Tuxedo was a magic cat. He knew all the words that people know in nine languages and could understand and speak them fluently (English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Russian, Japanese, Mandarin and Cantonese). He traveled the world, mostly on his four paws. Sometimes he traveled by boat or by ship. Sometimes he would ride the rails and hop a train like the littlest hobo, who was one of his friends. He did not find it difficult to go wherever he wanted and so he saw all the great wonders of the world many times over and would return whenever he wished to his favourite spots.
One day at the Sagrada Familia, before the nativity facade on the east face of the church, Tuxedo lounged in the sun. Being mostly black meant that he absorbed sunlight rather that reflecting it. He stretched out as long as he could and rolled over onto his back, exposing his white belly. Today was a good day to be alive, he thought, as he watched several strangers approach and stop to pat him on the head. As he listed in reverie he could not help but overhear their conversation.
"Once we have acquired the diamond, we will need a reliable buyer lined up right away."
"Yes, yes. Of course, but you already met who I had in mind. You remember?"
"That old buffoon? "
"He has a reliable connection to unload them in America."
"I wouldn't have guessed. Are you sure he can be trusted?"
"He isn't doing it for any sense of altruism, we will give him a fair cut. We can always trust people to act in their own self-interest."
Tuxedo cat had enough with these people. He rolled onto his four paws and began padding away quickly. He did not bother to swipe at them like other, lesser cats might do, but he did begin plotting and seeing if he couldn't learn more about this diamond, and so he circled around and came back in front of the eastern facade of the Sagrada Familia. The people from earlier were just leaving and he was able to follow them safely at a distance. They were talking in low voices about all the places in the city they could rob. They appeared to be arguing, though their voices remained hushed, about which burglary would be the hardest, and therefore most worthy of them.
Through the diamond the image split into a parallax of fractured geometry. Fractal geometry. Kelaedoscopic rotations of snake scale tesselatation rendered many times over in each face of cold carbon which spun the eye around it, but not through it. There was something dark at its centre that somehow drew light from the room and glowed with its own light of its own cruel cool quality.
Heated hands pressed its clear plastic case, leaving smudges which would at the end of the day be Windexed away by a cleaner. They left grease impressions of their fingerprints all over it, despite the sign, which hung on the wall next to the diamond: Please do not touch the glass. There was extra security stationed throughout the gallery for the occasion. The dosens had been warned and been forced into taking a training course in the attempt that something were to go wrong. They were to told to try to remember faces, distinguishing scars, tattoos, villianous mustachios or other prominent features, ways of identifying a potential thief. Everyone who entered the gallery was a suspect, to be memorized and taken careful note of, so that in the event of some kind of break in the dosens could simply refer to their mental inventory of possible suspects and identify the perpetrator.
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