Unknown - 15_Cat_In_A_Neon_Nightmare

Matt regarded his visitor, reflecting for the first time that Max reminded him of Flambeau, the master thief in a Father Brown story, those genteel literary exercises in crime, punishment, and Roman Catholic theology by G. K. Chesterton.

Balanced like a mime-acrobat on the railing, Kinsella waved his current calling card: the tall black-labeled bottle of amber liquid with which he had apparently leaned forward to rap on the glass.

Despite the skill of such a trick, Matt recognized that the bottle was whiskey and that Kinsella had already been drinking from it.

“Top of the evening to ye,” Kinsella greeted him in a stage brogue. “Mind if I come in?”

Matt did mind, but he was too curious to refuse. Before he could nod, the magician had untangled himself from the iron railing and vaulted into the living room in one liquid motion.

“To what do I owe—?” Matt asked, omitting the phrasethat usually followed those words: the pleasure of your company.

Max Kinsella evoked many feelings in Matt, but companionability was not one of them.

Kinsella didn’t answer directly. Did he ever? Matt wondered.

Instead he held the bottle up to the central ceiling fixture. The glass was such a dark brown that almost no light penetrated it.

“This,” Kinsella announced, “is the finest Irish whiskey in the world, Bushmill’s Millennium at a hundred dollars a bottle, and the Irish distill the finest whiskeys in the world. The word ‘whiskey’ is Gaelic in origin, did you know that?”

“Yes. It means ‘water of life.’ The Irish also have the finest addiction to alcohol in the world.”

“Ah. Not a tad of the Auld Sod in your soul.”

“Polish-American.”

“So you’re a beer man.”

“I don’t drink much of anything.”

Kinsella shrugged, quirked an eyebrow, and flourished the bottle in one fluid gesture.

He set the bottle down firmly on one of Matt’s discount-store cube tables. “I suggest you owe yourself a sip of Heaven now.”

“Heaven isn’t to be found in a bottle; more often Hell is.”

“True, and I’m generally abstemious. A man in my line of work can’t afford smudged senses.”

“Are you referring to magic or spying?”

“Either. Both. However, this is an occasion, and I suggest you join me in an uncharacteristic elbow-bend. Where are your glasses?”

“Kitchen,” Matt said, bemused.

Kinsella was not drunk, as he had feared, but he was in a strange, forced, bitter mood.

He was now peering into Matt’s cupboards and apparently displeased by what he saw.

“Not a lead crystal glass in the place. You can’t set up housekeeping without a pair of glasses worthy of the occasional drink of kings. Well, these gas-station jelly jars will have to do.”

“I don’t have any such thing.” Matt moved to defend his possessions.

Max had whisked two short thick glasses from the cupboard to the counter. Now he was rattling in the refrigerator in search of ice.

“Not a sliver, not a cube. ‘Tis more fitting that we take it neat, anyway.”

“Why should I drink with you?”

“It’s better than drinking alone?” Kinsella paused to reflect. “You can’t have me doing that, can you? Besides, we have something to celebrate.”

“You don’t seem in a very celebratory mood to me.”

“We Irish are deceptive. We laugh when you think we should weep, and weep when you think we should laugh.”

Matt took the glass Kinsella handed him, holding two inches of amber liquid as richly colored as precious topaz, the expensive, genuine article, not the cheap yellow citrine or smoky quartz that was passed off for it. He could already inhale the rich, sharp scent of aged whiskey.

Suddenly, he did wish for crystal glasses. Life needed its rituals and its ritual vessels.

By now Matt was ready for a drink. He lifted the glass and took a swallow: hot, burning in his throat like bile, yet strangely soothing.

“Is anybody ever allowed to sit on this?” Kinsella was still holding his glass, saving it, and staring at the long red sofa.

“It’s a Vladimir Kagan.”

“Here’s to Vladimir.” Kinsella lifted the lowly glass and drank.

“You can sit on it,” Matt said. “I sit on it all the time.”

“Designer sofa, rare whiskey, barware by Martha Steward,” Max enumerated.

Matt sat in front of the cube table Kinsella had notclaimed, realizing that the magician had purposefully mispronounced Martha’s last name, not liquorfully.

The play on words reminded Matt of Martha from the New Testament: that bustling, somehow frantic female fussing so compulsive that even Christ had urged her to slow down and smell the roses. Comparing domestic diva Martha Stewart to her New Testament namesake made for an interesting take on America’s Queen of Clean and Possibly Mean. Were successful women always assumed to be shrews? Or did success make shrews of us all? Matt wouldn’t know. He sipped more whiskey. It tasted stronger than swallowed perfume would smell, and he didn’t much like either.

Kinsella was lounging in a corner of the Kagan as no one else who had ever sat on it had dared to do, including himself. For all its provenance and rarity, it was a demanding, stylish seating piece and wasn’t the least bit comfortable. Like Kinsella himself.

“You look to the Kagan born,” Matt admitted.

Kinsella chuckled. “We’re both magicians, in our way. Our game is not to make you feel comfortable, but challenged, uneasy. Do I make you feel uneasy?”

“Sometimes.”

“Not all the time? Shame on me.”

“To what do I owe the honor of this visitation?”

“It’s not an honor. It’s a … bloody wake.”

“I still don’t get why you’re here.”

“This is a wake, after all,” Kinsella noted. “For that you need a priest.”

“So you think an ex-priest will do in a pinch.”

“Why not? An ex-Irishman will do.”

“So whose wake is it?” Matt was half afraid his bitter visitor would produce Vassar’s name.

“All of ours?” Kinsella sat forward, cradling the whiskey glass in his hands. “She’s … gone. Dead. Our Martha Stewart of the soul, giving us no rest, rearranging our priorities, redecorating our psychoscapes. To Kathleen.” He raised his glass. “To Kitty the Cutter. To our survival on the occasion of her death. I often thought she would kill me, but I never dreamed … she would die.”

, “An eternal enemy offers a certain stability,” Matt said, slowly, amazed by how true his words were only as he articulated them. “Why else is there the Devil?”

“You should know. You’re thinking of Cliff Effinger.”

“No. I didn’t cause his death. At least I hope not. I mean, not specifically, but by looking for him, I might have attracted the wrong sort of attention to him.”

“Devine! Effinger attracted the wrong sort of attention to himself. He was a royal loser. A royal pain in the ass to everyone who encountered him. You were his stepson. You had certainly felt the back of his hand. Don’t go all goody-goody on me and tell me you regret his death.”

“I do. You know what he said to me once, here, in Las Vegas, when we met again as adults? He said his abusive ways in my childhood home had done me a favor. He claimed he had taught me what the world was really like. I think it was like that for him, as a child, and he really did believe that was the way to rear a kid, to know how hard and cold the world can be.”

“So did you learn anything?”

“From coldness and hardness, no. But maybe from him, finally. Not what he wanted me to know. I found that inside he was small and afraid still, trying to be the big, rough person he thought it took to survive in this world.”