When the Cat's Away

by Kinky Friedman

  The closer we got to 199B Vandam, the darker and colder and seedier everything became. Sort of picked up my spirits.

  There was a black limo parked on a side street just down from the loft.

  “Whose car is that?” Rambam asked.

  “Garbage czar from New Jersey,” Ratso said.

  “Vandam Street’s a major garbage-truck staging area for the city,” I said, not without some little pride.

  “I can see,” said Rambam, as he kicked his way through the swirling newspapers and crap along the sidewalk.

  We drew a bye on the freight elevator and legged it up the stairs to the fourth floor. I opened the door of the loft, let Ratso and Rambam in ahead of me, and turned on the lights.

  A thin dark man dressed in black was standing very still with his hand inside his coat. He looked like Johnny Cash in 1952. He looked dangerous. He was standing next to the hat rack, but it didn’t look like he was planning to grab his hat and run.

  There was another guy across the room from us standing by a window. He had a smile on his face but it was about as thin as airline coffee.

  The rocking chair, which faced away from the door of the loft, was rocking slowly back and forth. It wouldn’t have been so bad, except it didn’t look like anybody was in it.

  54

  Somebody was.

  A dark figure slowly uncoiled itself from the chair and stood up to face us. It moved toward us in silence. If Joel Siegel had mated with Gene Shalit’s daughter, and if their offspring had been a male child born with a luxuriant mustache, it might’ve looked similar to the cookie duster under the beak of the approaching apparition.

  The figure came closer. Upon inspection, it had five shining emerald studs in its left ear. It had flat, dark, death-where-is-thy-sting eyes.

  “I am the Jaguar,” it said.

  There is almost nothing very humorous you can say in a situation like this. If raw courage is the ability not to let others know you are afraid, it could be said that I was very courageous. Because there was something about the presence of the Jaguar, despite his seemingly soft-spoken, refined manner, that transparently went against the grain of what it is to be human.

  “You find the key I left for you?” I asked.

  “The Jaguar doesn’t use a key. For the Jaguar, there are no doors,” he said.

  With a chill I thought about the story I’d read of a guy in Houston, a Colombian coke dealer, whom the cops had pinpointed, trapped, and tried to bust three times, only to find that he’d disappeared into thin air on each occasion. He was known as the Wizard, I believe. The Wizard. The Jaguar. There are many names for death, I thought.

  Rambam moved up a few steps. He was still carrying the attaché case, but I figured by the time he could open it and take out the Uzi, we’d all be pickled herring.

  My eyes flicked wistfully over to Rambam and the attaché case and then back to the Jaguar. The Jaguar continued to look straight ahead like a malicious Buddha.

  “That won’t be necessary, my friend,” he said. Then he paused and added, “Or very effective.”

  “Depends how you look at it,” said Rambam. He was holding what looked like some kind of high-tech police revolver in his right hand and aiming it placidly at the Jaguar’s gonads.

  I looked over my right shoulder and saw that Johnny Cash was now sporting a thin, gray cigar-box contraption with a long handle and a rather unpleasant-looking black nozzle extending from it. It was pointed at the back of my head and the guy was smiling.

  It was an ugly situation at the very best. Rambam continued to look challengingly at the Jaguar. The Jaguar only licked his chops. I hazarded a side glance at Ratso. He did not look like a happy camper.

  There were a couple other places I could think of that I’d rather be myself. Almost any of those bumper stickers that you always see would be fine. I’d rather be sailing. I’d rather be playing golf, though it bores me to death. The only good balls I ever hit was when I stepped on the garden rake. I’d rather be hang gliding.

  Most of all, though, I’d rather be in a Jacuzzi one night many years ago under the stars of Malibu with the most beautiful girl in the world with a flower in her hair from Vancouver. The girl was from Vancouver, not the flower. I’d given her the flower. She wanted to make love in the Jacuzzi that night under the stars, but, coming from Texas, I was a bit inhibited. Today, of course, I’d hose her in a heartbeat, but that, unfortunately, would be quite impossible. She’s wherever Dangerous Dan is, and I’m standing here in the loft with a man pointing an unusual-looking weapon at the back of my head and smiling like an airline stewardess.

