The Ears of a Cat

by Roderick Hart

  At long last, he arrived at the section detailing inserts, vaginal and anal. These came in three sizes, the size chosen depending, he read, on the size of the user’s organ. Which left him wondering which size to select and whether, to find out, he should measure himself flaccid or erect. Assuming the latter would be a better guide, he resorted to a back number of Boner long resident at the foot of his laundry basket, achieved the desired result, and checked off his size with a metal rule. It was reassuring, though not surprising, to discover that he, Munoz, would require the largest size of insert. Unfortunately, when it came to intercourse with Ai, he did not have to hand the copious supply of lubricant recommended by the manual. He didn’t have any at all so he would have to hit the streets. He was about to do just that when the bell rang.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Rafael Ignaz Munoz?’

  Pearson flashed his ID.

  ‘Klandestein? Never heard of it!’

  ‘There will be many things you’ve never heard of, Mr Munoz. We should talk.’

  Pearson said that he worked for the security services. Munoz asked which one.

  ‘On this occasion, the NSA, though they insist on complete deniability.’

  ‘That just means you can’t prove it, so give one good reason why I should give you the time of day.’

  ‘I can give you several. I suggest you hear me out.’

  ‘What did you say your name was?’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Pearson.’

  Munoz showed Pearson into the kitchen and they sat down, separated by the safety of a table.

  ‘Right, so what’s this about? I was just going out.’

  It was clear to Pearson, even if he hadn’t checked beforehand, that Munoz had Latino antecedents. There was a suggestion of naturally occurring oil on his face which Pearson considered, rightly or wrongly, as further evidence that Munoz was Mexican by origin. This was accentuated, for him, by an outbreak of open pores in the area of the nose, somewhat larger than they should have been and far from aesthetically pleasing.

  ‘You have a colleague, Gina Saito, for whom you recently collected a package.’

  Seeing that Munoz was about to deny it, Pearson pointed out that the evidence was clear on CCTV.

  ‘So what? Since when was collecting a parcel a crime?’

  ‘That,’ Pearson replied, ‘entirely depends on what it contains.’

  ‘Drugs?’ Munoz had leapt to a conclusion. ‘Gina doesn’t do drugs!’

  ‘I’ll take your word for that. But we have reason to believe that your friend might be into something altogether more dangerous.’

  He wasn’t at liberty to be more specific, but if Munoz didn’t mind, he had two more questions.

  ‘I’m sure you didn’t open it, Mr Munoz, but when you picked it up, did you notice any sign of broken glass? Clinking noises, anything like that?’

  ‘No, and what makes you so sure I didn’t open it?’

  ‘Let’s put it this way, son, you’re still in the land of the living.’ Pearson smiled grimly as he saw the shock on Munoz’ face. ‘Also,’ he continued, pressing home his advantage, ‘did you notice seepage of any sort?’

  ‘Seepage?’

  ‘Not a hard word, I would have thought: any liquid weeping from the package?’

  Confident that any sample the package contained would be held in a flask, Pearson’s questions were based on educated guesswork. But Munoz didn’t know that and broke out in a cold sweat. His visitor clearly believed that the package contained a liquid explosive, nitroglycerine or some such. Every pothole he’d gone over had brought him and his SUV one step closer to going up in smoke. It didn’t bear thinking about. Looking at Pearson, the remains of his fair hair still showing and a small outbreak of summer freckles invading his cheeks, he held him to blame for the danger he’d been in and looked for confirmation.

  ‘I was at risk, right?’

  ‘I would say so, yes.’

  ‘Well, I saw no sign of seepage, none at all.’

  The answer being “no” on both counts, Pearson was satisfied, for the moment at least, but requested that Munoz, in the interests of national security, keep him apprised of Ms Saito’s activities without, of course, informing her of the fact. However trivial it might seem, such information might prove vital.

  ‘Are we talking about the same person? Gina wouldn’t hurt a fly.’

