Page 93 of Shadow Ticket
But Ace by now has kick-started his machine, flipped a salute, and, calling back “Don’t tell anybody you saw me,” is rolling off and away.
—
Terike hears the newsfrom a bartender with a shortwave set in the back room. “Radioed them at Cluj, they said he’d be checking in, but nothing’s been heard since.”
Her face, her cryptic road-adventuress face, begins to drift into disarray, though nobody would notice who hasn’t been gazing at it as earnestly as Hicks. Her mouth going askew, eyes unable to look anywhere, forehead losing its smooth serenity.
The wind outside has grown louder, reached a high, disconsolate edge likely to last through the night, a wind not even eccentric or daredevil bikers tonight are eager to get out in. Everybody assumes that Ace has been in some kind of a crash. In the mountains, climbing through rain just at the edge of turning to snow, night coming earlier, Ace forgetting as usual to check the carbide in the headlamp, the light flickering, failing, dwindling to darkness and the metallic smell. Even with a reliable working headlamp, he’s always had this habit, or maybe practice, of riding faster at night than he should, of not staying safely inside the space lighted ahead of him. Like many Harley Flathead riders of the period, Ace has disconnected the new front-brake cable and grip arrangement, looking to avoid any more braking skids than what he’s going to get into anyway—possibly some annoyance, bordering on resentment, at the whole idea of braking itself, of any limits or interruptions to motion forward.
Hicks figures he’s somehow beaming telepathic messages of caring and support directly into Terike’s brain, puzzled that she doesn’t at least gaze back, slowly understanding that she wants not to be looked at at all. Fine with Hicks, who couldn’t have watched this collapse for much longer anyway.
Which as it turns out he doesn’t get to. One day it’s the carburetor. Thenfor a few bothersome days, a countershaft bearing situation. Next time he goes looking for her she’s all set to leave.
“His trouble might not’ve been mechanical, dispatch riders usually know better. Your chain acts funny, you’re always ready to break, press, rivet. Your tire goes flat, you stuff it with grass and ride on. Ace can be careless but he’s not stupid. This could be anything, even some run-in with locals known to get unfriendly. I have to go see. Try to understand—if it was me, wouldn’t you?”
“Sure. How about Ace, would he?” regretting it the minute it came blurting out.
“And that really is stupid, Hicks.”
Maybe, but he won’t let it go. “What if all it is is that he’s met—”
“Suppose he has and what’s it to you? He always knew how to ditch me, so natural that it took me a while to catch on that I was going to be alone again, so simple, no goodbye note, just some empty oil cans and cigarette butts lying around, and then one day there he’d be again, all right? Listen, if you’re going to get allinvestigativeabout this, swell, it’ll be up to you, but meantime if you don’t mind there’s a couple thousand bugs should have been in my teeth by now.”
Turns out that in some walled-in maze of a mountain town Ace has missed a turn or taken the wrong half of a fork and ends up running on fumes, miles out of his way just about the time the wolves come out. Wolves and as it happens Vladboys, who also run this terrain in packs. Aware of the danger, Ace has gone blasting on in anyway, thinking he had an edge, but these riders are not touring. They’re hunting. Small, nimble, predatory, full of pep—dirt scramblers, hill climbers, creek crossers. Ace’s weight and displacement work against him, he’s been listening for a throb as deep as his own, anything higher-pitched or faster will take him a tenth of a second too long to sort out, and that’s their edge. It proves decisive. The snow comes down more heavily, deleting other options. Ace finds himself in the hands of the Vladboys.
33
A Hungaro-Croatian terrorist training camp, located right on the borderline, not, like the notorious Jankapuszta, aimed at Yugoslavia in particular so much as flexibly all-purpose Fascist, quivering in readiness to be deployed anywhere…specializing in lightning putsches local and continent-wide, chaste as any of nature’s killer species, briefly innocent as Fascism in its “springtime of beauty,” as the old anthem goes, before it descended into paperwork and brutality…
Fascist adventurers have journeyed here from all over, Austrians sporting blue cornflowers and black grouse feathers, secret police, anti-Red goon squads, revolutionary cells, convicts escaped from internal exile and not sure where they are right now or what language they’re supposed to be speaking, colonial stooges in civvies in from as far afield as Indo-China and South America, irredentist aristos from the old Hungarian kingdom adrift in nostalgia, Polish freelancers working on spec for all of the above.
At the gate, sentries welcome the bus with the standard Ustaša exchange, “Za dom!” right hand striking chest over the heart, to which the bus driver replies, “Spremni!”
Like “Heil Hitler,” somebody, probably the bass player, who knows everything, explains, only different.
“History rolls on,” Storm Leader Dubendorff, apparently in charge of the entertainment around here, greets the band, “toward our Fascist future, immense and stately, we here being only the squalls and tornadoes breakingout at her edges,” cranking aside a drapery of some kind to reveal through multipaned floor-to-ceiling windows a vast stretch of the puszta, a sweeping view of tank-friendly countryside aswarm with vehicles the colors of local earth and dust, thundering and hurtling, squads scrambling around shooting at dummy tanks or machine-gun nests, practice detonations at all hours out in the brush.
“In this current exercise we are pretending to invade Fiume, which any number of potential clients want back, requiring only a simple pincer movement—in from the Adriatic, down out of the Velebit, all over in a day or two.Anasa supo.”
—
Tonight Vladboys havegathered from all over, to dance to the beat of this tiny orchestra making with swingtime straight from the night cities of capitalist decadence, in this ruined limestone amphitheater, once dedicated to bloodletting presented as amusement, back when the Fifth Macedonian Legion were busy here invading and occupying. Nazi bikers creep around furtively chiseling cigarettes from anybody they can as long as it’s not the official Storm Trooper brands they’re only permitted to smoke.
“A Gay Evening with Vlad Tepes,” including “Vlad’s Vegetarian Chef.”
“Et voilà—just out of the oven, Your Excellency, dig in!”
“Turnip loaf again, remind me to have the chef impaled.”
“What, again?”
“It’s simple—ease up on the vegetables, I do less impaling—pari passu, fair play, am I being so unreasonable?”
“Vlad at the Office.”
“Criminal code? Nemnemnem, too elaborate, first-degree this, second-degree that, too much paperwork…instead how about one penalty for everything—simple impalement! Murder, queue-jumping, double-dealing and false shuffles, easy to remember, no case law to look up, no judges to bribe, no lawyers’ fees—in fact, no lawyers! Find a stick, sharpen it,zzt! done in a flash, another of those reductions in government spending for which I have become famous. But do they ever call me Vlad the Spending Reducer?Not likely! Since I took power, the threat of Turkish invasion has fallen to zero—do they call me Vlad the Invasion Preventer? No…
“But!Runonestakethrough one small-time chiseler…”
