By Ed Staskus

   Even though Mr. Moto didn’t know how to think, he did his fair share of thinking. There was no sense of getting on the wrong side of the high priests. It was a breezy sunny morning. What he could see of New York City looked good. He squatted on the platform of the fire escape, checking out Hell’s Kitchen, and wondered, why is there something rather than nothing?

   There was a lot of everything in the big city, as far as he could see. It was true he slept more than not, sometimes sixteen hours a day, but between sightseeing on window ledges, visiting next-door stoops and roofs, and prowling the land, he saw enough. Where did it all come from? Where was it all going? What was it all about?

   “To be or not to be” was what he thought he knew. Where had he heard that? It might have been the junkie in the alley who was always mumbling to himself. Was that what it was all about? Was it all just something and not nothing and never mind everything in between? It was the simplest explanation, and the one he liked the most, but there was something about it that didn’t sit right with him. He never knew his father, but he remembered his mother. That was where he came from. He came from her. Everything had to come from somewhere. He flopped on his side, raised a hind leg, and started licking his butt. He kept himself clean as a whistle, even though he had never seen a clean whistle in his life.

   As far as he could tell, even though he couldn’t read, there were five concepts that philosophy revolved around, which were language, knowledge, truth, being, and good. He couldn’t talk, so it got whittled down to four in his world. The truth was always up for grabs, leaving three. There was no need wasting time arguing about what was right and wrong. He knew good and evil when he saw it. When it came to knowledge, he knew what he knew. “Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.” That left being, and being a cat, he was solid with that gospel truth. He was always being, no matter what he was doing. That’s what life was all about. Be true to yourself.

   It was about eating and drinking, too. He couldn’t think straight without food and drink. He was a stickler for fresh water in his bowl. He got cross if it was stale. Stan gave him canned fish in the morning, he ate all of it every morning, and the rest of the day nibbled on dry food. He had to throw his weight around every so often when Stan forgot about him. It paid to stay bulked up.

   Mr. Moto didn’t like “The unexamined life is not worth living.” If that were true, most lives weren’t worth living. Socrates was full of bull. Besides, who had the time to examine everything they did all the time? He never examined his own life. He didn’t know a single other cat, nor had he heard of any, who did. He didn’t believe the four-legged world ever did. He didn’t think many of the two-legged did, either, at least not in his neck of the world. Who was Socrates to say their lives weren’t worth living? No wonder 501 Athenians poisoned him when they got the chance. He must have been a pain in the ass.

   Mr. Moto lay on his stomach with his front paws stretched out. He looked like the Sphinx. He felt calm like Buddha. He purred deep in his throat like Felix the Cat. Some bluestocking said it is never right to lie. Should that idea be universally applied? If everybody lied, trust would disappear, so lying is wrong in all cases, is what the do-gooders said. What a lot of more bull! Mr. Moto distrusted almost everybody, and it stood him in good stead. He was able and willing to lie to anybody he didn’t trust, anybody who might be a menace to him. Whatever works was his motto. He only tipped the scales at fifteen pounds and had to watch his step. There were plenty of rats in the city bigger than him. His chief goal was survival. “We must all cultivate our own wisdom,” Voltaire said. That was more like it, more to his liking.

   He was taking the air on the fire escape, the wrought iron stairs bolted to the front of the building. It was where he did his best thinking. It was also where he stayed abreast of the street’s comings and goings. The World Series, whatever that was, was on everybody’s lips. Everybody was saying it was the Subway Series. It was starting tomorrow. He heard Dottie say she was going to be on the picture box, talking to one of the big men, although he was a small man, somebody by the name of Pee Wee Reese. Somebody sitting on the stoop next door was reading Sports Illustrated. Micky Mantle with a bat in his hands was on the cover.

   When he looked down at the sunlit pavement, watching Dottie come out the front door and start off to school, he didn’t like what he saw. A black Chevy panel truck was parked at the curb. Two men in dark suits, not overalls, wearing fedoras pulled down over their eyes, were getting out of the truck. They weren’t in the trades, that was for sure. He thought they looked like guinea gangsters.

