Unknown - 22_Cat_In_An_Ultramarine_Scheme

While Chef Song switches to uttering his own challenges in Chinese, I return full measure of hiss and spit, then show him the business end of my tail root and duck into the thick plant-stalk jungle.

Aaaah. Cool dirt between my toes, even though it will get stuck in my shivs.

“Okay, you worthless chowhounds,” I tell my now-assembled troops. “We have a mission. First, Three O’Clock, where is Midnight Louise?”

“I do not know. I just ambled over from the Glory Hole Gang’s test kitchen for some real food. Spuds Lonnigan is whipping up his specialty, potatoes, and I am not a meat-and-potatoes kind of guy. Meat, yes. Tater Tots, no.”

“You have not seen Miss Midnight Louise, either?” I ask the other two, while a singsong of imprecations continues above our heads and far, far away from our current concerns.

“Bast no, boss,” one says, with gratifying respect.

“Not since this old freeloader showed up at our new headquarters,” the other adds, indicating Three O’Clock with a quick flick of his shivs.

That is bad mews. Miss Louise should be long back here by now.

“Cut out that palaver,” the old boy orders me and his ex’s legmen. “I am washing my whiskers. The younger generation has no respect for the civilized formalities.”

“No time for cleanup work here,” I tell them, “there is a muchobad scene brewing at the Neon Nightmare, and we need to join Ma Barker and any minions she may have taken there right away.”

“I need time for my lunch to settle,” Three O’Clock complains. “I cannot do a long trek and then be ready for fisticuffs.”

“There is a shortcut,” I explain. “If Miss Midnight Louise had made it back here, she would have put one of you two on guard duty near it. And,” I tell the old guy, “no whining. The entrance to our Chunnel of Timely Crime Fighting is just behind the people-pool area. It is dark and cool and private. From there we can take a secret route into the bowels of the Neon Nightmare.”

I consider this a rousing speech to derring-do.

Three O’Clock hiccups and shakes his head. “My bowels are going to feel the earth move if I have to get going without my afternoon nap. After my seafaring life, I find the gentle waves of the subtly shifting koi pond essential and soothing.”

I shrug and eye the no-name muscle. They seem to have no digestion issues.

“Stay here and hold the fort, then, Three O’Clock. We need to be off and running to the rescue.”

I make a 180 swivel on my four-on-the-floor and take off, to the rewarding skitter of battle-ready shivs digging in behind me. The Cat Pack is on the hunt.

Drinkin’ Bitter Beer

After dinner and leaving the hotel that night, Gandolph led Max to the far edge of the tourist area, until the streets were deserted enough that they heard their individual footsteps.

“Soon,” he cautioned Max, unnecessarily, “they will find us.”

Almost eerily soon after that, a lone passerby bumped Gandolph into Max, who bumped into the corner of a building leading to a dark, narrow passage. Instantly, they were corned beef on rye toast, sandwiched between two thick, meaty wedges of Irish soda bread.

“Americans abroad, eh?” a coarse whisper crooned.

Now three men clothed in a damp wool scent hedged them in, one in the street, two in the alley.

Max had already taken a visual survey. All three were nearer Gandolph’s age than his, so they weren’t teenage hotheads unable to get jobs and turning to a bit of street violence if marching Orangemen weren’t available to attack.

Like most natives of a damp and cloudy climate, their Irish eyes were lighter than their hair color, which Max judged by their jaw stubble. Their heads were covered with knit fisherman’s caps, and they all wore that new and sinister urban fashion/disguise, hoodies, now pushed down into the monk’s-cowl position on their broad shoulders, the shoulders of workingmen or professional thugs.

The acrid odors of strong tobacco and ale were their cologne. Their narrowed eyes and tense mouth sets advertised the names of their signature scents: Suspicion and Up to No Good.

Ordinarily, Max would start flailing enough to distract two of them so Gandolph could belly-punch and shin-kick the third to the ground, by which time the second would come stumbling past him and get a disabling blow from the blackjack in the older man’s pocket. The other thug, of course, would be out cold by then, flat on the cool cobblestones two centuries old and witness to countless evening attacks of the same crude sort.

Except here, Max was handicapped from the outset, and Gandolph saw no point in making a fight of it. They surrendered to the hard, metal prods in their backs and faded a few steps away from the distant lights and tourists and traffic into the instant isolation of an alley that stank like a urinal.

So much for urban gentrification, thought Max.

“We know a little pub,” the same voice purred, with the velvet authority of being well armed.

Max shrugged and Gandolph nodded. They were here to take the temperature of Belfast today. These men weren’t muggers, or they’d be out cold and stripped of their paper, metal, and plastic belongings.

Max felt a frisson of fellowship to realize that he and Gandolph were long accustomed to being of like mind without words or gesture. For the second time since he’d awakened from his coma, his veins throbbed with a returning tingle of life and adventure. The first occasion had been with Revienne.

Mostly, he knew he wasn’t afraid, as a normal tourist would have been, but … pleased.

The “pub” was several blocks’ walk through ever-more-depressing slums. They passed a burned-out, graffiti-slathered office building and a cement-walled shopping arcade as dark as any crypt, before ducking down another alley to a low red-brick building from a couple centuries back.

Uneven cobblestones had Max limping badly by the time they arrived. He relished his obvious problem; it made their custodians careless. A gimp and an old man. Easy prey. For once, Max’s height wasn’t intimidating but made him appear awkward and unbalanced.

Shoved down some steps into a cellar, they found no warm, red-amber glow of wood and musical instruments and flushed crowds holding topaz-toned pint glasses filled with stout and ale and beer.

A lone bartender studiously refused to look up as they entered. The bar had only one customer, a powerful-shouldered man wearing a peacoat over a sweater and the ubiquitous billed tweed cap, huddled in a corner. Above them, hanging tin kettles and bellows dripped from blackened oak beams. Crude oil portraits of long-dead Irish Republican heroes made a sober row of faces along the dark wood walls.

They were shoved against a smoke-blackened brick wall, hemmed in by two of the shadow-jawed thugs while the third went to whisper to the man behind the scantily equipped bar.

Max pulled out two rough wooden chairs for Garry and himself. By the time they sat, the usual pint glasses filled with dark amber liquid topped by a dispirited frill of foam circled their table, dispensed from the barman’s universal round brown plastic tray.

“Not your usual elegant tourist surroundings, eh?” the waiting headman commented more than asked.

Max and Gandolph sipped in tandem and cocked their heads to signal they were listening.

“Came along like lambs,” another man chuckled. “You hardly needed all three of us, Liam,” they chided their leader.

“Yes,” Gandolph said, “we’re quite harmless, although not tourists.”

“I thought this lame beanpole was the great boy-betrayer, Kinsella,” another muttered into his first chugalug of ale.

“Great?” Max inquired with indifference. “I’m a great ale-drinker, ’tis true.”