  ‘Well, that remains to be seen, but flies aren’t in the firing line here; people are.’

  He passed Munoz a card. ‘You can contact me by email at any time via this address and I strongly advise you to do so.’

  ‘And if I don’t?’

  ‘It won’t have escaped your notice that persons of your ethnicity are not flavour of the month with the present administration. To be blunt, they’re going to build a wall, you’re going to pay for it, and the danger for you, if you fail to cooperate, is that you’ll find yourself on the wrong side of it. Permanently. You are not a citizen of the United States. Further to that, my records show that you have made no attempt to apply for citizenship.’

  Pearson’s records were correct but Munoz didn’t think that mattered so much.

  ‘I have a green card.’

  ‘Which can always be revoked.’

  Munoz had no idea if this was true. Pearson might be bluffing, but it didn’t seem a risk worth taking. He had just come to this conclusion when his visitor rose to his feet, strode from the kitchen and looked into the bathroom. Finding nothing of interest there, he threw open the door to the Munoz bedroom, the place, according to several of his social media accounts, where it all happened. Which hadn’t been the case before but might yet achieve that status when he’d bought his “copious supply of lubricant”.

  ‘Well, well, what have we here!’

  Pearson’s pale blue eyes surveyed the recumbent Ai, spread out on the bed, legs slightly apart in what he mistook for an inviting pose.

  ‘Ai,’ Munoz said, sick that this unwelcome visitor now had something else on him. ‘Just arrived. A gift. Comes with an app.’

  ‘Why am I not surprised?’

  As he hit the street, Pearson turned to Munoz with one last question.

  ‘None of my business, son, but do you even like her?’

  ‘Ai?’

  Was he hearing right, what was this guy on?

  ‘The Saito girl, the one you risked your life for.’

  39

  In his life as a self-employed security agent, Adalbert Pearson could never depend on what his accountant was pleased to call a continuous income stream and so had developed over the years a tendency to frugal living. His biggest regular overhead was the rent on his office in Berlin, closely followed, whenever possible, by the variable sums he contributed to his pension scheme because Adalbert, unlike some, had the foresight to fear an old age lived alone. Who would help him as he searched his apartment for his teeth? Not the wife he didn’t have, nor the children he didn’t have either. He would have to buy in help and that would cost. So he did what he could to build up a fighting fund against the day.

  He had to eat, that couldn’t be helped, and instantly evident to the eye, though always neatly attired, he was not a snappy dresser. His biggest bugbear was travel. If taking two flights was cheaper than flying direct, that was what he would do even if it added two hours to the flight time and doubled the chance of losing his luggage. But where he stayed when he arrived was another matter; there he had total control. His preference was to overnight in cheap hotels. On this trip, for example, he laid his weary head in a hotel room, not in LA itself but in nearby Sylmar, the Sea of Trees which, on top of its competitive rates, had a useful laundry service and free parking for his hired car. Okay, there was a problem with the AC, but wasn’t there always, and just into April he could live with that.
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  Sitting that evening in his room with the laptop which doubled as best friend and confidant, he considered his position. He was presently under contract to the BND, but now that Klein had retired, he had no idea how much longer this might last. Klein’s successor, Ursula Lang, was a woman he couldn’t get anything past. With her the only way forward was proving to be of use, and so far he was ahead of the game. He’d persuaded her that the people they were dealing with posed a potential threat, the key evidence being a clear connection to the theft of variant H7N9 from Breakout. And now that Saito had made contact with Charles Ventris, he was in a uniquely favourable position to follow that up. No one else could fulfil this role which, for the time being, surely made his services indispensable.

  What Pearson most enjoyed about his work was the covert invasion of privacy. That and coercion, aspects he’d neatly combined when he’d pressured Trudi Kirsch into letting him bug Catherine Cooper’s apartment. Opening his laptop and checking it out, he found that the remaining device, the one the Berlin police had missed, was still functioning. The anaemic Liesl von Eschwege might take exception, but she was young with much to learn. Lives might depend on information from Klandestein sources like this. And then there was Munoz. What to make of him?

