Cat in the Hat
Is my work cut out for me!
I have not been in such an early morning downpour since my mama done left me by a drainage ditch when she was swept away by one of Las Vegas’s tsunami rainstorms. She would not have left by her own druthers, of course. But these gully washers sweep druthers away like dreams.
So there I was, a kit with my ears still wet and getting wetter by the instant. My littermates were leaves in the watery wind. My sire at that time was just a whisper on the desert dust devil.
It was survival of the fittest and I was not very fit at that young age.
My Miss Temple reminds me of my abandoned younger self, and for a moment I could cry cat tears with her. Save that cat tears have never changed anything but the saline composition of my eye fluid.
So.
I could shake the sheets and some sense into my Miss Temple. Like tomorrow is another day and there is always another fine dude in the offing. But she would not listen in her present state, and I cannot blame her. We dudes are sometimes more than somewhat dense.
However, it is clear to me that what she most needs at the moment is not moonlight and roses and regret, but someone steady to untangle the many webs being woven at the New Millennium.
And I have the claws to do it!
I shimmy-shimmy off the zebra-print comforter. I have personally never taken much comfort in stripes of any sort, including tiger. We solid guys are the ones to rely on: solid black cats and . . . black panthers.
Faster than you can hitch a ride on a roller coaster, I am inside the New Millennium and rousting the resident Big Cats in their cages.
They blink and growl and hiss loud enough to fill the sails of a nice little ketch. Where, they ask, is Miss Louise?
While I am tongue-tied—for Louise is holding down the fort at the Crystal Phoenix—I feel an airy feminine presence brush by my side. Feline, of course.
The Big Boys growl in tandem, which—let me tell you—is ear inspiring. Also deafening.
“This is not the valiant daughter of Louie the First,” they thunder.
I see Squeaker’s narrow tall tremble slightly.
“You are that sssspolled houssssecat, Hyasssscinth,” they add hiss to growl.
Well, I am about to be outa there, seeing as one of their mitts would make a giant Freddy Kreuger–like razor-nailed glove, AWOL from Elm Street and in my own back yard. But Squeaker weaves back and forth, tail high and tickling their baseball-mitt-size noses.
“You big dummies,” she begins.
I cringe.
“You cannot tell a lilac-point Siamese from a chocolate-point one! Have you ever heard of Siamese fighting fish? You cannot keep two in a bowl, for one will eat the other.”
“Eat?” Lucky asks. “I am not into rampant indiscriminate carnivorosity. I am on a strict health regime. I do not eat what I do not know.”
“How unfortunate,” Squeaker says, “for your social circle.”
Kahlúa tries to clear things up. “We do not eat our trainers.”
As with dames of all species, explanation is a fatal move. I feel forced to put my body between hers and the Big Cats.
“Give the little lady a break, boys,” I urge. “She is new not only to show biz, but the crime beat. Have you two seen anything suspicious?”
“Everything is suspicious to us,” Lucky says. “We work for a masked man, and we see workmen crawling around up here where only bats and tree frogs should hang out.”
“And then there is the woman,” Kahlúa said.
“Shangri-La?”
“Shangri-La-ti-dah,” Lucky growls. “She has no time for leopards, but dotes on that skinny, snooty housecat of hers. No offense,” he adds in a polite aside to Squeaker.
“At least she is small, as humans go,” Kahlúa adds. “Our master has no business risking his neck up here, as he is so large and slow, like a lion.”
“And his mask emulating the look of our kind impairs his vision,” says Lucky.
“Which is weak and human to begin with.” Kahlúa looks out toward the performance area, his vertical pupils instantly adjusting to the change of focus and light, making his point. “One wrong step on those suspended platforms out there and any one of us could come crashing down.”
