Romanov Succession (13 page)

“I've got to work directly with Vlasov.”

“If you prefer not to work through me then perhaps you had better work out a scheme that excludes Vlasov.”

It had always been exasperating to deal with Oleg; he fought out of stubbornness more than conviction.

Oleg said, “The reason Vassily is dead is that too many people learned about it. I cannot put Vlasov in that jeopardy.”

“He's already in jeopardy. I can't do the job without him,” Alex said. “Your loyalty to the idea—the coalition—is it a sham?” He maintained an impassive facade and watched the determined resistance in Oleg's eyes change to sardonic self-deprecation when he saw he was going to have to surrender his control.

Finally with grudging logic Oleg said, “I suppose your intransigence is more reasonable than my own. Very well. But you must let me do it my way. I shall advise you when you may approach him. Do not attempt it until you have my clearance.”

“It's got to be done quickly.”

“It will be. We haven't much time, have we—or the Fuehrer will do our job for us.”

He had got what he'd come for; he turned to go but Oleg's voice arrested him. “You need men—I can provide them. If I ask them a thousand men will enlist with you.”

“I won't need a thousand.”

“Vassily wanted a regiment.…”

“We're not using Vassily's plan.”

The room began to stink of Oleg's pipe. He gave Alex a long scrutiny. “I see. But you still need people. My offer is genuine.”

Alex supposed his hesitation was obvious. After a moment Oleg said, “You are afraid of an imbalance in your force—too many rabid young Socialists—that would displease our conservative friends. But there is a risk in neutrality, young Alex—if things go awry you will have no strong allies among us. I know the hardships of working alone, remaining aloof from all the rest. Often it is the best way but it is never easy.”

“I haven't heard anybody suggest the job's easy.”

“Of course. All right—tell me how many of my people you can absorb without incurring the anger of Anatol and the others. Give me a number and that many young men will be on whatever doorstep you wish on the appointed date.”

“They'd want training. It's better to use professional soldiers.”

“You may find that the professional soldiers of the world are otherwise occupied at the moment.”

“Then keep the offer open.”

“Of course. But for your own sake do not take too much time—it is the one thing you haven't got.”

At noon he waited in the garden for Irina. The others hadn't yet finished lunch and Prince Leon was on a trunk call to Zurich, something to do with the Romanov finances, the sort of call you had to make cryptic and reserved because the lines passed through Vichy France.

A rickety airplane stuttered along the horizon to the south, possibly carrying mail to Barcelona. When Irina appeared on the terrace he climbed the steps and took her hand.

She looked wan but self-possessed. She pushed her hair back from her temples. “You're leaving right away then.”

“As soon as a few things have been signed.”

“I'll go with you to Madrid,” she said. “I'll bring Felix back if he agrees to come.”

“How much have they told you?”

“I've made a few surmises.” She had one of her Du Mauriers going; she coughed on the smoke. “I'm very glad you've taken it on. Vassily still had all his respect for you in spite of what happened between you.”

She'd given him the opening but he didn't take it and he felt the distance grow: the violence of Vassily's death had estranged them. He didn't know what it meant—what could be done about it.

She said, “I just want to ride to Madrid with you. We'll sit together and you'll hold my hand.”

18.

The day was blazing hot and tinder dry on the two-kilometer Madrid course. Felix swept his left hand from the wheel to downshift before going into the turn. His eyes judged the banked edge. He allowed himself a quick glance over his shoulder at the Alfa Romeo: it was gaining. Felix's grip whitened on the wooden wheel and he cut across the turn, wheels skittering, running in second with his foot flat down on the hard-sprung metal plate of the accelerator and the tachometer needle beyond the red line.

The thunder of engines and wind pierced the cotton stuffed in his ears; dust raveled high above the oval strip, high enough to turn the sky pale, caking the spectators who stood in knots around the track and the mechanics in their grease-black coveralls waiting by the impromptu pits.

