God's Scofflaws

Dust Jacket

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GOD’S SCOFFLAWS by Dakota Franklin

Grant Scarfe, a mathematician of genius, steadily on his way to the top as an engineer at Porsche, has led a protected life of privilege. It follows naturally that when Armitage, the premier racing house of the world, decides to throw a million dollar party at the Tourist Trophy on the Isle of Man, they should ask Grant if he wants to spend his sabbatical year building motorbikes for Billy Crawshaw to race. 

'A dead engineer would crawl out of the grave to race Billy Crawshaw in the TT.' 

But Lydia Simpresi, Armitage’s treasured sponsor, to whom no one ever says no, decides that the once-modest party at the TT will be a homage to her late father. That piles on the pressure. And then Billy decides, on a whim, that Grant should put the team in Northern Ireland where road racing is the national sport—right after terrorism. That makes the pressure intolerable, because each of the opposing terrorist groups, and their equally violent splinters, views Armitage as ‘on our patch’, couriers of drugs and money to fight the forthcoming election—and of detonators for bombs. 

'It was only a small bomb. A warning that the next one will kill some of us.' 

Then there is the police, traffic cops bumped up for their political allegiance, incapable of protecting Grant’s staff, more interested in ensuring that the Harringtons sent to beef up his security don’t cause a renewed outbreak of The Troubles. 

‘Joanne and those ex-commandos all by themselves are a moving small-scale war.’ 

Patton, the only competent cop, is a British anti-terrorist plant. He intends to force Grant to go along with both groups of terrorists and then to testify against them, clearly a suicide mission. 

That isn’t all. The internal politics of Armitage are such that if Grant in his motorbike ‘sideshow’ puts a scratch on Billy, Armitage’s Le Mans 24 Hours starter and star, Mallory and Jack Armitage will ruin his career. 

Grant’s only solace is his growing love affair with Harry Bingham, his Operations Director. 

'In her red leather team jacket she looks like Vogue’s idea of a biker’s moll.' 

On the Isle of Man for the TT, Grant discovers that his racing team’s trucks will be used to carry detonators for bombs into Britain. But he has a plan to put all his tormentors at each other’s throats — as soon as he has survived the dangerous TT with Billy intact.  

Then the terrorists take Harry to force Grant to carry their bomb into position for them, and everything explodes in uncontrolled violence on the Snaefell Mountain between the competing terrorist groups, Patton and his anti-terrorist police, and the Harringtons helping Grant recover Harry. 

*** 

I thought the characters were great. I was swept along...a cracking good read. 

— Joo's Book Reviews 

I thoroughly enjoyed this book — in fact, I started reading it again straight after I'd finished it. 

— L. Rumbold 

A wonderful story full of action and remarkable detail. 

— Boyd S Drew 

RUTHLESS TO WIN

Series Editor: André Jute

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GOD’S SCOFFLAWS

Dakota Franklin

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CoolMain Press

GOD’S SCOFFLAWS

by Dakota Franklin

Copyright © 2014 Dakota Franklin

The author has asserted her moral right.

Published by CoolMain Press 2014

http://www.coolmainpress.com

info@coolmainpress.com

RUTHLESS TO WIN Series Editor: André Jute

Associate Editor: Claudine van Wyk

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means without the written permission of the publisher.

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GOD’S SCOFFLAWS

Dakota Franklin

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"This isn’t just a thousand to one shot.

This is a professional blood sport.

It can happen to you.

And then it can happen to you again."

—from Harry Kleiner’s film Le Mans

Whose mirror is this?

‘She is the sister of a dead IRA man, a martyr to The Cause.’

Those were the first words anyone spoke to me in my new office where I came to take up my new job. The man who said those chilling words about a notorious terrorist group was a perfect stranger.

I blame Armitage Cartwright Racing Limited. They put me in that impossible position and into the lethal consequences. They didn’t do it maliciously, which would be some kind of perverse consolation: when people act against you it is most often because you have done something to deserve it. Armitage did it to me because of who and what they are: overambitious, pro-active, an unplanned rolling chaos.

I am a pure mathematician, employed for my lateral thinking as an engineer by a most orderly German sports car manufacturer. Though I am an American my circumstances have accustomed me from childhood to a rigidly rational environment in which effect is linked consequentially and proportionately to cause.

It is true that I made the single decision which put me in the purview of that spokesman for terrorists, and the terrorists who stand behind him, and the terrorists who oppose them, but I made the decision under the immense pressure which inheres in working for Armitage. And I wasn’t even a permanent employee! I was just filling in before going back to my proper job with a proper—German—engineering firm.

What makes the whole bizarre chain of events worse is that the initial event in the sequence which stood me up as a target in this violent hall of mirrors was a comic misunderstanding.

