Animal Appetite

wet, tears, I let out a cry of ecstasy: “Uncle Jack’s desk! The picture of Aunt Claudia! The special pen set! Oh, my cousins will be thrilled!” Regaining genuine control, I asked timidly and solemnly whether it might be possible for me to take a peek at the box that bore the name of my beloved Uncle Jack.
    In response to my inquiry, the young woman disclosed yet another respect in which Damned Yankee Press had, in the eighteen years since Jack Andrews’s murder, retained what I took to be its original character: The cellar, she informed me, had rats! On her first day here, the coffee machine had broken. Instead of following the admirable American course of sending her to buy a new one, someone called Leo—her employer, I gathered—had insisted that there was a perfectly good percolator on a shelf in the basement and, with no warning about the rats, had dispatched her in search of it. The dirty, dented percolator and its frayed electric cord had rested on the box labeled with Jack Andrews’s name.
    “Did you actually see a rat?” I asked.
    She nodded.
    “It couldn’t have been a mouse?”
    Playfully wagging a finger at Rowdy, who wagged his tail in return, she shook her head and replied with the confidence of true expertise, “In my country, you too could be food.” As before, she amended the statement: “Among the poorer classes.”
    “Well,” I said, suppressing a shudder of nausea, “family pictures are priceless, and what’s the worst thing a rat can do?”
    “Bite you,” she informed me promptly. “Transmit diseases.”
    What drove me into that cellar was not really, I think, the hope of finding anything relevant either to Jack’s murder or to Professor Foley’s. Rita subsequently made much of the nature of my lies about “Uncle” Jack: In claiming kinship with Jack, she insisted, I had told the psychological truth. At the time, I felt only the impulse to touch objects that had been Jack’s: pens, pencils, paper clips, the debris of the life he’d lived in the office where he’d been poisoned.
    After extracting herself from behind the computer and the other components of the barricade, the smiling young woman led me to a door, unlatched and opened it, reached in to flick on bright fluorescent lights, and provided clear, detailed directions to the shelf where she’d found the percolator. I was embarrassed to speak my mind to Rowdy in a stranger’s presence. I therefore fell back on an effort at thought transmission: “You go first, pal, because I’m sc-sc-sc-scared!” After he’d compliantly barged ahead and gone halfway down the steep flight of dirty stairs, I had second thoughts, not about my cherished position as the alpha figure in his life, but about the possibility that where there were rats, there might also be poison.
    “Rowdy, wait!” Gathering his leash in my hands, I hurried down after him. To make mortally certain that I had full control and could prevent him from gobbling up whatever deadly snacks he might encounter, I grabbed his collar, raised his head, and kept him tucked next to me.
    The basement turned out to be a damp, musty-smell-ing version of the upstairs, but with dozens of free-standing, or in some cases free-falling, shelf units. Following the precise directions I’d been given, I turned right at a Xerox machine that had probably started to acquire value as an antique. Making my way down a sort of alleyway between shelves, I passed several eye-level landmarks the young woman had mentioned: a greasy-looking toaster oven and a box that had once contained Gordon’s Gin. A few steps past the Gordon’s, I came to a set of shelves with boxes boldly labeled with red marker. As I’d been told, on my left I found one about twice the size of a shoe box that read:
     
    JACK ANDREWS
    CONTENTS OF DESK
     
    It was sealed with heavy brown tape. Scattered on the strip of tape across the top of the box were what I hoped were coffee grounds deposited by the old percolator. After checking for anything that could possibly be rat poison, I released my grip on Rowdy’s collar, looped his leash around my left wrist, and reached for the box with both hands.
    Just as I was getting the filthy box settled on my right hipbone, where I could support it with my arm, Rowdy, with no warning whatsoever, hit the end of his leash. With the reflexes of a real dog person, instead of sensibly letting him bolt, I did exactly what I’d been schooled from birth to do. As I tightened my