Page 102 of Shadow Ticket
“Why not, you’d make a handsome couple and the job offer stands. Head of Operations, Adjutant Kingpin, call it what you like.”
“How about ‘a dark delayed and a smacker short’? Sorry, Bruno. I’ll stick with freewheeling solo for a while.”
Offers of steady work keep rolling in. At a shipfitters’ bar in Kraljevica, Ace runs into Hop Wingdale again. “That was a tight spot you got us out of, back up the road there.”
“Not me, it was really that Czechoslovakian robot should get all the credit.”
“We could use you both at our shop. Sort of underground work. Escorting Jews to safety, one at a time or in truckloads, become a sought-after specialist in a fast-growing field, bright earning possibilities—”
“Earn Unlimited ‘Gelt’ in Jew Rescue, sounds like the back pages ofPopular Mechanics. You know what I used to do when I was working for Bruno, right?”
“Antisemitic grand larceny, so what? even better. Gives you a chance to reform.”
“Let me think about it.” He’s still thinking. Meantime a spot of aggravation with his triple tree rake angle is demanding some attention.
37
Abandoned after the War, the old Whitehead factory, where the torpedo as we have come to know it was invented, has fallen into ruin, occupied these days by unhoused squatters and motorcyclists passing through. Few care to stay much longer than overnight, because it’s said to be haunted by the ghosts of submarines long dismantled which feel compelled to return to their birthplace. More objects-with-souls gobbledeygook, Hicks figures. Hopefully.
The map Stuffy drew for Hicks seems clear enough. The beer joint is easy to walk up to and into but no guarantees about getting back out. Hicks has a look around. Enough light to see by, despite a blur of smoke out of which anything can come hurtling unannounced, a couple of industrious barmaids whose smiles are not unconnected with having just come on shift, circulating among assorted submarine sailors, if that’s what they are, on liberty, plus a few homegrown tomatoes rolling in and out.
“Nice joint, Stuffy. Been in worse.”
“What’d I tell you? Come on, like you to meet the Skipper.”
Ernst Hauffnitz is set up at a corner table behind a smoldering pipeful of some Latakia blend and a half-liter beer mug. Hicks isn’t sure what kind of story the sub skipper’s had from Stuffy, but apparently the cheez heiress ticket comes into it by way of Bruno Airmont.
“Who is about to be taken, as we speak, off on an undersea voyage of uncertain extent. We and our client apologize for any inconvenience this may be causing you.”
“This client wouldn’t happen to be a Viennese copper named Praediger—”
“Ach, der Praediger.” A chuckle plus two or three puffs of pipe smoke. “Ustashe operative, cocaine enthusiast…”
“That’s the kiddie.”
“It doesn’t matter. The vessel is invisible to him, as it is to the Vienna Police Directorate, none of whom have been exactly alone in their plodding pursuit of Mr. Airmont—there’s been quite a long list, headed by the International Cheese Syndicate, who happen to be the ones breathing down our necks at the moment.” It isn’t only the hefty amount of Syndicate money that Bruno has embezzled, but also everything he knows about the inner workings of the InChSyn. “The secret overlords of Cheese are understandably anxious for that to remain in confidence, even—in fact—at the cost of Mr. Airmont’s life. Working ourselves generally more in the search and rescue line, our objective is to see that Mr. Airmont is safely relocated where he can neither commit nor incur further harm. You might consider us an encapsulated volume of pre-Fascist space-time, forever on the move, a patch of Fiume as it once was, immune to time, surviving all these years in the deep refuge of the sea…”
Doubts began for the Skipper early in the War, when Max Valentiner torpedoed and sank SSPersiain the Mediterranean, killing 343 civilians in direct violation of Chancellery orders to spare passengers and rescue survivors. “I remembered Max from U-boat school in Kiel. Before the War he had become famous for saving lives. A hero, many times decorated. But command of one’s own U-boat can do strange things to a man.”
“Yet you managed to avoid that.”
“Spent my time in the Mediterranean Theater bottled up in the Adriatic behind the Otranto Barrage, playing cat and mouse with British destroyers and drifters, no casualty count that I know of, idiot’s luck no doubt…Some of us, if consciences had toenails, would be hanging on by just that margin. Yet conscience must find ways to go on operating inside history.”
In the late summer of 1921, U-13 was ordered to proceed to its birthplace, the Óbuda shipyard in Budapest, to be broken up pursuant to Article122 of the Trianon dictate. About a day out from port the Skipper had one of those moments. The K.u.K. Kriegsmarine had ceased to exist in 1918. Orders from some bureaucratic successor made no sense at all. The Skipper tied up at a disused quay near Csepel, left a skeleton crew, and sent everybody else over on liberty and went on a meditative bender himself in Budapest, his thoughts far from festive. The city had a long history of suicide, attracting pilgrims from all over the world seeking a Lourdes not of hope but of despair, assuming that suicide in Budapest, like love in Paris or greed in New York, would be somehow more authentic.
One night on the Chain Bridge, gazing down at the river, in an alcoholic trance, he was approached by a small delegation of his crew members, out looking for him, as it happened. “Evening, Skipper, hope we’re not interrupting anything.”
“Trouble with the boat?”
“The boat’s fine. But we’ve been wondering, some of us, why you’re not bringing her into the yard.”
“Why I’m disobeying orders.”
“Something like that.”
“I admit my command had more to do with running enemy blockades than disrupting their shipping, but I still developed a strange rapport with the boat, you could almost call it a sort of psychical connectedness…”
Not exactly muttering but producing the subvocal impression that the old man had gone off his rocker at last or, as some would put it, again.
