Page 78 of Shadow Ticket
“This isn’t Chicago.”
Pretending to look the place over, “By golly you’re right, it isn’t, but—”
“Though now that I recall…of course, you haven’t really seen him with the steam coming out his ears, yes, Hop can become quite excitable indeed, most ammo is like birdshot to him, bounces right off. Anyone wants to keep us apart, short of fifty-caliber, forget it.”
“Faithful?”
“Maybe not ‘unto death,’ as Herbert Gustave Schmalz might put it, but at least unto a high level of inconvenience for somebody. Just so you know—if it will get Hop back to me safe and sound, OK? there’s no depths I wouldn’t go to, even degrading myself rolling around with a lowlife such as you.”
“Could’ve just said you love the guy, I would’ve bought that.”
“But this way you also got to have your ashes hauled.”
“Now that you bring it up—”
“Looks like I have, but no.”
“Aw?”
“Because unless I lost count that would make it twice, Cupcake. Verydifferent from once, or did they forget to teach you that back at hard-boiled dick academy?”
“Ah…Just some one-nighter in a motorboat, yep it figures, why don’t I ever tumble sooner.”
Hicks isn’t about to admit it, but the thought crosses his mind—stops halfway, looks back over its shoulder and winks actually—wouldn’t it be a nice turnaround to bring some couple back together again, put the matrimony back in “matrimonial” for a change, instead of divorce lawyers into speedsters and limousines.
27
After a string of peculiar one-night engagements, girl vocal trios with megaphones, French horns in the brass section, white tenors putting on jive hepcat voices, reedmen who move their instruments around in the air all together, a bandleader with an electric violin whose bow he uses for a baton and whose long power cord he keeps tripping over, adding a thrill element of self-electrocution, Hop Wingdale gets as far as Geneva, where his booking agent is doing business out of a low-rent office in brisk walking or when necessary running distance of the train station, under the name of Nigel Trevelyan and behind a facial expression, carefully worked on for years, as dodgy as his name. “Half my client list, over here it’s standard practice. Jewish musicians prefer these English handles for some reason.”
“Well, you sure outdid yourself this time,” Hop collapsing onto a beat-up divan. “Must be a Depression on or something. Dismal, desperate…Toilets I don’t mind, Nigel. Just don’t ever book me into any of these Nazi joints popping up all over, them I won’t work in.”
“What, you’re Jewish or something?” A phrase going around lately. “Hop, wake up for a minute, how do you know you haven’t been taking Nazi money all along?”
“Because Nigel Trevelyan, my agent and incorruptible standard of truth, keeps reassuring me it’s all kosher.”
“Here’s something at least pareve, next week through the end of the summer, motorcycle gig, the Trans-Trianon 2000 Tour of Hungary Unredeemed, dance band including vocalist, transportation by luxuryroad-Pullman, excellent bar on board, one fashionable wayside lounge after another, it sez here, all through Lower Austria, Slovakia, Carpathians, Transylvania, Slovenian Alps, Adriatic coast, Fiume…Motorcycle riders plus their friends and admirers. According to this, ‘Each night will be like the czardas in reverse, peppy and crazy to begin with, yet soon relaxing to almost a soothing and stately lullaby, as one by one, motor-vagabond audiences go toppling drugged into night’s oblivion.’ Any flicker of interest here, Hop?”
“Long as nobody minds if I stay awake.”
“Bringing us to the clarinet. Lately, to a certain type ear, clarinet playing of any kind screams Jewish, anything else you could double on, how about trumpet?”
“Anything in A-flat, sure.”
“So each number you play, to what could turn out to be a houseful of violent Jew-haters, gambling on their collective tin ear, you’ll need to calibrate how klezmeratic, not to mention how Negro, you can afford to present yourself as. Anybody begins to suspect that the bright thread swooping out of your instrument might somehow be Jewish saliva, well…”
“Gotcha, Nigel.”
“We’ll call this a definite maybe. Now,” hitting switch buttons, disconnecting jacks and plugs, drawing the window blinds, and checking the lock on the office door, “moving to the real business at hand.”
Hop’s “booking agent” turns out to be a bureaucrat working at Continental scale, field supervisor for an agency seldom specified as to nationality and, like many offices in Geneva, exempt from a broad range of governmental controls. Hop gazes, fascinated as Nigel proceeds through a smooth frame-by-frame personal transition, gaining a couple inches in height, mustache narrowing to little more than a lip gesture, discreetly tinted indoor specs.
“You may have noticed the antisemitism situation has picked up some steam since the last time you were over here. As the momentum builds, it’s increasingly likely that Jews, maybe even in unprecedented numbers, will soon be needing to change their address, and quickly, and now’d be the time to start making arrangements—exit routes, dummy post office boxes like those already in Lisbon and Shanghai, fuel dumps, secure places to sleep…
“Not that there’s a hell of a lot of money available for this, nobody in London, Washington, anyplace helpful is willing to step an inch out of line. We’re in for some dark ages, kid. Dim at least. This could turn out to be thousands, maybe tens of thousands of lives, and we’ll have to be the ones with better logistics, infrastructures of resistance and escape in place and at hand…we’ll have to become supply officers, postal clerks, expediters, switchmen, every day, fact-compliant, inescapably committed to the given world…”
“And this motorcycle tour…”
“Will give you a chance to look at possible escape routes from Central Europe should a sudden exodus become necessary. Keeping you outside the borders of Hungary, where since the mad bomber Matuska, Jews are drawing more than the usual unwelcome attention. The key connection will be to Fiume, also known as Rijeka, partitioned, variously occupied, paperwork, bribery, and larceny everywhere, nobody’s first choice right now for a port of embarkation, but in the near future, along the edge of which we’re all blindly groping our way, it worked once and please God might again.”