I sense their sincere worry for their master. Now that I hear them discuss it, I realize how dangerous a show this is for the Cloaked Conjuror and his Big Cats. What it offers is a showcase for the lithe Shangri-La and Hyacinth. And the lithe Shangri-La has been involved in criminal shenanigans before this. I wonder how she talked her new partner, CC, into doing this stunt. The New Millennium sure wouldn’t want their major attraction executing a swan dive from sixty feet up.
Could the Cloaked Conjuror be blinded by love, or lust?
“She is always telling him what to do,” Kahlúa says with disdain. “We are a better-known attraction in Vegas, and Lucky and I do not do more than demur with a friendly growl now and then.”
“Really? Shangri-La rules this roost then.”
Lucky sniffs and lifts his upper lip to bare truly awesome fangs. It is an expression of total disgust among our kind.
“I could not sleep the other night and I heard them arguing. Well, I heard her arguing, her voice is high and harsh. Our master’s voice rumbles deep like a purr. He never says boo back to her.”
“The other night?” My ears perk up. “When was it?”
Lucky rubs his huge black nose with an even huger black mitt. These guys are big. “Three, four nights ago?”
“The night before the police came?”
“Yeah. Maybe so, now that I think of it.” Lucky yawns. “I have a bit of insomnia.”
“After what they tried to do to you, I can bet you do,” says Kahlúa. “If Miss Louise had not taken things in hand you would not be here and your new name would not be ‘Lucky’.”
“Hey,” I say, “that was my case, fellas. I had something to do with Lucky’s rescue too.”
Lucky was purring, so loudly the boys apparently did not hear me. “That Louise, she is a plucky little thing for someone who could be an appetizer for us.”
“We would not snack on one of our own species,” Kahlúa says quickly.
“Unless we were starving,” Lucky agrees.
I back away, just in case the meat truck has been a little slow today.
They have forgotten me anyway. Apparently, they only have eyes for Louise.
I am chewing over what I have learned, anyway, and find it pretty disturbing stuff.
There is a very good chance that Shangri-La was the last person to see the late Art Deckle alive, that she wasn’t arguing with CC but with Deckle, and that she helped him dive off the platform to his death.
Accursed
“Well, don’t you look like something the wet cat dragged in?”
Randy Wordsworth did a double-take to examine Temple’s expression. “Don’t tell me there’s more bad news about this accursed exhibition.”
“Don’t call it that. ‘Accursed’ is the kind of word that takes on a life of its own if the media get ahold of it.”
“Maybe you will call it that too when I tell you what the higher-ups learned from the police and told me, confidentially.”
“And you’ll tell me?”
“They don’t know what to do with it and I have a feeling you might.”
While Temple mulled that over, she studied the assembling skeleton of the exhibition spaces. Worker ants in white coveralls climbed an elliptical yet narrowing structure, reminding her of slaves laboring on Cheop’s Great Pyramid in Egypt.
The pinnacle was the clear Lexan plastic onion-shaped dome. Lexan was Lucite on steroids: impact proof. When the Czar Alexander scepter was suspended above its stone base and a bright pinpoint spot was aimed at all that high-carat jewel fire, the effect would be spectacular.
Already the exhibition’s lower levels glittered with period gowns and high-polished furniture, interspersed with islands of imperial s
ilver and gold and more gemstones.
“This should be a knockout, Randy.”
“This information should knock you out more.”
Temple gave him an inquiring look. Her usual slightly sandpapered voice was raw gravel this morning, thanks to serial sobbing into her pillow. Even Visine had only softened the bloody tinge of her eye whites. Having an emotional meltdown as a blonde was way too risky. Normally, her natural red hair would have deflected interest from her eyes.
“Tell me,” she said. Even bad news would take her mind off . . . things.
“The dead guy may have been a petty con man, but he had experience topside in this kind of show. He was, get this, Madame Olga Kirkov’s brother. Got his start performing in her traveling ballet company, then came here and got an American citizenship years ago.”
Temple allowed herself to look shocked. “Art Deckle had been a Russian ballet dancer?”
