Page 66 of Shadow Ticket
“Had you figured somehow for prim, once.”
“You didn’t know what you were missing.”
“Nothing new. Don’t see that Alf around.”
“No one ever does till it’s too late,” Pip with a toss of her bob and a brief side shift of the eyeballs flipping open a cigarette case with a guilloche design in silver and violet enamel, full of swanky Egyptian smokes, black with gold crests, sliding one between her lips. Hicks without asking reaches himself one just as she snaps the case shut again.
“Ouch.”
“Oops, didn’t draw blood there or anything, did I. These happen to be Ankhesenamuns, never that easy to come by and perhaps not quite up your street in any case.”
A smoke is a smoke, but, “Hep to that,” handing it back, “wouldn’t want to…”
“Oh, keep it.”
“You’re sure.”
“After your hands, previous whereabouts unknown, have been all over it…”
“You’re a sport.” They light up. As if there might be something weird and Oriental in the smoke, Hicks politely makes a point of holding it a while before exhaling through his nose.
“Delightful, aren’t they.”
Could use some menthol in fact, though Hicks only beams and nods.
“Getting along all right with Egon Praediger these days, seeing things eye-to-eye, one trusts?”
“More like nose to nose, he keeps saying it’s all about Bruno Airmont, but I can’t shake this feeling he’s up to something else.”
“You’ve twigged by now he isn’t really a policeman.”
“That would explain a lot, but maybe you shouldn’t be tellin me—”
“He’s one of us.”
“Good luck with that, whatever that ‘us’ is.”
“The Directorate in Vienna is a convenient cover for him, besides their helpfully vast collection of dossiers. His chief remit has to do with Croatia, which ever since being absorbed into the Yugoslavian state has been trying to become independent again, by way of a goon squad known as the Ustashe. They regard Yugoslavia as nothing but a new version of Serbia, which Austria still hates as bitterly as before the War and so have been pursuing a hands-off policy toward Ustashe mischief, including a good deal of train bombing and sabotage and that sort of thing.”
“So when you two handed me over to Praediger—”
“He’d been in Belgrade,” Alf manifesting out of nowhere, “helping to further one more deep Ustashe design against the Yugo entity, no doubt. Hullo, McTaggart, you again, listening to Mata Hari here telling tales out of school, though you mustn’t believe a word.”
Alf has arrived in a jaunty turnout including a trilby hat which draws looks of disgust from Pips. “Thought we’d seen the last of that thing.”
“That was the Herbert Johnson. This is the Mühlbacher.”
“Every spy in town wears one,” Pips explains, the town at the moment being Vienna, where the Quarrenders are currently based.
If you happen to be a spy, one big selling point about Vienna is there are no laws against spying, as long as the spying isn’t on Austria. “Spies all tell you they want to live in Vienna—culture, sophistication, friendly police, legal immunity. And once Vienna really was that cozy, nothing happening, one never had to venture out of town, everyone knew each other, same round of cafés, agents of various nations, if that’s your preference, once fairly sluggish going for anyone trying to scratch a living wage from International Intrigue, till of course the Nazis changed all that. Now it’s as dangerous as anyplace in Europe. Right, left, ultra and infra, everyone armed and out in the street and the police worse than useless.”
Alf has begun to locate at this stage in his career a “sensitive” side, a development Pip admits to being less than enchanted with. “Oh, dear, no. No, best of luck with that, some quivering retro-adolescent hoovering up everyone’s precious time, that would just stuff the haggis, wouldn’t it!”
“Pip Emma, my peach, you always did read me like a bus advert.”
“Not attentively enough, it seems, who’d believe that I once took you for a jolly lad only looking for a bit of fun—certainly not thetiresomecomplexoone observes before one at the moment.”
“Always marry a loquacious woman, McTaggart, less work for one’s own lungs, more room for smoking. In fact I have here two brilliant Havanas, if you’d like to step round the corner.”
