Saturday night, Dico had to admit, was made warmer by the presence of the cat sleeping curled up against him, but in the morning, Rose's money was gone, the market was closed and he was as hungry as ever.
"Now what?" he asked.
"Watch," the cat told him. It flicked its tail while considering those strolling past the shops still open on the far side of First Street, past the bakery, the Middle Eastern Grocery and the various coffee bars.
Selecting its prey, it said, "Come along, stick close to me and don't be surprised at anything."
Then it scampered kittenishly up to a middle-aged lady with a good haircut and an expensive-looking jogging suit and stopped her by putting its paws on her knee and looking pleadingly up into her face.
"Oh, what a sweet kitty!" she said, stooping down to scratch its ears and whiskers. "You must belong to someone to be so friendly."
"Oh, yes, pretty lady, I do. My master is that clever young ventriloquist you see there. We had a nice house like you and lovely clothes and delicious food, but my master lost his highly paid computer job and now we depend on the kindness of strangers." The cat nudged the lady's hand and purred mightily while the woman curiously inspected Dico to see if he was moving his lips. "Oh, please, purrritty lady, if you could only spare a few dollars so my master could buy some toiletries and our bus fare to the laundromat so he could apply for jobs, we'd be ever so grateful."
The lady looked around but nobody else seemed to have heard the cat. She stared even more curiously at Dico, who gave her an embarrassed smile and shrugged, hoping she wouldn't call the cops.
"I don't know what your problem is, fellow, but this is a really clever cat and you're a marvelous ventriloquist. You two ought to be onstage instead of here in the streets."
"I keep telling my master this, pretty lady, but he's very shy because he is so poor," the cat told her. "Though proud."
"Look, there's an open mike tomorrow night at the University Pub. Why don't you and kitty come and sign up?" she said to him, opening her purse to extract a ten, which she placed in his hand. To the cat she said, "A clever boots like this sweet kitty will get you spotted, and someone might give you a job. Don't let him spend it on drugs or booze, will you, kitty?"
"Oh, no, pretty lady, I am my master's only vice. Isn't that so, master?"
"Uh, yeah. That's right. What the cat said," Dico agreed, nodding. The woman gave the cat a final scritch and stroke and, without another nod to Dico, was away down the sidewalk.
* * *
The hit man made it into Seattle Saturday evening, climbing painfully to his second-story condo on Queen Anne Hill to clean up and sleep. He awoke in desperate need of something to drink. He scarcely had been able to stay on the bike, the way his side hurt, and there was a liquor store just a couple of blocks away.
Now, the hit man was not himself an alcoholic, nor was he addicted to drugs. Those habits would have made him unreliable and therefore unworthy of his calling. No, he was simply someone who was good at something bad and didn't much mind the job in the ordinary run of things. There was something a bit missing in his makeup that made him look at other people's unwanted problems, be they relatives, former friends or business associates, as if they were motes in a video game and he was the eternal Pac-Man. He was not, as any psychologist would have insisted, purely evil, but neither was he very good. Mostly, he simply had the feeling that he was the only conscious person in the world and that all other people played out their lives unaware of him—unless he interrupted. So although he was very worldly and very wary, he was a little startled to be accosted on his quest to the liquor store by the bundle of rags huddled near a Dumpster.
"Spare a buck for a poor old woman, young man?" the bag lady asked.
Since he was in considerable pain, he was displeased to be accosted, nor was he feeling any more generous than usual, nor was he pleased to be intruded upon in his quest. "Fuck off," he growled under his breath and kept walking. But she was in front of him, groveling and whining. "Look, son, you look like you can spare it, and I haven't had a bite to eat in days . . ."
She was looking up into his face. He didn't like it when people did that. He dug in the pocket of his leather jacket, but instead of change, he brought out the blade. "Want to know how I got so rich, gramma?" he asked, and flicked it open.
She didn't even back off a pace. "Oh, Bobby," she said, sounding pleasantly surprised, as if she recognized him. She clucked her tongue at him as if he was writing dirty words on the blackboard instead of getting ready to cut her. "All these years, all these lives, and you've never learned, have you? Do you really still blame yourself for failing your queen so that she killed you in the prime of life? You were a very good huntsman and you did the right thing, you know."
"You're nuts," he said.
"Maybe," she said. "But you're a toad."
And he was. It was magic, it was something the wicked witch usually did instead of the fairy godmother, but it was within her power, and it was after all self-defense.
He didn't change in appearance. However, he dropped the knife and hopped in a startled way toward the Dumpster.
Felicity left him for a moment until she found, in a mud puddle toward the back of the building, a furious toad with an attitude that wouldn't quit. She pocketed the toad, fastening a Velcro strip over its warty head while it croaked indignantly, and led the crazy man to the emergency room entrance at Harborview. They had a psych ward. She hoped he had insurance.
Later, in another part of Seattle, she found another Dumpster, this one by a grocery store.
A harried-looking young woman in jeans and a T-shirt was just rushing out of the Safeway with a bag full of groceries. "Please, lady, spare an old woman a crust of bread," Felicity said.
The woman paused and dug in her sack. She looked a little scared of the bag lady but said civilly enough, "I don't have much in here but baby formula and Pampers, unless you'd like the pint of ice cream I bought for my kid?"
"Oh, I would love ice cream," the bag lady said. "It's been forever since I've had a taste."
"I could give you the money and you could go get something more nutritious," the mother offered.
"Oh, no, they won't let me in there. Say I scare off the customers. The ice cream will do fine. Though I hate to take it from a little child."
