Page 95 of Shadow Ticket
“Thanks for the lift,” Ace mutters from the tonneau. “You might have bumped the punk off and saved everybody a lot of trouble.”
“UTOPIAN caveat in effect, I’m afraid,” explains the golem.
“Which would be…”
“Wired into every current-model golem—Unless The Opportunity Presents Itself, Attack Nobody. You want to keep your head down, or are you having too much fun up here in the wind?”
“We’ll need to get to my bike,” sez Ace.
“Not going to happen,” sez Hop. “That Flathead has long been taken away to a fate unknown.”
“Good, let them have it, it’s a rolling death trap anyway. Too heavy,clutch never could handle the weight, flywheel’s too small, go any faster than 50 it starts trying to shake itself apart…”
“Well, but aside from that—”
“Hate to interrupt but,” Hop pausing as something shadowy goes whizzing by close overhead and explodes deafeningly nearby, “I think that was for us.”
“I’ll make a note, thanks.”
With the first of the Vladboy pursuit screaming into the edge of his vision, Zdenek, bouncing behind the wheel muttering in Czech, makes a wide U-turn, sending up a plume of dust and gravel, back onto the road headed the other way. A line of brief dirt explosions goes racing left to right just ahead of them. “Hmm. You want to hang on—” Off the road into unpaved terrain torn up with ruts from heavy machinery and littered with shell casings from the recent activity.
From behind woodlines nobody can even see, field howitzers have begun to lob shells, abrupt small craters creeping closer in a tightening ellipse. Gas rises in dense flare-struck columns.
Nothing but fence as far as the eye can see. “There was supposed to be a gate around here someplace,” Zdenek somewhere between perplexity and annoyance.
“Could use a Bangalore torpedo,” Ace supposes.
“Might happen to have a pocket-size model here,” Zdenek rooting around in back and coming up with a few sticks of dynamite thoughtfully borrowed last week in Transylvania off of a freelance firefighting crew passing through en route to a Romanian oil-well fire everybody could see from fifty miles away.
“Ought to do the trick,” Ace figures. “Somebody got a light?”
Obligingly Zdenek snaps his fingers, which begin to glow red. “Here we go, everybody mind their ears now…”
34
Not that Daphne would admit to being lost, although it hasn’t taken her long to regret this impulsive attempt to find Hop. She has blundered out into a territory she thought she knew, which in fact the political situation has changed to something unrecognizable and poisonous. The best plan she can come up with is to retrace the old Klezmopolitan routes she remembers. Wear solid hiking shoes and watch her step.
Hamburg, once the Swing Kid metropolis, is especially depressing for Daphne to visit. Dockyard neighborhoods solidly Social Democratic and Communist are suddenly all infested with brownshirts, singing Nazi lyrics to the tune of “The Internationale,” “Auf Hit…lerleute, schließt, die Reih-en” and so forth, known as the “Hitlernazionale.” Local citizens try to drown this out by singing the original anthem, which might be charming enough for a travelogue, amusing even, except for the physical violence it always degenerates into. Negroes have vanished from the Reeperbahn jazz bars, leaving unlighted windows and Rooms to Let signs all through St. Pauli. Blues licks have largely given way to major triads.
Now and then she thinks she sees familiar faces, Swing Kids aged into the hopeless awareness that what may have been possible for them once is no longer so. Girls who used to dance their braids all loose before the end of the first set are now en route to children, church, and kitchen. No greetings of “Swing Heil!” anymore, not even in a whisper. No more gathering up closer to the bandstand to listen, humming harmony, sometimes to just hold each other and what they called “sway” in time to the music.
Daphne understands that she has already seen the last days of Klezmania, traveling parties of Swing Kids and Red Front fans, Jewish and otherwise, fraternizing shamelessly, who knows what expectations tumbling through their minds. The sort of thing Jew-haters don’t like to see but cops do, because it means overtime. To call yourself a Swing Kid was to count on a fight every time you went out to hear music, or dance, or even just hang around, running on little more than beer and their own adrenaline, while the Hitlerboys would be cranked up to unnatural levels of speed and force by the latest pills intended for Army use, some still under research at IG Farben. Creeping their way after the last set, dazed and apprehensive, back out into the deep hours of a future where not even furtive reprises can any longer be counted on and the streetcars home are few if running at all anymore…
One evening just past sundown Daphne wanders into a beer garden the Klezmopolitans once played at, formerly named the Midnight Mouse after a poem by Christian Morgenstern, now converted to a Sturmlokal, Der Schlagstock, with SA, since it’s legal to wear the uniform again, all over the place, amateur Nazi choir music, not so much sung as shouted in unison, tables crowded with boys in identical shirts and haircuts…
About the time her foot touches the doorsill, Daphne, who must have slid somehow into a nostalgic daze, is reminded it’s back to the present tense.
“Looking for me, Schätzchen?”
“Long way from Friedrichstraße tonight.”
She tries to turn and step back out but her way is blocked by Hitler-happy adolescents, faces already familiar by way of the newsreels, imagining themselves predators but when observed more closely, fated after all to suffer, to be brought down as prey, even at the hands of those they thought were brothers in a struggle for which they themselves were always too fragile.
Congratulations, Cheez Princess, she snarls to herself, you’re about to become fondue.
Providentially, overhead, approaching out of the dusk, comes a godawful racket.
“Ach nein!”
