The Big Miaouw Read online

  Louie in the sewer. His recent above-ground luck stank like the air down there: figure an enforced three-day sewer vacation as the crappiest-luck thing that could happen to a black rat just had to come true.

  Louie listened for the sound of sniffing and scuttling, claws on the slimy floor below, but heard only the gurgling of the turgid river. He didn’t look out: no point. Zero light, solid darkness out there, with no way of telling whether it was day or night aboveground. Besides, he was too scared of being spotted: sewer guys see fine.

  They don’t know where I am, and nor do I: the plaza’s above, that’s all I know, thought Louie.

  His eyes were only slowly adapting to the dark. The walls of the fissure he’d found were close, bent his whiskers on either side. The hole was narrow, but deep. He couldn’t see the river or riverbanks from the back of the crack, and was counting on that working two ways.

  Louie shivered though it wasn’t cold in the sewer — the stinking river seemed to warm the air even as it turned it foul. He shivered because he had the yips, real bad. On a good day, Louie rated as one of the least popular guys in the city, one who routinely looked over his shoulder every ten paces because there was always someone out there who wanted to rip him off or rip him to pieces, and that was on a good day. Today rated as extra bad. Like last night. Like the next few days, too.

  Louie was scared, but Louie was smart: smart like a guy who has to chisel and scam and sneak and thieve to keep from getting thin. Louie tried to work angles. His brain was working things over faster than was good, boiling in the fever air of the sewer. Keeping to the very back of the crevice, he tried to piece it all together:

  Marcus’ crews would be looking for him by now. And ‘crews’ could mean anything up to two million rats. They were out looking and sniffing for him. All the high places, probably, all the obvious places. Slow work, because the climbing would put them off, but not for ever. Brown rats always worked something out in the end: they were smart, they’d figure it — wall cavities, vent shafts, plumbing, garbage chutes, cable trays, wiring ducts... all ways UP.

  Three days, remembered Louie. Three days and then it happens, and it won’t matter what you heard, because then everything’s dead. Three days hiding out in a sewer where the brown rats would never think to look for him, where there was no light to see by, where the stink was so bad your own couldn’t give you away. Louie thought about the smells on him: nothing strong, nothing that would shout above the stink of human and brown rat shit and piss.

  Nothing on him, then, but something in him — brown rats could smell Fear. Fear was what might give him away.

  Think Nice Things, Louie, he told himself. Think about all the Nice Things that will happen again when you get out.

  Not ‘if’. ‘When.’

  Nice Things, to lull the fear.

  Fear was good sometimes: it kept you alert which kept you alive. But other times it crippled you — it could be your worst enemy — and the fear was always there. Being smart was bad luck. Big problem with being smart and scared? You could always imagine the worst... especially while you were huddled in a hole praying it wouldn’t come true. There was a little voice in Louie squeaking the worst thing. Louie wished it would shut up because it was going to wake up his fear.

  The worst thing? What brown rats did to black rats.

  Louie shivered, gritted his teeth, stuck real close to the back of the crevice, thought Nice Things: up on the roofs with Sax, singing... looking at the moon, planning on the day he’d go there and make The Big Cheese his turf.

  The Voice came back:

  No, Louie: by the time you get there, the rats from the moon will have eaten it all.

  Figures, thought Louie. That’d explain why they were all so fat.

  The goddamn partner was driving Schaeffer nuts.

  Schaeffer helped him out, but the two-legs couldn’t do squat to help him because he was two-legged and dumb and slow and didn’t know dogdick about the job. He drove the car and fixed Schaeffer’s chow when they clocked off — they shared an apartment — and that, basically, was the partnership. They had the same beat, but very different jobs, and Schaeffer wasn’t about to put in for a transfer, so he was stuck with Fatso.

  His partner didn’t talk to him much, which suited Schaeffer just fine: he had his kind of police work, and Fatso had another kind. The two-legs moved the winos and the smellier beggars on from where the clean people sat and drank, and he occasionally chased a thief, or, more likely, shouted into the radio on his belt and then made Schaeffer go get ’em. Schaeffer would go do the dangerous bit, Fatso would get the collar and Schaeffer would get a pat on the head, thinking someone should slap blueboy’s fat butt for a change and make him run after the bad guys.

