Page 49 of Shadow Ticket

A Hungaro-Croatian terrorist training camp, located right on the borderline, not, like the notorious Jankapuszta, aimed at Yugoslavia in particular so much as flexibly all-purpose Fascist, quivering in readiness to be deployed anywhere…

specializing in lightning putsches local and continent-wide, chaste as any of nature’s killer species, briefly innocent as Fascism in its “springtime of beauty,” as the old anthem goes, before it descended into paperwork and brutality…

Fascist adventurers have journeyed here from all over, Austrians sporting blue cornflowers and black grouse feathers, secret police, anti-Red goon squads, revolutionary cells, convicts escaped from internal exile and not sure where they are right now or what language they’re supposed to be speaking, colonial stooges in civvies in from as far afield as Indo-China and South America, irredentist aristos from the old Hungarian kingdom adrift in nostalgia, Polish freelancers working on spec for all of the above.

At the gate, sentries welcome the bus with the standard Usta?a exchange, “Za dom!” right hand striking chest over the heart, to which the bus driver replies, “Spremni!”

Like “Heil Hitler,” somebody, probably the bass player, who knows everything, explains, only different.

“History rolls on,” Storm Leader Dubendorff, apparently in charge of the entertainment around here, greets the band, “toward our Fascist future, immense and stately, we here being only the squalls and tornadoes breaking out at her edges,” cranking aside a drapery of some kind to reveal through multipaned floor-to-ceiling windows a vast stretch of the puszta, a sweeping view of tank-friendly countryside aswarm with vehicles the colors of local earth and dust, thundering and hurtling, squads scrambling around shooting at dummy tanks or machine-gun nests, practice detonations at all hours out in the brush.

“In this current exercise we are pretending to invade Fiume, which any number of potential clients want back, requiring only a simple pincer movement—in from the Adriatic, down out of the Velebit, all over in a day or two. Anasa supo.”

—

Tonight Vladboys have gathered from all over, to dance to the beat of this tiny orchestra making with swingtime straight from the night cities of capitalist decadence, in this ruined limestone amphitheater, once dedicated to bloodletting presented as amusement, back when the Fifth Macedonian Legion were busy here invading and occupying.

Nazi bikers creep around furtively chiseling cigarettes from anybody they can as long as it’s not the official Storm Trooper brands they’re only permitted to smoke.

“A Gay Evening with Vlad ?epes,” including “Vlad’s Vegetarian Chef.”

“Et voilà—just out of the oven, Your Excellency, dig in!”

“Turnip loaf again, remind me to have the chef impaled.”

“What, again?”

“It’s simple—ease up on the vegetables, I do less impaling—pari passu, fair play, am I being so unreasonable?”

“Vlad at the Office.”

“Criminal code? Nemnemnem, too elaborate, first-degree this, second-degree that, too much paperwork…instead how about one penalty for everything—simple impalement! Murder, queue-jumping, double-dealing and false shuffles, easy to remember, no case law to look up, no judges to bribe, no lawyers’ fees—in fact, no lawyers!

Find a stick, sharpen it, zzt! done in a flash, another of those reductions in government spending for which I have become famous.

But do they ever call me Vlad the Spending Reducer?

Not likely! Since I took power, the threat of Turkish invasion has fallen to zero—do they call me Vlad the Invasion Preventer? No…

“But! Run one stake through one small-time chiseler…”

—

Keeping pace with the lunar cycle, tensions within the Vladboys have been building up, sending them out after prey each time in a more dangerous state of arousal.

Trivial disputes are apt at any moment to erupt into violence.

Local women go more and more in fear of their safety, cover their hair, stay in groups.

The weirdly erotic charge accumulates, until vrrrooom!

here’s the Vladboys out on another massive prowl, unmuted machinery slowly thundering through devout villages where nothing mechanical is allowed—filling up the lanes and alleyways, while shut behind doors suddenly unreliable, guarding doorframes no mezuzah can protect, Jews wait, anxiety growing meantime among the Vladboys as the population of Jews available for persecution seems to be getting smaller lately, and any phantom, any report of a sighting in low light, any unexplained density passing among the streets and alleyways after nightfall that can be shot at, is apt to qualify as a “Jew.” Ace is an understandably welcome catch, with the Flathead an unexpected bonus, which the boys keep insisting is a Jewish motorcycle.

“Weiss Manfréd makes one,” Ace tries to point out, “but the displacement’s under 100 cc’s. This engine is much bigger, 750 or so.”

“Harley. David…Son, this is son of David, no?”

“Two guys from Milwaukee, I don’t think they’re Jewish.”

“American, same thing.”

Meantime when nerves are on edge and everyone is in easy reach of a weapon, never get into an argument over cards.

Somewhere close by, an ordinarily friendly cruce game has unexpectedly flared into violence when a visiting Fascist, maybe only unfamiliar with the ornately detailed Hungarian deck, fails to follow suit.

Demands that his hand be examined, considered impolite but not illegal, don’t help much.

Voices are raised, then fists, then hands as firearms are produced and aimed.

Within minutes of the first shot, gunfire has become general. “We’ll be back. Csongor, keep a careful eye on the Jew.”

“I’d rather come along with the rest of you.”

