Felidae on the Road - Special U.S. Edition (9 page)

'Murder me, will you, my friend?' he finally snarled with all the superiority of the sole of a shoe poised to squash a black beetle. The audience was now holding its breath. 'It'll be pretty strenuous. Bring you out in a sweat, you know.' With which he struck me on the head again with his other paw, this time hard enough to hurt, and with his claws out. They left a deep scratch in my right ear. Blood welled out of it.

I unsheathed the claws of my own forepaw, went like lightning for his empty left eye socket and drove my claws through the rubbery flesh. When they reached the brain I turned them into deadly hooks. Rhodes's slack lower jaw dropped a little further; his water-melon of a head shook in my grip like a kettle boiling dry just before it explodes, and a jet of blood shot from his nostrils. Then I withdrew my claws, and he slumped to the ground like a shot elephant. As he fell he uttered a blood-curdling howl which echoed on and on in that stony labyrinth. It sounded like a train of tanker trucks going over the edge of a precipice and slowly falling apart to the sound of metallic screeching.

'Ooooooooooooh!' went the crowd around us, striking up a chorus fit to make your flesh creep, as if the last agony of Rhodes were being telepathically transferred to their own nervous systems. There was awe at the moment of release rather than sympathy for the dying Rhodes in that cry; it suggested an unsettling affinity with the liberating power of death, and struck a hidden chord in me too. They couldn't actually watch me deal the mortal blow, but they all seemed to feel that Rhodes was lost for ever as executioner in the Catacombs of Mercy.

His penetrating howl became a miserable wheeze, and the wheeze finally dwindled to a despairing moan which echoed for a little longer and then died away entirely. His head dropped to one side and he breathed his last. I looked at the lifeless colossus with pity. Pangs of conscience began to set in. Against the background of the gently flowing stream, he now looked the very image of a fat man taking an afternoon nap on the beach. Rhodes lay on his back, all four paws outstretched, and but for the thin trickle of blood under his nose you might indeed have thought he was asleep. This was the second corpse I'd seen in under an hour. However, whatever I did I mustn't let my scruples show, not unless I wanted to undermine the credibility of my ice-cold Mickey Rourke act.

'Well, I said I'd murder him if he did that again,' I remarked in bored tones, turning to my audience. 'Anyone else fancy a bout?'

While the others were still open-mouthed and busy trying to recover from their astonishment, the Oriental lady, who had taken cover behind the boss when Rhodes appeared, shot out again. For a moment I thought I was going to have to tackle this termagant too, and largish cracks appeared in the cool façade I was maintaining with some difficulty. However, the all-clear sounded when Naomi Campbell in furs raced past me and began sniffing hard at the corpse. Then she laid her head against his belly, which towered up like a sand dune, and listened. The diagnosis was obviously not what she'd expected.

'He's killed him!' she cried. 'The shit! He really has, he's finished Rhodes off!'

Clearly this was more than she could understand, and she was unable to stop weeping and wailing over what couldn't be undone now. The rest of the mob joined her lamentations, uttering curses and loud, confused expressions of dismay, and competing with each other in suggesting suitable reprisals. As they did so they nodded their heads in time again. Finally the boss felt impelled to rise from his place, with the morose bearing of a small-town judge sick and tired of the squabbles of the local gentry, and uttered a welcome cry of, 'Shut your mouths, will you?' This duly took effect, suddenly silencing the mob which had been thirsting to lynch me. There was an oppressive stillness, broken only by the scratching of claws on the stony ground as the patriarch slowly made his way over to the scene of the crime.

'You've got us into a nice mess now, little one,' he said rather sadly, as he ceremoniously inspected the corpse with his nose.

'Well, if I hadn't, he'd have made
me
into a nice mess!' I defended myself. 'And you should really be grateful to me. There's your breakfast at last. Ought to be enough for everyone, and you can keep me for harvest festival or whatever.'

