The Ears of a Cat

by Roderick Hart

  Reassured by this thought, Saito began her final letter, this time by hand.

  Dear Stephen, she began.

  Though her message was simple, she found it more difficult to express than expected, and the stress of being on the run didn’t help. When she completed her draft, she checked it over. Yes, it was good; it hit the spot.

  She looked up to see Agnieszka smiling at her.

  ‘Finished?’

  She was, in more ways than one. Aware of CCTV cameras, she turned to Agnieszka. A worthy and well-meaning woman, her face wouldn’t be on a database anywhere.

  ‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘if you would post a letter for me. To my father in Japan.’

  Agnieszka was surprised by this request.

  ‘There is some reason you cannot do this for yourself?’

  Saito acknowledged that there was but said she couldn’t reveal it. It was a delicate matter. She extracted paper money from her bag, peeled off two fifty-dollar bills and handed the rest to Agnieszka.

  ‘We are all short of something. I need to buy time.’

  Being over eighty, Agnieszka considered that if anyone needed to buy time, it would be her, but noticed the wad was thick.

  ‘Really, dear, this is far too much.’

  Saito smiled benignly at the old lady.

  ‘I have no further need of money.’

  62

  Lang would have been happy for Catherine Cooper to stay with her several days longer, but there came a time when she had no choice. Despite her considerate treatment of her guest, Cooper was failing to repay her hospitality with information of any kind at all. What had been the plan? Lang thought she knew but confirmation would be good. Where was the stolen virus sample? And where was Saito? Cooper might not know but surely she could hazard an educated guess? Nowhere near helping with these questions, there was no credit left on Cooper’s card.

  Most of them already impounded, she packed her few belongings while Lang busied herself with her plants. Sometimes she watered them with a small green can, its spout tipped with a gleaming brass head. At other times, she opted for a quick blast from an atomiser. Why she chose one rather than the other was a mystery to Cooper, but increasingly sinking into hopelessness, she made no attempt to figure it out.

  ‘So that’s it then?’

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ Lang confirmed. ‘I’ll have to make the call. I’ve run out of road.’

  Then, as she was given to doing, Lang changed direction again.

  ‘Your mother’s request to speak with you.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘I told her we were happy to arrange it. You should have done the same. You should speak to her. She’s worried.’

  Though Cooper was aware of that, she wasn’t looking forward to explaining why she’d been detained. Still going to church from time to time, her mother was unlikely to approve of her plan to reduce global population. The conversation, when it came, wouldn’t be easy.

  ‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,’ she would say, ‘and you, my dear, are not the Lord.’

  ‘I had the impression,’ Lang continued, turning the screw, ‘that she’s thinking of coming over to support you in your time of trouble.’

  ‘That’s not going to happen.’

  Cooper knew her mother would want to come, but she also knew that without the help of her ex-husband, Friedrich Weber, she couldn’t afford to, and he was a man she would never ask for assistance knowing from experience the perverse pleasure he took in withholding it.

  Her mother was a problem all right, the only person she really cared for. She pictured her lying under tired sheets in that draughty bedroom of hers at the top of the stairs, wakened in the early hours by the screeching of starving seagulls circling their way in from the fished-out waters off the coast. What did the future hold for them, for her? How much bleaker would it be if she was parted from her only child, under lock and key for the duration?

  Cooper still bore the marks of the quarrels she’d heard before she left home, arguments of such verbal violence she’d taken refuge in the bathroom and locked the door on the din. When her mother raised the subject of parenting, Dr Weber reacted with fury to the suggestion that he had any responsibility at all. He hadn’t wanted a child in the first place; that had been her idea. But things turned really nasty whenever, back to the wall, she appealed to the concept of “family” as if it were something sacred. At the very sound of the word, her father, enraged, poisoned the air with obscenities. He usually peaked by shouting You fucking cunt! in her face at ear-splitting volume, a phrase still burned in her memory. An innocent young girl shouldn’t have to hear things like that. Not that Dr Weber had it all his own way. She recalled an exchange from her thirteenth year, her father shouting, Go fuck yourself, Eleanor and her mother’s killer reply: Since you don’t fulfil that function anymore, you leave me no choice.

  ‘Lost in thought?’ Lang asked, wondering where she’d gone.

  Perhaps, or maybe just lost. Eleanor would think she’d gone wrong somewhere down the line, but she’d always done her best by her daughter, the errant Dr Weber notwithstanding.

  ‘On the subject of phone calls.’

  ‘Yes?’

  What was Lang up to now?

  ‘We’ve been using your phone to message your friends.’

  Cooper was shocked; such an obvious move hadn’t occurred to her.

  ‘Is deception of that sort legal?’

  ‘Probably not. I haven’t checked. Your friend Magnus, for example.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘As recently as yesterday he told you to fuck off.’

  ‘Sounds like him.’

  ‘He’s since been arrested near a cache of low-level nuclear waste he’d been assembling at work. Did you know about that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He was planning a dirty bomb.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake!’

