by Nina Berry
Dieter was going to give Wolfgang his jacket, but why? Were they more than switching roles in the driver’s seat?
“We don’t have to drive the cars, do we?” she asked Emma to keep her busy. She knew Dieter would never let a girl drive in a race. Around them, the kids were streaming back up the stairs and out through the narrow opening into the metro tunnel. This then must be their gang meeting place, where Dieter gathered them first to get them all stirred up.
“No!” Emma laughed as they walked up the steps. “Dieter and Wolfgang have two special, fast cars they work on between races. Only Dieter, Wolfgang, and maybe Fritz and Heinz have been allowed to drive them so far. I’d like to see Dieter’s face if I tried to drive one.”
They followed Dieter out of the crypt and walked past the parked cars inside the metro tunnel. Pagan could see now with more flashlights at work that there were actually ten cars parked in different spots. Someone in a red jacket was revving one engine of a hot rod with flames painted on the side, and someone in a black jacket was starting up the other. It wasn’t light enough to tell whether Dieter was still wearing the red jacket or not. The rest of the kids kept on walking out of the tunnel.
“The races happen nearby,” Emma said. “We park the cars underground so the other gangs don’t spot our meeting place.”
They emerged from the tunnel in a gravel-strewn area with a fence around it. Two boys had unlocked a gate and dragged it open to let the hot rods drive out. One went right. The other left, and the kids walking along behind them split up, too.
“You split up so the other gangs don’t know where you’re coming from?” Pagan asked. They were half jogging along now, angling right after they made it through the fence.
“Exactly. It’s all Dieter’s idea. He’s the leader, you know. He’s very clever.”
Pagan didn’t say that anyone truly determined to find their hideout had only to follow some of them after the race to find their secret spot.
But maybe most kids didn’t think like that. To Emma this was all crazy fun, something the adults didn’t know about. The secrecy, the hiding place, it was part of the festive atmosphere, something to make them feel special. The other gangs couldn’t be much of a threat to them then. Maybe they got all their aggressions out via these drag races. Races were dumb, but they were better than fighting.
“Where are we?” Pagan asked.
“South of the main city,” Emma said. “It’s called Dock Sud, or South Dock, because the southern docks are right through there.” She motioned at the water gleaming between two large warehouses on their left.
“So Buenos Aires proper is—that way?” Pagan picked a direction at random.
Emma laughed and pointed back behind them. “More like that way. There’s a bridge a block or so over there to get you across the Riachuelo. That’s another branch of the river.”
A bridge over there. Pagan made a point to remember that, in case she needed to get the hell away from this madness. With luck, if Dieter went anywhere in Wolfgang’s black jacket, she could follow him.
After three long blocks they arrived at the dead end of a long wide street that ran straight for several hundred yards along the water. Warehouses, silent and dark, lined the other side. It might have been beautiful with the moon sparkling on the river if it wasn’t for the jostling clumps of smoking teenagers and the trash littering the sides of the road.
Four cars were parked, headlights on, at the end of the street. The two hot rods lined up one behind the other. So the other two—one with tiger stripes, the other with an oh-so-subtle dragon’s head roaring out flames—must belong to the other gang.
The guy in the red jacket didn’t get out of his car, and Pagan couldn’t see his face. But the other guy, in the black jacket, climbed out. It wasn’t Wolfgang or Dieter. Did that mean Dieter was the other driver, still wearing his red jacket?
Pagan pushed her way through Dieter’s followers, boys and girls, to get a better look, but Emma grabbed her wrist and shook her head. “That’s their side,” she said, gesturing to the water side of the street. “This is ours.”
Pagan craned her neck. The kids on the other side looked a lot like the kids on this side, dressed in the same jeans and T-shirts or cotton dresses, the boys with their hair gelled back and the girls sporting teased bobs and winged eyeliner. Like Dieter’s crew, they were talking to one another in low voices, throwing narrowed glances over at their rivals. Up near the cars, which had their hoods up, boys were bent over the engines while girls held flashlights. “Who are they?”
