The Cat Who Turned on and Off (16 page)

With enticing interrogatives in her voice Cluthra had invited Qwilleran to come later (?) in the evening (?) when they could both relax (?). But he had pleaded another engagement and had played dumb to her innuendos.

Now at the discreet hour of seven thirty he and Koko took a taxi to Skyline Towers and a swift elevator to the seventeenth floor. Koko did not object to elevators that ascended—only the kind that sank beneath him.

Cluthra met them in a swirling cloud of pale green chiffon and ostrich feathers. “I didn’t know you
were bringing a friend,” she said with her husky laugh.

“Koko has had a bad experience this evening, and he didn’t want me to leave him.” Qwilleran told her about Russell’s cruel experiment with electronic music.

“Beware of young men dressed in white!” she said. “They’ve got something they’re hiding.”

She ushered him into the cozy living room, which was done entirely in matching paisley—paisley fabric on the walls, paisley draperies, paisley slipcovers—all in warm tones of beige, brown and gold. The fabric gave the room the stifling hush of a closed coffin. Music was playing softly—something passionate, with violins. Cluthra’s perfume was overpowering.

Qwilleran looked around him at the polliwogs that characterize the paisley pattern and tried to estimate their number. Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? Half a million?

“Will you have a drinkie?” Cluthra extended the invitation with a conspiratorial gleam in her green eyes.

“Just a club soda. No liquor. Heavy on the ice.”

“Honey, I can do better than that for my favorite newspaper reporter,” she said, and when the drink came, it was pink, sparkling, and heavily aromatic.

Qwilleran sniffed it and frowned.

“Homemade chokecherry syrup,” she explained. “Men like it because it’s bitter.”

He took a cautious sip. The taste was not bad. Pleasant, in fact. “Did you make it?”

“Lordy, no! One of my kooky customers. She’s made a study of medicinal weeds, and she does this stuff with juniper, lovage, mullein, and I don’t know what else. Mullein puts hair on your chest, lover,” Cluthra added with a wink.

Qwilleran had taken a seat in a stiff pull-up chair, with Koko huddled on his lap.

“You’ve picked the only backbreaking chair in the place,” she protested. She herself was now seductively arranged on the paisley sofa surrounded by paisley pillows, carefully concealing her walking cast with the folds of her chiffon gown. Yards of ostrich fluff framed her shoulders, cascaded down her hilly slopes and circled the hem.

She patted the sofa cushions. “Why don’t you sit over here and be comfy?”

“With this cranky knee I’m better off on a straight chair,” Qwilleran said, and it was more or less true.

Cluthra regarded him with fond accusation. “You’ve been kidding us,” she said. “You’re not really a newspaper reporter. But we like you just the same.”

“If your kid sister has been spreading stories, forget it,” he said. “I’m just an underpaid, overworked feature writer for the
Fluxion,
with a private curiosity about sudden deaths. Ivy has a wild imagination.”

“It’s just a phase she’s going through.”

“By the way, did you know Andy was writing a novel about Junktown?”

“When Andy came over here,” she said, relishing the memory, “we did very little talking about literature.”

“Do you know Hollis Prantz very well?”

Cluthra rolled her eyes. “Preserve me from men who wear gray button-front sweaters!”

Qwilleran gulped his iced drink. The apartment was warm, and Koko was like a fur lap robe. But as they talked, the cat relaxed and eventually slid to the floor, much to the man’s relief. Soon Koko disappeared against the protective coloration of the beige and brown paisley. Qwilleran mopped his brow. He was beginning to suffocate. The temperature seemed to be in the nineties, and the polliwogs dazzled his eyes. He could look down at the plain beige carpet and see polliwogs; he could look up at the white ceiling and see polliwogs. He closed his eyes.

“Do you feel all right, honey?”

“Yes, I feel fine. My eyes are tired, that’s all. And it’s a trifle warm in here.”

“Would you like to lie down? You look kind of groggy. Come and lie down on the sofa.”

