How to Wash a Cat

by Rebecca M. Hale

  “Thanks for showing me the painting,” I said. My hand turned the knob behind my back as I slipped the second wire cage into my pocket. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that Ivan had almost reached the Green Vase. “See you tomorrow, Monty.”

  Monty mumbled something from behind the easel, but I didn’t wait for a clarification. I eased out the front door and scooted across the street to where Ivan was walking up the steps to the Green Vase. I scampered up behind him and swept him inside as quickly as possible.

  “Get down,” I insisted. “Monty might see you.”

  “Wha—,” was all he got out before I squashed his head down behind the counter.

  Carefully, cautiously, I peeped over the edge and peered back across to the studio. Monty was still studying the painting.

  “I was over at Monty’s,” I hissed to the crouching Ivan. “He almost saw you coming down the street.”

  Ivan looked up, amused. “And you’d prefer not to bring him along?”

  “I don’t want the entire population of Jackson Square to know about it by noon tomorrow,” I replied. Ivan chuckled.

  My eyes were still focused on Monty. I watched as he stood up and raised his index finger into the air, as if an idea had suddenly occurred to him. He strode briskly across the studio to the stairs that led to the second floor.

  “He’s going upstairs to get something,” I reported down to Ivan. “This is our chance.”

  “Great,” Ivan grunted from underneath the counter, “just give me the word.”

  “Now,” I whispered urgently, swinging open the front door and whisking him through it. I quickly turned the tulip key in the lock, and the two of us sprinted down the street. We pulled up as soon as we rounded the corner, both of us breathing hard.

  “I think we made it,” I said, peeking around the side of a building as I grabbed the stitch in my side.

  IVAN LED ME into the financial district and its forest of dark, dozing office buildings. The closed eyelids of the unlit windows snored in a deep, restful silence, undisturbed by the blinking electronic signs persistently flashing time, temperature, and market measurements to the vacant streets.

  A last, lawyer-looking type straggled wearily down stone steps to the sidewalk, lugging a pile of briefs that would steal half of tonight’s much needed sleep. His crisp, legal uniform had wilted from the day’s endeavors; it was crumpled with perspiration and mental fatigue. He fell in line behind us as we approached Market Street’s bright, wide-awake glare.

  Ahead of us, a homeless man pushed a rusting, metal shopping cart, piled high with a pathetic collection of crinkling plastic bags and discarded cardboard. He turned onto Market’s main drag, filled, on such a clear tepid night, with a number of similarly bedraggled figures, shuffling to position themselves on the best piece of concrete. The rotting human forms huddled on the grimy sidewalk underneath filthy, lice-infested blankets, their bodies almost unrecognizable from the toll of poverty’s accelerated decay.

  We walked past an uncountable number of these downtrodden shadows, carefully shading our eyes from their pleading faces and handwritten cardboard signs. A swirling wind whistled through the whole of us, stirring up an odorous stench of stale body odor and callous inhumanity.

  Despite all of her fantastic, overblown stories of instant success and rapidly acquired wealth, San Francisco has not been kind to many, if not most, who have washed up on her shore. But that reality has never seemed to slow the relentless, ever-incoming tide chasing her illusion.

  WE STOPPED AT the corner of Market and Montgomery, waiting for a traffic light to change. I looked down at my feet, noticing a bronze flagstone set into the sidewalk. It was a marker commemorating the city’s original shoreline. The rectangular inset included a map depicting the original delineation of the city’s boundaries. I stooped down over the marker, mentally comparing it to Oscar’s parchment until a laughing Ivan grabbed my hand and pulled me into the street.

  “You’re turning into your uncle,” he yelled over the noise of the traffic. “He used to spend hours staring at that stone.”

  Our feet found the curb on the opposite side of the street, and we headed down New Montgomery, past the Palace Hotel where Dilla’s cat costume auction would be held at the end of the week.

  According to Mr. Wang, the far end of the tunnel surfaced somewhere within this lavish building.