  The partnership stank, and the chain of command was round Schaeffer’s neck, choke on. But when he wasn’t doing the two-legs’ job for him, Schaeffer could do his own: keeping an eye on the plaza, keeping track of all the dogs, cats and birds and making damn sure the rats stayed behind drain-bars, down in the sewer where they belonged. Schaeffer wandered around nice and visible so everybody knew he was there, a full-on police presence. He was nice to all the two-leg kiddies, letting them pull his ears while making sure that no wiseass-coming-on-badass dogs bit their soccer balls. He told the pigeons to be nice and not shit where everybody ate, so between him and the guy on the other end of the leash the arches and the plaza were covered.

  Schaeffer knew every inch of the square and everyone in it by smell.

  He had a nose for police work. He knew the scents of every barker and howler, every bin-bag ripper and turd-artist; of all the snatch ’n’ dash sausage-blaggers hanging around waiting for an opportunity to make a thief out of a bum. He watchdogged the wannabee bad guys who thought they owned the place just because they once took a piss there; kept tabs on every lamp-post lingerer, leg-humper, flea-bitten mongrel loser and cheap-date trashcan gourmet. He knew the street mutts in the back alleys, the family pets, the barfly pooches and guide dogs, the scruffy, the dirty, the hungry and the lost, the hardball terriers and the shivery little chihuahuas. He knew the perfumed, ribboned, straight-from-the-beauty-parlour high-class poodles and pekes and the different tartans of a dozen cissy-dog waistcoats, and he kept the plaza safe for them. Or from them. Depending on which side of the good dog/bad dog line they left their paw prints.

  He knew them and they all knew him: he was Schaeffer, the top cop dog, police training college graduate with honours. Three generations of cop in his family, police-dogging in his blood, a cop to his German bones. His authority was stamped on the badge on his collar — Schaeffer, BCPD: PD 647 — and he’d made a lot of collars in his time. Everyone knew the plaza was Schaeffer’s beat and nobody messed because dog mess was verboten on his patch. He could follow you forever on a scent you didn’t know you’d left, and he never gave up, never forgot a smell. He had a big bark he backed up with bite when he had to, and the only chance an offender had was to be very quick and to never, ever come back to the plaza. Schaeffer knew that the only time there would ever be an animal crime on his beat was when he had to go do his partner’s damn job for him.

  Occasionally Schaeffer had to leave the plaza, sometimes for days at a stretch, helping Fatso, again. That was when he was at his edgiest: when procedure demanded he leave the beat, get in the car and go get caught up in some case across town. That was when the wiseasses whooped it up. Turds appeared all over the square, tourists had steaks heisted straight from their plates, footballs got bitten and punctured and little kiddies bawled, legs got humped, bins got turned over, mongrels tried it on with high-class dogs, and no lamp-post or column was safe. And Schaeffer couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

  Sometimes the department was so screwed up he could have howled. The partner was the pits. Schaeffer did his job for him, and at the end of the shift they’d go back to the apartment. While all Schaeffer could think of was being out on the beat doing his duty, letting the innocent just-out-for-a-walke
rs and mangy punks alike know that the law was there, the blue blob would park his lazy ass on the sofa, turn on the television and slob out with a can of beer balanced on his gut, stroking his gun or his dick. Schaeffer would have been scratching and whining at the door if he’d thought it would get him out into the street and not just a “*******! ****!”

  So he’d just have to get in his basket, use the time to think about procedure, methodology, smells and the law. Sometimes he’d think of putting in for a transfer, except he knew he’d miss the beat too much, and the only other assignments were the ball games and the Metro — dull dog-house postings. Narcotics had juice for a career-minded dog, except it sounded better than it really was: working the airport, sniffing suitcases all day in too-clean surroundings, lots of waiting around and working with people – a bum job. Then he’d think, What the hell? I do my job, Fatso does his. They were two sides of the same Police Department, both sworn to Protect and Serve. And no matter how dumb the partner was, no matter how dumb procedure was, it didn’t stop Schaeffer from getting the job done. At the end of the day Partner slobbed, watched television and let the job go. Schaeffer lay in his basket, thought about real police work and licked his balls. It beat television.

