He reached for the calvados.
“A good half meter into the grass. I saw the skid and thought, Oh God but still hoped he’d pull out.” He took a drink. “At that point, the bridge was only four hundred meters or so away. He knew, he saw, he was doing anything he could to try to save himself, countersteering, braking—there were marks—trying to aim through the bridge.”
He stopped and pressed his lips hard together.
“He didn’t make it,” I finished for him, quietly. He shook his head and drained his glass.
“So young,” he whispered.
Design Note 22.3—Air intake plate [Dr. Porsche]
The air intake vents should be increased from three to seven, and the foot pedal shortened and rotated approximately five degrees in a clockwise direction for quicker response. Maintain present size of plate until further measurement. [See further note for discussion of spring.]
I couldn’t find Otto Geyer; he’d gone to Munich, I was told, to visit relatives. But in the process of looking for him, I discovered that the pieces of the wreck had been taken to a garage in Darmstadt, close to where the accident had happened.
I drove there, filled with equal parts dread and curiosity. When I introduced myself, the proprietor of the garage raised his eyebrows in respect and ushered me at once to the end bay, its sliding door discreetly closed and fastened with a padlock.
“Here, Herr Doktor Porsche,” he said, beckoning me to the side of the building, where a door gave access. “The lady came just a little while ago.”
“The lady?”
“Frau Rosemeyer, ja,” he said, and opened the door for me.
The last thing I had expected was to meet the grieving widow over what was, in effect, Bernd’s coffin, and I entered with some diffidence. Elly Beinhorn—she seldom called herself Frau Rosemeyer—turned when I came in, her eyebrows raising with surprise.
“Ferdinand,” she said. Then she smiled, a little sadly. “Of course—you would need to see it too.” She stepped back, a hand sweeping low to invite me to look at what lay on the stained concrete under the glare of a big work light overhead.
“It” was what was left of the 6.5 L 1938 Stromlinienwagen. Or the “Death Car,” as the newspapers all too accurately called it. There was no visible blood, but the crumpled metal and exploded tires bore eloquent witness to that accuracy.
The Streamliner’s dismembered parts were laid out on the ground like sections of a slaughtered, crudely butchered beast. The garage smelled of racing fuel. I loved that smell, but now I imagined the scent of blood mixed in and started to take shallow breaths.
Elly came up bravely to my side but then faltered a little, not quite reaching for my arm.
“I—I don’t think...”
I took her hand and tucked it into the crook of my elbow.
“It’s all right,” I said. “He didn’t die in the car, you know.”
She’d been holding her breath; she let it go with a sigh like a punctured inner tube.
“You’re sure of that?” she asked, and swallowed. She’d been thinking the same things I had; how could she not have been?
“I’m sure,” I said, and consciously took a good, deep breath. “He was thrown free.” He had been; that much I knew.
The cockpit was enclosed. Normally, it took tools, time, and more than one mechanic to get a driver out. It had taken a fraction of a second for Bernie to be thrown free as the car burst apart. They found him in the grass, lying very peacefully there, his cloth helmet still fastened, not a mark on him (or so they said. You can’t trust public reports of anything, especially anything the chancellor takes a special interest in).
My assurance seemed to relieve her, and she let go of my arm and went forward, squatting down to look at the detached fairing, lying nearly paired beside the rest of the wreckage. A side panel lay just beyond, the metal hideously crumpled at one end, and nearby a big, solid metal chest.
“The ice tank?” she said, pointing her chin at the chest. “Bernie told me about it.”
“Yes.” I squatted myself, with much less grace, and ran a hand over the tank. It hadn’t broken open but was very battered. The car had flipped, then, at least once...the ice tank had replaced the water-filled radiator in function, but not in position, I saw—they’d left the radiator in the front. I could see the fastenings where it had been, and shattered pieces of grille still set in the braces.
The fairings were detached—I saw that the bolts had been too short; half of them had pulled out completely. But what did that matter, as this had clearly happened as a result of the impact with the bridge.
“Do you think they did it?” Elly turned to me, sudden as a stooping hawk.
“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 sai
d. 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.
“Turbulence?” she said at one point, lifting the edge of the side panel. “I read one account that speculated that it was turbulence caused by the forest. ‘Turbulence is unpredictable in a forest,’” she quoted. “‘The racecourse ran through dense forest on either side.’ A Venturi effect?”
I creased my brow at that and looked at the wreckage, but reluctantly shook my head.
“I can’t see how that could be. I haven’t seen the course, but I’ve seen woodland. Too much irregularity—and to develop such an effect in a run of less than ten seconds?”
“Ridiculous,” she agreed. “But speaking of airflow—it has to have been that, don’t you think?” She spoke with complete confidence, not admitting any possibility that Bernie could have failed in any way.
If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be here, I thought, but I obligingly got up and came to kneel beside her over a round steel plate—the air-intake regulator. It was battered, a little bent. There were seven air-intake ports, as I’d specified in my design notes—but all of them had been welded shut.
“That would be a lot of help,” I muttered. “Do you see the foot pedal?”
“Over there, I think. Is this it?” She reached and handed it to me. They hadn’t shortened it, but that didn’t matter, as with the intake ports all permanently closed, the driver couldn’t regulate the airflow with the pedal anyway. Was this evidence of some tampering, though? I didn’t see how it could be—the ports had been sealed with a welding torch; a solid, professional job. No one could have abstracted the plate, made that alteration, and put it back without someone on the crew—probably everyone—noticing. And there were plausible reasons why Auto Union might have done that, depending on the results of their own wind-tunnel tests.
