“They always say that,” Phil reassured her with timid cheeriness, “and it never happens.”

She shrugged fatalistically. “This time it will.”

“I heard the president talking about something like that tonight,” Phil said, “but he sounded drunk.”

She shrugged.

“But Fun Incorporated is supposed to have all sorts of connections with the government,” Phil continued to object.

She smiled oddly. “You’re right. The best connections any syndicate ever had. Just the same, they’re finished. Moe’s been worried for weeks, worried bad. I can tell.”

“Moe?”

“Moe Brimstine. You saw him for a minute this afternoon.”

“Oh, yes,” Phil said, getting a vivid memory flash of the door-filling, dark jowled hulk, and then went on with a little laugh, “You know, it startled me when his voice was the same as Old Rubberarm’s. He seemed too important a man to be a door-tender.”

“I’ll say he is!” she exclaimed, the boom returning to her voice for a moment. “You didn’t actually think, Phil, did you, that he spent his time peeking through a one-way peephole and working that spring-rubber dingus? And would I be calling him a dumb robot? He just used his own voice to record Old Rubberarm’s questions and answers. He gets a kick out of things like that.” She lifted her heavy eyebrows. “Don’t you know who Moe Brimstine is?”

Phil shook his head.

“Where you been all your life? ‘Scuse me, Phil, but Moe Brimstine is… why, he’s on top of the syndicate, right next to Mr. Billig himself!”

When Phil didn’t recognize the second name either, she quit trying. “Well, anyway, Phil,” she said in her friendly, quiet voice, “there’s Moe Brimstine, practically the boss of Fun Incorporated, which runs wrestling and amusement centers, all sales-robots, jukebox burlesque, and a lot of other things they don’t talk so much about. And he’s worried, real worried. Now I know Moe. He don’t worry about nothing but the syndicate. So things must be real bad.” She paused, then added cryptically, but with a sort of personal gloominess, “Lots of things are real bad.”

Phil nodded. There was a silence.

“Say, Phil,” she finally said huskily, watching her big, gravy stained finger rub her near empty glass. “That really was a – whadya call it? – delusion, wasn’t it, this afternoon when you was talking about a green cat?”

“I thought so then,” Phil said softly. “Now I’m not sure.”

She let out a big breath and looked up at him. “You know,” she said with sudden warmth, “neither am I. Say Phil, how valuable is that cat, anyway, if there is a cat? Could it be worth $10,000?”

Phil felt his eyes bug at the same instant he was thinking that Lucky’s worth could never be measured in money. “$10,000?” he murmured. “I haven’t the faintest idea. What made you think of that figure?”

“Well,” Juno said slowly, “after the Akeley’s – muck ’em! – had left this afternoon, Jack came in to me and started talking again about how dumb I was about you. Only this time it wasn’t because I had let you in, but because I’d let you go. He says to me, ‘You’re dumb, Juno, you’re deductively dopey. You don’t recognize opportunity. Now I’m in a position to make $10,000 out of that little squirt, only I’m not going to do it, at least not right away,’ he says, ‘because there are higher things, Juno, there are higher things.’” And she rolled her eyes as if she were in the ring and approaching her spouse in his character of Swish Jack Jones, the Lady Killer.

“Well, anyway,” she went on after a moment in a less outraged voice, “I didn’t wonder too much about that at the time, ’cause he’s always trying to needle me that way since he met Sashy (Jack hates me to call him that) Akeley. But then, just after I get out of the ring tonight, Moe Brimstine starts pumping me about a green cat. Seems he’d been playing Old Rubberarm’s recordings of his conversations for the afternoon, and I’d talked about a green cat when I was talking to you. He pretended it was what you call idle curiosity, but that’s something Moe Brimstine’s got nothing of. Course I told him you were just a harmless nut with cats in your bonnet, but he didn’t seem satisfied.” She looked at Phil puzzledly. “You did think you were a nut this afternoon, didn’t you? You didn’t believe in any green cat then – I mean, after we’d argued you out of it?”

Phil had to nod.

“But now you’ve changed your mind?”

