Page 30 of Shadow Ticket
“That’ll be another department, Special Arrangements, just down the hall, six attorneys, each a potential junior partner, no waiting.”
“Back in a flash.”
After an avuncular, though few would go so far as to say kindly, once-over, “According to our files, Mr. McTaggart, you and Miss Airmont have some previous relationship.”
“One long-ago boat ride, couple hours’ work—an impulse! Which happened years ago! I don’t even get a statute of limitations here?”
“Are you aware of the American Indian belief, referenced in depositions filed on Miss Airmont’s behalf, that once you save somebody’s life, you’re responsible for them in perpetuity?”
“No. No. I didn’t save her life. Which first,” Hicks explains, “means shehad to be in some danger, which she never was, see, it was all timing, location—”
“Yes, turning briefly,” paper-shuffling, “to the words of the young woman herself—‘It was a crucially decisive intervention. The few hours’ time it bought me then have since represented all the difference between growing to normal adult maturity and being condemned to a lifetime of infantilized misery.’ ”
“Funny, she sounds just like a lawyer.”
“Given that ear for nuance, you may also appreciate the distinction between saving somebody’s life and changing the course of it, which considering also that Wisconsin law doesn’t apply on Ojibwe territory could be argued in court forever,” a shrug from which some private merriment may not be entirely absent.
Nodding, eyes held amiably wide, “Maybe you know what that means, but don’t bother to explain. Did Mr. Crosstown mention that my specialty usually is considered more along the lines of the muscle category?”
“Making you just the man for the job. Miss Airmont can become on occasion violently uncooperative, even with those concerned only for her mental well-being.”
“I think it’s called resisting arrest.”
“You’d approve of that, I expect.”
“A dame with some moxie instead of one more baby-talking lulu. Hmm, well, let me think that one over.”
Boynt comes back from down the hall looking strangely feverish, as if he’s fallen off a wagon too recently hammered together to have a name yet.
“How much?” Hicks asks once they’re outside.
“Hefty to whopping. You’ll see.”
13
Hicks has always preferred not to work for anybody too upper-class if he can trade tickets with one of the other ops, who’re usually only too happy to. Despite which he now finds himself up here on Prospect Avenue with the aristocracy, looking around for moats and drawbridges and so forth, though the Airmont mansion turns out to be a notch more modest, turn-of-the-century millwork, unblocked view of the Lake, Menomonee Valley brick kept clear of downtown industrial gray, fresh as a dairymaid’s morning delivery.
Hicks gets off the streetcar a couple of stops early and walks in by way of the Airmont driveway, appearing on city maps under a street name of its own, where he finds a new Cadillac Sport Phaeton with the hood still warm, plus a Bentley bobtail cold to the touch as daytime Milwaukee, throwing him an idea of what he’s likely to find inside.
Once past a couple-three Waupun alumni posing as residential security, he’s stashed in something they call the library, though there aren’t that many books or even magazines around. Tries to keep his hands in his pockets and remember where his elbows are.
Social chitchat around here, as he learns from falling into conversation with a number of eccentric Airmont cousins wandering around without much to do, seems very focused on cheese, in particular the recent Bruno Airmont Dairy Metaphysics Symposium held annually at the Department of Cheese Studies at the UW branch in Sheboygan, this year featuring the deepand perennial question, “Does cheese, considered as a living entity, also possess consciousness?”
“Cheese, oh to be sure, cheese is alive. Self-aware, actually, maybe not exactly the way we are, but still more than some clever simulation. We’re at a pivot point here in the history of food science, a strange new form of life that was deliberately invented, like Doctor Frankenstein or something—”
“Cheese—wait, cheese…has feelings, you say? You mean like…emotions?”
“Long-time spiritual truth in Wisconsin. Thousands of secretly devout cheezatarians…”
“Secretly?”
“Only waiting for our moment. We have to be careful, don’t we…wouldn’t want to go through all that Christians-and-Romans business again, would we?”
“Wisconsin is possessed by some vast earth-scented spirit of Bovinity, docile herds of cows by the untold thousands all across the state every day at the same hour lining up shed-side in patient queues waiting to be milked, while microbial cultures, silent yet conscious, working below the level of human attention, go on bringing a strange shadowy inertia into human character…”
“And no wonder the Japanese hate us, no dairy element to speak of in their diet, they see us as a bovine race, lacking all martial spirit.”
“What you could call a negative attitude toward cheese in particular.”
