Page 51 of Shadow Ticket
“But you do…rememberwhoyouare, right?”
“Who I…am…sure, just gimme a minute.”
Next thing they’re on an upper deck someplace, accompanied by a junior purser. Glow is puzzled. “You’re sure this is it.”
“Right here on the ticket, Miss.”
“Well. My antennas need tuning, all right. I had him figured for tourist third, tops.”
In the cabin, Hicks finds a steward named Clifton busy light-fingering his way like a working Parisienne on her lunch break through steamer trunks full of uptown wardrobe choices, growing more excited as he proceeds.
“Mind my asking,” Hicks not wishing to spoil anybody’s fun, “all the high-priced dry goods around here, somebody else’s cabin, maybe? Edward, Prince of Wales, one of them?”
Up goes an eyebrow. Nothing in the ship’s records to suggest the cabin’s assigned to anybody but Hicks. “Here, how about this one?” suggests Clifton, “Midnight aubergine and electric kumquat…not perhaps as understated a look as one might wish.” Though in fact, as the Gumshoe’s Manual points out, quite useful if you want eyewitnesses to be focused more on the suit than the mug happens to be in it.
Idly curious, Hicks grabs a handful of the getup and tries to wrinkle it. No go, it just bounces back good as new. You could sleep in this number night after night, still be ready to walk right into the ritzy gathering of your choice, nobody’d even blink…Shrugging into the jacket for a second, “Fits like a glove, ain’t it.” Well, a catcher’s mitt anyway.
“And maybe…this tie? couple shirts…” meantime making furtive Ronald Colman faces at himself in the mirror, “snappy hat here…how about it, Clifton, how’s this look to you?”
“Clark Gable green with envy, sir.”
“Not too cowboy-style around the brim, you think?”
“Um, sorry, boys, don’t mean to interrupt—”
Clifton catching sight of Glow, “Welcome aboard, Señora del Vasto, unless this is her kid sister, of course.”
“Lovely to see you as always, Clifton, once again by strange coincidence in the old familiar pickle, can you guess?”
“Your—”
“Yes! my ex- or as he likes to think of it current husband Porfirio, up to his usual melodrama, somehow finding out whenever I book passage and arranging to be on the same boat. Only trying to keep me out of trouble, as he calls it, just when I’m trying to get into some. The latest just in is now the big sap wants to give me an autogyro, all set to fly, supposedly waiting for me on the dock at Tangier.”
“One of those rigs,” Hicks recalls, “I keep seeing inPopular Mechanics.”
“Just so. A Spanish invention. Spain and the autogyro are linked intimately, Porfi would say romantically…”
—
Tonight the saloon deckis swarming with grinning stewards, uniformed juveniles years corrupted, American sorority girls, exiled royalty, chorus cuties trucking across at all angles shaking ostrich-feather fans in footlight colors, postwar liner travel in full swing. “Icebergs? enemy torpedoes? Phooey! if that’s the worst that could happen, then it’s happened already, hasn’t it, and anything else is only an amateur act. Long as we’re alive, let’s live.”
“Gaudeamus igiturto that, Jack!”
Champagne Cocktails, Sidecars, French 75s, Jack Roses, and Ward Eights flow without interruption. Staircases grand and otherwise being left unpatrolled by ship’s security, allow different classes of passenger all to shuffle together.
Up in the first class saloon, seated beneath a mural big as a billboard showing theStupendicaherself driving gallantly head-on through a Force 3 weather event, Hicks discovers Royal Navy Lieutenant-Commander Alf Quarrender, retired, and his wife Philippa, neither quite old enough for the story they’re peddling—off on an extended world tour, gathering impressions wherever they go. With the States, sorry to say, not figuring as much of a high point.
“You’ve in so many ways such a lovely country, it’s a pity one can’t find a proper Sticky Toffee Pudding in it anywhere.”
“Sorry, ‘a proper…’?”
“That’s it! That’s the tone exactly! One tries ever so hard to make them understand, ‘Sticky—Toffee—Pud-ding? surely you’ve heard of it?’ ‘You bet, lady!’ And then they bring you in one more horrible, inedible simulation.”
“The nation which cannot produce a plausible SticToPud,” summarizes Alf, “is a nation whose soul is in peril. Now Germany, although the true SticToPud per se may not exist there either—yet, if a blokefanciedone, well…achtung, you know. Waiting for you at breakfast the very next morning, and impossible to tell from the real thing.”
“Next time you’re in Chicago,” Hicks amiably, “you might want to try a chop house called St. Hubert’s, specializes in genuine English food.”
“Actually yes, we did of course, all but one’s first stop in Chicago, but regrettably with no better than indifferent luck, though I do recall ever such a nice chat there with a Mr. Guzik.”
