Page 54 of Shadow Ticket

Abandoned after the War, the old Whitehead factory, where the torpedo as we have come to know it was invented, has fallen into ruin, occupied these days by unhoused squatters and motorcyclists passing through.

Few care to stay much longer than overnight, because it’s said to be haunted by the ghosts of submarines long dismantled which feel compelled to return to their birthplace.

More objects-with-souls gobbledeygook, Hicks figures. Hopefully.

The map Stuffy drew for Hicks seems clear enough.

The beer joint is easy to walk up to and into but no guarantees about getting back out.

Hicks has a look around. Enough light to see by, despite a blur of smoke out of which anything can come hurtling unannounced, a couple of industrious barmaids whose smiles are not unconnected with having just come on shift, circulating among assorted submarine sailors, if that’s what they are, on liberty, plus a few homegrown tomatoes rolling in and out.

“Nice joint, Stuffy. Been in worse.”

“What’d I tell you? Come on, like you to meet the Skipper.”

Ernst Hauffnitz is set up at a corner table behind a smoldering pipeful of some Latakia blend and a half-liter beer mug. Hicks isn’t sure what kind of story the sub skipper’s had from Stuffy, but apparently the cheez heiress ticket comes into it by way of Bruno Airmont.

“Who is about to be taken, as we speak, off on an undersea voyage of uncertain extent. We and our client apologize for any inconvenience this may be causing you.”

“This client wouldn’t happen to be a Viennese copper named Praediger—”

“Ach, der Praediger.” A chuckle plus two or three puffs of pipe smoke. “Ustashe operative, cocaine enthusiast…”

“That’s the kiddie.”

“It doesn’t matter. The vessel is invisible to him, as it is to the Vienna Police Directorate, none of whom have been exactly alone in their plodding pursuit of Mr. Airmont—there’s been quite a long list, headed by the International Cheese Syndicate, who happen to be the ones breathing down our necks at the moment.

” It isn’t only the hefty amount of Syndicate money that Bruno has embezzled, but also everything he knows about the inner workings of the InChSyn.

“The secret overlords of Cheese are understandably anxious for that to remain in confidence, even—in fact—at the cost of Mr. Airmont’s life.

Working ourselves generally more in the search and rescue line, our objective is to see that Mr. Airmont is safely relocated where he can neither commit nor incur further harm.

You might consider us an encapsulated volume of pre-Fascist space-time, forever on the move, a patch of Fiume as it once was, immune to time, surviving all these years in the deep refuge of the sea… ”

Doubts began for the Skipper early in the War, when Max Valentiner torpedoed and sank SS Persia in the Mediterranean, killing 343 civilians in direct violation of Chancellery orders to spare passengers and rescue survivors.

“I remembered Max from U-boat school in Kiel. Before the War he had become famous for saving lives. A hero, many times decorated. But command of one’s own U-boat can do strange things to a man. ”

“Yet you managed to avoid that.”

“Spent my time in the Mediterranean Theater bottled up in the Adriatic behind the Otranto Barrage, playing cat and mouse with British destroyers and drifters, no casualty count that I know of, idiot’s luck no doubt…

Some of us, if consciences had toenails, would be hanging on by just that margin.

Yet conscience must find ways to go on operating inside history. ”

In the late summer of 1921, U-13 was ordered to proceed to its birthplace, the óbuda shipyard in Budapest, to be broken up pursuant to Article 122 of the Trianon dictate.

About a day out from port the Skipper had one of those moments.

The K.u.K. Kriegsmarine had ceased to exist in 1918.

Orders from some bureaucratic successor made no sense at all.

The Skipper tied up at a disused quay near Csepel, left a skeleton crew, and sent everybody else over on liberty and went on a meditative bender himself in Budapest, his thoughts far from festive.

The city had a long history of suicide, attracting pilgrims from all over the world seeking a Lourdes not of hope but of despair, assuming that suicide in Budapest, like love in Paris or greed in New York, would be somehow more authentic.

One night on the Chain Bridge, gazing down at the river, in an alcoholic trance, he was approached by a small delegation of his crew members, out looking for him, as it happened. “Evening, Skipper, hope we’re not interrupting anything.”

“Trouble with the boat?”

“The boat’s fine. But we’ve been wondering, some of us, why you’re not bringing her into the yard.”

“Why I’m disobeying orders.”

“Something like that.”

“I admit my command had more to do with running enemy blockades than disrupting their shipping, but I still developed a strange rapport with the boat, you could almost call it a sort of psychical connectedness…”

Not exactly muttering but producing the subvocal impression that the old man had gone off his rocker at last or, as some would put it, again.

“…so you can appreciate that to hand over the U-13 to the ship-breakers makes no more sense than it would to commit suicide myself—wait, what’d I just say…”

Indeed. As he would later come to explain it, that moment was the beginning of his new career of nonbelligerence, though other forces were already at work, running, you could say, deeper—fear of and desire for oceanic depths despite the U-13 having been originally designed for shallower missions, for actually creeping about on retractable wheels over harbor floors at modest depths, still there will come over him an urge more ancient than anything he knows of to go deeper, to descend, rivets creaking, into depths legendary as those of the Valdivia Expedition of 1898–99, which brought up into the daylight a pitch-black critter known as the Vampire Squid, by whose name, these days, the U-13 has since come to be known.

—

“What we expected,” Bruno handing Daphne an account number at a bank in Geneva, “it’s here. I was going to leave you this at the last minute and now’s about as last minute as it’s going to get, so here you go, my li’l midnight pumpkin, all for you.”

“Don’t want your money, never did.”

“Better than money.”

“No such thing.”

“It’s information. Enough on the secret history of the InChSyn, and the full membership, anonymous and otherwise, to send the whole business up in one giant fondoozical cataclysm.”

