Page 51 of Shadow Ticket

Once a major port of embarkation for the New World, bright and bustling, Fiume now is a tattered ghost city with a sordid history of secret treaties and sellouts, edging its way through what the Fascist Italian regime calls Year Ten, continuing to collapse in on itself, unlikely to be redeemed, barricaded and wire-fenced, corroded, sentry-boxed, moonlit some nights brighter than what flickering neon remains…

Some blame Fascist Italy, which absorbed it. Others point out that any attempt to go up against the liberal bourgeois order is destined to fail. Rollicking youth grow old, the middle-class condition goes on forever. So forth.

One day of rain and fog, secondhand light here in the streets and piazzas reflecting off the wet pavement, a day meant for slow silver emulsions and long exposures and few chances for color, Daphne hears a woman somewhere invisible singing “Daleko m’ê moj Split,” an operetta tune from a few years back, grabs an umbrella, walks out the door, down an alleyway, then another, trying to find the source.

The sky brightening a little, then dark again with more rain.

Adrijana, who works at the cigarette factory, is off shift today and just about to put in earrings representing a black Moor’s head in a fancy white turban, which Daphne has been noticing on ears elsewhere around town.

“What wonderful earrings.”

“There’s something like it in Venice, but you’ll find the Mor?i? only in Fiume. Our little Moor, our protector, our good luck.”

They locate a café with a piano in back, Adrijana teaches Daphne the song. “They’ll excuse your accent, but miss a double-dot on the beat and they’ll never let you forget it.”

—

A couple nights later, after hours, they show up at a sympathetic room in a roadhouse on the Yugoslavian side of the line, where neighborhood musicians like to get together, tonight a C-melody sax, banjo-uke, trombone, piano, an underlying beat from snare brushes and woodblock.

Daphne understanding before she’s eight bars in, not without goose bumps, that this is likely not the last time she’ll be singing it in public…

a warm peach-colored spot picking up sun streaks in her hair she’s forgotten were there, a smile at the band for going easy with practical jokes such as unannounced key changes…

and after the vocal, an instrumental break, joined out of somewhere by a clarinet, all too immediately recognizable as who else but Hop Wingdale, klezmerizing all over the place, salaciously wiggling his licorice stick in her direction, understanding with some seldom used fraction of his brain, about the same time she tumbles, that like it or not here they are again.

“Caught me right in the middle, couldn’t believe it was you, had to stop and go back to the tonic and wait.”

“I noticed.”

“Liked your number.”

“Still needs some work, but thanks.”

“Hope you weren’t thinking I ran out on you, or—”

“Did cross my mind.”

“Daphne, I would never have—”

“Sh-sh. Yes, of course, I’ve been out there looking for you ever since.”

“Thought by now you would’ve just gone back to the States.”

“I would never have done that. Not without you.” Eyes gazing nowhere for the effective beat and a half, and when she does look back into his, even a stumblebum like Hop understands the emotional disarray this has already begun to collapse into.

He reaches for a highball glass, where he’s been keeping a couple of reeds soaking in slivovitz, drinks what’s there, pours in more.

“U-uhck! That’s disgusting!”

“Dunno, gives it a sound somehow.”

—

A busy echoing interior comfortably dim with all-night cigarette and kitchen smoke, young runners who never fall asleep in and out bringing seafood fresh from the Adriatic, a continuous wind outside, down from the high limestone, a theremin of uneasiness, sliding around a narrow band of notes, in which it’s said you may come to hear repeated melodies, themes and variations, which is when you know you’re going bughouse, with only a very short period of grace to try and escape before it no longer matters.

“What’d I do now?”

“How about what you were doing then.” Daphne lights up and sits there deadpan and puffing.

Hop goes through it again and of course it keeps coming out even less convincing, as it has each time around.

“So…all this time you were pretending to be a klezmer clarinetist, romantically involved with an heiress to an American cheese fortune, meantime gathering intelligence on the sly, sending faithful summaries, about what and back to whom, exactly, not for the likes of me to imagine.”

“Not exactly the way I’d’ve put it. But—”

“But we both know the headline, Empty-Headed Good-Time Girl Finds Love at Last, meantime falling for one of the sorriest routines in the history of male deceit, congratulations, lady-killer, what it must’ve cost you—my yes, the stamina, the patience.

All those tea leaf readers and penny scales were right all along.

Cheeziness is my destiny. Should have stuck with Rodney, least there’d’ve been some class in my life. ”

“Wait, second thoughts about—”

“You bet. Especially since he went literary.”

Having reluctantly given up on scheming after Daphne’s fortune, G.

