How to Moon a Cat (3 page)

They were a sickly, haggard bunch, from youth to scoundrel. Their grimy faces were a pallid jaundiced yellow, the outward symptom of the dysentery and malaria they had picked up during their voyage. That first night in San Francisco, they would search the sprawling, ramshackle city for a place to sleep or a shelter to crawl under, but they would find no vacancies. In this fast-growing boomtown, even the most basic commodities were in short supply.

But no amount of hardship could dampen the enthusiasm of these newly minted Californians. No temporary inconvenience could cool their fever. Each one felt certain that tomorrow, the next day, or surely the coming week would bring an upswing in fortune. Soon, their empty, threadbare pockets would be packed with nuggets of gold. They could survive any torture if it meant reaching that goal.

Clem strummed the unbuttoned front of his linen suit jacket and gummed his dentures thoughtfully. With a quick blink of his gray eyelashes, he dialed back the timeline of his vision, now picturing the area in the years before the madness of 1849.

The saloon and the ground beneath it fell away as the bricks and mortar that lined the street faded into a marshy wetland. The mounds of sand and rubble that made up the Gold Rush–era landfill disappeared, and the shoreline retreated a hundred or so yards into the distance.

In his mind, Clem walked down the swampy, uninhabited beach. The land that would later support some of the tallest office buildings in San Francisco’s financial district was reduced to a blustery landscape of sand dunes, short scrubby trees, and tall whipping grasses. A quiet calm, unattainable in modern times, fell in around him as he hiked up a slight grade into the scruffy little village that was still known by its Mexican Territory moniker of Yerba Buena.

This was the Wild West in its infancy. The Mexican government, putative landlord to the scattered settlement, exerted little influence or control over the area’s day-today activities. The Mexican grip on the broad expanse of its California Territory was tenuous at best, near-nonexistent on this northern frontier.

The residents of this remote outpost represented numerous nationalities, but American settlers were gradually becoming the majority. The inhabitants were, by most accounts, escapists—men with shady pasts who had slipped away to California’s mythical, unknown lands to lose themselves in its lawless society and sparsely populated wilderness. In this dusty sand-blown inlet, it was every man for himself.

Clem strode up to a scattering of low-slung adobes that formed the middle of the settlement; then he turned in a circle as he surveyed the roughly constructed wooden buildings. One stood out among the rest, the only two-story structure in the group. His mental vision honed in on the property, sweeping around to the lavish garden that curved behind it.

This was the home of the tiny town’s most prominent businessman, a shipping magnate who had moved to Yerba Buena from New Orleans. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man with a dusky complexion and thick muttonchop sideburns who had recently received the honorary appointment of American vice-consul. With the help of his beautiful Russian maid, he was the designated host for the area’s most distinguished visitors: disgruntled Mexican military officials, steely-eyed ship captains who’d dropped anchor in the bay’s protective cove, and the occasional renegade explorer determined to stir up the local American settlers into a rebellion.

It was this historical figure—the American vice-consul with the elaborate muttonchop sideburns—that Clem had been researching just prior to his abrupt departure from Jackson Square almost a year ago. That research had given him valuable insights into the local intrigues and political motivations of pre–Gold Rush Yerba Buena and had led to a breakthrough in his quest to unearth several hidden treasures from that time frame. The name of the man whose historical background had proven so useful was William Leidesdorff.

Clem turned back once more to face the Green Vase, letting the imagined scenes of Jackson Square’s past evaporate into the day’s brilliant sunlight. As he peered in through the glass windows, he needed no creative assistance to picture the building’s modern-day interior. He knew its layout like the back of his hand.

A narrow staircase in a darkened corner at the far end of the showroom led to an apartment that occupied the second and third floors. The wooden steps were worn slick from the tread of hundreds of years’ worth of feet. A low-hanging beam over the sixth step, he cautioned himself with a wry grin, would nick your forehead if you forgot to duck beneath it.

The top of the stairs opened into a kitchen, an odd-shaped, heavily wallpapered room with a homey wooden table, an uneven tile floor, and a temperamental dishwasher that had rarely been used in the year since his departure.