  ’You don’t approve?’

  ‘Not a solution; totally ineffective.’

  Though Cooper couldn’t care less what happened to Magnus, she was concerned about Cindy Horváth.

  ‘Ah, now that’s not so easy. It took us some time to pick up on this, but we believe the replies we’ve had from her were actually composed by a member of the Hungarian Security Service.’

  So one secret service had been messaging another without either being aware of it. How ludicrous was that!

  ‘She’s not a bad person.’

  ‘All we know is that so far she hasn’t been charged with anything, hasn’t been arrested and isn’t in custody. Not officially, at any rate.’

  ‘József Báthory.’

  ‘Probably. From what I hear she’s a good-looking girl, generously proportioned. Werner assures me she’s positively succulent.’

  Cooper was appalled. ‘That’s no way to talk!’

  Lang smiled. ‘Perhaps not, but her YouTube videos reinforce it somewhat, and she didn’t make them at gunpoint. Our best guess is that Fräulein Horváth is under what we might call unofficial house arrest.’

  ‘Like me.’

  Lang smiled benignly.

  ‘But Katarine, my dear, you know where the door is. You could have left at any time.’

  Since Lang had her passport, credit card and phone, that had never been a realistic option. And even if it had been, she had nowhere to go. Thinking back to an earlier conversation as if it had just taken place, she finally answered the question which mattered most to Lang.

  ‘I don’t know where she is and I’ve no idea what she’s doing. Really.’

  ‘Saito?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Neither did anyone else.

  63

  Though methodical by nature, Saito gave way to the irrational and delayed putting her plan into action due to a liking for the
old lady she had just met. Knowing this to be an example of human weakness, she gave way to it anyway.

  It was over an hour before Agnieszka left for her flight, giving her a reassuring hug as she rose to leave.

  ‘I’ll post the letter for you, I won’t forget. And don’t worry, dear, it isn’t as bad as it seems.’

  Saito knew this already: it was very much worse.

  Since Agnieszka was well past breeding age, there was little more damage she could do, so she was happy to wait a further ten minutes till the lady was clear. Then she took the flask from her bag, opened it, held it under her nose and breathed in deeply before emptying the contents under her seat. Not the most dramatic way to die, and certainly not the quickest, but when it came to spreading infection, clearly effective. With passengers travelling far and wide to all parts of the globe, her action would have the maximum impact a woman on her own could hope to achieve.

  When she left the terminal building, the heat hit her hard; all the harder in the time it took to locate the bus. Line 780. Sliding into a midway seat, she settled down in the cool, conditioned air and watched as a variety of passengers followed her on board. Diversity? Not a problem on this vehicle. Two young backpackers settled in the seat in front and smiled. She smiled back. She could do so without hypocrisy: having inhaled from the flask less than an hour before, she couldn’t possibly be contagious. The virus was in her all right, raiding the resources of her body to multiply. Even so, it would take some time to render her a threat to others.

  One of the backpackers offered her information she really didn’t need.

  ‘We’re visiting the Museum of Death.’

  The fact that there was one came as news to her, but anything she had to do with death would not be confined to a museum.

  She took in little of the many streets and constant traffic on the hour-long drive to Hollywood, for her not the home of the stars but simply a place to change buses. Someone asked her where the rehearsal studios were. She had no idea and couldn’t care less. Her first performance would also be her last.

  Boarding the bus for Pasadena, she noted among the other passengers an older man with creased and weather-beaten face. Aspiring to the complete package, Stetson and leather cowboy boots, Saito was alarmed to note that he was also toting a guitar adorned with stickers and hanging tassels. And sure enough, half an hour into the journey he broke into song. He was going home to Pasadena, where the grass was greener. Which it might have been, though hardly a blade was visible through the window. The Death of Grass. Not that she was inclined to believe a balding fifty-year-old man with a greying beard and moustache. Come to that, she saw no signs of the orange trees either which, according to him, scented the breeze.

  ‘But of course, folks,’ he said, unexpectedly lowering his instrument and descending into speech, ‘they won’t be doing that right now, the orange blossom season being over this year at least.’

  Yes, the blossoms had faded and fallen, as he would too with any luck.

  Alighting at the gallery, she noted with relief that the guitar and its owner remained on board. She looked round to get her bearings. Norton Simon would doubtless have been impressed to see his gallery now, but for her the grounds held more attraction than his works of art. Why look at the painting of a flower when you could take in the flower itself? Smell it. Touch it. Where was the sense in that?

  As she sat with green tea under a parasol in the garden café, her bag on a neighbouring chair to discourage others, she considered this question, not out of its intrinsic interest but to free her mind from thoughts of impending death. From any thought at all. What she was about to do would best be accomplished on an autopilot of the mind. She observed those around her as if they were no longer real, as though they were characters observed in a game courtesy of the VR 360 Headset.

