Page 37 of Shadow Ticket

Things pick up a day or two later when Slide reports that Daphne has been sighted at the Tropikus nightclub, in Nagymez? utca, the Broadway of Budapest.

Night business here is going full tilt, sedans, roadsters, and motorcycles prowling the overlit bustle, pedestrians dodging in and out of the traffic, maybe no Dearborn and Randolph but bright enough.

Tropikus, an all-night dance-cabaret on a nautical theme in the metropolis of a landlocked artifact of Trianon, whatever it might answer to emotionally, must’ve looked to owners Imi and Jóska like a surefire ticket, especially with commercial real estate so cheap at the moment.

Looking down the street and seeing how well the Arizona and the Moulin Rouge were doing, it seemed reasonable to ask, Why shouldn’t there be room for one more joint to catch the overflow?

Waitresses in abbreviated sailor-girl getups back and forth with Unicum boilermakers and fruit-heavy house specials in coconut and conch shells, ceramic mermaids with purple Cellophane drinking straws emerging from the tops of their heads, smoke hanging like tropical weather.

As Imi works the tables, making with the repartee, Jóska attends to the cash drawers, the liquor supply, the security, the girls.

The band, camouflaged in the scenery here, itching to go Latin all evening, impatient little raps and flourishes among the percussion and brass, apparently misplaced beats in the waltzes and foxtrots till at last helplessly collapsing into a Latin American fanfare, conga drums suddenly apporting in hot from the tropics along with claves, güiros, timbales, and cowbells, and sure enough here’s Daphne Airmont, same lengthy red flow of hair Hicks remembers, backless evening dress, arm-length gloves, long strides, apparently solo tonight, straight to the bandstand where she’s ushered to a microphone, takes off one glove, scratches the mike with a fingernail, puts the glove back on, and with a practiced swing-vocalist bounce right in on the beat—

Yes…here…comes…

that…

Strange-ly trop-i-cal rhyth-m!

Yes! Strangely, hauntingly so—no

Mat-ter how, gring-go, you

Might-think-you are, some-

-thin lights up ’n’ goes “Bing-go!”

and you’re suddenly far…far

away, at some

un-expec-ted fi-esta, just as

syn-copated-as sin—one

Min-ute you’re Ang-glo, next

Min-ute-you’re not,

The stars seem to hang low,

The or-chestra’s hot—

Tell ya what—

take

take

[bridge]

a-break from Prohi-

-bi-tion, wave

hasta la vista to the Feds—

one li’l te-

-qui-la inter-

-mis-sion,

Pretty soon you’re Lupe Velez! like

the fella sez, it’s a pleas-

ure steppin

Right, a-long, with-that rhyth-m—that

Pan-Ame-ri-can jive, dive-

-in into the deep end, lettin ’em

know, you’re, alive…

down where fate is philanthropical…

mis-apprehensions mic-ro, scop-ical…

not-to mention all that tropical,

strange-ly trop-i-cal, rhyth-m!

The room by now lit up in some unearthly color process, timed in a faraway film lab so as to present an outward and visible sign of some strange underacknowledged link between Hungary and tropical Brazil, energetic dancers in vivid flashes of parrot colors and fanciful hats gliding elaborately by, camera angles growing dutched and dizzy, as it all goes sweeping down a long depth of focus away toward, and perhaps at last funneling into, an elaborate ladies’ lounge or toilet, and who knows what further vistas of streamlined modernity…

Slide was tipped off to Daphne’s whereabouts by Pancho Caramba, one of the percussionists, a bandmate of Hop Wingdale’s from the old Klezmopolitans.

Hicks has to make his way through a crowd of smitten debutantes just to pass him a quick word of thanks, Pancho apparently enjoying some success not only with his extravagant solos but also working the ladies’ man angle in between.

“Ironically it was never me but Pancho Caramba’s many fans who brought him into being, Casanova with a drum kit, all-round swoon material.

’Course it helps to be crazy. I go into this kind of trance, when it’s over they all come rushing up to tell me all about it.

