Maahes

What people know about him is exactly what cats are willing to say, which is nothing. He turned up Downtown one heatwave evening, flawless black hair, slit green eyes, and the neighborhood’s stray cats — which follow no one — fell into procession behind him. An antique dealer claims he once saw his exact face on a statuette three thousand years old; he tried to sell it to him, he smiled, and the dealer swears that at that very moment it vanished from the window display. He’s never denied it. Denying, after all, is already an answer.

Maahes works the hushed hours, between last call and dawn, wherever the locks get bored. He walks in where he pleases, walks back out whenever he pleases, and the places he’s visited take days to realize they were. On the rare occasion a job goes sideways anyway, the final bill is always oddly light: retaliation loses its way en route, complaints get misfiled, witnesses only recall a cat. Squads fight over him like a lucky charm, and he picks his outings the way he’d pick a windowsill: sunny, and with a view.

His cool isn’t a shell, it’s a conviction: nothing deserves being run for, except possibly a closing door. He sleeps entire days away in patches of sun only he knows about, on the House’s rooftops or a friendly windowsill, one eye half-open on the street — because even asleep, he’s watching, and the district has come to count on it. Those who take him for indifferent are confusing indifference with economy: he only spends his attention on what moves, and in this city, sooner or later, everything moves.