Page 99 of Shadow Ticket
Drago casting a look of speedy appraisal, “Special rate for two, if—”
“Not me,” sez Hicks.
“Not him,” confirms Daphne.
“Buy you a quick cup of Joe, you got time.”
They find a café. “That boat trip isn’t for me, as if you didn’t guess. Me, I’m taking the next liner back, you’ll be happy to hear.”
“Must be Bruno then. Don’t tell me nothin more, I’m still technically workin for Praediger, who thinks I’m helping him haul Bruno in.”
“You won’t say anything, will you?”
Shrug. “Not my ticket, even if somebody tells me what in heck’s going on, which ain’t about to happen. And with Praediger I can’t get a word in edgewise anyway.”
“What did you think would happen?”
“No idea. Besides which, the gumshoe’s code, no daydreaming on the job, so forth.”
“He’s in real danger, seriously on the lam this time. I can’t not help him, Hicks.”
“Gotcha.” They observe each other carefully in the precarious sunlight. “Well, Daphne, now, there might be one thing—”
“Ha! The speedboat! I knew the moment would come! Look at him, he can’t stand it anymore, can’t keep away from thosemotorboatmemories, yes, damned if he isn’t turning to Jell-O right here before my eyes!”
“Well only a small favor, but if you’re gonna be that way…”
“No. What I really mean is thanks forever for saving me way back when from the kindly attentions of the Winnetka bughouse, and consider yourself released. It was an impulsive act of rescue and thus may not incur recompense, let alone lifelong obligation, U.S. versus somebody, federal case, I looked it up once.”
“You’re lettin me off that Chippewa hook? About time.”
“There was also something about—”
“Oh. Well, in case I don’t get back to the States as soon as you do? if you wouldn’t mind getting a message to somebody?”
“The girl you left behind you.”
“More like grown woman, married, family to raise, unknown numbers of gun-totin Calabresi in the picture, but if it was being brought to her personally, see, by the actual daughter of the Al Capone of Cheese in Exile…”
“My pleasure, I’m sure, and that object you keep carrying around all the time there? I hope you’re paid up on your fire insurance.”
What one of them should have been saying was “We’re in the last minutes of a break that will seem so wonderful and peaceable and carefree. Ifanybody’s around to remember. Still trying to keep on with it before it gets too dark. Until finally we turn to look back the way we came, and there’s that last light bulb, once so bright, now feebly flickering, about to burn out, and it’s well past time to be saying, Florsheims, let’s ambulate.
“Stay, or go. Two fates beginning to diverge—back to the U.S., marry, raise a family, assemble a life you can persuade yourself is free from fear, as meanwhile, over here, the other outcome continues to unfold, to roll in dark as the end of time. Those you could have saved, could’ve shifted at least somehow onto a safer stretch of track, are one by one robbed, beaten, killed, seized and taken away into the nameless, the unrecoverable.
“Until one night, too late, you wake into an understanding of what you should have been doing with your life all along.”
Something like that. If anybody was still there to hear it. Which there isn’t.
36
Bruno had been hearing about Fiume since it was still an independent state under D’Annunzio. What brought him there in person was a scouting assignment on behalf of the InChSyn, which by then had grown more global and sinister in scope, avoiding central headquarters, instead choosing a more distributed model, free-zone hopping, setting up shop in short-lived entities emerging from the World War and the Russian Revolution, preferring mixed populations, disputed territories, histories of plebiscites and provisional government, currencies printed on inexpensive stock in fugitive inks.
Fiume, despite a rumor Woodrow Wilson was once considering it as a site for the League of Nations HQ, turned out to be one such focus of impermanence. Bruno himself by then, keeping on the hop, expecting the door to be kicked in any minute, avoiding paperwork, file cabinets, anything too heavy to pick up and vamoose with, took little more than a look and was instantly charmed, acquiring a villa just across the border from the new Yugoslavian entity, in fact having no agreed-upon location unless “Currently in Dispute” is your idea of a postal address, at times partly situated in Serbo-Croat-Slovene territory, and part in Fascist Italy…from which if necessary a cheeze magnate on the move could easily step from country to country as long as he’s willing to put up with sentries, delays, routines of the borderline that require constant attention to grease and gratuities.
For Daphne the villa is a place she would gladly have come “home” to, even to live in. Her prayers for Bruno having once almost included the hopethat he grow into somebody who’d understand and deserve someplace very like this, however much South Sea cooch-dancing tabloid scenarios might turn out to be more up his alley.
The villa dates from just after the War, when d’Annunzio’s republic was young and Fiume had a reputation as a party town, fun-seekers converging from all over, whoopee of many persuasions, wide-open to nudists, vegetarians, coke snorters, tricksters, pirates and runners of contraband, orgy-goers, fighters of after-dark hand-grenade duels, astounders of the bourgeoisie…Bridges, archways, views of the gulf and the islands, floor plan like a native quarter, with a lengthy history of re-surveys and legal shouting matches in various international courtrooms. Easy for visitors to get lost climbing up and down among levels, running mazes vertical and horizontal, navigating an indoor geography they fail to learn much about before it’s time to move on. Nobody knows how many rooms there are, scale enough for suites and wings, alliances and betrayals, storms of armed emotion sweeping through the house unannounced.
