Douglas, Nelson - 2Golden garland

Then I look up. This apartment is strangely made, with high pointed ceilings and high shelves underneath them fit only for gathering dust or holding ugly large-scale decorative objects and innumerable small spiders. In some ways Miss Kit Carlson is living in a fish bowl and I am on Candid Camera. What can I do to inspire a stranger to rush over and ring the doorbell?

Locking a leg behind my neck and conducting some delicate personal grooming in plain view might enrage a few envious pussycats, but I cannot see a human coming all unhinged at such a display.

I could knock the rather unfortunate Santa Fe vase off the upper shelf, but the noise would draw the attention of my darling ladies, the eventuality I most desire to avoid.

I study a small, star-shaped metal object embedded in the ceiling. I believe it is a sprinkler system, a precaution against fires. In my experience, that is, in Las Vegas, Nevada, such escapees from Asian martial arts films are usually to be found in major buildings, like offices or hotels, but apparently New Yorkers are unusually safety-conscious, especially in old buildings that have been renovated recently.

Is there any way Midnight Louie could start a fire other than by coming on to some new girl in town? I leap onto a countertop to paw open a drawer, though hardly anybody keeps matches around any more.

Pity. The humble matchbook cover used to solve many a crime in the olden days, especially when used as a memo pad. Now, hardly anybody at all even smokes, except oysters and herrings, of which I am exceptionally fond. Still, my groping limb overturns one of those short stubby votive candles. And where there is wax with a fuse, there is usually a matchstick to light it.

Finally I work out a matchbook, but it is not one of those cheapie, flip-cover, old-movie jobs, but a tiny little box with tiny little wooden matchsticks in it. How adorable! Nonetheless, I take this worthless object in my teeth and hop from counter to espresso-machine top to distant shelf.

Now. To add flames to the fire. It takes my sharpest shiv to break into the box, then mondo maneuvering to work out one crummy miniature match. My next problem: providing enough friction to ignite the match, and enough of the proper kindling to set off the fire alarm. The entire job might have been easier if I had cracked Miss Kit's pantry door and broken into a can of Texas chili. Power to the pepper and the pussycat!

I cannot think of anything useful to burn around the place ... until I remember the pile of papers Miss Kit Carlson keeps beside her computer in the room Miss Temple is sleeping in, when she is not sleeping out. They are only typed on one side, so I figure Miss Kit keeps them there for scratch paper. Pleased, I hop down to the floor by stages to implement the next, and most tedious, part of my plan.

Anybody dumb enough to have trained their eagle eye or telescope on these windows will be getting a most mysterious eyeful over the next couple of hours. Like a bunny rabbit, I hop out of sight, and then I hop back into view and up to the high shelf. My return trips are notable for the roll of paper clutched in my incisors.

In due time I have a nicely mounded pile of pages, each one titled "Siege of Sighs."

Finally, I drop-kick a match to the pile and scratch kitty litter until something ignites. (You must understand that I am not literally scratching kitty litter. I only use the stuff when there is not so much as a potted plant around as a substitute. But I use the same friction-laden movements with my hind feet that would burn litter, were it at all combustible.)

Finally a lucky kick slides match head against striker. I hear a sound of many wings beating, but it is only the leaves of paper that are curling as a cutting edge of bright fire eats away at them.

I skedaddle before any random spark catches my heels, and hunker down by the front door.

Not long afterward, an ear-splitting beeping goes off, accompanied by inmate shrieking, frantic phone dialing, downward drifting clouds of smoke and an urgent knock at the door, followed by a scrabbling sound of a passkey in the lock.

Above it all, the sprinkler system hisses to life and a gentle chlorinated rain falls on everything within range. Now the Leo the Lion at the MGM Grand hotel in Las Vegas is not the only one with a spraying problem.

But despite the hullabaloo, I keep my post by the door, springing forward to freedom when it bursts open and an excitable super spouting a language of the Indian subcontinent rushes through into the rain and the shrieks.

I am on my way to the fire exits, which are being thronged by nervous folk in nightclothes. The doors bat open and shut as tenants seek safety below. I thread through their legs on the dark, steep stairwell and am soon in the small lower lobby.

From there I am an ankle away from the freedom of the city.

In the distance, another of those annoyingly frequent New York sirens carries on like a banshee.

Everyone on the ground floor and the sidewalk outside looks up, so when I leap out fur to femur with an oblivious human, no one tries to stop me.

I sniff the evening air, which is much brisker than it is in Las Vegas. A pity. Scents do poorly in colder climes. I will have to use my other senses to follow the map route I have lain upon all afternoon. Luckily, Cornelia Street walks right into the Avenue of the Americas, otherwise known as Sixth. I take off down the street at a brisk trot, glimpsing Washington Square a block away. These pads were made for walking, but I have a long way to go up the spine of Manhattan before I hit the hostelry I seek.

In no time at all I am passing Fourteenth Street. Only thirty more blocks to go, but they are shrimp appetizers compared with the whale-length extent of blocks in Las Vegas. I pass churches and bars and office buildings. I am almost scuttled at Thirty-first when a bag lady decides that I am worse off than she is and tries to run me down with her shopping cart in the name of saving my soul. I dodge the squeaky wheels and take my chances underfoot, pausing to catch my breath at the Empire State Building. I am tempted to join the lines snaking to the top for a look-see at the Big Apple from the worm-on-top's point of view, but decide a tourist jaunt could blow my cover.

By then I am in Herald Square, where Broadway crosses Sixth on its way to the seamy environs of Times Square. I sigh and head for more respectable realms, straight north, past Macy's department store. There I pause to offer suitable honor to the late Rudy, with whom I share a certain weakness for a certain weed, although my kind is legal. While I am paying my respects to a dead veteran, wouldn't you know some dude emerges from a building with not one but two Russian wolfhounds in tow. Or rather, the Russian wolfhounds have him in tow.

They eye me as one, launch a keening duet and tangle their leashes as they streak after me. Their owner has just become a boat anchor with nothing to snag onto.

I take off flat out, ears flat, feet flat, hair slicked to my back for maximum speed. I zig and zag, targeting tourists and other slow-moving pedestrians. On an even, unpopulated playing field I would be black caviar for those ancient hunters, but this is dysfunctionally chaotic New York City, boys, and I do not have any fancy harness holding me back.

I leave them entwined with a fairy-light bestrewed tree and a lady walking a toy poodle behind the New York Public Library. I give a small roar of greeting and triumph to the unseen Big Cats keeping guard on the building's Fifth Avenue entrance and pussyfoot the last two blocks to Forty-fourth.

Unfortunately, people in this city are more used to dog doo-doo by the curb than to the sight of an independent feline (and waste-management expert) on the move. They cry out and point to me, but I keep trotting and do not look back. It is lucky that my national commercials for Allpetco are not yet reality. It would really slow me down if I had to stop and sign autographs.