“Ready, Detective?”
“Let’s get it over with.”
We jagged the car to a stop at a maintenance post and climbed onto a railing. The boxcar behind us swerved onto a separate track, squealing and tooting. The fat-cat at the console stuck his mug out the window and shrieked an insult—“Buttlicker!”—but I didn’t even glare at him.
This was the tricky part. There were about twenty rungs down the side of the pylon to the catwalks of the Cradles. Easy enough for a pussy; a nightmare for a mutt. Lap went first, claws out, folding and unfolding downward, step after step, nimble as a monkey. But when it came my turn I had to cling to each rung with my teeth, scratching for support, fighting for balance, struggling not to look down. It was a miracle I made it without wetting myself. And that was just the beginning.
The catwalk was made of wicker. It swayed like a clothesline in a hurricane. A hundred feet below—I knew it even without looking—were the tar-paper roofs of the Kennels. Down there I used to snarl at the flea-sized figures slinking along these walks—now I was one of them. I picked my way after Lap, gulping and shuddering, knowing one false move and they’d be scraping me off the pavement like last night’s dinner.
We were heading for a huge nest of carpets, raincoats, pajamas, and bamboo—the palace at the center of the web, the converging point of twenty catwalks. Generator fans were whirling and clicking. Rain tanks were creaking and dripping. As we got closer I could hear cats hissing and spitting at me—they didn’t want me there any more than I did.
“You’ll need to wait outside a few moments,” Lap said, “as I negotiate safe passage.”
We stopped under a canopy of cheap rugs and palm-weave mats. Lap headed for a command post covered with mirror glass and camouflaging leaves. He miaowed a few times and a door peeled open wide enough for him to wriggle in. Waiting outside I clung to the railing, riding wind shifts, ignoring all the stink-eye. There were huge bird-catching nets beneath the walks. A few old-timers were skyfishing with nylon lines and hooks. A couple of wildcats on bungee lines were catching flappers in sacks. It was a whole new world to me, as weird as Kathattan, and I held my breath.
A greasy-looking Tonkinese brandishing a bird gun appeared to call me in. I plunged into the darkness, almost immediately gagging on the stink of incense and unlicked cats. It took seconds for my peepers to focus, and then I saw a posse of trigger-itchy guards ringing the joint with their tails twitching. And there was Lap, in the middle of the room, bowing. And at the back, wadded between feather pillows and sheepskins, was Don “Scarcheek” Gato—the first time I’d seen him in the fur.
“Dis is de first Yap dat’s been up here since dat tax dog,” he rumbled. “What happened t’him, Gomez?”
“Went sailin’,” giggled a sniveling little tabby. “Didn’t have no sails.”
Don Gato smirked and eyed me like a canned herring. He was in hemp-weave pants and a tropical shirt covered with palm trees and toucans. His nails were unclipped and a huge gumleaf cigar was smoldering in his paw. “Maybe dis mutt here,” he said, “he wants to go sailin’, too?”
“Detective McNash seeks nothing more that to be lowered safely into the Kennels,” Lap assured him. “We crossed from the island this morning. We have urgent business below.”
Don Gato rolled his cigar unhappily. “Dis stinks of trouble. I already said too much.”
“Your assistance so far has been most productive and appreciated,” Lap told him, “but it has been mentioned officially to no one. I swear it on my mother’s chemically treated hide.”
“Did ya read the rags, like I said?”
“We did. And we picked up a thread. The thread led to a feral. A feral in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Don Gato flicked ash from his cigar. “Ferals were de original tenants of dis land, you know. Two thousand years ago, it was, before de arrival of de ’wowers.”
“A matter of historical dispute, but we respect your convictions. And in any case we’re not here for a debate. We ask only for your cooperation.”
“What’s in it for Don Gato?”
“Nothing but a warm heart.”
“Cats don’t have hearts. Dey got a muscle dat pumps blood. It ain’t de same thing.”
“Each of us, even the most hard-hearted cat, has in them somewhere a modicum of goodwill. A sense of justice. A hatred of exploitation. It’s to those qualities that I appeal now.”
