How to Moon a Cat (4 page)

That I used to work as an accountant in one of these frequently cursed buildings had caused Oscar no end of angst. He had, on more than one occasion, wondered aloud about the earthquake stability of the office building that housed my tiny cubicle.

I shook my head ruefully. I couldn’t help but wonder what my uncle would have said about my current choice of occupation.

In the days following Oscar’s death, I’d found myself unexpectedly unemployed, so the cats and I had moved into the apartment that occupied the two floors above the store. It had taken several months to clean up the place, but I was now the sole proprietor of the newly renovated Green Vase antiques shop.

The store looked altogether different from when my uncle had run it. Oscar had taken a rather unorthodox approach to his operation of the business. During his tenure, the showroom had been stacked from floor to ceiling with dusty piles of boxes and crates.

The containers had been filled with an odd assortment of my uncle’s collected trinkets. There were broken lamps, splintered walking canes, rusted-out mining pans, a wide variety of gold teeth, and, inexplicably, a full-sized stuffed kangaroo. The place had looked more like a pawnshop than an antique store.

There had been, however, a method to Oscar’s madness. What had appeared to the casual observer—and to me, quite frankly—to be a horrendous don’t-touch-anything mess was actually a carefully organized outlay of historic relics that dated back to California’s Gold Rush.

Oscar had been utterly obsessed with the time period. He had scoured the city searching for hidden remnants from that era, anything that might provide insight into the lives of those early residents. All of his findings, he’d brought back here to the Green Vase.

This section of the city had been at the heart of the Gold Rush’s population influx, entertaining multitudes of hopeful miners in its numerous bars and brothels. Shadowed hints of that long-forgotten era could still be found in the neighborhood’s historic red brick buildings—especially for someone who knew how and where to look. Uncle Oscar had been known throughout Jackson Square as just that type of “someone.”

Oscar’s fascination with the Gold Rush, however, had been more than just an intellectual curiosity. The decrepit appearance of the Green Vase showroom had dissuaded all but the most intrepid visitors, providing an effective cover for Oscar’s true occupation. The elusive old man hermit-ed behind the cracked glass door of the inhospitable-looking antiques shop had been, in fact, a treasure hunter extraordinaire.

Rather than searching for high-end showpiece artifacts, Oscar had focused his efforts on discarded scraps and thrown-away remnants from the Gold Rush time period. In Oscar’s expert hands, these leftover bits and pieces of lives lived long ago had revealed precious information about their long-dead owners. By delving into the mundane details of wealthy and influential figures from San Francisco’s past, Oscar had uncovered lost treasures that no one even knew existed.

Unfortunately, Oscar had been extremely secretive about his research, and I still had no idea what hidden significance might lie behind most of the items in his collection. I had sorted through a small portion of it, cleaned up what I could, and stored the rest in the basement for later inspection.

Were he to stop by Jackson Square today, I thought with a grin, Oscar might have trouble recognizing the showroom downstairs. Months of cleaning, scrubbing, painting, and rearranging had changed its appearance into a place that actually resembled a functioning store. The antiques shop still rarely entertained customers, but at least the neighbors had stopped complaining about the mess.

After months of trying to lure in shoppers, I had finally given up trying to compete with the well-established boutiques up and down the street. The old image of the Green Vase was well ingrained in the collective memory of San Francisco’s elite antique crowd. Despite the recent facelift, it would never have the cachet or reputation that the other Jackson Square shops enjoyed. Almost a year after Oscar’s death, the traditional sale of antiques had yet to provide a single penny of income.

With that avenue of revenue closed off, I had, instead, thrown myself into replicating Oscar’s research. I’d read everything I could get my hands on about the early history of San Francisco and had started the daunting task of cataloging the bizarre and seemingly random items from Oscar’s collection. I had no chance, I knew, of filling my late uncle’s treasure-hunting shoes, but I hoped that I might be able to grab a small toehold of his success.

In the meantime, my monetary reserves were beginning to run low. It had been several weeks since Rupert’s last cash discovery, and another wad of bills would sure come in handy.

