“It’s ready,” Papa insisted, betraying a flicker of anger.
“Please, don’t do this,” I begged.
“You should have a little more faith in your own invention,” he said determinedly. “I’m telling you, we’re ready.”
“And when would you like to complete your challenge?” Victor asked.
My father rose from his chair. “How about now?”
Christian and I stared at him in disbelief.
“You’re a fool, Luca,” Christian hissed, before striding furiously out of the bar.
I felt suddenly torn. I didn’t want to see Victor win; but even less did I want Papa to make a fool of himself.
He must have sensed my conflict, and put an arm on my shoulder. “Trust me. We can win. Now, am I driving or are you?”
By the time we reached the test track, Victor and almost the entire village were already there. They had gathered in the field with a motley collection of oil lamps and flaming torches.
Marguerite was also there, her head swathed in a scarf tied under her bristly chin. As my father and I approached, she pushed Benoît toward us and he hobbled over.
“My wife would like you to know that we’d be happy to drive the car for you—for the test,” he stuttered, before coughing up a large gobbet of mucus, which he spat onto the grass.
“That’s very decent of you, Benoît,” my father replied, touched by the old man’s gesture. “So you know how to drive a car, then?”
“Haven’t got a clue.” He shrugged, his face cracking into a gummy grin. “But I’m a quick learner.”
Before my father could take him up on his offer, I interrupted anxiously. “Christian isn’t here.”
“He’ll come,” Papa assured me. “He won’t miss this.”
Suddenly the crowd parted and Victor emerged into the center of the circle.
“So,” he boomed, looking around theatrically. “Where is this wonderful new invention of yours? I’m sure we’re all dying to see it.”
On cue, the doors of the workshop were pulled open with a rusty groan that announced the appearance of the prototype. As the Tin Snail rattled out, the light from its single headlamp throbbed weakly in time with the engine.
A howl of laughter immediately went up from the assembled villagers.
“This is what you’ve been secretly building all these months?” Victor chuckled, eyeing the battered corrugated iron and the single windscreen wiper. I felt my cheeks immediately burn with indignation. “Tell me”—he turned to Benoît with more than a hint of mockery—“would you buy one?”
Benoît looked startled to be put on the spot in front of his neighbors. “Reckon by the look of it, I could make one myself,” he wheezed. His remark was met by more gales of laughter and he smiled a toothless grin at finding himself suddenly so popular.
“I would,” came a voice no one recognized.
Everyone looked around, wondering who had spoken.
“Who said that?” Victor demanded.
After a moment, Marguerite summoned the courage to step forward. “I did.”
Her remark was met by a chorus of gasps. In over twenty years, not one of the villagers had heard her speak.
Benoît’s wrinkled, prune-like eyes widened in disbelief. “M-Marguerite?” he stammered.
“Yes. That’s right,” she said, “I found my voice.” She turned to me. “If your car will drive me to market so my excuse for a husband can stay working in the fields instead of lazing on his bony backside—then, yes, I will buy your car. I have enough put away.”
Benoît looked astonished. “Since when?”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” she replied.
As the crowd of onlookers burst into laughter again, Benoît blinked uncertainly, not knowing how to handle this affront.
“Well, young Angelo”—Victor nodded—“you have your first customer. But I think before any money changes hands, we must see the goods. The proof of this particular pudding,” he said, “is in the driving.”
He turned to my father.
“I believe the rules of the bet call for a farmer and his wife to drive the car carrying two chickens, a jug of wine and a dozen eggs—am I right?” He turned back to the crowd. “Since Benoît can’t drive, who here is willing to be our farmer?”
“I will,” Camille declared, suddenly stepping forward. “I will be your farmer.”
I glanced up and saw that she was looking straight at me. My heart was pounding inside my chest as I cleared my throat. “And I will be the driver,” I announced.
“Strictly speaking, the rules call for a farmer and wife,” Victor observed. “But I suppose if these two fine young people are willing to pretend, it’s good enough for me.”
“Then let’s not waste any more time,” my father declared. “One lap of the field, agreed?”
“Agreed.” Victor beamed, clearly convinced he was set to double his winnings.
As my father put the flagon of wine in the back, I clambered nervously into the driver’s seat and gripped the steering wheel. Was I really about to do this?
A moment later, the passenger door creaked open and Camille climbed in beside me holding a tray of eggs.
“Just so you know,” she said, eyeing me defiantly, “if you crash this like last time, I’ll kill you.”
It was clearly intended as a joke, but by now my nerves were starting to get the better of me. Suddenly my father was at the window, craning to speak to me through the flap.
“No heroics, you understand? If anything—anything—goes wrong, get out. Forget the bet, do you hear me?”
“It won’t go wrong,” I assured him. But inside, my pulse was like machine-gun fire.
Marguerite squeezed two of her hens in through the passenger window and Camille clamped an arm firmly round each before turning to face me.
“You’re sure you can handle this?”
I nodded and swallowed hard. “Whatever you do, just keep hold of those eggs. If one of them breaks, I’ll hold you personally responsible.”
For a second she must have thought I was serious; then her mouth slowly creased into a smile.
