Nine Lives Last Forever

by Rebecca M. Hale

  “Hmm,” I said, studying the lineup of spices. I selected a different collection of bottles and began preparing the next coating mixture.

  Monty got up and scraped the pile of bones from his plate into the kitchen trashcan. Rupert’s blue eyes followed him, his fixed stare never leaving Monty’s greasy fingers.

  I peeked under the lid of the skillet. The current batch was about ready to turn. “Next round should be up in a minute or two,” I said as I grabbed a pair of tongs and flipped over the simmering chicken legs. “I hope you’re still hungry.”

  Monty glanced down at Rupert, who smacked his lips enthusiastically. “Keep ’em coming,” he replied. Monty wiped his mouth with a napkin and cleared his throat. “So I need the cats to help me find the frogs,” he said casually.

  “More metal frogs?” I asked as I rolled a chicken leg in the newest coating mixture. “Don’t you have enough of those?”

  “Oh no, real-life frogs.” Monty tapped his forehead. “Like the one that beaned me on the noggin.”

  I checked the skillet again. This time, I pulled one of the legs out and dropped it onto his plate.

  “You see,” Monty continued as he chomped down on a mouthful of the most recent sample, “I received new information this afternoon about the Sutro money—it’s gold actually—from my Vigilance Committee colleagues.”

  “Did you?” I asked, looking up from the stove to the kitchen table.

  “With apologies for this morning’s initiation exercise,” he added, as if he were still soothing his wounded ego. “I passed the test, by the way,” he said defensively.

  “Congratulations,” I replied, trying not to laugh.

  “You see, the VC have discovered a new clue to the gold’s location,” Monty said, clearly excited at the development.

  I returned my attention to the skillet as Monty wiped off his fingers, reached into his coat pocket, and pulled out a small piece of paper. “They think your Uncle Oscar moved it from its original hiding place.”

  I turned away from the stove to face Monty. He held a small piece of paper up in front of his face and read out in a serious tone, “Follow the frogs.”

  “That’s it? That’s your new clue?” I asked. “What does this have to do with taking my cats to City Hall?”

  Monty fed a last sliver of chicken meat to Rupert. “I’m sure that’s the place. There have been numerous frog sightings throughout the building recently. Apparently, one even made its way into the Mayor’s office—caused quite a fuss.”

  Monty leaned back in his chair and patted his full stomach. “I have a theory . . .”

  “Oh no,” I groaned. That phrase never passed through Monty’s lips without being followed by some sort of preposterous supposition.

  Monty proceeded, undeterred. “Oscar hid the gold in City Hall, and the frogs are guarding it—kind of like leprechauns. If we follow the frogs, they’ll lead us right to it.”

  I stared up at the ceiling. If nothing else, Monty was consistent.

  “It’s perfectly logical when you think about it,” Monty insisted despite my skepticism. “Adolph Sutro was totally destroyed by the big-business interests that ran City Hall. The first part of Sutro’s gold was used to support a change in the way the Board of Supervisors were elected—the Supervisors are the driving force in City Hall. Another portion of the gold was used to fund the Milk campaign—to help him change the political dynamics in City Hall. It only makes sense that Oscar would have hidden the remaining gold somewhere within—City Hall.”

  He flicked the piece of paper. “Follow the frogs,” he repeated. “Couldn’t be simpler. I just need your cats to help me track down the frogs, so that I can follow them.”

  Wincing dubiously, I plucked the piece of paper from Monty’s fingers. “Here, let me see it.”

  The paper was yellowed and curling around its edges. A smear of grease bleared the right-hand corner. In the middle of the paper, the phrase Monty had just read was written in a round, looping scrawl I instantly recognized.

  The note had been written, presumably some time ago, by my Uncle Oscar.

  I stared into the skillet, watching the coating on the chicken legs slowly turn from creamy white to golden brown, the unfolded piece of paper clasped tightly between my fingers.

  Follow the frogs, I repeated to myself. I thought of the mysterious webbed footprints in my kitchen and the frog the cats had found in the basement. The message could just as easily have been referring to the Green Vase, but the VC apparently thought differently.