I looked over at Rupert and Isabella, who were still watching me intently from the opposite side of the kitchen. Then, with one last adjustment to the goggles, I bent back down to the hole.

“Let’s see what’s behind this wall,” I said eagerly.

I RAN A
gloved hand across the lower half of the wall next to Rupert’s hole. For some reason, this bottom corner had only been covered by a single layer of wallpaper. An interior framing board was visible at the edge of the triangular opening.

Not so the area above the hole. It, in contrast, was plastered by a haphazard mishmash of several different pieces of textured fabric. The sheets appeared to be randomly meshed together; some had been plastered vertically, some horizontally.

I shook my head, sighing at my uncle’s craftsmanship. Oscar had been a do-it-yourself kind of guy, and he had not been one to follow the directions associated with any of the secondhand home improvement products he purchased. Still, I was intrigued by the odd transition between the lower and middle sections of the wallpaper. Perhaps this was something more than a random transition between building materials.

I breathed heavily into the mask, sucked in my lower lip, and picked up a metal hand-scraper from the collection of tools I’d spread out across the table. With the rubber tips of my gloved fingers, I ruffled the curled-up corner of the top layer of wallpaper, slid the edge of the scraper beneath it, and prepared to pull. It wasn’t until my goggled glasses were mere inches from the surface of the wall that I noticed the faded image repeated in the dizzy floral pattern of the paper.

Much of the printing on the wallpaper had deteriorated into washed-out shadows, and it was difficult to make out the detail of the picture that repeated systematically across the surface, but my eyes latched on to one example that still retained some clarity. My pulse quickened as I studied the small painted blossom. Three tiny brushstrokes formed the petals of a purple tulip.

Tulips,
I thought excitedly. That had to be significant.

Just prior to his sudden death last spring, Oscar had been researching a pair of gold cufflinks whose rodlike bars had been fashioned into the shape of a three-petaled tulip. The cufflinks had once been worn by a man named William Leidesdorff.

A charismatic figure with a secretive past, William Leidesdorff lived in San Francisco during its pre–Gold Rush–era, when it was still part of the Mexican Territory of California. A successful shipping magnate and entrepreneur who exerted a powerful political influence in the region, Leidesdorff famously succumbed to a mysterious illness days before the Gold Rush hit. He left behind a valuable estate that was tied up in the courts for years as multiple parties fought over its ownership.

Nearly twelve months earlier, right after I moved into the apartment above the Green Vase, Leidesdorff’s tulipshaped cufflinks had set me off on a trail of clues that eventually led to the decorative tulip-embossed handle on the front door of the showroom and the secret cavity mounted into the framing beneath. I smoothed my gloved hand over the faded tulip image printed on this top layer of wallpaper. I was now more certain than ever that Oscar had hidden something behind this wall.

Pushing the cotton mask up onto my forehead, I called back to my two feline observers, “I have a good feeling about this.”

Isabella turned her head and made a sharp clicking sound with her mouth. After a short pause to puzzle over these instructions, I decided to interpret her remarks as encouragement.

With the slight flick of my wrist, the scraper slid beneath the top layer of tulip-decorated paper, and it fell easily away from the wall. The stiff, brittle texture crumbled as it hit the kitchen floor, sending a poof of dustlike particles up into the air.

Fighting the urge to sneeze, I quickly pulled the mask back down over my face. My eyes watered as I leaned in to study the sheet of wallpaper I’d just uncovered. The printing on this layer was clear and distinct: a design of dime-sized tulips with the same three-petal motif.

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” I shouted to my furry spectators, my voice muffled by the mask.

Isabella began walking across the kitchen toward me, her pert pink nose lifted up into the air. Rupert held back, warily eyeing the black hole in the bottom of the wall as his sister barked out a string of sharp, trilling—but to my ears, uninterpretable—comments. I knelt down to attack the second layer with the scraper.

After another dust-releasing tear, I found myself staring at a third fabric surface. This one was splashed with a blooming collage of even larger purple tulips. The image had expanded to such a size that you could see the individual bristle marks left by the paintbrush used to make the broad three-petaled strokes of the design.