Don Gato thought about it. He stared at me with slitted eyes. Behind him, a pigeon splattered against a pane of mirror glass and dropped into a net—he didn’t even seem to notice.
“Why you say nuthin’, Detective? Cat got your tongue?”
I shrugged. “Don’t want to say nuthin’. Don’t want to say something wrong.”
“You gonna sink your teeth into a feral?”
“I’m gonna do my job.”
“So you ’spect Don Gato to drop you into de Kennels just so you can chase a cat?”
“To save a cat, maybe. And my pups.”
Don Gato squinted. “Pups?”
“They could be in danger, too.”
Don Gato tilted his head, looking at me with a whole new expression. “Got a litter, Detective?”
“Five little scratchers.”
“Proud of dem, are you?”
“Proud as a dog can be.”
“Where are dey now?”
“In obedience school. That’s where I wanna go now. To take them out, the whole litter. Before someone else does.”
Suddenly Don Gato looked like he wanted to rub against my legs. He took a puff of his cigar and his eyes twinkled. “Family is everythin’,” he said. “Nuthin’ else matters. I sired ninety-seven kitties, you know. I only drowned forty-six of dem. Got some of dem in da crèche right now. Care to see ’em?”
But Lap chipped in. “With respect, Don Gato, we’ve not much time. Things are moving extremely fast down there. So may we be on our way, with your assistance and blessing?”
Don Gato didn’t look completely happy—he must’ve been real proud of his scratchers—but at least we’d found some marrow in his bone-cased pumper.
WE WERE LUCKY and unlucky. There was a way of dropping into the Kennels unseen, through a giant chimney that reached almost as high as the catwalks. Problem was, it was in Dishlick just three blocks from the cophouse, where we all knew it well. Old Smoky, we called it. When it was pumping it made everyone sneeze.
We were lowered into the chimney by ropes. Lap went first, quickly swallowed by the darkness. But when it was my turn the Tonkinese reeling out the line had some fun, swinging the line so I banged around the sides of the shaft. I clamped my choppers so tight around the rope—thinking of Reynard, MacFluff, Carlos the Jackal, and everyone else who wanted me killed—that I bit right through it. I fell thirty feet into a feathery mountain of ash.
When I rose my suit was gray. My whiskers were singed. I had embers in my nostrils. But at least I was back on solid ground. And out of the Cradles.
“Your turn to lead the way,” said Lap, also powdered white.
We spilled into Duty Street just in time to see Bud Borzoi whisk past in a squad tooter. I stared at him, ashen-faced, but he didn’t even recognize us. Every sinew in me wanted to chase him and drag him through the window, but I reminded myself I had bigger gizzards to fry.
We ducked through the back of Pedro’s and flashed our tags.
“We’d like a car,” said Lap.
“And a soy milk?” asked the ’wower.
“Just a vehicle, if you have one.”
We were lucky and unlucky again. Deported as illegal wetpaws, Poco and the Subwoofers had left their gig-mobile parked outside with a full tank. Problem was, it was a snarling little tooter, not much bigger than a Corgi, with an engine held together with rubber bands and bubble gum. The horn played “La Cucaracha.” Squeezed ear to ear like two handbag hounds, Lap and I squirted through traffic to the Flagwag Expressway and spluttered across town to the Ever-Faithfu
l off-ramp. In the sky, the thwuckers of the CAT Squad were already on the buzz, hunting the feral with super binoculars and audio-sensors.
We must’ve looked a sight when we got to the Rover Cleveland Elementary School. The principal, a prim Spitz bitch, looked dumbslapped when I demanded to see my puppies.
“It’s not about Bitzer Chips, is it?”
“Listen, lambflap—”
“He’s gone! He was shown the door!”
“I don’t care if—”
“He wasn’t appropriate! He didn’t fit our standards! We have a new history teacher now!”
I had no idea what she was yapping about, but Lap chipped in:
“Excuse me, madam, are you saying that a history teacher wasn’t appropriate?”
“That’s correct!” The principal straightened, eager to impress.