  I looked at the five shining emeralds in the Jaguar’s ear and all I could think about was how much I missed the stars shining over Malibu. How much I missed somebody. How much I missed.

  “Well?” said the Jaguar. He was smiling now, but the smile had all the humanity of an upside-down tragedy mask.

  I looked at Johnny Cash. I looked at Rambam. I looked at the Jaguar.

  “Colombian standoff?” I asked.

  55

  The Jaguar issued forth a thick, throaty, animallike laugh and gave Johnny Cash a sign with his emerald-ringed finger. When I looked around, the weapon was back under Johnny Cash’s coat and Johnny was still smiling, though not quite as much as when he’d thought he was going to get to use it. Rambam shook his head like a fireman who’s seen too many false alarms and quietly slipped the gun back into a shoulder holster.

  A little color was coming back into Ratso’s face and he began, for the first time, to breathe perceptibly. I was starting to feel a little better myself.

  I took out two cigars, offered one to the Jaguar, which he accepted, and then I walked over to the desk and guillotined the butt off my cigar in one rather decisive, macho movement. I motioned for the Jaguar to use the guillotine on his cigar. He shook his head and walked over to the kitchen table near where Ratso was standing.

  From his breast pocket, the Jaguar took out a white object, gave it a dextrous flick, and walked close to Ratso with a bone-handled straight razor in his hand. Ratso looked like an extra from the cast of the movie Coma. He didn’t turn a hair as the Jaguar moved past him, put the cigar on the table, and cut the end off like a master surgeon working with warm butter.

  “Jesus,” Ratso said almost involuntarily. “Do you shave with that?”

  The guy by the far window said something in Spanish. The Jaguar and Johnny Cash both laughed.

  “What’d he say?” I asked.

  “He said,” said the Jaguar, “if you shaved with it, you’d cut your lips off.”

  It was pretty clear to me what the thing was used for, but as long as the Jaguar was slicing cigars and not working on passageways for lungs, it was okay by me.

  “It is so sharp,” said the Jaguar, holding up the straight razor, “that when you cut someone with it, they do not even know that they’re cut for sometimes twenty seconds.” He folded the straight razor and put it back in his breast pocket.

  “Sometimes,” I said, “I bet they never find out.”

  “That is true,” said the Jaguar. “But that is only when the Jaguar wishes to be kind.”

  The small talk had pretty well run its course. The Jaguar took out an expensive-looking gold lighter and lit his cigar. I took out the pastel-purple Bic I’d bought from the Pakistani the night I’d gone to Leila’s apartment and met Carlos. If Bics could talk. That particular Bic had now seen two major cocaine-cartel kingpins, one very dead body in Estelle Beekman’s closet, and one very live and lovely body when I’d lit a cigarette for Leila afterward. It had led a very exciting life for a Bic. Five days it had been with me and it was still going strong. That was longer than some marriages. Unfortunately, the lifespan of the Bic and my own mortality had in common a rather evanescent quality.

  I lit the cigar. For a while the Jaguar and I stood around and quite literally blew smoke. Then he reached over and picked up a package from the seat of the rocking chair.

&nbs
p; “It is good what you have done to Carlos,” he said, as he watched me closely. “Carlos is no good. Carlos’s people are no good. Did you receive the perla yi-yo?”

  “Yes,” I said, “but—”

  The Jaguar silenced me with his hand. “Here,” he said, “is another token of appreciation from the Jaguar. Some say it is even better than the perla yi-yo.”

  Ratso rolled his eyes but didn’t say anything. The Jaguar held the package out for me to take.

  “Beware of geeks bearing gifts,” said Rambam in a stage whisper from my left.

  I walked over to the Jaguar, thanked him, and took the package. He was one gift horse I wasn’t even going to think about looking in the mouth. I carried the package over to the kitchen table. It was wrapped in the same butcher paper as the perla yi-yo. I tore off the paper.

  If the Jaguar hadn’t been a smarmy, evil, Freon-blooded killer, the gift would’ve been almost poignant. “What is it?” Ratso asked. “Heroin?”

  “No,” I said, as I threw the package over the counter to Rambam, “Coffee beans.”

