Page 44 of Shadow Ticket

Of the many paramilitary gangs that have been proliferating ever since the departure of Béla Kun’s Lenin Boys and the arrival of the White Terror with its open season on Jews, the Vladboys have come to be considered among the worst. Their hatred of Jews is pure, free of remorse, they aren’t in it for the ideology, they just want to damage as many Jews as they can, taking as their inspiration Béla Kun’s triggerman Tibor Szamuely, who cruised the Hungarian Soviet aboard his personal death train with a platoon of Lenin-fiúk, and wherever it stopped people were hanged.

“They’re merciless, this bunch, unbribable because nothing the law-abiding world knows how to offer them has ever been enough…

We’ve got to go search and rescue,” Slide figures.

“If the Vladboys get hold of Hop, they’re so desperate for Nazi approval that they’ll do some creative damage before handing over what’s left of him.

And now he’s about to play a Vladboys rally.

Wishing him a hatful of luck, I’m sure.” Slide up on his feet and down the street.

“See if I can’t promote us some transportation, back in a flash. ”

Which is more like a day and a half later, when Slide shows up out of nowhere, which turns out to’ve been Bratislava, in an Alfa Romeo 8C Touring Spider, accompanied by Zdeněk, who claims to be an authentic Czechoslovakian golem, in a Bugatti Type 50 sedan, his face not easily read, something like a bowler on a bowling trophy just at that split second before the ball’s about to leave his hand, a face prepared to react as needed to whatever gutter balls, strikes, difficult-to-impossible splits may lie seconds away down the alley in an untranspired future.

“Nice buggies, boys, where’d you pick ’em up?”

Happened to run into a Concorso d’Eleganza translocated from somewhere, Lagondas and Delahayes and Hispano-Suizas, a parade of snazzy coachwork and chrome, drivers worried more about receiving so much as a scratch than getting hijacked, which being unthinkable was what Slide and Zdeněk went ahead and did, and next thing anybody knew there they were, tooling on down the highway each in his own elegant ride.

—

For centuries, Zdeněk explains, ever since Judah Loew was Rabbi of Prague, a body of powerful golem lore has been passed down, rabbi to rabbi.

At present, owing to a secret rider to the Treaty of Saint-Germain, written in invisible ink, no one in the newly patched-together Czecho-Slovak entity has been allowed to build any golem above a certain size.

If a customer should, however, find they needed a smaller, single-purpose unit, making up in pugnacity for what it lacks in dimension, a sort of snub-nose golem, there does happen to be a clandestine works near Pardubice, of which Zdeněk is a Versailles-compliant alumnus, up to modern spec.

“And how many of you are there?”

Not as many as there should be, thanks to BAGEL, the Bureau Administering Golems Employed Locally, whose agents are always snooping around, hoping to interrupt funny business in progress, working in cahoots with various late-capitalist entities to whom a golem is only a primitive form of cheap robot.

Lately Zdeněk has been coming in for unwelcome attention, and Slide obligingly was giving him a lift out of town.

“Only checking in with the shomrim, more Jewish tough guys in Bratislava than anyplace east of the Purple Gang.”

Bratislava, once Pozsony, before that Pressburg, kept trying to be a free city, but each time the Czechoslovak Legion came in, started killing people, threw their weight around enough to slap on the kibosh.

The wind unrelenting all year long is believed by some to be the vestige of this free city that never came to be, as the breath of ghosts may sometimes be felt in haunted locations—a great history-wide sigh of unrequited political desire.

“And shomrim, that’s, um…”

A self-defense group, meaning “watchers” in Hebrew, formed a couple of years back, when Nazi students in Prague began staging anti-Jewish riots, which soon spread to Bratislava, where currently the shomrim are busy inventing a close-quarters form of combat soon to be known as Krav Maga.

“We’ve been keeping an eye on the Hercules Gymnasium…

there’s this Lichtenfeld kid, already a champion wrestler, takes a particular interest in street fighting.

Understands that there are no rule books, this isn’t sport, it’s Nazis who are out to kill us, and the less well-mannered we can be about it, the more effective.

Nazis prefer an intellectual cosmopolitan Jew who lives mostly inside his head, a Luftmensch, easy to push around, little or no means to defend himself.

Surprise! In Bratislava they’re developing a more dangerous model.

Idea is to always keep moving, keep hitting, never have both hands doing the same thing at the same time. ”

“Sounds kind of Japanese.”

“You could think of it as Jew-jitsu,” sez Zdeněk, who’s actually just as happy to be away from Bratislava for a while, an uneasy triangle having developed featuring himself and a glamorous, indeed sultry, robotka or female robot named Dushka, who has a crush on him, and the local rabbi nominally in charge of golem affairs, who despite being unsure if Dushka is human or mechanical, wouldn’t mind dating her himself…

“Ahhhgghh!” Slide rolling his eyes upward, side to side, around and around. “Do we have time for this? Wasn’t there some business in Transylvania we needed to take care of?”

Later, breezing down the highway, “Appreciate the company, Slide, seein this ain’t exactly your type of ticket.”

“You kidding, it’s the scoop of the century,” replies Slide, “cheap at half the price and thanks for asking.”

“Cheez Heiress on the Run? thought that’d all be yesterday’s news.”

“This is bigger.”

“And,” Hicks nodding more in encouragement than understanding, “the headline will read…”

“We will know it when we see it, as the hat-check girl said to the private eye.”