Nobody could say when the tower clock had first begun to misbehave, only that it did so with an almost insulting precision: every night, at exactly 3:07, it fell silent, and every morning Mr. Varga, the clockmaker, trudged up two hundred steps to coax it back to life. He had cleaned the gears, replaced the springs and even consulted a colleague in the capital, but the clock went on stopping. The mayor, who regarded lateness as a personal insult, took to grumbling about it to everyone who crossed the square.
Nina, ten years old and unimpressed by grown-up explanations, had a simpler theory: a thing that happens at the same minute every night is not a defect, it is a visitor. So one frosty evening she slipped out with a flashlight and a flask of cocoa and settled behind the fountain to wait.
For hours the square gave her nothing but cold. Then, a little after 3:06, there came a faint scraping from the tower, and a thin gray cat squeezed through a broken window as though it paid rent there. It crossed the machinery with the confidence of an employee, curled up on the pendulum weight and, within a minute, the clock stopped.
Nina did not shout. She was far too satisfied for that. The next morning she merely asked Mr. Varga whether he happened to own a basket. They mended the window together and set a cushioned bed beside the pendulum, and the clock never faltered again. The town, which had always preferred a good name to a good explanation, called the cat Minute.