Page 43 of Shadow Ticket

Soon enough, however, the music has shifted grimly minor, as overhead now looms a giant soup ladle, about to dip down and scoop up one or more of the aqua-lovelies, as if, in the distant world from which the ladle has descended, they are considered edible delicacies.

The girls cast theatrical glances skyward, scream, squeal, submerge in the soup trying to escape, yet smiling all through the shot, having just the greatest fun, while pretending to croon, in tight inside-the-octave harmony.

Sir-loin steaks-from-the bar-

-be-cue—

Hot fudge sundaes ’n’ lob-sters too, It’s my

own business what I’ve been

Ee-at-ing,

Never mind how much I ate—

Long as you keep yer lunch-hooks a-

-way from my plate, when we’re

Eea-ea-ting!

The setting is someplace vaguely outer European, not Russia exactly, everybody talking with a different foreign accent, and even more peculiar, for a Squeezita Thickly movie, now and then also shooting at each other, both semi- and fully-automatically, not always in play, plus setting off spherical anarchist-style bombs which appear to wreck one expensive set after another, causing Bruno, each time one of them goes off, to shiver agreeably, which Daphne can’t help noticing.

“Little blast-happy, Pumpkin,” he explains. “Something the mental docs call Ekrexophilia.”

“New one on me, thought I’d heard ’em all.”

“Shh!”

“Vanilla ‘or’ chocolate, Yer Excellency? ‘Or’? Really? I could always just gobble ’em both up, couldn’t I, one right after the other, ’n’ see how ya like that.”

“Oh but I say—”

“Who’s gonna stop me? You?”

“Well, upon my word.”

“Do you mind? I’m in a hurry and I’m hungry.”

Turned out in stylish little Soviet-inspired uniforms, Squeezita it seems has recently been appointed Food Commissar of a recently installed People’s Republic, where she lives with her Daddy (Wallace Beery), a chef with a big soup-soaked mustache and top-heavy chef’s toque who keeps drifting out of the frame on secret missions for the new regime, while everyone continues to regard him only as the everyday amiable lout Wallace Beery often gets to play—a perfect cover story, at least until Squeezita, whose respect for her parent lately has begun to slacken, finds out by accident about this other secretly heroic identity.

“Aww, Sweetie, and here all this time I thought you hated me.”

“Ooh, Daddy, it’s only because I mistook you for one more spineless drudge…”

“Well, that’ll learn ya, kid…lemme just tell you how it was in the old days…

” Born in fact into a minor branch of the former ruling dynasty, roaming the prerevolutionary halls of stately homes and summer palaces he found himself pausing in various kitchens whose helpful personnel before long were showing him how to bake pies, cakes, and pastry, smoothly drifting into an alternate identity, the soon widely discussed “Chef Raoul,” patissier to the elite of three continents, rumored to be a jewel thief on the side, a casino gambler, a breaker of aristocratic and too often innocent hearts.

After the movie, in an adjoining subterranean café, streetcars still rumbling overhead, “So what’d you think of the picture?”

“Didn’t care much for that firefight at the end. The rifle grenades and so forth.”

“Did seem to go on a little too long.”

“Well…not long enough, actually.”

“Don’t you think Wallace Beery deserved some comeuppance, working for both sides like that?”

“If that’s what it was, only it looked to me like somebody was setting him up. Unless I missed something when I stepped out for seconds on popcorn, mine having somehow mysteriously disappeared.”

“That funny Italian guy who kept hollering at everybody—you think that was supposed to be Mussolini?”

“Everybody’s afraid of the Duce, even in Hollywood they might not want to offend him.”

If Daphne has been hoping for something incestuous yet romantic, she’s once again reminded how very little anybody can put past Bruno. They are somehow soon deep in financial discussion.

“Apparently your Gramps left you some herds.”

“How many cows would that be about, do you figure?”

“Ten thousand head at least, up to a hundred thousand, maybe.”

“Kind of a spread there.”

“Helps sometimes to think in orders of magnitude, Pumpkin. They’re all over the state.

Some of them your Grampa owned directly, plus all the other herds he had controlling interest in.

Someplace somebody’s been keeping complete records, I’m sure.

” Scribbling on his napkin, “Even with prices brought down to where they are, that’s still a hell of a lot of milk—if those goldurn Bolshevik collectives would let us sell it, of course.

Right now they’d rather block all the shipments and dump them trackside.

Even back when prices were normal your Gramps’s bookkeeping was impossible to follow, and given current conditions you might not want the trouble it’s likely to cost you for the eentsy li’l percentage you’d end up with. ”

Time for another of those profound gazes, except that Daphne’s right now is looking more like a squint of suspicion.

