Page 27 of Shadow Ticket

About all Hicks can recall is having what he thought was an innocent beer, which in fact turned out to’ve been visited by a needle full of something in the chloral hydrate family, sending him off to dreamland before he could remember how to find a coaster to set his glass on.

Next thing he knows he’s out someplace draped over what seems to be…

something big, steel…moving around under his feet, smells like salt water, Diesel fuel no wait, nngghhh no, can’t be can it…

Sure can. Turns out to be the ocean liner Stupendica, by now someplace well out to sea. He risks a nauseated, desperate look aft, as if there still might be land in sight, which there doesn’t seem to be.

“Little green around the gills, there.” Looks like a seagoing-type tomato, a species he doesn’t recall running across that often, smoking a Melachrino in a jade holder, doll hat in pale mauve perched over one ear, hair styled in one of those varsity bobs, curl dipping in at the eye kind of thing.

In Wisconsin they’d say either too young or too East Coast.

Somehow Hicks seems to be still wearing his hat, whose brim he now gives a touch. “Swell, thanks, how about yourself?”

“Oh I never get seasick, this is only research, you know, working the rail, learning to tell the sports from the stiffs, the stomach never lies.”

Glow Tripforth del Vasto is here on assignment for Hep Debutante magazine, sending in a series of articles on how to be a Jazz Age adventuress on a Depression budget.

“Stick around, I may need some advice.”

“Ooh! poor thing, asleep on your feet, maybe you’d be safer in your cabin, do you think you can make it there all right?”

“My…”

Hmm, forgotten his cabin number too…Sparks of interest, all right. Some girls go for a man in uniform, but give Glow an amnesia case anytime. No ex-wives or old flames to brood about, can’t get much more romantic than that.

“All’s I know is is it ain’t Harlem, which last I knew it was.”

“But you do…remember who you are, 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, Senora 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 in Popular Mechanics.”

“Just so. A Spanish invention. Spain and the autogyro are linked intimately, Porfi would say romantically…”

—

Tonight the saloon deck is 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 igitur to 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 the Stupendica herself 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 bloke fancied one, 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.”

“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 of espionage racket, 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—”