Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

Temple knew that. She also knew, somewhere deep in her foreshortened bones, that more was going on here at the New Millennium than Synth games.

Andrei-Art had died first, during a possible attempt to steal the scepter.

That meant that someone had torpedoed his scheme as artfully as Max’s. Not just anyone. If she believed in Max, at least as a wily super-criminal—and she did, until death or disinterest did them part—his role was the coda of this operation, not the prelude.

Speaking in musical terms, could Olga Kirkov have used her disabled and disowned younger brother to fulfill a long-delayed lust for a priceless piece of her White Russian past?

And what about Count Volpe, an urbane aristocratic gigolo living on the decadent Western cult of personality? He had consulted himself into the trivial notoriety of the Vogue and Vanity Fair party-photo pages, a grave that would ultimately be unmarked. Unless he recovered the Czar Alexander scepter for his family, his past, his legacy.

Then there was Dimitri, the government functionary nobody much liked. And his big guard dogs too. Two. What couldn’t the three of them accomplish if up to no good . . . up to no Boris Godunov? Temple imagined that the New Russia was no more immune to the lure of Big Bucks than the old imperialist model.

So. Who had planned what would have been a spectacular distraction? Up in the sky! Look! It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s super-destruction—!

Had Max not been there on Synth business, the Cloaked Conjuror, Shangri-La, the two black panthers, and Hyacinth, the performing housecat, would have all plummeted to their deaths.

In that chaos, with everybody present focusing on the carnage on the floor, any ground-bound predator could have easily nipped the scepter.

Max had admitted that he’d prepared the Lexan cover for lift-off. Someone else might have observed his operation and planned to take advantage of it.

Had the scenario gone as planned, the crushed body of Max Kinsella, aka Mask Guy, would have joined everyone else on the killing floor.

But the plan had gone wrong, thanks to the hypersensitive sixth sense and super-physical strength of said Max Kinsella.

Temple paused to smile. Even when she was mad at him, she knew he was a hero. Her secret smile faded. It was hard to be a hero’s helpmate, was all.

And . . . there was something Max wasn’t telling her, as usual. He had gone very vague when she’d asked what had kept the leopards from plunging to cat heaven sixty feet below.

He’d had nothing to do with it. Couldn’t have.

And what the heck had happened to Hyacinth anyway? After she’d left the wide-load tracks in Max’s back? Shouldn’t she have been DOA on the floor far below, along with her mistress?

Nobody had asked Temple to ID a cat.

Not even her own.

Hmmm.

Since she didn’t think interrogating Midnight Louie, wherever he was, would do her one whit of good, she decided to start with the wandering Russians.

Madame Olga was to be found wandering the lower levels of the installation, a study in melancholy. The exhibition was roped off now, of course, but it was not the scene of the death and insiders were still allowed access.

“Such a pity,” Madame Olga said when she saw Temple catching up to her. “Such glory. All fallen.”

Temple eyed the fittings from the Czars’s private apartments; exotic woods inlaid with mother-of-pearl and green-veined malachite and capped with gleaming gold ormolu decorations.

“So exquisite,” Madame Olga murmured. “Hard to believe that anyone lived like that. Our Swan Lake tutus were real swans’ down. Genuine diamonds studded our tiaras. Our strained muscles and bleeding toes were our own, however. We last dancers of the Old Regime. Oh, not myself, Miss Barr. I was too young for that. But the tradition lingered on. Even today, I am watched. Not that they can stop me. Even though I defected twenty years ago, and it is now legal, old habits are stubborn and they fear bad press. They fear an ancient of days and dance like myself. Mighty Mother Russia, who feared no one, not even Napoleon! Now my home is a bankrupt republic and its rulers are the Russian Mob, not the liberated mob of the people. Bullies will always be bullies, only some will be refined.”

“Is wrong ever refined?”

Madame Olga finally glanced at Temple. “Perhaps not. So. My brother, poor wounded swan, is dead. He was poetry in Swan Lake once. Now I could not knit a missing wing for him to fly one short distance with.”

Temple instantly recognized the fairy tale of the maiden indentured to weave wings for her seven brothers before they were turned into . . . what? The proletariat?

“Someone,” Temple said, “wanted you to help steal the scepter for your brother’s sake.”