I cannot think of anything useful to burn around the place ... until I remember the pile of papers Miss Kit Carlson keeps beside her computer in the room Miss Temple is sleeping in, when she is not sleeping out. They are only typed on one side, so I figure Miss Kit keeps them there for scratch paper. Pleased, I hop down to the floor by stages to implement the next, and most tedious, part of my plan.
Anybody dumb enough to have trained their eagle eye or telescope on these windows will be getting a most mysterious eyeful over the next couple of hours. Like a bunny rabbit, I hop out of sight, and then I hop back into view and up to the high shelf. My return trips are notable for the roll of paper clutched in my incisors.
In due time I have a nicely mounded pile of pages, each one titled "Siege of Sighs."
Finally, I drop-kick a match to the pile and scratch kitty litter until something ignites. (You must understand that I am not literally scratching kitty litter. I only use the stuff when there is not so much as a potted plant around as a substitute. But I use the same friction-laden movements with my hind feet that would burn litter, were it at all combustible.)
Finally a lucky kick slides match head against striker. I hear a sound of many wings beating, but it is only the leaves of paper that are curling as a cutting edge of bright fire eats away at them.
I skedaddle before any random spark catches my heels, and hunker down by the front door.
Not long afterward, an ear-splitting beeping goes off, accompanied by inmate shrieking, frantic phone dialing, downward drifting clouds of smoke and an urgent knock at the door, followed by a scrabbling sound of a passkey in the lock.
Above it all, the sprinkler system hisses to life and a gentle chlorinated rain falls on everything within range. Now the Leo the Lion at the MGM Grand hotel in Las Vegas is not the only one with a spraying problem.
But despite the hullabaloo, I keep my post by the door, springing forward to freedom when it bursts open and an excitable super spouting a language of the Indian subcontinent rushes through into the rain and the shrieks.
I am on my way to the fire exits, which are being thronged by nervous folk in nightclothes. The doors bat open and shut as tenants seek safety below. I thread through their legs on the dark, steep stairwell and am soon in the small lower lobby.
From there I am an ankle away from the freedom of the city.
In the distance, another of those annoyingly frequent New York sirens carries on like a banshee.
Everyone on the ground floor and the sidewalk outside looks up, so when I leap out fur to femur with an oblivious human, no one tries to stop me.
I sniff the evening air, which is much brisker than it is in Las Vegas. A pity. Scents do poorly in colder climes. I will have to use my other senses to follow the map route I have lain upon all afternoon. Luckily, Cornelia Street walks right into the Avenue of the Americas, otherwise known as Sixth. I take off down the street at a brisk trot, glimpsing Washington Square a block away. These pads were made for walking, but I have a long way to go up the spine of Manhattan before I hit the hostelry I seek.
In no time at all I am passing Fourteenth Street. Only thirty more blocks to go, but they are shrimp appetizers compared with the whale-length extent of blocks in Las Vegas. I pass churches and bars and office buildings. I am almost scuttled at Thirty-first when a bag lady decides that I am worse off than she is and tries to run me down with her shopping cart in the name of saving my soul. I dodge the squeaky wheels and take my chances underfoot, pausing to catch my breath at the Empire State Building. I am tempted to join the lines snaking to the top for a look-see at the Big Apple from the worm-on-top's point of view, but decide a tourist jaunt could blow my cover.
By then I am in Herald Square, where Broadway crosses Sixth on its way to the seamy environs of Times Square. I sigh and head for more respectable realms, straight north, past Macy's department store. There I pause to offer suitable honor to the late Rudy, with whom I share a certain weakness for a certain weed, although my kind is legal. While I am paying my respects to a dead veteran, wouldn't you know some dude emerges from a building with not one but two Russian wolfhounds in tow. Or rather, the Russian wolfhounds have him in tow.
They eye me as one, launch a keening duet and tangle their leashes as they streak after me. Their owner has just become a boat anchor with nothing to snag onto.
I take off flat out, ears flat, feet flat, hair slicked to my back for maximum speed. I zig and zag, targeting tourists and other slow-moving pedestrians. On an even, unpopulated playing field I would be black caviar for those ancient hunters, but this is dysfunctionally chaotic New York City, boys, and I do not have any fancy harness holding me back.
I leave them entwined with a fairy-light bestrewed tree and a lady walking a toy poodle behind the New York Public Library. I give a small roar of greeting and triumph to the unseen Big Cats keeping guard on the building's Fifth Avenue entrance and pussyfoot the last two blocks to Forty-fourth.
Unfortunately, people in this city are more used to dog doo-doo by the curb than to the sight of an independent feline (and waste-management expert) on the move. They cry out and point to me, but I keep trotting and do not look back. It is lucky that my national commercials for Allpetco are not yet reality. It would really slow me down if I had to stop and sign autographs.
By the time I get to the Algonquin at Sixth and Forty-fourth, I am pooped, but only in the sense of being tired. I have not littered once upon the streets of New York, despite the stress of the chase. However, my breath blows frosty smoke rings and my sides are heaving. I collect myself outside the Blue Bar next door before attempting the final stage of my mission.
The Algonquin doormen are attired in long, full winter coats like the Wizard's guards wore in Oz. But I can work with long full coats. My wits and stamina gathered, I dart under the longest model on the shortest doorman. Within seconds I am within inches of the opening double doors. It is nothing for an old Las Vegas hand like myself to calculate the odds down to a whisker's breadth. I leap between the closing pincers of glass and brass without losing a tail-hair, then sprint through the inner set unscathed.
I am spit out into a lobby of the old school . . . say the library of Princeton University.
Luckily, the lobby resembles Mr. Robert Frost's wood: lovely, dark and deep. Age-darkened wood looms all around, providing excellent camouflage for a swarthy fellow like me. The carpeting, tastefully worn to a dull red, is less amenable, but no one seems to find my feline presence remarkable.
"Oh, look," says a lady with a Southern accent. "The famous house cat."
I bow and stroll into the eighteenth-century ambiance of the lobby-bar, moving among wing chairs and tea tables, head and tail high. At last, no hubbub. No dogs. No doo-doo. Just the tranquility so dear to the feline soul, and a smidgen of respect.
I am so pleased to be recognized despite the fact that none of my ads have run yet, that I fail to scan the ambience with all of my senses. Imagine my surprise to scent an odor of the most delicate feline nature.
A female of my species is very near.
Naturally, I cannot resist discovering if the Divine Yvette has accompanied her mistress for a cocktail, yet the scent is . . . foreign, if no less intriguing. I reconnoiter, arriving finally near a mahogany niche, a bookcase with the doors removed, which has been remodeled into a cat accommodation.