'What the hell are you talking about? One of those clever-dicks who think their powers of deduction something marvellous, are you? You won't do much more thinking when your head's jammed up your arse. Maybe you're smart enough to snuff out a poor old sod who could hardly stand on his feet, but do you think you can put on the same show with every single one of us?'

'I kind of thought we might stop for the regulation breaks between rounds.'

'The death penalty, that's what I say!' screeched Lady Boss, and her claws shot past my nose just a hair's breadth away. 'Let's kill the bastard now, before he can do any more harm.'

'Gently, gently,' Golden Earring soothed her. 'Up to this point we just had a troublesome witness, and we were going to deal with him painlessly. The situation's quite different now. We now have before us someone who's sent one of ourselves across the Jordan. So his death must be celebrated with all due ceremony, if only in honour of the memory of Rhodes. What's your name, then, little fellow?'

'Francis,' I said.

The wiry witch froze in the middle of her nervous movements. The Chartreux suddenly raised his head, and he too remained perfectly still in that posture. An excited whispering arose from the middle of the assembled company and spread like the wind to its farthest corners. After a while His Majesty, obviously partaking of the confusion felt by his companions in misfortune, began on a series of what they call displacement activities. He licked the root of his tail like one possessed, scratched vigorously behind his ears, and paid great attention to washing his balls. We perform these displacement activities spontaneously when we have to make a difficult decision or size up some unusual situation. Human beings perform various displacement activities too, without being aware of it: for instance, when they're in some kind of difficulty they will rub their ears, massage their foreheads as if in pain, make acrobatic movements of the tongue outside the mouth, and last but not least they go in for smoking, smoking and more smoking.

'Francis?' said the leader, more to himself than to me. 'You don't mean the Francis?'

'Well, I'm not the sailor or the film director. Just Francis,' I said, shrugging my shoulders. Maybe they were thinking of some particular brand of tinned food.

'The Francis who solved the most complicated crime ever to take place in our ranks? The Francis whose deeds are legendary? Francis the genius?'

'There was certainly a dark period in my past when I encountered a lord of darkness who had forgotten that light could ever exist. Compared to you lot, though, he suddenly seems about as diabolical as one of Steffi Graf's ball-boys.'

'Why didn't you tell us at once?'

'I hate personality cults - particularly when the idea of the cult is to eat the personality.'

'I'm afraid you've got quite the wrong impression of our community, Francis. I suppose it's partly our own fault. Still, since we met in such unfortunate circumstances you were bound to misunderstand certain things, including our real nature. If you're to get the true picture we shall have to tell you a long story. Allow me to introduce myself: my name is Saffron.'

'And yours is Cardamom, right?' I said, turning to the warrior queen beside me. She didn't seem at all keen on the idea of making peace, far from it: it was more as if the revelation of my name had spoiled the game for her. She moved her head back and forth suspiciously, ready to strike again at any moment, eyes narrowed to slits, and performed an orientation manoeuvre to make sure she could still locate my exact position. To this end she employed the radar effect of her vibrating whiskers, which can register even the smallest changes in air circulation. When she 'read off' the results, they provided her spatial imagination with a three-dimensional diagram of the object of her interest. It was almost like seeing without eyes.

'Wrong, Sherlock. Niger, that's my name. I was once called Cindy like that man's daughter - the girl who wanted something cuddly for Christmas. She lost interest in me on Boxing Day, so the man put me in a plastic bag and threw me in the river. Luckily the bag was torn, and I managed to swim to the bank and hide in a drainpipe. But you needn't think I decided to take the name of Niger so as to identify with an underprivileged race of humans. It was just because the name suits me, being the Latin word for ... '

'Black,' I said.

'Yes, well, goes to show you deserve your reputation as a clever-dick,' Saffron interrupted. 'Hostilities over now, right? We've been waiting a long time for someone like you. You see, we have a job for you, Francis.'

