Page 92 of Shadow Ticket
“Or we could do it another way, which is, you see Gunther there?” an office fixture maybe two meters high, with a background in bill collection. “You leave right now and we won’t have to ask him to help you find the way out.”
“Um. Well then if that’s all, guess I’ll just…” heading for the door.
“Or there might be one thing,” in a tone of voice that goes along with thumbing off a safety.
“Sure. OK if I turn around?”
“Say we upped the ante and there was more cash in front…”
“You want to give somebody the bump.”
“Nobody you know personally, nobody special, you must have done it plenty during the War—”
“I was a dispatch rider, needed both hands just for getting point Ack to point Beer.”
“Oh? What’s with the face? knew you were such a virgin I’d’ve shifted into Sunday whites and classed up my language.”
“Just a two-bit grifter here, Bruno, trying to stay even with the upkeep on my bike. Don’t sound like anything much in my line.”
“Give you a day to think about it.”
Ace, with no idea how unusually generous this is of Bruno, spends his day of grace decoking his exhaust, looking for parts at the junkyard, avoiding people he owes money to. Next day, “Well. Here’s the mug shot, I can suggest times and places but it’ll be up to you really.”
“Why me, you’ve got plenty of talent around here to choose from.”
“Turns out the lucky stiff-to-be is Jewish.”
“And I’m not. So what?”
“You’re the top performer at HIJAC right now.” This being one of Bruno’s many sidelines, Homeland Integrity through Jewish Asset Conversion, where Ace has been specializing lately as a sort of strong-arm repossess man cashing in on selected Jewish citizens who’ve decided to flee their countries in a hurry, leaving behind enough property to be worth the effort of stealing it.
“Which makes me what, prime Jew-killer material? Are we working for Hitler now?”
“You might want to mind your mouth, grease monkey, who I do business with is none of yours, is it.”
“Nope, no more than who your daughter keeps company with, Boss,” Ace having learned how not to look away from eye contact at moments like these. Daphne’s story has been an open secret around the shop for a while. Which isn’t helping Bruno much with his composure.
“I don’t have time for this. You want to keep going with it I’ll ask Gunther to drop around later,” meantime pretending to get busy with some pieces of paper.
When Ace gets to the stairway he decides for some reason not to takethe steps but slide down the banister instead. It is a long enough swoop, the breeze blowing in between his ears and clearing out any number of cobwebs, that by the time he hits the street it’s pretty clear where things go from here. By nightfall he’s in Bratislava and slipping unnoticed in among a convoy of Trans-Trianon machinery in the 750-cc-and-above range. Nobody is speaking English and they all seem to be heading roughly south and west, which is fine with Ace.
Meanwhile, as if Jewish clarinet players aren’t bad enough, Bruno, to whom it has more than once occurred that Ace himself also might be smitten with Daphne, ends up shifting Ace over into a higher category of risk. Ace is now, as they used to say in the business, a marked man. “Wall of Death work is a sort of working vacation,” as he describes it to Hop Wingdale. “Living on tips these days, just dropped by to pick up a few pengoes. The Harley is expensive, but those lightweight li’l rigs just make me nervous.”
“Somebody said it’s safe long as you keep moving fast enough, something about centrifugal force.”
“Ridin the Wall of Death, ridin the Trans-Trianon, same only different. Problem down here at ground level is goin too fast, somebody hits the throttle, gets slung away on a tangent, ending up who knows where. Maybe forever. ’Course then again, ridin in circles all day, a man’s brain does start to spin.”
“So that cheese kingpin is after us both,” sez Hop. “Sorry you got dragged in.”
“Me too. You packing any heat?”
“Little Frommer STÖP, I keep it in with my clarinet.” Ace’s eyebrows go up a little. “It comes in handy now and then. Not everybody over here is a jazz lover.”
Ace climbs aboard his Flathead. “Don’t think it could have anythin to do with that, uhm, that Daphne Airmont, do you?”
Uh-oh. Hop has no idea what Bruno knows, how much he may have told Ace, how interested Ace might really be in Daphne, round and round yet again. “Crosses my mind now and then. Why Bruno should want either of us out of the picture that much.”
Here is one of those openings for the kind of discussion two men withan interest in the same woman might get into, when both understand that she plays in a league more advanced than any either has ever heard of…Except for the lingering few percentage points of a chance here that Ace might still be working for Bruno.
