Cat in a Quicksilver Caper

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Who? Why? Didn’t matter. Everyone involved in the show, everything, including the cats big and small, were in peril of fatal plunges to the hard marble floor below.

  Max glanced again to where Louie had appeared. His place on the brink of the disabled pedestal had been taken by a small, pale-coated cat tipped dark brown on all its extremities. Hyacinth.

  A piece of moving darkness showed that Louie was now balancing at the entrance to the big cats’ divided platforms. Their huge forms shifted in the dark, the spotlights glancing off huge white fangs as they panted with pre-performance excitement and off the bejeweled green of their shining eyes.

  Louie apparently intended to turn these bruisers back. Single pawed. Max saw Louie’s back hoop in the classic feline offensive/defensive pose. He could almost hear the hiss of a housecat hitting those large, rounded, jungle-sharp ears.

  Max could do nothing about the cats, wild or domestic. Who ever could? His eyes flicked to the two opposing platforms where CC and Shangri-La would appear very shortly.

  Great. Two booby-trapped platforms waiting for the weight of one footstep from their human victims.

  One observer, with only a reach and strength so long, so fast.

  Who to rescue?

  Shangri-La weighed maybe a hundred and ten pounds in her airy costume. Easy save. Like Tarzan and Jane. Except . . . she was an enemy.

  The Cloaked Conjuror was a confrere, a kind of friend. Max didn’t envy his hidden life and the masked face that kept him isolated, however wealthy and famous. Maybe he’d welcome a spectacular death. A Page One passing. Anyway, the man, costumed in Klingon-style platform boots and mask, must run two-fifty. Max weighed one-eighty sopping wet, which he was now, with dangerous perspiration. Bad for his grip.

  The introductory music swelled to a climax to blast out the entrance bars. Echoing here above and down below. In Heaven and Hell.

  The most certain save was the most personally distasteful. The most unlikely save was the most preferred. Gallantry said rescue the woman. Personal druthers said preserve the fellow magician.

  Time for thought was done. The spotlights brightened on each platform, forty feet apart. A lithe figure in fluttering white stepped forward. A massive Darth Vader–like persona in black stepped forward.

  Max swung out from the ceiling, dark but neither light nor heavy.

  He swept out and down, catching Shangri-La’s torso in one arm, and rappelled off the side wall to deposit her in the niche where Midnight Louie held the big cats at bay. Maybe she was too light to tip the balance.

  He pushed his feet against the wall again and caught up with the Cloaked Conjuror just as the platform broke and plummeted from his booted feet to the floor below. The crowd roared with fright.

  He’d snagged CC by one arm. Their combined weight pulled Max’s bungee cord down, down, down toward the Lexan onion dome that both revealed and guarded the newly installed scepter.

  Drop CC and the prize was his.

  Instead they fell together like a lead weight, until the top of the spiral staircase leading to the scepter was just below.

  Max let CC go. He dropped perhaps four feet.

  Max kicked off the onion dome, swinging over the installation.

  In an instant, he had seized the scepter and ricocheted from the base of the installation. The piercing whine of an alarm ran up and down the scale as the bungee cord rebounded up to the ceiling, making him a Spider-man about to go comic book splat!

  Max caught at the collapsed platform that had been CC’s downfall. His body bruised into it, but his grasp held long enough to slow his rebound.

  Then the platform sagged and broke free, falling down into the heart of the screams and scattering audience members below, including Temple.

  Max had no time to look back. He bounced off the looming ceiling, slowed, in control again.

  The big cats, cowed perhaps as much by the unscripted chaos as Midnight Louie’s fierce stand, had backed away from the treacherous platforms they’d been trained to mount on the music’s cue. If Midnight Louie could intimidate two panthers who outweighed him a hundred-to-one, Max guessed he could pull Shangri-La to safety.

  She was using her considerable acrobatic skills to take her weight off the disintegrating platform beneath her feet, which were hampered by arch-deforming ballet toe-shoes. They produced a graceful image for an airborne magician-acrobat, but they were useless for establishing any foothold on a disintegrating web of wooden platforms and elastic bungee cords.