  I slunk out of the plaza like a murderer, and probably that was what I looked like to any passer-by who didn’t know me — didn’t know about me an’ canaries.

  I left the canary unburied. I didn’t like leavin’ her out there with a thousand pairs of feet trampin’ by but I couldn’t carry her away without takin’ her in my jaws and havin’ to run a gauntlet of hissin’ humans. Some of ’em would’ve figured she was maybe still alive, because even they know that birds try an’ trick a cat an’ maybe bluff one last chance t’ get on the wing by playing dead. I’d’ve been cornered and hauled up by the scruff and smacked around the head ’til I let go and then I’d be blamed for killin’ her and probably gotten another slapping... So I went back to the alleys an’ prowled awhile, thinking about the Jane Doe, but mainly about another canary, remindin’ myself that the promise I made her was good for all canaries if it was to mean anythin’ at all.

  I found a passageway, got off the street, crawled under a gate, found a quiet yard an’ sat there, alone, rememberin’.

  I guess it was love but it ain’t easy for a cat to love a canary in the right way an’ I used to wonder whether that was what she was singin’ about there in the cage: ’bout how close we was, ’bout the day I was a young stray cat cruisin’ the rooftops an’ I saw her for the first time, an’ I went to it thinkin’ food... an’ then, I heard her sing and time froze. We just looked at each other, her probably picturin’ me with feathers round my mouth... but she was wrong. I wanted t’ hear more song soooo bad I rolled on the floor an’ miaouwed, beggin’ for it. She mustta seen I was a sucker for a toon.

  I went back every day, fell in love with the music an’ the canary, told myself she loved me and told her no cat was ever gonna touch her cos baaaad ginger Frankie Frr was the cat they gotta get past t’ do it. It was love, the real thing, from the heart, so true it ached. The songs were so beautiful. I couldn’t make out the words. Songs from the old country, I guess. Maybe she was singin’ a toon for me. I never knew. I still don’t. I never will. Sometimes the songs were so sad they broke my heart with notes sharp as claws laying me open to my soul, makin’ my fur stand on end so I’d want to yowl. Those songs were easy enough to understand: they were about how she couldn’t get out of the damn cage an’ about how I couldn’t help, an’ maybe about how even if I could, it wouldn’t have worked for us.

  She saw birds flyin’ by all day every day, an’ though they weren’t as pretty as her they was free an’ she was behind bars... Some old dame, lived on the fifth floor, didn’t walk too good, didn’t have a family, or least if she did she didn’t see them much... gotta have a bird in a cage, like that’s gonna make it all better. Shouldda had a dog an’ kept it in a trashcan.

  Now I know what she was singin’ about. It wasn’t the diva an’ the alley cat, it wasn’t the lady an’ the tramp, it wasn’t love she was singin’ about: it was freedom, an’ how life ain’t nothin’ without it. When I came to see it that way, I took it so bad after a while I couldn’t be near her for long; had to make an excuse about a case or a contact or a lead an’ split. But I could hear her song all over the ’hood an’ it was like cold water on my fur. Me! Mean, big, tough Frankie Frr, keepin’ it together in a tough world, the ginger cat you didn’t stroke the wrong way unless you was real tough... An’ then I’d hear the song floatin’ on the breeze, meltin’ me, makin’ me a kitten. She’d sing an’ somethin’ real big, real deep inside me would move an’ I’d try to make it go away, but she’d just keep singin’ an’ the song would float across the city night clear as the moon, an’ find me out an’ tell me my heart. Maybe so’s I wouldn’t forget. Maybe so’s I couldn’t forget.

  The songs were like butterflies you couldn’t box away. Songs about freedom an’ songs about how you gonna give your heart to somethin’, or someone, like it or not. The canary — she had my heart: it was there right next to her in the cage.

  One day I went back to the little bit of terrace on the fifth where the old dame put the cage, determined to spring her. I knew somethin’ was wrong when I was approachin’ an’ I didn’t hear no song. I got closer. Then I saw why. The old dame was dead — had been for a couple days judgin’ by the smell. Nobody’d cared enough to have found out. The city can do that to you. Poor old lady. Nobody cared that she was dead except me, an’ that was for another reason anyway. I cared because if somebody’d bothered enough to look in on the old dame, maybe she wouldn’t’ve been dead an’ the canary would have been fed.

