The female clerk didn't even look up, so she missed seeing Louie on his maiden voyage as a floating head. "Block down. The other side. Left."
A block! Why had the cabbie dumped her and Louie a block and a half away? And on the wrong side of the street? Couldn't he count?
Read? "New York, New York," she muttered as she dragged herself and the luggage back into the mob.
Nobody noticed.
She could have been carrying the decapitated head of Alfredo Garcia and no one would notice, she thought grimly. She could be mugged, murdered, taken by aliens and nobody would notice. Except the men hovering by the buildings, watching the passing women and shouting nasty things they fortunately couldn't quite hear. No one shouted anything remotely nasty at Temple. Being pregnant with a cat was not altogether a bad thing, she decided.
By that time she'd gone too far, and had to retrace her steps, cross at a green light a street that everyone else had already crossed on the previous red light. Finally, squinting in the dark at absent or illegible numbers, she found the right one. But could this narrow, dingy entrance possibly house a respectable apartment building?
By the time she'd entered and found the small elevator and wondered at the wire crisscrossing the glass in its small window, and had gone up to the proper floor, she was ready to walk all the way back to Las Vegas, en famille.
She rang the doorbell. This had better be the right place!
Chapter 4
A Ticket to Ride
Some may be wondering at my saintly conduct during the trials and tribulations of my transport to New York City. Is it possible that they take Midnight Louie for a prima donna of some kind?
But no; I am the most laid-back and genial of dudes. Why should I object to being cooped for several hours within a purple nylon Kat-Karrier with sexy peek-a-boo black mesh ventilation areas, much resembling the fishnet stockings on the legs of certain damsels of an
exhibitionist nature?
Should I take umbrage at my public transfer to the purple nylon CatAboard Seat in a ladies' room of a major metropolitan airport?
Does any of this detract from my macho dignity?
Not at all.
Purple, after all, is the color of royalty, and we all know just how royally I am descended. My great-great-great-etcetera grandma (Oh, mighty Bastet; I bow to your female feline superiority) was Pharaoh's favorite gumshoe. Or perhaps it was gum-sandal. And sometimes footstool. They also serve who only sit and accept weight.
And at least these portable devices are modern and lightweight.
There is nothing worse to rattle around in than the plastic shell of an old-fashioned carrier with a steel grille. The newfangled products at least use zippers (and those who have followed my adventures know that my way with a zipper is almost as smooth and sassy as my way with females--of any species). The amusing and inventive CatAboard Seat even offers the prisoner--I mean the passenger-- a view. If said passenger is not inadvertently throttled by the neck-area drawstring. Also in this front-tote device, I am kept close to the heart and best interests of my little doll, Miss Temple Barr.
Did she think no one saw the nasty dudes ogling her from the building walls? Had one ruffian dared to approach, I would have huffed and puffed my way loose of the drawstring (or, if unable to burst free fast enough, bitten anything tender within reach).
Besides, one other fact explains my extreme docility in being dragged from pillar to post at forty thousand feet high and six hundred miles an hour fast: I like to travel. I got around quite a bit before deciding to honor Miss Temple with my cohabitation.
I have even been to the previous Inauguration in Washington Dee Cee, where I saved the president-elect from an embarrassing moment involving a saxophone and a hidden stash of grass as in illegal tender, aka marijuana. In fact, if there is any justice in the world, I should be invited as a special guest at the next Inauguration. So I have flown before, and not on catnip. Hence my calm demeanor during this whole expedition. I understand that one's dignity suffers dearly going from one place to another. Just look at Miss Temple Barr as she stands here huffing and perspiring in front of a pretty nondescript door on the eighth floor of a nondescript building in lower Manhattan.
She is a mess. I, however, travel well. I do not even have a hangnail. I can hardly wait to get out and about to explore what some have named Baghdad-on-the-Hudson, the Big Apple, the Naked City. None of these nicknames makes any more sense than what my kind call it: the Mother of all Hairballs.
Chapter 5
Ho! Ho! Ho!
The door opened at last.
Temple braced herself for a stranger, for a snarling New York City apartment-building superintendent, the legendary "Super" of sitcoms. She would have been prepared for one of Santa's errant elves, for who-knows-what, but anything other than her aunt Kit. This had not been her day and there was no reason for the evening to start playing into her expectations.
She retained her cool when Santa Claus himself stood there, white beard and long curled hair flowing, wearing nothing but red long Johns that matched his cherry-red button nose, and Rudolph's, for that matter.
A stubby crystal tumbler of amber liquid in one hand might explain the red nose.
"You must be Temple Darling!" he exclaimed in a deep baritone that belonged to a Don Giovanni at the Metropolitan Opera.
He was also as thin as a cat's whisker. Did Santa have a secret eating disorder? Bulimia might explain how he dealt with having to consume all those cookies on Christmas Eve.
Temple Darling was uncharacteristically speechless. Clearly, she was expected. Clearly, this was not her aunt.
"Come in, Little Merry Christmas!"
Santa stood aside, a grand welcoming gesture perilously tilting the glass and its eighty-proof contents. "And bring your little cat too," he added with a cackle that was far from jolly. "Oops, sorry! Just did the matinee witch at the Children's Museum. Wrong part."
Wrong place, Temple thought.
But she was unwilling to lug a single thing, especially Midnight Louie, anywhere else for a while. Besides, they knew her name here.
Coming in surprised her.
The polished oak floors were glossy enough to see your underwear in, if you were wearing skirts, and neither she nor skinny old Saint Nick were.
High, white and handsome walls intersected at unexpected angles, creating the feeling of an ultramodern maze, or a blank theater set.
"Kit Darling," Santa called over his red shoulder to the Great Unknown beyond the current cliff of albino wall. "Mother and Child are here, seeking a room for the night. No guy, and no donkey, unless I'm to be dragooned into the part. Probably the ass." He slugged down a fat finger of booze in one gulp that made his Adam's apple prance.
"Must whip up the reindeer and run, Temple Darling. Got to do the whole boring nine yards: boots, belt, hot red felt fat-suit, everything. Not to mention the Mae West underneath for the proper avoirdupois. But anything for the kiddies and an honest buck."
He vanished around one white wall at the same moment her aunt, Kit Carlson, rounded the other wall like an ingenue in a Sardou farce.
"Did our Father Christmas pull his vanishing act? I wanted to introduce you formally. How are you, Kid? "
Kit, draped in a caftan of a far more sophisticated cut and color than an Electra Lark muumuu, swooped open her arms in the proper pose for a ballet third position. The resulting butterfly effect wrapped Temple in a cocoon of muted earth-tone silk and some spicy, expensive and thoroughly decadent perfume.
"He'll pop off in a couple of minutes. He has a Macy's gig tonight, and I let him change here. I'll introduce you later, when he comes back."