  As she rose to leave, she saw the many people relaxing at the tables, people of all ages, sizes and shapes, and to judge from some overheard snatches of conversation, several nationalities too. She threaded her way through them and headed for the street, noting a statue of an otherwise well set-up young man lacking a head. Did this signify, she wondered, that men were brainless? If so, it accorded with her experience – which she knew to be limited and destined to stay that way.

  Crossing West Colorado Boulevard, she headed for Carmelita Gardens, a haven of rest and the second last location on her list. Walking through the trees brought both shade and peace, though there was no filtering out the roar of traffic from the boulevards overhead. She wondered how the birds managed, sing as they might, how did they hear each other? As was usually the case, human activity degraded the natural world, however beautiful some of it might appear to the casual eye.

  In due course she made it to the Arroyo Seco, keeping well clear of the trail where walkers might note her presence. On the lookout for rattlesnakes, she climbed carefully up the stony incline to a patch of scrub under the bridge where no one looking down would see her, removed a yoga mat from her bag, spread it out and sat down. She had no idea how long she would last before she succumbed, but she had no intention of inflicting on others an end she wouldn’t suffer herself. That would not be right. To ensure dehydration didn’t take her out first, she still had her second bottle of water.

  As the sun faded and the night wore on, Saito noticed a drop in temperature, reminding her of the narrow range of climate living things inhabit. Even at the best of times, which this was not, survival was on a knife edge whether we knew it or not.

  64

  That first night in the undergrowth, she lay down on her mat with her bag as a headrest. As far as she could tell, things had gone according to plan. She looked up at the night sky hoping for confirmation from the stars, only to find they were hidden from view, not by clouds but washed out of sight by the extensive hemisphere of light enclosing the great city of Los Angeles and its many surrounding boroughs. She wondered for a moment how owls survived, and moths, but the moment didn’t last long since she had no way of knowing and none of finding out.

  As usual, she had done her research but luck was also on her side. It would have been easy to elevate luck into Fate, yet she could have travelled far to find an airport with more international destinations than Los Angeles. When she’d started listing them, she lost count at eighty. But by then, the map had taken shape in her head, the network of routes spreading out in all directions to Western Europe, Russia, the Middle East, the Far East, China, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Central and South America. Not forgetting Alaska, though she doubted whether the virus would spread so rapidly in the colder air of the Arctic.

  Her yoga mat, fine for a bedroom floor or a well-tended stretch of grass, provided little comfort under the bridge. She rose several times to kick away the worst of the stones, the largest and the sharpest, but even small ones cut right through, and for the first time in her life Saito wished that she had more flesh on the bone. Padding had its uses. Yet even as a young girl in Sapporo, personal comfort had never been an objective. If sacrifice had to be made for the greater good then she would make it.

  Settling into her discomfort, her mind returned to the flights spreading out from LA to destinations all over the world. And the beauty of it was that due to the incubation period, thousands of international passengers would deliver the virus to all of these places before they could be identified as carriers. Then, as reports of people showing serious flu-like symptoms started coming in from locations near and far, all hell would break loose because thousands would fall ill and die.

  In due course, the authorities would pinpoint Los Angeles as the source of the outbreak. All well and good, but that was where their problems would begin, compiling lists not just of single-flight passengers but also of the many who’d changed flights at connecting hubs. And as if that wasn’t difficult enough, all the contacts of these many thousand passengers would have to be traced as well.

  She had never h
eard of Leonard Mathieson or Molly Breitenbach but she knew how it would be, officials like them in public health centres across the globe sitting all night at computer screens compiling lists, cross-checking data, going glassy-eyed at the impossibility of covering so many angles at all, let alone at breakneck speed in the hope of containing the outbreak. Yes, she was one woman acting alone, but she would leave her mark. And when the news broke, Catherine would be impressed, and Cindy too, in the moments she paid attention. Cindy. She sometimes wished she could have been more like her, happy, outgoing, taking pleasure in life, but she didn’t have it in her. Which, she thought wryly, could seldom be said of Cindy.

  But their task was well-nigh impossible. However hard they tried, public health officials would, in the end, have to hope that over the weeks and months the outbreak would eventually run its course as all such epidemics had in the past. And Saito knew that however many perished, the death toll would still be too low. The species would survive. To have any lasting impact, her reasoned explanation to the media, and here was a pleasing thought, would have to go viral as well.

  Knowing she could do nothing more, she settled down to sleep on her bed of stones, which seemed to her a metaphor of her final days in this vale of tears. And she had nearly made it when she heard small but distinct scratching noises and pebbles rolling down the incline towards the base of the arroyo. The creatures of the night were on the move. She imagined what they might be: mice, rats, raccoons. And if she was really unlucky, rattlesnakes. The boots she’d bought to protect herself from surprise attack as she walked through the scrub wouldn’t help her now, not lying down. Were rattlers nocturnal? She didn’t know, but given the heat of day, they might relish slithering out into the cooler evening air. And darkness would hardly deter creatures with infrared sensors. Even now, a local rattler might have imaged her body heat, though when it caught her size, she liked to think it would give her a wide berth.