  Max sailed down, the scepter in his belt flashing in one of the hidden mirrors above. He glimpsed Shangri-La’s makeup-masked features, her exotic beauty and grace, dismissing her ambiguous role in shady events past and present. Her life and lifeline made her as fragile now as a blown-glass ballerina.

  He caught one wrist as she was slipping away. It was sharp and thin, a bundle of razor blades. Every sinew in his arm strained, but he had only to dive low, release her over a safe landing point, then fly up like Peter Pan dropping Wendy back at home.

  But CC’s rescue had strained his synapses as well as tendon and bone. He could barely hold on to her. . . . Then a fiery cactus exploded on his back and shoulders.

  He heard a martial arts yowl, cat style.

  That damn Hyacinth, thinking to protect her mistress, was dooming her instead. Max’s fingers tightened, flinched, then felt skin and bones slipping through his grasp.

  They were still thirty feet above the hard marble flooring.

  The white butterfly fluttered free below him, spinning and glittering in a graceful, fatal trajectory.

  Max, freed from the dead weight, rebounded against the ceiling so fast it took all of his remaining strength to slow the snap, to grab disintegrating platforms on his rebound, to become an unseen spider in a lethal web high above.

  The cat slid off his back and fell, a tangle of bungee cords serving as its precarious cradle. It swung there, its shrill voice mimicking the relentless, heartbeat-stirring siren of the alarm.

  The canned music hid the sound of whatever impact there had been. The scepter installation site looked as if it had been hit by a tornado.

  Below him, people—heads of all colors—gathered, unthinking, around a shining reverse-Rorschach ink-blot pattern of fallen white on the pale floor far below. No one else seemed injured.

  Max had no time left to linger, look back, regret. He unsnapped his trusty bungee cord, the only safe one because whoever had sabotaged the magic act had not known about his own arrangements. Then he ditched the boots, cloak, and CC mask, and his spider self slipped from the ceiling handholds and down the narrow escape tunnel he and Gandolph had made.

  The Cloaked Conjuror and the big cats had survived to perform another day, thanks to Max—and Midnight Louie—being on the scene. Shangri-La definitely and possibly her cat Hyacinth were among the collateral damage.

  “Damn,” Max hissed to himself over and over as he elbow crawled through the passage, its existence now publicly betrayed.

  He struggled to keep the invaluable scepter from scraping on the narrowing ductwork. His spectacular theft had turned into a botched heist and a messy, semifailed rescue operation.

  A woman lay dead on the exhibition floor. Temple’s assignment as well as his own were both terminally damaged. The Cloaked Conjuror’s show and career were tainted, perhaps beyond redemption, like his own.

  He had let down everyone who depended upon him, whether they knew it or not.

  And . . . the Synth would not be pleased. Or maybe those manipulative shadow figures would be delighted with the carnage, and the publicity.

  Poor Temple! Her career was at stake, and he had not only meddled in it, but devastated the site of her greatest PR triumph.

  Damn!

  His back burned with raw fire, the badge of a cat’s tragically misguided courage. Otherwise he could have saved a human life, no matter his suspicions about its purpose. Shangri-La had been a mystery, maybe a criminal, but until tonight, she had b
een living. Her life had hung from his hands and slipped away.

  He felt sick, as sick as when the IRA pub bomb had turned his boyhood best friend, his cousin Sean, into exploded bits of flesh and blood.

  How could he face his uncle and aunt, his family?

  He couldn’t then.

  He couldn’t now. He had to go away, run far, find some way to make reparations. Leave home. Leave Temple. Leave Las Vegas, leave life and death behind him. Again.

  Damn!

  Cat’s Cradle

  Triage is not a skill you usually find in PIs, or the apparently humble pussycat.

  But I gaze down from the lip of the Big Cats staging area about as horrified as I have ever been in memory.

  Shangri-La lies there, a mangled white butterfly on the white marble floor, a small pale form, framed by pieces of black platform that circle her like flotsam from a shipwreck. A shipwreck in the sky.

  What to do? Where to go?

  The Cloaked Conjurer is stirring at the mouth of his staging area where Mr. Max deposited him with superhuman strength. For even he cannot fool Midnight Louie. I would know those moves anywhere.

