The Akeley living room was as crazily cluttered as when Phil last saw
it. No one had done much, if any, cleaning up after the fight. In
addition, there were a large number of dirty plates, cups and glasses
abandoned in odd places. Judging by the remnants of food and drink in
them, three informal meals had been consumed since last night, not
counting snacks.
The black velvet curtains at the far end of the room had been pulled
aside, revealing the altar Sacheverell had prepared for Lucky in what
had been the dining room a century ago. It consisted of a small table
or box set against the far wall and covered with reddish-brown velvet
that trailed to the floor in graceful folds. Fastened to the wall above
it was an ancient ankh or crux ansata, the Egyptian cross with looped
top, symbolizing procreation and life. On lower tables to either side
were large unlit candles and statuettes of many of the Egyptian gods:
queenly Isis, whip-wielding Osiris, jackal-jawed Anubis and cat-headed
Bast herself.
And there was the same profusion of cats, though they were no longer
peaceful as they'd been when Lucky was in the house. They stalked about
with ears drawn back and fur fluffed fearsomely; they ambushed each
other from behind and under furniture; they snarled and jumped whenever
they met. Those wolfing the bits of food left on plates would lift
their heads every few seconds to hiss warnings. The only one asleep was
impiously curled on Lucky's altar.
The dark low table inlaid with a silver pentacle had been righted and
placed in the center of the room. On it were glasses and a bottle of
brandy. Beside it sat Juno Jones, still in her dowdy dress with the
ripped sleeves hanging from her meaty arms, but with her flower covered
hat once more jammed down over her cropped blonde hair. She looked
sullen and on the defensive.
Across the table from her, leaning forward in their chairs, sat Dion
da Silva and Morton Opperly. Both of them stood up as Sacheverell
triumphantly swept Phil and Dytie into the room, saying "Our council of
war--or perhaps I should say muscular peace--is complete!"
Opperly smiled courteously, seeming completely at home in these wild,
wonderful and crummy surroundings; perhaps a mind hungry for any and
all facts liked a grubby bohemian atmosphere.
Dion da Silva on the other hand, as soon as he spotted Dytie, put
down the big glass of whiskey he was holding and whooped out three or
four words in a foreign language, then caught himself and changed to,
"'Allo, darling! Great see. 'Allo, 'allo, 'allo."
By this time he had Dytie in his arms and was hugging her with a
hungriness that struck Phil as distinctly unbrotherly. She wasn't being
any too sisterly about it herself. But finally she pushed him away with
a gasp. "Thas 'nough," she told him. "Great see too, dumbhead. 'Bout
time turn up."
Dion looked hurt for as long as it took him to get his glass of
whiskey. "Know what doing?" he asked his sister excitedly.
"Yes, get drunk," she told him and whispered to Phil, "Know what Dion
short for? God wine. Pick good name, eh?"
"No get drunk," Dion asserted with some dignity. Then his excitement
got the better of him again and he burst out with, "We finding
pussycat!"
There was a giggle that Phil recognized. Looking around, he saw Mary
Akeley sitting in her alcove backed by her shelves of wax dolls and
busy at work sewing clothes for another under a large magnifier.
Sacheverell's witch-nosed young wife had shifted to an almost
off-the-bosom evening dress and tied a huge green bow around her coarse
dark hair.
"That man, he cuts me up in little pieces every time he says a word,"
she gurgled, without pausing in her work. "He's so cute."
"Thanks, sweetheart," Dion replied, gayly waving his glass at her, "I
cute all over. All full s'prises. Show sometime."
Dytie suppressed a guffaw and whispered to Phil, "'Member tell you: two
legs, milk glands?" Phil nodded, though he judged that Dion's interest
in Mary didn't nearly come up to his thirsty adoration of Dora Pannes.
The satyr (Phil felt shocked at how glibly the word came into his mind)
was just keeping his hand in.
Sacheverell ignored the flirtatious interchange. His sun-burned
features gleamed with controlled excitement. "The young lady is Dytie
da Silva, Dion's sister," he told Opperly and Juno. Then he turned to
Phil. "I suppose you're wondering why Dr. Opperly and Señor da Silva
are here. Well, I brought them along with me from the Foundation
because both of them are genuinely interested in _him_, and among the
lot of us I think we have a very good chance of delivering _him_ from
his enemies."
"What he mean, him?" Dytie asked Phil. "He means pussycat?"
Phil nodded.
"I mean the Green One," Sacheverell confirmed a bit reprovingly. "I
mean Bast Returned, the Bringer of Love and Concord."
Dytie didn't bother with that, but went on to whisper to Phil, "He say
Op'ly. Op'ly nice slim man there good face? Meet us please."
Sacheverell was getting set for a speech and he gave Phil a faintly
pained look when the latter performed the desired introduction.