  I sighed tensely. I couldn’t imagine what would have inspired Oscar to write such strange instructions, but there seemed to be only one way to find out.

  “All right,” I said with determination. “But I’m coming with you.”

  “Excellent,” Monty replied, surprised at my sudden agreement.

  Monty carried his empty plate from the table to the stove and nudged it toward the skillet. I clamped the tongs around another fried leg and shifted it onto his plate.

  Monty bit into the crust of the latest sample. “Still not quite right,” he assessed. “Oscar’s was lighter, fluffier, almost unexpectedly floral . . .”

  I glanced sharply up at Monty. He and I both landed on the missing ingredient at exactly the same time.

  “Ooh—ooh,” he cried out, jumping up and down.

  Wordlessly, I crossed the kitchen to the chair where I’d dropped my shoulder bag and pulled out a small vial filled with tulip petal extract. I’d been carrying the vial around with me as a security precaution ever since our Napis-engineered bus misadventure.

  Monty leaned over the kitchen counter as I added a couple of the pungent drops of extract to the coating mixture. Almost instantly, I could tell that I’d finally found the right combination.

  “You’ve done it,” Monty whispered, his voice filled with awe.

  I stepped back from the stove, my hands on my hips as I pondered this revelation. All of that time, I thought, shaking my head, my Uncle Oscar had been cooking up his fried chicken with the antidote to Frank Napis’s poison.

  Chapter 32

  IN AN ABANDONED PLACE

  THAT SAME NIGHT, in a nearby Jackson Square kitchen, preparation of yet another skillet full of fried chicken was under way.

  An elderly Asian man watched from a wobbly three-legged stool as his daughter cooked the meal. Her long, silky ponytail of black hair swished back and forth as she combined the ingredients, carefully following a recipe taken from a cookbook spread open on the counter. The title printed on the book’s cover read The Art of Chicken.

  The kitchen was in a small loft apartment above an abandoned antique store. The loft was sparsely furnished but pleasant enough for its most recent resident. The large open space of the loft’s living area overlooked the store’s empty showroom. Sheets of brown kraft paper covered the building’s floor-to-ceiling windows, sealing off the showroom and the loft’s occupants from street-level view.

  Despite the use of numerous air-freshening devices, stale, stuffy whiffs of sandalwood and hibiscus still floated through the air in the loft, remnants of the endless incense sticks burned by the previous tenant. The whole place had been cleared out a couple of months earlier following the tenant’s sudden and unexpected departure. A highly polished fat-bellied Buddha sat on the loft’s kitchen table, the only item that remained from the showroom’s previous inventory.

  The building was not as tall as its neighbors up and down the street, comprising only two stories instead of three, and its construction was of a much more recent vintage. The previous Gold Rush-era structure on the lot had been leveled in the late 1970s, during a period of much looser regulation of the city’s historical properties.

  While there had been quite a furor at the time of the original demolition, the new building was constructed with the same type of red bricks as the older structures up and down the street. Nowadays, almost no one remembered that the establishment next door to the Green Vase didn’t share its lengthy
history.

  The owner of the plot had been surprised during the older building’s teardown to find a secret passageway leading between his property and a low-hanging stairwell above the first floor of the Green Vase. With the assistance of his construction manager, a perpetually disgruntled man named Harold Wombler, the new owner had ensured that a covering of tarps concealed the opening to the passageway until the new construction was complete.

  A hidden door in the loft’s back bathroom now provided access to this passageway. Behind the door, dusty steps led into a narrow tunnel, the exterior of which, to untrained eyes, appeared to be an oversized ventilation duct. On the other side of the tunnel, a trapdoor opened up over a low-hanging beam just above the sixth step on the stairs leading from the Green Vase showroom to the second floor kitchen.

  The old man chuckled, remembering Oscar’s excitement about the secret passageway. Who knew what kind of mischief it had been used for during the Gold Rush days? It had certainly come in handy of late.