When I wedged the scraper beneath the corner of this third layer of wallpaper, the tool hit a much more solid substance. I’d reached the two-by-four framing of the wall. Instead of attaching the wallpaper to drywall, my uncle had pasted this bottom layer directly onto the wood.

“Nice technique, Oscar,” I muttered into the mask as I squinted at the white bead of Elmer’s glue forming the seam between the wallpaper and the two-by-four.

“All right, Rupert,” I said, eagerly anticipating the sight of another bundle of cash. “Let’s see what you’ve sniffed out this time.”

I tapped the handle of the scraper with the palm of my hand, and the glued edge of the wallpaper gave way. Reaching for the loose corner of the third sheet of paper, I gripped its slick surface firmly between my gloved fingers. But just as my arm tensed to pull it back, I hesitated, my anticipation shaken by a sudden shudder of apprehension.

In the recent history of the Green Vase, I reflected, the tulip symbol had another, more menacing association. The multiple tulip references my Uncle Oscar left behind had also been a warning, one that I hadn’t understood until it was too late to avoid the danger. The trail of Oscar’s tuliprelated research had led me right into the hands of his neighbor and former business partner, the nefarious Frank Napis.

Frank and Oscar had shared a mutual interest in Gold Rush history, particularly in regard to the historical figure of William Leidesdorff. They had both been searching for the obscure spider venom that induced the sleeplike coma that preceded Leidesdorff’s death.

A cold tension clenched down on my shoulders. Unlike my uncle, Frank Napis had a vicious dark side, one made all the more intimidating by his mastery of disguises. In his efforts to unveil my uncle’s secrets, Napis had threatened my life more than once.

Nearly a year ago, he had instructed his coconspirator, an ex-con named Ivan Batrachos, to slip me a dose of the Leidesdorff spider toxin. Thankfully, the effects had been reversed by the last-minute application of the antidote, a compound found in purple tulip petals. The poisoning attempt had sent Ivan back to prison; Frank Napis, however, remained at large.

Last summer, a secret group of my uncle’s former colleagues had tried to lure Napis out into the open so that the police could enforce a warrant for his arrest. Calling themselves the Vigilance Committee, the group’s efforts had triggered a massive frog infestation of San Francisco’s City Hall—an event which had caused a great deal of mayhem in the Mayor’s office—but, once more, Frank Napis had eluded capture.

Isabella sat down on the floor next to me. She gently nudged my elbow with the top of her head, and I straightened my shoulders defiantly. Napis hadn’t been seen or heard from in months, I told myself firmly. There was no way
he
was standing behind these layers of tulip wallpapering. This improvised, slapped-together construction was clearly my uncle’s work.

Pursing my lips together, I returned my attentions to the last layer of wallpaper. Once more gripping the loosened edge, I tugged at the tulip-covered fabric. There was a brief moment of resistance before the last bits of glue let go of the framing boards. Isabella jumped out of the way as the entire four-foot length peeled off with a loud renting
crack
, and I tumbled backwards onto the kitchen floor.

Isabella muttered under her breath as I dusted myself off, but she joined me at the wall when I crawled back to the expanded hole to look inside. I grabbed a flashlight and, with gloved-finger difficulty, slid the power switch to the
on
position. A dank moldy smell seeped up at me as the shaking beam of the flashlight panned the dark recess of the interior framing.

A dusty gray object sat on a ledge about a foot off the ground, next to a clump of chewed-up cardboard, a trail of tiny brown mouse pellets, and a nest of white cat hair. I rotated my head sideways, trying to position my goggleshielded glasses to get a better look.

Isabella crowded beside me to get her own visual angle into the wall. Her nose snuffled in my right ear at the clammy scent wafting up from the crevice.

Gingerly, I reached a gloved hand into the wall space, wrapped my fingers around the object, and lifted it out. As the light from the kitchen hit the undulating sides of the translucent ceramic material, the gray-colored glass turned a dust-muted green.