This man may appear prosperous. I do not understand exactly how I am able to judge the value of his clothes. To know, as well, the impression he seeks to convey. But I sense that this is true, just as I understand the smell of his hand reveals something other than moneyed comfort and a need deeper than the hunger to consume the city’s riches. Scent does not lie: this man Bushwick lives in fear.
He also, and this I find most strange, has not had contact with the boy Care misses so. As lightly as I can, I walk the sofa’s length, taking in every scent he has left from their brief interaction. In my mind, I run through that strange meeting: the man on an errand, stopped apparently by the appearance of a girl. No, he was lying about Tick; perhaps about many things. What I would like to know is why.
With a lightness that belies my age, I arc over the sleeping girl and attain the floor. If only she had been sleeping when he came by, I would have answers as well as questions. Though as I leap up to that desktop, I am mulling the most challenging of all. Why, that is, I did not examine the man more thoroughly when I had my chance.
I pause to consider this, wrapping my tail around my feet in a move both reflexive and comforting as I list the possibilities. In part, I know, it was fear that stopped me from accosting him. Fear for her, that is. Unlike that brute at the pawn shop, this man was not a killer of dumb beasts. I would not have turned my back on him, not without expecting a sly kick, but he posed no real danger to me. To the girl, though, he could have been a source of evil. His lasciviousness boded ill, and his love of money and of comfort worse. He would trade in human flesh with no more compunction than he would devour an animal’s, and Care’s youth and frailty would only add to her marketability in his all-consuming world.
In part, my own fastidious nature may have been to blame. Even now, the stench of the man makes my ears flicker back. The fact of that fur, as well, offends me. Not the source – some are made to die, just as some to hunt – but the care, or lack of it. When I kill, I do so cleanly – a quick shake to snap the neck. A bite to pierce the skull. Although it is reasonable to assume I have offspring, I have no recollection of teaching a kitten to do the same. Never had to prolong the last agony into the panic and squeals that marked that pelt. It is not what I do. I hunt alone.
Or I have, until now. Which may, ultimately, be what was at play today as I stood back to watch. The girl is intelligent and has had some rudimentary training. But she is not a cat, and now I regret my wasted deference. The opportunity lost as I, the hunter, stood aside. My vision is not my strongest sense, and yet I was acting in a most un-feline fashion. Did I consider an attack? Or was there something else about this man, about this shopkeeper, that kept me in the shadows? It is a question for another night, I decide finally. The girl has started to stir and I do not know when I will get this chance again.
First, the papers. Care has been through them, and her scent lingers. She has found soap to wash with, and the impression of her warm, clean fingers makes me pause over certain pages. It is not sentiment that holds me so. While I consider my senses superior to those of any human, and certainly this child, she has the advantage of me in one way: I cannot read. And although I sense the import of these papers, I receive only the barest hint – as if in memory, forgotten, from a dream. No, I seek out those pages with which the girl has lingered. It is her interest in them that marks them for me, and when I find the one over which she exclaimed, I pull it free, gently piercing its corner with one extended claw.
It is one of the newer pages. The scrawl looks hurried and the writing brief. Still, it had some significance. She held this one so tightly she left an indent, and I run my nose over the marks. She sweat holding this, and there is a faint mark of water – a trace of salt – in the corner. I sniff that too, though it leaves me both confused and saddened. I would turn away if its mystery did not compel me so. But as I close my eyes, I get another, fainter trace. Tobacco from a pipe, its ashes tossed carelessly as the writer puffed. The nicotine was soothing and it helped him concentrate when sleep was not an option. I imagine him sitting in that chair: the old man as he must have been, resting his pipe here – the darkness of a burn marks the desk’s edge – and scratching away at this paper mere hours, perhaps, before his death.
This is what drives her, more than defiance of AD or fear for the trades he might apprentice her to. She seeks some connection with the old man, an understanding of his end. I settle on the page to absorb what I can. This quest has led her to another dead man – Fat Peter – and perhaps cost her the boy. Yet she will continue; I can read that in her as easily as I can spot a mouse.