Qwilleran contemplated the inviting picture before him—the deep-cushioned sofa, the soft pillows. He also caught a glimpse of movement behind Cluthra’s halo of red hair. Koko had risen silently and almost invisibly to the back of the sofa.

“Take off your coat and lie down and make yourself comfy,” his hostess was urging. “You don’t
have to mind your manners with Cousin Cluthra.” She gave his moustache and shoulders an appreciative appraisal and batted her lashes.

Qwilleran wished he had not come. He liked women who were more subtle. He hated paisley. His eyes had been bothering him lately (maybe he needed glasses) and the allover pattern was making him dizzy. Or was it the drink? He wondered about that cherry syrup. Juniper, mullein,
lovage.
What the devil was lovage?

Then without warning Cluthra sneezed. “Oh! Excuse me!”

Qwilleran took the opportunity to change the subject. “They’ll be burying old C.C. tomorrow,” he said with an attempt at animation, although he had an overwhelming desire to close his eyes.

“He was a real man,” Cluthra said with narrowed eyes. “You don’t find many of them any more, believe me!” She sneezed again. “Excuse me! I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”

Qwilleran could guess. Koko had his nose buried in her ostrich feathers. “Iris is taking it very hard,” he said.

Cluthra pulled a chiffon handkerchief from some hidden place and touched her eyes, which were reddening and beginning to stream. “Iris wod’t have ady bore ghostly problebs with her glasses,” she said. “C.C. used to get up id the dight to play tricks with theb.”

“That’s what I call devotion,” Qwilleran said.
“Look here! Are you by any chance allergic to cat hair?”

The visit ended abruptly, and it was with a great sense of escape that Qwilleran got out in the cold air and shook the polliwogs from his vision.

Cluthra had called after him, “You bust visit be without your buddy dext tibe.”

He took Koko home and got into his scrounging clothes for his next appointment. But first he looked up a word in the dictionary. “Lovage—a domestic remedy.” For what ailment or deficiency, the book did not say. Qwilleran also opened a can of shrimp and gave Koko a treat, and he spent a certain amount of time thinking about Cluthra’s voice. Whiskey voice, they used to call it.

At the appointed hour he found Ben waiting at the curb in a gray station wagon that was a masterpiece of rust, with a wire coat hanger serving as a radio antenna and with the curbside headlight, anchored by a single screw, staring glumly at the gutter. The driver was bundled up in a mackinaw, early aviator’s helmet, and long striped muffler.

The motor coughed a few times, the car shuddered and lurched away from the curb, sucking up blasts of icy cold and dampness through a gaping hole under the dashboard. Fortunately it was a short drive to the Garrick Theatre in the demolition area. It stood proudly among other abandoned buildings, looking like a relic of fifteenth century Venice.

“Alas, poor Garrick! We knew it well,” said Ben morosely. “The great and glorious names of the
theatre once played here. Then . . . vaudeville. Then silent pictures. Then talkies. Then double features. Then Italian films. Then horror movies. Then nothing. And now—only Benjamin X. Nicholas, playing to a ghostly audience and applauded by pigeons.”

Qwilleran carried the crowbar. They both carried flashlights, and Ben directed the newsman in wrenching the boarding from the stage door. The boards came away easily, as if accustomed to cooperating, and the two men entered the dark, silent, empty building.

Ben led the way down a narrow hall, past the doorkeeper’s cubicle, past the skeleton of an iron staircase, and onto the stage. The auditorium was a hollow shell, dangling with dead wires, coated with dust, and raw in patches where decorations had been pried from the sidewalls and the two tiers of boxes. Qwilleran beamed his light at the ceiling; all that remained of the Garrick’s grandeur were the frescoes in the dome—floating images of Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra. If there was nothing left to scrounge, why had Ben brought him here? Soon Qwilleran guessed the answer. The old actor had taken center stage, and an eerie performance began.

“Friends, Romans, countrymen—” Ben declaimed in passionate tones.

“
Friends, Romans
—” came a distant reverberating voice.

“Lend me your ears!” said Ben.