In front of us, lit up by the feeble headlamp, was a checkered flag one of the villagers had made out of a tea towel and a branch. Beyond that the ruts of the field receded into inky darkness.
I squeezed the floor pedal to set a little fuel and the engine slowly responded, rising to a whine that made the windows rattle and the speedometer go into spasm.
My father called to me above the noise. “Slow and steady.”
I nodded, my mouth dry with anticipation. This was no longer just about winning a bet. Bertrand’s unswerving faith, my father’s career and, more than anything, my parents’ marriage—all rested on the little car passing this test without disintegrating. Failure was simply not an option.
The checkered tea towel was waved and I eased out the clutch—a little too eagerly, as it happened. The car juddered forward, coming within a hairsbreadth of stalling. Luckily for my pride, it found its feet again and began to pick up a little speed.
Carefully, tentatively, I guided it toward the center of the plowed field. Beside me, Camille clutched the hens so tightly she was in danger of throttling them.
Both of us barely dared to breathe as the first of the ruts loomed in front of us in the dim headlight. Too slow, and I risked losing momentum and getting stuck. Too fast, and I could put too much strain on the suspension. Anything but the smallest jolt could make an egg tumble or send the hens into a flap.
The front wheels finally reached the first rut. For a moment the car ballooned upward and my heart gave a surge of fear as I waited for the back end to strike the ground. Would the suspension cope or would the car bottom out and snap the axle?
The answer came soon enough. Like a tiny schooner floating over a wave, the Tin Snail glided over the rut, then eased itself effortlessly down the other side.
“It’s working!” I exclaimed. I allowed my foot
to press the accelerator a little harder and the car began to pick up speed.
Camille began to tense again. Some of the eggs were starting to rattle. “Aren’t we going too fast?”
But I was in my element, willing the car forward. “We need to reach thirty, otherwise the test-drive doesn’t count.”
This was one of Bertrand’s golden rules. But by now the hens were becoming increasingly afflicted by motion sickness and fighting to get free.
“You have to slow down,” Camille called out as the car continued to barrel over the plowed field.
“Just a little more,” I urged, squinting to see through the windscreen, which was now caked in mud thrown up by the tires. I glanced down, frantically groping for the windscreen wiper.
“I can’t see!” I cried. “Work the wiper.”
“I can’t!” Camille shouted. “The hens…” She was desperately fighting to contain the birds.
Unable to see, we suddenly hit a deep, rocky gulley near the edge of the field. To my amazement, the eggs still didn’t break, but a deafening crunch of metal announced a far more serious problem.
“The brakes!” I shouted, pounding the floor with my foot. “They’re broken!”
I’d barely got the words out before the car slammed through a fence and began to plunge down the hillside beyond, scattering rabbits in every direction.
Suddenly a pair of fox eyes was staring back at me dead ahead. Yanking the steering wheel hard to the right, I narrowly avoided colliding with a tree, only to discover that a much larger obstacle was now looming straight ahead of us.
“Get down!” I screamed, and we dived behind the dashboard just in time as we went headlong into Benoît’s barn. The wooden doors exploded around us like shrapnel, and the Tin Snail careered through a pile of rusty farm machinery before embedding itself in a very large bale of straw.
Camille spat out some straw and pulled several twigs from her hair before blinking away the mud that was by now evenly coating her face. Next to her, I sat rigid in shock.
“Well, by and large, I’d say that went pretty well,” I concluded.
“This is what you call ‘pretty well’?” she asked, staring around at the barn incredulously.
“But it worked!” I cried, my eyes shining with excitement. “The suspension worked.”
Camille stared at me, then calmly cracked an egg on my forehead. The gooey yolk trickled down my face till it ran over my mouth and I licked it away with my tongue.
“I’m going to leave now,” she said, and reached for the door handle. But this was easier said than done. Having sustained several glancing blows from fences and tree branches, the door refused to budge. But one swift kick with the heel of her boot sent it clanking to the ground.
Quick release, I thought, making a mental note.
Within minutes the villagers began to arrive to survey the carnage. First on the scene was my father. He rushed down the hillside toward Camille.
“Are you all right?” he panted.
“Oh, fine,” Camille answered sarcastically. “In fact, apparently everything went pretty well.”
There was a loud rasp of metal as I levered the driver’s door open. My father rushed over to me, hauling me free from the wreckage.
“Are you OK? Did you break anything?”
“Only the headlamp,” I replied with a rueful smile. “Oh, and the brake pipe kind of snapped back there somewhere.”
“Who cares about the car. I meant you,” he said. “I thought for a moment…” He trailed off, unable to utter the words.
“I’m fine. The main thing is, we won.” I beamed.
“What are you talking about? Of course we didn’t. The car’s a write-off.”
“No, you don’t understand,” I protested. “The eggs. Look at them.”
Papa glanced at the tray of eggs Camille, astonishingly, was still holding. Apart from the one she’d broken on my head, they were all, miraculously, still in one piece. What’s more, the flagon of wine was intact.
For a second my father struggled to take in the enormity of what he was seeing. Then, slowly, his mouth spread into a smile and he pulled me clean off my feet.