Any minute now, Clem thought with anticipation, the woman with the bifocal glasses and the long brown hair would walk into this room. Today, she would discover something she’d been diligently searching for over the last several months. If Clem’s little associate had done his part, Oscar’s niece was about to discover a clue to one of her uncle’s hidden treasures.

Clem reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a large white mustache with bristly unkempt whiskers that matched the scruffy hair of his eyebrows. After thumbing off a protective strip from a square of adhesive backing, he stretched out the corners of his mouth to flatten the surface beneath his nose. His eyes crossed as he centered the hairpiece above his upper lip and affixed it to his skin. Checking his reflection in the storefront glass, he scrunched up his face to confirm that the mustache was securely attached.

“Perfect,” he said with satisfaction.

His costume complete, Clem climbed back onto his bike and pedaled off down the street. He had a few more stops to make in the city before leaving for the next leg of his journey.

TWO WHITE CATS
with orange-tipped ears and tails sat at the edge of the kitchen in the second floor apartment above the Green Vase showroom, watching as I bent down near the back wall to study what remained of the bottom corner’s frayed wallpaper.

Sometime during the night, a creature with sharp scraping claws—that is, Rupert the cat—had ripped open a triangular hole, about six inches across at its base, from the lower section of wallpaper. A telltale clump of fluffy white hair had been left on the floor near the opening.

“All right,” I said briskly, tapping the wall as I stood up. With a quick nod to my cat audience, I turned toward the kitchen table and the home improvement book that lay open on its surface. “Let’s go through this one more time.”

My eyes skimmed over the paragraphs describing wallpaper removal.

“Gloves?” I asked in a stern professional voice.

I stretched my arms out in front of my chest and tugged, one at a time, at the cuffs of the thick rubber gloves encasing my hands.

“Check,” I confirmed, glancing at the cats as I released the right cuff. The elastic rubber snapped back into place with a loud smacking
pop
.

“Coveralls?” I ticked off the list, lightly stamping my feet to flap the loose vinyl fabric of the orange jumpsuit that covered my T-shirt and blue jeans.

“Check.”

“Goggles?” I asked, thumping the rubber thumb of my glove against the rim of the protective gear strapped around my head. It had been a tight fit, but I had managed to stretch the goggles over the plastic frames of my bifocal eyeglasses. An uncomfortable pressure was beginning to pinch at my ears. This project, I hoped, wasn’t going to take very long to complete.

“Check.”

“Face mask?” I slid the cup of a white cotton mask down over my nose and mouth and gave out a much more muffled “Check.”

I turned to model my home improvement costume to my feline observers.

Isabella’s sharp pixielike face carefully scrutinized my altered appearance. She raised her right paw in the air and made a series of intricate clicking noises with her mouth as if she were issuing instructions. There were few aspects of my life, in Isabella’s opinion, that couldn’t be improved by her modifications.

A slender cat with a proud, angular head and a silky white coat, Isabella had the color point pattern typical of a Siamese. But instead of brown or gray, the darker hair on her ears and tail was a peachy orange shade, probably inherited from a tabby ancestor. The orange and white fur of her coat paired with ice-blue eyes to make a stunning combination, a fact of which she was well aware.

Isabella carried herself with an elegant, regal poise, the self-appointed queen of all she surveyed. She was, for the most part, a benevolent ruler, although her patience was frequently tested by her lowly subjects: Rupert, who usually ignored her commands, and me, who rarely understood them.

After a long string of Isabella chatter and paw-waving, I nodded a pretended acknowledgment of her cat commentary and shifted my attention to her brother.

Even if he didn’t match her in physique, Rupert’s chunky fluff of feathery hair matched his sister’s in coloring. He had inherited the tabby forebear’s more rounded figure, longhaired coat, and voracious appetite. He was content to play the sloppy joker, lolling about for hours on end in a sleepy, punch-drunk haze. Most days, the hunger pangs of an empty stomach were all that could wake Rupert from the pleasure of his daydreams.