  Rambam went to work with the grinder and the espresso machine and pretty soon the loft was filled with an aroma so rich even my beezer could tell it was the McCoy.

  The whole place was threatening to become Kinky’s Kosher Cajun Coffee Kitchen.

  Suddenly, we heard the kitchen window break as if five or six baseballs had been thrown through it in extremely rapid succession. There was no other sound until Johnny Cash slumped to the floor. He was still smiling, but it looked like somebody’d crocheted his face.

  Mustaches were moving along the fire escape.

  It looked like it might be a while before anybody was going to have a cup of coffee.

  56

  The cat jumped over the moon, the Rat scurried for the hallway, and I ducked behind the kitchen counter. I could hear more invisible baseballs crashing through the windows, making no sound but for the breaking glass. I couldn’t see Rambam. I couldn’t see the Jaguar either, but I could imagine what he was thinking. Set up.

  Then the lights went out. I glanced up and saw little cometlike tongues of fire coming through the windows. Wherever he was, it looked like the Jaguar had his hands full for the moment. It was a good thing, too, because the idea of the Jaguar stalking the Kinkster with a bone-handled straight razor in a darkened loft: was enough to keep the sandman away for the rest of my life. Which, under the circumstances, might not be too long.

  Strangely enough, I was not afraid. Or else I was so afraid that my fear had become a kind of quiet rage. If nothing else, I was determined to outlast the Bic.

  I peered over the top of the counter into the semidarkness. I saw several red flashes. A window crashed, and two mustaches bit the fire escape. But there were more, I suspected, where they came from. The Dixie cup kids.

  There was a large crash from the direction of the bedroom that sounded like the wreck of the Hesperus. I took it to be the window that wouldn’t open. I never said it couldn’t be opened. I could see dim figures moving around in the bedroom. Men were shouting in Spanish. Strange sounds erupted like Paul Bunyan zipping and unzipping his fly many times in rapid succession. More figures crouched on the fire escape. The place sounded like a bullring with a rather small crowd. It looked like an urban Alamo.

  Obviously, the Jaguar’s boys were coming in from the west side of the building, and the other guys—who belonged to either Carlos or Santa Anna—were coming in from the front or south side. Directions can be important when you’re lost in the woods in the dark. Without them, you might never get to Grandmother’s house.

  There was a strange aroma in the air—a heady, acrid, robust mixture of gunpowder and Colombian coffee. Very distinctive. You couldn’t fool this crowd with Folger’s crystals.

  I didn’t know how long I could stay there between the counter and the espresso machine before I caught a bullet, or realized twenty seconds too late that I’d been cut cleanly in half with a very sharp knife. I didn’t want to be there, but everywhere else seemed worse.

  Someone grabbed both my arms from the back in an iron grip. I looked around expecting to see a smiling mustache, and was somewhat relieved when I didn’t. It was Rambam.

  “Time to go,” he said. “But stay down low.”

  “Where to?” I asked.

  He extended his hand toward the door of the loft like a maître d’ showing me to a table.

  “This way, Mr. Kennedy,” he said, “right through the kitchen.”

  57

  There is a rhythm to fear.

  It’s not something you pick up at Arthur Murray. It’s measured in the statistical velocity at which the head and the feet can fly toward each other when the guts disappear. It’s something you feel when you stand in a dark hallway and realize you may be about to die.

  It has a sickly, draconic, not quite Caribbean flavor that can be very catchy when you see the cotton-candy-colored specter of death pressing its evil, childlike nose against the frosted glass of your mind. By then, of course, the party is o-v-e-r.

  On the stairwell below I could hear the sound of a man dying in another language. I didn’t plan to stick around for the translation. I was moving on up faster than the Jeffersons when Rambam caught me on the landing between the fourth and fifth floors. He had the Uzi on a strap around his neck. He handed me the police revolver.

  “How do I use it?” I asked.

  “You see anything that even faintly resembles a spic, you pull the trigger,” he said.

  “Fine.” I didn’t like this at all. Where the hell were the sirens? I wondered. I wanted sirens. I needed sirens.

  “They’re using MAC-10’s with silencers,” said Rambam. “That’s the noise like a zipper you keep hearing.”

