by Zoe Jasmine
Then it was gone.
“Oh, sweetheart, come out,” said Winnie. “What are you scared of? Your old mama out there is going bonkers with grief. Come on.” She raised her voice. “You'll have some tinned fish or liver, something with a smell?”
“Not for me, thank you, I've had my elevenses.”
“I mean for the cat. Here, kitty kitty kitty.”
Mrs. Maddingly didn't answer. Perhaps she'd forgotten what Winnie was doing. “Oh, well, I suppose another little drop won't hurt, if you must,” she was saying to herself. The sound of sherry pouring gluggily.
“Here, kitty,” said Winnie.
She switched on a bedside lamp; the bulb, all ten watts of it, flickered. She angled the shade, a cone of cinnamon-colored cardboard, to try to get more light. Something twitched. A sliding heap of old-lady housedresses or nightgowns, their nylon surfaces whispering against one another. “Come on, you cat; no sense scaring the poor thing out of her mind. God knows she's half there already.” Yeah, she and who else? Winnie thought to herself: Here you are being jittery about a housecat?
Fearing a slicing claw, Winnie picked up a walker that the old woman no doubt used to get out of bed. She touched the laundry with the leg of it. Then she reached and tugged at a hem. The top garment lifted up at an angle, caught on something unseen. With a crusty ripping sound, it came away. A clot of dried sherry or some other more intimate fluid, patching one garment against another? The far edge of the next garment rippled; the cat was backing up underneath.
She said a poem to stiffen her nerves.
"Pussycat, Pussycat, where have you been?
I've been to London to visit the Queen.
Pussycat, Pussycat, what did you there?
I frightened a little mouse—"
She stifled a gag as she peeled back the top nightgown.
Two, then three cats came to light, blood matting their fur to the nightdress below. Each one had wounds about the head or neck. They'd been chewed at. And they'd been dead long enough to stiffen. The smell was atrocious.
“Oh, Christ.”
The nightgown twitched some more, and the living cat beneath it flexed and complained in a voice more alto than, in Winnie's experience, was customary for a cat. She held the walker in front of her, ready to poke its rubber-tipped feet into the animal's face should it attack her. Then she whisked away the garment. The cat was a burnt persimmon color, like ancient orange rind. It looked twice its size, hissing, its back a wicket of radiating spikes.
She tried to speak in a level voice, as if a cat could care whether she screamed or not. “Easy, boy, what's gotten at your poor friends?” Chutney, if so it was, launched himself into the air. Despite herself Winnie raised the walker, in foolish terror; she batted the cat away. He fell back, wailing piteously or with venom, and spat. He drove his head into the neck of one of the cats, decking himself in its blood and gop, and before Winnie could see what had happened, the cat had disappeared. Just like that? She held the light up, breathing heavily. No—she wasn't that delusional, not yet—the cat had squeezed itself behind a jutting bit of wainscoting, and squirreled himself into the rubble of ancient lath and deteriorated plaster.
“Mrs. Maddingly,” said Winnie. “I think I found your other cats. And I hate to break the news to you but I think they're dead.”
“It's not them I'm worried about,” she answered. “They're all safely accounted for. It's my darling. Have you laid eyes on him?”
“He's orange? I believe I have. We'd better get rid of the corpses.”
Mrs. Maddingly shuffled in. She peered at them. “Surely they're just sleeping?” she said. “They do enjoy a nice long snooze, you know. Cats are like that. They sleep all day. I hear them up and cavorting at night, once I've gone to bed and turned the lamp down.”
“They're done cavorting, I'm afraid.”
“Well, they've been done cavorting for some time; they've been fixed for years, all of them,” said Mrs. Maddingly. “And a good thing too. Proper ladies they were. Look at them, all resting in peace.”
Mrs. Maddingly braced herself with a sip of medicinal something and took herself off to the kitchen to locate a hand broom and a dustpan.
“I do find all that hard to believe,” said Allegra Lowe, when Winnie had taken herself in hand and called her to make further inquiry into news about John. “Are you suggesting that Chutney killed his companions?”