Emma shrugged. “Jews, mostly. Other nights we race the Negros, or this really stupid group of pinkos from San Telmo. But mostly we race the Jews. Dieter says there are way too many in BA. Perón let Germans immigrate to Argentina, but he let the Jews in, too. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“It’s easier to get along in the world if you give up hoping people will make sense,” Pagan said.
It was the Nazis that didn’t make sense to Pagan, and Mama, too. She was still trying desperately to understand her mother’s actions to help Von Albrecht and maybe others, and now here she was in the midst of people who thought a lot like Mama.
Maybe there was something to be learned here. She let Emma lead her closer to the first hot rod. The hood was open, and the guy she didn’t know in the black jacket was making some last-minute adjustments to the engine while another boy held a flashlight so he could see.
“We’re starting soon, ja, Franz?” Emma yelled to the mechanic in German over the noise of engines.
“In a minute,” Franz said without looking up.
Pagan stepped away from Emma and peered inside the car at the driver in his red jacket. It was Wolfgang. He had taken Dieter’s jacket. Then where the hell was Dieter?
She craned her neck, looking over the milling throng of the fascist gang. The car headlights were the main source of illumination, and they were pointed the other way, so all she saw at first were dark human shapes and glints off eyes and teeth.
A flame sparked near the back of the crowd. A lighter. As Emma talked to Franz the mechanic, Pagan drifted toward that flame, squinting. A big hand cupped the light. A flash of blond hair. Flexible lips pursed around a cigarette as the tip smoked, and a mole flexed next to a dimple on a cheek.
Dieter. He now wore a black shirt she hadn’t seen before and black pants and a jacket. Ranged around him were maybe half a dozen other boys, also dressed in dark colors.
Dieter shot a look back at the cars, and Pagan shrank back, using a cluster of five other girls as cover. But Dieter wasn’t looking for her. Pagan turned to follow the direction of his gaze and saw the girl from the Jewish gang, her hair still in that fabulous bouffant, kissing her boyfriend, Hector, in front of his car’s headlights.
Dieter’s hand curled tighter around his cigarette as he stared at them.
Naomi, that’s what they’d said the girl’s name was back in the stairwell below the observatory. Something about her really had Dieter on a string.
Back by the hot rods, Franz shouted something at Hector. He shouted it in Spanish, but Pagan could only recognize about one in three words. He must be using some kind of Argentine slang.
Hector understood it well enough, though. His chest puffed out and he shouted back, “Keep your fascist eyes off my girl, jackboot!”
“But it’s impossible to see anything else when her nose is that big!” Franz shouted back. The boys and girls around him laughed. “I could keep my fireplace going all night long with that much firewood.”
Firewood. A Nazi reference to Jews burned in the crematoria in the camps. Pagan felt sick.
Hector lunged violently toward Franz, but Naomi grabbed his arm. “Hector, no! Nobody cares what he says.”
Pagan looked back at Dieter. He was backing away from the crowd slowly, staring at Naomi. The ot
her boys who had been ranged around him were now nearly half a block away, but Dieter was having a hard time leaving, and his eyes had the same strange glint she’d seen when he looked at Mercedes.
Pagan wound her way as seamlessly as she could through the crowd, getting closer to Dieter. If she was going to follow him, she needed to be quick and careful. Emma was bound to come looking for her soon.
Franz was still taunting the Jewish girl. He caught her wrist in one large hand and jerked her body toward him.
Naomi wrenched her arm away and slapped him across the face.
His cheek reddened. “You’re asking for it,” he growled, loud enough to hear over the roaring engines.
Hector yelled something angrily and got between them. Behind him, his friends surged forward to surround Naomi protectively.
Pagan looked back again at Dieter. Still gazing at Naomi and her friends, he spat on the ground, smiled and said, low, “You’ll all find out who’s in charge soon enough.”