  The Palace Hotel had been one of William Ralston’s last projects, one he zealously pursued despite the infamous diamond fiasco. Ralston had dreamed of building one of the finest hotels in the world as a tribute to his beloved San Francisco, a city he credited as the inspiration for his phenomenal run of luck—Ralston’s stubborn belief in his predestined prosperity had apparently been undiminished by the diamond deal meltdown.

  Ralston spared no cost or extravagance on his new hotel, nearly bankrupting the project in the process. As the over-budget venture neared completion, Ralston’s bank succumbed to a run on its reserves. After temporarily closing its doors to recuperate, the bank’s board of director’s moved to oust him.

  Ralston was last seen alive the afternoon following his ouster, jumping into the bay at Aquatic Park for his daily swim. Onlookers from the shore saw him struggling and mounted a rescue effort, but Ralston could not be resuscitated. Ralston’s business partner, William Sharon, pushed the Palace project to completion, and the hotel opened a few months after Ralston’s death.

  I stared up at the building as Ivan whisked me past.

  It was solid and stately, but the current rendition lacked some of the whimsical grandeur of the original structure, destroyed by fire in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake. Sketches of the earlier building depicted a magnificent, palace-like edifice bulging with column after column of gleaming bay windows, so that each guest had the perfect place to watch—and be watched by—the citizens of San Francisco.

  A couple of blocks past the Palace, a seedier side of San Francisco filled in around us. We were headed deeper into the South of Market district where the city’s rising rental rates had inspired the rapid construction of several high-rise condominiums. Flocks of yuppies had nested in these pricey, elevated cubbies, lured by lower rents and birdhouse views of the city’s skyline.

  The street level where we walked was home to the neighborhood’s edgier inhabitants. I moved closer to Ivan as a dark, disheveled man drinking out of a paper sack- covered bottle stopped to leer at me.

  “It’s up here on the right,” Ivan said as we approached a lot enclosed by a ten-foot high chain-link fence. A sign announced the imminent arrival of yet another luxury apartment building.

  The immense building site had previously served as a twenty-dollar a day parking lot. The cracked asphalt had been scalped away, along with several underlying tons of dirt, sand, and muck.

  A fleet of voracious bulldozers and other menacing excavation equipment was parked for the night on a landing, fifteen feet below the street level. Beyond this midway staging area, the depths of the mammoth pit sank into a murky darkness, illuminated only by a small halo of light focused on a twenty-foot high pile driver that had been halted midway through one of its head-splitting poundings.

  A few forlorn streetlamps hung over the sidewalk where Ivan and I stood. He scanned up and down the deserted street before pulling a key out of his pocket and prizing open a padlock hooked through a gate in the fence.

  “There’s a ladder over on the right,” he said briskly, as if he were ushering me into an amusement park and not this treacherous, chthonic sinkhole. “I’ll keep watch up here.”

  I nodded nervously, biting down on my lip as he handed me his flashlight. I had forgotten mine in the rush to escape the Green Vase without being seen by Monty.

  The rains from the previous week had pooled in this sub-sea level hole. The weekend’s clear weather hadn’t done much to dry the thick, gooey mud that quickly layered the soles of my tennis shoes, adding at least three slippery inches to my height. I struggled to keep my balance a
s I slid across the sloped staging area to the ladder.

  Gripping the top rung, I panned the flashlight’s beam across the bottom of the pit. Nothing in the churned up mud suggested the presence of a recently uncovered antique.

  I tucked the flashlight into my coat pocket so that I could hold on to the ladder with both hands. In near darkness, I carefully began my descent, each foot blindly feeling for the next rung.

  The pit quickly swallowed up the sounds of the city, creating a suffocating silence that was interrupted only by the squishing of my shoes. I was hardly visible to myself, much less to anyone else, but I had the eerie sensation of being watched by someone other than Ivan.

  My feet finally found the slimy floor of the pit, and I steadied myself with the ladder while I pulled out the flashlight. Just as I clicked the lever to turn it back on, a surprised gasp sounded above my head.

  I swung the flashlight up towards the source of a slipping, sliding slurp—in time to illuminate a mud-covered Monty somersaulting over the edge of the pit, his purple and green silk tie flapping in his shocked face.