Zuffenhausen flier

I came to work for Armitage Cartwright Racing Limited because in a single day I lost my love, my home, my car and my dog. Because of the misunderstanding which arose from these events, I was also relieved of a really good job with Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche AG—the Porsche automobile corporation of Stuttgart, though how the events of that day would interfere with my career did not become clear for several weeks.

The comic misunderstanding wasn’t funny to me: I was in pain.

I came home from work one day to discover open cardboard cartons standing on the carpet and on the bed open suitcases half packed with Lisa’s clothes. In our sitting room my eye passed over a bookshelf near the hi-fi and I stopped dead. Lisa had removed to the floor and was packing only her own books and CDs. Even more sinister, she was leaving the CDs and books we chose together.

She sat at the kitchen table drinking a glass of lemon tea. A second glass, freshly made since she heard me come in, waited on the table at a chair across the table from her. I sat down and studied her face.

Lisa is an achingly beautiful girl—more precisely a recent woman. She has long corn-blonde hair straight out of a Teutonic folk tale which that day was braided into a swinging rope behind her head. High cheekbones, eyes the precise blue of Lake Como on a spring evening. Listen, there is no point in torturing myself, so let’s just say she is very beautiful, 21, and willful.

‘What’s this about?’ I asked.

‘What it looks like, Grant,’ she said politely as if from a great distance. ‘You’re the genius. You work it out.’

‘Why?’ We have not fought; we never fight. I simply give way in everything to Lisa.

She moved her hand with the glass of tea about an inch. ‘I’ve grown up. Now I want live on my own.’

Lisa has lived with me since she entered college at 18. ‘I thought we have a future.’

She laughed gaily, quite sincerely: I had taken her by surprise. ‘Of course we do! We shall be best friends. I’m not ungrateful for the experience, you know.’

And there it was: I am the older man she lived with for the experience. ‘You could have waited until after my birthday in a couple of months, when I shall be all of thirty.’

Suddenly I made sense of a whole series of irritating little jibes Lisa threw out over the last few months, about my age, about my IQ, about both together as in, ‘The boy genius thought the music at the concert was childishly self-indulgent noise.’ Ugh! That one was the worst. In retrospect that by itself should have been enough to give me pause for thought. Hey, I’m a mathematician who earns his living as an automobile engineer: that counts double in the insensitivity stakes.

Not that, even if I noticed, I could have done anything about it. Lisa makes up her own mind and goes her own way. Her parents spoiled her rotten. I’m in a good position to know because her father is my supervisor at work and a good friend. I watched Lisa grow up. I watched her being spoiled. I delighted in helping to spoil her. Now I would pay the price. There was nothing I could do or say that would change her mind.

I shoved the lemon tea away and picked up my car keys from the table. In the door I turned. ‘I shall be back at midnight.’ If I waited around to watch her leave I would break down and beg.

She raised her hand to shoulder height and wriggled her fingers at me. ‘See you around, Grant.’

Something of course happened next but that’s the last I remember, the wriggling fingers, the casual goodbye after four years as if to a passing acquaintance.

Germany has wonderful B-roads, secondary highways. Any old idiot with a well-paying job can buy a Porsche and drive it beyond his ability on the autobahn. I am the king of the B-roads, a craftsman driver, good enough to be a superior club driver and to be invited by the works test drivers to drive development cars when it is quicker to let me show myself whatever they want me to know than to explain it to me.

I’m perfectly capable at speeds over 150mph on the autobahn as well. However, as an engineer at a supercar manufacturer I am also in a good position to understand that at such speeds on public roads even the superb passive and active safety measures we build into the car become progressively less valuable in protecting me against the stupidity (or just simple bad luck) of every other driver on the autobahn.

No, I don’t remember what I thought I was doing on the autobahn that evening. I don’t remember the accident. The police investigated and the proper authorities decided some fat baumeister traveling at 250kph or 155mph in an S-class Mercedes suffered a heart attack and lost it. He sprayed the occupants of 16 other cars and bits of torn, hot metal over several square miles of countryside. I was one of the lucky ones: I survived.

The proper authority in this case was probably the lands-procurator-general. In nearly ten years in Germany I have had so little to do with the police and their bosses that I don’t really know his precise title. But he’s something like the attorney-general of a State in America, only a professional appointment rather than a politician. I’m telling you this now because the police, if not the German police, will feature in this story and it is important to me that you believe from the start that I was of previously blameless character.

I came to, briefly, face to face with a red-faced German fireman at the top of a very tall ladder. Later I heard that I was 30 meters or about 100 feet from the autobahn and nearly that much above the ground, stuck in a tall tree. The fireman shouted at me not to move or I would fall. I passed out again and came to in hospital where the police, not bothering to hide their schadenfreude, told me that what was left of my nearly new Porsche Turbo was found much further away.

