The Highway Kind(42)

“Who?” I asked weakly. And, belatedly: “Did what?”

The corner of her mouth twitched, but it wasn’t a smile.

“You saw the photos, didn’t you? The ones at the beginning.”

I had, and the memory of the images was still enough to make the hairs rise on my shoulders. The lovely shape of my car, the original, had been altered, the sides straightened and raised into massive fairings. The news photos had shown it—the skin of the car, the side panel, was warped, distorted over the left side. It hurt me to see it. The air wasn’t flowing smoothly at all. Two seconds in and something was happening.

“Them,” she said, lowering her voice, thank God, as she jerked her head toward the door, where two brown-shirted men were smoking. Her driver, I supposed, and one of the omnipresent minders; I’d seen such pairs before. I knew she didn’t mean these men specifically but what they represented: the Nazi Party and its control.

“Them? But why?” I was honestly bewildered. Bernie had no use for politics—anybody’s politics—and neither did Elly. (Elly had little use for anybody’s opinions, period. I suppose that a certain disregard for what people think is useful to an adventuress—though it likely works better if the adventuress is beautiful. But then, what doesn’t?)

That disregard didn’t keep her from being aware of what people thought, though. She gave me a quick, assessing look from the corner of her eye before focusing on the wreckage.

“They’ve taken over the funeral,” she said, her voice carefully neutral. “I said I wanted it to be only us, just our families. But Herr Trotter—from the Reich; he does their promotional information—assured me he has it ‘under control.’” There was a brief burst of laughter from the men at the door, some response to a joke quickly stifled as they recalled where they were. She didn’t look around, but her shoulders stiffened.

“So it’s to be a state occasion,” she said in the same neutral tone. “Limousines—Mercedes, I expect—and a band. With—”

“A band? At a funeral?” I risked a quick glance over my shoulder, but the men were paying no attention to us.

“With banners flying,” she went on, “and speeches at the graveside.” Her face was stiff with distaste. “A full SS state funeral, with Hitler’s own honor guard. Now, whether the SS chooses to pay for it...that’s maybe something else.”

“Ah,” I said. My Nazi Party number was 567,902; Auto Union arranged for it, the membership a guise of respectability. Partial compensation for my unfortunate heredity. Bernie’s number was 403,201. He’d laughed when I told him about mine and pulled his card out of his wallet to show me. It was folded in quarters and he’d apparently been picking his teeth with it.

The corners of Elly’s nostrils had gone white.

“Hitler’s hero,” she said as if to herself. “They call him—called him—that. You’ve seen the newspapers?”

I’d seen them; the photographs, I thought she meant. The run. The wreckage. There were a few photos, but not enough.

“When did you first meet Bernie?” I asked, just for something to say, to distract her. They hadn’t been married long, barely eighteen months.

She made a little hiccup of a laugh.

“You were there. In Brno, the Grand Prix three years ago.”

“Oh,” I said. I had no memory of her being at the Czechoslovakian Grand Prix that year—but at a race, I had no eyes for anything but the cars.

“You?” she said, swallowing. “When did you meet him?”

“Oh, that same year—but earlier. When he came to try out as a test driver.” I smiled despite myself. “Did he ever tell you about it? All the others came wearing overalls, but Bernie came to drive in his best suit. When the director asked him why, he said he thought it was an important occasion—he should wear the best thing he had.”

This time the sound she made was much less a laugh.

“No, he didn’t tell me. But he wouldn’t, you know; he didn’t ever look back—” The last of the word vanished with a small gulp.

She wasn’t the kind of woman to whom you would offer gestures of affection without a specific invitation, but I was old enough to be her father, and while my grief could never equal hers, she knew it was genuine. I made a slight reaching motion—she turned slightly toward me—and then she came into my arms and I felt the heat of her face and her tears through my shirt. I patted her back, very gingerly. I could feel her breasts against me too; very large and hard with milk, and for the first time I remembered that she had a baby, no more than two months old.

That made my own eyes sting. The badness of the loss and the thought that at least there was that much left of Bernie—he’d told me they called the baby Bernd Jr.

Neither one of us was the sort to weep in public, though, and she stepped back, turning her face away.

“Let’s look,” she said.

It was obvious what had caused the wreck—impact with the central pillar of a concrete bridge (what in God’s name had made them choose a run with a bridge in it?). Much less obvious was what had caused Bernie to lose control and crash into it.

Elly was an aviatrix; she understood airflow, and together we knelt and turned things over, tracing crumpled metal with our fingers, murmuring possibilities.