Another round hit the ruined privateer. The former theater flack in Temple cringed to watch a great set smashed to smithereens. Something else plunged to deck on a rigging-top rope, too bulky to be an acrobatic sailor.
Temple squinted through the smoke, wishing for a spy-glass. Could it be--? Was it possible--? How had she forgotten something so vital? So far she had spied no treasure chest, but now a massive example swung to and fro above the battered deck, its lid agape and its contents glittering.
She might as well be in China, Temple thought in despair. The chest dangled at least two sailors'
height from the deck. The ship itself sat ten feet from the bridge's right railing, which was crammed with onlookers and therefore witnesses. The ship was also systematically being shattered down to its skeleton, and who was to say that the treasure chest was not the next target?
Perhaps the propmaster was to say, because if the special effects folks destroyed the chest for the show, a fresh one would have to replace it at every performance. Propmasters, Temple knew, hate replacing big, complicated props like fully loaded treasure chests.
So the chest was safe, which meant that it could very well house the prize pumps . . . safely.
While Temple tried to follow her thread of logic to the gravity-defying act of somehow swinging aboard the pirate ship to rummage in its fallen chest, the British had not been idle.
An articulate order of "Fire!" came once more.
This time the order was taken literally. The pirate ship exploded from mast-top to main deck in searing flames. On the structure behind the ship, where the pirates presumably stored their powder in a mighty magazine, the entire wall expelled a massive black cloud haloed with a fiery nimbus. Blast-furnace heat flushed Temple's face as people around her screamed their delight at tasting danger so close. She herself wondered how the attraction dared barbecue its audience. What if something went wrong?
Meanwhile, pirates were deserting the ship like rats, diving headfirst into the dark waters. Even then their valiant captain exhorted his remaining men to return fire one last time.
Speaking of rats . . . ugh, what a touch of ghastly realism! One particularly large specimen clung to the treasure chest's drooping lip, back legs churning as its forelegs hung on for dear life. At first she took it for an animated machine, but no robotic tail could thrash so fluidly. Amazing what animal trainers could do these days, Temple marveled. The rat's silhouette was as sharp as etched glass against the fiery magazine wall beyond it, and its frantic struggles made the treasure chest twist on its rope, turning its open maw toward her.
She could see inside! If she could only really see!
Temple elbowed, kneed and toed her way through the upward-staring crowd, trying to keep her head (and line of sight) above bald spots and sunvisors. She was soon pressed against the opposite railing, this close to the heat and the hectic activity . . . and to the treasure chest twisting slowly in the wind, with no one paying it any mind.
Contents, she thought. Something red and sparkly, like rubies ... no, crinkled red cellophane, an old stage trick. Something silver that shone . . . Shoes?
Drat that rat, it was interfering with her view, with its big black head and its thick black tail. Rats don't have big heads. Nor furry tails. And rats aren't black, are they? Not even trained rats.
"A cat, " Temple whispered.
Who did she fear would hear her in that crowd? Eightball was across the way. Only she saw what she saw.
A black cat.
The animal continued to claw the trunk as if trying to scramble inside. Finally, its grip loosened and it fell--Temple winced but did not shut her eyes--it fell, pulling the chest contents after it in a tumble of crumpled tinfoil, cellophane, metallic plastic beads and ... no shoes.
Where was the cat?
Temple's gaze raked the deck just in time to see a last craven figure catapult from the rail into the water below.
"Louie," she whispered. She knew it was Midnight Louie.
Pitch-black in the ship's shadow, the water still rippled from the recent explosion, but nothing living moved in it. Temple pushed back across the bridge, where she stood and searched the brackish waves for survivors.
Nothing. Not a sailor, not a ship's cat. Eightball was still raptly staring at the British ship, which suddenly erupted in flames from the pirate ship's last volley.
"Louie," Temple murmured disconsolately into a sea of triumphant shouts. Nobody liked Captain Spit-and-Polish.
The British ship began to sink. The captain ordered his crew to swim for it while he remained ramrod-rigid at the splintered mast, clinging to his doomed position as stoutly as the shredded sails clung to the masts. The entire ship slowly slipped down, down, down into the briny deep.
Is that where Louie was now?
Temple leaned her head over the railing and watched the British crew thrash toward the bridge.
When they were almost under it, she shouted, "Is there a cat down there?"
Two men looked up, treading water.
"A cat!" she mouthed, hoping they could read lips. She made pathetic little paddling motions with her hands.
They read her distressed face, looked under the bridge, then shook their sopping heads. Then they swam on to some hidden exit under the bridge.
Maybe Louie had found it.
Music swelled around her, but Temple was too worried to heed it. Eightball grabbed her arm.
"Look. Look there! The ship's rising again."
Would Louie rise again?
Temple saw the Royal Navy's mast-tops pricking the water's thin skin and then rising more and more, until the Captain's bare head appeared. There was the bloody prig now, still standing at attention as
"Rule, Britannia, Britannia Rule the Waves" pounded over the speaker system and his battle-battered ship lifted to ride normally on the waves.
The crowd, laughing and applauding, thinned into a moving stream of indistinguishable people with pressing places to go, like craps tables. Solemnly, the British ship retreated around the point, to be restored to spanking, white-sailed condition by the next show.
Temple wandered back to the pirate-ship side, where all was broken and charred. She assumed the technical crew would have it shipshape again in forty minutes.
Could she find someone from the crew? Beg them to check the ship, the water, the staging area for Louie? Would they believe her?
"Kind of hard to believe," Eightball ruminated beside her.
She glanced at the elderly man. He was discussing the programmed destruction and resurrection of the dueling ships, but he had inadvertently answered her unspoken question. No one would believe a cat had jumped into the midst of battle to claw open a treasure chest so his human roommate could find a pair of bejeweled shoes.
Temple sadly eyed the fallen treasure, as tawdry and deceptive as any dream of riches from El Dorado to Indiana Jones's Temple of Doom.
Midnight Louie was her real treasure, not some rare shoes bearing an image she had decided was him, and not simply an anonymous black cat. Perhaps the shoes would be his memorial.
For he had slipped aboard on purpose to inspect the chest; she knew that. Somehow, he had picked up the trail of her quest and had boldly gone where she could not go.
A tear meandered down her cheek to her throat.
"Hey." Eightball jerked on her sleeve. "That's funny. Never noticed that detail before."
"What?" she asked listlessly.
"Over there by the houses, next to the parrot. Look, atop that buxom figurehead."
Temple finally did look. It would be too hard to explain the unrehearsed show that she had seen unfolding amidst the advertised attraction: the end of Midnight Louie.
The parrot still sat there in its gaudy glory, head forever cocked. The figurehead still thrust her chin and bosom into the distance. And crouching atop her tilted-back head, eyeing the parrot, was a cat. A black cat. A wet black cat.
Temple opened her mouth but said nothing.