‘I hope it was fully insured,’ the policeman said primly. His colleague nodded emphatically as if to add, You got what you deserved.

‘It was insured for full retail replacement value so I shall make a profit because I bought it as an ex-demonstrator. On top of that I also received the full employee discount. But thank you for your concern.’

After that they questioned me hard enough to give me a headache as they tried to make me admit to something they could charge me with. Finally I rang the bell and a nice nurse chased them out. She was ringless and eyed me speculatively. Even behind the bruises and the gauze on my face I was clearly not an ogre; a Herr Doktor with a job at a famous firm like Porsche would be a trophy her parents and classmates will appreciate fully, at the very least a good provider.

Helmut came to visit me. He is my superior, my friend and Lisa’s father. If he ever had a problem about Lisa and me I never heard about it. Olga, her mother, also came. Far from her having a problem, she was delighted that her daughter chose to pair off with me. Like me, Olga was planning on a big wedding, happy families together, admittedly at an unspecified date but in a definite, pre-ordained future. In Olga’s world-view I am particularly suited to be Lisa’s consort: distinguished family, intellectually distinguished in my own right, the crown prince of her husband’s department at work and destined to rise much further (if not necessarily all the way to the top because pure mathematicians don’t).

Quite a bit was said between old friends but the key passage was a classic case of the confuddle of ‘niceness’.

I said, ‘Tell Lisa I don’t expect her to visit. Let her get on with her new life.’ Actually, I couldn’t bear a visit from my new ‘best friend’.

Olga was looking out of the window, probably blinking back the tears that made her eyes shiny. She said, ‘Oh, Lisa says she’s not submitting to emotional blackmail.’

A very long moment passed while Helmut and I stared at her back. Then she turned from the window and realized what she said. Her hand flew to her mouth. ‘I’m so sorry, Grant.’

How could I tell her that I wasn’t devastated by her daughter’s departure to the point of committing a messy suicide?

Thus it got about at work that I went off the rails because Lisa left me, tried to kill myself for love, then let my life go to pieces, things no logical engineer should do, a mathematician least of all. But it wasn’t like that. Circumstances simply conspired.

When Lisa left at quarter to twelve she left the door open either to welcome me back home or simply carelessly. By itself that would have been no great disaster as my house was then an artist’s studio at the bottom of the garden belonging to a grander house, surrounded by grown trees and not visible from the street. But I did not return: I was in hospital.

Lisa owned a little dog, a Spitzer called Fonzie. I bought it for her as a pup. I assumed she took the dog so I made no arrangements from my hospital bed for its feeding and care until I could return. On the third day it went begging for food at the back door of my landlady who dislikes pets intensely. The landlady went to investigate my little house, found the front door left open, the back door blown open, papers blown all over my house, some of them soggy on the carpet because the same wind drove rain into the house. She came to the hospital, accompanied by an attorney, to tell me I was out.

Ever tried house-hunting on crutches with two broken legs in plaster?

The friendly, hopeful nurse gave up her day off to find me a boarding house and stored some of my books and music, which had been roughly handled by the removal company the landlady hired to move me out while I was still in hospital.

The only thing the landlady kept was the dog, on the principle that she is better suited to look after it than Lisa or me. When I went to collect Fonzie the day after the casts were removed it bit me. That woman would turn a saint into a viper. She taught the dog to snarl before she would feed it.

I was crumpled because my clothes were squashed into a too-small wardrobe in the boarding house and on crutches it was difficult to reach the laundry and the cleaners. I was continually late for work because I couldn’t drive and was forced to find a taxi every morning. People who were misinformed about my psychological state either gave me a wide berth or made matters worse by being solicitous and trying to do my work. I started snapping at my co-workers.

Helmut felt guilty about Lisa’s behavior. He made up for it by not telling me, as either my friend or my superior, to straighten myself out.

I was in a downward spiral. I did it entirely to myself by not taking the generous sick-leave that German workers are entitled to. I should have gone away and returned rested, sorted, freshly laundered.

On the day I returned from having the casts cut off Helmut’s superior invited me to dinner at his apartment. Christoph Wilhelm is eleven years older than I am. He was my tutor when I took my doctorate in mathematics at the university in Zurich at 16. I boarded in his house. He is a good friend and so is his wife, Frieda. When I finished four years of post-doctoral studies in the States, Christoph offered me a job at Porsche, which head-hunted him a couple of years before. Christoph is a physicist not quite of the first rank but he is a superior teacher and an inspiring leader of men. I’m his crown prince too for a few years down the line when he joins the board.

