Page 68 of Shadow Ticket
“And yet each trap I set for him, some he could not even have been aware of, he has always, through some perverse turn of fortune, managed to evade. I can’t show my face around the Directorate without some idiot sniggering about Criminal Genius, as if Airmont is another Dr. Mabuse or Fu Manchu…Can youappreciate, howinfuriating?” a tendency to scream through his nose, “howinsultingtomepersonally, to, to be mentioned in the same breath with this feeble impersonation of a crime boss? To waste my talent not on an evil genius but on an evil moron, dangerous not for his intellect, what there may be of it, but for the power that his ill-deserved wealth allows him to exert, which his admirers pretend is will, though it never amounts to more than the stubbornness of a child…”
“Could be worse,” Hicks tries to murmur sympathetically, just managing to avoid adding, “like if it turns out he’s just smarter than you.” How far is he expected to go along with Praediger’s obsessions, how copasetic is he supposed to be with any of this? Who’ll be the next well-wisher to pull himaside and warn him, “This ain’t your beef, this leaper here is heading for trouble you don’t want to be in, better get clear of him while you can.”
Steps do need to be taken, sooner rather than later, before everybody’s dodging airborne furniture or reaching for their roscoe. The Gumshoe’s Manual here is not as helpful as it could be. Hicks has even written them letters about it, never answered, sometimes even sent back unopened, despite such real and widespread concern in the business, you see it every day—“What if I get teamed up, unwillingly, with somebody who’s off their rocker? What’s the best action to take? Prompt reply appreciated.”
“Not meaning to add to your troubles, but I had a visit from Ace Lomax the other night, detained him at gunpoint, expecting you to show up any minute, next thing I know he and that lamp both give me the slip.”
“Ach, der Lomax,kleine Kartoffel, meantime I seem to have run out of investigative supplies…”
—
Hicks, headed forthe street at last, grabs the paternoster down to the lobby, where he runs into Terike just emerging from her latest run-in with the authorities over her motorcycle, a 500 cc Guzzi Sport 15. “It’s a racing bike, which doesn’t keep them from hauling me in and demanding registration documents, which there were never really any of to begin with. Plus some work of my own on the bore and stroke so she’ll do better than 100 miles an hour, which they’re calling illegal unless I pay a fee, along with the usual threats of inspection I have to come up with excuses for avoiding.”
They arrive at a revolving door to the street. Terike motions him on ahead. “Hungarian tradition, the man always goes first, in case of trouble.” Hicks steps in first, Terike behind him, and somehow by the time they get outside she’s ahead of him and halfway down the block. “Huh?”
Sometimes in Hungary, and this is sworn to by any number of tourists and travelers, you can step into a revolving door in front of a native Hungarian, who will nevertheless then step out into the street ahead of you, as if you somehow havepercolatedthrougheach other, actually occupying the same space, no memory, no expectation, simply the coercive sweep of themoving door drawing you along, molecules for an instant all intermingling, simmering together like, likesoup…and how intimate is that?
Word of this gets around and pretty soon among cognizant tourist traffic there’s a noticeable increase of those whowanttohavethishappentothem, it’s a craze, another must-do for the sophisticated globe-trotter, like crossing the Equator or kissing the Blarney Stone.
Out in Vörösmarty tér, Terike once clear of entanglement,havingrememberedhow, it seems, to reassemble into the same solid Hungarian person again, takes a glance back, like a dame will sometimes to see whether anybody’s conducting a posterior survey.
“Mind if I ask—”
“Ask Zoltán. He thinks it’s apports…you understand how apports could come into it.”
“Sure. Well, no—you mean the Hungarian person, which is you, somehow…apports herself a quarter-turn ahead—”
“…of the non-Hungarian, which in this same example could be you.”
“You can say is. Is is good.”
“On the other hand, maybe you just fell asleep for a moment, and I was in a hurry, so…” with a quick hip gesture.
“Can we try it again, just to—”
“No.”
Before he ever actually met any Hungarian women, Hicks typically imagined them as, well, kind of…Mexican. Latin spitfire kind of dame. “Because of the paprika, maybe…hot peppers, hot women, so forth?”
“Whereas American men, you in particular, seem the kind ofkemény gyerekI was brought up to stay well away from.”
“It could be worse. I could be paying you to be nice to me.”
“Here she is.” The Guzzi. The original bright red factory paint job by now faded to a road- and weather-beaten field magenta.
“New sidecar, just about to take it for a test spin, works better with an 80-, 90-kilo carcass in it, anybody interested?” The sidecar has a sleek teardrop shape, the kind of teardrop that only gets shed on purpose, to further some undisclosed scheme, a glamorous teardrop you might say, as if drafted in one single, emotion-free gesture of the pen.
“Unapologetically Guzzista…I love this bike, intense relationship, she’s seen me out of more trouble than I’ll ever talk about, ’cause it’d only sound like more tall tales from the wild highways. The bike, let’s face it, is a metaphysical critter. We know, the way you’d say a cowboy knows, that there’s a fierce living soul here that we have to deal with.”
Hicks in the sidecar, off they go, the rig speeding over cobbles and under arches, flying, it seems, above broken road surfaces and up impossible grades, through gateways, down indoor-outdoor corridors that seem too narrow for a bike let alone a combination.
You want a gearbox disassembled and repaired while on the move, time and a half if you’re doing over 100 miles per hour, she’s your gal. She can get anything that’ll fit in a sidecar across the worst terrain you can think of, war-damaged cities a specialty, master of urban obstacle-running, she can go straight up the sides of walls,passthroughwalls, ride upside down on the overheads, cross moving water, jump ditches, barricades, urban chasms one rooftop to the next, office-building corridors to native-quarter alleyways quicker than a wink.
Into a tunnel—colder all of a sudden, blasted at by their own echoing, down into a city beneath the city, grown over the years according to the demands of history, gunpowder logistics, mineral springs everywhere, saline, radioactive, violently boiling, laminar as sleep, bringing in coachloads of well-off Europeans rolling on a yearly cycle spa to spa along routes as closely mapped and annotated as pilgrimages.
Terike’s first time beneath the city as a dispatch biker, though she tried not to admit it to herself, was one of those unreal entrances that actors recall making now and then. “It looked like just another tunnel” has been a comic tagline down here for years. She didn’t join so much as blend, unaware at the time of any formalities, into the motor-dispatch community with its traditions of best practice, honor, coolness under fire, a mission to connect anywhere in space-time, any set of points, anything they had to do, obstacles no obstacle, ignoring cozy indoor axes, Biedermeyer xyz plus time dutifully ticking away over in some corner, zooming around through the tunnels under Budapest. Crossing back and forth under the river, keeping to theirown dedicated routes, including a long-term easement through Budafok, twenty-five miles of wine cellar tunneled through limestone, requiring special exhaust work to cause as little noise as possible so the vintages might lie undisturbed…a silent patch in the undercity clamoring with youthfulness, as messengers in dusters, helmets, and goggles pull out of the traffic to gather briefly for quick tunnelside smoke breaks and, finding themselves enticed by surfaces whose acoustics promise to be kind to those who can’t sing but must anyway, gathering for eight or sixteen bars or so, echoing up branch tunnels, exit ramps, up to the street, which now seems like daytime to a resident of the night.
They head north along the river. “Where we going?”
