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the bank in Zurich, but don’t wait too long, ’cause it won’t be there forever and neither will you.”
“I’ve been trying to keep my nerve,” Daphne admits, “but it’s too dangerous over here anymore, I know that going back to the U.S.A. will only be buying time, that sooner or later no place will be safe. We need to relocate before it’s all Storm Trooper chorales and three-note harmony.
For a while Daphne, flown into a dither, was chasing all over the map, trying to be there waiting wherever the puck might be on its way to but not always guessing right, along with wires going astray, trains running late, street-fighting and barricades to detour around and so forth, sleeping and eating when
she can,
Daphne continuing to run a train and a half, a day or a night or a street address behind, till eventually the charm wore off and she wound down to this pause in Budapest,
Daphne could just sit and listen to Hop on that licorice stick all day and night,
like the solo from Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2, swinging it with a respectful jazz-band approach. Gets her every time.
shaking her head slowly. “You seriously believed everything they told you? For a beat-up old-timer you’re pretty naive.”
you’re way more fly than the junior party regular the papers still like to write you up as, too young to know any better, uh huh, instead here’s Greta Garbo, all gussied up and out on the prowl and looking for trouble.”
what if after what’s sure to be a lot of work I find ol’ Hop is just out doing the horizontal Peabody all this time with somebody cute and don’t want to be interrupted?” “My, you’re sure dwelling down there in the mudflats these days ain’t you, Sport.” “Must be why the pay’s so good.”
That’s really how I come across?” “Heck, Toots, I don’t even know if you do.” “Talk about suave. How’s that one work back in Wauwatosa?” “Have I been mashing on you? No wonder I’m such a hit with the dames, out there pitching woo, half the time I don’t even know it. “
“I mean if you want suave, I can be plenty suave, if I have to.” “Of course with me you don’t have to.”
“Why, how sweet. A girl could get confused.” “About what?” “Your intentions.”
After a string of peculiar one-night engagements, girl vocal trios with megaphones, French horns in the brass section, white tenors putting on jive hepcat voices, reedmen who move their instruments around in the air all together, a bandleader with an electric violin whose bow he uses
for a baton and whose long power cord he keeps tripping over, adding a thrill element of self-electrocution, Hop Wingdale gets as far as Geneva,
Hop collapsing onto a beat-up divan. “Must be a Depression on or something. Dismal, desperate…Toilets
Just don’t ever book me into any of these Nazi joints popping up all over, them I won’t work in.” “What, you’re Jewish or something?”
‘Each night will be like the czardas in reverse, peppy and crazy to begin with, yet soon relaxing to almost a soothing and stately lullaby, as one by one, motor-vagabond audiences go toppling drugged into night’s oblivion.’ Any flicker of interest here, Hop?”
“Bringing us to the clarinet. Lately, to a certain type ear, clarinet playing of any kind screams Jewish, anything else you could double on, how about trumpet?”
you’ll need to calibrate how klezmeratic, not to mention how Negro, you can afford to present yourself as. Anybody begins to suspect that the bright thread swooping out of your instrument might somehow be Jewish saliva, well…”
Sometimes all Hicks wants is to be back in Milwaukee, restored to normal life, to a country not yet gone Fascist, a place of clarity and safety, still snoozy and safe, brat smoke from a lunch wagon grill, some kid practicing accordion through an open window, first snow coming into town off the prairie,
El Productos in glass tubes, fried perch and coleslaw on Friday nights. Buttermilk crullers, goes without saying. A fantasy of old-time Milwaukee, dairy-colored surfaces through the leisurely days imperceptibly continuing to darken behind a bituminous haze safe to breathe, never as bad as Chicago…Back
No more runaway rich dame tickets for li’l old H. McT., thanks, this one so help me’ll be my last.”
ain’t often comes along as deep of a desperado as Bruno Airmont. Maybe your grandma told you there’s some good in everybody? Well, Bruno in the neighborhood’ll even send Granny reachin for the squirrel rifle…”
Bruno keeps showing up, the same low point everything nearby seems fated to go draining into,
Bye-bye, to Boo, hoo, hoo-dapest!