“No telling how this will develop. Better to have somebody in reserve.”

Csongor is a sort common in these parts, an apprentice vampire doomed never to develop past journeyman, despite which everybody’s afraid of him because they think he’s mad, as in mad dog, a glitter in his eyes telegraphing trouble long before he’s inside Za dom! radius, by which point it’s too late…

Punctuating the rifle and machine-gun fire, hand grenades and tank and anti-tank guns can now occasionally be heard.

Because in situations like this it soon becomes advisable to get flat and under cover and wait there for longer than you think you might need to, Ace and Csongor presently find themselves sheltering under a good-size Czechoslovakian army truck, a Tatra six-wheeler.

“Don’t suppose you know what’s become of my Mauser,” Ace in a friendly enough way.

“Unless you people think that’s Jewish too, like my bike. ”

“We meant no disrespect. We only assumed—”

“Yeah, nothing personal, forget it. You boys sure get cranked up over anything Jewish, don’tcha.”

In the bursts of light from explosions and military traffic on the move, Csongor finds himself gazing at a tattoo on Ace’s arm of a mad-eyed zombie on a BMW bike as seen from a few degrees below flat-on, an angle providing a good stretch of apocalyptic sky to frame him against. “Die Todten reiten schnell,” the Vladboy reads from the Gothic lettering there. “Something about the dead ride fast.”

Ace shrugs. “Some old poetry.” The tattoo artist in Berlin, years ago, threw it in for free.

Csongor can’t let it go. “And do they? the dead. Ride fast?”

Ace is smiling, though not sociably. “I never spent much time in math classes, too busy learning how to hot-wire cars, but from what I recall you’re never allowed to divide anything by zero.

Over there, among the dead, time has no meaning anymore, so to get distance per hour you’d have to divide by zero, which even if it was legal would still give you infinite speed. OK so far?”

“Is this what they call Jewish physics?”

“No idea. But I already may’ve begun to cross over to the next world, not dead yet but pretty damaged. Maybe worse than some little troop of amateurs know how to do.”

“Tough Jew.”

“If you like. But now stand by, you’re about to see the genuine article, heading our way.”

It’s the pocket-size golem Zdeněk, his elegant touring car fueled up and raring to go, its original finish now camouflaged in brushland shades as if he’s expecting to be in trouble sometime soon. With him is Hop Wingdale.

“Saw you go under the truck, thought you might need a ride out of here.”

Zdeněk’s left arm turns out to be a modified ZB-26 Czech light machine gun, with the magazine built into his shoulder.

“This is one of many earthly variants of Azrael, the Angel of Death,” he informs Csongor, “a Jew less forgiving than some you may have hoped to come across, who has been keeping a busy schedule and is still a little backlogged, though be patient, shmuck, you’re at the top of the list, it’ll be your turn before you know it. ”

“Best be on your way,” Ace suggests, “while you’ve got him in a good mood. Nice chatting with you, Csongor, hope you won’t get into too much trouble.”

“This isn’t over,” replies the Vladboy peevishly.

“It never began. Stay safe, pal.”

Zdeněk hits the gas.

“Thanks for the lift,” Ace mutters from the tonneau. “You might have bumped the punk off and saved everybody a lot of trouble.”

“UTOPIAN caveat in effect, I’m afraid,” explains the golem.

“Which would be…”

“Wired into every current-model golem—Unless The Opportunity Presents Itself, Attack Nobody. You want to keep your head down, or are you having too much fun up here in the wind?”

“We’ll need to get to my bike,” sez Ace.

“Not going to happen,” sez Hop. “That Flathead has long been taken away to a fate unknown.”

“Good, let them have it, it’s a rolling death trap anyway. Too heavy, clutch never could handle the weight, flywheel’s too small, go any faster than 50 it starts trying to shake itself apart…”

“Well, but aside from that—”

“Hate to interrupt but,” Hop pausing as something shadowy goes whizzing by close overhead and explodes deafeningly nearby, “I think that was for us.”

“I’ll make a note, thanks.”

With the first of the Vladboy pursuit screaming into the edge of his vision, Zdeněk, bouncing behind the wheel muttering in Czech, makes a wide U-turn, sending up a plume of dust and gravel, back onto the road headed the other way.

A line of brief dirt explosions goes racing left to right just ahead of them.

“Hmm. You want to hang on—” Off the road into unpaved terrain torn up with ruts from heavy machinery and littered with shell casings from the recent activity.

From behind woodlines nobody can even see, field howitzers have begun to lob shells, abrupt small craters creeping closer in a tightening ellipse. Gas rises in dense flare-struck columns.

Nothing but fence as far as the eye can see. “There was supposed to be a gate around here someplace,” Zdeněk somewhere between perplexity and annoyance.

“Could use a Bangalore torpedo,” Ace supposes.

“Might happen to have a pocket-size model here,” Zdeněk rooting around in back and coming up with a few sticks of dynamite thoughtfully borrowed last week in Transylvania off of a freelance firefighting crew passing through en route to a Romanian oil-well fire everybody could see from fifty miles away.

“Ought to do the trick,” Ace figures. “Somebody got a light?”

Obligingly Zdeněk snaps his fingers, which begin to glow red. “Here we go, everybody mind their ears now…”