Shadow Ticket

by Thomas Pynchon

Zoli

sharing a floor with Anglo-Danubian Casualty and Theft, specialists in the newly emerging field of apport insurance, whose advertising can be seen on a number of streetcars around town—a poster showing a top hat brimming with diamond jewelry making a swift escape into the

sky, apparently under its...

gemless couple gaze up after it in dismay. “We should’ve insured ...

“So you’re not really—” “Well…depending what you mean by ‘really’…”

I’m Schnucki! I’m Dieter! I’m Heinz!

[Schnucki] Now if you smell something funny, and— [Dieter] It isn’t the smokes— [Heinz] It’s probably us with— [All together] Some more crazy jokes! Folks, Folks, just hope we remem-ber, our lines,

Ja, I’m Schnucki! I’m Dieter! I’m Heinz!

Hicks, PI reflexes kicking in, guesses to be Bruno Airmont’s deputy Ace Lomax.

the gangster from Chicago.” “On the schnozzola, pal, bad as they come, worth an El Producto at least, remind me sometime I owe you one of them.” “How’s ’ose Cubs doing since they traded Hack Wilson?” “Startin off the season pretty good, lost a couple to Cincinnati, Brooklyn.” “Hornsby still playing second?” “Nah, it’s this kid Billy Herman.

Meantime the Rajah ain’t playin much, they’ve got him in as manager, the Commissioner’s after him, front office ain’t happy, everybody figures his days are numbered.”

Meantime, Pips Quarrender has materialized in Budapest, gone platinum, a finger-wave, a smart little nearly ultraviolet cocktail hat with a veil, earlobes dazzling, as if beginning to pick up from somewhere a grasp of what goes with what in the doll-up department.

disappeared into the toilet, next thing anybody knows, ka-pow, the Budapest Suicide Bug has bitten again. In Antal’s pocket they find a farewell note in the form of a crossword puzzle he designed himself, whose solution will reveal the reasons he did the deed, along with the names of other people involved.

Devout cruciverbalists from foreign countries have learned Hungarian, sometimes to a quite advanced and literary level, even quit their jobs, just to come to Budapest to work on the notorious Mystery Crossword, “and sooner or later they all show up at the toilet of the fatal café.”

Vassily’s attention now is elsewhere. He is staring into the street, as if trying to see around the corner, where a slow clattering engine sound, advancing out of the inaudible, is now nearly upon them.

another breath become a scream of terror. “It’s them!” Who turn out to be nightclub apport trio Schnucki, Dieter, and Heinz,

“Tourists out for a spin, Vassily, what’s making you so jumpy?” “Can’t you see? riding back on the extra seat? The invisible rider!”

As Vassily Midoff, were he not at the moment running for his life, would no doubt have pointed out, for a trinity to be effective, and not just a set which happens to contain three members, there must be a fourth element, silent, withheld. A fourth rider, say, working a phantom gearbox…

Reporting in to an all-purpose governmental office converted from a Royal Gendarmerie station where Praediger conducts ICPC business when in Budapest, Hicks finds Praediger obsessively brooding about his latest failure to entrap and arrest Bruno Airmont,

Steps do need to be taken, sooner rather than later,

The Gumshoe’s Manual here is not as helpful as

it cou...

even written them letters about it, never answered, sometimes even sent back unopened, despite such real and widespread concern in the business, you see it every day—“What if I get teamed up, unwillingly, with somebody who’s off their ro...

at a revolving door to the street. Terike motions him on ahead. “Hungarian tradition, the man always goes first, in case of trouble.”

Sometimes in Hungary,

you can step into a revolving door in front of a native Hungarian, who will nevertheless then step out into the street ahead of you, as if you somehow have percolated through each other, actually occupying the same space, no memory, no expectation, simply the coercive sweep of the moving door drawing you along, molecules for an

instant all intermingling, simmering together like, like soup…and ...

there’s a noticeable increase of those who want to have this happen to them, it’s a craze, another must-do for the sophisticated globe-trotter, like crossing the Equator or kissing the Blarney Stone.

Terike once clear of entanglement,

it seems, to reassemble into the same solid Hungarian person again, takes a glance back, like a dame will sometimes to see whether an...

Well, no—you mean the Hungarian person, which is you, somehow…apports herself a quarter-turn ahead—” “…of the non-Hungarian, which in this same example could be you.” “You can say is. Is is good.”

You want a gearbox disassembled and repaired while on the move, time and a half if you’re doing over 100 miles per hour, she’s your gal. She can get anything that’ll fit in a sidecar across the worst terrain you can think of, war-damaged cities a specialty, master of urban obstacle-running, she can go straight up the

sides of walls, pass through walls, ride upside down on the overheads, cross moving water, jump ditches, barricades, urban chasms one rooftop to the next, office-building corridors to native-quarter alleyways quicker than a wink.

she’s handed a wooden crate, weighing hardly anything at all. “Try not to break anything.” “What’s in here, light bulbs?” “Vacuum tubes. Experimental, specially designed for the theremin.” “The…” “It’s a musical instrument.” Dimly, “Electrical gizmo, comes on the radio now and then. Mostly when there’s something weird happening.”

“You’re just in time,” Terike’s friend Zsófi greets them, “we’re running through these tubes like nose tissues at a Garbo movie.” “Sealex machines at Tungsram aren’t quite up to speed yet, they’re cranking these out as fast as they can by hand.”

Slide is often heard whistling “The Best Things in Life Are Free.”

“Which,” he likes to remind people, “means the next to best things in life are cheap,”

“The way I hear it is, is you’re looking for a certain cheez heiress, who is informally attached to a certain swing band, correct?” “That’s what the tick...

the Klezmopolitans have broken up. Daphne and Hop’s whereabouts are suddenly unknown,

“Hey, it’s Hungary, insult is poetry here,

they tell you to go climb onto Death’s penis?” “Whoo. Really?” “Try it sometime out in the street, Menj a halál faszára.

on the full spectrum of Hungarian insult it’s just an everyday howdy-do.” “Not an easy language to get a handle on.”

Things pick up a day or two later when Slide reports that Daphne has been sighted at the Tropikus nightclub, in Nagymező utca, the Broadway of Budapest.

Waitresses in abbreviated sailor-girl getups back and forth with Unicum boilermakers and fruit-heavy house specials in coconut and conch shells, ceramic mermaids with purple Cellophane drinking straws emerging from the tops of their heads, smoke hanging like tropical weather.

You two already met, I think.” “Been carrying around this daydream about it happening again sometime,” Daphne trying not to sound like she’s complaining, “you know the one.” Hicks can guess. “Basic rule of the business ain’t it, Miss Airmont, one person’s big romance is another’s time and a half for overtime.”

“Ever dance professionally?” “Back in Chicago, ballroom act, didn’t work out.” “Personal issues, artistic differences?” “Gang war.” “That thing where it looked like you were walking forward but you’re really sort of gliding backwards?” “Yeah, Cab Calloway showed me the basics one night at a joint up on Walnut Street. Calls it The Buzz.”

The Klezmopolitans, reformatted by electric xylorimba virtuoso Curly Capstock from his original Back Alley Rhythm Cats into a progressive swing band, continually bringing in chords glamorized with up-to-date accidentals, lines with chromatic licks, Latin percussion, a less inhibited or as some might put it screamingly insane brass section

an openness to non-Western scales especially in the solos of reedmen, each as crazy as any trumpet player in the band, since Curly only hires crazy to begin with…

Curly announces,

If we liquidate now, money’s there in