After dinner Frieda settled down with a play she videotaped earlier while Christoph and I sat in his tiny den with coffee and brandy. He put his thumb in his mouth, his fingernail edgewise between top and bottom teeth. I knew by that gesture that he was acutely uncomfortable.

‘I know, Christoph. I’m a mess, an embarrassment to my friends.’

He nodded, then shook his head. ‘You’re a mess. Friends you can embarrass aren’t. Helmut and I talked. He is absent tonight because he feels that you may blame him, at least in a small part, for—‘

‘I don’t.’

‘In any event, that is why he is not here tonight. The real danger is embarrassing Porsche.’ He considered and decided there is more to it. ‘To protect your future you also must not appear weak before people you will in a few years lead.’

I drank coffee and then brandy. ‘I haven’t produced anything for months. I’ve been wondering if I should resign before I am fired.’

‘You have an employment contract, Grant,’ Christoph said gently. ‘You must ask my permission to resign. I shall not give it. No one has any intention of dispensing permanently with your services.’

I blew out my breath. ‘What then? Glass Hell?’ It is what we call being lent to Volkswagen to help sort out the Skoda works in Slovakia. It’s not my sort of work though I can hack it or fake it as required.

‘You’re on six months medical leave, starting tomorrow. At the end of that you will be on a year’s sabbatical with full pay. After eighteen months you will return refreshed and bursting with ideas.’

‘But—‘

‘It’s an order, Grant. Helmut and I will not discuss this. You have earned a break. Take it, for your own sake and ours.’

‘Well, if I’m on holiday from tomorrow I’ll take an extra shot of your brandy.’

‘That’s the spirit.’ He smiled encouragingly until I grinned at his pun.

‘I’ll pick up my dog tomorrow, borrow my brother’s house on Lake Como and start recuperating.’

But Fonzie preferred staying with the landlady from hell to traipsing to Lake Como with me. Instead of going to Italy I stopped off at the emergency department of the hospital to have my hand stitched where Fonzie bit me, took a taxi to the airport and went home to visit my parents in Boston.

And that is how I came to work for Armitage.

Big brother

‘So you’re a speculator,’ my father said, none of his disdain showing on his face. He has lifelong practice at keeping his emotions off his face though not out of his cutting comments. For decades, until I finished high school at twelve, he was the American Trade Consul in Berne. For the last dozen years he has been in nominal retirement but is called out of it almost continually to help with the GATT. This coarse word stands for the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs and it is the global creator and distributor of wealth, as my father will be happy to explain at length if you show the smallest interest. He’s a nut for free trade. He’s therefore a diplomat, though of a specialized, even exotic kind.

‘I’m not a speculator, Father. I’m a mathematician. Roderick shared a few stock market tips with me when I first started working and earning good money.’ Roderick is my brother, exactly twenty years older than me—our birthdays are four days apart. He’s an important executive in Simpresi, the Swiss liquor, soft drinks, entertainment and pharmaceuticals empire. ‘But to make real profit I had to buy on margin, borrowing ten times as much as my savings. That struck me as a risky speculation. Instead I worked out a way of making a constant stream of small profits without going out on a limb. I programmed a computer to do the work, then licensed the program to other investors.’

‘How does this program work?’

‘It draws a trend line for each stock. If the stock goes up or down for long enough to establish a forecast, the computer issues buy or sell orders in the expectation that the trend will continue. When the trend turns the buy and sell orders are reversed. It’s called Lemming Turn because it runs with the lemmings to the very top of the cliff—and then doesn’t jump.’

I’m rather proud of Lemming Turn. It’s clever and foolproof. It has been very successful. I’m paid enough at Porsche to afford the cheapest Porsche a couple of years old on hire purchase. Lemming Turn paid for a new Turbo in cash plus other luxuries including superb skiing holidays with Lisa.

‘That’s worse than speculation. I didn’t realize that you wrote the program which is responsible for illogical over-reaction on stock markets around the world. That’s parasitical, Grant. Stock markets are intended to supply rational capital investment for corporations which provide employment, goods and services.’

‘Let’s agree to differ, Father.’

‘What does Roderick think of this? At least he invests from knowledge.’

‘Roderick was my first customer for the software and helped me market it professionally. He has made millions out of using it. Father, do you understand how dangerous it is for Roderick to buy shares on the open market? They wouldn’t need to prove insider trading against him: just the accusation would ruin him. My program is much safer: Roderick appears to be buying and selling shares utterly at random.’

‘Well, if Roderick approves to the extent of helping you, perhaps that is the modern way. Roderick would certainly not do anything immoral.’

‘Precisely.’

