"A private elevator for the owner of the building. Bye-bye, kitties! Glad to have you here, Mr. Qwilleran." The Siamese had not uttered a sound. He picked up the roaster and the carrier and moved to the elevator bank, accompanied by Napoleon and Kitty-Baby. Two doors, one painted red and one painted green, were closed, displaying an abstract design of scratches and gouges made by impatient tenants carrying doorkeys. He pressed the button, and noises in the shaft indicated that Old Red was descending... slowly... very slowly. When the car finally arrived, it could be heard bouncing and leveling. Then the door opened with a convulsive jerk, and a tiny Asian woman with two small, doll- like children stepped out and scurried away as if glad to escape safely.
Qwilleran boarded, signaled for the fourteenth floor, and waited for the door to close, while Napoleon and Kitty- Baby stayed in the lobby staring into the car as if they would not be caught dead in Old Red. The Siamese were still ominously silent.
There was a bulletin board on the rear wall of the elevator, where manager and tenants had posted notices, and Qwilleran amused himself while waiting for the door to close by reading the messages. Two signs were neatly lettered with a felt marker and signed "Mrs. T." IF DOOR IS OPEN, DO NOT JUMP! ATTENTION ALL CATS! MONDAY IS SPRAY DAY!
There was also a handwritten message on a note card with an embossed W, offering a baby grand piano for sale in apartment -F. Scribbled on a scrap of brown paper was an ad for a tennis racquet for twenty-five dollars, spelled T-E-N- I-S R-A-C-K-E-T. Qwilleran was a born proofreader.
Mystified by the first two notices and questioning the market for baby grands in such a building, he failed to notice that the elevator door was still standing open. It was hardly the latest model in automatic equipment, and he looked for a suitable button to press. There was one labeled OPEN and a red button labeled HELP; that was all. The red button, he observed, showed signs of wear. Out in the lobby all was quiet. Mrs. Tuttle had left her post behind the bulletproof window, and the only signs of life were Napoleon and Kitty-Baby.
In Qwilleran's lean and hungry days, when he lived for a brief time at the decrepit Medford Manor, there was a stubborn elevator door that responded to a vigorous kick. He tried it, but Old Red only shuddered. Then he heard running footsteps approaching from the front door and a voice calling "Hold it!" A short man in a yellow satin jacket, with the name "Valdez" on the back, slid into view like a base runner approaching first.
"No hurry," Qwilleran told him. "The door won't close." The fellow gave him a scornful glance and jumped up and down on the elevator floor. The door immediately closed, and the car proceeded slowly upward, clanking and shuddering as it passed each floor. Valdez got off at Five, and as he left the car he turned and said, "You jump." Qwilleran jumped, the door closed, and Old Red ascended at the same snail-like pace, with groaning and scraping added to the clanking and shuddering. The Siamese had been patient, but suddenly Yum Yum emitted her earsplitting screech, and immediately the car stopped dead. According to the floor indicator over the door they were not yet at Fourteen. According to the floor indicator they were not anywhere.
"Now what have you done?" Qwilleran scolded.
He pressed the button for his floor, but the car did not budge. He jumped, Valdez-style, and nothing happened.
He pressed the button labeled OPEN, and the door slowly obliged, revealing the black brick wall of the elevator shaft.
"Ye gods!" Qwilleran shouted. "We're trapped between floors!"
3
THE SIAMESE, who had been more or less uncommunicative for four hundred miles, became vociferous when told they were trapped between floors in the Casablanca elevator shaft. Qwilleran pressed the HELP button and could hear a bell like a fire alarm ringing in some remote precinct of the old building, but the longer he leaned on the red button and the longer the bell pealed, the louder Koko howled and Yum Yum yodeled.
"Quiet!" Qwilleran commanded, and gave the bell another prolonged ring, but in Siamese cat language "quiet" means "louder." "Shhhh!" he scolded.