“Yes, I have. You see, I finally took your husband’s advice and went to see the analyst.”

“That lousy psycher the Akeleys put him onto!” she snorted.

Phil sketched the essentials of his episode with Dr. Romadka. When he had finished, Juno burst out, “I get it all right. If he locks you up and calls in some hoods and they demagnetize the law tape chasing you, then that green cat’s no weed dream, brother!”

“They didn’t look like hoodlums,” Phil objected doubtfully. “Besides, Miss Romadka didn’t seem to think the green cat was important.”

“That sexy little she-punk!” Juno dismissed Mitzie contemptuously.

Phil was startled – he hadn’t realized he’d told Juno so much about Mitzie.

“Besides,” Juno went on conclusively, “Moe’s interested in the green cat, or he wouldn’t pump me about it, and anything Moe’s interested in has gotta be real. Oh, the poor little mutt.”

“Who, Moe?” Phil asked confusedly.

“Course not. I mean Jack, specially after Moe catches up with him and finds he had that green cat and then didn’t deliver.” Her brow furrowed excitedly. “Look, Phil, this is the way I figger it: Moe tells Jack and some of the other punks, ‘Boys, I’m paying $10,000 to anybody who brings me a green cat.’ $10,000 is Moe’s favorite figger dealing with smart jerks like Jack.”

“But why would Moe Brimstine want a green cat?” Phil objected. “Did you ask him tonight when he was pumping you?”

“Brother, you don’t ask Moe Brimstine anything,” Juno assured him.

“But you do think now that your husband and Cookie stole the green cat while Old Rubberarm was keeping me out?”

Juno’s look implied he stated the obvious far too often.

“Has Mr. Brimstine been asking your husband questions?” Phil asked.

“Jack wasn’t billed for tonight,” Juno explained. “He went off somewhere.”

“To the Akeleys’?” Phil asked, a blurred memory nudging at his mind.

“This isn’t the night,” Juno said. Her voice became for a moment bitterly mincing. “They only receive wunct a week! Most likely Jack’s gone off with Cookie somewhere.”

“But if your guess is right about Mr. Brimstine offering $10,000 for a green cat, and Jack stole the cat, then why hasn’t he taken it to him?”

Juno rolled her head like an angry bull. “Oh, it’d be something those Akeleys put him up to; something they flattered him into. Maybe they even got him to give them the cat. They can really twist him.”

Phil felt all at sea again. “But what would the Akeleys want with the cat?”

“What do screwballs like that want with anything?” Juno countered. “What do they want with Jack?” She snuffed and looked at Phil. “Get one thing straight,” she said gruffly, “I love Jack, the little rat. I’ve taken a lot from him, but I haven’t minded too much. Oh, it hurt when I found out he thought more of Cookie and those other punks than he did for me, but I didn’t let it show through my skin. After all, if a man knows you can lick him, I suppose it’s bound to affect him. But when those Akeleys discovered him and began to play up to him and change him, that was too much for me. They’re intelleckchuls, you see, and they flattered Jack and filled him up with a lot of gux about how he had a hidden artistic talent and how he was Zeus or some name like that battling the female principle and so on. Well, he falls for it see? – goes into a complete free-fall. Starts to buy reading tapes, printed books even! Next thing he’s insulting me – using a lot of words I never hardly heard of. Keeps talking about how great Mary is, with her art and her magic figures or whatever they are, and how wonderful Sashy is, with his great ideas about understanding and love and a lot of other junk. Tells me to my face that I’m a dumb bell, a stupe semantically!” And having done well with that last word, Juno slugged down the rest of her drink. “Look, Phil,” she went on, “I could fight Cookie and the others, because they’re on my level, but I can’t fight intelleckchuls. They’re lifting Jack away from me and I can’t do nothing about it. And now they’ve done and got him into some real trouble, I bet, with this green cat business. Because Moe Brimstine isn’t impressed with intelleckchuls or anything.” She carefully took the glass out of her hand and made claws. “If I had the little rat here,” she said, “I’d strangle some sense into him. But until Moe Brimstine talked to me, I didn’t really suspicion anything was wrong, and now I can’t do nothing.”