Cat with an Emerald Eye
Prologue
A Higher Calling
I am told that most people would be happy to receive personal advice from on high.
However, I am not most people. I am not even a person.
And right now I am preparing for my annual autumn slump. This, I believe, is a universal condition. When that first October evening turns nippy, something primitive in the cells of every red-blooded critter stops dead for a moment, looks around and turns into a couch potato, or maybe a pumpkin.
Call it a genetic disposition to hibernate. Call it a seasonal disaffective disorder. Call it Ishmael.
Whatever, it is one of nature's most powerful urges, and I did not get the enviable reputation I have as the primo progenitor in this town by ignoring nature's most powerful urges.
It does not matter that my hometown is Las Vegas, where virtually year-round it is hotter than the scales on the back of a skink. Of course, my closest acquaintance with a scale is in the piano bar of the Crystal Phoenix, since I came fresh from the factory with a luxuriant coat of jet-black fur. Still, there is bone and muscle under all this velvet plush, and I am old enough that a chill can creep past my barrier fuzz and into my skeleton. Come September, the nights dwindle down to a precious few degrees, like forty or fifty. Then October, November, and December kick in and it really gets cold when the daylight goes on down time.
So in late October I long to dine diligently, drink deeply and then curl up someplace off the ground, where I bury my nose in my external muffler, flatten my ears to the slap-happy, insomniac uproar of Las Vegas doing business as usual and hope for a long winter's nap. Maybe I will not even blink my peepers ajar until, say, March and the IRS is threatening. (Though I am exempt from personal taxes, and that is another story.)
As far as I am concerned, from this moment on, Miss Temple can deliver meals to my feet.
She can even tent a few newspapers over my head and forget about me until the cobwebs start looking like macrame plant hangers ... and the resident spider is big enough to go to med school.
But then, as I lie there, gently napping, suddenly there comes a twitching, as of someone gently switching a tail a-dust with itching ... powder.
Urgh! How can I describe this unnatural, burrowing feeling that comes stealing over my contented, drowsing form? Like a fly walking tippy-toe over an emery board. Like taking a sitz bath in rock salt or getting a grain of sand between your two hardest-to-reach toes...
Oh, it is awful! One of my eyelids snaps open like a runaway shade letting in a fistful of daylight. I am a peaceful, twilight kind of guy. Why else would they call me Midnight Louie?
And right now I am all a-pant for shorter days and longer nights. That way my serial naps can stretch out into one long snooze. But it is not to be, not with the kind of neighbors up with which I have to put.
And I do mean up. I can feel the intangible itching powder drifting down two floors from directly above me. My left ear does the Jerk. Then my right. A buzzing as of something nasty scuzzing about the edges of my consciousness makes my right leg try to get up and walk...
without me.
And I am having such a splendid dream, adrift with the Divine Yvette on the river Nile as it snakes through the lobby of the huge new Oasis Hotel past a cast-chrome Sphinx with Bette Davis eyes, cruising under a canopy of tall date trees... that are dropping coconuts on my head, my consciousness ... bullets and bulletins from another, less imaginative and more wakeful intelligence.
Rats! (If it only were.)
I come cold awake with a start, my patented night vision instantly focusing on the shadows of Miss Temple's living room furniture. I am tempted to waddle into the kitchen and see what there is to eat, but another nugget of unwanted knowledge crashes onto my cranium with full force.
Louie! Come here, I need you.
You and the cast of CATS! , I think sourly.
Do not be grumpy, I am admonished in the privacy of my own head. You know what you must do.
Au contraire. I know what I will not like to do. So, sighing in the hopes that Miss Temple will awaken in the adjoining bedroom and rush out to take me captive (dim chance), I struggle out of my contented curl on the sofa, rise, leap down to the (ugh) cold parquet, then stretch my legs and arms in turn.
("How many arms does a cat like you have?" I can hear some yahoo asking with a sneer.
Two, up front, like everybody else, and two legs out back. Anyone who wishes to consider my two front limbs mere legs has not seen me open a French door lever.) Anyway, I stretch all four of my extremities and head for the guest bathroom, which is seldom used. Even I almost never disturb the dust in the litter box Miss Temple Barr keeps under the sink. Now I leap upon that sink (yieee, cold porcelain on my delicate pads!), loft to the sill of the long, high window and wriggle through its open slit.
The night air is compress-cold and slaps my kisser back and forth a few times, especially when I take a few drags of its frosty breath and then exhale a visible stream of icy air. Ick. All my body heat is escaping into the wild black yonder of this night in the lonesome October. I jump down to the patio, up to the railing and then up again to the arching palm tree that is my private bridge between domestic coziness and urban scuzziness, between uptown bliss and downtown danger.
Now that I am roused and on the move, the battering of my brain has ceased. I pause, my built-in pitons digging into palm bark, and gaze up, toward the moon. Nearly full, its ruddy face leers down on us all like a Peeping Tom. Or like a Peeping Pumpkin, rather, given the season so soon upon us.
I shiver, or perhaps I shudder. My kind has never liked this time of year for reasons that have to do with comfort of a kind other than physical. While I thus muse, I suddenly realize that the nighttime silhouette of the Circle Ritz, which I know so well from similar evening jaunts, has developed a startling new feature.
I stare as if seeing will make it disappear, but no such luck. Something pale and wan gleams atop the railing of Miss Electra Lark's penthouse patio against the leering dark forms of topiary trees turned into nightmare grotesques. Perhaps Miss Electra has imported an albino pumpkin to her patio, and not yet carved a face into it.
Alas, no. Though the object is round enough to be a vegetable-in-waiting for a bit of seasonal surgery, it displays a trait quite alarming in a vegetable. It walks along the rail to better see the moon.
I fear that my long winter's nap is over before it has barely begun. The reclusive creature known as Karma has never seen the light of day. Anything that has pried her from sanctuary to commune with the moon like a mere dog... is something that I wish to know nothing about.
Louie! Do not dawdle.
Oh, my aching inner ears! To hear is to obey, but not to like it. I run along the bowed palm trunk, leap to an upper balcony and zigzag my way up the building's slick exterior. One poorly timed pounce, and I will be road kill.
Chapter 1
Magic Acts
Temple awoke, sitting up in bed.
She patted the coverlet, hunting for the warm, furry bulk of Midnight Louie.
He was gone.
She wasn't surprised.
In her dream, the big black cat had also disappeared. But the dream cat had been a massive animal, a panther sprung to life from an Art Deco design--angular, with industrial-strength musculature.
She shut her eyes, visualizing the dreamscape again.
She was the magician's assistant for Siegfried and Roy, pinioned on stage in the glare of the spotlight, while huge white lions and tigers and one black panther cavorted around her. The Big Cats posed, paws raised, on a pyramid of perches painted to resemble the tops of New York City skyscrapers. At the highest point, atop the Chrysler Building's silvery pinnacle, sat the sole Black Panther gleaming as if carved from Whitby jet. All the Big Cats sparkled in the light, like giant rhinestone brooches. The white tigers' stripes were aurora borealis rainbows. These bejeweled animals even out-shone Siegfried and Roy's most glitzy jumpsuits. Both magicians sported long, Elvis-thick sideburns, Siegfried's golden and Roy's panther-black.