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Prohibition deepened, as the gunfire down in Chicago reached peaks unheard-of, as even more G-boys came
pouring into SMEGMA (Semi-Military Entity Greater Milwaukee Area), which by then had become a staging ground for frontline operations in Chicago.
Now it seems they want to talk to you, Hicks.”
“Bad for them, worse for me, as Jack Zuta might say. If he was still around to say it. I guess they want me to hop the el in to Chicago.” “Actually they’d prefer Milwaukee.” “Onk, there’s no such thing as a B of I office in Milwaukee, not since the good old days.”
“They’re trying to hang the Stuffy Keegan bomb on you.”
you are on a seriously short list of reasonable patsies to pin it on.
Use the entrance on Michigan. Mornings would be best.”
On days of low winter light the federal courthouse can take on a sinister look, a setting for a story best not told at bedtime, the jagged profile of an evil castle against pale light reflected off the Lake, bell tower, archways, gargoyles, haunted shadows, Halloween all year long.
Though he wouldn’t call it a full-scale attack of the Fee Bee jeebies, what gets him especially nervous about this newer type of federals is that nobody knows yet exactly how bad they can be.
Today’s unknown quantity, Assistant Special Agent in Charge T. P. O’Grizbee,
“We’d much prefer that you cooperate, though you’re always welcome down at our little country jailhouse in Atlanta G-A,
“And you’d be runnin me in for what again?” “Too technical to explain, think of it as Aggravated Mopery.”
“Your country calls.” “Line’s busy.”
“I’m afraid it isn’t optional,”
“I could use some advice, Boynt.” “Uh huh, and any chance you’ll be snapping out of this anytime soon?” “I’m getting a hard sales pitch for somethin I don’t even know what it is.”
they’re trying to turn you. Back to what you never stopped being.
“Oriental Attitude, discipline, serenity, call it what you like, wallow as deep in it as you can get, but he’s still in there, Hicks, still the same dirt-stupid gorilla always ready to take short pay for beating up whoever he’s told to.
“They.” “The federals who had you in are likely just a front, OK? It’s the outfit that’s behind them, a nationwide syndicate of financial tycoons, all organized in constant touch against the forces of evil, namely everything to the left of Herbert Hoover.
Hicks has always preferred not to work for anybody too upper-class if he can trade tickets with one of the other ops, who’re usually only too happy to. Despite which he now finds himself up here on Prospect Avenue with the aristocracy,
Social chitchat around here,
seems very focused on cheese, in particular the recent Bruno Airmont Dairy Metaphysics Symposium held annually at the Department of Cheese Studies at the UW branch in Sheboygan, this year featuring the deep and perennial question, “Does cheese, considered as a living entity, also possess consciousness?”
“Cheese—wait, cheese…has feelings, you say? You mean like…emotions?” “Long-time spiritual truth in Wisconsin. Thousands of secretly devout cheezatarians…”
“Wisconsin is possessed by some vast earth-scented spirit of Bovinity, docile herds of cows by the untold thousands all across the state every day at the same hour lining up shed-side in patient queues waiting to be milked,
no wonder the Japanese hate us, no dairy element to speak of in their diet, they see us as a bovine race, lacking all martial spirit.”
advertising the once infamous food product known as Radio-Cheez, the basis of Bruno Airmont’s fortune,
briefly competitive with the Kraft classic Velveeta,
Radio-Cheez was designed to stay fresh forever, in or out of the icebox, thanks to a secret, indeed obsessionally pro...
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radioactive mineral water, patent radium elixirs and aphrodisiacs, radium suppositories—despite the appearance five or six years earlier of poisoning symptoms down in nearby Ottawa, Illinois, where hundreds of “Radium Girls” were employed in painting numbers on glow-in-the-dark clock dials, licking their brushes every so often
Bruno Airmont, already becoming known in the industry as the Al Capone of Cheese, who without mentioning it to anybody, including his family, has been carefully planning an unannounced exit to legal safety elsewhere,
When Bruno skedaddled off the civilized map for parts unknown, Daphne Airmont was just at that point of later girlhood when an understanding Pop might’ve come in handy,
Since the end of the War the center of gravity of the Cheese Universe has apparently been shifting, to some observers at alarming speed, in the direction of Chicago, where Kraft, having by now captured 40 percent of the U.S. market,
Beginning with its acquisition in 1927 of Velveeta,
a regional-scale roll-up has been in progress, more modest cheese operations all over Wisconsin and beyond qu...
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The year 1930 happened to be the 1776 of the cheese business. The British company Lever Brothers merged with the Dutch cartel known as the Margarine Union to form Unilever. After the merger of National Dairy Products with Kraft everything avalanched, faster than anybody was
ready for, climaxing in the Cheese Corridor Incursion,
a major sector of Wisconsin de-cheesed in the blink of an eye, entire cheese inventories hijacked
no cash taken, no payrolls, only physical cheese, Colby longhorns, bricks of Brick wrapped in tinfoil and carried away by the hodful, storming on down the Cheese Corridor in a bold sweep already “legend-dairy,”
The world of cheez and its ways, already perplexing, had turned suddenly opaque as well for Daphne, who found sometimes she had trouble keeping a handle on it all.
the former scheming heel known as G. Rodney Flaunch
is no more, I swear, he’s betrayed his last milkmaid.”
Hicks just stepped into it without much thinking ahead. Having obtained by way of his Uncle Detlef master keys for most of the high-performance smuggling craft captured in local waters by the Drys and kept down at a lakeside boat pound they rented from the MPD,
Hicks and Daphne have a quick look at each other.
Natural redhead, captivating set of pins, a way of letting you know you’re getting the O-O but gO-Od.
“You know, Miss Airmont, you could’ve said something. Snazzy redhead, how’s anybody supposed to react?” “Thanks. Maybe just once I’d like to be rescued for myself, not for my hair.”
“You can’t go rescuing somebody and then just forget it—Ojibwe belief is, interfere with somebody’s life and you’re responsible for them forever—” Opportunities for light conversation after that deteriorated along with the weather.
Hicks seems to have run Daphne a good way up what’s known here as the Shipwreck Coast, as far as a secret Indian reservation, mentioned only once in a rider to a phantom treaty
Like rezzes elsewhere in the state more familiar and earthly, there’s no Wisconsin statutes in effect here, either. “Where white man’s law is null and void,” as Boynt likes to put it, “and savage ways prevail.”
By strange Chippewa telepathy a small committee has gathered dockside in the fog and drizzle to welcome Daphne.
“Thanks, you just saved me from life in the nuthouse.” Kissing him formally on the cheek. “Step easy, there, Daphne.”
For days now Hicks has been noticing, even in the daylight and out on the street, the return, from somewhere back in deeper Prohibition times, all across his body and over his face, light as delusional bugs, the ghostly crawl of professional finger-eye coordination, somewhere above and in the distance,