“I have never heard of a cat killing another cat,” said Winnie. “Have you?”
“It's vile, and I've a customer at the door,” said Allegra, as if Winnie was making it up, and rang off.
Winnie had moved the construction tools to one side and put John's kitchen as much back to rights as she could. When she went to the Royal Free Hospital to ask about Colum Jenkins, she was told he had been checked out by a family member several days earlier. The staff refused to divulge his home address. “But he was all right?” Winnie said.
“He'd not have been released otherwise,” said the clerk.
“Well, hopeless cases, you know. Sending someone home to die. That sort of thing,” said Winnie apologetically, before wandering off.
Given the peculiarities of life in Rudge House, the slain cats, the increasing dottiness of Mrs. Maddingly, it was beginning to seem entirely of a piece that Winnie's cousin was missing with no forwarding address. But what was there to do about it? Winnie made the place her own as best as she could. Reluctant to turn on her laptop, she set herself small exercises each day, trying to jump-start the story of Wendy Pritzke and her obsession with Jack the Ripper. Though as she headed in the Tube toward Aldgate one bitterly damp day, a tourist pamphlet advertising Jack the Ripper sites tucked in the inside pocket of her coat, it did occur to Winnie that Wendy Pritzke seemed to have left London.
Winnie didn't believe in writing as channeling, in any sense. She was a hack, a journeyman, a slogger. Yet usually she could prod a character into her consciousness by insulting it a bit, challenging it to respond. Not so on this trip. Like John Comestor, Wendy Pritzke appeared to have disappeared, just at the time that the thing, the shred, the shroud, had been exhumed, unhoused. Wendy was farther out already, in the hinterlands of Romania, for all she knew.
Still, work was work. Maybe some torrid bit of local color, some sleight-of-vision coincidence, would reveal Wendy Pritzke or her intentions, or the thing that threatened her, in what was left of Ripper London. Winnie felt increasingly dubious, but this was her work. She couldn't be doing nothing.
The Metropolitan Line train terminated at Aldgate. She was decanted into one end of a suburban shopping mall that seemed to burrow in the right direction, following the line of Whitechapel High Street above and heading toward Commercial Street. Winnie wasn't looking for much, not an exposé of Jack the Ripper, certainly not a real ghost, but a bit of charming overlap, the kind of thing that in someone else's hands might make an amusing New Yorker “Talk of the Town” piece. Anything could be a germ. Anything could hot-wire a fever. Only when the fever took over was there a story.
But though she'd set her sights on Thrawl Street, because she loved the name, she began to lose heart once she emerged from the glassy fluorescence of the shopping mall into the gritted streets above. Commercial Street seemed largely Pakistani, as far as she could make out.
Thrawl Street, Angel Alley, Gunthorpe Street. Women turning to prostitution because of poverty, homelessness. All the dangers, all the huge lonelinesses, all the appurtenances of love with none of the affection. Martha Tabram mutilated, stabbed thirty-nine times after the “cheap and quick knee trembler” her friend Pearly Poll reported to the police. All that tumbling of organs onto the ground, all that simple need for cash so that a woman could spend a night sleeping on a mattress out of the wind.
Sadly, Thrawl Street had nothing much to say to Winnie, or nothing of use. It seemed to have been subsumed into a housing estate of red brick and nicely slanting roofs. From doorways bloomed the ghosts of curry past, present, and yet to
come. Midday, the place was largely deserted, and there was no kernel, no starter yeast. The whole district was airy and desolate.
Loneliness collapsed into her. She wandered by Indian take-away and discount footware storefronts, feeling Jack the Ripper dissolving, the mystery of his indecency beyond either her power to call it up or to dismiss it. She gave up, feeling as if in abandoning the lookout for the ghost of Jack the Ripper, she was putting her dim Wendy Pritzke at greater risk. But Winnie knew nothing else to do. She went back to Hampstead.
That night she made herself a strong drink and set herself the mental task of remembering John's friend's name. When she woke up she had it: Britt Chalmers. Listed in the directory, hurrah. Chalmers, Girdlestone Walk, Highgate. She waited till a respectful 10A.M . on a Saturday morning and woke him up.
