Iron to Iron

  Despite the constant swerving, Luka didn’t let Katsuo and Yokuto get more than a few seconds ahead. Adele kept the pace, her fist hungry on the throttle. A few times she swerved the opposite way around potholes, pulling ahead of Luka and teasing Yokuto’s flank. She had eyes for first: pushing, pushing into Katsuo’s piece of road, trying to get her bike in position to pass the Japanese victor. The attempt could have been successful, except for Yokuto’s sudden veer in her direction. Adele tapped her brakes, and Luka was forced to do likewise to keep them from becoming a tangle of metal and bloody limbs.

  “Don’t do that” were Luka’s first words to her when they stopped to set up camp on the night-smothered sands.

  Adele tugged down her mask. Dust marks slashed across her cheekbones. These plus the dark made her eyes ten times more cutting. “You wanted someone with ambition.”

  “Ambition!” Luka unstrapped his pup tent from the back of his bike, threw it into the sands. “Not stupidity.”

  “I saw an opening, and I went for it. How is that stupid?”

  Let me count the ways. Luka fought the urge to roll his eyes, and did not win. “Never mind Katsuo’s pride. Trying to make passes in pothole central is pleading for a wreck. Yokuto almost turned you into road jam.”

  The fräulein wasn’t fazed. “But he didn’t.”

  “Because you slammed on your brakes, which almost turned me into road jam and yet didn’t because I slammed on my brakes, which took seconds off my time. I don’t like seconds being scraped off my time.” Luka tugged the tent parts from their bag and began assembling them. “This isn’t some asphalt track. You don’t just loop around a few times and win by muscling your way ahead. If you want to do well in the Axis Tour, you have to be in it for the long game.”

  “Fine, then. Let’s talk the long game. That’s why we’re here, right?”

  The tent came with instructions, but Luka tossed them aside. It was too dark to read anyway. “Our move, when we make it, will be after Hanoi.”

  “Hanoi!” Adele’s breath hissed in, cut off. “That’s thousands of kilometers away!”

  “The long game is long. Katsuo’s on his guard. If we make a move now, we’re going to fail. You have to let your competition think he’s winning. Let his pride put him at ease.”

  “So you just want to let him stay in first?”

  “Yep. Why are there so many verdammt pieces to this thing?” The poles and tarp were straightforward enough, but the stakes… there were supposed to be eight of them. Luka could only count seven. “Always something missing…”

  “Why Hanoi?”

  “The Li River,” he answered, patting the sand for the escapee stake. “It’s just a few hours outside of Hanoi. The bridge across it got blown to high heaven during the war, and the Japanese never replaced it. The ferry they use to cross it can only fit three riders at a time. If you’re not in the first batch, you automatically lose ten minutes. If you’re not in the second batch, you lose twenty. The area is a natural bottleneck.”

  Adele walked back to her bike. There was a rustling, and at first Luka figured she was getting out her own pup tent. She held up an electric lantern instead. Let there be light! It poured across her face and over the sands. Luka spotted the missing stake by his knee. If it were a scorpion, it would’ve stung him.

  “You want to use the river crossing to squeeze Katsuo out of the lead?” She was quick. No denying that.

  Luka snatched up a hammer and started driving the support poles into the ground. “Strategically it’s the best place. Ten minutes is impossible to reclaim at that point. It’s the second-to-last leg, and there’s no more overnight camping after that for Katsuo to enact his revenge. He’ll try something on the Kaiten, of course, but we’ll be ready.”

  “Lull him into false security, stay on the defensive, strike at the end when he least expects it.” Adele counted out the points of the conversation: thumb, forefinger, middle. “Got it.”

  “That’s right, lo”—Luka caught himself, midhammer—“vely Adele.”

  The girl scowled. “If I’d wanted to be flirted with, I would’ve stayed in Frankfurt with a decent head of hair.”

  Both tents went up, ration packets were ripped open, canteens uncapped, and water guzzled. They were so close to the Mediterranean that Luka could hear the sea hushing as they dug into their food. It was a low, constant noise. Enough to mask the footsteps of any unwelcome guests who might come sneaking around at odd hours. Luka doubted Takeo would try any knife work so soon after Rome, but he didn’t want to bet both tires on it.