“Angelo! You did it!”
As he hugged me ecstatically, I glanced back at Camille to see that, despite herself, even she was smiling. As our eyes met, I suddenly felt a scalding sensation down the back of my neck. I wasn’t sure if it was whiplash, excitement at finally fulfilling Bertrand’s brief, or because I realized that, despite all her protests to the contrary, Camille really didn’t hate me after all.
In fact, it was just possible we might finally be friends.
“You’ve heard, I assume?” Bertrand asked, looking white as a sheet.
“Just now,” my father replied. “It was all over the newspapers when we got into the station.”
Two hours earlier, at precisely five p.m., the French government had followed the British and declared war on Hitler’s Germany.
It was three days after I’d crashed the prototype into Benoît’s barn, and my father and I had traveled up to Paris to tell Bertrand the brilliant news about the suspension in person. We’d wanted to come up sooner, but the day after the test run there had been ominous news: Germany had invaded Poland. This was a direct challenge to Britain and France, who had vowed to defend Poland.
Had Germany been calling their bluff or deliberately goading them into war? Either way, our worst fears had become a reality. We were now at war.
We’d made our way to Paris as fast as we could, but it wasn’t easy. The threat of imminent war had caused havoc to the trains. Those services that hadn’t been canceled were piled full of people urgently traveling back to Paris or fleeing to the countryside.
By the time we finally reached the city, it was buzzing with the news we were dreading.
“What does it mean for the car?” I asked cautiously.
Bertrand’s face was somber. “It means we’re too late.”
“But we did your test,” I pleaded. “We drove over the field without breaking the eggs.”
“I’m pleased. But now you must scrap everything.”
My father gasped. “What? But surely—”
“Listen to me. Go back to the village. Find every trace of the prototypes—petrol cans, starter motors, the lot—then destroy them.”
“Destroy them?” I repeated, hardly believing my ears.
“You can’t mean that,” Papa protested.
“Nothing must be left.” Bertrand was staring wildly, more agitated than ever. “Promise me.”
“But—but why?” I stammered. “After everything we’ve done…”
“Because the only thing worse than destroying that little car is the Germans finding it. And if they invade, that’s exactly what they’ll try to do.”
Things were moving too fast for me. Bertrand could clearly see the thoughts crowding into my head and stepped closer.
“There’s no need to be afraid,” he said, looking into my eyes earnestly. “We will win this war eventually, of that I am certain. But one thing is essential: the Germans must never, never discover those prototypes.”
“Now listen to me,” my father growled angrily. “I never wanted to make this car in the first place, but you convinced me that it was the right thing to do. And I believed you.” His eyes were burning like molten lead. “Building that car from scratch has been the hardest—and the proudest—achievement of my career, and no blasted German army is going to destroy that! I’ve—we’ve—come too far for that.”
“Papa,” I said softly, gripping his arm. “Bertrand’s right. If we don’t break up the cars, the Germans will steal everything. We can build it again in a few months once the war is over.”
“We have no idea how long this war will last—anything could have happened by then,” he protested. “Besides, what would we build it from? We’ve made no blueprints of the new design.”
“None at all?” Bertrand asked, alarmed.
“We didn’t h
ave time,” Papa explained. “Everything is up here.” He pointed vaguely to his head.
But Bertrand was immovable. The cars had to be destroyed to prevent them falling into enemy hands.
“If there was any other way…” He sighed sadly.
For a moment my father was completely still; then, with one violent movement of his arm, he swept everything off Bertrand’s desk. It smashed against the wall, making me start. He stood there for a moment, breathing hard, trying to steady his nerves.
“I’m sorry,” he said eventually, his voice catching with emotion. “It’s just such a blasted waste.”
An hour later, with only seconds to spare, we clambered onto the train back to Regnac and found the last remaining seats. We were lucky to get them—the train was filling up with families taking their children away to the relative safety of the country. War had been declared only a matter of hours earlier, but already people were terrified German bombs would start raining down from the sky or the streets would echo to the march of jackboots.
As our train rumbled out of the station, my father and I sat in stunned silence. Eventually my fear got the better of me.
“Maman won’t be able to come back now, will she?” I said.
My father sighed heavyheartedly and shook his head. “No,” he muttered. “Italy is on Germany’s side. Even if she could get back into the country, she wouldn’t be welcome here.”
I felt like I’d been stabbed through the side.
“What about you?” I asked, scared now. “Will they hurt you?”
He turned to me, frowning. “Hurt me?”
“Because you’re Italian.”
For a moment he looked grave; then his face softened. “No. They won’t hurt me.”
“How can you be so sure?”
He smiled, all trace of his earlier outburst gone. “Haven’t you heard? I’m Luca Fabrizzi, father of Angelo, the creator of the Tin Snail. How could the people of France possibly hurt me?” he said, his eyes shining with pride.
I was curled up on the seat, fast asleep, when my father gently shook me by the shoulder.
“We’re here.”
I got to my feet awkwardly. One of my legs had fallen asleep and was now throbbing with pins and needles. I hobbled after my father and climbed down onto the platform. When I looked up, I saw Christian waiting for us.
The Tin Snail Page 12