“Oh, so sorry,” she said jollily. “I always assume if people don't want to be awakened by the phone these days they turn the ringer off or pull the connection out. But there you are. While I've got you, Britt, I need to know where John Comestor is.”
“Who is this?” he said groggily.
“It's Winifred Rudge. We ran into each other some days ago at the Café Rouge. John still hasn't shown up and there's all sorts of funny business going on here.”
“Oh,” said Britt. “Yes, I remember. Well, I'll be little help to you, I'm afraid. The man runs his affairs with the secrecy of MI-5. I'm sure he's not half as full of derring-do as he'd like us to believe. He's probably planting a herbaceous border at some hideaway cottage in the Cotswolds. How long are you going to stay?”
“A while yet.” She felt stiff and faintly paranoid, for he was hiding something from her, she could tell it and not prove it. She continued. “Quite a while, I guess. Or maybe not. I've got MI-5 in my blood too, I suppose. We're cousins, after all.”
“Yes,” he said. “Right. Well, then.” He rang off.
“Rice here.”
“Malcolm Rice. This is Winnie Rudge.”
“Yes. Oh, yes. You're still here, or have you gone away and come back already?”
“Still here. Look, I hate to seem a busybody, but I'm running out of ideas. It's closing in on two weeks and there's still no sign from John, no word, no phone call. Has he been in touch with you?”
There was a long pause. Winnie imagined the older man studying his cuticles, trying to remember his brief. “Miss Rudge, do you think he's avoiding you?”
“I hardly think that, Malcolm.” She used his Christian name like an insult. “What possible reason could he have for doing that?”
“Oh, far beyond me even to speculate. He just doesn't seem like the type of fellow to get in trouble of a serious nature. You haven't overlooked some note? You didn't scribble the dates in your diary wrong?”
“Should I go to the police? I don't want to get involved in raising suspicions about him at work.”
“It is not my business to say what you should do or not do, Miss Rudge. If you'll excuse me, I've guests in the lounge. There's nothing more to say. Don't bother to ring again; if I've anything to tell you, I'll take it upon myself to be in touch.”
I'm making a nuisance of myself, she thought. But what else can I do?
She rang Rasia. She got a child on the phone who with some prodding admitted his name. “Tariq.”
“Tariq McIntyre,” said Winnie. “May I speak to your mommy?”
“No,” said Tariq. He breathed asthmatically, waiting.
“Please?”
“She's not here. She's—” More breathing. “Out.”
“Oh. Who's minding you?”
“Navida.”
“I see. Well, would you remember to tell her that I called?”
“Tell her what?”
“I mean, tell her I rang. Winnie. Can you remember? It's okay. I'm the one who came and we listened to the sounds in the closet? Your mom said sometimes she heard a cat there. Oh, you don't hear a cat anymore, do you?” She had a thought, of Chutney breaking through the shared wall, and coming into the McIntyre flat, and doing to the poor McIntyre baby what it might have done to Mrs. Maddingly's cats. It was a stupid, silly thought, but it wouldn't go away. “Is there a cat in your flat? Have you seen a cat? Don't go near it. Are you alone? Let me speak to Navida.”
“You can't.”
“Oh, it's important. Let me speak to Navida.”
“You can't. She can't.”
“Why not?”
“She's in the loo.”
“Oh. There's a baby, where is it?”
“With Mum.”
“Tariq. Tariq. Listen. Have you seen a cat in your flat?”
Tariq did a young person's version of the same sort of quiet rumination that Malcolm Rice had done. As if humoring her. “Well . . .”
“Tariq, yes or no?”
“Sort of a cat.”
“Tariq, answer me. Yes or no.”
“I don't want to talk to you anymore,” he said. He rang off.
She walked around the block and knocked at the door. Navida and Tariq wouldn't let her in. Allegra Lowe came to the window and looked up from the kitchen, her hands all covered in plaster dust. With a huff of derision she disappeared and then a minute later opened the front door. “It's you; are you becoming some sort of squatter around here?”