  “I’ll take the first watch,” he told Adele after dinner, reaching into his jacket pocket for the perfect pairing: cigarette and match. “I’m not tired yet.”

  Apparently Adele wasn’t either. Her empty ration packets sat crumpled in the sand, but she made no move to switch off the lantern or return to her tent. Instead she nodded at the unlit cigarette between Luka’s fingers. “Are those any good?”

  “Not really. They’re… an acquired taste.”

  “Then why do you smoke them?”

  “Because I’m not supposed to.” At least, that’s why Luka tried them the first time, in the alley behind Herr Kahler’s shop, at the tender age of eleven. Word was going around that the Führer wanted to outlaw cigarettes, which only made the demand for them even higher. His childhood friend Franz Gross had snuck one out of his father’s pack to try. It took them five whole minutes to get it lit. One whole minute to inhale without spluttering. Luka coughed on and off the entire next week.

  It wasn’t until after his victory—three years later—that his smoking habit really set in. There were several reasons. He could get away with it as a victor. With his Axis Tour winnings, he could afford them at black-market prices. He needed something, anything, to prove that he was more than just a sketch on a poster on wall after wall after wall.

  “They help me feel more like myself. Less like a lemming.”

  “Lemming?”

  “You know… those little rodents that supposedly follow each other off cliffs in droves. They just run right off because the lemming in front of them did it. Tumble, splat, dead!”

  “Let’s have it, then.” Adele held out her hand.

  Luka stared at the fingertips. Against the lamplight, they had a plasterlike appearance. Breakable.

  “What?” She frowned. “You think I can’t handle it?”

  “I—” Luka had no idea what to say. It wasn’t a sensation that happened very often, but this fräulein and her un-fräulein-ness put him on needle points. His usual lines would not work with her.

  Adele’s palm stayed open. Luka handed her the smoke and light, then dove back into his jacket pocket for more of his own.

  “Is that the story behind the jacket, too?” Adele struck her match against her biking boot. It fizzed to life, fluttering as she brought it to the end of the cigarette. A breath in, a fire caught, a smooth, smoke-spiral exhale. “Black leather is too lemming for you?”

  “Something like that.” Luka lit his own cigarette, let the tobacco hum through his veins. Good timing. Thinking about his jacket—the real story behind it—always put him on edge.

  “How’d you get permission to wear it?”

  “After my first victory, I convinced the tour officials to let me wear it in my father’s honor. It was his prewar riding jacket. Motorcycles were his life. He was a member of the Kradschützen during the war, but he lost his arm on the eastern front. Couldn’t ride after that. He gave this jacket to me as—as a reminder.”

  “And what does the jacket remind you of?”

  “The kind of man I’m supposed to be.” (Two-Cross strong. Not just hard, but unbreakable.) This was dangerous territory. Luka moved on quickly. “That was just an excuse. Really it’s because I look much better in brown leather than I do in black. How’s the cigarette?”

  Adele smoked like a natural, wielding the cigarette without so much as a cough. “Full of ashy rebellion. I like it.”

/>   “So what’s your story, Adele Wolfe?” he asked after a drawn-out drag. “Why aren’t you back in Frankfurt, breaking all the boys’ hearts with your decent head of hair?”

  Her eyes lit up behind the cigarette’s glow. “Racing’s in the Wolfe blood. My father’s a mechanic, owns a garage in Frankfurt, Wolfe Auto Shop. There were always racers from the Nürburgring tracks coming in and out of the place. My brothers and I begged our father to teach us how to ride. He did. We were all good. Good enough to start racing. Only I wasn’t allowed on the tracks.”

  “I’m guessing this didn’t stop you,” Luka said.

  “Ever wonder what it’s like to be a female lemming?” She didn’t wait for his answer. “If you aren’t the daughter of an elite party member, when you turn eighteen you have only two options: find a strapping lad to marry and make babies with or get assigned to the Lebensborn, where you pump out babies sans wedding ring and schnitzel smashing.

