Wolf by Wolf

by Ryan Graudin

  “You’ll be flown to Hanoi, where a shipment of Rikuo Type 98s fitted in Tokyo will be waiting. The race will carry on from the Hanoi checkpoint. Your times will remain the same.”

  New Delhi to Hanoi. That was over 4,800 kilometers of race.

  Four thousand eight hundred kilometers. Gone. Just like that.

  Yael felt her heart falling, falling, falling. The curry in her stomach bubbled and churned.

  Katsuo smiled.

  “Hanoi?” Luka, who’d kept an uneasy seat at the end of the table, stood. He’d obviously been to see Nurse Wilhelmina; an absurd amount of gauze was wrapped around his head. As if he’d lost a whole ear and not just the tip. “You’re sending us all the way to Hanoi? That’s almost a quarter of the race! That’s unacceptable!”

  He smacked the table. Fourteen plates rattled. The red in Luka’s cheeks flushed deeper as he went on, “Why not ship them here? Or even to Dhaka?”

  The checkpoint official stayed cool, almost surgical in his delivery. “The decision has been approved by the Emperor and the Führer themselves. To question this decision is to question them.”

  Luka’s palm stayed flat on the tabletop. He sat back down.

  “We find it very acceptable.” Katsuo didn’t even try to hide the smug in his voice. It oozed from his pores, widened his smile.

  “That changes things,” Felix murmured beside her.

  It did. From hard to impossible. Hanoi to Tokyo was only 4,433 kilometers. Close to 3,600 of those would be on an unfamiliar bike and 800 over the East China Sea, out of Yael’s control altogether. Sleepless nights and fourth gear would not be enough. And she couldn’t simply wait for another miracle.

  Yael looked down the table. Every racer’s face—except Katsuo’s—was stunned, crumpled. Lars seemed close to tears. Masaru’s eyes were hollowed out, his lips edged paper-straight: the look of the lost. Because they all knew the truth—they had no chance of catching up. None of them did. Unless…

  Her eyes found Luka’s. He was watching her—a frustrated stare through wads of bandages—passing something between them. Something different from the kiss, but still dangerous. Still knowing.

  Allies?

  Yael nodded.

  It was time to play dirty.

  CHAPTER 27

  NOW

  MARCH 27, 1956

  FLIGHT FROM NEW DELHI TO HANOI

  The kilometers looked so different from above. An easy span of centimeters: rivers sprouting like nerve endings through lush jungle hills. Days of mud, malaria, and muggy misery. Nights of tiger calls and howling primates.

  Yael watched it all pass through the airplane window. Part of her was glad for the respite. The tropical portion of the tour was historically the hardest, collecting the highest number of crossed-out names, with its mosquito-stab diseases and countless river crossings. It was a rare year indeed that thirteen riders made it to Hanoi. (Yamato was out of the race, his ankle too severely sprained to keep riding.) In fact, Yael couldn’t remember the last time it had happened. If ever.

  The plane cabin rattled as if every screw and bolt were coming apart: bouncing and roaring through clouds. Even with cotton stuffed deep into Yael’s ear canal, the propellers drowned out everything else. She didn’t even hear Luka approach until he tapped her on the shoulder.

  She jumped, looked over to find him standing in the aisle, leaning into Felix to get close to her. Adele’s brother’s face dialed from scowl to sour. He swatted the victor’s hand: Go away.

  “Mind if… take… seat, Fräu…” Luka’s tilted dark eyebrows filled in the gaps of his question.

  He wanted to make plans here? They’d have to scream to be heard. Katsuo was seated only two rows and an aisle away, a smile still carved into his face. Luka leaned in farther—so his dog tag dangled onto Felix’s nose—and held out a notebook and a pen.

  Felix glared at Yael as she nodded. She didn’t need the years of sibling history to read the warning behind his eyes: Don’t do this; don’t trust him. She kept nodding until Felix finally rolled his eyes and stood.

  As Luka settled into the seat, Yael was aware of his nearness. Their elbows grazed together on the shared armrest. Brown leather sticking to black. When he pressed the notebook in his lap and began writing, his elbow jostled. Every letter he created nudged against her hidden wolves.

