Page 35 of Shadow Ticket

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 oversized soup spoon out of someplace and begun energetically to shovel cocaine into both nostrils at once.

“And yet each trap I set for him, some he could not even have been aware of, he has always, through some perverse turn of fortune, managed to evade. I can’t show my face around the Directorate without some idiot sniggering about Criminal Genius, as if Airmont is another Dr. Mabuse or Fu Manchu…

Can you appreciate, how infuriating?” a tendency to scream through his nose, “how insulting to me personally, to, to be mentioned in the same breath with this feeble impersonation of a crime boss? To waste my talent not on an evil genius but on an evil moron, dangerous not for his intellect, what there may be of it, but for the power that his ill-deserved wealth allows him to exert, which his admirers pretend is will, though it never amounts to more than the stubbornness of a child…”

“Could be worse,” Hicks tries to murmur sympathetically, just managing to avoid adding, “like if it turns out he’s just smarter than you.

” How far is he expected to go along with Praediger’s obsessions, how copasetic is he supposed to be with any of this?

Who’ll be the next well-wisher to pull him aside and warn him, “This ain’t your beef, this leaper here is heading for trouble you don’t want to be in, better get clear of him while you can. ”

Steps do need to be taken, sooner rather than later, before everybody’s dodging airborne furniture or reaching for their roscoe.

The Gumshoe’s Manual here is not as helpful as it could be.

Hicks has even written them letters about it, never answered, sometimes even sent back unopened, despite such real and widespread concern in the business, you see it every day—“What if I get teamed up, unwillingly, with somebody who’s off their rocker?

What’s the best action to take? Prompt reply appreciated. ”

“Not meaning to add to your troubles, but I had a visit from Ace Lomax the other night, detained him at gunpoint, expecting you to show up any minute, next thing I know he and that lamp both give me the slip.”

“Ach, der Lomax, kleine Kartoffel, meantime I seem to have run out of investigative supplies…”

—

Hicks, headed for the street at last, grabs the paternoster down to the lobby, where he runs into Terike just emerging from her latest run-in with the authorities over her motorcycle, a 500 cc Guzzi Sport 15.

“It’s a racing bike, which doesn’t keep them from hauling me in and demanding registration documents, which there were never really any of to begin with.

Plus some work of my own on the bore and stroke so she’ll do better than 100 miles an hour, which they’re calling illegal unless I pay a fee, along with the usual threats of inspection I have to come up with excuses for avoiding. ”

They arrive at a revolving door to the street. Terike motions him on ahead. “Hungarian tradition, the man always goes first, in case of trouble.” Hicks steps in first, Terike behind him, and somehow by the time they get outside she’s ahead of him and halfway down the block. “Huh?”

Sometimes in Hungary, and this is sworn to by any number of tourists and travelers, you can step into a revolving door in front of a native Hungarian, who will nevertheless then step out into the street ahead of you, as if you somehow have percolated through each other, actually occupying the same space, no memory, no expectation, simply the coercive sweep of the moving door drawing you along, molecules for an instant all intermingling, simmering together like, like soup… and how intimate is that?

Word of this gets around and pretty soon among cognizant tourist traffic there’s a noticeable increase of those who want to have this happen to them, it’s a craze, another must-do for the sophisticated globe-trotter, like crossing the Equator or kissing the Blarney Stone.

Out in Vorosmarty tér, Terike once clear of entanglement, having remembered how, it seems, to reassemble into the same solid Hungarian person again, takes a glance back, like a dame will sometimes to see whether anybody’s conducting a posterior survey.

“Mind if I ask—”

“Ask Zoltán. He thinks it’s apports…you understand how apports could come into it.”

“Sure. Well, no—you mean the Hungarian person, which is you, somehow…apports herself a quarter-turn ahead—”

“…of the non-Hungarian, which in this same example could be you.”

“You can say is. Is is good.”

“On the other hand, maybe you just fell asleep for a moment, and I was in a hurry, so…” with a quick hip gesture.

“Can we try it again, just to—”

“No.”

Before he ever actually met any Hungarian women, Hicks typically imagined them as, well, kind of…Mexican. Latin spitfire kind of dame. “Because of the paprika, maybe…hot peppers, hot women, so forth?”