  “Husband, children, a life shackled to the kitchen… I don’t want any of that. Never did.” Adele let out a breath, watched its smoke curl into shafts of lamplight. “Motorcycle racing is a different story. Pulling out onto the road, feeling the asphalt rush beneath you, the adrenaline coursing everywhere… it’s not just in my blood. It’s life.”

  Luka knew what she meant. There was something about racing that pulled him onto his Zündapp again and again. It was the opposite of road jitters… a road high. Adrenaline at its purest. Tastes of fullness that only made the emptiness that followed more aching.

  Life! Life! Is this all there is?

  “What do your brothers think about you racing?”

  “Felix has always supported me. He’s let me use his papers ever since we were ten. Martin’s dead,” Adele said the last part quickly. “Broke his neck on the track four years ago.”

  The night suddenly felt a shade darker. “I’m sorry,” Luka said. (And he was.)

  “Life’s short.” Ashes speckled the sand as Adele tapped her cigarette. “It’s getting shorter every day. I’m not going to waste mine fulfilling someone else’s idea of who I should be. That’s why I entered the Axis Tour. I want people to remember my name.”

  It doesn’t help, Luka wanted to tell her. Even when they’re screaming it at the top of their lungs.

  “But you’re racing as Felix Wolfe,” he pointed out.

  “Ever heard of Hanna Reitsch?”

  “Who hasn’t?” The aviatrix—with her waspish waist, fair features, and stellar flight record—had been a propaganda centerpiece for as long as Luka could remember. Goebbels gobbled her up, as did the rest of the Reich. “I met her once. We were giving interviews at the Ministry of Propaganda at the same time. She was nice.”

  “Hanna Reitsch was so gifted at flying that the Führer himself awarded her an Iron Cross. If Fräulein Reitsch can remain unwed and flying, then there’s hope that I can be unwed and racing. If I prove I’m the best, they won’t care I’m a girl.”

  “And by proving you’re the best, you mean winning?” Luka asked.

  “I didn’t enter the race to lose.”

  At least she was honest.

  “There our interests diverge.” As they always did with these alliances. Nothing lasted forever, especially when it came to Axis Tour loyalties. Luka wasn’t too worried. Adele knew her secret was unsafe with him if she tried anything underhanded.

  “After we deal with Katsuo we’ll part ways,” he promised.

  “Why do you need the Double Cross so badly?” Adele asked. “You already won the Axis Tour. You have everything.”

  He had everything, and it was too much. It was nothing at all.

  Adele had so many words… so many reasons. And Luka? His Iron Cross hung heavy around his throat, and he struggled to even understand this hunger inside of him, much less verbalize it. He didn’t need to win. Not the way this girl did. His previous victory assured him his choice of Lebensraum assignment. No lottery would force Luka to move to the never-thawing tundra of the Muscovy territories or to this godforsaken sandbox.

  “There’s always something more,” he told her.

  Adele was silent after that, nursing the last of her cigarette, staring up at stars or down at ashes. Luka made a study of her face in the lamplight. Striking cheekbones, comet-trail eyebrows, something beneath that was just as strong, far more blazing.

  Life. Oomph. She was full of it.

  He was more than fascinated.

  He was hooked.

  Chapter 6

  They rode forth with the dawn. Warriors on steeds of steel, galloping across a land of endless dust. This was the part of the tour where Luka usually started reciting the alphabet backward in his head, so he wouldn’t crash from sheer boredom. Sure, the sight of the glistening Mediterranean to his left was pretty, and sure, the Sahara desert was nice, too, but there was only so much water and sand you could see before wanting a change of scenery.

  This year there was no need for Z, Y, X, W.… Luka had plenty to keep his mind off the thirst that jabbed at his throat between fuel stops. Adele kept snagging his eye, and not just because her rear end was nice.

  Most people didn’t talk to Luka Löwe the way this fräulein did: brass-tack sharp and to the point. Most people didn’t listen to him the way she did either. Usually they shouted over him (Sieg heil!) or wanted him to say something different. (“Let’s shoot that interview again. A bit less cursing in front of the cameras, please, Victor Löwe!”)