‘Enough of this dissension in the ranks,’ my mother said as she came in from the garden with a basket of flowers. ‘I have invited some young people to tennis and drinks, Grant. Unfortunately it is very difficult to find suitable young men so there will be a preponderance of women. You will manage, I trust.’

My parents are both tall, thin and over 70. On any street in any European city the wannabe terrorist will spot them instantly as American patricians. Everyone else will identify my father from his manner as a high-level civil servant or a decidedly unconfused university professor. (He in fact holds a visiting chair at Georgetown where he teaches aspiring diplomats to be brutally clear and totally uncompromising. If they listen to him we should all invest in armaments manufacturers because when his students reach the top they will start a lot of wars.)

There is nothing wrong with my parents’ bodies except age, and with their minds nothing at all. But they are not comfortable, cuddly intellectuals. They’re outright abrasive; the conversation about investment strategies is perfectly typical of my father’s everyday discourse. He once read Pope John Paul II, himself not chopped liver, a lecture on the propagation of the faith. His Holiness replied, ‘Thank you for the incisive analysis. I shall put myself in charge of supervising the details.’ That’s not bad for an Episcopalian; my father publicly regrets ‘being born into a church which does not know what it stands for.’ As I said, Father’s a special kind of diplomat, one who values the ability to render an honest count higher than omnidirectional charm.

I love my parents but more than a fortnight in their house will drive me nuts. Fortunately my exemplary brother Roderick turned up for our birthday party, my thirtieth and his fiftieth; his presence restrained me from committing an axe-murder or, worse, telling my father to shut off the constant flow of moralizing.

Before the celebratory dinner we walked on icy paths between the sack-covered rosebushes. ‘Your mother now has a man who comes to help with the garden,’ our father said ‘But it is worth the expense for the space to walk. She won’t hear of moving to somewhere with a smaller garden. So, Grant, what will you do with your sabbatical to ensure that you have a job to return to in eighteen months?’

‘I don’t know, Father. I’m rather enjoying idleness. And I have enough money saved never to work again, should I decide not to work.’

‘You can’t needle a retired diplomat,’ my father said. Roderick, who in my father’s presence is a totally different man, cast me a glare of reproach. ‘Seriously, Grant.’

‘Seriously, you are under a misapprehension. I am on full pay for the very good reason that Porsche expects me to return and work out my contract in the mutual expectation that at the end of it I shall be promoted and offered a new contract. What did you do on your sabbaticals?’

‘I took only one before I stopped teaching and entered government service. Your mother and I went to England where I researched and wrote my book about the relationship between Ricardo and Malthus.’

‘Mathematicians don’t write books unless they have discovered a new concept in physics. In any event, I’m a mathematician who works for an engineering corporation. Whatever I have invented that my employers consider fit for public consumption is written on my patents. If I blare out their secrets in a book I shall certainly have no job to return to.’

‘Do you want something to do meanwhile?’ Roderick asked, earning an emphatic nod from our father.

‘Of course he does,’ my mother said behind us. ‘No child of mine, however comfortable he may be financially, will ever be idle.’

‘I’m thirty years old, Mother, and an officially certified invalid. You might show a little compassion.’

‘Ha! You looked pretty nippy on the tennis court for a man with the plaster off his legs less than a fortnight. And there’s nothing wrong with your head, judging by the way you put down each of the beautiful and accomplished women I invited. I really don’t know how I shall explain to their mothers.’

Roderick sighed but not loudly enough for her to hear. ‘Mother, Grant doesn’t need matchmaking. He’s recently been disappointed in love. Give him some breathing space, eh?’

‘I don’t see why I should spend my serendipity time in places where committees of desperate mothers control the indoor tennis courts.’

Behind us my mother snorted but it is true. Try booking an indoor court in a college town and you will soon discover I am right. There are no mothers more desperate than those in academia whose daughters decide to follow the family profession. In Cambridge, Mass, unless he has a visible deformity, a bachelor of my age, gender, qualifications, connections and prospects might as well paint a target over his heart.

‘I was thinking of finding a space in the Southwest or some other sunny place and building up a motorbike,’ I said to Roderick. ‘I’m not needling you, Father. It is something I always wanted to do with my own hands. Besides, if the decision needs justifying, it is work-related in that sooner or later Porsche Engineering Services, the division in which I work, will be offered another motorcycle contract.’

‘As long as you know why you want to do whatever you decide on,’ my father said diplomatically. He would be back for another bite at that cherry; we all knew it.

‘The Great Conciliator strikes again,’ my mother said. After a round of GATT talks in which Father, against all expectation, managed to ram through a radical program of liberalization, he was misnamed The Great Conciliator by some ill-informed journalist. Mother, who of course knows better, pretends to believe it is a sound description of my father.

