I cannot for the life of me see how a Dragon Lady in the mandarin-nailed, oddly berobed getup of a ghost from a Chinese opera adds sex appeal to anything. She is wearing a mask, but it is all makeup: chalk-white paint that blushes blood-red high on the cheekbones and makes a mask over the slanted black-drawn lines of her eyes and eyebrows. The painted lines draw her features tauter than a plastic surgeon’s scalpel. She looks mean, and wind blown, as if a demon held her captive by the end of her long, black hair and was fighting to pull her back into hell.
If this is sexy, I am Father Christmas.
However, I long ago gave up trying to understand what humans find enthralling, other than my own breed, which is quite understandable.
I can see that they are hard at work here: the masked man and woman and the barefaced, hair-faced leopard.
It is a trick as old as illusion: the lady becomes a leopard and the leopard becomes a lady.
Shangri-La’s elegantly tattered robes (they look like my pal Osiris has used her for a scratching post recently) part as she moves to reveal a glittering leopard catsuit beneath the frills.
This sight gives me a chill, I admit. I am always chary of humans in catsuits. To me, it bespeaks a primitive need to hunt us for our hides. Although I call Mr. Max’s second-story outfit a catsuit, it is merely black slacks and turtleneck sweater. But Miss Shangri-La wears the real thing, like a second skin, except for me the mottled pattern is more reminiscent of a large, suffocating snake than of an elegant jungle cat.
I wonder if she is wearing Miss Temple’s ring, and then I do not wonder much more, because a sharp nail taps me on the shoulder, and it is not one of Miss Shangri-La’s four-inch nail-fangs, as she is still across the room.
You cannot call what I have just then so much a premonition as a sick headache all over.
I glance over my shoulder to see the baby-Bluebeard blue eyes in their own lavender-brown mask of velvet fur. (Okay, Bluebeard was a guy monster, but just pretend he had a sex change operation and you would have Hyacinth.) I glance to check the color painted on those lethal toenails so close to my jugular vein: not tinted blood red or poison green today, but gangrene teal.
Once again the evil Hyacinth has found me before I found her.
I just hope Miss Midnight Louise is still lost, because I would never want a maybe-relation of mine to be found in company such as this. Especially me.
The only good thing about this revolting situation is that Hyacinth only has eyes for me.
She has missed Mr. Max Kinsella entirely.
I guess that is the price of living in a cat-centric world. I have long accustomed myself to dwelling among humans, and while some street dudes would consider me a traitor to the Code of the Road, I have always found it more of an advantage than a disadvantage.
So my path is clear here: I must keep Miss Hyacinth distracted and allow Mr. Max to do his strange, solo, human nosing around.
“You just cannot seem to keep away from me, Louie,” Hyacinth purrs in the odious way of a female sure of her lures.
Vanity, thy name is feline fatale!
“Who could?” I reply.
Now I must confess, privately, that I have never been much attracted to these lean, mean ladies of an Eastern persuasion. They make like they are so demure and all the while they are practicing kamasutra violin or sushi tiramisù, a lethal variety of either marital or martial arts (sometimes they are the same, in my humble observation) nobody else in the world has ever heard of or knows any more about than they do Mr. Sherlock Holmes’s baritsu, an Oriental art so obscure it has never been heard of again. If only I could say the same for Hyacinth.
But I make the chitchat with the cat-lady while watching her petite mistress curl herself into a box until she seems to disappear. Osiris obediently crouches in a matching box, ready for the cloth to be flourished away and reveal him in her “place.”
“You enjoy watching these laborious delusions?” Hyacinth asks.
“This house does not seem to be equipped with cable,” I say with a shrug. “Do you have something more provocative in mind worth watching?”
“Besides me?”
“There is no one besides you,” I flatter outrageously. “I see that you have forsaken the film world for the live stage.”
“Not permanently. I’m up for the lead in a cat food commercial.”
“Really?”
“They are searching for the perfect partner for me. A Bombay is the leading candidate.”
I shake my head. “Too rangy, too shorthaired. Your unique appeal would be better enhanced by contrast, not a competitor.”
“What did you have in mind?”
I polish my nails on my exquisitely groomed vest. “Sophisticated dude about town, formal black coat, luxurious satin lapels. The Cary Grant type.”
“Hmmm. You must come up and see me sometime.”
“Ah…I think I have done so already. I mean, an attic is ‘up,’ right?”
“This is no attic.” Hyacinth shows me her scrawny tail as she turns and slinks along the wall toward the stairs.
I follow, as I wish to give Mr. Max free rein.
“This,” Hyacinth goes on, “was a ballroom, screening room, and assignation room for the late great film star Carissa Caine.”
“Now it is rehearsal hall,” I note.
“All things decay with time.”
We are retracing my steps down the stairs. I wonder if we are headed for the basement. Oh, joy. No doubt that is not a basement but a wine cellar, film vault, and temporary dungeon.
Above us, behind us, I hear man, woman, and cat debating their various roles in an illusion.
So where is Midnight Louise?
“As I was saying,” Hyacinth goes on, her lisping purr reminiscent of Peter Lorre in his more pussyfooted impersonations, “I might be able to put in a good word for you on the TV commercial circuit.”
“I have other fish to fry, or chow down at least. I could not care less about being an Á La Cat spokescat.”
“Other fish! You refer to your dubious appearance on the TV court show, no doubt, where you made a spectacle of yourself with that pallid little tart of a Persian.”
I bite my tongue. Literally. Such a description of the Divine Yvette is blasphemy to Bastet herself. But let the Goddess take her revenge in her own time. I am working undercover and must not betray my true purpose, which should be easy because I am not quite sure what it is yet.
“Yvette is a good match to her mistress, I suppose, although I do not think Savannah Ashleigh is of the Persian persuasion. And your own lovely mistress, what breed is she?”
“Shangri-La?” Hyacinth sits to add lip gloss to her already gleaming and unnaturally painted nails. “I have never seen her without her mask of makeup. We are both members of masked breeds, perhaps that is why we understand each other. She is small and lithe, like myself, and I flatter myself that she is of a similar kind, an ancient race from the East, wise and inscrutable.”
“Hmmm,” say I, who loathe the word inscrutable. To me it is a synonym for “stuck-up.”
“Ommmm, Louie?” Hyacinth mistakenly quotes me. “Are you meditating? That is a very enlightened thing to do, perhaps more Indian than Asian.”
I am not about to remind her of the glorious Persian’s roots in Afghanistan, just above India. She does not seem capable of appreciating the many attributes of the Divine Yvette.
“Ommm, hmmm,” I reply diplomatically, managing to straddle both East and West. I am not convinced that Hyacinth even knows the origins of her deceptive mistress. I suppose I will have to leave solving that mystery up to Mr. Max.
I chafe, sorry to be no longer eavesdropping on the humans and the leopard upstairs.
Miss Hyacinth mistakes my unease for other urges.
“I am working,” she says shortly. “I do not have time for dalliances.”
Hallelujah!
“Now that we have met again, without prison bars between us,” I gabble like the lovesick swain.