It was getting dark outside, and the sighs of the two men near the door were becoming louder. At last we got to our feet and stood, not wanting simply to walk away.
“I’ll speak to some people,” I said. “At Auto Union.”
She nodded. “So will I. I know the crew; they’ll talk to me.”
We shook hands, very formally, and I walked behind her, away from the wreckage.
Design Note 43.21: Heat Shield
The heat shield is to be placed behind the cockpit, between the driver and the rear axles, which support the ice tank and the fuel tank. Height, 1.1 m, width .87 m. Insulated construction, multiple layers of wood and felt.
Workshop ref. 209/13.
Bernd grew up on a motorcycle. I always thought that’s what made him such a good race driver: he didn’t have any sort of preconception as to what a car could do or what the limits might be.
The limits...those were my province. The province of the designer, and the engineer, and finally of the workmen who built the car to our specifications. If Bernie hadn’t made a mistake, then someone else had.
I took the train to Zwickau. It was a journey I’d made many times, but there was no sense of déjà vu about it. The train carriage was unheated but crowded, and the condensed breath of the passengers ran in trickles down the windows, smearing the landscape of Saxony. And I carried a weight of anxiety that I’d never had previously, not even before the trials of a new design.
A long journey, but I’d started early, and it was just past two o’clock when the taxi delivered me to the Auto Union premises. These were in the old Horch works, a sprawling brickyard ringed with buildings. It was a weekday and the place was bustling with workers, messengers, trucks bringing in piles of rubber tires and sheet steel, the big trailers for shipping cars clustered outside the plant like a herd of skeletal cows.
I felt the strong pull of the workshops, wanted to wander in and see what was happening, smell the hot solder and the rubber and the metal that was my favorite perfume. Maybe later, I told myself, and instead headed for the white-brick building that housed the main offices.
It was only a couple of months since I had worked here regularly, and the receptionist’s face lit up with pleasure at seeing me.
“Herr Doktor Porsche!” he said. “How nice it is to see you again! I didn’t know there was a meeting today—shall I bring you a coffee?”
I would at that point have sold at least a small part of my soul for hot coffee, but reluctantly, I shook my head.
“Danke, Reinhart. It’s not a meeting. I only wanted to see Dr. Eberan for half an hour. Just to go over some technical things about the Stromlinienwagen.”
His face sobered at that.
“Such a terrible thing,” he said, and shook his head. “Poor Rosemeyer. We couldn’t believe it—but we never believe it, do we, and yet we know it happens, it must happen in this business, nein?”
“It does, alas,” I said. “Can you see if Herr Doktor Eberan is available?” I had thought about sending a telegram to make an appointment but decided against it. I didn’t want Eberan to think about it ahead of time and told myself that if he wasn’t in, I would just poke around, maybe ask some questions of the other Auto Union officials—and the engineers. Eberan’s own car was in the yard, though—a big twelve-cylinder Daimler, dove gray and glossy, with a grille that looked like it was about to eat you alive.
Reinhart gestured me to a chair and disappeared. I didn’t sit, though; I hovered in the doorway, looking down the long, dim corridor. The day outside was rainy, and the patches of light that fell into the corridor from the open doors were pale and insubstantial. It seemed I was a ghost myself, recognizing all the things I saw, knowing them intimately, and yet feeling detached.
I’d worked with Robert for many months; we got along, we worked quite well together—yet we’d never become friends. Part of it was caste; I was a Czech, while his family had been Austrian nobility. They had still been using the name von Eberhorst in his childhood, and one doesn’t forget things like that. I had more than once thought that his dislike of working under me had a lot to do with my departure from Auto Union—though the parting itself was reasonably amicable. And then again, he was an ambitious man. He had his own thoughts on design.
Which was what was bot
hering me now.
Reinhart flickered into sight at the far end of the hallway, and I ducked back into his tiny office to be discovered looking out of the window when he came in, full of apologies, to tell me that Herr Doktor Eberan was called away, had just left for a meeting in Stuttgart. He would be desolated to hear—
“That’s all right, Reinhart,” I interrupted, and patted his shoulder.
So, plan B. The engineering department was in the same building; I’d need to wait a bit. Teatime was three o’clock; everyone would be going to the canteen and I could slip into the building by the rear entrance, and—with luck—have half an hour alone in the closet that held the files of design notes, plans, and records.
In the meantime, I decided that I might as well stroll by the workshops and see whether anyone I knew was around.
There wasn’t much going on. Only two bays were busy; I didn’t know the men in the first one, but I spotted Dieter Pfizen in the second, with a half-assembled twelve-cylinder head on a stand in front of him.
“So, Dieter, what have you got?” He looked up, surprised at my voice, but smiled.
“Herr Doktor Porsche!” He stepped back, gesturing at the motor. “Nothing much, yet. Checking the oil flow.” There was a strong smell of the kerosene used for cleaning, and I saw small golden dribbles of motor oil on the stand.
We chatted about small things for a bit, but I knew the memory of the accident hung heavy over Auto Union, and the moment I mentioned Bernd’s name, Dieter’s face clouded. He was a big man who didn’t hide his feelings.
“It should never have happened! Never,” he said vehemently, shaking his head. “They rushed it, everybody knew. Didn’t want to risk Mercedes scooping up the record without even a challenge—not now.”
I nodded. The competition between the two companies had risen markedly with Hitler’s decision to develop a great German motor industry and his splitting the development money between Mercedes and Auto Union. That split, both companies knew, could be a lot less even next time.
The Highway Kind Page 13