into the hopper and it gets ground up into mouseburger. That’s terrific, Bern. While you’re at it, why not drop the trap into the incinerator? Why not burn the poor creature alive?”

I remembered something. “You can release the mice from glue traps,” I said. “You pour a little baby oil on their feet and it acts as a solvent for the glue. The mouse just runs off, none the worse for wear.”

“None the worse for wear?”

“Well—”

“Bern,” she said. “Don’t you realize what you’d be doing? You’d be releasing a psychotic mouse. Either it would find its way back into the store or it would get into one of the neighboring buildings, and who’s to say what it would do? Even if you let it go miles from here, even if you took it clear out to Flushing, you’d be unleashing a deranged rodent upon the unsuspecting public. Bern, forget traps. Forget poison. You don’t need any of that.” She tapped the side of the cat carrier. “You’ve got a friend,” she said.

“You’re not talking friends. You’re talking cats.”

“What have you got against cats?”

“I haven’t got anything against cats. I haven’t got anything against elk, either, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to keep one in the store so I’ll have a place to hang my hat.”

“I thought you liked cats.”

“They’re okay.”

“You’re always sweet to Archie and Ubi. I figured you were fond of them.”

“I am fond of them,” I said. “I think they’re fine in their place, and their place happens to be your apartment. Carolyn, believe me, I don’t want a pet. I’m not the type. If I can’t even keep a steady girlfriend, how can I keep a pet?”

“Pets are easier,” she said with feeling. “Believe me. Anyway, this cat’s not a pet.”

“Then what is it?”

“An employee,” she said. “A working cat. A companion animal by day, a solitary night watchman when you’re gone. A loyal, faithful, hard-working servant.”

“Miaow,” the cat said.

We both glanced at the cat carrier, and Carolyn bent down to unfasten its clasps. “He’s cooped up in there,” she said.

“Don’t let him out.”

“Oh, come on,” she said, doing just that. “We’re not talking Pandora’s Box here, Bern. I’m just letting him get some air.”

“That’s what the air holes are for.”

“He needs to stretch his legs,” she said, and the cat emerged and did just that, extending his front legs and stretching, then doing the same for his rear legs. You know how cats do, like they’re warming up for a dance class.

“He,” I said. “It’s a male? Well, at least it won’t be having kittens all the time.”

“Absolutely not,” she said. “He’s guaranteed not to have kittens.”

“But won’t he run around peeing on things? Like books, for instance. Don’t male cats make a habit of that sort of thing?”

“He’s post-op, Bern.”

“Poor guy.”

“He doesn’t know what he’s missing. But he won’t have kittens, and he won’t father them, either, or go nuts yowling whenever there’s a female cat in heat somewhere between Thirty-fourth Street and the Battery. No, he’ll just do his job, guarding the store and keeping the mice down.”

“And using the books for a scratching post. What’s the point of getting rid of mice if the books all wind up with claw marks?”

“No claws, Bern.”

“Oh.”

“He doesn’t really need them, since there aren’t a lot of enemies to fend off in here. Or a whole lot of trees to climb.”

“I guess.” I looked at him. There was something strange about him, but it took me a second or two to figure it out. “Carolyn,” I said, “what happened to his tail?”

“He’s a Manx.”

“So he was born tailless. But don’t Manx cats have a sort of hopping gait, almost like a rabbit? This guy just walks around like your ordinary garden-variety cat. He doesn’t look much like any Manx I ever saw.”

“Well, maybe he’s only part Manx.”

“Which part? The tail?”

“Well—”

“What do you figure happened? Did he get it caught in a door, or did the vet get carried away? I’ll tell you, Carolyn, he’s been neutered and declawed and his tail’s no more than a memory. When you come right down to it, there’s not a whole lot of the original cat left, is there? What we’ve got here is the stripped-down economy model. Is there anything else missing that I don’t know about?”

“No.”

“Did they leave the part that knows how to use a litter box? That’s going to be tons of fun, changing the litter every day. Does he at least know how to use a box?”

“Even better, Bern. He uses the toilet.”

“Like Archie and Ubi?” Carolyn had trained her own cats, first by keeping their litter pan on top of the toilet seat, then by cutting a hole in it, gradually enlarging the hole and finally getting rid of the pan altogether. “Well, that’s something,” I said. “I don’t suppose he’s figured out how to flush it.”

“No. And don’t leave the seat up.”

I sighed heavily. The animal was stalking around my store, poking his head into corners. Surgery or no surgery, I kept waiting for him to cock a leg at a shelf full of first editions. I admit it, I didn’t trust the little bastard.