The Alfa behind him dropped back on the inside of the tight turn and now, coming out of it, Felix allowed his outside rear wheel to skip along the dusty loose shoulder, freewheeling for the few seconds it took to build up engine speed in high gear. It was a winning trick, practiced into habit; he felt the engine take hold when he sideslid back onto the hardpan. The ripsaw-buzzing Bugatti shot into the straightaway, surging ahead sharply enough to snap his neck back. The bright exhaust tubes shimmered before him.

The wound-up 57SC engine pushed toward its deafening limit in the tach's red zone. The Bugatti's polished long snake of a gearshift lever whipped violently with vibration and wind howled across the stark square top of the windscreen.

It was a race for the big cars, not the limited-formula Grand Prix cars he was accustomed to; these were eight-cylinder monsters running at well over a hundred miles an hour. The smallest mechanical malfunction, the slightest error of judgment, a slick of dropped crankcase-oil on the track could smash you to pulp or cause you to be pulled out of the car without a single mark on you, but dead all the same.

A sheared brake-rod had cost him ninety seconds in the pit after the seventeenth lap. He still had nearly a full lap to make up: the pack was running twenty lengths behind him but in fact it was Felix who was behind. It wasn't the Alfa he had to beat; the Alfa was two laps back; it was the four Mercedes Benz 540K juggernauts, and the D8S Delage but he had a feeling the French car hadn't the staying power to make the hundred laps. There were three 4-liter Hispano-Suizas in the crowd and a 4-liter Talbot-Lago rushing the inside rail with a hard vicious uproar, and a pair of old Mercedes Benz SSKs; a Frazer Nash-B.M.W., an aging American Duesenberg supercharged SJ, an Invicta and a Daimler. But it was the swollen great Mercedes Benz 540Ks, pledged to win for the Master Race, that had to be caught—and Felix meant to do it.

Another lap and he'd gained a few lengths; he was calculating the ground he had to eat—a hundred and twenty kilometers before the finish: how many meters did he need to gain per lap?

There were drivers who liked running half a lap behind; they would sit there out of the dust and racket and coast until the last ten laps. They called it “stroking”: conserving the delicate machinery for the last push, waiting for the pack-leaders to drop out. Felix was a charger, he pushed his car to its limit and relied on his pit crew and the tough Bugatti engineers who'd built the car. They hadn't built it for loafing—they hadn't built
him
for it either.

He always drove against the red line.

Fiftieth lap … fifty-fifth … sixtieth. The pack was ahead of him and he had their dust in his teeth; he slid forward among the stragglers. The Alfa was still right behind him but the Alfa had an extra lap to make up and wasn't going to do it. Up ahead one of the German team's cars had got into a long fender-crashing duel with the Talbot-Lago, wheel hubs screaming and cars lurching, and the rest of the crowd was veering away from that idiocy, some of them falling back for safety. The big red Mercedes made another pass at the Talbot-Lago and the smaller car broke away, giving in, losing ground into the turn because he had to go at it from a bad angle. The red Mercedes thundered ahead with his three teammates blocking the crowd behind him. That was going to be the one to beat—the red one.

The Bugatti's 3.3-liter engine powered him past a low grey Auto Union with dark smoke coming out of its exhaust. He went tight into the lap turn; the Bugatti's low heavy chassis kept it on the track and allowed him to cut inside a wide-swinging Hispano-Suiza and the old Mercedes SSK that was crowding its tail. He was against the rear of the solid pack now and had to make openings for himself. Coming out of the turn against the inside of the oval he shot across the front of the Invicta and went across the straightaway to the outside edge, losing half a car length but gaining an opening beside the Daimler which he squeezed through before the Paraguayan had time to try and block him. He had grit in his teeth and a mote in his eye; he blinked it furiously and found the shift knob by laying his open palm forward and letting the whipping flexible lever slap into it. There was a slot to the left of one of the big Mercedes and he judged it without turning the car that way because as soon as the Mercedes saw him make that move the slot would be closed; he'd have to take it in the sharp turn, pry a path between the Mercedes and the Hispano-Suiza to its left before the Mercedes could find room to swing left. The Mercedes had all the bloody power in the world with its enormous eight-cylinder pushrod engine but it was an unwieldy behemoth and it wasn't going to be able to cut him off when it was in the middle of a turn that strained its cornering to the limit; the Hispano-Suiza was an older car with a smaller engine but it could hug the inside curve and gain lengths and Felix knew the Hispano-Suiza's driver would have to play it that way, outmaneuvering because he couldn't outpower. It would leave a spread between the two cars and he had to get the Bugatti into that—at the crest of the turn when it was too late for the Mercedes to anticipate it and too early for the Mercedes to block it.