‘Oh, definitely,’ Roderick said. ‘Pack tonight, Grant. We’re off to California at dawn. I’ll drop you off back here in a couple of days.’

I was glad to escape Boston so I went with Roderick on his plane, a Boeing so big it has a boardroom table in the humpback.

Roderick too grew up in Berne where Father was American consul. He came home to take his Ph.D. at Harvard but all the rest of his education is European; he has worked all his life for the Simpresi who are naturalized Swiss of recent Sicilian origin. Roderick is more Swiss than the Swiss, even visually in a barely definable but collectively perfectly definite way: the suits and haberdashery so deliberately dull, the paper-thin watch without a maker’s name, the deliberately calm body language.

Roderick is a monster executive. A director of the Volkswagen Audi Group told me that every big European and American corporation with growth plans have him on their headhunters’ permanent short list. But it is rather difficult to find out what he does. His title is Special Assistant to Lydia Simpresi; it makes him sound like a briefcase carrier. Until about ten years ago he was the Herr Doktor Direktor, All Hemispheres: at that time he ran all the Simpresi marketing operations.

On his plane, after he waved away some younger clones of himself, I asked, ‘What is it that you do these days, Roderick?’

‘I wield infinite power without any responsibility.’ He gestured at the plane, an overwhelming symbol of power.

‘How?’

‘I sit in. I turn up. I go walkabout.’ He made it sound like a threat, at the very least a promise of consequences.

‘You supervise?’

‘Good heavens, no. I don’t have time for that. There are layers of professional managers who manage, boards of directors to supervise. At the very most I make a rare suggestion. If you’re in romantic mood you may call that inspiration. But mostly by just focusing my attention I bring an operation to a higher pitch.’

‘You manage by fear?’

‘Not at all. Simpresi is a paternalistic employer. Let’s just say that when I focus my attention people in the spotlight start wondering whether they can perhaps do better.’

‘But you must be responsible, even for as little as a rare suggestion.’

‘Now you’re sounding like Father.’

I chuckled dutifully. If you don’t laugh at Roderick’s jokes he explains them to you. The Swiss love him because he is so much like our father.

‘I have no explicit power to order anything. Of course, since I appointed the men at the head of the corporations in the first instance, they are inclined to believe in my wisdom. But we pay them for their judgment. If my suggestion is counterproductive they should not execute it.’

‘That’s amazing. Certainly not how an engineering firm like Porsche works. I imagine that Helmut and I are the least controlled employees but we are still responsible to Christoph. And he is most definitely liable for all our actions which, incidentally, is why I am on sick leave.’

‘I know an auto-engineering firm which works precisely like I do. In fact, more so, since Simpresi does it only at the top and at Armitage Cartwright Racing they do it at all levels.’

‘Oh, them. In Weissach we call them God’s Scofflaws,’ I said in German before switching back into English. ‘They get away with so much it sometimes seems as if the laws of physics—and manmade laws too—don’t apply to Sir Jack Armitage and his happy henchmen.’

In another arm of Porsche where they provide consulting services (as distinct from hard engineering) to automobile and other manufacturers, they also wonder how Armitage not only stays in business but grows richer every year. But I wasn’t about to tell Roderick that. He loves Armitage, whose racing cars have been a key element in the marketing of Simpresi products for over thirty years, ever since he was an intern with Simpresi, given a vacation job because Father helped old Signor Simpresi find a partner with a bottling plant in Louisiana, the first in what is now a huge industry. In any event Roderick is much better qualified than I am to judge the business acumen of Armitage.

Roderick laughed. ‘You can’t expect a bunch of Germans to approve of Jack and his guys. It takes a Swiss of Sicilian extraction to appreciate the steadfast purpose of Jack Armitage and his partners.’

‘My particular Germans surely appreciate all the races Armitage have won with our engines and their contract for us to produce engines for their road cars.’

‘How much have you worked with Armitage?’

‘On and off over the years, hmm… Perhaps as much as a man-year, say two hundred days in ten years. Their design office always asks for me.’

‘Because of your work on the engine cooling systems for their Le Mans car?’

‘I didn’t realize you know the details.’ I certainly never told him. Porsche works for many manufacturers who prefer to claim they designed the entire car themselves. We guarantee absolute anonymity. But Armitage doesn’t care who knows we designed their engines or that they hire us when they create a bottleneck for themselves: too little time and too few engineers to meet a deadline they recklessly set too close.

‘Ludo dell’ Mira came to ski with me. He told me.’

Ludo is the Chief Designer of the Armitage cars, a super aerodynamicist, an elegant man with an elegant mind.

‘The cooling system work was done a long time ago by a big team on which I was the most junior skivvy, hardly more than a trainee. Our people still update the cooling systems on the Armitage Le Mans cars but that’s a routine job so I don’t have anything to do with it.’