  I glance at the Big Boys, who have realized that the act has turned deadly wrong.

  “Return to your cages and sit tight,” I tell them. “Someone will come for you when they think of it.”

  They retreat as meekly as the Cowardly Lion after Dorothy has slapped his nose. I am afraid I had to unsheath my shivs and do a little nose whacking myself to force them back from the deadly, drop-off edge.

  I dash around their cages and to the connecting hall, taking a left and another left in the ill-lit maze all backstage areas are, the better to keep audiences from seeing in.

  I have guessed right. CC is pushing himself up to his knees and leaning over the edge in an attempt to view the same horrible sight I have seen. He is shocked and groggy, so I am forced to take a stand in his path. I hiss and growl and slash him back, as if I were the trainer and he the cat act.

  “I must be hallucinating,” he mutters during his retreat. “Lucky and Kalúha have shrunk? And Shang and Hyacinth too?”

  When I have herded him ten feet back from the edge, I hear the scrabble of rescuing hands and feet in the maze of service chutes honeycombing this sky-high stage.

  Not Mr. Max’s. He is long gone and that is one party in this tragedy I feel no need to follow. Worry about is something else. He tried for a two-fer save. Had not the misguided Hyacinth scourged his back, he might have made it. I sincerely hope her boast of curare-painted nails was all bravado. I watch her struggling in her bungee cord cradle. I shall never hear the truth from her lips. Shangri-La has made her eternal peace with solid marble, but Hyacinth will never make peace with me. I cannot help but think that they were two of a kind: unhappy, scrappy souls. Only Hyacinth remains now, but for the intervention of a few threads, and Shangri-La perhaps has brought her end upon her.

  Still, my Miss Temple is somewhere far below, by herself, trying to salvage order from tragedy.

  I duck into the entrance/exit tunnel designed for Hyacinth . . . and nearly swallow my own tongue to see her silhouette waiting for me.

  Maybe nine lives are literal with her kind of cat. Maybe she is some immortal emissary of Bast and I have failed to save her. Maybe I too will soon be floating like a butterfly and landing like the QE II. . . .

  “Louie! We must get to the floor below.”

  The silhouette says Hyacinth but the voice says Squeaker.

  “Are you okay?” I ask, astounded.

  “No, of course not. I witnessed everything, as you did. Hyacinth, as you saw, felt strong enough to perform herself. And then some. Poor misguided creature! She had no idea her interference was what doomed her mistress. If only there was something we could have done.”

  “Not without leaving our hides on the exhibition floor.”

  “I saw you warn Lucky and Kahlúa. And the Cloaked Conjuror is safe?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who was that masked man?”

  I am certain that Squeaker, fresh from a shelter experience, has not logged the hours I have in watching high-number cable channels with ancient TV show reruns, so I only say the truth.

  “I think he came to steal the Czar Alexander scepter but discovered that someone had got here before him and rigged the whole suspended performance area to collapse.”

  “We all could have been killed then, if he hadn’t been here?”

  “Sure as shootin’,” I cannot resist saying, thinking of the Lone Ranger’s silver bullets.

  “At least CC and the Big Cats are safe.”

  I nod modestly. Mr. Max and I work well together, even when we do not know about it beforehand.

  “That masked man would have saved Shangri-La too, if Hyacinth had not gone postal.”

  Squeaker is not as sheltered as I had suspected.

  “Louie, I do not wish to be found up here!” she says. “I am very sensitive about facing humans. I was not treated well by them. Call me a coward but I must find a way out of here. Quick! Before they catch me and put me in a cage again.”

  “No problem, Princess.”

  I peer out Hyacinth’s entrance niche. Everyone below is focusing on the emergency personnel who have made a circle around Shangri-La’s form. The rescue parties are swarming up the tunnels behind us.

  “We will have to risk a little Tarzan swing up to that tangle of bungee cords under the ceiling.”

  “I fear man but not the works of man,” Squeaker says. “You know where you wish us to go. Lead and I will follow.”