  Chapter 29

  MONTY’S LONG, LANKYarms flailed against the oozing, earthen wall of the pit as he pummeled to the bottom. His feet dug into the wall of mud, the pointed tips of his shoes carving out two parallel grooves as he slid to the bottom. He landed with a squelching thud, spread-eagled on the floor of the pit.

  I sighed resignedly and then called out, “Are you okay?”

  A muddy paw rose up out of the mud and waved in my direction. “Fine, thanks.”

  Monty sat up gingerly, looking mildly disgruntled, but he didn’t appear to have broken any bones. I walked over and helped him up, shining the light over his mud-dappled suit.

  “You’re covered in mud,” I said. “Otherwise, you appear to be okay.”

  “So,” Monty said, grinning as he scraped a glob of mud off his face. “What are you kids up to?” He pointed a knobby finger at me. “I had quite a job keeping up with you two after the sprint down Jackson Street.” He wagged the finger reproachfully. “How am I supposed to protect you if you keep sneaking off like this?”

  I returned his point with the direct beam of the flashlight. Mud had caked his curly hair and slimed over his eyebrows. He was lucky he hadn’t broken his neck falling over the side of the pit.

  “Protect me? What makes you think you need to protect me?” I asked, incredulous. “Have you lost your mind?”

  Monty cleared his throat as he straightened his soiled tie. “I have a theory . . .”

  I couldn’t take another theory. “Oh, for the love of—where’s Ivan?”

  Monty pointed up towards the street as Ivan’s concerned face peeked over the edge.

  Ivan called out, “You all right, Carmichael?”

  Monty waved back, throwing his right arm up into a mock salute. The gesture knocked him off kilter, causing him to stagger backwards. His left foot slipped on the slick floor of the pit. He wobbled for a long moment, desperately trying to regain his balance, but both feet flew out from under him. He landed like a flipped pancake, smacking against the gelatinous surface of the mud.

  Ivan grimaced as he pulled back from the ledge to his surveillance post.

  Monty righted himself and began to stroll a circle around me. “So, what are we doing down here anyway? What’s the story?”

  With each step, his feet sunk further into the gloppy mire. His mud-soaked pants flapped against his bony legs as he tried to shake his feet free of the mud. Monty looked more stork-like than ever.

  I threw my hands up in the air, relenting. “Oscar came here the Thursday before he died—the night Harold Wombler caught you in the kitchen above the Green Vase.”

  Monty stroked his chin, the wheels in his head spinning. “Ah,” he said, raising a soiled forefinger. “And you’re wondering if Oscar found something down here related to Leidesdorff. Something that shed light on how Leidesdorff managed to give everyone the slip back in 1848.” He crept up behind my right ear and lowered his voice to a loud whisper. “Something that showed Oscar how to perform the same trick.”

  I whipped around, nearly knocking Monty over. “Oscar’s dead, okay? I saw him with my own eyes. I watched his casket being buried into the ground. You’re way off base.”

  “Whatever you say, dear,” Monty said in a patronizing falsetto.

  “You have to keep all of this under your hat, do you understand?” I said sternly. “You can’t tell anyone about my visit here tonight.”

  “Cross my heart,” he replied, solemnly smearing the front of his suit jacket to make the mark. “Now then,” he asked eagerly, straightening the battered tulip still pinned limply to his lapel. “What are we looking for?”

  “I’m not sure really,” I said, tracking the light towards the back corner of the pit.

  The wet ground glistened. Water had collected in the lowest corner, swamping the mud into a black, putrid-swilling soup.

  Monty crinkled up his nose as I slid towards the make-shift pond. “Oh, surely not in there,” he said as I shone the flashlight into the murky water.

  A film of mossy-green algae skimmed the surface of the standing water and clung to a collection of decomposing leaves, broken twigs, and blown away trash that poked out of the muck. Monty grabbed one of the larger twigs and stirred the brew. The motion disrupted the stringy arms of the algae, causing chunks to break off and swarm around the stick.

