all their gadgets working. But there were no signs of them tonight either. It had also occurred to him that if they had conclusive evidence on a man who was unlikely to be alone and sure to be heavily armed, they might pull everybody back for a day and swoop in later. But the neighborhood presented too much clear evidence against that theory. There were cars in all the driveways. Television sets projected moving glows on many white ceilings. If the FBI had planned to raid the house of a Mafia capo like Tosca, they wouldn't want civilians in the line of fire. There were no feds: he had the night to himself.
Tosca's house had a lawn that looked like a city park, with tall old trees at irregular intervals. There was a long driveway with a circle around a flower bed near the door, in nearly the same sort of grand miniaturization as the empty house around the corner.
He turned his attention to the house. The place would be filled with dozens of machines that were supposed to make the night go away, make the cold and the heat stay within a degree of each other, bring in images from everywhere in the world, and keep Frank Tosca safe. Considerable effort would be required to hide from the machines and stay invisible. He set to work on the electronic gear.
He climbed a tree at the corner of the house to reach the eaves and pulled himself up onto the roof. If there was a power failure and the phone lines were cut, the battery-operated internal modem in the security system control box in the house would begin dialing the headquarters of the security company. But the signal would be sent by a battery-operated transmitter that amounted to a cell phone mounted on the roof. He found the power cord for recharging the battery, followed it to the transmitter mounted near the peak, and disconnected both power sources.
Just beyond the edge of the roof was the tree he had climbed to get up here. He grasped a limb and lowered himself to the ground, walked around the house to the telephone circuit box, and pulled the wires from their connections. Next he went to the electrical circuit box and flipped the main circuit breaker to cut the power to the house.
He had not completely neutralized the alarm system. The security circuit box inside the house would have a rechargeable battery that would cause the alarm to sound when a breach occurred. All he had done was ensure that the signal wouldn't go to the security company and the police.
He circled the house, looking in the windows to find the easiest way in. He knew the system installed on the windows and doors. Each contact consisted of a magnet on one side and a switch on the other. If the magnet on the window frame moved away from the switch in the sill, the switch would close, the alarm circuit would be completed, and the alarm would sound. There was an alarm system box somewhere in the house, and it was possible to open it and turn off the system. But it was always hidden in a closet or cupboard, and Tosca had a big house.
After a few minutes he found the window he wanted. It was divided into four small panes on the top half and four on the bottom, and looked out onto a small garden of low, thick flowering plants. He used duct tape to cover one pane so it wouldn't shatter and make a loud noise. Then he wrapped his crowbar in his jacket and pushed it against the windowpane until it gave inward with a quiet crack. Nothing fell to the floor. He pulled the glass out and set it on the ground. Then he put his arm inside. He placed the magnet he had brought right beside the window at the center of the sill where the switch would be. Next he reached up to disengage the latch and raised the window. No alarm sounded.
He climbed inside, lowered the window again, took his magnet, and moved to stand with his back against the inner wall of the room. He stood still, looked into the dark house, and listened. When he was still a boy, Eddie Mastrewski had said, 'If you want to be good at night work, watch the cat.'
The cat he meant was the big yellow tomcat that Eddie allowed to live in the office of the butcher shop. Most of the time he seemed to be asleep. He slept whenever there was no strong reason not to. 'You mean now?'
'He's resting. Learn from him.'
The boy could tell that Eddie was serious. Eddie's lessons were also tests, and the boy knew it. He watched the cat for a long time before he was sure that the cat wasn't exactly sleeping, but not exactly not sleeping either. The cat's eyes were not quite closed, and he was still aware of the things that were going on around him. He kept watching the cat while he was working-weighing, wrapping, and labeling cuts of meat that Eddie's expert knifework placed on the cutting board-and he kept noticing other things. At the end of that day, Eddie said, 'What have you learned?'
The boy said, 'I'm not ready to say yet. I want to think about him and watch some more.'
'Good start. That's what the cat would do.'
The boy watched the cat get up at twilight and start to walk out the back door of the butcher shop. The boy reached for him to scoop him up so he could be watched, but the cat wriggled, turned its head slightly, and placed all four fangs on the boy's wrist, not quite breaking the skin, but showing him the possibility. The boy didn't let go, so the cat's claws came out to give him a quick, shallow slash that made the boy drop him.
The cat landed on his feet with a faint thump, and his body flowed around the door and into the evening.
The boy didn't know Eddie had been watching. 'They're faster than we are because their nervous system is quicker. If you beat a cat to something, he's letting you win.'
'Why would he do that?'
'He does it for his own reasons, and he doesn't talk. Go ahead. I'll clean up.'
It was not a small favor. Every night each surface of the shop had to be cleaned and washed, and all the metal polished before they locked the door. The boy went down and out into the weedy empty lot behind the shop, sat down on a cinder block, and waited, trying to catch sight of the cat.
It took him minutes of patient staring at denser spots in the general darkness, but then a car went by and the light of its headlights reflected off the cat's amber eyes. The boy stayed where he was, watching for three hours while the cat waited in ambush for small creatures of the night, or took up a new position and then melted into nothing more than a concentration of the darkness, something that might be a rock or a clump of grass or a piece of wood-but not a cat. And then, when the cat knew that the prey was too close to escape, it moved like electricity or a thought, and grasped the animal. The cat would hold the prey with its foreclaws and kick with the rear claws to gut it. As the boy got used to watching the cat, he began to learn the things that Eddie wanted him to see, the secrets. A cat could shape himself into a hundred motionless not-cat silhouettes. And the cat could shape time. He would wait as long as the prey thought a cat might wait, and then longer. Then he could move so quickly that the only view the boy had was a memory, an impression of something that had already happened.
When he was finally ready to tell Eddie what he had observed, Eddie said, 'Remember that you and the cat are in the same business, and he's the grand champion. He was born into it, kind of like you. People say cats are cruel because they'll play with a mouse, pretend to let him go, and then catch him again. It's not cruelty. He's practicing, trying to get better at being what he is. If you could move through the dark like a cat does, you'd live forever.'
Eddie had practically lived forever, long enough to die of his other job. Eating all those precious cuts of meat, marbled with fat and cooked over a flame, had ultimately given him a heart attack. When he finally died, Eddie's funeral was arranged by the same local undertakers who had arranged his parents' funeral, but there was a different feeling to it.
All of the women who had received special attention from Eddie, the wives who had him deliver special cuts of meat to their back doors while their husbands were away at work, showed up. So did a couple of divorcees and a widow Eddie would let come into the back of the shop to pick out their own delicacies. It was as though Eddie's secret girlfriends had agreed that if they all showed up, no gossip could possibly single out any one of them for disapproval. The boy considered their silent agreement the last noble gesture of his childhood, and was careful to be very polite and respectful to each of the ladies during the funeral and the endless reception held at Eddie's house afterward. When everyone had gone home, he went to the butcher shop and did some defrosting.
Eddie had told him at least five years earlier that when he died, the boy should thaw the big blocks of ice at the back of the freezer. The boy took the blocks to the back of the shop, and used hot water, sunshine, and a blowtorch. Inside the ice, carefully wrapped, the boy found several sealed plastic boxes. Each was labeled GIBLETS AND GIZZARDS FOR CAT. In them were stacks of hundred-dollar bills.
The next day the boy gave all the meat in the shop to neighborhood families, gave the shop and its equipment one last cleaning as Eddie had taught him, and put the house and the shop up for sale. He gave the cat to the lady florist two doors down from the shop who always bought cat treats for his daily visits to her store.