  Luckily, the old man was short enough to make the trip without too much discomfort. He had even managed to navigate the passage carrying a plate of freshly fried chicken.

  The old man leaned back in his stool and reached for the plastic tubing connected to his oxygen tank. He had recently turned in his pipe for a nicotine patch, but his teeth were permanently etched with tobacco stains from his years of smoking. His frail fingers poked at the patch, prodding its surface to ensure that the medicine was still oozing out; then he reached for a plastic chopstick and slid it between his thin lips as if it were a cigarette. He had cheated death for now, but he knew it wouldn’t last.

  His hand travelled to his face and the long, wispy growth that spun out from his chin. He had let his facial hair grow during the past months of self-imposed incarceration, and he was rather enjoying the effect.

  Of course, he’d had plenty of company during these months of seclusion. His wife and daughter had visited him frequently, nursing him through the tulip extract resuscitation from his self-applied spider toxin coma.

  The man’s fingers twirled the chopstick as he thought back thirty years ago to his Vigilance Committee days. Such a long time had passed since he’d posed in the black-and-white photo in front of Harvey Milk’s Castro Street campaign headquarters. His reflections on that period always brought a solemn moment of sadness. The bright excitement of that heady time had been forever darkened by the City Hall murders.

  Oscar had been so excited when he’d guessed the location of Adolph Sutro’s hidden fortune. It had been Oscar’s first major discovery, the beginning of a long line of successes. It was so like Oscar, the man thought, to see into someone’s soul through the artifacts they’d left behind.

  Sutro wouldn’t have hidden the funds on his estate, Oscar had reasoned. It would have been too likely that one of his heirs would find it. No, he had reverted true to form.

  As Oscar had imagined it, Sutro had walked down the hill from his estate to the amusement park spread out across the beach. The area would have been packed every weekend with working-class families—along with the city’s beautiful children, full of hope and laughter, a lifetime’s worth of opportunity ahead of them. Sutro had secreted the money within the most popular ride in the park, a brightly painted merry-go-round whose pole-mounted seats were fashioned into all manner of animals: horses, giraffes, lions, goats, dragons, and a Sutro-era substitution provided by an anonymous donor—a single gold-trimmed frog.

  The key had been in Sutro’s library. His extensive literary collection had at one time been the largest in the city. Most of the books were sold when the estate was liquidated, but Sutro’s daughter had managed to hold on to one volume, her father’s favorite green-covered text that contained several Mark Twain essays. One of the selections was particularly dog-eared: the famous Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.

  It had not been easy to track down the Playland-at-the-Beach merry-go-round. Oscar had had to negotiate long and hard with a collector in New Mexico before he convinced the man to part with the antique ride. Their agreement had required that the merry-go-round be made available for a short display period in Southern California before coming north to San Francisco.

  But the effort had been worth it. Sutro’s hidden fortune had been right where Oscar had suspected, in the secret mouth cavity of the gold-trimmed frog. In place of the buckshot that had filled the mouth of Twain’s frog, Sutro had taken a mountain of gold coins and melted them down into a collection of gold ingots, specifically shaped so that they fit like puzzle pieces into the curved contours of the frog’s oral cavity.

  Once Oscar tracked down Sutro’s hidden gold, everything else fell into place. The initiative to change the Board of Supervisors seating structure had passed, and Harvey Milk had begun to lead a progressive coalition of newly elected representatives. The VC were excitedly preparing for the next election, energized by the impact they were having on their city. The morning of the shootings, however, changed them all forever.

  John Wang rubbed his pallid face, the paper-thin skin wrinkling beneath his fingers. Thirty years later, he and Dilla had decided to bring back the VC. It was a much smaller initiative that they were now pursuing, more limited in scope, more personal in motive. But, he had to admit, he was enjoying the entertainment.

  Mr. Wang stood up and tottered toward a card table in the middle of the room, dragging his oxygen tank behind him. His body was rail thin; the dark trousers cinched around his bony waist swallowed up his entire lower half. A dinner of fried chicken and mashed potatoes, supplemented with Oscar’s life-boosting tulip juice, should help bulk him up a bit. His daughter was concerned about his plummeting weight.