“
Countrymen—friends, Romans—lend me—
countrymen—ears—lend me,
” whispered the ghosts of old actors.

“Alas,” said Ben when he had spoken the speech and Qwilleran had applauded with gloved thumps and a bravo or two. “Alas, we were born too late . . . . But let us to work! What does our heart desire? A bit of carving? A crumb of marble! Not much choice; the wretches have raped the place. But here!” He kicked a heating grille. “A bronze bauble for your pleasure!”

The moldings crumbled, and the newsman easily pried the blackened grillwork loose. The dust rose. Both men coughed and choked. There was a whirring of wings in the darkness overhead, and Qwilleran thought of bats.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said.

“But stay! One more treasure!” said Ben, flashing his light around the tiers of boxes. All but one of them had been denuded of embellishment. The first box on the left still bore its sculptured crest supported by cherubs blowing trumpets and wearing garlands of flowers. “It would bring a pretty penny.”

“How much?”

“A hundred dollars from any dealer. Two hundred from a smart collector. Three hundred from some bloody fool.”

“How would we get it off?”

“Others have succeeded. Let us be bold!”

Ben led the way to the mezzanine level and into the box.

“You hold both lights,” Qwilleran told him, “and I’ll see what I can do with the crowbar.”

The newsman leaned over the railing and pried at the carving. The floor of the box creaked.

“Lay on, Macduff!” cried Ben.

“Shine the light over the railing,” Qwilleran instructed. “I’m working in shadow.” Then he paused with crowbar in midair. He had seen something in the dust on the floor. He turned to look at Ben and was blinded by the two flashlights. A shudder in his moustache made him plunge to the rear of the box. There was a wrenching of timbers and a crash and a cloud of choking dust rising from the floor below. Two beams of light danced crazily on the walls and ceiling.

“What the hell happened?” gasped Qwilleran. “The railing let loose!”

The railing was gone, and the sagging floor of the box sloped off into blackness.

“The saints were with us!” cried Ben, choked with emotion or dust.

“Give me a light and let’s get out of here,” said the newsman.

They drove back to Junktown with the brass grille in the back seat, Qwilleran silent as he recalled his narrow escape and what he had seen in the dust.

“Our performance lacked fire this evening,” Ben apologized. An icicle glistened on the tip of his nose. “We were frozen to the bone. But come to the pub and witness a performance that will gladden your heart. Come join us in a brandy.”

The Lion’s Tail had been a neighborhood bank in the 1920s—a miniature Roman temple, now desecrated by a neon sign and panels of glass blocks in the arched windows. Inside, it was lofty, undecorated, smoke-filled, and noisy. An assortment of patrons stood at the bar and filled half the tables—men in work clothes, and raggle-taggle members of Junktown’s after-dark set.

As Ben made his entrance, he was greeted by cheering, stamping of feet, and pounding of tables. He acknowledged the acclaim graciously and held up his hand for silence.

“Tonight,” he said, “a brief scene from
King Richard III,
and then drinks for the entire house!”

With magnificent poise he moved through the crowd, his muffler hanging down to his heels, and disappeared. A moment later he emerged on a small balcony.

“Now is the winter of our discontent . . .” he began.

The man had a ringing delivery, and the audience was quiet if not wholly attentive.

“He capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber,” came the voice from the balcony, and there was riotous laughter down below.

Ben concluded with a melodramatic leer: “I am determined to prove a villain and hate the idle pleasures of these days!”

The applause was deafening, the actor bowed humbly, and the bartender went to work filling glasses.

When Ben came down from the balcony, he threw a wad of folded bills on the bar—bills folded lengthwise. “King Richard or Charley’s aunt, what matter?” he said to Qwilleran with a gloomy countenance. “The day of the true artist is gone forever. The baggy-pants comic is an ‘artist.’ So is the bullfighter, tightrope walker and long-haired guitar player. Next it will be baseball players and bricklayers! Sir, the time is out of joint.”

The thirsty audience soon demanded an encore.

“Pardon us,” Ben said to Qwilleran. “We must oblige,” and he moved once more toward the balcony.