  It was nice writing: stout, but not too blocky. Strong without being strict. If either of us wants a chance of winning this tour, we need to take care of Katsuo.

  Yael nodded and looked back to Katsuo. The boy was still sky high, gloating into his window. Paying no attention to the rows of racers behind him.

  Luka kept scrawling. Remember what happened outside Hanoi last year?

  He handed the writing tools to her. Yael tried to look calm as she splayed the notebook against her lap. Newsreels and pages of transcribed interviews whipped through her memory as she pressed pen to the paper.

  Hanoi. Hanoi. Hanoi.

  What happened outside Hanoi?

  A seventeen-year-old German rider had slipped off the road into a rice paddy. Shattering both his bike’s front axle and his leg beyond repair. But that couldn’t be what Luka was talking about. He and Adele had been far ahead of that accident. There was something—something else—about a fight on a ferry crossing? It had been a mere blip in that day’s recap. Squeezed between gruesome reports of the German rider’s amputation and the Chancellery Chat where the Führer praised his great sacrifice for the immortal glory of the Fatherland and the Third Reich.

  It had to be the ferry. Yael pushed the pen so hard the ink started to blot before she replicated Adele’s writing. The ferry?

  Luka flipped to a new page after she handed the book to him.

  We need to keep on Katsuo’s tail so all of us cross the Li on the same boat. Give him a little dose of history. But this time we’ll get the job done.

  These words did not help the turbulence nausea in Yael’s stomach. What had happened on the Li River ferry? What did Luka expect her to do? Push Katsuo off? Sabotage his bike?

  Whatever it was, she’d have to improvise.

  Luka kept writing. In any case, we need to stay together. Ride close.

  Riding together. Yael nodded again (she was beginning to feel like a jack-in-the-box: bouncing, nodding, bouncing, nodding), but her toes clenched inside her boots. It was risky enough having Felix alongside, all the time watching. But Adele’s brother—while he threw a good punch, stuck burr-tight to her side—was interested in one thing: his sister’s safety. Her alliance with him was good for protection, but aggression… aggression was Luka’s specialty. The victor had a fire, a plan to make sure Katsuo never reached the finish line.

  They’d just have to part ways before he turned that fire on her.

  She fished the notebook from Luka’s hands. How far will we ride together?

  He grinned when he read this. A burst of white teeth through peeling, chapped lips. Strange, Yael thought, they hadn’t felt rough at all when they were touching hers that night on the train. They’d been more silk and shock. Tingling like winter-dry air.

  Yael caught herself and looked away. Luka’s fingers feathered against hers—slowly, slowly—as he slid the notebook from Yael’s grasp.

  Her toes clenched so hard a few of them actually popped.

  It was just a touch. Just a kiss. Just a chemical reaction flaring under her skin, changing things. It meant nothing—not when Yael was not Yael and the world was dying and he was one of them. (Wasn’t he?)

  Luka handed the book back: As far as we need to go.

  Yael looked at the words for a moment. So open-ended, begging for questions or a response: How far? Or Let’s go. Or Blot, smudge, smear, and spilled-ink secrets.

  She snapped the notebook shut and handed it back to him.

  There was nothing else to say.

  CHAPTER 28

  NOW

  MARCH 27, 1956

  HANOI CHECKPOINT KILOMETER 16,347

  “
What do you think you’re doing?” Felix’s question melted with the rustle of palm fronds in Yael’s ears. She stood under the humid watch of Hanoi’s sun, trying to breathe through the leather of her jacket, air as thick as hurt. The other racers had stripped off their riding gear, down to bare muscles and undershirts as they strolled through the sweltering courtyard, toward the line of Rikuo 98s. Thirteen motorcycles fresh from the plane: virgin shiny, no dust or dents. The riders approached them slowly—the way a trainer might face a feral beast—inspecting the gears and deep-tread tires from every angle.

  Felix was the only one not paying attention to the new motorcycles. He watched Yael instead, frowning as she moved toward her bike. “Luka’s playing you.”

  “How do you know I’m not playing him?” Yael knelt down to get a closer look at the Rikuo’s specs. Drum brakes—front and rear. A hand-operated three-speed gear change. A wider, heavier frame with less horsepower than its Zündapp counterpart. Even at its highest gear, she could tell, the Rikuo would offer only a fraction of her old bike’s speed.

