Page 67 of Shadow Ticket
Given the British appetite for alternate meanings, the Secret Service has long angled among the sizable pool of cryptic crossword solvers looking for potential code-buster talent, which is what Alf is taking a break from at the moment.
“Need to clear my head, been all morning at the Crossword Suicide Café.”
“The…um…”
One night a few years ago, Alf explains, around midnight, an unemployed waiter named Antal Gyula steps in to what was then known as the Emke Café, just down the block, tried to make a couple of phone calls, noluck, disappeared into the toilet, next thing anybody knows, ka-pow, the Budapest Suicide Bug has bitten again. In Antal’s pocket they find a farewell note in the form of a crossword puzzle he designed himself, whose solution will reveal the reasons he did the deed, along with the names of other people involved.
“It’s been some time now, and nobody’s solved it yet. A crypto bonanza potentially and yet just as easily somebody’s idea of a practical joke.” The longer it goes unsolved, the more confusion and dismay. Devout cruciverbalists from foreign countries have learned Hungarian, sometimes to a quite advanced and literary level, even quit their jobs, just to come to Budapest to work on the notorious Mystery Crossword, “and sooner or later they all show up at the toilet of the fatal café.”
“Wait—there are Hungarian crossword puzzles? Written in Hungarian and everything?”
“The alphabet’s a bit more complex, fourteen vowels, for one thing, double and triple consonants. One imagines old Dilly Knox would be the bloke to see about that, if one were interested—but hello, what’s this then, someone busy pawing my wife, come along, McTaggart, I may need you to ‘put the arm on’ someone.”
“Pipka!”
“Vassily!”
One of those left-right-left Russian kisses, repeated indefinitely, intended, as near as Hicks can tell, less for Pip than for the irascible husband approaching.
“Yes, well, cue the balalaikas, Charing Cross Station clock around here isn’t it.”
Known to Alf and Pip by his British code name Vassily Midoff since shortly after the War, when he was running around London go-betweening, shifting cash, pawnable jewelry, microfilm, wire traffic, one alias in fact among so many that by now he’s begun to forget some of the earlier ones.
Impressions of what he looks like also vary widely. Not that he’s invisible, exactly, people see him all the time, but theydon’trememberthat they saw him. They’d better not. He has too much invested, he’s given up literallyyears of intra-Party maneuvering to slip away to workshops in the Far East, where the training among clandestine orders of brothers and sisters is relentlessly devoted to the arts of passing through the world without leaving a trace.
They find an inconspicuous café, Vassily sitting with the best view of possible street approaches.
“We haven’t seen you in Vienna lately. Hate to think you’ve been avoiding us.”
“He was there,” Pip suggests, “we just didn’t see him.”
“You do seem nervous, Vassily, more than usual.”
“You know what it is. Don’t pretend you don’t know. Everybody knows what it is.”
“If it’s anything we’ve done or neglected to—”
But Vassily’s attention now is elsewhere. He is staring into the street, as if trying to see around the corner, where a slow clattering engine sound, advancing out of the inaudible, is now nearly upon them. “Pizdets,” with a rising inflection that will after another breath become a scream of terror. “It’s them!”
Who turn out to be nightclub apport trio Schnucki, Dieter, and Heinz, seated one behind another on a Böhmerland Long Touring motorcycle, ten and a half foot wheelbase, red and yellow paint job, riding patrol, keeping an eye out for Russians who may be in town plotting to put the snatch on Zoltán von Kiss. Just doing what they’re hired for, though try to tell that to Vassily Midoff.
“Tourists out for a spin, Vassily, what’s making you so jumpy?”
“Can’t you see? riding back on the extra seat? The invisible rider!”
“There’s no one,” Pip carefully. “The seat’s empty.”
“Steady, old radish,” advises Alf. But Vassily is up and off hysterical down the street. There does exist an experimental military version of the long Czechoslovakian bike, with a second gearbox in back, to be operated by any rearmost or fourth passenger. In this case, invisible. As Vassily Midoff, were he not at the moment running for his life, would no doubt have pointed out, for a trinity to be effective, and not just a set which happens tocontain three members, there must be a fourth element, silent, withheld. A fourth rider, say, working a phantom gearbox…
“We won’t see him again,” Pip dismal. “Something has spooked him back into invisibility.”
Alf indignant, “Wasn’t—”
“Ssh. Not us.” Patting him on the hand, “His extra rider.”
24
Reporting in to an all-purpose governmental office converted from a Royal Gendarmerie station where Praediger conducts ICPC business when in Budapest, Hicks finds Praediger obsessively brooding about his latest failure to entrap and arrest Bruno Airmont, not only flying into rages but introducing barrel rolls and Immelmanns as well. Today he has also hauled an oversizedsoupspoonout of someplace and begun energetically to shovel cocaine into both nostrils at once.
