Page 48 of Shadow Ticket
“What’s with that sign out the window, Fal a Halál? Hungarians at Christmastime?”
“Means ‘Wall of Death.’ ”
“We’re supposed to be playing a gig at one of them?”
“Good ol’ Nigel, done it again.”
They pull in by a towering wooden cylinder set in a clearing, filled with the snarling of low-displacement bike engines, light of beacon intensity thrown skyward, Motalko exhaust and smoke from bike engines and spectator tobacco rising slowly up the bright column into outer darkness.
The management here want music not only for drinking and dancing but also to accompany Wall of Death activities, not that ascents, descents, and time on the Wall between aren’t dramatic enough already. Sheet music copied from Erno Rapée’s Motion Picture Moods is available.
Ace Lomax, taking a break from the Harley-Davidson he rode in on, has been working aboard a local brand of bike about the size and horsepower of an Indian Scout, zooming up, down, and around, collecting tips paper and metallic in a number of different currencies as he goes circling around the top.
“And welcome to amateur night! Your turn, hotshot.”
“Me?” Ace a little embarrassed, “Can’t carry a tune in a bucket.”
“Take a look at this crowd. Nobody’ll notice.”
“Anybody here know ‘O.K. Corral’?”
“Didn’t Smith Ballew cover that?”
“Whistle us a couple bars.”
[clip-clop cowboy rhythm]
Down by the O-K, Corral,
That’s where we usually met,
our little corner of Tombstone,
Where folks seldom get…
Just passin’ the day,
Me and my fiancée,
when sud-denly ev’ry bless-
-ed fire-arm in town
Starts blastin’ a-way!
[the drummer goes temporarily crazy]
[bridge]
“It’s your family!” I cried,
As she smiled and replied,
“Better both keep our heads down,
’n’ go along for the ride”—
Now the gunsmoke’s all gone,
Looks like she’s moseyin on,
When I ask about next week,
All I get’s just a yawn…
Talk about the miles, of chaparral
between a trail hand and his gal!
Things were so jake, at the O.K. Corral—
Till those Earps and Clantons came along—
Good luck to you, my femme fatale,
Yep and to that old O.K. Cor-ral…
Later in the evening, about to get back out in the wind, Ace goes over to wave so long to the band, spots Hop, and does a double take. “Well, ’at’s ’at there Hop Wingdale, ain’t it.”
“Last time I checked. You’re…”
“Ace Lomax. Recognize you from your mug shot, nice to see you’re still vertical.”
“Was I not supposed to be?”
“In fact Bruno Airmont offered me the job of seeing to it you wouldn’t be, but I said no thanks and now I’m on the run and it’s Bruno and them that’s after me. Not sure you’re the reason why exactly.”
Could also have dated back to once when, having put the arm on someone for a trifling sum grown overdue, Ace approached the boss with a gentle reminder.
Usual practice around here being to stiff his smaller creditors, Bruno got slightly annoyed. “I sent it to your last known address by trusted messenger, in a deluxe paper bag embossed with my personal monogram, you mean it didn’t get there? Well, land sakes.”
“No harm done, just look in your petty cash drawer—smaller bills if you wouldn’t mind.”
“Or we could do it another way, which is, you see Gunther there?” an office fixture maybe two meters high, with a background in bill collection. “You leave right now and we won’t have to ask him to help you find the way out.”
“Um. Well then if that’s all, guess I’ll just…” heading for the door.
“Or there might be one thing,” in a tone of voice that goes along with thumbing off a safety.
“Sure. OK if I turn around?”
“Say we upped the ante and there was more cash in front…”
“You want to give somebody the bump.”
“Nobody you know personally, nobody special, you must have done it plenty during the War—”
“I was a dispatch rider, needed both hands just for getting point Ack to point Beer.”
“Oh? What’s with the face? knew you were such a virgin I’d’ve shifted into Sunday whites and classed up my language.”
“Just a two-bit grifter here, Bruno, trying to stay even with the upkeep on my bike. Don’t sound like anything much in my line.”
“Give you a day to think about it.”
Ace, with no idea how unusually generous this is of Bruno, spends his day of grace decoking his exhaust, looking for parts at the junkyard, avoiding people he owes money to. Next day, “Well. Here’s the mug shot, I can suggest times and places but it’ll be up to you really.”
“Why me, you’ve got plenty of talent around here to choose from.”
“Turns out the lucky stiff-to-be is Jewish.”
“And I’m not. So what?”
“You’re the top performer at HIJAC right now.
” This being one of Bruno’s many sidelines, Homeland Integrity through Jewish Asset Conversion, where Ace has been specializing lately as a sort of strong-arm repossess man cashing in on selected Jewish citizens who’ve decided to flee their countries in a hurry, leaving behind enough property to be worth the effort of stealing it.
“Which makes me what, prime Jew-killer material? Are we working for Hitler now?”
“You might want to mind your mouth, grease monkey, who I do business with is none of yours, is it.”
“Nope, no more than who your daughter keeps company with, Boss,” Ace having learned how not to look away from eye contact at moments like these. Daphne’s story has been an open secret around the shop for a while. Which isn’t helping Bruno much with his composure.
“I don’t have time for this. You want to keep going with it I’ll ask Gunther to drop around later,” meantime pretending to get busy with some pieces of paper.
When Ace gets to the stairway he decides for some reason not to take the steps but slide down the banister instead.
It is a long enough swoop, the breeze blowing in between his ears and clearing out any number of cobwebs, that by the time he hits the street it’s pretty clear where things go from here.
