Page 32 of Shadow Ticket

The Oktogon is jumping. A good percentage of the foot traffic in this part of Budapest look to be young women, turned out far more snazzily than anybody working West Wells Street, or the Loop for that matter.

Zoltán von Kiss is sporting a suit of summer-weight fresco in a citric shade sometimes observed on swing musicians.

A quick once-over further reveals that the suit, though appearing slept in for a number of nights in a row and uneasily at that, has working buttons and buttonholes on the sleeves, suggesting that it may have been run up just for him, someplace exclusive.

“Ebenstein’s,” von Kiss notices him looking, “actually, best in town, I’d be delighted to introduce you.” His gaze remaining for an extra few seconds on Hicks’s own purple-and-orange check turnout.

“OK with this one I’ve got on, no place in my bag for another suit anyway, but thanks, Doc.”

“Call me Zoli, everyone does, you can ignore the ‘von’ part, it’s political.”

They are approached by a young woman on a Moto Guzzi motorcycle with an uninhibited exhaust.

“I kiss your hand,” murmurs Zoltán, “and while I’ve got it,” pretending to scrutinize her palm, “you will meet a tough and indeed hardboiled, if that’s your type, American who— well look at this, he’s been sitting right here all this time.”

“Terike,” nodding to Hicks, flashing him a look familiar since back in high school—they warned me about you, I shouldn’t be anywhere near you, even outdoors in a brightly lit crowd.

Along with pickup and delivery citywide, Terike does occasional apport work, “Glamorous Assistant basically, though no easier on the nerves than a magic or knife-throwing act.” No idea what will come through one minute to the next, from top notes of some perfume nobody can afford to a grand piano falling from an upper story.

A girl has to stay on the alert, ready to take cover.

Some knowledge of emergency nursing is also helpful.

“At least the pay is good. Which reminds me, Zoli…”

Zoltán reaches into some tailor-made inner pocket and comes out with a discreetly stuffed envelope and hands it over. Arranging for Hicks and the tabletop to be in the way of any third-party curiosity. Terike throttles up and rolls on her way, waving to Hicks, calling, “Szia!”

“Hope so,” sez Hicks.

“Hungarian for so long,” Zoltán explains.

—

Zoli works out of a modern-style office building, convenient to the East Station, sharing a floor with Anglo-Danubian Casualty and Theft, specialists in the newly emerging field of apport insurance, whose advertising can be seen on a number of streetcars around town—a poster showing a top hat brimming with diamond jewelry making a swift escape into the sky, apparently under its own power, while far below on a hotel terrace crowded with elegant dancers a hatless, gemless couple gaze up after it in dismay.

“We should’ve insured with Anglo-Danubian! ”

“Sad spectacle, isn’t it, once an echt working apportist, lately more of a psychic celebrity detective pursuing a life enviable at least from a distance.

” Police departments and Foreign Offices bidding for his services, women amateur and professional throwing themselves in his direction, newsreel and magazine photographers his natural element, flash powder and neon his everyday light.

“What I took at first for amazement and respect turned out to be little more than applause for the hired entertainment. You mustn’t imagine I enjoy all this attention.”

“Coulda fooled me, Zoli.”

“Oh…champagne, limousines, women who enjoy a good time, of course—but really, what need has a spiritual person for any of that?”

“Dunno, let me give it some thought…”

“You are a practical people, Americans, everyone is either some kind of inventor or at least a gifted repairman. I myself have grown to rely too much on the passionate mindlessness which creeps over me just as an apport is about to arrive or depart. I am painfully aware of how much more exposure I need to the secular, material world.”

“And you figure Americans are just the ticket. Are you telling me this stuff is all a variety-house routine, that it doesn’t…really happen?”

Beaming playfully, “You will want proof, some trivial example”—producing out of as far as Hicks can see nowhere a small single-action revolver, offering it butt-first, tapping himself on the forehead—“go ahead, point-blank, as many shots as you like…”

“Are you crazy, get that goldurn thing away from me—” looking nervously around for something to dive underneath.

“Won’t matter, every round will just asport away to someplace harmless. These days I don’t get shot at as much as I used to, now and then some ambitious party still thinks they’ll get in a lucky shot a split-second before I can make it de-manifest.”

“Must put a nice edge on your day. You’d sure have fun in Chicago.”

