The Romanov succession

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.