  It would be like riding a draft horse after weeks on a thoroughbred.

  (Luka put it more succinctly, shouting, “These bikes are complete Scheisse!” from three Rikuos away.)

  “The way things are now, Katsuo is going to win this race.” Yael kept her voice low. The other racers seemed just as preoccupied with their bikes as she was, but there was no guarantee who might be listening. “He’s over three hours ahead on his home turf, riding a model of bike he’s almost definitely trained on. We’ve only got three, maybe four, days of actual riding left.

  “Luka has a plan”—whatever it was (Yael, digging through her memory the entire remainder of the flight, could recall nothing about the Li River ferry)—“and he needs my help.”

  “He’s not a part of… that thing”—Felix’s pointed stare spelled out resistance—“is he?”

  Yael shook her head.

  “Then you can bet his plan doesn’t involve letting you win.” Felix stood over her, arms crossed, blocking some of the sun’s swelter with his lanky frame.

  “If Luka and I don’t work together, it’s mutually assured defeat. Once Katsuo’s eliminated, we’ll go our separate ways.”

  Adele’s brother kicked her Rikuo’s tire.

  All the reasons she’d pumped herself full of kept leaking out in a hiss. “Besides, Luka won’t try anything as long as you’re watching my back.”

  Yael looked up after she said this, trying to gauge the pressure behind Felix’s face. But there was too much light behind him, too many shadows rubbed into the Nordic geometry of his features. He was unreadable.

  “Why did you let him kiss you?”

  It took Yael a moment to process his question, ingest it word by word. You. Him. Kiss. Let. Why. It took her another few heartbeats to work out possible answers.

  Because I am Adele Valerie Wolfe.

  Because I wasn’t expecting it. Because I’m different on the inside. Because I was on a train. Because he needs to think I trust him. Because I’m alone.

  Because I’m not Adele Valerie Wolfe.

  Too many answers, all of them clogging her throat. None of them just right.

  “I just ask,” Felix went on, “because I wonder if maybe your judgment has been clouded.”

  Yael bristled at this and stood, so the light was even between them. Shadow for shadow. Shine for shine. “This isn’t about me and Luka,” she whispered. “This is about winning. This is about—”

  Her wolves sweated under the leather, begging for air. And her heart felt so weak, so heavy—always breaking off at the edges, smaller, smaller, smaller. Into pieces she tucked under her sleeve. Was there even anything left?

  Felix raised his eyebrows, waited for her to go on.

  “I have this under control,” she told him finally. “We just have to ride with Luka for a day. Then the race will be even again.”

  “C’mon, Ad. You can’t trust him.…”

  “I don’t,” Yael said. “But as far as I can tell, this is the only way. If you have a better solution, I’m all ears.”

  Felix’s jaw knotted as he chewed back his temper.

  When it was clear he had no answers, Yael turned and slid onto the bike. She turned the ignition into a smooth start, got a feel for the humming motor, the tension of the throttle and brakes. Within the first ten seconds, Yael knew the ride would be clumsy—sheer size and unwieldy gears.

  Her practice laps on the streets around the checkpoint were wavery. The engine burned her calf, and she kept reflexively trying to change the gears with her foot. All the while her conversation with Felix beat at the back of her skull. A migraine of questions, unsaid answers.

  Doubts started sliding in when Yael mixed up the gear change for the fifth time, got flustered, and let go of the throttle. The bike shuddered beneath her. Katsuo passed her just as the engine stalled out, his own riding flawless.

  It took Yael a moment to collect herself. Breathe in, push it all back.

  It was just a kiss. And it meant nothing.

  It was just one day, one ferry, one strike through a name. And it meant everything.

  Yael cranked the Rikuo back to life, luring it into a steady speed down the street.

  She had everything under control.

  They started off the next morning, lining up according to time as they did at every checkpoint—thirteen racers stacked under the sweltering sun, calves cramped and waiting to push off. Muggy, tense silence stretched out among them, punctuated by crickets and idling motor hum, finally severed by the gunshot.

  BOOM and go!