“I don’t know about this,” I said. “There must be a way to mouseproof a store like this. Maybe I should talk it over with an exterminator.”

“Are you kidding? You want some weirdo skulking around the aisles, spraying toxic chemicals all over the place? Bern, you don’t have to call an exterminator. You’ve got a live-in exterminator, your own personal organic rodent control division. He’s had all his shots, he’s free of fleas and ticks, and if he ever needs grooming you’ve got a friend in the business.What more could you ask for?”

I felt myself weakening, and I hated that. “He seems to like it here,” I admitted. “He acts as though he’s right at home.”

“And why not? What could be more natural than a cat in a bookstore?”

“He’s not bad-looking,” I said. “Once you get used to the absence of a tail. And that shouldn’t be too hard, given that I was already perfectly accustomed to the absence of an entire cat. What color would you say he was?”

“Gray tabby.”

“It’s a nice functional look,” I decided. “Nothing flashy about it, but it goes with everything, doesn’t it? Has he got a name?”

“Bern, you can always change it.”

“Oh, I bet it’s a pip.”

“Well, it’s not horrendous, at least I don’t think it is, but he’s like most cats I’ve known. He doesn’t respond to his name. You know how Archie and Ubi are. Calling them by name is a waste of time. If I want them to come, I just run the electric can opener.”

“What’s his name, Carolyn.”

“Raffles,” she said. “But you can change it to anything you want. Feel free.”

“Raffles,” I said.

“If you hate it—”

“Hate it?” I stared at her. “Are you kidding? It’s got to be the perfect name for him.”

“How do you figure that, Bern?”

“Don’t you know who Raffles was? In the books by E. W. Hornung back around the turn of the century, and in the stories Barry Perowne’s been doing recently? Raffles the amateur cracksman? World-class cricket player and gentleman burglar? I can’t believe you never heard of the celebrated A. J. Raffles.”

Her mouth fell open. “I never made the connection,” she said. “All I could think of was like raffling off a car to raise funds for a church. But now that you mention it—”

“Raffles,” I said. “The quintessential burglar of fiction. And here he is, a cat in a bookstore, and the bookstore’s owned by a former burglar. I’ll tell you, if I were looking for a name for the cat I couldn’t possibly do better than the one he came with.”

Her eyes met mine, “Bernie,” she said solemnly, “it was meant to be.”

“Miaow,” said Raffles.

At noon the following day it was my turn to pick up lunch. I stopped at the falafel stand on the way to the Poodle Factory. Carolyn asked how Raffles was doing.

“He’s doing fine,” I said. “He drinks from his water bowl and eats out of his new blue cat dish, and I’ll be damned if he doesn’t use the toilet just the way you said he did. Of course I have to remember to leave the door ajar, but when I forget he reminds me by standing in front of it and yowling.”

“It sounds as though it’s working out.”

“Oh, it’s working out marvelously,” I said. “Tell me something. What was his name before it was Raffles?”

“I don’t follow you, Bern.”

“‘I don’t follow you, Bern.’ That was the crowning touch, wasn’t it? You waited until you had me pretty well softened up, and then you tossed in the name as a sort of coup de foie gras. ‘His name’s Raffles, but you can always change it.’ Where did the cat come from?”

“Didn’t I tell you? A customer of mine, he’s a fashion photographer, he has a really gorgeous Irish water spaniel, and he told me about a friend of his who developed asthma and was heartbroken because his allergist insisted he had to get rid of his cat.”

“And then what happened?”

“Then you developed a mouse problem, so I went and picked up the cat, and—”

“No.”

“No?”

I shook my head. “You’re leaving something out. All I had to do was mention the word mouse and you were out of here like a cat out of hell. You didn’t even have to think about it. And it couldn’t have taken you more than twenty minutes to go and get the cat and stick it in a carrying case and come back with it. How did you spend those twenty minutes? Let’s see—first you went back to the Poodle Factory to look up the number of your customer the fashion photographer, and then you called him and asked for the name and number of his friend with the allergies. Then I guess you called the friend and introduced yourself and arranged to meet him at his apartment and take a look at the animal, and then—”

“Stop it.”

“Well?”

“The cat was at my apartment.”

“What was he doing there?”

“He was living there, Bern.”

I frowned. “I’ve met your cats,” I said. “I’ve known them for years. I’d recognize them, with or without tails. Archie’s a sable Burmese and Ubi’s a Russian Blue. Neither one of them could pass for a gray tabby, except maybe in a dark alley.”