But very little of it’s on purpose, ’cause in public basically I’m shy. ”

“Except when he cuts loose on the cymbals,” Daphne materializing from someplace, “then it’s ‘bashful.’ Saludos, Pancho, thanks for not stepping on my number.”

“Ever tried that I’d be counting my toes. You two already met, I think.”

“Been carrying around this daydream about it happening again sometime,” Daphne trying not to sound like she’s complaining, “you know the one.”

Hicks can guess. “Basic rule of the business ain’t it, Miss Airmont, one person’s big romance is another’s time and a half for overtime.”

“You can say Daphne, that worked OK before.” Not one of these after-dark sophisticates partial to cigarette holders, she counts on lipstick alone to keep the gasper attached to her lower lip, whether dancing, chatting, sipping cocktails, even eating sometimes.

Admirers grow fascinated as to when and where butt and ashes, often still glowing, will drop.

“Yes,” one eye in a squint for the smoke, “stylish as hell, and you’d better know I also chew gum. Something you’ll have to deal with if this bittersweet reprise is going anyplace.”

“This what? Miss Airmont, Daphne, come on, it must be years by now, one high-speed boat ride, once, that’s the complete rap sheet.”

“Certainly one way to look at it.”

“Since then, only been following your career from a distance, Chicago papers, gossip mags, and so forth—”

“Another way to look at it, Snooks,” along with an emphatic flare of cigarette smoke out her nose, “you breezed in at just the right moment and kept me away from that North Shore Zombie Two-Step, otherwise I’d still be inside and lost. You are a key factor in my history, like it or not.”

“Boating conditions,” he protests, “at the time, see, I was only thinking about making it back in again without runnin out of gas.”

“While what I was thinking was, was if they had pulled me back into Winnetka Shores it would’ve been the last time, that’s how desperate it was for me. So…”

“Daphne, if you’re gonna start in again with that Chippewa hoodoo…”

By which point they’re dancing, having glided into it from some everyday moment, like reaching across him for a cigarette…

after no more than four bars of which he can feel her begin to relax, and unless Hicks wants to start deliberately stepping on her feet or tripping over his own, he’s stuck once again with being Oversize Fred Astaire here.

By the time the band takes a break she has a peculiar look in her eye. Speculative.

“What?”

“You’re not what you seem.”

“Maybe it’s you makin me look good.”

“Ever dance professionally?”

“Back in Chicago, ballroom act, didn’t work out.”

“Personal issues, artistic differences?”

“Gang war.”

“That thing where it looked like you were walking forward but you’re really sort of gliding backwards?”

“Yeah, Cab Calloway showed me the basics one night at a joint up on Walnut Street. Calls it The Buzz.”

After thinking a while, “See,” she lets him know, “there’s the other fella.”

“Hop Wingdale.”

“The only one for me, case you’re wondering.”

“Hmm, and would that ol’ Hop happen to be around tonight, it’d sure be nice to meet him sometime—”

“Hoping for a twofer, were you. Sorry, flatfoot, I don’t know where he is, and frankly it’s beginning to worry me.”

A familiar mental prowl car now begins to drive back and forth across Hicks’s brain, gonging high-low-high-low, signaling trouble for somebody, which Hicks would prefer to be anybody but him.

“Don’t know what they told you about me and Hop except these days it’s not running off with, but more like running after.

Since the morning I woke up to find the Klezmopolitans dissolved into solo acts and once again life’s vaudeville hook emerging from the wings and latching around Hop’s neck, and off he goes staggering to boos and whistles, wondering what he did wrong this time… ”

No, not exactly the way it happened. Or not without what she should have recognized as the tip-off one early evening at the Hotel Grand Pignouf in Paris, where all up and down the corridors transoms are open, a dozen invisible plumes from illicit cigarettes, out-of-town cooking, perfume being overapplied as if in romantic spasms, each a different nasal melodrama.