  Suits me. This leap is kit’s play compared to the acrobatics I use to scale the Circle Ritz most nights. I lunge, hang over empty air for a split second, and tangle sixteen shivs in Mr. Max’s special ceiling cradle of bungee cords. It still holds firm.

  Squeaker glances over her pale cream shoulder at the approaching hordes of inquisitive humans, then blinks her baby blues at me. Or maybe she winks, but I personally think that she is too shy.

  She launches her lean form like an Olympics gymnast and in a moment my webbing trembles from the impact of another sixteen-point landing.

  “Unlatch yourself and follow me,” I say, swinging into the barely visible open black mouth of Mr. Max’s escape hatch.

  She manages the transfer like one running for her life.

  When we are both safely situated, I lean out and slash a key bungee cord free. The whole mess falls free, then snags on a piece of dangling platform twenty feet below.

  Squeaker’s velvet gray muzzle wrinkles with puzzlement at my action.

  “The masked man is a sort of friend of mine. Besides, the longer they do not find his escape tunnel, the longer we will have to escape.”

  With that we turn and make our easy way through an anaconda-size twist and turn of giant piping. Sometimes, even I wonder how Mr. Max Kinsella does it.

  But I am glad he did it.

  Brass Tactics

  “Is she . . . dead?” Temple asked Randy.

  He nodded, his face paler than his ash-blond hair. “I’m pretty sure. You don’t have to see for yourself.”

  “I do.”

  “Then I’ll come too. They’ll only let us so close.”

  But he hadn’t reckoned there’d be the sober ring of Fontana brothers circling the death scene like white-suited angels from a 1940s movie fantasy.

  Despite their light-colored garb, their serious and handsomely swarthy faces lent the somber air of a Mafia funeral to the occasion. They posed with their broad defensive backs to the victim, legs splayed apart as if for a last stand, hands clasped in front like an honor guard with the muzzles of the black Berettas in those hands aimed at the white marble floor.

  Temple could already hear a wave of rising consternation from the casino as emergency technicians and police forged their way through the crowded aisles to this cul-de-sac of tragedy at the very back of the huge hotel.

  Probably there was a nearer, more discreet entrance, but e
mergency crews couldn’t gamble on finding it. This entire museum wing was new and had never required a siren run before.

  “Well?” she asked the nearest Fontana brother. He looked down at her, his expression stern as a Marine’s.

  “Not pretty, Miss Temple.”

  “This is my job scene.”

  Ralph nodded and shifted to one side.

  She saw the form aptly described as “crumpled.”

  The painted face was turned toward her, almost accusingly. The traditions of Chinese opera face painting made American clown-face colors elegant: white face accomplished with fine rice powder, not heavy grease paint. No enlarged fire-engine-red lips, but the crimson petals of a mouth echoed in a red blush over the cheekbones and around the eyes, delicate as a pale rose petal. Slashing black lines exaggerating natural eyelashes and eyebrows.

  And a crooked trickle of blood drooling out one corner of the perfectly painted crimson bud of a mouth. A pool of that blood engulfed the horse tail–long strands of dull black hair, probably false, haloing the figure.

  This woman had stolen Temple’s ring as part of a stage magic act and probably participated in her kidnapping. So Temple shouldn’t bat an eyelash to see this stagy figure melted into white marble like her darker sister, the Wicked Witch of the West, right?

  Temple batted two eyelashes, thick with tears of shock.

  Aldo stepped in front of her to conceal the body again.

  “Cheese it, the cops,” he muttered, while an adept hand gesture made the Beretta vanish.

  The Fontanas had broken rank and melted bonelessly into their ice cream suits, backing into the watching crowd of murmuring hotel and corporate honchos.

  Randy pulled Temple aside as a gurney crashed through the mob faster than an Olympic sled. They were called over to the fringes by the murmuring executives.

  “Thank God the press was barred from attending,” Pete Wayans noted. “What about the formal opening next week?”

  “How soon can the damaged set pieces be replaced?” Temple asked.

  Madame Kirkov’s papery skin was a duplicate of Shangri-La’s painted mask. It had been paste white since the first death on the exhibition site. She waved a beringed, shriveled hand that would have seemed natural to a mummy.