Every so often, however, a short burst of insuppressible energy would sweep over him, and he would set off on a scrambling, high-speed sprint across the slick wooden floors of the Green Vase showroom, a furry white hazard to any antique—or human—that might cross his wild slinging path.

It was during these spontaneous moments of brief but frenetic activity that Rupert performed his most notable acts of destruction. His middle-of-the-night renovation to the kitchen wall was just the latest example of his handiwork.

Rupert had skittishly avoided the area all morning, as if he might implicate himself by proximity to the scene of his crime. He sat on the floor next to his sister, hunched forward as he nervously eyed my orange vinyl coveralls and goggled headgear.

“It’s okay,” I said shaking my head in puzzlement at this unusual display of contrition. Rupert had never been known to apologize for the messes he created. “You’re not in trouble.” I cleared my throat to emphasize the clarification. “
This
time.”

I returned to the home improvement book to scan through the list once more.

“Check. Check. Check,” I repeated to myself as I made another adjustment to my face mask and goggles. These last two items weren’t actually cited in the how-to manual as required equipment, but given my late Uncle Oscar’s eccentricities, I wasn’t taking any chances. Who knew what might be lurking in the crawl spaces behind these walls? I slapped my gloved hands together optimistically—I knew what I was hoping to find.

For a pudgy cat with few cares in the world beyond scarfing down cat food and sedately soaking up the sun, Rupert had recently developed a unique and incredibly useful talent. Over the past couple of months, he had sniffed out several tightly wrapped bundles that my late Uncle Oscar had apparently hidden throughout the apartment prior to his death—bundles that contained wads of cash.

Rupert had found the first stash in the bedroom, stuffed inside the box springs beneath the mattress. During one of his early-morning episodes of high-octane exuberance, he had shredded a hole in the fibrous cloth that covered the open end of the box spring’s wooden framing. Soon after he climbed inside to look around, his energy spurt petered out, and he settled in for a nap.

Despite Isabella’s best efforts to guide me, it had taken the better part of an afternoon to find him. All that was visible from beneath the bed was a Rupert-sized bulge pressing down on the fabric cover of the box spring. After several sharp pokes from the bottom side of the fabric, I’d finally convinced him to leave his new hiding place. You can imagine my surprise when a packet of dollar bills followed a disgruntled Rupert out his improvised exit in the fabric covering of the box spring.

Since that first discovery, Rupert had ferreted out bundles of money from all sorts of nooks and crannies: in the false bottom of a cupboard drawer, taped inside the covering of a light fixture, and—in a situation that had required an extensive Rupert-extraction operation—in the six-inch crawl space behind the washer and dryer.

Oscar must have been squirreling away this cash for years; the bills spanned a wide range of serial numbers and print dates. The pieces of paper were wrinkled and worn from use, and each one carried a slightly greasy fragrance. This was, presumably, the scent that Rupert’s olfactory glands had honed in on: It was that of his favorite dish, my Uncle Oscar’s fried chicken.

I peered through my goggled glasses at the room around me. This was the kitchen where my uncle had spent countless hours cooking up his signature recipe. It had been almost a year since his death, but I could still picture him, standing over the stove, grumbling into his various pots and pans.

Oscar had been a crotchety old man with a wide stomach, thinning white hair, and a short stocky body that a long life had worn smooth around the edges. His regular wardrobe had rarely varied from a navy-blue collared shirt and pants, both of which were almost always dusted with flour and dotted with flecks of grease. His typically dour expression, however, had masked a warm, caring soul, albeit one that carried more than its fair share of eccentricities.

I chuckled softly into my mask. It was no surprise that Oscar had resorted to his own methods for ensuring the safekeeping of his money. He had been deeply skeptical of modern banking and financial institutions. The highrise office towers of downtown San Francisco that shadowed Jackson Square had been the regular recipients of his scorn and derision.

“Stiff-suited . . . moneygrubbing
crooks . . . ”
he would grumble under his breath with a dismissive shrug at the scrapered skyline that represented the physical embodiment of the city’s thriving financial industry. “
Bah!
You can’t trust ’em.”