  “Yeck,” he said, as I circled the flashlight’s beam over the water, searching for any evidence of the uncovered antique that had drawn Oscar to the construction site.

  This location, I thought uneasily, was all wrong. It was too far inland for Oscar’s interests. This part of the city had originally been covered in the sand dunes that had been scraped down to fill in the bay. It wasn’t part of the landfill area.

  “I don’t think there’s anything down here,” I said, playing the light over the water one more time.

  “Sounds good to me,” Monty said, turning towards the ladder he’d missed on his way down.

  Something flickered in the beam of my flashlight. “Hold on a minute,” I called back to him, bending down towards the water. I could have sworn I’d seen something shining just beneath the surface.

  I stepped tentatively into the edge of the pond. The water seeped through my tennis shoes, causing my toes to recoil and curl up under the balls of my feet.

  Gritting my teeth, I willed myself forward into the water, quickly sinking in halfway up to my shins as my feet disappeared beneath the black surface. The mud wrapped its slithering tentacles around my shoes, threatening to pull me down into its limicolous lair.

  Water slopped over my knees as the pond rippled from a movement other than my own. I froze. “Monty,” I said slowly, “is that you?”

  There was no answer—only the fishy aroma rising up from the stagnant water. My chest thumping, I turned to look behind me.

  I found myself face to face with a Frankenstein-impersonating Monty.

  “Wha-ah-ah . . . ,” he cackled in a deep throated voice, quickly followed by a wind-sucking “whump” as I slugged him squarely, satisfyingly, in the stomach.

  I pushed forward into the water. Monty waded after me, flapping noisily.

  “This is worse than the tunnel,” I muttered.

  “Couldn’t agree with you more,” Monty replied, disturbingly close to my ear. I swatted my right hand behind my head but didn’t make contact.

  The longer we spent on the bottom of the construction pit, the more curious its thriving insect population became of us. The inquisitive shuffling of thousands of insect legs ringed the bank of the pond. The more intrepid observers began to skitter across the surface of the water towards us.

  Then we heard the rustle of a slightly larger being at the edge of the dank water.

  Monty whispered tensely, “Tell me that wasn’t a rat.”

  I panned the beam of the flashlight around the shadowy periphery. The glassy pits of several pairs of
pupils reflected back. We’d attracted quite a crowd.

  “Okay,” I said grimly, “it wasn’t a rat—more like many rats.”

  “I don’t do rats,” Monty whimpered. Gulping palely, he turned and sprinted out of the pond, splashing loudly as he hollered at the rats to make way.

  “I thought you were here to protect me?” I called out as I turned to follow him.

  Something sparkled in the water near my feet. The wake of Monty’s departure had disturbed the bottom surface of the pond. A turbulence of slimy debris floated to the surface.

  I trained my flashlight down into the soupy water and finally found the object that had drawn me in to begin with. I shoved the sleeves of my sweater up my arms as far as they would go and reached down into the muck. The thick sludge closed in around my hands like a pair of gloves, melding into every groove on the surface of my fingers. I grabbed on to the shiny object and pulled it up to the surface. A feathering layer of slime trailed behind it.

  I could hear Monty clambering up the rungs of the ladder as I held the object under the flashlight to inspect it.

  Smoothing my hands over the curling metal shape, I wondered how one of Leidesdorff’s tulip-shaped cufflinks could have made its way to the bottom of this construction pit.

  This one felt somehow different—lighter—than the one I’d inspected in Oscar’s kitchen. I flipped it over.

  The back read, “Made in Japan.”

  Chapter 30

  IVAN GREETED US as we topped the ladder and headed for the gate. “Find anything useful?” he asked, grinning as he surveyed our mud-covered condition.

  “Nope, not a thing,” Monty muttered bitterly. “Nada. Zip. Nothing.”

  “You were certainly thorough,” Ivan said wryly. “Did you take a swim in the pond at the bottom corner?”

  “That one forced me in,” Monty said churlishly, jerking his head in my direction.

  “Thank you for letting me check it out,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. I looked back down at the steep sides of the pit. “That would have been quite a climb for Oscar. His knees were giving out.”