There it was again, the hint that something big was happening. Where the hell was he going, leaving most of his gang behind?
Pagan kept one eye on Dieter and got closer to the clutch of girls she’d been using as cover. “Who is that girl who slapped Franz?” she asked in English. “She’s such a troublemaker.”
“That’s Naomi Schusterman,” a girl in a poodle skirt said in heavily accented English. “Her father and mother work in the Israeli embassy.”
“Do you know her that well?” Pagan asked. For rival gangs, they knew an awful lot about each other.
The girl shrugged. “Everybody knows Naomi and her boyfriend.”
“And Dieter knows who all the Jews are who work in the embassy,” another girl piped up. “We need to keep watch, he says.”
Well, that was disturbing. The other girls were nodding, staring at the fracas, as if it wasn’t strange at all. They hadn’t seemed to notice that Dieter and his six friends had broken away. The drama up by the cars was too fascinating.
Hector slammed the hood of his car down with a loud clang and shouted something at Franz, who screamed back.
The boys on both sides were yelling things Pagan couldn’t decipher. Chins were pulled in, fists clenched. This wasn’t posturing. They were getting ready to fight.
Pagan backed away as the girls and everyone else flowed toward the conflict.
The Germanic crowd around Wolfgang’s car was chanting, “Sieg! Sieg! Sieg!”
Victory. A chant painfully close to the Nazi “Sieg heil” everyone remembered from the war.
The headlights from the two hot rods shined down the long naked roadway before them. Taunting teenagers knotted behind each car as Hector got in his car and revved the engine. Naomi gave him another kiss through the open side window.
Dieter had finally turned his back and was walking away, fast. Pagan took the navy silk scarf from around her neck, threw it over her bright hair and followed him.
She took one last look back as Naomi Schusterman walked up to stand like a sleek statue in the headlights, both hands in the air, about to signal the start of the race.
Naomi reminded Pagan a little of herself, before the accident. A bit foolish and fearless, and fierce.
The girl’s arms swung down, and the cars surged forward. Pagan caught one last glimpse of Emma, cheering, before she turned and ran as quietly as she could after Dieter.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Recoleta, Buenos Aires
January 12, 1962
ESPEJO
Mirror step. When one dance partner mirrors the steps of the other.
Pagan followed Dieter and his six cohorts back to the mouth of the tunnel where their cars were parked. None of them seemed to notice her hanging back in the shadows. Dieter did look over his shoulder, but it looked like a reflex. And each time, Pagan was hugging the long wall of the warehouse, and his eyes skimmed right past her. Her navy dress with its white polka dots turned out to have been a good choice for skulking. She made a mental note in case she needed to lurk in the future.
All six boys piled into Dieter’s car, talking among themselves as she crouched behind a different parked car, listening hard. She couldn’t catch a lot of it, thanks to slang and their local accents, but she could tell that Dieter was laughing at how easy it was to distract their rival gangs on this important night.
“They try to watch us,” he said, finishing up his cigarette as the others jostled into the car. “They think I don’t see them spying, but I do.”
“They watch us, and we watch them,” said a large boy in the backseat.
“Ja, ja,” Dieter said. “It’s part of the deal. But right now the idiots are back there, thinking we are there, too. They think I love racing so much that I must be there, that we all must be. They could never imagine we’d use this night for something more important than any race.”
“They’ll never know we helped change the world,” the large boy said.
“After, we’ll make sure they know,” Dieter said, and tossed his cigarette into the darkness before he got into the car.
As he started the engine, Pagan opened the door to the car she was crouched beside and crawled inside. She was going to have to work fast if she wanted to follow them, although she had a sinking feeling she knew where they were headed.
Above her lowered head, the lights from Dieter’s car cut a swath across the rough rock walls of the tunnel. Dieter had even turned on the radio, albeit at a low volume. Elvis was singing “Rock-a-Hula Baby” as they drove past.