  Bottom of the cage: yellow feathers, grey grit, her head under her wing. Something died in me then — make that eight lives left. Tears in my eyes, I blamed myself and promised a dead bird I’d protect all the canaries. I got out through a window and scratched at a neighbour’s door ‘til someone came, then I miaouwed at the old dame’s door ’til the penny dropped that the old dame needed attention. I split before the cops arrived.

  That was what I was thinking about in the yard. That, and the bite marks in the Jane Doe’s neck. All of a sudden I wanted to hear birdsong again, a canary hittin’ a note that could break a glass heart, an’ holdin’ it ‘til tears came to my eyes and my fur crackled down my spine.

  I miss her. I miss the music. I got my toons from other birds now, but they were never as good. An’ anyway, Zoot Jackdaw and his Rooftop Swing Combo weren’t playin’ that night.

  Sai tried to think one step ahead of Domus. He accepted the food that was brought to him but ate none of it. Hunger was the least of Sai’s concerns: he had spare flesh, he would not fade. There was no leaving the apartment and no slackening of vigilance from the guards at the door. There would be no visits from the others. Were they being fed poison? Had they been convinced or coerced into joining Domus’ party? Had, conversely, a miracle occurred: one of the pro-Domus faction had experienced a change of heart? There was no way of knowing.

  With only anxieties for company, Sai knew it would not be long before he started to experience despair, his thoughts spiralling down into catastrophic pessimism. Was that part of Domus’ plan? To isolate opposition to his twisted dreams of power, and thus weaken it? Sai thought of his old friends Dorothea, Priscillian, Spero and Nestor: all dead now, all hunted down by the very humans who had made the MOONrats what they were. Sai missed them badly — they all would have wholly deplored Domus’ scheme, means and ends alike. And yet the scheme was not ridiculous: that was the worst thing. Domus’ idea was all too feasible, and looked well within the realms of possibility. He had the weapon, had planned its deployment, calculated its effects. He had thought about it as a human, not as a rat, but no plan devised by humans ever went perfectly. There was always human error.

  Sai shuddered.

  Two days to go until the Convocation.

  Hope depended on finding an err
or in a brilliant plan.

  I need time. I need information.

  He waddled over to the bookcase and found a book that had caught his eye on his arrival: Florence, 1320-1480.

  Sai heaved up the ladder, hooked the top of the book’s spine with a claw, and tugged it ’til it toppled to the floor with a thump. The door was immediately opened. One of the guards came in, alarmed.

  “My lord, noise may alert others to our presence here.”

  Sai fixed him with a piercing pink stare, and ordered him to take the book to the reading table by the plaza-side window. He watched the team of rats the guard fetched move the book to where he had told them. Then Sai dismissed them curtly.

  “Leave me.”

  He opened the book to its title pages, scanned the chapter headings and found ‘Chapter 10: Social Conditions’.

  He opened the book at that page, and started reading.

  Out of sight, out of mind... In a cat’s ass, thought Schaeffer with grim satisfaction as he sat in the back of the car and Partner took them across town, back to the plaza.

  The midtown midday traffic was agonisingly slow: Schaeffer barked at Partner to put the siren on, and got told, “*******!”

  Vehicles wheezed like fat old dogs through the city. Humans growled at traffic lights and worked car-horns the way a dog barks when it’s been cooped up in a flat on the fifth floor for two days and needs to poop.

  Schaeffer’s week so far: a temporary posting to Narco, a day spent away from the plaza rooting around a trailer park across town, sniffing for powder. The spaniel-job should have gone to a rookie —- he was too damn good to waste on a routine sniff-out. But the assignment went Schaeffer’s way anyway. Usual procedure: the cop dog did the police work while his two-legs bitched at the top of the lead and took lots of coffee-breaks. The two-legs all stank heaps worse than the load the dog was sniffing for, and this being a case where the two-legs would be getting the credit when the dog dug up the stash, it was all being done by the book — the dumbest way, in a grid-search pattern. Visuals, because two-legs couldn’t smell for shit. ‘Procedure’. They should have let the expert off the leash. He would have tossed the trailer-park in an hour tops, and had the bag out of the ground before the second box of donuts was even opened.