The Animal-Lover's Book of Beastly Murder by Patricia Highsmith Page B

board. The gondolier was sleeping under a blanket. The sausage smell came from a paper beside him. The rat found the remains of a sandwich, ate his fill, and curled up in a coarse, dirty rag. The gondola bobbed gently. The rat was an expert swimmer now. Many a time he had dived underwater to escape a cat that had been bold enough to pursue him into a canal. But cats didn’t care to go below the surface.
    The rat was awakened by a bumping sound. The man was standing up, untying a rope. The gondola moved away from the pavement. The rat was not alarmed. If the man saw him and came at him, he would simply jump overboard and swim to the nearest wall of stones.
    The gondola crossed the Canale Grande and entered a widish canal between huge palaces which were now hotels. The rat could smell the aromas of fresh roasting pork, baking bread, orange peel and the sharper scent of ham. Some time later, the man maneuvered the gondola to the steps of a house, got out and banged on a door with a round ring of a knocker. From the gunwale, the rat saw a decaying portion of the embankment that would offer foothold, jumped into the water and made for it. The gondolier heard the splash and stomped towards him, yelling “ Aye -yeh!” So the rat didn’t climb up at that spot, but swam on, found another accessible place and got to dry pavement. The gondolier was back at the door, knocking again.
    That day the rat met a female, a pleasant encounter in a rather damp alley behind a dress shop. It had just rained. Pushing on, the rat found a trail, almost, of sandwich ends, dropped peanuts, and hard corn kernels which he didn’t bother with. Then he found himself in a large open area. It was the Piazza San Marco, where the rat had never been. He could not see all its vastness, but he sensed it. Pigeons in greater number than he had ever seen walked about on the pavement among people who were tossing grain to them. Pigeons sailed down, spread their wings and tails and landed on the backs of others. The smell of popcorn made the rat hungry. But it was broad daylight, and the rat knew he must be careful. He kept to the angle made by the pavement and the walls of the buildings, ready to duck into a passageway. He seized a peanut and nibbled it as he hobbled along, letting the shell fall, keeping the peanut in his mouth, retrieving the other half of the peanut which held a second morsel.
    Tables and chairs. And music. Not many people sat in the chairs, and those who did wore overcoats. Here were all manner of croissant crumbs, bread crusts, even bits of ham on the stone pavement among the chairs.
    A man laughed and pointed to the rat. “Look, Helen!” he said to his wife. “Look at that rat! At this time of day!”
    “Oh! What a creature !” The woman’s shock was genuine. She was nearly sixty, and from Massachusetts. Then she laughed, a laugh of relief, amusement, and with a little bit of fear.
    “Good God, somebody’s cut his feet off!” the man said in almost a whisper. “And one eye’s gone! Look at him!”
    “Now that’s something to tell the folks back home!” said the woman. “Hand me the camera, Alden!”
    The husband did so. “Don’t do it now, the waiter’s coming.”
    “ Altro, signor? ” asked the waiter politely.
    “ No, grazie. Ah, si! Un caffe latte, per piacere. ”
    “Alden—”
    He wasn’t supposed to have more than two coffees a day, one morning, one evening. Alden knew. He had only a few months to live. But the rat had given him a curious zest, a sudden joy. He watched the rat nosing nervously in the forest of chair legs just three feet away, peering with his good eye, darting for the crumbs, eschewing the small, the inferior, the already crushed. “Do it now before he goes,” said Alden.
    Helen lifted the camera.
    The rat sensed the movement, one of potential hostility and glanced up.
    Click!
    “I think that’ll be good!” Helen whispered, laughing with a gentle happiness as if she’d just taken the