“Andrei Dechynevski. He made the leap thirty years ago. Did you know Madame Olga herself had defected from Russia twenty years ago? Back when you couldn’t leave the Soviet Union without an escape pod and help from the CIA or an underground group?”
“So, this White Russian exhibition in the white-hot center of American tourism would mean a lot to her. Could she and her brother have been in it together? Why would a respected elder stateswoman of the ballet world want to steal the Czar Alexander scepter?”
“Dunno. Maybe some clever person with a reason to interview the old dame should ask her. You know the ins and outs of this museum/performance fine arts stuff.”
“That’s true. I do,” Temple said. She winced at her last two words. “I will.” That wasn’t much better. Why did she have vows on her mind? For reasons of breaking or making them?
Concentrating on the weird death—and now strange family history—of Art Deckle might take her mind off . . . other things.
After inquiring, Temple was directed to the second-floor meeting room that served as exhibition headquarters. She found her way to the same oblong room wrapped around a very long conference table littered with architects’ floor plans and elevations.
It was her luck that Madame Olga was the only one here. The old woman was sitting cross-legged like an elf atop the table, studying the pale blue lines of the drawings. The prominent veins in her hands and arms were even more vivid than the sketch lines.
Still, her back and spine were ruler straight. That she maintained that ballerina’s combination of flexibility and ramrod posture was amazing for a woman of her age. Maybe Aunt Kit was mistaken about inevitable female decrepitude. Just a little.
“Ah.” The woman looked up with a grateful sigh. “My eyes are seeing double on these drawings. Just the one to make it all come clear. Miss Barr, is it?”
“Yes. Why are you sitting on the table, may I ask?”
“Why not?” The age-faded face wore a pixieish grin. Madame Olga reminded Temple of an octogenarian teenager, a total contradiction in impressions. “Come. Join me, child. You can’t see anything right unless you’re in the middle of things.”
Or the muddle of things. That’s where Temple was right now.
“I don’t know if I can—”
“Not in those high heels. Leave them on the floor.”
“But . . . I’m not wearing stockings.” She didn’t feel that bare-foot odor was suitable for the woman’s turned-up yet aristocratic nose.
“Excellent. Stockings only cut off circulation. High heels are the average woman’s equivalent to toe shoes. They strengthen the line of the leg and intensify the curve of the calf. Very sexy, my dear. Do you dance?”
“Only socially. A little.”
“Pity. You have dancer’s legs. I noticed that immediately. I always judge people by their legs. A clumsy leg betokens an idle mind and crooked legs signify a twisted soul. Your legs are slender and straight. You can be trusted.”
Temple hoped Max would agree with that evaluation.
“Why are you here to see me? You are here to see me?”
“Um . . . yes, I am.” Temple gazed at the architectural renderings papering the wooden tabletop. She felt she was at the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party without tea, and with only one very old, eccentric, and formidable guest.
She eyed the old lady next to her, who seemed her own height.
“It’s funny,” Temple said. “I always feel short but I don’t now that I am sitting next to you.”
The black eyes in that pale, blue-veined face crackled with energy and amusement.
“The best ballerinas, my dear, are petite. We reach for the sky, or the flies, when we go en point, our arms high above our heads. We then become one elegant attenuated line, as if suspended from an invisible thread of spider silk. There is nothing like it in the performing arts. We are the centerpiece. The male dancer is but a suitor, a slave, a mere prop to our strength and certainty. We are queens. We are the Alexander scepter of the stage. We are czarinas. We defy gravity.”
Temple was reminded of Mariah Molina’s performance song at the recent Teen Queen pageant. “Defying Gravity” was from the Broadway hit Wicked, based on the imagined lives of the good and evil witches from The Wizard of Oz.
The confluence of ideas and images confused Temple. Just as they did in her personal life. Everything seemed weighted now. Significant. Painful. Liberating.
Was she consorting with a wicked witch, White Russian style?
Madame Olga had no doubts. “You have not come to me for affirmation, but confirmation. Am I right?”
