The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [214]
“Pish, my dearest. What conceivable need would anyone at this establishment ever have for a locksmith in this saloon? In any event, we shall return the missing pages when we are finished with them and you may tape them in again.”
The following day Leon and I donned the suits and ties that we wore when conducting serious business. Leon put his long hair in a ponytail and carried his officious-looking attaché case, and we took to the streets, visiting all the locksmith’s shops in the city one at a time, guided on our mission by the phone book pages.
The not-so-cleverly named establishment Mr. Locksmith was only the ninth place we visited. (Leon did have a general idea of where the shop was located.) Imagine the eight faces we saw before Leon’s long-lost uncle: all the arched eyebrows and questioning looks we received when a monstrously obese man and a deformed hairless dwarf, both in suits and ties and one of them carrying an officious-looking attaché case, entered their shops to inquire whether they had known Leon as a babe in arms. Most people told us to get lost and hurried us away. A few feared we might be engaged in something illegal or otherwise nefarious, and their hands drifted to their phones when we walked through their doors. Thank God we finally found the right place on only the ninth try, because by the late afternoon of our day of searching, my stubby little legs were so rubbery with exhaustion that I don’t think I would have been able to stand (literally) for another day of this heretofore fruitless quest. I did, however, enjoy exposing my nose to the fresh air and the adoration of the masses. We got a lot of interested stares, and not all of them were because of the freakish spectacle that we brought with us wherever we went; I’m sure that some of the women who passed us on the street looked twice at me not just because I was freakish, but because of my newly beautified face. We found Leon’s great-uncle’s shop off of Broome Street on the Lower East Side. The storefront was across the street from the courtyard of a decrepit tenement complex and in front of a pile of black fly-covered trash bags in a filthy and run-down-ish area. I’ve been told that during the years I have languished in captivity this area has undergone significant gentrification, but at the time the place still more or less looked authentically squalid.
There was a yellow neon light in the window, shaped like a key. Behind that, on a windowsill, a cat—a soft fat black cat with a white face, belly, and feet—lay beneath the neon key in a bed made of a rumpled towel, watching Leon and me from inside.
“This one is it,” said Leon to me. “I’m absolutely certain of it.”
“How do you know?”
Leon pointed at the cat. “The cat has seven toes on each paw. My grandmother had one just like it. That deformity has been passed down for generations of my family’s cats.”
I looked at the cat’s feet. He was right: the cat had enormous feet due to an excess of toes.
We went in. As we did the jingle-bells clinked on the door behind us and the cat mewled indifferently. It was a dark, cramped room with wood-paneled walls, full of all kinds of locks and keys—there were keys hanging on pegs in the brown breadboard walls. Everything inside was brass and brown, and had the metallic, oily smell of a machine shop. A man who looked to be about three hundred and six years old sat behind the counter on a stool, working on something at a high workbench. Bushy sprigs of white hair sprouted from his ears and nostrils, and he wore a green plastic visor. Behind the counter there was a small TV; the picture was jittery and the volume was low, and the man wasn’t watching it. The cat in the window was looking at me. I looked back at the cat. The twenty-eight-toed cat groaned and returned her attention to the sidewalk in front of the store.
“I’m almost closed,” said the man, glancing disinterestedly at us and then at his watch. “Fifteen minutes.”
“No matter,” said Leon. “We are not here for keys.”
“Then what do you want?”
The man had a bald, liver-spotted head and