Page 56 of Shadow Ticket
At sunset, light coming in at a shallow angle, the view back along the wake is apt to include all manner of shapes, there for a brief flash and then gone.
“They’re looking for you in the Marconi saloon, by the way.”
Sounds to Hicks like a Third Ward speakeasy but turns out to be the radio gang’s recreational lounge, up at shelter-deck level, along with a fairly constant flow of field-tripping sorority girls in and out of the first-class dining saloons.
“Oh Phoebe, you’re such a spinthromaniac.”
“What kind of maniac did you just call me?”
“Spinthro, Sweetie, it means crazy about Sparks.”
“Oo! You—” and before anybody can step in, not that Hicks would, being content to look on, the two co-ed cuties are going round and round. Hair gets pulled, clothes ripped, faces slapped, the usual entertainment. It isn’t long before chaperones hired for their refereeing skills have plunged bravely between and separated the opponents.
“McTaggart?”
“Uh, this go on much around here?”
“Ever since we sailed. Come on in the shack. Maybe you heard there’s a submarine been following us.”
“News to me.” Which it isn’t. Suspicions beginning to creep.
“You seem to have friends aboard.” Handing Hicks a pair of earphones, “OK if we listen too?”
“Hicksie, that you? It’s me, Stuffy. Stuffy Keegan.”
“Long time, Stuffy. Don’t sound like you.”
“You neither, come to think of it. Case you’re wondering, that’s me, I should say us, in the U-13, off your starboard quarter. Funny running into each other again out on the high seas like this, ain’t it.”
“You hear somebody laughin it must be we’re all in the loony bin. First I get railroaded back to New York, next thing somebody slips me a mickey, and I wake up on this tub. Sooner or later they’re gonna offload me in Europe someplace and that’s all I can find out.”
“We’re headed in to home port in the Adriatic Sea, if that helps any.”
“You guys wouldn’t be planning to…”
“Not us, nothin on board to do it with anymore.” Explaining that around the time the War ended, the Skipper got, maybe not religion, but something along those lines. “Some Allied commission ordered him to bring the boat in to be scrapped and he decided not to. Went on the run, got her refitted for peacetime instead, deep-sixed all the torpedoes, torpedotubes, guns, ammo, leavin plenty of room inside, free to start a new career running only nonbelligerent chores.”
“Meaning, remind me again…”
“Well, most of it, coppers like yourself would call us smugglers, though we like to say ‘outlaws of the Deep.’ ”
“There you go.”
“Free trade—see, back in Milwaukee, freedom, nobody thought much about it, we just figured hey, a free country ain’t it and left it at that. But—” this being about the point Hicks begins to feel warning signs from his feet—“the real thing, what if that’s only when they’re comin after you for somethin? But they haven’t caught you yet. So for a while, as long as you can stay on the run, that’s the only time you’re really free?”
“Uh-huh well Stuffy like they say there in the submarine racket, too deep for me.”
A stretch of atmospheric crackling easy to confuse with loss of signal. From the dining saloon across the way, sounds of crockery, glassware, festivity.
“Let’s talk it over sometime,” Stuffy suggests. “Better if there’s beer on the table. You ever get to Fiume, that’s our home port these days, there’s some swell beer joints, it’s the Milwaukee of the Adriatic.”
“Sure, fair enough. Lookin forward, Stuffy.”
—
Meantime there remainthe more immediate and less certain emotions of Porfirio del Vasto to worry about.
“Look, Clifton, you’ve dealt with him before.”