  As Lily began to pull the chicken from the pot, Mr. Wang offered a fried cricket to each of his dining companions, a friendly pair of frogs he had recently rescued from a traveling circus. Their antics, he found, amused him.

  The frogs, in turn, seemed quite enamored with their new props—a frog-sized pair of feathery orange mustaches.

  Chapter 33

  THE BREAK-IN

  DARKNESS HAD FALLEN when Monty’s white van pulled out of Jackson Square Saturday evening and headed toward City Hall.

  Rupert, Isabella, and I had each been thoroughly briefed by Monty on his plan to sneak the cats into City Hall so that they could track down the source of its growing frog population. Monty had drawn up endless schematics of the two entrances we planned to use, supplemented by hand-sketched floor plans and stick-figure diagrams. He had painstakingly walked us through the sequence of events that would allegedly allow us to breach security. I could recite every detail by heart. I was certain we would all end up in jail.

  But that is how I found myself dressed up in a spare pair of Sam the janitor’s rumpled overalls, crouched on the metal floor in the back of Monty’s van, holding on to a rolling cart with an orange-shaped air freshener tied to its handle. The cart was almost identical in size and shape to the one Sam typically pushed around, but instead of hauling refuse, mine carried two cats sitting on top of a mound of old blankets and towels.

  I glanced down at the faded nametag on the overalls. Monty had assured me that Sam was off work today and probably wouldn’t miss this extra pair, which normally hung on a peg in his cleaning closet. I hoped Sam wouldn’t notice that I had run them through the wash before putting them on.

  The cuffs at the bottom of each leg were rolled up several times to make way for my feet, which were clad in an old pair of Harold Wombler’s similarly loose-fitting construction boots. Additional rolls of cloth were wound up around my wrists. I felt as if I’d been mummified.

  The driver of the van was an extraordinarily grumpy Harold Wombler. “You look too clean to be a janitor,” he had crankily opined when he helped me load the cart into the back of the van.

  Monty had assured me that Harold was a perfect accomplice for this mission. The Vigilance Committee’s roots, he had told me with a brash confidence, spread far and wide. I was not
convinced, but as I reached into my pocket and folded my fingers around the piece of paper containing my late Uncle Oscar’s handwriting, I was determined to find out more.

  Harold slowed the van as he drove down Van Ness. A block away from City Hall, he pulled up next to a red-painted curb. Engine idling, Harold removed a walkie-talkie from his tool belt and grumbled into the receiver.

  “You in position, Carmichael?”

  The van was filled with a moment of static, followed by Monty’s crackling voice.

  “No fear, we’re here, Wombler.”

  At that moment, around the opposite side of City Hall, a shiny black Town Car pulled up in front of the entrance facing the Civic Center Plaza, just beneath the winding gold railing of the balcony outside of the Mayor’s office suite.

  The car’s chauffeur had tied her wavy auburn hair into a tight bun at the nape of her neck. A prim flat-topped cap with a hard rim that hid her heavily mascaraed eyes had been secured to her head with bobby pins. She clicked the tips of her long, curved fingernails against the steering wheel as she waited for Monty to finish preparing himself.

  At exactly ten past nine, he called up to the driver’s seat. “I’m ready.”

  Cursing under her breath, the chauffeur opened the driver’s side door and stepped out.

  The rounded curves of her figure were flattened out by the bulky fabric of the chauffeur’s uniform. A neatly pressed coat overlaid a matching pair of slacks with black piping running down their seams. Miranda Richards had never looked so androgynous.

  The rubber soles of Miranda’s black industrial-issue shoes squeaked against the pavement as she walked around the side of the vehicle and opened the passenger side door.

  Monty carefully unfolded his long legs from the back of the Town Car, trying to mimic the man he’d watched depart from a similar ride outside of the Cliff House a few days earlier. Miranda scowled at him as he planted his shiny dress shoes on the sidewalk and smoothly stood up.