‘It was the downtown office as much as any reference,’ she says out loud. I sit up and yawn, taking the morning air into my mouth, showing my fangs to the world. ‘That was why the old man trusted Diamond Jim – why we both did.’ She shakes her head and collapses on the broken pavement beside me.
‘I wonder if he knew. If he suspected who Diamond Jim was really working with.’ She pauses, mouth slightly open. It seems, for a moment, as if she can taste the air. Can read it, like I do. She seems to be gathering information. Putting the pieces in place in her mind. ‘He liked to know things. “Knowledge is power,” he always said. He wouldn’t have interfered, though …’
She stops. I have seen her bite her lip before. She is lucky her teeth are not like mine. In so many ways, she is unlike me. For all her apparent independence, she is not that tough. She is, in many ways, a child.
‘No, he might have, Blackie. If he thought that they were dragging in Tick or me …’ Again her voice breaks off. She pulls the card from her pocket and stares at it like it will tell her something, but then she puts it away.
‘He and I used to talk about this. About my education. About Tick’s. He used to say Tick didn’t have enough of a base. I always thought he meant that Tick wasn’t smart enough. Wasn’t as quick as I am, but maybe that wasn’t it, or not entirely. Tick was really young when his mother gave him up. He’d been in the home for a few years when I got there, after my parents … after the crash. He took to me. He was such a sweet kid. If you knew him then …’
She stops. Her lip is beginning to bleed where she has worked it raw.
‘I don’t believe he would betray me, Blackie. Anything he did he did either because he thought it was what I wanted or because he had to. I mean, he’s a kid. Small for his size, and he gets hungry. Gets picked on. And after our foster father …’ She stares at the card again. And again she shakes her head. There’s a battle going on inside her, and it has made her as itchy as if she had fleas.
I shiver, my coat twitching all over at the thought. But that is all. Maybe it is the cold. The nights still have frost in them. Maybe it was that dunking. I’ve not been bothered by vermin, I realize. I have not thought about such things as fleas or ticks. Nor, really, about any other hungers beyond my belly. Maybe this is the natural outgrowth of that constant dream state. Maybe it is age or the wear and tear of injury and the streets. It occurs to me now, though, that all I have thought about since the culvert – the vision – is this girl. This girl and that one strange image of three men with cold eyes.
‘They’re monsters, Blackie. The lot of them. AD’s the most obvious, but that Fat Peter worked the trade, too. And if Diamond Jim and Bushwick are in league? No, Tick’s not safe with them, and I bet the old man knew it. I bet he thought he was protecting me too.’ She looks at me, her green eyes sad. ‘I bet he would have tried to stop them. Maybe he did.’
She rests her chin on her arms, staring into the street. From the side, I can see the tears welling up in those eyes, the way her lips tremble. She is sorrowful, as lost as any creature I can recall. I lean toward her, pushing the flat of my head against her elbow in a clumsy imitation of a head butt. I am a denizen of the streets, and the gesture is somewhat foreign to me, despite this day of purring and being stroked. She sniffs and looks over at me, momentarily distracted. So I repeat the motion, rolling my eyes up to look at her as she reaches over to massage the base of my ears. I add a purr, knowing it is a poor offering in the face of so much loss, and rub my cheek against her. And when her lip stops trembling, when the ghost of a smile begins to play at its corners, I do it again, pushing my head hard into her arm. It works. She smiles.
I am a cat, but I am not a brute.
‘Thanks, Blackie,’ she says. She is running her hand over my back and I do not have to fake my pleasure. I stretch as her warm hand soothes me, smoothing my fur and my tired spine. It is always a matter of small gestures, minor movements, adding up. Building. ‘Sometimes I think you know what I’m feeling,’ she says, her voice once again calm. I lean into the pet. I listen. ‘The old man always said cats could communicate. Maybe he was right. Maybe you can read me – you just don’t know how to tell me—’
She stops. Her hand stops, right by the base of my tail. I look up, my reverie broken by the abrupt cessation of pleasure.