Cat In A White Tie And Tails

He is standing, seeing his blue eyes in the mirror and then, blink, the green contact lenses glide into place on his vitreous humour, the glistening fluid of his eyes. He becomes the Mystifying Max … and also a few degrees closer to a disguise that will keep Max Kinsella a wholly separate entity, at least in international intrigue circles.

His own gall surprises him. By doing a show in Las Vegas in any guise he’d been taking a hell of a risk.

Why had he done the Vegas bit? Garry had retired here, of course. He must have gotten an offer he couldn’t refuse from the Goliath. Only for a year, but it must have been renewable. And … as his memory clicked into operation, the eyes on his poster shifted from feline green to a tantalizing blue gray, not quite either. Temple Barr’s eyes.

Max shut his eyelids as memory replayed himself talking, selling, cajoling. She’d come here to Vegas because of his upcoming gig. Because of him. Leaving her home city, her career. That was a major commitment. Had he ever experienced anything but specific traumas of the distant past? Was he as brave as Temple Barr? Or just obsessed?

Max paged past his own frozen image. The Mystifying Max was history. Even if he remembered all his old stage moves and illusions, his compromised physique would probably be unable to duplicate them.

The next poster had him staring into Harry Houdini’s truly mesmerizing vividly black gaze. That man had enough visceral charisma and drive to power a planet. The storied “escapologist” was pictured nearly naked, hunched over like an ape-man, metal cuffs and chains hanging from every muscle and sinew. He’d accomplished incredible feats of working in freezing water to free himself, of hanging upside down like a bat. The illusions may all have stemmed from the same secret magical routines of his predecessors, but the marketing chutzpah and electrifying stage presence were individual.

Max searched himself and found no remembered driving motive. Revenge for Gandolph’s death? That tragic recent incident in Belfast had been a last impotent cannon shot in a cause long left behind by a more tortured contemporary history. It wouldn’t have happened if Garry hadn’t been so loyal in tracking down Max’s obsession with a past he didn’t even have the good grace to remember.

Maybe it was good to have no one to hate, but it was more than bad to have no one to love.

Max flipped back to his false-eyed image.

He did not know the man.

Chapter 44

Midnight at the Oasis

“You may wonder,” Miss Midnight Louise says, sashaying back and forth in front of the Dumpster behind the police substation, “why I have called you all together this afternoon.”

There is indeed a convocation of cats crowded around the closed Dumpster, domestic shorthairs and longhairs, big, small, chubby, lean, striped, spotted, calicos, tabbies, tortoiseshells, black-and-white tuxedos, solid whites, and, naturally, the royal color, solid black.

Of course, cats do not come with birth certificates unless they are purebreds, so you could say three generations of the Midnight clan are present, if you believe Miss Midnight Louise’s claim that I am her long-lost daddy.

“Why indeed has your caterwauling awakened us?” Ma Barker grumbles under her Happy Meal breath as her forepaws box the sleep from her eyes. “This is the hottest part of the day and I need my afternoon beauty sleep.”

I try not to choke audibly on that last statement. Ma Barker, as leader of the clan of Las Vegas cats called a clowder, bears many honorable scars from fierce territorial battles, but she is no beauty and proud of it.