“May I ask why, precisely?”
“He was too radical. He encouraged dissent. He made the pups confused…questioning…ambivalent.”
“And these qualities are now regarded as inappropriate?”
The Spitz puffed up. “At Rover Cleveland we believe a happy dog is a single-minded dog. We try to curb curiosity. We chastise independent thought. We hunt out disloyalty.”
“You like to sing from the same songbook, in short?” In the background a choir was singing “It’s a Short Life After All.”
The Spitz looked guarded all of a sudden. “You could say that.”
But I was losing patience. “What about my puppies?” I said. “I need to take ’em out.”
The Spitz shook her head. “Classes are now in session. No one is permitted to leave until the bell sounds.”
“I can’t wait for no bell.”
“It’s a rule of conditioning here at Rover Cleveland—everyone answers to the bell. And it’s only ten minutes.”
I managed, at least, to find out where my pups were. Jip, the youngest, was in toilet-training class. Skip, slightly older, was in Alpha-rolling class. Rip was doing road crossing. Pip was learning how to be a good brood bitch. And Flip, the most acrobatic, was jumping through hoops for a visiting superintendent.
I paced the corridor. Above the door was an inscription: GIVE ME THE PUP AT SEVEN WEEKS AND I WILL GIVE YOU THE DOG. Lap picked up a little schoolbook and pawed through it with fascination. “Remarkable,” he said. “Social steering on a massive scale. I had no idea it was so advanced. It’s exactly what Quentin Riossiti was warning about.”
“Don’t mention that name,” I said. “We got enough to worry about already.”
“What really bothers me about Riossiti,” Lap mused, putting the book down, “is that we failed to make sense of some of his puzzles.”
“Some? I never made sense of him at all.”
But just then the bell rang and doors slid back. Pups of all ages flooded into the corridor, blank-eyed, tight-tailed, moving obediently to the next class. I saw Jip and whistled him aside. I found Rip and grabbed him by the ear. I smelled Flip and hooked him by the collar. I spied Pip and separated her from a slow-moving pack. “Where’s Skip?” I asked, looking around.
“Here I am!” said Skip, the brightest of all. “What’s the meat, Pop?”
“I’m taking you to Uncle Spike’s. And you know the rules—make with the lip and I give you a clip.”
I rounded them up and herded them toward Lap, but the cat had the weirdest look on his mug, like he’d got his tail stuck in an electrical socket.
“Of course,” he whispered, eyes wide as saucers. “Of course…”
But as usual he didn’t explain himself.
“LET ME SEE if I understand this fully.”
I knew Thomas Schrödinger from the quiz shows, where he answered all the flash-and-whistle questions and went home with the big biscuits. What I didn’t know was that he was a law professor, a colleague and mentor of Lap’s late wife, Cuddles, and a retired attorney famous for getting three border collies acquitted in the international sheepdog trials. Now with my pups and their mother safely squirreled away in Spike’s doghouse, Lap and I were in Schrödinger’s cramped little office in Cats 4 Dogs, a legal charity headquartered over a scraps kitchen in Gobbet.
“A secret department,” he said, “part governmental and part corporate sector, is dedicated to Machiavellian manipulations of the public consciousness at both micro and macro levels. One manifestation of such is a plan to dent canine pride—and by extension dog status and aspirations—by proving in the boxing ring that cats are physically, and not just mentally, superior to their canine compatriots.”
He was a shaggy-browed Kashmir wearing a carpet tie and a corduroy jacket with elbow patches. He was leaning back against a desk piled high with fat legal texts and seemed, like most lawyers, to be enjoying the music of his own miaows. Lap, like me, was itching to get to the gristle, but we knew we had to be patient—we had to give the old cat time to gather his wool.