By nightfall he’s in Bratislava and slipping unnoticed in among a convoy of Trans-Trianon machinery in the 750-cc-and-above range.
Nobody is speaking English and they all seem to be heading roughly south and west, which is fine with Ace.
Meanwhile, as if Jewish clarinet players aren’t bad enough, Bruno, to whom it has more than once occurred that Ace himself also might be smitten with Daphne, ends up shifting Ace over into a higher category of risk.
Ace is now, as they used to say in the business, a marked man.
“Wall of Death work is a sort of working vacation,” as he describes it to Hop Wingdale.
“Living on tips these days, just dropped by to pick up a few pengoes. The Harley is expensive, but those lightweight li’l rigs just make me nervous. ”
“Somebody said it’s safe long as you keep moving fast enough, something about centrifugal force.”
“Ridin the Wall of Death, ridin the Trans-Trianon, same only different. Problem down here at ground level is goin too fast, somebody hits the throttle, gets slung away on a tangent, ending up who knows where. Maybe forever. ’Course then again, ridin in circles all day, a man’s brain does start to spin. ”
“So that cheese kingpin is after us both,” sez Hop. “Sorry you got dragged in.”
“Me too. You packing any heat?”
“Little Frommer ST?P, I keep it in with my clarinet.” Ace’s eyebrows go up a little. “It comes in handy now and then. Not everybody over here is a jazz lover.”
Ace climbs aboard his Flathead. “Don’t think it could have anythin to do with that, uhm, that Daphne Airmont, do you?”
Uh-oh. Hop has no idea what Bruno knows, how much he may have told Ace, how interested Ace might really be in Daphne, round and round yet again. “Crosses my mind now and then. Why Bruno should want either of us out of the picture that much.”
Here is one of those openings for the kind of discussion two men with an interest in the same woman might get into, when both understand that she plays in a league more advanced than any either has ever heard of…
Except for the lingering few percentage points of a chance here that Ace might still be working for Bruno.
But Ace by now has kick-started his machine, flipped a salute, and, calling back “Don’t tell anybody you saw me,” is rolling off and away.
—
Terike hears the news from a bartender with a shortwave set in the back room. “Radioed them at Cluj, they said he’d be checking in, but nothing’s been heard since.”
Her face, her cryptic road-adventuress face, begins to drift into disarray, though nobody would notice who hasn’t been gazing at it as earnestly as Hicks. Her mouth going askew, eyes unable to look anywhere, forehead losing its smooth serenity.
The wind outside has grown louder, reached a high, disconsolate edge likely to last through the night, a wind not even eccentric or daredevil bikers tonight are eager to get out in.
Everybody assumes that Ace has been in some kind of a crash.
In the mountains, climbing through rain just at the edge of turning to snow, night coming earlier, Ace forgetting as usual to check the carbide in the headlamp, the light flickering, failing, dwindling to darkness and the metallic smell.
Even with a reliable working headlamp, he’s always had this habit, or maybe practice, of riding faster at night than he should, of not staying safely inside the space lighted ahead of him.
Like many Harley Flathead riders of the period, Ace has disconnected the new front-brake cable and grip arrangement, looking to avoid any more braking skids than what he’s going to get into anyway—possibly some annoyance, bordering on resentment, at the whole idea of braking itself, of any limits or interruptions to motion forward.
Hicks figures he’s somehow beaming telepathic messages of caring and support directly into Terike’s brain, puzzled that she doesn’t at least gaze back, slowly understanding that she wants not to be looked at at all. Fine with Hicks, who couldn’t have watched this collapse for much longer anyway.
Which as it turns out he doesn’t get to. One day it’s the carburetor. Then for a few bothersome days, a countershaft bearing situation. Next time he goes looking for her she’s all set to leave.
“His trouble might not’ve been mechanical, dispatch riders usually know better.
Your chain acts funny, you’re always ready to break, press, rivet.
Your tire goes flat, you stuff it with grass and ride on.
Ace can be careless but he’s not stupid.
This could be anything, even some run-in with locals known to get unfriendly.
I have to go see. Try to understand—if it was me, wouldn’t you? ”
“Sure. How about Ace, would he?” regretting it the minute it came blurting out.
“And that really is stupid, Hicks.”
Maybe, but he won’t let it go. “What if all it is is that he’s met—”
“Suppose he has and what’s it to you? He always knew how to ditch me, so natural that it took me a while to catch on that I was going to be alone again, so simple, no goodbye note, just some empty oil cans and cigarette butts lying around, and then one day there he’d be again, all right?
Listen, if you’re going to get all investigative about this, swell, it’ll be up to you, but meantime if you don’t mind there’s a couple thousand bugs should have been in my teeth by now. ”
Turns out that in some walled-in maze of a mountain town Ace has missed a turn or taken the wrong half of a fork and ends up running on fumes, miles out of his way just about the time the wolves come out.
Wolves and as it happens Vladboys, who also run this terrain in packs.
Aware of the danger, Ace has gone blasting on in anyway, thinking he had an edge, but these riders are not touring.
They’re hunting. Small, nimble, predatory, full of pep—dirt scramblers, hill climbers, creek crossers.
Ace’s weight and displacement work against him, he’s been listening for a throb as deep as his own, anything higher-pitched or faster will take him a tenth of a second too long to sort out, and that’s their edge.
It proves decisive. The snow comes down more heavily, deleting other options.
Ace finds himself in the hands of the Vladboys.