Shadow Ticket

by Thomas Pynchon

A big ape with a light touch. The light touch fools women into thinking he’s sensitive, which he isn’t.

The logical field to get into after North Division High, it seemed to Hicks, was strikebreaking, being basically the same thing only better pay and always hiring.

Over that summer the papers were full of Sacco and Vanzetti, the usual bleeding hearts out in the street carrying signs and pissing and moaning ain’t it awful. Houses in the Third Ward, enough so you noticed, draped in black. Somehow it must have all passed without much effect on Hicks that he can remember.

Mention was often made of the MPD station-house bomb of 1917 and its Italian origin.

“What’d be your idea of the next career step after industrial goon squad, Mr. McTaggart?” Hicks gets nervous when anybody mentions next steps. Sooner or later the step turns out to be off the edge of some bluff and into the Lake. “I give up, tell me.”

In business since the days of the Haymarket bomb frame-up and the Rolling Mills Massacre, the Unamalgamated shop has always turned a brisk dollar from strong-arm jobs on behalf of management against labor, sometimes brutal and one-sided, sometimes fatal, no doubt, though why should offices back or front need to keep count, or even know that much?

“Your country calls.” “Line’s busy.”

“Does cheese, considered as a living entity, also possess consciousness?” “Cheese, oh to be sure, cheese is alive. Self-aware, actually, maybe not exactly the way we are, but still more than some clever simulation. We’re at a pivot point here in the history of food science, a strange new form of life that was deliberately invented, like Doctor Frankenstein or something—”

“Long-time spiritual truth in Wisconsin. Thousands of secretly devout cheezatarians…” “Secretly?” “Only waiting for our moment. We have to be careful, don’t we…wouldn’t want to go through all that Christians-and-Romans business again, would we?”

“In the business, we understand that an explosion, not always but sometimes, is actually somebody with something to say. Like, a voice, with a message we aren’t receiving so much as overhearing.”

The unspoken kiss-off, which the Manual doesn’t include but experience in the field confirms, being that after a while, if you should live so long, it gets funny again.

“My accountants assure me it’s a legal business expense. Usually written off under ‘Postnuptial Miscellaneous.’ ”

Seems Alf and Pips have been out on a worldwide scouting expedition to find recruits for the Secret Intelligence, and are currently on their way back from the U.S., where a number of code breakers have recently found themselves at loose ends after the Black Chamber was shut down, on Halloween of 1929, just after the stock market crashed, by Republican bigwig and Secretary of State Henry “Gentlemen Don’t Read Each Other’s Mail” Stimson.

Nice espionage career? Pay is terrible to begin with, all somewhat boracic around the MI these days, you know, but one does get to mingle on an everyday basis with persons of consequence.”

“Routine ticket, only over here for as long as it takes, till everything’s back to normal.” “Oh, dear,” Pips making with an eyebrow, “do you really not know? ‘Normal’? Things will never go back to the way they were, it’ll all just keep getting more, what the Chinese call, ‘interesting.’ ”

Terike throttles up and rolls on her way, waving to Hicks, calling, “Szia!” “Hope so,” sez Hicks. “Hungarian for so long,” Zoltán explains.

Suddenly Csopi has showed up at ZvK’s elbow, looking uneasy, muttering in Esperanto, with a lot of that wishful u sound in it.

“Pip Emma, my peach, you always did read me like a bus advert.” “Not attentively enough, it seems, who’d believe that I once took you for a jolly lad only looking for a bit of fun—certainly

To waste my talent not on an evil genius but on an evil moron, dangerous not for his intellect, what there may be of it, but for the power that his ill-deserved wealth allows him to exert, which his admirers pretend is will, though it never amounts to more than the stubbornness of a child…”

Who’d ev-ver wanna stop, eea-ting? Pass that ba-na-na cream pi-i-ie—

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