“And shomrim, that’s, um…” A self-defense group, meaning “watchers” in Hebrew,
shomrim are busy inventing a close-quarters form of combat soon to be known as Krav Maga.
In Bratislava they’re developing a more dangerous model. Idea is to always keep moving, keep hitting, never have both hands doing the same thing at the same time.” “Sounds kind of Japanese.” “You could think of it as Jew-jitsu,” sez Zdeněk,
“Cheez Heiress on the Run? thought that’d all be yesterday’s news.” “This is bigger.” “And,” Hicks nodding more in encouragement than understanding, “the headline will read…” “We will know it when we see it, as the hat-check girl said to the private eye.”
By terms of the Treaty of Trianon, concluded in 1920 at Versailles, the former Kingdom of Hungary got dissected by the Entente into pieces to be handed out to the newly reformulated nations of Romania, Czecho-Slovakia and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, soon to be
known as Yugoslavia,
The Vienna branch of MI3b, daytime, a modest-size office decorated with a movie poster of Lilian Harvey waltzing with Willy Fritsch in Der Kongreß tanzt and an ancient map of the Hapsburg Dual Monarchy, bentwood office furniture in the local Workshop style.
“Russia remains the world’s largest untapped reservoir of pre-Christian faith…magical and shamanic arts…Dialectical materialism will never succeed with a people who regard the material sphere as essentially spiritual…Objects with souls…Bolshevism only a passing phase…ephemeral cannot begin to describe…As long as Gleb Bokii is safe, the narkomat is safe.
Beneath an archway with a neon sign, Átfogó Alkatrészek, visible for miles as an electric blue nimbus above the treetops, Hicks, Slide, and Zdeněk come rolling into a parts depot deep in the Transylvanian forest,
As the road-Pullman plows its way through the night, moving deeper into Vladboys terrain, underlit landscape furling silently aside, the band find themselves growing less enthusiastic about the Trans-Trianon 2000 Tour of Hungary Unredeemed.
Hungaro-Croatian terrorist training camp, located right on the borderline, not, like the notorious Jankapuszta, aimed at Yugoslavia in particular so much as flexibly all-purpose Fascist, quivering in readiness to be deployed anywhere…specializing in lightning putsches local and continent-wide,
innocent as Fascism in its “springtime of beauty,” as the old anthem goes, before it descended into paperwork and brutality…
the standard Ustaša exchange, “Za dom!” right hand striking chest over the heart, to which the bus driver replies, “Spremni!” Like “Heil Hitler,”
“History rolls on,” Storm Leader Dubendorff, apparently in charge
of the entertainment around here, greets the band, “toward our Fascist future, immense and stately, we here being only the squalls and tornadoes breaking out at her edges,”
Keeping pace with the lunar cycle, tensions within the Vladboys have been building up, sending them out after prey each time in a more dangerous state of arousal.
anxiety growing meantime among the Vladboys as the population of Jews available for persecution seems to be getting smaller lately, and any phantom,
Ace is an understandably welcome catch, with the Flathead an unexpected bonus, which the boys keep insisting is a Jewish motorcycle.
“Harley. David…Son, this is son of David, no?” “Two guys from Milwaukee, I don’t think they’re Jewish.”
Csongor, keep a careful eye on the Jew.”
Csongor is a sort common in these parts, an apprentice vampire doomed never to develop past journeyman, despite which everybody’s afraid of him because they think he’s mad, as in mad dog, a glitter in his eyes telegraphing trouble long before he’s inside Za dom! radius, by which point it’s too late…
Ace and Csongor presently find themselves sheltering under a good-size Czechoslovakian army truck, a Tatra six-wheeler. “Don’t suppose you know what’s become of my Mauser,” Ace in a friendly enough way. “Unless you people think that’s Jewish too, like my bike.”
You boys sure get cranked up over anything Jewish, don’tcha.”
Not that Daphne would admit to being lost, although it hasn’t taken her long to regret this impulsive attempt to find Hop. She has blundered out into a territory she thought she knew, which in fact the political situation has changed to something unrecognizable and poisonous.