“You must always be right,” Temple said with a grin.
“I am old enough to give that impression, but my early life was struggle, disappointment, frustration. Uncertainty. I deserted my homeland because it was in the hands of venal bureaucrats. I left my family because they were broken and accepted it. I abandoned my one true love because he could not change. I gave myself to my art because it was cruel and demanding, but it gave me wings.”
The old woman’s knotty but strong finger speared a point on a nearby drawing. The sketch of the Alexander scepter’s installation.
“This is the nexus. The link between the Old World I loved that nurtured my family line and my art, and this New World that makes art into spectacle. Still, that is a kind of immortality. They draw on the same energy, River Dance and Swan Lake.”
“A peasant form and an aristocratic one?”
“They are the same. If you do not understand that, you do not understand art. That is why I embrace this American potpourri of commerce and art. Why I lend my name, which is all the power I have left.”
She flexed a bare instep, drawing it almost into the image of a bound Chinese foot, all exaggerated curve of arch with the toes curled into crippled insignificance underneath it.
Temple winced to witness that ingrained deformity. Were her own means of borrowed height that disabling? No, she wore heels only for short periods. If she could have gone en point, maybe she wouldn’t have worn them at all.
“What do you want to know?” the old woman asked.
What not?
Temple tried to fix herself in here and now, job and profession. She wasn’t a czarina, but she was a media mistress.
“The dead man was your brother?”
“Yes, a long-lost one. I had no idea until the police confronted me with evidence of his identity. He was the only family member besides me who left for America. I sought art, he sought profit. Still, I had a soft spot for him. Is that the expression? Yes. He wished to seize this world and make it his, as I did. He had a crooked leg and insufficient art, thus he took the name ‘Art.’ He had a certain nerve and desire. I liked him. He was the peasant, asking for more than crumbs from the indifferent table.
“Early on, I found employment for him among my company, but he had higher ambitions and lower means. He left. I never saw him for, um, perhaps twenty years. Until he hung dead over this exhibition and of course had become unrecognizable to me. That clown-white painted face was both a disguise to the end and
an editorial comment.”
“You don’t think it odd that the person who threatened this show, this exhibition, should be a shirt-tail relative of yours?”
“ ‘Shirt tail.’ So casual. So American. No, I don’t think it odd. I think that this exhibition brilliantly combines Old World and New. Old troubles and new ones.”
“Had he become a terrorist?”
“Andrei? He had not a political bone in his body. He had no bones at all. He was a tool, not a terrorist.”
What a pitiless assessment of a life. A death.
“And what of Ivan Volpe?”
“What of him?” Madame Olga asked with supreme indifference.
“Might he have a motive for disrupting the exhibition or stealing the scepter?”
“He has a motive for self-advancement. He is one of those sad, professional displaced Russians, consoling themselves with exile in Paris. His whole family was of the same, spineless stock. First to leave, and last to lament the great, grand old days. I would not be surprised if he would some day soon produce another candidate as offspring of the mystical Anastasia.”
“Czar Nicholas’s daughter who was rumored to have escaped the family slaughter.”
“People love legends that never die. Why else does Swan Lake persist, and the paintings of Van Gogh. And sightings of Elvis Presley? Even those who are not Russian need their icons.”
Icons referred originally to the gilt-touched paintings of Russian Orthodox saints. Like many specific words, it had been adapted to apply to modern idols as well as holy figures: to rock stars and Hollywood legends. Even to a blue-collar boy from Tupelo, Mississippi. Just as the word “diva” had been plucked from the operatic world to revert to pop music stars.
Things always went from the sublime to the ridiculous, Temple reflected. Maybe even murder.
Temple nodded her thanks to Madame Olga for her time and her insight. She skittered across the tabletop, pushing papers away like leaves, and hopped down onto solid ground to push her toes back into her usual high heels.
Cat in a Quicksilver Caper Page 18