   When they blocked Dottie’s way and reached for her, clamping a sweet-smelling damp handkerchief over her mouth, the black cat, his ears pinned back, sprang into action. He raced down the steps of the fire escape. He whirled on the sidewalk and ran straight at the struggle. Dottie was kicking furiously at the men. Leaping, he jumped over the back of the man holding her from behind, over the top of Dottie’s head, and on to the face of the man facing him. The man screamed as Mr. Moto raked his face with his razor-sharp claws.

   “Hey, what’s going on?” Sports Illustrated on the stoop shouted, standing up.

   The hoodlum grabbed at the cat, got hold of him, and flung him away. Blood gushed from his face and one eye. Mr. Moto pivoted and went at him again, coming up short but landing on his chest, where he grabbed with all his claws digging into the man’s shirt. The goon flung him off again, bellowing curses. The cat landed on all fours and glared up at him. The man’s face was gushing blood and his shirt was starting to ooze red, too.

   Dottie went limp from the chloroform on the handkerchief and the men dragged her to the back of the panel truck, tossing her inside, and slamming the doors shut. An empty bottle of Sneaky Pete rolled into the gutter. Mr. Moto went after them again but had to dodge bullets from the soon-to-be-Scarface, and skittered behind a trash can, more bullets ripping through the thin metal of the can and ricocheting off concrete.

   The man on the stoop threw himself flat, his magazine forgotten, cradling his head with his arms. When the truck started pulling away, heads appearing in windows, and shouts that it was gunfire, not backfire, Mr. Moto ran after it. When he jumped at one of the rear wheels, hoping to puncture it, all he got for his trouble was two ripped-out claws and bruised ribs when he was flung off the spinning steel belt to the curb.

   He looked up at the disappearing truck and in a flash memorized the license plate number. Back on the sidewalk he pulled a scrap of paper from the overturned trash can and wrote the letters and numbers on it in his own blood. Even though he didn’t know how to write, he could recreate symbols. He didn’t know what the symbols meant, but they had to mean something. Everything meant something. He would take the symbols to Stan. He would know what they meant.

   He heard a whistle. A policeman on the beat was running up the sidewalk. A woman yelled out her window, “It’s the Riddman girl!”

   “What happened?” the policeman yelled up to the woman.

   “I don’t know, two guys were dragging her. She looked like she was knocked out. They threw her into their truck, started shooting at some cat, and raced away.”

   “Did you see their faces?”

   “No.”

   “How about the plates?”

   “No.”

   “Which way did they go?”

   “It’s a one way only street. They went that way.”

   It wasn’t any better sledding with anybody else. Everybody had seen what happened, but nobody knew what the trail looked like. The patrolman wrote down what he heard and waited for the squad car he knew was coming. He could already hear a siren in the distance.

   Mr. Moto felt bad. If he wanted to be honest with himself, he didn’t feel up to snuff, at all. He had stanched the bleeding by licking his paw, but he was having a hard time breathing. His chest hurt like the devil. When he tried to walk, he felt like he had strained a tendon or a ligament in his right back leg. He was a mess. He limped up the walk. He kept a grip on the scrap of paper with his canine teeth. There wasn’t any way he was going to be able to scurry up the wood trim to the awning to the second-floor platform and back to the open window of the apartment. He waited at the front door until the woman in Apartment 1A came running out, slipped into the foyer, and through the quietly closing inner door.

   He dragged himself up to the fourth floor, to the hallway window, and gingerly hopped up on the sill. He went out to the fire escape and back into the apartment he shared with Stan and Dottie through the living room window. 

   The apartment was a living room, dining room, kitchen, bathroom, and two bedrooms. He went to his water bowl first, caught his breath, and lapped up enough to slake his dry mouth. He staggered to Dottie’s room, stopping inside the door to catch his breath again. His chest hurt something awful. He clawed his way up onto the bed, let the scrap of paper fall from his mouth, and lay there until his wheezing tapered off.

   A minute later he fell into a dreamless sleep, one more life gone.

Excerpted from the crime novel “Cross Walk.”

Ed Staskus posts on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Made in Cleveland  http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”