Page 88 of Shadow Ticket
Philippa sits gazing into a Keepall Bandoulière with built-incompartments for short- and long-range weapons and ammo plus fashionable getups for a range of occasions indoors and out. She’s learned to inhabit this stylish bag, it’s become a portable flat for her no matter where in the world she and Alf get sent off to.
“Oh, they’re assuming it’ll be me again. You aren’t remorseless enough. Might be you that finally nags me into it, but it’ll be my finger on the trigger, as usual.”
Limited clarification arrives presently in an intercepted message from one I. P. Khvostov at the GPU to his opposite number in British Intelligence, who awkwardly it seems has just been sent into unwilling retirement while the enigmatic block of text goes on wandering the mazes of Secret Intelligence till eventually finding its way to MI3b and the already overloaded desk of Alf Quarrender.
The news, encoded a bit more elaborately than expected, is that Vassily Midoff, far from being the scattered moral casualty he seems, has apparently been promoted to deputy operations officer of an unacknowledged narkomat, a Blavatskian brotherhood of psychical masters and adepts located someplace out in the wild Far East. Stalin, it’s assumed, hedging his bets. A rumor that his chief crypto genius Gleb Bokii is also running a secret lab specializing in the paranormal…Beyond this, the plaintext rapidly proves elusive. An encryption that somehow cannot,must not, be broken, allowing Alf only glimpses behind a cloak of dark intention at something on a scale far beyond trivialities of known politics or history, which one fears if ever correctly deciphered will yield a secret so grave, so countersacramental, that more than one government will go to any lengths to obtain and with luck to suppress it. Which will no doubt also mean a death sentence for any poor blighter unlucky enough to have broken it.
Better, obviously, to leave it alone. But he can’t quite, can he, not Alf—as if something, some invisible power, is counting on his curiosity, his obsession…Luckily only occasional fragments are making it through. “Russia remains the world’s largest untapped reservoir of pre-Christian faith…magical and shamanic arts…Dialectical materialism will never succeed with a people who regard the material sphere as essentially spiritual…Objects with souls…Bolshevism only a passing phase…ephemeral cannotbegin to describe…As long as Gleb Bokii is safe, the narkomat is safe. But if we ever get to the point where Stalin believes himself actually threatened by supernatural forces…” An indecipherable patch, perhaps a string of possible scenarios. “Even then he’d probably go after Jews first.”
“No idea,” Alf clutching a cold cigar tightly between his teeth, “what to make of this confounded Blavatskian narkomat of his. He may have gone mad, he may in fact have crossed a line forbidden or invisible to the likes of us, thrown by some occult switchwork over onto an alternate branch line of history, where Stalin and his crew are no longer possibilities…”
By which point Pip has reached out her Webley, ascertained that there are indeed rounds in all chambers, and calmly aimed it in Alf’s direction.
“Oh well if you’re going to be that way about it…”
—
Alf and Piparrive at the Russian Trans-Trianon caravan to find the expected ideas of merriment, Russian bikers up at all hours—drunken uproar punctuated by the not always playful discharge of firearms. Any of these motor pilgrims could be GPU, posing as pit mechanics or cameramen or even star act Yuri and Yelena, riding IZh-1’s, appearing in the international illustrated press posed side by side, semipro enough to wonder how much longer they’re meant to get through on youthful glamour. Yuri, now in what he thinks of as government work, sports a prison tattoo of Marx, Engels, and Lenin across his chest, needled in years ago in the semireligious belief that no Soviet firing squad would ever damage imagery this sacred.
“Udachi.Of course all it takes is one renegade willing to spare your holy trinity and just go for a head shot.”
Yelena meantime back on low-traffic byroads and dead-ends, seldom passing up a chance to entertain pit crews, bikers, and propaganda units of other nations, everybody but Yuri, her supposed partner in motorcycling romance and adventure, one day happens to be in the middle of a rendezvous with Vassily Midoff, in whose air of hysterical desperation she has found a strange appeal, when their stolen moment is interrupted by a small crowd of local folks running around excitedly gesturing at the sky hollering, “Lubenitazburator! Lubenitazburator!”
“What’s this?” Vassily with a wild and jittery upward gaze.
“Means ‘Flying watermelon! Flying watermelon!’ Looks more like a zeppelin, doesn’t it?”
Sure enough. Seems that for a couple of years now, deep in the growing season, a passenger zeppelin has been detouring briefly from its route between Friedrichshafen and Rio de Janeiro to touch down at a Transylvanian watermelon field only a short ride from here, bestowing on the crop a brief benediction not altogether free of political motives, then flying off again. Today it has also occurred to somebody to paint the ship with light and dark streaks of green, so it will look something like a watermelon in flight.
An early autumn day in Transylvania, giant pear-shaped haystacks in the fields, heat of passion and so forth, but Vassily is shivering nonetheless. Likely something to do, Yelena guesses, with the pair of British visitors—Alf and Pip in fact—who arrived yesterday in a not inconspicuous Austro-Daimler 635 and have since been observed lurking around the Russian encampment. “Asking after someone who could easily be you, claiming you’re all long-time comrades. But after a while one picks up a sixth sense for this kind of thing, and these two sad to say scream nothing but Capitalist Assassin.”
“No four-seat Czech motorcycle, or.”
“No. Something like what’s headed the way right now,” head-gesturing back down the road, where a roadster of somewhat swank design has just appeared.
“Pizdets. These two. They’ve sold me out, I knew it.”
“Ever flown in a zep before?”
“I have a choice?”
“We might make it in time. Hop on.”
On the road, before they can get up to speed, here come a number of rifle shots close enough that Yelena at first mistakes them for high-speed bumblebees. “Your old comrades. You could’ve said something. I sure know how to pick ’em.”
A temporary landing site has been set up with a local concert band and a chorus of presentable young women singing “Székely Himnusz,” the Transylvanian regional anthem.
By the time Yelena can get close enough, the Blessing of the Watermelons has concluded, and volunteer zeppelin ground crew have begun to release mooring lines, except for a stray length of cable dangling from the gondola. Better odds than Vassily is used to, grabbing hold of the line just as the immense dirigible, as if taken by some reverse gravity, goes plummeting into the sky.
“Paka paka,” she calls. “Prashai. Forgive me.”
A desperate few minutes’ struggle, swaying over an abyss deepening by the second, hand over hand up to the gondola. A hatch slightly ajar, which seems too far away to reach, given the fatigue he’s begun to feel in his arms, but at the last moment, he’s hauled up and in. Passengers in the lounge are too busy swilling down Caipirinhas, listening to Carmen Miranda’s hit record “Ta-hi” on the Victrola, and exchanging merrily evasive quips, not about sex or alcohol so much as the millions of cubic feet of hydrogen gas just above their heads, to pay much attention.
A brass-buttoned purser in a dark suit approaches. “Das war knapp,” one of the few useful German phrases Vassily has picked up over the years, attempting a three-stage Russian-style kiss, from which the purser takes a professional step back.
“That’ll be $450 U.S. to Pernambuco, $475 to Rio.”
Far below, dwindling, through the slanted windows of the promenade, Vassily thinks he can just make out the foiled assassins, arrived too late and reluctant to risk any more gunplay. Instead of jumping up and down and shaking their fists at the ascending zep, however, Alf and Pip have become noticeably more relaxed.