“Whereas American men, you in particular, seem the kind of kemény gyerek I was brought up to stay well away from.”

“It could be worse. I could be paying you to be nice to me.”

“Here she is.” The Guzzi. The original bright red factory paint job by now faded to a road- and weather-beaten field magenta.

“New sidecar, just about to take it for a test spin, works better with an 80-, 90-kilo carcass in it, anybody interested?” The sidecar has a sleek teardrop shape, the kind of teardrop that only gets shed on purpose, to further some undisclosed scheme, a glamorous teardrop you might say, as if drafted in one single, emotion-free gesture of the pen.

“Unapologetically Guzzista…I love this bike, intense relationship, she’s seen me out of more trouble than I’ll ever talk about, ’cause it’d only sound like more tall tales from the wild highways.

The bike, let’s face it, is a metaphysical critter.

We know, the way you’d say a cowboy knows, that there’s a fierce living soul here that we have to deal with. ”

Hicks in the sidecar, off they go, the rig speeding over cobbles and under arches, flying, it seems, above broken road surfaces and up impossible grades, through gateways, down indoor-outdoor corridors that seem too narrow for a bike let alone a combination.

You want a gearbox disassembled and repaired while on the move, time and a half if you’re doing over 100 miles per hour, she’s your gal.

She can get anything that’ll fit in a sidecar across the worst terrain you can think of, war-damaged cities a specialty, master of urban obstacle-running, she can go straight up the sides of walls, pass through walls, ride upside down on the overheads, cross moving water, jump ditches, barricades, urban chasms one rooftop to the next, office-building corridors to native-quarter alleyways quicker than a wink.

Into a tunnel—colder all of a sudden, blasted at by their own echoing, down into a city beneath the city, grown over the years according to the demands of history, gunpowder logistics, mineral springs everywhere, saline, radioactive, violently boiling, laminar as sleep, bringing in coachloads of well-off Europeans rolling on a yearly cycle spa to spa along routes as closely mapped and annotated as pilgrimages.

Terike’s first time beneath the city as a dispatch biker, though she tried not to admit it to herself, was one of those unreal entrances that actors recall making now and then.

“It looked like just another tunnel” has been a comic tagline down here for years.

She didn’t join so much as blend, unaware at the time of any formalities, into the motor-dispatch community with its traditions of best practice, honor, coolness under fire, a mission to connect anywhere in space-time, any set of points, anything they had to do, obstacles no obstacle, ignoring cozy indoor axes, Biedermeyer xyz plus time dutifully ticking away over in some corner, zooming around through the tunnels under Budapest. Crossing back and forth under the river, keeping to their own dedicated routes, including a long-term easement through Budafok, twenty-five miles of wine cellar tunneled through limestone, requiring special exhaust work to cause as little noise as possible so the vintages might lie undisturbed…

a silent patch in the undercity clamoring with youthfulness, as messengers in dusters, helmets, and goggles pull out of the traffic to gather briefly for quick tunnelside smoke breaks and, finding themselves enticed by surfaces whose acoustics promise to be kind to those who can’t sing but must anyway, gathering for eight or sixteen bars or so, echoing up branch tunnels, exit ramps, up to the street, which now seems like daytime to a resident of the night.

They head north along the river. “Where we going?”

“újpest. Pickup and delivery. Only be a couple of minutes.”

They arrive at a factory gate at quitting time. “What’s this?”

“Tungsram. We’re going around back.” Hundreds of women, on foot and bicycles. “Some girl-heavy workforce here.”

“Assembling radio valves is delicate work. Needs a light touch. Breakage rate’s too high, sorry boys, young ladies only. I hope you’re not as clumsy as you look. Here we are.”

They pull up by a loading dock where she’s handed a wooden crate, weighing hardly anything at all.

“Try not to break anything.”

“What’s in here, light bulbs?”

“Vacuum tubes. Experimental, specially designed for the theremin.”

“The…”

“It’s a musical instrument.”

Dimly, “Electrical gizmo, comes on the radio now and then. Mostly when there’s something weird happening.”

“As you’re about to see.”