‘Ludo says you treat a minor problem with the same respect as a major one.’

‘Everything’s connected to everything else. A minor problem always has complications. They can bite you in the ankle. But why not use the same interconnectedness to turn major problems minor?’

‘So what specifically happened?’

‘What impressed Ludo and Piero Agnelli, their Technical Director, was a tiny bit of lateral thinking. They were faced on their production car with a major redesign of the body structure—which is very expensive to test and certify—to fit the bigger exhaust system required by a more powerful engine. I was sent with the team from Porsche. We made a factory inspection, simply to find suitable working space for ourselves.’

‘What did you personally do?’

‘I wandered onto an assembly floor because it suddenly shot into my mind that nowhere in the briefing sheets did I read that anyone made a physical inspection of the car. There was about an inch of unused space beside the existing exhaust that didn’t show on the plans. With a bit of wriggling this space turned out to be just enough. So a major redesign and re-certification headache turned into a minor repackaging job.’

‘Ludo makes it sound a big deal.’

‘It was—for Armitage. They have a waiting list stretching into years for those cars. Not having to shut down the production line for recertification of altered stressed parts in the monocoque saved them probably half their income for that year.’

‘Ah!’

In Los Angeles I sat in on Roderick’s meeting. The conversation with film executives about placing Simpresi products in movies was conducted entirely by the president of Simpresi’s advertising agency and his clones. Roderick said not word though I heard from advertising agency executives that ‘Mr Scarfe is concerned,’ that ‘Mr Scarfe is not impressed,’ that ‘Mr Scarfe believes more prominence should be given.’

The advertising boss rode to the airport with us. ‘Can’t we find a better class of film than this bubblegum rubbish?’ Roderick asked him.

‘It’s what they make, Roderick. It’s targeted on our market and it’s relatively cheap. But if you—‘

‘No, I don’t think we want to interpose personal taste in logical media selection decisions. Do you?’

‘Of course not. If a better quality movie comes along shall I offer more to secure it for us?’

‘Whatever it takes.’

‘Stella Ramsey has two quality films coming up. She resists product placements. You know her.’

‘She used to make sports videos which we distribute.’ Roderick pursed his lips. ‘All right, I’ll call her and ask her to give you a hearing.’

‘Amazing how the New York hucksters look down on the Los Angeles hucksters,’ Roderick said as we stood beside the car at the airport watching the ad-men’s plane head back for New York. ‘Let’s go play tennis.’

One of his assistants said, ‘The helicopter is just over there. We can walk.’

Because of the noise we couldn’t talk in the helicopter. We flew north as far as Santa Barbara and then east into the mountains. As we descended I looked down on a massive oval racetrack set into a bowl in the mountain. The oval is so big its infield contains a whole big road racing course. Inside this again is set a big freestyle steering pad plus a set of concentric circles bigger than those at Porsche’s test track at Weissach. Most amazingly of all, right down the middle of this oval runs a colonnade of colossal classical Greek pillars with vines set in huge tubs growing over the top for shade. The scale of the colonnade I judged by the twin tennis courts beside it and an Olympic size pool being built a little further along: it appeared to be nearly a mile long.

We landed on a pad where two medevac helicopters stood with their rotors stationary. It is clearly an operating test or racing establishment though not open to the public because there is no public seating, just a little review stand for at most 200 people.

At Weissach the track is cramped and dangerous because it was built in a suburb which allows no room for expansion at a time when even a fine sports car was thirty miles per hour slower than today’s better executive cars. Without blinking again I can name five engineers at Weissach who will sacrifice their first-born for a facility like this one.

High on the oval stock cars circulated at 209mph according to a big-screen speed trap at the end of the main straightway. The infield track was in use by a single yellow Porsche 911.

‘Don’t tell me. This impressive facility belongs to Armitage and that’s Thrill Morgan’s car.’ I’ve worked with her on and off at Woking in England when she was the senior development engineer and latterly Chief Engineer of Armitage. She always drives a bright sunflower-yellow Porsche.

Roderick pumped his ears. ‘She’s become the directing partner of Armitage, Jack Armitage’s successor.’

‘It doesn’t seem to have changed anything. She’s still racing.’ In February she won the 24 Hours of Daytona for sports cars. Thrill Morgan also has wins in the Monte Carlo Rally and the Monaco Grand Prix plus multiple class wins and an outright victory at Le Mans. She is the most versatile driver who ever lived and a superb engineer besides.

‘There’s no need to change anything. Armitage is winning.’

The yellow Porsche stopped by us to drop off a rangy, hawkfaced boy in his early twenties.

‘This is Rafael Antonio Ferenghetti, Operations Director of Armitage America—and a tennis hustler. Call him Raf. My brother, Grant.’

