Page 84 of Shadow Ticket
The setting is someplace vaguely outer European, not Russia exactly, everybody talking with a different foreign accent, and even more peculiar, for a Squeezita Thickly movie, now and then alsoshootingateachother, both semi- and fully-automatically, not always in play, plus setting off spherical anarchist-style bombs which appear to wreck one expensive set after another, causing Bruno, each time one of them goes off, to shiver agreeably, which Daphne can’t help noticing.
“Little blast-happy, Pumpkin,” he explains. “Something the mental docs call Ekrexophilia.”
“New one on me, thought I’d heard ’em all.”
“Shh!”
“Vanilla ‘or’ chocolate, Yer Excellency? ‘Or’? Really? I could always just gobble ’embothup, couldn’t I, one right after the other, ’n’ see how ya likethat.”
“Oh but I say—”
“Who’s gonna stop me? You?”
“Well, upon my word.”
“Do you mind? I’m in a hurry and I’m hungry.”
Turned out in stylish little Soviet-inspired uniforms, Squeezita it seems has recently been appointed Food Commissar of a recently installed People’s Republic, where she lives with her Daddy (Wallace Beery), a chef with a big soup-soaked mustache and top-heavy chef’s toque who keeps drifting out of the frame on secret missions for the new regime, while everyone continues to regard him only as the everyday amiable lout Wallace Beery often gets to play—a perfect cover story, at least until Squeezita, whose respect for her parent lately has begun to slacken, finds out by accident about this other secretly heroic identity.
“Aww, Sweetie, and here all this time I thought you hated me.”
“Ooh, Daddy, it’s only because I mistook you for one more spineless drudge…”
“Well, that’ll learn ya, kid…lemme just tell you how it was in the old days…” Born in fact into a minor branch of the former ruling dynasty, roaming the prerevolutionary halls of stately homes and summer palaces he found himself pausing in various kitchens whose helpful personnel before long were showing him how to bake pies, cakes, and pastry, smoothly drifting into an alternate identity, the soon widely discussed “Chef Raoul,” pâtissier to the elite of three continents, rumored to be a jewel thief on the side, a casino gambler, a breaker of aristocratic and too often innocent hearts.
After the movie, in an adjoining subterranean café, streetcars still rumbling overhead, “So what’d you think of the picture?”
“Didn’t care much for that firefight at the end. The rifle grenades and so forth.”
“Did seem to go on a little too long.”
“Well…not long enough, actually.”
“Don’t you think Wallace Beery deserved some comeuppance, working for both sides like that?”
“If that’s what it was, only it looked to me like somebody was setting him up. Unless I missed something when I stepped out for seconds on popcorn, mine having somehow mysteriously disappeared.”
“That funny Italian guy who kept hollering at everybody—you think that was supposed to be Mussolini?”
“Everybody’s afraid of the Duce, even in Hollywood they might not want to offend him.”
If Daphne has been hoping for something incestuous yet romantic, she’s once again reminded how very little anybody can put past Bruno. They are somehow soon deep in financial discussion.
“Apparently your Gramps left you some herds.”
“How many cows would that be about, do you figure?”
“Ten thousand head at least, up to a hundred thousand, maybe.”
“Kind of a spread there.”
“Helps sometimes to think in orders of magnitude, Pumpkin. They’re all over the state. Some of them your Grampa owned directly, plus all the other herds he had controlling interest in. Someplace somebody’s been keeping complete records, I’m sure.” Scribbling on his napkin, “Even with prices brought down to where they are, that’s still a hell of a lot of milk—if those goldurn Bolshevik collectives would let us sell it, of course. Right now they’d rather block all the shipments and dump them trackside. Even back when prices were normal your Gramps’s bookkeeping was impossible to follow, and given current conditions you might not want the trouble it’s likely to cost you for the eentsy li’l percentage you’d end up with.”
Time for another of those profound gazes, except that Daphne’s right now is looking more like a squint of suspicion. “Let me guess. You can put me in touch with somebody who’ll be willing to take all the bothersome details of herd ownership off my hands, right? Plus the bookkeeping. Realizing maybe a fraction of pre-1929 value, of course. All I’d have to do’d be sign that impressive-looking piece of paper you’ve been fidgeting with there.”
“Oh. This. Just a standard release form. We can fill in some figures later.”
“Uh, huh. Surely, Pops, now you’re not trying to euchre me, your own daughter here, out of money that’s rightfully mine, nothing like that?”
