Lilian Braun - The Cat Who Turned On and Off

It was then that he heard the odd sound — like soft moaning. It was the purring of cats, but louder. It was the cooing of pigeons, but more guttural. It had a mechanical regularity, and it seemed to be coming from the partition behind his bed — the wall that was papered with book leaves. He listened — keenly at first, then drowsily, and the monotony of the sound soon lulled him to sleep. He slept well that first night in the Cobb mansion, dreaming pleasantly of the Mackintosh coat of arms with its three snarling cats and its weathered blues and reds. His pleasurable dreams were always in color; others were in sepia, like old-time rotogravure.

On Saturday morning, as he began to emerge from slumber, he felt a great weight pressing on his chest. In the first stages of waking, before his eyes were open and before his mind was clear, he had a vision of the iron coat of arms, crushing him, pinning him to the bed. He struggled to regain his senses, and as he succeeded in opening his eyelids, he found himself staring into two violet-blue eyes, slightly crossed. Little Yum Yum was sitting on his chest in a compact and featherweight bundle. He took a deep breath of relief, and the heaving of his chest pleased her. She purred. She reached out one velvety paw and touched his moustache tenderly. She used the stubble on his chin to scratch the top of her head.

Then, from somewhere overhead, came an imperious command. Koko was sitting on the tail of the swan, making pronouncements in a loud voice. Either he was ordering breakfast, or he was deploring Yum Yum's familiarity with the man of the house. Koko seemed to have strong ideas about priorities.

The steam was hissing and clanking in the radiators, and when the heat came on in this old house, the whole building smelled of baked potatoes. Qwilleran got up and diced some round steak for the cats and heated it in a spoonful of consomm‚, while Koko supervised and Yum Yum streaked around the apartment, chased by an imaginary pursuer. For his own breakfast the newsman was contemplating the sugary bun that had become unappetizingly gummy during the night.

As he arranged the diced meat on one of the antique blue and white plates that came with the apartment, he heard a knock on the door. Iris Cobb was standing there, beaming at him.

"I'm sorry. Did I get you out of bed?" she asked when she saw the red plaid bathrobe. "I heard you talking to the cats and thought you were up. Here's a fresh shower curtain for your bathtub. Did you sleep well?" "Yes, it's a good bed." Qwilleran protruded his lower lip and blew into his moustache, dislodging a cat hair that was waving under his nose.

"I had a terrible night. C.C. snored like a foghorn, and I didn't get a wink of sleep. Is there anything you need? Is everything all right?" "Everything's fine, except that my toothbrush has disappeared. I put it in a tumbler last night, and this morning it's gone." Iris rolled her eyes. "It's Mathilda! She's hidden it somewhere. Just hunt around and you'll find it. Would you like a few antique accessories to make your apartment more homey? Some colored glass? Some figurines?" "No, thanks, but I'd like to get a telephone installed in a hurry." "You can call the phone company from our apartment. And why don't you let me fix you a bite of breakfast? I made corn muffins for C.C. before he went picketing, and there's half a panful left." Qwilleran remembered the sticky breakfast roll glued to its limp paper wrapper — and accepted.

Later, while he was eating bacon and eggs and buttering hot corn muffins, Iris talked to him of the antiques business. "You know the dentist's chair that was in your apartment?" she said. "C.C. originally found it in the basement of a clinic that was being torn down, and Ben Nicholas bought it from him for fifty dollars. Then Ben sold it to Andy for sixty dollars. After that, Russ gave Andy seventy-five for it and put new leather on the seat. When C.C. saw it, he wanted it back, so Russ let it go for a hundred and twenty-five, and yesterday we sold it for two hundred and twenty dollars." "Cozy arrangement," said Qwilleran. "Don't put that in the paper, though." "Do all the dealers get along well?" "Oh, yes. Occasionally there's a flare-up, like the time Andy fired Russ for drinking on the job, but it was soon forgotten. Russ is the one with the gorgeous blond hair. I used to have lovely blond hair myself, but it turned ashen overnight when I lost my first husband. I suppose I should have something done to it." After breakfast Qwilleran called the telephone company and asked to have an instrument connected at 6331 Zwinger.

"There will be a fif-ty dol-lar de-pos-it, sir," said the singsong female voice on the line.

"Fifty! In advance? I never heard of such a thing!" "Sor-ry. You are in zone thir-teen. There is a fif-ty dol- lar de-pos-it." "What's the zone got to do with it?" Qwilleran shouted into the mouthpiece. "I need that phone immediately, and I'm not going to pay your outrageous deposit! I'm a staff writer for the Daily Fluxion, and I'm going to report this to the managing editor." "One mo-ment, please." He turned to the landlady. "Of all the high-handed nerve! They want eight months' payment in advance." "We get that kind of treatment all the time in Junktown," Iris said with a meek shrug.

The voice returned to the line. "Ser-vice will be sup-plied at once, sir. Sor-ry, sir." Qwilleran was still simmering with indignation when he left the house to cover his beat. He was also unhappy about the loss of his red feather. He was sure it had been in his hatband the night before, but now it was gone, and without it the tweed porkpie lost much of its ‚clat. A search of the apartment and staircase produced nothing but a cat's hairball and a red gum wrapper.

On Zwinger Street the weather growled at him, and he was in a mood to growl back. All was gray — the sky, the snow, the people. At that moment a white Jaguar sleeked down the street and turned into the carriage house on the block.

Qwilleran regarded it as a finger of fate and followed it. Russell Patch's refinishing shop had been a two-carriage carriage house in its heyday. Now it was half garage and half showroom. The Jaguar shared the space with items of furniture in the last stages of despair — peeling, mildewed, crazed, waterstained, or merely gray with dirt and age — and the premises smelled high of turpentine and lacquer.

Qwilleran heard a scuffing and thumping sound in the back room, and a moment later a husky young man appeared, swinging ably across the rough floor on metal crutches. He was dressed completely in white — white ducks, white open-necked shirt, white socks, white tennis shoes.

Qwilleran introduced himself. "Yes, I know," said Patch with a smile. "I saw you at the auction, and word got around who you were." The newsman glanced about the shop. "This is what I call genuine junk-type junk. Do people really buy it?" "They sure do. It's having a big thing right now. Everything you see here is in the rough; I refinish it to the customer's specifications. See that sideboard? I'll cut off the legs, paint the whole thing mauve, stripe it in magenta, spatter it with umber, and give it a glaze of Venetian bronze. It's going into a two-hundred-thousand-dollar house in Lost Lake Hills." "How long have you been doing this kind of work?" "Just six months for myself. Before that, I worked for Andy Glanz for four years. Want to see how it's done?" He led the way into the workshop, where he put on a long white coat like a butcher's, daubed with red and brown.

"This rocker," he said, "was sitting out in a barnyard for years. I tightened it up, gave it a red undercoat, and now — watch this." He drew on a pair of plastic gloves and started brushing a muddy substance on the chair seat.

"Did Andy teach you how to do this?" "No, I picked it up myself," said Patch, with a trace of touchiness.