"That's okay. I'll go get him some more." She took it from the bag and handed it, gingerly, as if afraid the bag lady would draw a weapon or an accomplice would jump out and grab her. "To be honest, I probably wouldn't have stopped most days, but I got laid off this morning. I may need your advice on a good street corner for me and my kids pretty soon." Her voice sounded shaky and scared and her words just spilled out, nervously, as if she had to talk to someone.
"Oh, I heard about the layoffs. Just terrible, dear. Where did you work?"
"Boeing. On the assembly line. It was a good job, but it didn't pay me enough to save anything, not with two kids I'm raising alone, and now we won't even have medical insurance if one of them gets sick . . ."
"You poor thing. You're very generous to help me when you know you and your kids'll be in a bad way soon."
Her eyes were bright with tears now. She sniffed and said, "I guess we're all in it together, aren't we?"
"Yes, indeed we are. Oh, dear, I suppose I'll just have to let this melt and drink it. I have no spoon, you see."
"Just a minute," the woman said. "I have to go back in for more ice cream anyway. I'll get you a spoon."
The baby-sitter could wait another little while. There was still money to pay her and money for groceries. She thought of how she'd feel if she had to beg for somebody's ice cream. It wasn't like the old lady was asking for money to drink or something. She really was hungry. On impulse, the young mother whipped through the store and bought a bag of apples, a box of crackers, a pound of cheese and a sausage. All things that would keep for a while, that would feed the old lady for a few days. If she could digest such things. She almost forgot the box of plastic silverware and her own ice cream.
She took the things back out to the old lady, just removing the second pint of ice cream to put with her own sack. "There, that might see you through for a little while."
"Thanks," said the old woman, and grabbed the bag and turned around with it, as if she was so hungry she couldn't wait to chow down. The young woman shrugged and started for her car, but the bag lady hailed her again and said, "Wait, dear! You forgot this."
Now in a real hurry to get home to her children, the young mother turned around. She felt the bag lady press a piece of cardboard into her hand, along with who knew what germs, and then the younger woman popped into her car and headed for home.
It wasn't until later, when the baby was chewing on a brightly colored piece of something and she realized it must have been the cardboard the old woman handled, that she took it away from the protesting baby and saw that it was two Wheel of Fortune lottery cards. She scratched off the silvery coating and saw that each card was worth twenty thousand dollars.
Later, when she'd been able to redeem the cards, she returned to the Dumpster to find the old woman and give her some of the money, but she was not there, either that time or any other time the woman returned to the Safeway. But whenever she bought groceries afterwards, she bought a lottery ticket and though she never won so much again, she always won something, a dollar, two dollars, five, ten or fifty until she found another job. In the meantime, she helped her friends who had been laid off, and when they asked her how she was making do, she told them about the bag lady. But of course, it didn't work for everyone.
* * *
Later that night, toad in her pocket, Felicity returned to her suite on the thirteenth floor of the Olympic Four Seasons Hotel. The suite was a very posh suite, and very cheap. There was no charge because the hotel, like most hotels, never acknowledged that it had a thirteenth floor. The only drawback was that Felicity had to walk up from the twelfth floor and make her own door, but that was very little trouble and required only a bit of healthful exercise and quite minor magic.
Although she had a Chinese shawl from the shop draped over the standard hotel table with her crystal set in the middle, she still needed a few things to make her suite feel like home. The phone, complete with two lines and a message machine, and the television were adequate, and her computer was set up for her to receive electronic mail worldwide via GEnie and CompuServe, but she still needed a police scanner and a fax machine. Right now her major problem was setting up a terrarium for the toad. He could stay in the bathroom for the night. She was put out with him anyway. Some creatures never learned.
* * *
They barely got back from the mall when Mama wanted to go again. "This time I don't want you kids calling the police," Mama said. "It was so embarrassing that they'd think I meant to leave you. I was just next door looking at cards the whole time, and I got frantic when I couldn't find you. Now this time, I'll take you in, and you wait for me."
But Gigi cried constantly and Hank felt bad because he couldn't quite believe Mama but he didn't want to think she was fibbing either.
Just the same, as they rode the series of buses to get to the mall, a ride which took them practically all day, every time they left, Hank would lag behind and ask for a transfer, which the driver gave him to shut the little kid up and which he duly pocketed so they could find their way home again when the security man asked and maybe this time they wouldn't call the police and Mama wouldn't be mad.
This mall was farther away than the other one and much, much bigger. Hank carefully noted that the name of it was a funny word that started with a P and then said "Center" and that they went away from the water to get there and toward Mount Rainier, which looked like the top of an ice cream cone after you'd licked the ice cream all around.
He had paid attention to the questions the policemen asked, and he also knew his house number and remembered Mama's whole name and Daddy's.
Where was Daddy now? Hank missed him terribly. Everything had been all right when they lived in the country before Daddy lost his job.
This time Mama took them straight to the McDonald's inside the mall and set them up with hamburgers and fries and shakes and told them not to move, she'd be back, and not to come looking for her or talk to strangers, even those in uniform.
Hank hoped she wasn't going to disappear again. He watched her for a long time as she walked down the long, broad corridor, then he saw a man step out of a store—the same man who came home with her in the mornings sometimes, and she walked off down the aisle with him, his arm around her and his hand on her bottom.
"Come on," Hank said to Gigi. Gigi stared at him for a moment and he said, "Come on or she'll get away again and leave us."
That made his sister start to cry again but he took her by the hand and dragged her down the mall, after Mama.
She was gone before they even got to the place she had been, though. Hank dropped Gigi's hand and ran to the exit in time to see the man putting Mama into a car and getting in himself. Hank ran outside but the car was gone. When he ran back inside, Gigi wasn't where he'd left her.