“He was living with Archie and Ubi,” she said.

“Since when?”

“Oh, just for a little while.”

I thought for a moment. “Not for just a little while,” I said, “because he was there long enough to learn the toilet trick. You don’t learn something like that overnight. Look how long it takes with human beings. That’s how he learned, right? He picked it up from your cats, didn’t he?”

“I suppose so.”

“And he didn’t pick it up overnight, either. Did he?”

“I feel like a suspect,” she said. “I feel as though I’m being grilled.”

“Grilled? You ought to be char-broiled. You set me up and euchred me, for heaven’s sake. How long has Raffles been living with you?”

“Two and a half months.”

“Two and a half months!”

“Well, maybe it’s more like three.”

“Three months! That’s unbelievable. How many times have I been over to your place in the past three months? It’s got to be eight or ten at the very least. Are you telling me I looked at the cat and didn’t even notice him?”

“When you came over,” she said, “I used to put him in the other room.”

“What other room? You live in one room.”

“I put him in the closet.”

“In the closet?”

“Uh-huh. So you wouldn’t see him.”

“But why?”

“The same reason I never mentioned him.”

“Why’s that? I don’t get it. Were you ashamed of him? What’s wrong with him, anyway?”

“There’s nothing wrong with him.”

“Because if there’s something shameful about the animal, I don’t know that I want him hanging around my store.”

“There’s nothing shameful about him,” she said. “He’s a perfectly fine cat. He’s trustworthy, he’s loyal, he’s helpful and friendly—”

“Courteous, kind,” I said. “Obedient, cheerful, thrifty. He’s a regular Boy Scout, isn’t he? So why the hell were you keeping him a secret from me?”

“It wasn’t just you, Bern. Honest. I was keeping him a secret from everybody.”

“But why, Carolyn?”

“I don’t even want to say it.”

“Come on, for God’s sake.”

She took a breath. “Because,” she said darkly, “he was the Third Cat.”

“You lost me.”

“Oh, God. This is impossible to explain. Bernie, there’s something you have to understand. Cats can be very dangerous for a woman.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You start with one,” she said, “and that’s fine, no problem, nothing wrong with that. And then you get a second one and that’s even better, as a matter of fact, because they keep each other company. It’s a curious thing, but it’s actually easier to have two cats than one.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“Then you get a third, and that’s all right, it’s still manageable, but before you know it you take in a fourth, and then you’ve gone and done it.”

“Done what?”

“You’ve crossed the line.”

“What line, and how have you crossed it?”

“You’ve become a Woman With Cats.” I nodded. Light was beginning to dawn. “You know the kind of woman I mean,” she went on. “They’re all over the place. They don’t have any friends, and they hardly ever set foot outdoors, and when they die people discover thirty or forty cats in the house. Or they’re cooped up in an apartment with thirty or forty cats and the neighbors take them to court to evict them because of the filth and the smell. Or they seem perfectly normal, and then there’s a fire or a break-in or something, and the world finds them out for what they are. They’re Women With Cats, Bernie, and that’s not what I want to be.”

“No,” I said, “and I can see why. But—”

“It doesn’t seem to be a problem for men,” she said. “There are lots of men with two cats, and probably plenty with three or four, but when did you ever hear anything about a Man With Cats? When it comes to cats, men don’t seem to have trouble knowing when to stop.” She frowned. “Funny, isn’t it? In every other area of their lives—”

“Let’s stick to cats,” I suggested. “How did you happen to wind up with Raffles hanging out in your closet? And what was his name before it was Raffles?”

She shook her head. “Forget it, Bern. It was a real pussy name, if you ask me. Not right for the cat at all. As far as how I got him, well, it happened pretty much the way I said, except there were a few things I left out. George Brill is a customer of mine. I groom his Irish water spaniel.”

“And his friend is allergic to cats.”

“No, George is the one who’s allergic. And when Felipe moved in with George, the cat had to go. The dog and cat got along fine, but George was wheezing and red-eyed all the time, so Felipe had to give up either George or the cat.”

“And that was it for Raffles.”

“Well, Felipe wasn’t all that attached to the cat. It wasn’t his cat in the first place. It was Patrick’s.”

“Where did Patrick come from?”

“Ireland, and he couldn’t get a green card and he didn’t like it here that much anyway, so when he went back home he left the cat with Felipe, because he couldn’t take him through Immigration. Felipe was willing to give the cat a home, but when he and George got together, well, the cat had to go.”

“And how come you were elected to take him?”

“George tricked me into it.”

“What did he do, tell you the Poodle Factory was infested with mice?”