The gun abruptly vanishing, “And yet, trust me, I’m a mind reader, you’re asking yourself, did that really just apport in and out of the unknown, or was it all a cheap stage act, a French drop performed at lightning speed, a moment of trick cinema, here one frame, gone the next.”

“I give up,” sez Hicks, “which is it?”

“If I knew, which I don’t, I couldn’t tell you, it’d be bad for business. Perhaps tomorrow night you’ll have a better chance to judge.”

“Howzat again?”

“Our first assignment—”

“Our, that’d be…me and you.”

“—will be to locate and restore to its owner a somewhat tasteless table lamp, indeed among lamp collectors considered the crown jewel of tasteless lamps, a lamp so stupefyingly tasteless it makes nonsense of the tasteless-lamp category itself. Too horribly tasteless ever to have been photographed. Cameras break, eyeglass prescriptions are drastically rewritten, crowds of spectators run screaming out of exits they then get jammed up in. Tasteless Lamp Quarterly runs out of space to contain the overflow of readers’ indignation.

Is how tasteless it is, this lamp, known in underworld Esperanto as La Lampo Plej Malbongusto.

“Through some perverse law of secondary markets, the more vehemently denounced, the more valuable it has become. Lamp-collector mentality, a mystery as deep perhaps as apportation, which it seems is what’s just happened to it.”

The client, one of the more comfortably fixed residents of the upslope or Buda side of the river, some sort of Count, Hicks gathers, world-renowned for his collection of lamps ranging from Rather Offensive to Quite Tasteless Indeed, wants it back—“though to be honest, it may only have paused midway in its return to some more authentic owner, what we call an ‘apporepo,’ or apport of repossession—vulnerable, fair game for any hijackers who think they can make a grab for it en route. Who are sure to include associates of Bruno Airmont, in whom I am told you have some interest.”

Requiring another get-together with Praediger, who happens to be in Budapest consulting with a flying squad out of Unit IV downtown who work nothing but apport fraud.

Turns out that in response to the local ass/app situation, a trade has sprung up in counterfeit apports, passing for merchandise just in from the other side of whatever this is that’s going on. Returns. Fake returns.

“Important therefore that you become acquainted with La Lampo Plej Malbongusto, for even the most hopelessly ill-imagined lamp deserves to belong somewhere, to have been awaited, to enact some return, to stand watch on some table, in some corner, as a place-keeper, a marker, a promise of redemption.”

“Sure Egon, but this lamp—it could be a fake?”

“Childish, mean-spirited, exactly up Bruno’s alley…

An astounding percent of asported merchandise turns out to be lamps at least as tasteless as this one.

We send our operatives out through the shopping districts, we gather data on every tasteless lamp currently for sale, we follow the weekly announcements in the trade papers… ”

“What about lamps that aren’t tasteless?”

“No such thing. Most lamps are inherently in bad taste because the design constraints are so few—when all you need is a socket, a cord, a switch, and some way of carrying off the heat of the bulb, the field is left wide-open to any ungifted amateur who wants to try his hand and get away with something on the cheap.”

“This one Bruno is after—”

“Don’t expect him to show up in person. He’ll likely delegate one of his deputies like Ace Lomax. So keep your eyes open and do give Dr. von Kiss our best.”

Suddenly La Lampo Plej Malbongusto is the topic of the moment…the Zoltán von Kiss shop reporting suspect faces on streetcars, in cafés, phone threats in the middle of the night—

“There is interest in La Lampo from powerful elements for whom you can never amount to more than a bothersome detail. For your personal safety, please, have nothing more to do with it,” and so forth, eventually a postal delivery with an additional apportation stamp, depicting the Holy Right Hand of St. Stephen, hacked off at the wrist, dripping blood, flying through the air across Hungary holding a sealed envelope.

Below stand a country woman carrying a sheaf of wheat, a soldier in full Hussar uniform, and a factory worker holding a monkey wrench, all gazing skyward in open-mouthed wonder at the flying Hand, beneath the radiant slogan Sürg?s, urgent, filling the sky behind it.

ZvK reads the note enclosed, nods. “All right, that’s us. Let’s get moving.”

Rainy city pavement, fog, everything in a low-intensity blur. Hicks has no idea of where they may be headed.

First ZvK stops off at a church for a quick novena to St. Anthony of Padua, patron saint of the lost and found. “Can’t hurt, kind of preventive maintenance. Lost people, lost hope, by extension patron saint of apportists.”