Page 86 of Shadow Ticket
“And how many of you are there?”
Not as many as there should be, thanks to BAGEL, the Bureau Administering Golems Employed Locally, whose agents are always snooping around, hoping to interrupt funny business in progress, working in cahoots with various late-capitalist entities to whom a golem is only a primitive form of cheap robot. Lately Zdenek has been coming in for unwelcome attention, and Slide obligingly was giving him a lift out of town.
“Only checking in with the shomrim, more Jewish tough guys in Bratislava than anyplace east of the Purple Gang.”
Bratislava, once Pozsony, before that Pressburg, kept trying to be a free city, but each time the Czechoslovak Legion came in, started killing people, threw their weight around enough to slap on the kibosh. The wind unrelenting all year long is believed by some to be the vestige of this free city that never came to be, as the breath of ghosts may sometimes be felt in haunted locations—a great history-wide sigh of unrequited political desire.
“And shomrim, that’s, um…”
A self-defense group, meaning “watchers” in Hebrew, formed a couple of years back, when Nazi students in Prague began staging anti-Jewish riots, which soon spread to Bratislava, where currently the shomrim are busy inventing a close-quarters form of combat soon to be known as Krav Maga.
“We’ve been keeping an eye on the Hercules Gymnasium…there’s this Lichtenfeld kid, already a champion wrestler, takes a particular interest in street fighting. Understands that there are no rule books, this isn’t sport, it’s Nazis who are out to kill us, and the less well-mannered we can be aboutit, the more effective. Nazis prefer an intellectual cosmopolitan Jew who lives mostly inside his head, a Luftmensch, easy to push around, little or no means to defend himself. Surprise! In Bratislava they’re developing a more dangerous model. Idea is to always keep moving, keep hitting, never have both hands doing the same thing at the same time.”
“Sounds kind of Japanese.”
“You could think of it as Jew-jitsu,” sez Zdenek, who’s actually just as happy to be away from Bratislava for a while, an uneasy triangle having developed featuring himself and a glamorous, indeed sultry,robotkaor female robot named Dushka, who has a crush on him, and the local rabbi nominally in charge of golem affairs, who despite being unsure if Dushka is human or mechanical, wouldn’t mind dating her himself…
“Ahhhgghh!” Slide rolling his eyes upward, side to side, around and around. “Do we have time for this? Wasn’t there some business in Transylvania we needed to take care of?”
Later, breezing down the highway, “Appreciate the company, Slide, seein this ain’t exactly your type of ticket.”
“You kidding, it’s the scoop of the century,” replies Slide, “cheap at half the price and thanks for asking.”
“Cheez Heiress on the Run? thought that’d all be yesterday’s news.”
“This is bigger.”
“And,” Hicks nodding more in encouragement than understanding, “the headline will read…”
“We will know it when we see it, as the hat-check girl said to the private eye.”
29
By terms of the Treaty of Trianon, concluded in 1920 at Versailles, the former Kingdom of Hungary got dissected by the Entente into pieces to be handed out to the newly reformulated nations of Romania, Czecho-Slovakia and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, soon to be known as Yugoslavia, which also got the old kingdom’s access to the sea, the port of Fiume, nowadays known by its Croatian name Rijeka. Leaving a broken ring of unredeemed territory around the fragment still known as “Hungary,” a halo, as some would have it—battered, insulted, compromised.
The route of the Trans-Trianon 2000 runs inside this shadow zone between the concentric Hungaries old and new—in some places dating back to the legions of Roman Dacia, all conditions of roadbed from hoofbeaten to fresh-poured, ranging from marshy flats up into the Carpathians, Velebit, Karawanken, anywhere a motorcycle can roll, climb, or jump, headlong down high-percentage grades, airborne over gulches, across rivers by raft or ferry, through great forests which, though not endless, for some riders might as well be.
Sometime in the period 1920–25 the first tentative motorcyclists set out on low-horsepower machinery, army dispatch bikes, city-street models. While the ’20s roared in Chicago and American expats whooped it up in Paree, while Dziga Vertov and Mikhail Kaufman went gliding through the city traffic of Petersburg filming a newly tsarless and not yet Stalinized people, while Berlin still offered unparalleled freedom and refuge to heretics and asylum seekers of all persuasions, this is what was going on in the strange ringof historical debris that had once belonged to the Kingdom of Hungary—bikers in motion, some riding clockwise, some counter-, not a rally, not a race, not a pilgrimage, no timekeepers, no grand prizes, no order of finish, no finish line for that matter, though some, speaking metaphysically, say if there were one it’d be at Fiume. Rijeka, whichever.
Riders can join in at any point along the route. There are no restrictions as to sex, nationality, or engine displacement or how much of the 2,000-kilometer circuit anyone is obliged to ride, since as quickly becomes clear, it’s not for everybody, though it continues year-round—riders get iced or snowed in, flooded out, caught in lightning storms that come out of nowhere, “Is what it is, takes as long as it takes,” as you hear often out on the route.
Some riders are here on intelligence-gathering operations, reconnaissance, mapping, some are zealots who regard the XT2K as outward and visible expression of some geophysical redemption to come, while others, looking back, are chroniclers of unfinished business, tellers of and believers in geopolitical ghost stories. There’s always more than terrain to get through, or old tribal boundaries to get across—some duty taken on as if under a flag of truce, in the dark, silently.
Out on open stretches of road with her Guzzi up to speed, Terike feels it now and then, some inward ignition, a willingness to risk more, for all she knows everything, drawn mysteriously by something beyond her own perimeter…Run-ins are frequent, with armed and jittery young men in uniforms newly designed or assembled from pieces of earlier ones, appearing at ridgelines and river crossings, out to intercept anything they can, being extra-attentive to motorcycle traffic, the most common excuse being tobacco smuggling, regarded as a capital sin out here, where everybody smokes all the time. Brought for a moment out of the snooze of routine, they’ll often just let Terike go rolling on through. But not always. One nightfall some semi-uniformed mountain patrol start throwing their weight around. Nobody can find the right papers, safeties on sidearms are being nervously toggled off and on again, pretty soon there’s a queue of machinery backed up out into the twilight, riders now and then allowing their engines to rip into silences felt to’ve gone on too long. At some unexpected point in the middle of which, into the overspills of light electric and acetylenecomes rolling Ace Lomax, all throb and opacity, aboard his Harley-Davidson Flathead, waving genially, poised to launch his widely recognized insane laugh. A stirring in the small unit, nothing observed actually changing hands because everybody out here has picked up a repertoire of drops and passes and other low-visibility transfer skills. Business soon taken care of, the patrol smile and salute, jaunty as operetta tenors.
“Nice runnin into you, Terike, guess you’re clear to roll.”
“Anything else you noticed out there that you might want to tell me about? Oh and did I forget to say thanks?”
“Don’t imagine you’d be interested in riding point for a little.”
Her gaze narrows.
“Who’s after you now, Ace?”
Ace realizes he probably could have hesitated longer before coming out with, “You mean besides Bruno.”
“You’re supposed to be working for Bruno. Did I miss something, hear something wrong?”
