‘We haven’t done anything wrong,’ said the kid. ‘Not here, anyway.’
‘You never know, with governments. Just sit still here, kid. I’ll take a look.’
People did look at Maurice when he stalked into the building, but it seemed that in a town beset by rats a cat was quite popular. A man did try to pick him up, but lost interest when Maurice turned and clawed the back of his hand.
The queue wound into a big hall and passed in front of a long trestle table. There, each person showed their piece of paper to two women in front of a big tray of bread, and were given some bread. Then they moved on to a man with a vat of sausages, and got considerably less sausage.
Watching over all this, and occasionally saying something to the food servers, was the mayor. Maurice recognized him instantly because he had a gold chain around his neck. He had run across a lot of mayors since working with the rats. This one was different from the rest. He was smaller, far more worried, and had a bald spot that he’d tried to cover with three strands of hair. He was a lot thinner than other mayors Maurice had seen, too. He didn’t look as if he’d been bought by the ton.
So… food is scarce, Maurice thought. They’re having to ration it out. Looks like they’ll be, needing a piper any day now. Lucky for us we arrived just in time…
He walked out again, but this time a bit faster, because he realized that someone was playing a pipe. It was, as he feared, the kid. He’d put his cap on the ground in front of him, and had even accumulated a few coins. The queue had bent round so that people could hear him, and one or two small children were actually dancing.
Maurice was only an expert on cat singing, which of standing two inches in front of other cats and screaming at them until they give in. Human music always sounded thin and watery to him. But people tapped their feet when they heard the kid play. They smiled for a while.
Maurice waited until the kid had finished the tune. While the queue was clapping, he sidled up behind the kid, brushed up against him and hissed, ‘Well done, fish-for-brains! We’re supposed to be inconspicuousl Come on, let’s go. Oh, grab the money, too.’
He led the way across the square until he stopped so suddenly that the kid almost trod on him.
‘Whoops, here comes some more government,’ he said. ‘And we know what these are, don’t we… ?’
The kid did. They were rat-catchers, two of them. Even here, they wore the long dusty coats and battered black top hats of their profession. They each carried a pole over one shoulder, from which dangled a variety of traps.
From the other shoulder hung a big bag, the kind you really wouldn’t want to look inside. And each man had a terrier on a string. They were skinny, argumentative dogs, and growled at Maurice when they were dragged past.
The queue cheered as the men approached, and clapped when they both reached into their bags and held up a couple of handfuls of what looked, to Maurice, like black string.
‘Two hundred today!’ shouted one of the rat-catchers.
One of the terriers lunged at Maurice, tugging frantically on its string. The cat didn’t move. Probably only the stupid-looking kid heard him say, in a low voice, ‘Heel, fleabag! Bad dog!’
The terrier’s face screwed up in the horribly worried expression of a dog trying to have two thoughts at the same time. It knew cats shouldn’t talk, and this cat had just talked. It was a terrible problem. It sat down awkwardly and whined.
Maurice washed himself. It was a deadly insult.
The rat-catcher, annoyed at such a cowardly performance from his dog, jerked it away.
And dropped a few of the black strings.
‘Rat tails!’ said the kid. ‘They really must have a problem here!’
‘A bigger one than you think,’ said Maurice, staring at the bunch of tails. ‘Just pick those up when no-one’s looking, will you?’
The kid waited until people weren’t looking towards them, and reached down. Just as his fingers touched the tangle of tails a large, shiny black boot trod heavily on it.
‘Now, you don’t want to go touching them, young sir,’ said a voice above him. ‘You can get plague, you know, from rats. It makes your legs explode.’ It was one of the rat-catchers. He gave the kid a big grin, but it was not a humorous one. It smelled of beer.
‘That’s right, young sir, and then your brains come down your nose,’ said the other rat-catcher, coming up behind the kid. ‘You wouldn’t dare use your hanky, young sir, if you got the plague.’
‘My associate has as usual put his finger right on it, young sir,’ said the first rat-catcher, breathing more beer into the kid’s face.
‘Which is more than you’d be able to do, young sir,’ said Rat-catcher 2, ‘because when you get the plague, your fingers go all—’
‘ Your legs haven’t exploded,’ said the kid. Maurice groaned. It was never a good idea to be rude to a smell of beer. But the rat-catchers were at the stage where, against all the odds, they thought they were funny.
‘Ah, well said, young sir, but that’s because lesson one at the Guild of Rat-catchers’ school is not letting your legs explode,’ said Rat-catcher 1.
‘Which is a good thing ‘cos the second lesson is upstairs,’ said Rat-catcher 2. ‘Oh, I am a one, aren’t I, young sir?’
The other rat-catcher picked up the bundle of black strings, and his smile faded as he stared at the kid. ‘Ain’t seen you before, kid,’ he said, ‘And my advice to you is, keep your nose clean and don’t say nothing to nobody about anything. Not a word. Understand?’
The kid opened his mouth, and then shut it hurriedly. The rat-catcher grinned his awful grin again.
‘Ah. You catch on quick, young sir,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we’ll see you around, eh?’
‘I bet you’d like to be a rat-catcher when you grow up, eh, young sir,’ said Rat-catcher 2, patting the kid too heavily on the back.
The kid nodded. It seemed the best thing to do. Rat-catcher 1 leaned down until his red, pock-marked nose was an inch away from the kid’s face.
‘If you grow up, young sir,’ he said.
The rat-catchers walked away, dragging their dogs with them. One of the terriers kept looking back at Maurice.
‘Very unusual rat-catchers they have hereabouts,’ said the cat.
‘I haven’t seen rat-catchers like them before,’ said the kid. ‘They looked nasty. Like they enjoyed it.’
‘I haven’t seen rat-catchers who’ve been so busy but still have nice clean boots,’ said Maurice.
‘Yes, they did, didn’t they…’ said the kid.
‘But even that’s not as odd as the rats round here,’ said Maurice, in the same quiet voice, as though he was adding up money.
‘What’s odd about the rats?’ said the kid.
‘Some of them have very strange tails,’ said Maurice.
The kid looked around the square. The queue for bread was still quite long, and it made him nervous. But so did the steam. Little bursts of it puffed up from gratings and manhole-covers all over the place, as if the whole town had been built on a kettle. Also, he had the distinct feeling that someone was watching him.
‘I think we ought to find the rats and move on,’ he said.
‘No, this smells like a town with opportunities,’ said Maurice. ‘Something’s going on, and when something’s going on, that means someone’s getting rich, and when someone’s getting rich, I don’t see why that shouldn’t be m—us.’
‘Yes, but we don’t want those people killing Dangerous Beans and the rest of them!’
‘They won’t get caught,’ said Maurice. ‘Those men wouldn’t win any prizes for thinking. Even Hamnpork could run rings round ’em, I’d say. And Dangerous Beans has got brains coming out of his ears.’
‘I hope not!’
‘Nah, nah,’ said Maurice, who generally told people what they wanted to hear, ‘I mean our rats can out-think most humans, OK? Remember back in Scrote when Sardines got in that kettle and blew a raspberry at the old woman when she lifted the lid? Hah, even ordinary rats can out-think humans. Humans think that just because they’re bigger, they’re better—Hold on, I’ll shut up, someone’s watching us…’
A man carrying a basket had stopped on his way out of the Rathaus and was staring at Maurice with a good deal of interest. Then he looked up at the kid and said, ‘Good ratter, is he? I’ll bet he is, a big cat like that. Is he yours, boy?’
‘ Say yes,’ Maurice whispered.
‘Sort of, yes,’ said the kid. He picked Maurice up.