Dr. Opperly surprised Phil by gallantly kissing Dytie's hand and
then not letting go of it. He didn't behave at all like a scientist
of eighty-plus years should. And Dytie turned on a lot more charm
than Phil recalled her using on him. As the two of them stood there
murmuring happy but probably highly intelligent nothings to each other,
Phil felt a jealous impulse to call out to Opperly, "Wait until you
see her real legs," but he somehow suspected that Opperly wouldn't be
shocked at Dytie's real legs or anything about her. He had noted a look
of surprise come into Opperly's face as the latter took Dytie's hand,
and from his own experience he'd known why, but Opperly's surprise had
turned not to revulsion, but to eager interest.
Opperly's voice suddenly became sharp, clear and romantic: "I'd be
delighted to, Miss da Silva."
Dytie turned to the others with a self-satisfied smile. "Op'ly me got
much talk 'bout," she announced. "'Scuse please. Dion you take care
pussycat business me."
And she and Dr. Opperly strolled out through the dining room arm in
arm, beaming at each other and chatting happily.
Sacheverell looked after them a shade critically. "They don't seem to
have any great regard for the importance of the situation, I must say,
so we'll carry on by ourselves in making plans to rescue the Green One.
Mr. Gish, what have you to contribute?"
In a few sentences Phil sketched how he'd found Lucky at Fun
Incorporated, lost him again, then caught up with him at the Humberford
Foundation just before Dora Pannes grabbed him.
As soon as Phil finished, Mary Akeley cut in. She was through sewing
clothes and had begun to put them on a relatively bulky doll which
Phil recognized as the portrait of Moe Brimstine she'd started on
last night. To his amazement, Phil noticed that she was even putting
underwear on the doll and slipping almost microscopically tiny objects
into its pants pockets with a tiny tweezer.
She said, "Did you happen to find out, Phil, why little old Dr. Romadka
kidnapped those three cats of ours?"
Phil explained, as briefly and unsickeningly as he could, what had
happened to them.
Mary reached over her shoulder and got the doll that was the image of
Dr. Romadka. She fixed on it her witchiest stare.
"Slow, slow acid dripped on your forehead," she incanted with a
sincerity that sent gooseflesh coursing under Phil's shirt. "And I hope
it's days before it gets in your eye. That's the first and mildest of
your torments." She picked up the doll she'd been dressing and informed
it, "That goes for you, too. After the acid really gets in the first
eye, we deviate to other parts of your body. To begin with...."
A sudden cat fight prevented Phil from finding out just how nasty
Mary Akeley's imagination could get. Sacheverell separated the five
squalling combatants with a few painless but strategic kicks. Then he
hitched up his turquoise slacks and said, looking at his wife severely,
"Now perhaps we can forget all hates and other dark vibrations and get
down to business. Here's the situation, Mr. Gish. Earlier today, Juno
overheard her husband Jackie tell Cookie where Billig and Mr. Brimstine
are hiding...."
"Just Moe Brimstine," Juno corrected dourly.
"Comes to the same thing," Sacheverell went on. "Now Jackie and Cookie
are safely asleep upstairs...."
"Yes," Juno butted in again, "but they're not going to stay that way
too much longer."
"Not after what you put in their whiskey?" Sacheverell asked her with a
thin smile.
"Listen," Juno told him, "those two guys have had more things in their
whiskey than ever got wrote down in books jerks like you read. They're
tough, the little punks."
"Well, if they do wake up, I'm sure you can take care of the two of
them. So there's the situation, Mr. Gish, and the only trouble is
that Mrs. Jones won't tell us where Mr. Brimstine is. She started to,
but then she shut up like an air lock. We've pleaded with her, we've
implored her, we've promised her things. I've done my best to explain
to her just how cosmically important it is that the Green One be served
and worshipped properly, so that he will be able to change the world.
Señor da Silva flattered and jollied her, and Dr. Opperly was friendly
as anything. But she just won't talk."
"I sure won't talk to nuts like you," the female wrestler told him
wrathfully. "If you hadn't started acting so squirrely, I'd have
probably spilled it straight off. But I'm not the sort of person who
likes to be jollied or anything else--"
"'Scuse please," Dion interrupted. "No jolly, really mean. Much like
you, Juno Jones. Big strong woman."
"And I don't enjoy nut talk," Juno said to Sacheverell, ignoring da
Silva. "Every crazy reason you gave me for talking made me that much
surer I wouldn't." She took a drink and turned toward Phil, her elbows
on her correspondingly large knees. "Now, with you it's different," she
said. "You got a nut's idea of food, but outside of that you're pretty
human. And I gotta admit you're a gutsy little guy, because I saw you
go up against Brimstine and from what I hear you did some more of the
same later. But the main thing is that you own this crazy cat, or at
least you was looking for it when I first met you. And I don't believe
you had any nut ideas about it, though I thought so at the time. That
right, Phil? Or are you planning to do something cosmic with that cat?"
"I just want to find it," Phil said honestly.
"That settles it for me. It's your cat and you got a right to know
where it is, even if you get killed trying to get it and I get into
all sorts of mucking trouble for telling you. You want I should tell
you in private, Phil, or just say it right out in front of all these
screwballs?"
"Thank you, Juno," Phil said quietly. "Just say it right out."