  Some people were flattered by the feeling that in cooperating with the security services they were doing their bit for their country. A few would gratefully have accepted a deputy’s badge and proudly pinned it on. Munoz wasn’t one. First impressions were of a sex-mad buffoon who would sell out his best friend, maybe not for money but certainly to protect his own position. He hadn’t reacted well to mention of The Wall, and even less so to the possibility that his prized green card might be revoked. Pearson assumed this was possible and so did Munoz. Lowlifes like him tended to believe that the Pearsons of this world, masters of the dark arts, could do anything they liked. Which wasn’t far from the mark.

  He stood up, stretched and looked out of the window to the wooded gully beyond, his mind turning to the meeting which had recently taken place in Leise Park. He had the full cast list, Cooper, Saito and Horváth but, unfortunately, had no idea what had been said. There was, however, a possible point of entry through one József Báthory, man about town and member of the Hungarian security service. He didn’t know much about him but Lang could help him there. And if he and Horváth were sharing a bed, Báthory would soon know more about her than she knew about herself.

  Sharing a bed. Yes. Pearson had never enjoyed a lasting relationship with anyone but that was the way it had to be. In his line of work, a partner was a point of weakness, someone who would want to know where he was, who he was meeting and why, when he was coming home for his evening meal. Even Charles Ventris, not noted for his surfeit of human warmth, had noticed this attitude and attempted to fell him with the chilling prediction that he would die alone. But Pearson had remained standing. As he saw it, everyone who ever lived had died alone. He never saw wives climbing into their husbands’ coffins before the undertaker took out his cordless driver and screwed down the lid.

  But recently, as if even his mind had a mind of its own, which doubtless it did, he had caught his thoughts straying to Gina Saito. She was a woman he had yet to meet but whose image attracted him greatly, as did her intellect, particularly as it appeared in the writings of her alter ego, Herschel J Wood. He had recently finished reading this gentleman’s complete works and what struck him most was the cool, analytical cast of mind which had the ability to damn with faint praise in an elegant manner. He found this admirable in one for whom English was a second language. Saito had to be a highly intelligent person, which made her even more attractive to him. Beauty fades, he told himself, but intelligence… He pushed all thought of dementia into the background, where no light would fall on it and therefore, invisible, it would not exist. Much as a child, covering his eyes, believes the people he now cannot see, cannot see him either. That accomplished, he could safely say that beauty fades but intelligence is forever.

  Her most recent review had been of an intelligent hairbrush which warned the user of breaking hair. Since broken hairs were harmless, Herschel J Wood considered that the premium this product attracted would not be money well spent except for those consumed with vanity and self-regard, people who would, in any case, always find creative ways of waving goodbye to their money. But what interested Pearson most about this review was a short note in italics at the end. Next month, the product under the microscope would be the latest product of Learmonth Labs, the Dreamview VR360 Headset. When he read this, he was visited by one of the strangest thoughts he had ever had, switched on his phone and scrolled down the contact list till he came to David Farrow.

  ‘Hi, David. Pearson.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I have another project for you.’

  There was a moment’s silence at the other end.

  ‘Does this one pay?’

  The last one had not, and Pearson thought for a moment how best to draw Farrow in.

  ‘Like you wouldn’t believe.’

  40

  Cooper didn’t talk to Schnucki all the time, far from it, among other reasons because he was seldom in communicative mode. But the day after the meeting in Leise Park, he made an exception and bedded down with her on the wrong sofa even though he didn’t want anything.

  ‘Well,’ she said to him when he was settled, ‘to what do I owe the honour this time?’

  In the absence of a meaningful reply, she carried on a one-sided conversation.

  ‘So that’s it then, men are useless. It’s down to the girls now.’