  Katsuo was off. It took Yael two wobbling seconds to balance, crouch, be on her way, and see that he was already meters ahead. She coaxed the engine to its highest speed. Hanoi’s humid air whistled over her goggles and smacked against her face. Asphalt ripped beneath her, and rich colonial architecture blipped through lines of palm trees, flag-waving crowds and ever-camped Reichssender cameras.

  But it still felt so slow.

  Yael kept her eyes on Katsuo’s taillight. Their speeds were matching now. Equidistant as the city thinned from French-era buildings into shacks and rice paddies. Long kilometers of flat fields—their waters mirrored the pale burn of the sun through the green of growing rice. She followed him close, just as Luka had instructed. The other victor was tailing her. Yael hadn’t seen him yet (she couldn’t risk looking over her shoulder and misaligning her bike), but she heard the gnash of his engine just behind.

  She’d hoped Katsuo might ease up once they were firmly in the countryside, out of the memory of the starting gun. But the victor kept going—raging into the open road, tugging a few more seconds out of his three-and-a-half-hour lead.

  It didn’t matter, she told herself. All she had to do was stay close. Get to the ferry.

  The sun climbed high into a clouding sky, and the landscape changed, transforming into something out of a fairy tale. Dramatic, sudden mountains jutted from waterlogged fields. Like the fingers of an underground giant, hungry for sky. Hundreds of tree-capped heights and hundreds of valleys braided with rivers and mists, rice paddies and lean-tos. Ancient tombs hugged the road—less dramatic mounds of earth marked by poetic stones, overgrown with tattered offerings of money and liquor bottles.

  All this and a taillight.

  They tore through this watercolor scenery of limestone hills and quiet farms. The afternoon hours were swallowed by sterling clouds, and the mists grew. Their second fuel stop was in a small shack of a town, where Yael crammed down several protein bars while race officials siphoned gasoline into her tank with makeshift hoses. Children watched from matchstick doorways as Katsuo got back on the road first, scattering a group of chickens in his haste.

  The Li River wasn’t much farther, just two villages more. Its waters wound around the mountains, green and much too deep to forge without drowning their new engines. The bridge that once spanned it was in remnants (destroyed—like so many other things—in the
war, never rebuilt). Two crumbling cliffsides facing each other. The road leading to the bridge was crossed out by an X of boards and red kanji: WARNING: DO NOT CROSS.

  A dirt path redirected the racers to the shoreline, where a narrow line of stones edged with cormorants stabbed into the river’s shallows. The ferry was moored at the end. At first Yael thought there was a mistake. The structure Katsuo was pushing his bike toward couldn’t possibly be the ferry. Boat was hardly the word for it. Raft, perhaps, was a better term for the fat stalks of bamboo that had been chopped down, lashed together in layers.

  But Katsuo pushed his bike all the way to the end of the dock and began to board. The ferry operator—a gaunt man with a bell-shaped hat and a bamboo staff in his hand—didn’t seem to argue.

  Yael wasted no time dismounting her bike and guiding it along the narrow dock. Behind her she heard Luka’s motor cutting off, and ahead Katsuo’s command to the ferryman, “Cast off before the others get here!”

  Either the old man did not understand Japanese or he did not care. His joints were rusted and slow as he set down his pole and unknotted the mooring ropes. He wasn’t even done with the first knot when Yael managed her bike down the ramp, onto the raft.

  Katsuo stared at her from the ferry’s bow end—fierce, fierce, cut and carve.

  She stared back.

  “Get off.” It was the first time he’d spoken to her, Yael realized. He didn’t even bother using German.

  Yael let go of the Rikuo’s handlebars.

  Katsuo didn’t move. (It was an unnerving stillness. The kind a cobra holds before the strike.) The raft shuddered as it was boarded by new wheels, sinking a few more centimeters. River water crept through the gaps in the bamboo, up the edges of Yael’s boots.

  Luka had made it aboard. Yael could tell from the shift in weight that he’d taken the stern position. She was sandwiched between them.

  Now what?

  “It’s too late to get off,” Yael said in German, staring at the furrow in Katsuo’s forehead, made even deeper from the pull of his goggles. It was easier than getting dissected by those eyes.