Now without really thinking it out his body made a rapid sequence of motions to convert theory into practice. The left foot went onto the brake pedal and lay there without pressure. The left hand gripped the shift lever and the right hand at two o'clock on the wheel locked tight, the right arm tensing for its anticipated leftward turn. The left hand popped the gear lever into neutral, without use of the clutch, and the right foot slammed down on the accelerator while the left foot lightly applied the brakes to bring her down to cornering speed. She was in neutral, braking on the end of the straightaway, and now he revved the engine up far across the red line. If there was a weakness anywhere in a piston or a rod it would explode now.

Left foot hard and fast from brake to clutch, and ram the clutch all the way to the floor. Engine still revving: left hand shift into third. Swinging into the turn now with the Mercedes waddling toward the outside and the Hispano-Suiza predictably shearing toward the inside. You could drive a battleship through there now. Dust wheeling up, the awful whine of superchargers drilling through the cotton waste in his ears, the hard seat and the tight leather harness bucking and pitching him around on the Bugatti's drum-tight suspension. Tires chittering on the track surface and the stink of imperfectly burned gasoline in his nostrils despite the swift sucking wind that made it hard to breathe at all.…

Pop the clutch.

The engine, freewheeling beyond its safe margin of operate ing speed, suddenly ran up against resistance from the transmission and the differential gear between the back wheels. Now either something was going to break or the twin-cam power of Ettore Bugatti's finest engine was going to hurtle him into the gap.

The wheels slithered and gripped. The seat surged forward, pushing him back hard. The rear end was breaking a little to the right but he had that under control and he knew how much room he had to slide toward the Mercedes. He came into the crest of the turn doing a good fifteen miles an hour better than the Mercedes.

The German hadn't much steering room and couldn't accelerate yet; it gave Felix time to oil through the gap and then he clutched, revved it in neutral just enough to run the engine up without breaking into a powerless slide: popped the clutch again into fourth and surged ahead of the Mercedes's massive grille.

The Hispano-Suiza's driver was Enzione, the Italian, and Felix had a glimpse of the approving grin on his face before the Bugatti's power took him ahead of the Italian. The big Mercedes kept pace within a meter of his rear fender all the way down the straightaway but he lost the Mercedes on the far turn and then he had just four cars ahead of him—three Germans and the French D8S Delage.

One of the Germans rolled off to the shoulder into the pit for tires and on the eighty-first lap the Delage broke down on the lap turn, braking into the ambulance driveway. Felix had only the two Mercedes ahead of him and he was crowding the green one by the eighty-seventh lap.

He had fuel to finish the race without another pit stop; he was not so certain of the tires. But the red Mercedes was a good twenty lengths ahead of the green one and so there was no question in Felix's mind about stopping for tires. The four tires could be changed in thirty-four seconds but with only twelve laps left that would cost him the race.

And if the Bugatti's tires were thin so were the Germans': they were carrying more weight on theirs and none of them had been into the pits for anything but fuel since the fortieth lap.

There had been some talk around the pits this morning about the Fuehrer's direct personal interest in this race, which was the first contest outside Nazi-occupied territory in which the newly modified 540Ks had been entered. Enzione had said casually, “They'll do anything for a win you know. Anything. I suspect it will cost them unspeakably if they don't take the cup.”

“Then they're too tense,” Felix had replied, “and tense drivers make, mistakes.”

“Don't count on that too much. Streicher particularly—Streicher can be something less than a gentleman.”

Felix knew that; he'd raced Georg Streicher for years. He knew most of Streicher's bag of dirty tricks and he'd heard the brown-shirted veteran's cries of German invincibility.