The Klezmopolitans, reformatted by electric xylorimba virtuoso Curly Capstock from his original Back Alley Rhythm Cats into a progressive swing band, continually bringing in chords glamorized with up-to-date accidentals, lines with chromatic licks, Latin percussion, a less inhibited or as some might put it screamingly insane brass section where the Harmon mute despite being the hep dance-band introduction of the moment goes generally underemployed, an openness to non-Western scales especially in the solos of reedmen, each as crazy as any trumpet player in the band, since Curly only hires crazy to begin with…

“They want freilach, that’s what we give ’em. They want hot Latin rumbas, that’s what they’ll get. The customers can have whatever they want. Any comments?”

“Do we have to smile, like in the movies?”

“Depends. Sometimes you’ll want to go more for that earnest hardworking style, which you’ll have to tell me what it looks like, I don’t see much of it around here.”

The last thing resembling a pep talk till the dismal day Curly announces, “Could still be some loose change to be made here and there, though we’d be running it close.

If we liquidate now, money’s there in the bank in Zurich, but don’t wait too long, ’cause it won’t be there forever and neither will you. ”

Meanwhile as the prospects for anything like reliable work go fading, “I’ve been trying to keep my nerve,” Daphne admits, “but it’s too dangerous over here anymore, I know that going back to the U.S.A.

will only be buying time, that sooner or later no place will be safe.

We need to relocate before it’s all Storm Trooper chorales and three-note harmony.

You’re thinking about it, so am I. When can we leave? ”

“Of course there’s still work,” Hop a little grumpy, “house orchestras at some of the hotels, bands pretending to be Lud Gluskin on tour, but if you want, sure we can make our way to Zurich, cash in my shares if they’re still there…”

“Cheap talk, Hop, and it won’t fix anything about you and me—you’d rather keep playing till the sun comes up, alone with your clarinet, unless it’s some little Swing Fr?ulein, which I could understand, maybe even pick up a few fashion tips in the course of, but not this, this is a magic act, you’re disappearing from me, into all the trick lighting, and the big band glare and shine.

‘One of these days’ might’ve already come and gone, for all I know, you might be gone anyway. ”

“Nothing you can’t get used to, is it.”

“Ah, there it is once again, like a monster in the Tunnel of Love—Bruno, evil Bruno, family crimes, bad blood, never good enough for the biblical prophet here.”

“Who can assure you that the ways of God are not for us to even puzzle over. Bruno in your life is a mixed blessing which is only likely to get more so.”

“You keep saying. But then remember, he isn’t in my life, hasn’t been for a good while.”

“Sit back and let me bring you the evening news. Awkwardly enough, it turns out more of your life than you think is being run on the Q.T. by none other. Look at the things that don’t keep happening—Bruno doesn’t make any surprise visits, doesn’t die or go bankrupt, you watch the market reports for signs of cheese being hoarded, sold off, yes, and not only the Board of Trade and other cheese trading floors but also grazing conditions in pasturelands so far away the cows go oom for all we know, the movements of refrigerated trains and fleets, dairy operations local to nationwide, herd dynamics, any quivering li’l deviation from normal that could turn out to be Bruno’s invisible hand… ”

And so they have hurtled on into that warm patch somewhere between heartburn and mittelschmerz at the immensity of everything they don’t want to happen to them, together or separate.

She wants to dissolve into some “Oh, please, Hop…” but instead out comes, “I could always get it changed into small bills and rent an airplane and just fly around pretending I’m the weather, dumping it on people, till I get my net worth down to a number you’re comfortable with, how’d that be? ”

“Gosh, honey, you’d really do that? For me?”

“No.”

A patch of silence, short and also long enough.

“There’s a train for Le Havre I can be on before you get back from work.” She almost said “before you get home.”

No more than a dotted whole rest this time.

“Well, Daphne. See you around the circuit.”

“You bet, Hop.” Yes, it’s the Norma Shearer turn she’s always being accused of, “Oh how I’ll miss you,” plus “Whew, out the door at last!” Everybody’s got her number, all right, and so what?