“Let me guess. You can put me in touch with somebody who’ll be willing to take all the bothersome details of herd ownership off my hands, right?

Plus the bookkeeping. Realizing maybe a fraction of pre-1929 value, of course.

All I’d have to do’d be sign that impressive-looking piece of paper you’ve been fidgeting with there. ”

“Oh. This. Just a standard release form. We can fill in some figures later.”

“Uh, huh. Surely, Pops, now you’re not trying to euchre me, your own daughter here, out of money that’s rightfully mine, nothing like that?”

A broad sort of “Who, me?” shrug, a comical face he thinks is endearing. “Well yes I suppose I am, in a way. It’s time you grew up, and sometimes it’s a father’s job to speed things along. Just ’cause I call you Pumpkin doesn’t mean I want my li’l Cinderella turning into one.”

“Um, Pop, I don’t think it’s actually Cinderella who turns into a—”

“Whatever, maybe I wasn’t paying that close attention, mostly remember reading it all snuggled together when you were little…”

Probably not the best time to do a double take, and she tries not to, but…Creepy? Maybe a little.

“I need the money, Daph, I’m on the lam. Some very bad people are after your old Pop, itchin to take down the Al Capone of Cheese. Forces I once had no idea even existed.”

“Who’s chasing you, Pop, and why?”

“Somebody wants to run the Cheese Outfit, and frankly if they want it they can have it, fine with me, though it’ll take more to keep the sawed-off shotguns away. When did I ever ask to be the Al Capone of Cheese?”

“May or June of 1930—you forgot already?”

“Just never say I didn’t warn you. Here, here’s a ‘Kleenex,’ wipe your nose and try not to fall apart into too many pieces.

” Reaching for a Unicum bottle that happens to be nearby, meantime wondering, What’s wrong with the kid?

she used to have some sense once, there was even a time he’d expected to bring her into the Cheese racket someday, teach her everything he knows about the different cultures and processing, how to read the markets, buy and sell, options and futures…

Heck with it. Fatherly pipe-dreaming. By now she’s stepped out into a life of her own. Bruno may understand that this is something he needs to come to terms with. Then again, maybe not.

—

Of course if anybody has the inside dope it’s Slide Gearheart.

“One way to look at it,” Slide busily pretending to redefine his hat brim, “except maybe she’s known everything about it all along.

Word around is she’s been working her own counter-scheme, luring Bruno deeper into a sordid and forbidden sex affair while hired photo crews secretly record every last shameful detail—”

“Wait, wait. Daphne? A-and Bruno? come on, her own father, that’s illegal, ain’t it?”

“Not too much of that going on in Milwaukee, I bet. Here, catch up on the news of the world,” tossing over a back issue of Lowlife Gazette, in which Hicks finds snapshots of Daphne, early adolescence, posing ambiguously on Bruno’s lap, each with the same self-pleased expression on their kisser.

Easy to mistake for the imperfectly contained smirking of a girl and a secret lover.

So of course next time he and Daphne cross paths, Hicks figures he ought to bring it up.

“And…what’s it to you again? One evening recently, you and I did some kidding around, with a lovely time appearing to’ve been had by all, but I’m not sure how much of the story of my life that entitles you to.”

Next thing he knows Daphne has gone AWOL.

Looking for Hop, according to Slide’s sources, which include Heino Z?pfchen, a much sought-after Judenj?ger, or Jew-tracker, familiar with ranges and habits, and secret migration patterns…

“In for 10 percent. The rest goes to the client, all on spec,” Slide explains, “he sends them over, gets as much as he can, if they’re not for one customer they’ll be for another. ”

“And when he brings in somebody who turns out to be not Jewish—”

“Never happens. Heino gets to make the final call. If he says they’re a Jew, whatever they were when he made the collar, by the time he brings them in, they’re a Jew.

Leading to a lot of complaining because Jews don’t proselytize, plus it’s not uncommon for Heino to turn around and convey to safety a Jew he’s already shopped and collected bounty payment on—pursuit and rescue, playing both sides of the racket. ”

“And we’re paying him…”

“All on contingency. Fact, I have him nearly convinced he should be paying us.”

Heino’s list of useful leads happens to include Nigel Trevelyan, and so a rough idea of Hop Wingdale’s whereabouts is not long in arriving.

“He’s booked onto a motorcycle circuit of some kind, which would be a breeze ordinarily, except that it’s heading him straight into Vladboys territory.”