Rodney Flaunch has recently published How to Lose a Million and a Half and Bounce Back Smiling, already named a Book of the Month and picking up a devout group of followers growing larger every day, including indicted embezzlers, retired moonshiners, and perpetual litigants, with plans for a further series of How to Lose books plus a Dale Carnegie–style lecture-seminar to go along with each.

“I can get you signed copies, if you like.”

“You have every right to feel this bitter—”

“Just your sensitive, caring side coming out, don’t let it bother you, it won’t last long.”

“Someday this will all ease up. Someday, some heat wave of danger and crisis safely behind us, released into the first autumn breezes of rational adult behavior, I’ll be tracking some long-held secret bank account, you’ll be shopping for a hat to celebrate the new fashion season.

We’ll cross paths in the bar of some grand hotel… ”

“Traveling sales-rep talk, yes spare us both, Hop, or whatever you’re calling yourself these days. Don’t even bother to come looking, you won’t find me that useful anymore.”

“Useful. I want useful, I go to a hardware store…”

But she’s already out the door.

—

Hicks runs into Daphne down at the harbor, busy wrapping up some arrangement with Drago Pebka?, skipper of a little coaster making break-bulk runs to Split, Dubrovnik, Corfu, and points beyond.

Focusing in on his right earlobe, “We’re both wearing the same earring, that Mor?i?.”

“Wouldn’t cast off a line without it.”

“Never thought I’d need that kind of luck, but— Eek! why Hicks, you did make me jump.”

“Only havin a look, no need to act furtive or nothin, jake with me if you’re hightailin it, Daphne, long as you don’t mind signing a release, keep ’em all happy back in Milwaukee.”

Drago casting a look of speedy appraisal, “Special rate for two, if—”

“Not me,” sez Hicks.

“Not him,” confirms Daphne.

“Buy you a quick cup of Joe, you got time.”

They find a café. “That boat trip isn’t for me, as if you didn’t guess. Me, I’m taking the next liner back, you’ll be happy to hear.”

“Must be Bruno then. Don’t tell me nothin more, I’m still technically workin for Praediger, who thinks I’m helping him haul Bruno in.”

“You won’t say anything, will you?”

Shrug. “Not my ticket, even if somebody tells me what in heck’s going on, which ain’t about to happen. And with Praediger I can’t get a word in edgewise anyway.”

“What did you think would happen?”

“No idea. Besides which, the gumshoe’s code, no daydreaming on the job, so forth.”

“He’s in real danger, seriously on the lam this time. I can’t not help him, Hicks.”

“Gotcha.” They observe each other carefully in the precarious sunlight. “Well, Daphne, now, there might be one thing—”

“Ha! The speedboat! I knew the moment would come! Look at him, he can’t stand it anymore, can’t keep away from those motorboat memories, yes, damned if he isn’t turning to Jell-O right here before my eyes!”

“Well only a small favor, but if you’re gonna be that way…”

“No. What I really mean is thanks forever for saving me way back when from the kindly attentions of the Winnetka bughouse, and consider yourself released. It was an impulsive act of rescue and thus may not incur recompense, let alone lifelong obligation, U.S. versus somebody, federal case, I looked it up once.”

“You’re lettin me off that Chippewa hook? About time.”

“There was also something about—”

“Oh. Well, in case I don’t get back to the States as soon as you do? if you wouldn’t mind getting a message to somebody?”

“The girl you left behind you.”

“More like grown woman, married, family to raise, unknown numbers of gun-totin Calabresi in the picture, but if it was being brought to her personally, see, by the actual daughter of the Al Capone of Cheese in Exile…”

“My pleasure, I’m sure, and that object you keep carrying around all the time there? I hope you’re paid up on your fire insurance.”

What one of them should have been saying was “We’re in the last minutes of a break that will seem so wonderful and peaceable and carefree.

If anybody’s around to remember. Still trying to keep on with it before it gets too dark.

Until finally we turn to look back the way we came, and there’s that last light bulb, once so bright, now feebly flickering, about to burn out, and it’s well past time to be saying, Florsheims, let’s ambulate.

“Stay, or go. Two fates beginning to diverge—back to the U.S., marry, raise a family, assemble a life you can persuade yourself is free from fear, as meanwhile, over here, the other outcome continues to unfold, to roll in dark as the end of time. Those you could have saved, could’ve shifted at least somehow onto a safer stretch of track, are one by one robbed, beaten, killed, seized and taken away into the nameless, the unrecoverable.

“Until one night, too late, you wake into an understanding of what you should have been doing with your life all along.”

Something like that. If anybody was still there to hear it. Which there isn’t.