“Two feral cats,” Schrödinger went on, getting more and more fascinated, “are selected for grooming as champion prizefighters. The cats have already been tagged, not entirely respectfully, as ‘Kitty’ and ‘the Cat.’ In a highly secretive laboratory, hidden within the storehouse of an exotic bird-and-fish importer, the two unfortunate felines are conditioned over a matter of months to attack viciously the nearest dog upon the sounding of a simple bell—specifically the bell that signals the start of each round of a boxing contest. The better trained and more presentable of these ferals is transformed into ‘Zeus Katsopoulos,’ supposedly a championship contender from Greece, assiduously screened from all interfering noises by tight-fitting headphones. The less successful feral—‘the Cat’—is maintained as an understudy until it’s decided that his existence is redundant and possibly dangerous. Accordingly he is taken by two Rottweiler hoodlums to a wharf in Fly’s Picnic, but before his assassination can be effected—”
“—a nearby factory bell rings,” Lap said, “signaling the evening break.”
Schrödinger smiled and nodded, as if Lap had just guessed something he hadn’t gotten to yet. “The feral rises up in fury, dispatches the two hoodlums, and leaps for safety into Belvedere Bay, from where he enters the sewage system. But from there he doesn’t lie low—he goes high. Using his experience as a rooftop predator, he ascends to the building tops of the Kennels and creeps noiselessly across the city toward his home in the woods. But as luck would have it, the night after the first killing he happens to be passing near a storage facility in Chitterling when a theft is attempted and—”
“—and a burglar alarm goes off—”
“—and the feral again goes into an uncontrollable rage. He sets eyes on an innocent dog, a Doberman Pinscher this time, and rips him apart before returning to the roofs and moving on. But the following night, alas, he is passing in the vicinity of a museum when yet another bell sounds—”
“—the bell warning of imminent closure—”
“—and by a twist of fate he tears apart a marketing manager whose company might well have financed, at least partly, his conditioning in the first place.” Schrödinger was smiling again. “The feral then roams across the rooftops again, oblivious to the great controversy he’s stirred up, ignorant of the hunt his actions have set in motion, and quite possibly confused as to why he has so much blood on his paws in the first place. Intent only on reaching familiar territory, he curls around the Cradles and is hiding within a film set when—”
“—when a bell rings to shut everyone up.” It was me this time, wanting to get my muzzle in.
“—and the Cat kills yet again, his last-known murder, before bolting away, eluding hired assassins, and making his way back into the great maze of the Kennels, where he hides now. And where, by the grace of Our Master, he hears no more bells.”
“The bells of sport, security, instruction, and popular entertainment.” Lap shook his head. “I was looking for a link in the feral’s victims. But the only connection was the prevalence of society’s regulation by bells.”
S
chrödinger hooked his paws behind his lapels and launched himself from the desk, keen to take over again. “In any event, what we currently have is a mass-murdering feral on the loose, a cat who might conceivably kill again at any moment. And what you want from me, if I understand correctly, is a reason to find him completely innocent. You want me to turn him from an attacker into a victim. Poetically speaking, you want me to make him as sinless as a newborn kitten.”
“What we want,” said Lap, “is a reason to make his assassination unlawful. Because the governor’s order is predicated on the assumption that the Cat is a clear-and-present danger to public safety. To the lives of innocent citizens. And as such he can be legally dispatched on sight, without even an attempt to capture him unharmed.”
“Difficult.” Schrödinger’s shaggy brows creased at the thought. “If the Cat’s murdering stimulus is simply the sound of bells, then there’s a real possibility that he might become aggravated and unstoppable again—at the sound of a fire alarm, perhaps—and so there’s every reason to support the principle of the governor’s order.”
“But officially the governor doesn’t know about the bells,” Lap argued.
“But you know,” Schrödinger pointed out, “and so you can’t argue the point without revealing your knowledge. And that brings us back to the start.”
I butted in. “What if we clear him away from all bells?”
And Lap nodded. “Precisely. We can shut down the entire electricity grid for ten blocks around him, eliminating the possibility of bells and thus the whole murdering stimulus. And that makes him no more dangerous than any ordinary cat.”
“Perhaps,” said Schrödinger, “but you’d need to convince the governor that the Cat is not completely insane to begin with. Because technically the governor has decided he’s a threat even without the bells.”
The Unscratchables Page 19