  She was thinking with relief of the fact that the irascible Magnus Hjemdahl had joined loose cannon Eric Wanless in writing himself out of the script, leaving her with Saito and Horváth as an all-girl driving force. She had no doubt at all about Saito, a single-minded young woman who had done the impossible in securing financial backing for Future World. As for Cindy Horváth, she was intelligent but wayward with it. In her strange choice of boyfriend, she was taking an unnecessary risk, so she had to assume that danger was part of the thrill. To hear her tell it, they were lining up at her door. She could have got it together with a street cleaner or a graphic designer. Someone safe. Horváth might assure them that she knew what she was doing but, as Saito said, one mistake would be all it took.

  Schnucki seemed unimpressed by all this, perhaps, Cooper thought, because he was a male of the species himself.

  ‘Oops, oh dear! No offence intended.’

  Since none seemed to be taken, she gave his little bell a playful jangle but he didn’t react to that either.

  ‘The thing is, Schnucki, you can’t depend on men for anything.’

  Then she was struck by an afterthought. ‘But you shouldn’t take it from this that I have lesbian tendencies. Actually,’ she added, not caring much, ‘I don’t really have tendencies at all anymore. Why might that be, do you think?’

  Pearson was tempted to answer: previous experience with her husband, maybe, loss of libido due to hormonal change? As if reacting to the fact that he was listening in, Cooper suddenly remembered the functioning microphone with ears at the other end.

  ‘In any case,’ she said, in the audio equivalent of playing to the camera, ‘the provision of prophylactics to women in what we in the west patronisingly refer to as the Third World must be radically improved if we hope to make any impact at all on the exponential growth of the human population.’

  Pearson had been listening with half an ear but now he switched on both. He wasn’t an animal lover. He would never have said anything at all to a ball of fur with a peanut for a brain, let alone a major statement on birth control. I mean, come on, he thought, who would? What Cooper had just said didn’t ring true. He detected a false note, a twang. Either she was on the latest legal high or she’d discovered the second mic and was trying to pull a fast one. But the Berlin police had failed to find it,
tiny as it was, so it was hardly likely that Cooper had – unless she was one of those women, like his late mother, who attacked every conceivable nook and cranny with a feather duster in what he now considered an attempted release of sexual tension.

  A second thought occurred to him. Cooper was an academic, of little use to herself and even less to society at large. Academics were heavily into formulations, the more abstract the better. That way, they hoped to bamboozle plebeians like him and while they were at it, keep public money rolling in. And so, Pearson, in the grip of a stereotype, abandoned the correct explanation he had just considered in favour of another which, though wrong, gave him more pleasure.

  As much as he was grimly dedicated to his work, Pearson was still open to pleasure, as was evident when an image of the silicone sex doll he’d seen in the bedroom of Rafael Munoz came unbidden into his mind. To his eye, the doll had been of Asiatic appearance – Japanese maybe, or Korean – and all the more attractive for that since for him sexy was neat and trim. And Ai was trim all right, make no mistake. The problem was that Pearson had no interest in dolls, so acquiring one of his own was not a solution. What he needed was an unfettered hour with a real Ai, an Ai of flesh and blood like Nari, the girl he’d hooked up with on his previous trip to LA. He didn’t have her number so he’d just have to try his luck.

  Despite his best efforts, the spruced-up Pearson still looked middle-aged, in good shape maybe, but no longer young. When he squared up to the mirror in the hotel bathroom with its harsh wall-mounted light, he didn’t much care for the lived-in face looking back, though he consoled himself with the thought that it didn’t carry an extra ounce in the face or neck. But the slightest sign of nasal hair always upset him, to which end he’d bought a device worthy of review by Herschel J Wood himself, a battery-operated nasal hair remover with neat rotating head. According to the leaflet, it could also handle hair growing from the ear but, thank God, there was no sign of that yet. Okay, he could have had more hair on the head, but the key to the door was money now which, to his irritation, could not be written off against tax.