Lilian Jackson Braun - Cat 11 Who Lived High

"You really blew it!" Qwilleran told Koko. "They were coming to our rescue, and you wouldn't keep your mouth shut. Now we may be here all night." He looked around the dismal cell with its soiled walls and torn floor tiles. One of the fluorescent tubes had burned out leaving half the car in shadow. "At least you've got your commode," he said to his disgruntled companions, "which is more than I can say." He rang the emergency bell again.

There was another wrenching sound in the shaft above, and a voice overhead - somewhat closer this time - yelled, "You gotta climb out!" "YOW!" Koko replied.

"How?" Qwilleran shouted.

"What?" "YOW!" Qwilleran gave the cat carrier a remonstrative shove with his foot, which only accelerated the howls. "How do I climb out?" "Push up the roof!" In the tan ceiling of the car there was a metal plate, black with fingerprints.

"Push it all the way!" carne the instructions from on high.

Qwilleran reached up, gave the metal plate a forceful push, and it flopped open with a clatter. Through the rectangular opening he could see a bare light bulb, dazzlingly bright in the black shaft, and a ladder slowly descending.

He wondered if he could squeeze through the hole in the roof; he wondered if the carrier would go through.

"I've got luggage down here!" he yelled. There was another long wait, and then a rope carne dangling through the trapdoor.

"Tie it on the handle!" called the rescuer. Qwilleran quickly knotted one end to the top handle of the cat carrier and watched it rise off the floor and ascend in jerks that annoyed the occupants. It disappeared into the hole above.

"Any thin' else?" Qwilleran looked speculatively at the turkey roaster. Its handles had long ago been sawed off to fit on the floor of the car. Furthermore, it contained slightly used kitty gravel.

"Nothing else!" he shouted, kicking the pan into a dark comer of the elevator. Then he started up the ladder.

Above him he could see a pale face and a red golf hat clapped on a head of sandy hair.

The custodian was waiting for him at the top. "Sorry 'bout this." On hands and knees Qwilleran crawled out of the black hole onto the mosaic tile floor of a hallway, a performance that interested the waiting cats enormously; they were always entranced by unusual behavior on his part.

"Where are we?" he asked.

"On Nine. Gotta walk up. We got both cars broke now - Old Red and Old Green. Serviceman don't come till tomorrow. Costs double on Sundays." Their rescuer was a thin, wiry man of middle age, all elbows and knees and bony shoulders, wearing khaki pants and a bush jacket, its large pockets bulging with a flashlight and other tools of his trade. Judging by his prison pallor, it was doubtful that he had ever bushwhacked beyond the weedy landscaping of the Casablanca. The man picked up the cat carrier and headed for the stairwell.

"Here, let me take that," Qwilleran offered. "It's heavy." "I seen heavier. Lady on Seven, she's got two I cats, must weigh twenty pounds apiece. You in 14-A?" "Yes. My name's Qwilleran. What's your name?" "Rupert." "I appreciate your coming to our rescue." After that brief exchange, the two men plodded silently up the four long flights to the fourteenth floor, which was really the thirteenth. At the top of the stairs they emerged into a small lobby with a marble floor and marble walls, a relic of the rooftop restaurant in the Casablanca's illustrious past. There were two elevator doors, closed and silent, and two apartment doors with painted numbers.

Qwilleran glanced at his key and opened 14-A. "I guess this is it." "Yep, this is it," said Rupert. "Doorbell's broke." He touched the pearl button to prove it.

"All the doorbells are broke." They walked into a spacious foyer handsomely furnished in the contemporary style, with door- ways and arches leading to other equally lavish areas. This was more than Qwilleran had expected. It explained why the rent was high. A bank of French doors overlooked a large room with a lofty ceiling and a conversation pit six feet deep. "Is that the sunken living room?" he asked. "It looks like a carpeted swimming pool." "That's what it was - a swimmin' pool," said the custodian. "Not very deep. Didn't do much divin' in them days, I reckon." An exceptionally long sofa doglegged around one end of the depression, and around the ceramic-tiled rim of the former pool there were indoor trees in tubs, some reaching almost to the skylight twenty feet overhead.

Qwilleran noticed a few plastic pails scattered about the room, and there were waterstains on the carpet. "Does the skylight leak?" he asked.