Page 52 of Shadow Ticket
“Greasy Thumb Guzik? Sounds like the place, all right. But, um…”
“Busy chap, corner table, constant procession to and from, not entirely respectable-looking, all seemed to be carrying paper bags of one sort or another.”
“He’s Al Capone’s chief financial adviser.”
“How marvelous and apparently quite thick as well with your Mr. Dawes, savior of the German economy.”
“This joint is right next door to the Union League Club, see, big Republican hangout, paths’ve been known to cross.”
“But Al Capone, I say— Republicans and gangsters? How can such things be?”
Hicks blinks once, maybe twice.
“Though he seemed rather a modest retiring sort, Mr. Guzik did happen to mention his role in helping with what we now know as the Dawes Plan.”
Hicks dimly recalls something about German inflation right after the War, wheelbarrows full of unspendable billions of marks in paper money, a crisis Charles Dawes was widely credited with resolving.
“Your Guzik chap’s a financial genius, apparently only took a minute to suggest that Mr. Dawes make them a good-size loan against his own bank, thus in an instant clearing up a number of complications all round. Rescued Germany absolutely, put them back in the game, setting the stage indeed for the New Germany we’re now witnessing.”
“There’s that ol’ Greasy Thumb for ya.”
“We should never have fought them in the first place,” opines Alf, “certainly never demanded reparations on that scale. The only good to come of it’s that now with the old lot on their way out, there’s a second chance, not only for Germany but for all civilization.”
Hicks eyes the couple uneasily. Though they might really be no more than innocent retirees out to see the world, there’s also about them an air of international monkey business, maybe even some kind ofespionageracket, hard at work. Plus that familiar feeling that at any moment the name of a certain German Political Celebrity is about to come up, which indeed it does, only to sink, to Hicks’s relief, back into the general effervescence.
“The whole idea, then as now, being to keep the bolshies behind the fence.” Alf expects a “Great Simplification” quite soon, “Matters will then all be ever so much easier. Not like the last show. This time around, thanks to improvements in radio, internal combustion, aeronautics, no time zone will be spared, no more of those strangely named distant purgatories…”
“And with each day brought so much more into doubt than the one before,” adds Philippa, “imagine how enormously simplified romance will become, scarcely time for it, anyway, once is enough, isn’t it, and tralala on to the next.” A strange hectic glee taking hold of her for a second or two. Hicks thinks he sees goose bumps.
“Look, folks, do you mind if I ask you something?”
“Anything, my darling, name it.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way but…Would either of you have any idea…how I got here?”
“Ah. Well…you see…when a Mum and a Dad love each other very much—”
“Now, none of that, Pip Emma, you damned flirt,” Alf waving a finger, “stop it at once, I say—”
“What I mean is here on this boat, see, I don’t remember ever…really…coming on board?”
“I shouldn’t wonder, you were altogether blotto.”
“Mickey on the menu. Anything else?”
“Some sort of American government vessel, chasing after us, at flank speed.”
“Bureau of Prohibition?”
“Declined to identify themselves,” Alf recalls, “behaved as if they didn’t have to, no hull number, nothing at the jackstaff, put a shot across our bow, actually,” whereupon theStupendicahad dutifully matched course and speed with the pugnacious little cutter, which sent over a line, and soon after that Hicks, winched across in a canvas sling, above a furious aftward rush of ocean whitecaps…
—
“How’s the amnesia,forgotten anything interesting lately?”
The del Vasto broad again. Carrying a Jack Rose the size of a birdbath.
“Yeah, what’s the legal age for one of these? I believe it’s proper etiquette for the gentleman to go first?” Grabbing her glass and swilling down about half what’s in it, “hmm, old enough maybe, too soon to tell, let’s just…”