“Oh, I know you'll think I'm bonkers.” She spoke quickly because she knew that the words would certify her as a lunatic, and she couldn't help it. “I'm worried that old Mrs. Maddingly's cat has found a way to burrow through the walls and get into your side of the house. Have you heard anything? Any yowling?”
“There's only one thing yowling, and it isn't pretty.”
“Oh, stop, just stop it. You didn't see those cats laid out. Let me in, Allegra. Those kids are home alone up there.”
“Winnie, if you don't mind my being blunt, it's none of your concern.”
“It's absolutely of my concern and I do mind your being blunt.” She was ready to take offense at everything. “Will you just let me pass? I'll be only a moment up there.”
But before they could come to a scuffle, Rasia came trodding along on the pavement, the baby in a Snugli and the computer weighing down her shoulder. “Hello, a party,” she said. “Just what I need after a long day.” But her face was clouded and the baby whimpering.
“Hardly a party, ” said Allegra, and stomped away, slamming her inside door.
“I can't ask you in, I've left the little ones alone and this one needs a change of nappy. Another time?”
“Rasia, have you seen a cat in your apartment? An orange cat? Have you heard it mewing in the walls the way you did a week or two ago?”
“No cats,” said Rasia, “and no time. Please, Winnie. I have to close this door.”
“Just tell me for sure. I'm not being silly.”
“I'm going to close the door now.”
There seemed no place else to turn. Winnie had folded the shroud into as regular a stack of cloth as she could, given its ragtag edges, and sprinkled it liberally with moth flakes. Then she'd tucked it in a plastic John Lewis bag and knotted the handles together. The parcel gave off no sinister reek of presence. It was just an old potato sack someone had hung on a nail, no matter what Ritzi Ostertag had said.
She sat at the kitchen table in the vacant flat, writing Wendy, Wendy, Wendy Pritzke, unable to find her.
Already through Ploisti, and Cimpina, and Sinaia, those pretty cities only a string of memories from Bucharest to Brasov. How quickly could memories be set in place, how firmly erased?
In each town that they stopped for the night, Wendy and John had requested separate rooms, as befits cousins, though they were stepcousins really, not blooded. After suffering separately the cold dribble that passed for a shower, they met in Wendy's room. She sat on the calcified mattress, which was made up with sheets and blanket in the usual manner, but also wrapped all round with a clean white sheet in which a central shape had been cut, so the blanket from beneath showed through as a lozenge of wool the color of hor
sehair.
She sipped her gray vodka and cut her lip on a chip in the glass.
“So we're here,” said John.
“We're here,” she answered, “bleeding and all.”
“You're all here?”
“Meaning?”
“You're not chasing Jack the Ripper in your mind?”
“My job is to be here. We've left that fancy far behind. This is real.”
“Are you scared?”
“Only very scared, not very very scared.”
“It'll be more than all right. It's the beginning of everything good.”
“Don't say that.” She kicked off her shoes and lay back on the bed, not so much relaxing ostentatiously in front of him, but trying to work out the kinks in her lower spine from a day spent in the rackety car driven by Doroftei.
“I saved some bread from lunch, are you hungry?” he said.
“The bread is grayer than the vodka.”
“You have to keep up your strength.”
“More vodka, then, dear thing.”
He came to the edge of the bed and perched briefly on it, his rump making a pull in the sheet, a ripple of cotton. How could the Romanians get their linen so white when their flour was so ashen? She'd hardly eaten a thing but crackers since arriving.
She hoped he wouldn't stay on the bed, and he didn't, because Doroftei knocked on the door and he jumped up guiltily. Though there was nothing to be guilty about, nothing; there never had been.
“On to the holiday hour,” said Doroftei. He had rubbed something like motor oil in his hair, and his shirt was rakishly open to the second button. “Such good time to enjoy, you tell everyone in U.S. and U.K., they all coming to Sunny Clearing, Poiana Brasov, and being happy.”
“Do we have to be happy tonight?” she said in a low voice, but John had been the one to hire the driver, through connections at his work; he couldn't allow Costal Doroftei to think them bored or uninterested for a moment.
“How many more nights have we?” John asked. “Let's just go look and see.”