Somewhere an elevator door was being forced open; somewhere a distant voice was shouting.
Qwilleran shouted back, "We're stuck between floors!" "Where y'at?" came the faint query.
"YOW!" Koko replied.
"Quiet, you dumbbell! I can't hear what he's saying... We're stuck between floors!" "What floor?" The voice sounded hollow, suggesting that hands were being cupped for a megaphone effect.
"YOW!" "I can't hear you!" Qwilleran shouted.
"What floor?" The voice was coming from overhead.
"YOW!" "Shut up!" "What you say down there?" "We're between floors! I don't know where!" Qwilleran bellowed at his loudest.
There was the sound of a heavy door closing, followed by a long period of silence and inactivity.
"You really blew it!" Qwilleran told Koko. "They were coming to our rescue, and you wouldn't keep your mouth shut. Now we may be here all night." He looked around the dismal cell with its soiled walls and torn floor tiles. One of the fluorescent tubes had burned out leaving half the car in shadow. "At least you've got your commode," he said to his disgruntled companions, "which is more than I can say." He rang the emergency bell again.
There was another wrenching sound in the shaft above, and a voice overhead - somewhat closer this time - yelled, "You gotta climb out!" "YOW!" Koko replied.
"How?" Qwilleran shouted.
"What?" "YOW!" Qwilleran gave the cat carrier a remonstrative shove with his foot, which only accelerated the howls. "How do I climb out?" "Push up the roof!" In the tan ceiling of the car there was a metal plate, black with fingerprints.
"Push it all the way!" carne the instructions from on high.
Qwilleran reached up, gave the metal plate a forceful push, and it flopped open with a clatter. Through the rectangular opening he could see a bare light bulb, dazzlingly bright in the black shaft, and a ladder slowly descending.
He wondered if he could squeeze through the hole in the roof; he wondered if the carrier would go through.
"I've got luggage down here!" he yelled. There was another long wait, and then a rope carne dangling through the trapdoor.
"Tie it on the handle!" called the rescuer. Qwilleran quickly knotted one end to the top handle of the cat carrier and watched it rise off the floor and ascend in jerks that annoyed the occupants. It disappeared into the hole above.
"Any thin' else?" Qwilleran looked speculatively at the turkey roaster. Its handles had long ago been sawed off to fit on the floor of the car. Furthermore, it contained slightly used kitty gravel.
"Nothing else!" he shouted, kicking the pan into a dark comer of the elevator. Then he started up the ladder.
Above him he could see a pale face and a red golf hat clapped on a head of sandy hair.
The custodian was waiting for him at the top. "Sorry 'bout this." On hands and knees Qwilleran crawled out of the black hole onto the mosaic tile floor of a hallway, a performance that interested the waiting cats enormously; they were always entranced by unusual behavior on his part.
"Where are we?" he asked.
"On Nine. Gotta walk up. We got both cars broke now - Old Red and Old Green. Serviceman don't come till tomorrow. Costs double on Sundays." Their rescuer was a thin, wiry man of middle age, all elbows and knees and bony shoulders, wearing khaki pants and a bush jacket, its large pockets bulging with a flashlight and other tools of his trade. Judging by his prison pallor, it was doubtful that he had ever bushwhacked beyond the weedy landscaping of the Casablanca. The man picked up the cat carrier and headed for the stairwell.
"Here, let me take that," Qwilleran offered. "It's heavy." "I seen heavier. Lady on Seven, she's got two I cats, must weigh twenty pounds apiece. You in 14-A?" "Yes. My name's Qwilleran. What's your name?" "Rupert." "I appreciate your coming to our rescue." After that brief exchange, the two men plodded silently up the four long flights to the fourteenth floor, which was really the thirteenth. At the top of the stairs they emerged into a small lobby with a marble floor and marble walls, a relic of the rooftop restaurant in the Casablanca's illustrious past. There were two elevator doors, closed and silent, and two apartment doors with painted numbers.