“And whatever’s left gets grabbed up by pikers and riffraff—Kraft, Unilever, the Cheese Exchange in Sheboygan, oh, Pop, no, how can I—”

“All safe and sound in a vault under a remote Swiss mountain range just waiting for you. You’ll know when, if, and how to use it. Everything the Al Capone of Cheez was Al Capone of is now in your hands, you’re the Alcaponissima.”

“Di Formaggio, thanks, Pop. The boat’s all set to go, Drago says he does this all the time, a look-alike in a beat-up old jalopy with 8 cylinders under the hood will lead them miles out of the way and then go invisible, meantime you’re off with Drago’s crew doing a little harmless night fishing. Skipped before anybody knows it.”

“Where’d I ever get the idea you were just some kind of innocent bystander.”

“Gossip columnists will say anything. Better you find out now than when it’s too late.”

“Oh, Daphne—”

“Don’t know why I said that. Forget it. It’s not too late, Pop, never will be, not for us.”

Quick look at a Rolex Oyster Perpetual he does not seem to recognize, as if thanks to the psychical ambience he’s been in all evening it has just apported onto his wrist, “Could be if we don’t hurry.”

—

Close to dawn, a pale foreglow revealing clouds sweeping over and down from the Karst, Drago Pebka?, at the wheel of his little coaster, having threaded his way innocently among a number of islands, out in the open Adriatic at last, is presented with an unexpected dilemma—is the dark shape now looming ahead a solid real-world vessel, or some fragment of nightmare reluctant to withdraw into the early light?

“Not a mirage,” his Moor’s-head earring in a whisper only he can hear. “Solid steel and on a collision course.”

Drago stops the engine and heaves to. A hatch in the U-boat’s conning tower opens, and Ernst Hauffnitz, in an old-time Austro-Hungarian captain’s uniform, brass buttons, visor cap with gold braid and so forth, comes out with a megaphone. “You have an American passenger aboard.”

“Looks like that won’t be for much longer.”

“Where were you taking him?”

“Hadn’t decided. Dubrovnik?”

The Skipper hauls out his pipe and lights up as Bruno emerges on deck in a state of agitation. “I thought we had a deal.”

“A young woman handed me an envelope full of banknotes. I took you aboard. In your country that may pass for a sacred covenant. Out here…” A shrug.

“How much more will it cost you to let me off in Dubrovnik?”

“Take it up with this gentleman and his U-boat. I have no inclination this morning to be torpedoed.”

Captain Hauffnitz puffs away, mischievously beaming. “Dubrovnik’s loss. Come along, Mr. Airmont, and welcome aboard.”

The hatch is secured behind them and the metallic command to dive is heard on the loudspeakers.

Bruno is escorted to a snug though not uncomfortable cabin and handed a cigar compliments of the U-13.

He lights up, sits awhile smoking and stupefied.

Goes over to a porthole and observes a tuna looking back in at him showing every sign of wanting to communicate.

Is this the brig I’m in, he wonders. No, submarines don’t have brigs, they are brigs.

The tuna winks its visible eye and swims off.

Bruno turns abruptly. Lounging in the doorway is somebody he thinks he ought to recognize.

“Howdy, Bruno.”

“Who are you?”

“Christopher Keegan, but everybody calls me Stuffy.”

“Whose bright idea was this? It’s that goddamned Praediger, isn’t it?”

“Somebody else, some cheese syndicate. A while ago they say you skipped with a good-size piece of their cash, and they still want it back.”

“I’ve spent some of it.”

“No regrets, I guess.”

“Why? What else do you do with money? Eat it, smoke it? Take it out on a date?”

“They’re OK with whatever percentage is left. But they intend to be less than courteous if they ever get hold of you.”

“And how much are you delivering me for?”

“We’re not working for them.”

“Who?”

Shrug. “See, there’s a difference between the Al Capone of Cheese and the AC of C in Exile. One sooner or later gets the paving-material overcoat. The other goes where he’ll do no harm. Our racket happens to be exile.”

“You’re telling me there are death squads going around with a list of targets while friendly submarines meantime are also cruising around benevolently picking them up before any harm can be done. This is crazy.”

“Latest from Stateside,” handing over a copy of the Chicago Tribune, delivered out of the darkness by transoceanic radio facsimile.

Seems revolution has broken out in the U.S.

, beginning in Wisconsin as a strike over the price per hundredweight that dairy farmers were demanding for milk, spreading across the region and soon the nation.

Milk shipments hijacked and dumped at trackside, trees felled across roadways and set aflame to stop motor delivery, all-night sentinels, crossroads pickets, roundups, ambushes, bayonet charges, gunfire, casualties military and civilian.

“They’re out to destroy Cheese,” is Bruno’s immediate assumption.

“To destroy everything I’m Al Capone of.

” Nobody wants to hear about it. The real Al Capone can’t help, he’s in the pen now and the Outfit has other problems on its mind.

The Red Hour has struck at last. Bankers, capitalists, club-fellows, Fascists locally and abroad ignore Bruno’s pleas, offer no aid or comfort, fail to return ship-to-shore phone calls, often too busy thrashing desperately themselves against the relentless vortex of a sinking world order, others relying on their faith in the realities of blood and soil, which never go away, to save them.

“I knew it. The minute that damned Bolshevik Roosevelt got into office—”

“Only for a minute and a half. There was a coup. Gang of millionaires including a couple of Roosevelt’s own Brain Trusters, like that Hugh Johnson. General MacArthur is in command now.”

“The one who broke up the Bonus Army.”

“Says he understands the insurrectionary mind.”

“Old Milwaukee family. I think Doug went to West Division High around the time I was in Chicago Latin.”

“Might be a useful contact for you back there.”

“We never met, we didn’t move in the same circles.”