'A job? Look, I'm sorry, Your Highness, but I gave up detecting ages ago. The only cases now solved by yours truly Mr Marlowe concern the mysterious disappearance of smoked salmon from the larder.'

'That's OK; we don't want you to solve a case, we want you to find someone. But before we go into detail there's a final ceremony I think we should perform.'

Before I could protest and assure them that all I intended to find was the goddam exit from this damp realm of shadows, Saffron approached the corpse of Rhodes, raised his head to the vault above and intoned our familiar and musical 'Yeeeoooowl!' This time that mysterious cry lasted longer than the usual short burst, because it was taken up by the blind animals encircling us as if they were singing a round and went on and on, becoming an endless lament. If one of the singers struck up a sequence of notes but had to stop for breath, his neighbour stepped into the breach. It was like a musical relay. They wove a moving tapestry of sound which finally dissolved entirely into the shrill howls peculiar to us, which we utter when we're particularly excited. No doubt about it, they were howling a funeral dirge, a requiem for one of our own kind, and one I had killed.

Saffron lowered his head and gave Rhodes a gentle push with his nose. As if this were only a symbolic gesture, like a politician laying a wreath, several of his subjects came up from various directions and pushed the dead body on before them with their own noses. The corpse rolled over the ground, and was finally tipped over the side of the stone walkway to fall into the sewer. 'Yeeeoooowl!' sang his blind friends, bidding farewell to their companion for the last time as Rhodes floated away downstream like a rudderless raft, and although I had a lump in my own throat by now I sang along with them as loud as I could.

'It wasn't your fault, Francis,' said Saffron quietly. 'Or rather, we're all equally guilty. Rhodes certainly had more blood on his paws than you'd find on Charles Manson's hands. His IQ didn't exactly qualify for the
Guinness Book of Records
, and we found he came in handy to do the rough stuff. He'd probably have died of his injuries and deformities in a few weeks' time anyway. However, we must justify ourselves before God, even for the death of such a bloodthirsty being. Why, I ask myself, is our species doomed to show hostility, indeed brute force, when it encounters strangers of its own kind? Is it because of our origins - because we were once hunters in vast territories where a single competitor could endanger our survival? No, clever scientific arguments don't really explain anything. Misunderstandings, misunderstandings! And always violence. Yes, violence seems to be in our nature.'

Once the mourners, tears in their eyes, had dispatched their defunct Angel of Death into the maw of the sewers they formed a dense crowd around us again. I felt a vague excitement rising among them, as if some pleasing event were about to take place. I had lost sight of Niger during the funeral ceremony, but now she pushed her way out of the crowd again and made straight for Saffron.

'Scout come back?' he asked when she was beside him.

'Yes, it's main inlet number thirty-four this time, over to the west of the city. They've finished the repair works at number seventy-eight and sealed it off again.'

'Then we have quite a way to go. You come too, Francis, and
en route
I'll tell you why you mustn't refuse our request.'

'But can't we discuss it here, Saffron? Where are we going?'

'From darkness into light - for the sake of our health.'

And saying no more
, he set off at a determined trot. As if all the rest were just waiting for that signal to start, total chaos broke out among the company, who had hitherto displayed all the exemplary discipline of consumers queuing outside food shops in the former Communist countries. Instantly some of the blind animals leaped over our heads, like salmon going upstream, to get a front place in the mad rush, and there was much excited pushing and shoving on the path, which was far too narrow for such a crowd. It was as if a fire had broken out near by. However, theirs was a cheerful excitement motivated solely by anticipation, so in spite of everything courtesy and consideration were the order of the day. Everyone made sure no one else got shoved too hard or came too close to the left-hand side of the walkway, where you might get pushed off into the sewer. Above all, they took the greatest care of the babies who made up a kind of fluffily mobile substructure in this milling throng. I could account for the sudden restlessness of my blind acquaintances only by assuming that there was a prospect of some reservoir of food in the distance.