“No, he used some pretty outrageous emotional blackmail on me. Anyway, it worked. The next thing I knew I had a Third Cat.”

“How did Archie and Ubi feel about it?”

“They didn’t actually say anything, but their body language translated into something along the lines of, ‘There goes the neighborhood.’ I don’t think it broke their hearts yesterday when I packed him up and took him out of there.”

“But in the meantime he spent three months in your apartment and you never said a word.”

“I was planning on telling you, Bern.”

“When?”

“Sooner or later. But I was afraid.”

“Of what I would think?”

“Not only that. Afraid of what the Third Cat signified.” She heaved a sigh. “All those Women With Cats,” she said. “They didn’t plan on it, Bern. They got a first cat, they got a second cat, they got a third cat, and all of a sudden they were gone.”

“You don’t think they might have been the least bit odd to begin with?”

“No,” she said. “No, I don’t. Oh, once in a while, maybe, you get a slightly wacko lady, and next thing you know she’s up to her armpits in cats. But most of the Cat Ladies start out normal. By the time you get to the end of the story they’re nuts, all right, but having thirty or forty cats’ll do that to you. It sneaks up on you, and before you know it you’re over the edge.”

“And the Third Cat’s the charm, huh?”

“No question. Bern, there are primitive cultures that don’t really have numbers, not in the sense that we do. They have a word that means ‘one,’ and other words for ‘two’ and ‘three,’ and after that there’s a word that just means ‘more than three.’ And that’s how it is in our culture with cats. You can have one cat, you can have two cats, you can even have three cats, but after that you’ve got ‘more than three.’”

“And you’re a Woman With Cats.”

“You got it.”

“I’ve got it, all right. I’ve got your third cat. Is that the real reason you never mentioned it? Because you were planning all along to palm the little bugger off on me?”

“No,” she said quickly. “Swear to God, Bern. A couple of times over the years the subject of a dog or cat has come up, and you’ve always said you didn’t want a pet. Did I ever once press you?”

“No.”

“I took you at your word. It sometimes crossed my mind that you might have a better time in life if you had an animal to love, but I managed to keep it to myself. It never even occurred to me that you could use a working cat. And then when I found out about your rodent problem—”

“You knew just how to solve it.”

“Well, sure. And it’s a great solution, isn’t it? Admit it, Bern. Didn’t it do your heart good this morning to have Raffles there to greet you?”

“It was all right,” I admitted. “At least he was still alive. I had visions of him lying there dead with his paws in the air, and the mice forming a great circle around his body.”

“See? You’re concerned about him, Bern. Before you know it you’re going to fall in love with the little guy.”

“Don’t hold your breath. Carolyn? What was his name before it was Raffles.”

“Oh, forget it. It was a stupid name.”

“Tell me.”

“Do I have to?” She sighed. “Well, it was Andro.”

“Andrew? What’s so stupid about that? Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson, Andrew Carnegie—they all did okay with it.”

“Not Andrew, Bern. Andro.”

“Andrew Mellon, Andrew Gardner… not Andrew? Andro?”

“Right.”

“What’s that, Greek for Andrew?”

She shook her head. “It’s short for Androgenous.”

“Oh.”

“The idea being that his surgery had left the cat somewhat uncertain from a sexual standpoint.”

“Oh.”

“Which I gather was also the case for Patrick, although I don’t believe surgery had anything to do with it.”

“Oh.”

“I never called him ‘Andro’ myself,” she said. “Actually, I didn’t call him anything. I didn’t want to give him a new name because that would mean I was leaning toward keeping him, and—”

“I understand.”

“And then on the way over to the bookstore it just came to me in a flash. Raffles.”

“As in raffling off a car to raise money for a church, I think you said.”

“Don’t hate me, Bern.”

“I’ll try not to.”

“It’s been no picnic, living a lie for the past three months. Believe me.”

“I guess it’ll be easier for everybody now that Raffles is out of the closet.”

“I know it will. Bern, I didn’t want to trick you into taking the cat.”

“Of course you did.”

“No, I didn’t. I just wanted to make it as easy as possible for you and the cat to start off on the right foot. I knew you’d be crazy about him once you got to know him, and I thought anything I could do to get you over the first hurdle, any minor deception I might have to practice—”

“Like lying your head off.”

“It was in a good cause. I had only your best interests at heart, Bern. Yours and the cat’s.”

“And your own.”

“Well, yeah,” she said, and flashed a winning smile. “But it worked out, didn’t it? Bern, you’ve got to admit it worked out.”

“We’ll see,” I said.