Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

She was really too small for an aerial show. She wouldn’t be very visible. But Max understood Shangri-La’s loyalty to an animal partner. He’d worked with some himself and knew that they came to love and crave the spotlight. Praise and adulation and applause could seduce any species, a sad commentary on how often it was missing in young human and animal lives.

Max blinked. He wasn’t wearing his colored contact lenses tonight: not the Mystifying Max’s feline-green ones, not the Phantom Mage’s brown ones. His eyes were their natural hue, blue, rather like the Siamese cat’s.

But he wasn’t seeing a Siamese cat on the small, half-hidden perch reserved for it.

He was seeing a small glimmer of ultra-feline green, as vivid as his own false lenses. He didn’t see much else there, just disembodied eyes, like the isolated toothy smile of the Cheshire Cat from Wonderland, implying a total cat, but winking out.

This was a kink in the perfect plan. Hyacinth hadn’t suddenly made her blue eyes green. With a shudder of premonition, Max looked harder. A dark feline form was moving onto the platform poised like a diver’s board on the edge of nothing.

It was, of course, Temple’s eternally meddling tomcat, Midnight Louie. While he posed there, invisible to everyone near and far but Max, he glanced up. Directly. At Max.

Great. Outed by an alley cat.

Then Louie pounced farther out onto his podium, as if chasing phantom prey.

Max’s mouth opened to shout a warning no cat would heed. Stop!

But Midnight Louie had already leapt back into the shadow of what passed for wings up here, besides bungee cords.

And the entire platform buckled and fell vertical to its support members. It dangled there as if held by an invisible thread of remaining support.

Sometimes seconds can take minutes. It required enormous muscular strength for Max to cling to the ceiling. His body craved the release of a bungee freefall, of stretching long to fly and then liberate the prize, seize it, rebound upward toward ungiving ceiling, then cling and skitter out the escape route.

That release was gone, Max realized. While he and Gandolph had been rigging their secret web above it all, someone else had sabotaged the actual performance platforms, and probably the bungee cord anchors too. Everything was too weak to hold . . . even an alley cat.

Who? Why? Didn’t matter. Everyone involved in the show, everything, including the cats big and small, were in peril of fatal plunges to the hard marble floor below.

Max glanced again to where Louie had appeared. His place on the brink of the disabled pedestal had been taken by a small, pale-coated cat tipped dark brown on all its extremities. Hyacinth.

A piece of moving darkness showed that Louie was now balancing at the entrance to the big cats’ divided platforms. Their huge forms shifted in the dark, the spotlights glancing off huge white fangs as they panted with pre-performance excitement and off the bejeweled green of their shining eyes.

Louie apparently intended to turn these bruisers back. Single pawed. Max saw Louie’s back hoop in the classic feline offensive/defensive pose. He could almost hear the hiss of a housecat hitting those large, rounded, jungle-sharp ears.

Max could do nothing about the cats, wild or domestic. Who ever could? His eyes flicked to the two opposing platforms where CC and Shangri-La would appear very shortly.

Great. Two booby-trapped platforms waiting for the weight of one footstep from their human victims.

One observer, with only a reach and strength so long, so fast.

Who to rescue?

Shangri-La weighed maybe a hundred and ten pounds in her airy costume. Easy save. Like Tarzan and Jane. Except . . . she was an enemy.

The Cloaked Conjuror was a confrere, a kind of friend. Max didn’t envy his hidden life and the masked face that kept him isolated, however wealthy and famous. Maybe he’d welcome a spectacular death. A Page One passing. Anyway, the man, costumed in Klingon-style platform boots and mask, must run two-fifty. Max weighed one-eighty sopping wet, which he was now, with dangerous perspiration. Bad for his grip.

The introductory music swelled to a climax to blast out the entrance bars. Echoing here above and down below. In Heaven and Hell.

The most certain save was the most personally distasteful. The most unlikely save was the most preferred. Gallantry said rescue the woman. Personal druthers said preserve the fellow magician.

Time for thought was done. The spotlights brightened on each platform, forty feet apart. A lithe figure in fluttering white stepped forward. A massive Darth Vader–like persona in black stepped forward.

Max swung out from the ceiling, dark but neither light nor heavy.

He swept out and down, catching Shangri-La’s torso in one arm, and rappelled off the side wall to deposit her in the niche where Midnight Louie held the big cats at bay. Maybe she was too light to tip the balance.