Page 34 of Shadow Ticket

Meantime, Pips Quarrender has materialized in Budapest, gone platinum, a finger-wave, a smart little nearly ultraviolet cocktail hat with a veil, earlobes dazzling, as if beginning to pick up from somewhere a grasp of what goes with what in the doll-up department.

“Well.” Hicks taking her hand, giving her a twirl.

“I am, from head to foot, as Marlene might say. And does, actually.”

“This might take some getting used to.”

“All part of the craft, give whoever’s watching something blonde and shiny to fix their attention, then should one need to disappear, simply get rid of it and fade into the mobility. Whoosh, and away goes this,” flipping a curl, “and it’s back to the old cottage loaf again…”

“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 the tiresome complexo one 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.”

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, no luck, 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 they don’t remember that they saw him.

They’d better not. He has too much invested, he’s given up literally years 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 Bohmerland 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 to contain 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.”