  Adele listened as if she actually cared what he had to say.

  It was refreshing.

  Verdammt refreshing.

  When Adele asked for cigarettes the next two nights, Luka obliged, because he wanted to keep talking. Their conversation wound this way and that, meandering like a drunk booted out of a bierstube. It skirted motorcycle parts (as a mechanic’s daughter, Adele knew far more about the click-and-clack innards of Zündapps than Luka), before landing on who their favorite Reichssender staff member was. (They both appreciated Fritz Naumann, a cameraman with wire glasses, and ever-wirier hair, who insisted interviews be kept as short as possible. “Film is precious,” he’d say when other Reichssender staff fussed at him. “Do you want to radio Goebbels saying you ran out just as they reached the finish line?”) Then they lamented the sad state of their on-the-road meal options: dried chicken/dried beef/dried cardboard.

  “Give me some grüne Sosse with beef brisket and boiled potatoes.” Adele fluttered her eyelids with phantom taste bud delight. “And a glass of Ebbelwoi to wash it all down. Real food.”

  “I have a theory that they provide such flavor-leached tack to make us go faster. Keeps us motivated to get to the checkpoint meals,” Luka reasoned.

  Adele laughed, a real, true sound that splashed into the canvas of stars above them. It wasn’t until Luka heard it that he realized how much his life had lacked the noise.

  “There’s always the hunter-gatherer option. I saw Katsuo fishing out here last year.” Luka nodded toward the ocean. “I have no idea if he caught anything. Or how he cooked it.”

  Adele shuddered. “I hate fish. All those slippery, slimy scales. Dead eyes just bulging out at you. They just taste like ocean vomit.”

  It was Luka’s turn to laugh. He was surprised at how easily it slipped out. “You wouldn’t fit in well in Hamburg. We love our fish. You can’t pick up a fork without tripping over something of the piscine persuasion.”

  “I’ll take the flavorless mystery meat, thanks.” Adele tossed her third cigarette into the sand. It blinked out. She nudged the discarded butts with her boot. “I see why you smoke these things. They have a certain draw, don’t they? Once you get past the initial taste.”

  Luka’s cigarette was down to finger-burning length as well. He followed suit, very briefly considering a fourth before deciding he needed to slow down. They needed to slow down. At the rate they were smoking, his stash would be depleted before Shanghai, and his road jitters were always at their worst on the last leg.

  “I’m
surprised you like them so much,” Luka said.

  “You’re surprised I tried them at all,” the fräulein countered. “You shouldn’t be. Fish affinities aside, you and I aren’t so different.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  Luka waited for Adele to elaborate, but she didn’t. Their conversation was winding down, and just as well, since the night was drawing long.

  “We need to get up early tomorrow to make the push to Cairo,” he told her. “Katsuo will probably be off at first light.”

  “You still want to let Katsuo stay in first?” she asked as Luka stood, stretching the affronted muscles of his wrists and rear.

  “The plan hasn’t changed, Adele.”

  “Felix,” she corrected him. “I’m Felix at the checkpoint.”

  “We’re not there yet, Adeleadeleadele.” The name was a good one, as far as rhythms went. It flowed naturally into itself, tumbling off Luka’s tongue like a frantic lemming herd. “Goodnight, Adeleadeleadele.”

  She laughed again.

  A smile crept its way onto Luka’s face as he ducked inside his tent.

  March 17, 1955. Cairo came.

  1st: Tsuda Katsuo, 4 days, 1 hour, 56 minutes, 13 seconds.

  2nd: Luka Löwe, 4 days, 1 hour, 56 minutes, 20 seconds.

  3rd: Kobi Yokuto, 4 days, 1 hour, 56 minutes, 24 seconds.

  4th: Felix Wolfe, 4 days, 1 hour, 56 minutes, 30 seconds.

  Cairo went. March 18, 1955.

  The desert continued, all flat. Luka found himself racing not just to keep up with Katsuo and stay cumulatively ahead of Yokuto, but also to get to the evening, when he could exhale words and smoke and feel his insides lift in a way that wasn’t tangled with adrenaline or nicotine.