  “Until they make contact,” I said. “Then it sounds like somebody caught his shvantz in his Jordaches.”

  “That gap-lapper with the dance class still up here?” asked Rambam as we hit the fifth floor.

  “Yeah,” I said, as I looked at the pistol in my hand and at Rambam with his Uzi and Israeli Army jacket. “But I’m not sure if she’s ready for the raid on Entebbe.”

  As we listened to the freight elevator creak ominously through the gloom, Rambam banged once on the door of Winnie Katz’s loft, turned the knob, and threw it open.

  If you’re going to interrupt a lesbian dance class, you can’t insist upon no surprises. We were ready for just about anything and that’s just about what we got.

  There was a Colombian lying barely inside the doorway. A bright red worm was crawling out of his head and moving in the general direction of the kitchen. Winnie Katz was standing over the body in a powder-blue warm-up suit, holding a MAC-10.

  “How do you reload this cocksucker?” she asked. There were sirens in the distance now, but I could see shadowy figures moving around on the fire escape. A fag in leotards came leaping by and two hysterical girls were cowering in the kitchen. Nothing wrong with cowering in the kitchen, I thought. I was just starting to look around the place when a barrage of shots forced us all to the floor and took out a large mirror on the wall behind us.

  Rambam killed the lights, took up the Uzi, and cleared the fire escape, taking out every front window in the place. A quiet, uncertain moment followed in which everybody’s ears rang and cold air and colder fear poured into the loft in about equal quantities. I looked outside but I didn’t see any movement on the fire escape.

  “You oughta get a silencer for that thing,” I said.

  Rambam was looking out of one of the broken windows. “Still a lot of action down there,” he said. “I’ll stay here. You check the bedroom.”

  I walked across the darkened studio with my pistol out, like a gunfighter walking into the bar where the bad guys were. I didn’t think anybody was in the bedroom, and I was pretty sure Rambam didn’t either or he wouldn’t’ve sent me in there. It was like sending seven different people to get blankets when you’re treating a drowning victim. Gives everybody something
to do, and maybe somebody shows up with a blanket in time to cover the guy before he dies of shock. If everybody shows up with blankets, you send them out again for beer and fried chicken and you have a picnic by the riverside.

  Halfway to the bedroom I saw something move down by the floor under a desk. I crept closer and pointed the revolver in front of me. As I got very near the desk, a taut white face looked up at me. It was Ratso.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I asked, dropping the gun to my side.

  “What the fuck do you think I’m doing?” said Ratso. “I’m calling 911!”

  “Jesus Christ, Ratso, how long does it take to call 911?”

  “I’m on hold,” he said.

  I walked over to the bedroom, prepared to take a quick, cursory look around. I walked in about four or five nervous steps. There wasn’t even a bed in the place, just one of those tofu mattresses. Lesbians are weird, all right.

  As I turned to leave the room, a figure suddenly detached itself from the far wall and flew at me like a desperate bat. It was too dim in the room to tell if it faintly resembled a spic, but it had a long, shiny knife in one hand so I pulled the trigger. The knife seemed to flutter against my throat like a steel moth and then it fell away. At that distance, with Rambam’s big gun, even Mr. Magoo would’ve been deadly. The bat bit the tofu.

  I hit the lights and looked at the body. It was very dead. The first life I’d ever taken. A line came into my head from the poet Kenneth Patchen: “There are so many little dyings, it doesn’t matter which of them is death.” I turned the body over with my foot.

  It was Carlos.

  I stood there for a moment breathing like the guy who came in 791st in the Boston Marathon.

  “Call your sister,” I said.

  58

  I crept back across the studio like an anxietous crab. Rambam was peering out of the doorway into the hall and motioned me to join him. Two dark figures had forced the doors of the freight elevator, and a third was firing down into the shaft with a MAC-10. The wall switch for the elevator had been thrown and apparently it had stopped between floors. There was no roof to the freight elevator; it was little more than a grimy cage with a light bulb hanging from two crossbars. It was like shooting fish in a barrel, except that the fish were screaming and cursing in Spanish, and the racket was echoing in the elevator shaft.