She felt for and found the steering column. She didn’t have a screwdriver or anything like it to help her rip the plastic cover off the steering column. Back when they were in Lighthouse Reformatory, Mercedes had drawn a diagram on a napkin stolen from the cafeteria to show her where the clips holding it in place were. They’d been planning an escape to Mexico at the time, and once they were free, they’d need to steal a car. So Pagan had memorized everything Mercedes told her, and the information had stuck.
Pagan had no idea what kind of car she was in now. She’d stopped paying attention to makes and models after she crashed her Corvette. But Mercedes had stolen pretty much every kind of car on the planet in her day, and her lessons had been comprehensive.
Pagan’s hands fumbled around in the dark, until she found a clip, and then another. In two quick rips, the steering column was exposed. Or at least, it felt that way. Mercedes had said you often needed to steal a car in the dark, so it was best to feel for the wires leading straight up into the steering column.
As Dieter’s engine faded into the distance, the blackness and silence became total except for Pagan’s own breathing. She sat up and flicked her Zippo lighter to life to see what she was dealing with. Looked like an automatic transmission, maybe a Turboglide.
Battery wires—red, right? Better be. She had to strip the dang things with her teeth, since Mercedes wasn’t here with a handy pocketknife. Twist those, then connect the ignition wire, then the stripped section of the starter.
Careful now. Don’t electrocute yourself.
How embarrassing it would be if Emma and company came back to find her dead body, hair on end, smelling of burned skin, lying on the front seat of the car. No, thanks.
She barely touched the starter wire to the battery and the ignition stuttered to life.
Her heart was hammering louder than the engine, but a wide smile spread across her face. Just wait till Mercedes heard she’d hot-wired her first car!
She tapped the accelerator to rev the engine, shoved the thing into gear and reluctantly flicked on the headlights. She needed them to get out of this dark hole, then she could turn them off for stealth.
Her hands were shaking as she hauled the wheel around and bounced up the uneven floor of the cave toward the open air. Ever since the accident that kille
d Daddy and Ava, even being in the front seat of a car was enough to make the back of Pagan’s neck sweat. Driving was like traveling back in time to the night she’d drunkenly driven them off that cliff. Red convertibles were the worst, of course. She’d driven one since the accident, and only because she had no choice. Never again.
But this car was gray, inside and out, and had no drop-top. It was huge, with spiky fins and a vast hood.
Nothing like her cherry-red Corvette. Not at all. This was not that night. It was something else. Tonight she was driving to make things better, not worse. Helping not hurting. That was her driving mantra, and it damn well better keep her steady, damn it, or the panic would win.
Dieter’s crew hadn’t closed the gate behind them, so she was able to click off her headlights and gun the car out of there to follow their distant red taillights off to her left.
Now she was the one following someone else in a car. It made her wonder—what had happened to Alaric Vogel? Was he still out there, possibly a block or so behind her, doggedly watching her every move?
No headlights appeared in her rearview mirror for blocks, and she could hear no engines other than Dieter’s in the distance. If Vogel was still following her, he’d changed his tactics.
For a couple of miles, she had no idea where she was. She followed as they crossed a small arm of the river and wound through narrow cobbled streets that reminded her of San Telmo, where they’d first found Dieter in the café. But then the streets widened, the buildings grew taller and more gracious and a park appeared on her right just as Dieter pulled over and parked in front of a brick building.
They were back at the Von Albrecht home.
Pagan turned right, losing sight of Dieter’s car. But she didn’t want to pass Dieter and his boys as they piled out. She knew where they were headed now. She parked on the side street and reluctantly tugged the wires she’d rigged apart. The engine sputtered into silence.
There were no lights on in any of the Von Albrecht windows as Pagan slunk up the back alley where she’d seen Dieter parking his bicycle from Emma’s window the day before. The bike was still there, chained to the steps leading up to the kitchen.