‘We have whites to fit you, Grant,’ Raf said, shaking my hand. ‘Since, according to our cheat sheet on you, you recently broke both your legs, we’ll give you an easy start. My blind sister Anna and I against you and Roderick?’

‘Ha!’ Roderick said. ‘Anna and I have come to an arrangement. She plays only with me.’

We climbed aboard a golf cart.

‘Civilian cars are not allowed inside the track,’ said Raf, ‘except that Thrill’s car, being taken to be washed and gassed up, is driven on an unused part of the track by anyone who wants to feel like a racing driver.’

I was already feeling quite as at home here as Roderick clearly is.

In the locker room there was a locker with my name on the card. The whites fitted and I liked the well-balanced heft of the racket Raf gave me. ‘Nice. Whose is it?’

‘Yours, now.’

‘Lend me one of your old rackets instead.’

‘It’s on expenses, Grant. Enjoy it with Armitage’s compliments.’

Outside Thrill Morgan kissed my cheek. She’s a slender woman three years older than me, with a triangular face and huge violet eyes. I imagine being an oil-and-newspaper-heiress gave her a good start in life but in a business that is the epitome of male chauvinism she rose by talent, working harder than anyone else, and pure will-power. Her patience with incompetents is about three microns long, an invisible quantity. ‘Play with me against Roderick and Anna. If you tire, Raf will relieve you. Watch Anna’s body shots.’

Anna is a smoothly muscled, well-tanned woman of about thirty, much older and six inches shorter than her little brother. Her mirror-black glasses followed me. ‘Nah, Grant has nice vibes. He’s safe from me.’

She too is a hustler. She hugs the net. I closed on her, imagining that I could use my superior height to outreach her. Her first return beat me and smashed into my chest right over my heart. I fell flat on my back, more out of surprise than hurt though my skin burned.

Even when I played on the baseline, Anna hit me twice more, the second time hard enough to wind me. I played on grittily. Thrill is both powerful and graceful but she isn’t quite good enough to outplay both Roderick and Anna with so little help from me.

‘Are you generally vicious or do you have something specific against me?’ I asked Anna when we walked off. She appears to sense by sonics or some other kinesthetic sense where the ball and opponents are: she clearly hit me deliberately. I was so pissed off I didn’t care that Armitage obviously built and operate their tennis courts for the benefit of my ball freak brother Roderick.

‘Just checking what you’re made of. You want a game of singles?’

‘Sure. For a handicap, I serve first?’

‘Why not.’

My first serve would have aced any other player. It hit her full in the stomach. As intended.

‘Jesus, Raf, do something,’ a woman’s voice said at the side of the court. I looked. A handsome blonde woman with a pageboy cut.

‘Anna’s a big girl,’ said the man who was introduced as her fiancé, Patrick, a film stuntman.

Anna, returning my ball, whacked me on the chest again.

‘Harry means to protect Grant,’ Raf laughed.

As a result of paying more attention to staying out the way of Anna’s vicious strokes than my returns I went down six-love, six-love. ‘That would be a disgraceful performance even with your legs still in plaster,’ Anna said brightly as we walked off.

‘What can I do to bribe you?’

She grinned up at me. ‘Now we’re talking. I have a Porsche my father gave me for my 29th birthday. If I bring it to Germany can I drive on your track at Weissach? Raf lets me drive it on the oval, flat out.’

‘Raf does?’ He must be out of his mind. Flat out on a banked oval this big in even a base Porsche would be around 175mph. Imagine an endless straight road running slightly downhill: that is the effect of an oval with long enough straights and properly banked, properly wide turns, just like the huge oval in the center of which we now stood.

‘Sure. How about it?’

‘I don’t have that kind of authority. When I want to drive on the track I stand in line like everyone else.’

‘Well, at least you aren’t as insanely competitive as Roderick.’

Raf raised an eyebrow at me. I had to grin. I hoped my ribs weren’t cracked by this insanely competitive blind woman. ‘Thanks for your concern,’ I said to the blonde woman.

‘I wanted you to stop bullying Anna,’ she said crisply.

‘Harriet Bingham, meet Grant Scarfe,’ Raf said. ‘We call her Harry.’

She is a tall girl with the squared-off shoulders of a professional athlete. She wore the same team gear as the Armitage crowd who hadn’t changed for tennis. It consists of white leather basketball boots, cream linen slacks, a natural silk poloneck shirt and a red bomber jacket of soft leather. Hers was plain everyday wear, without advertising. I have a kit like it, with advertising, issued to me when I worked the Cartwright-Armitage pit at Le Mans four years ago.

The outfit emphasized Harry’s slender ankles, tapered legs and narrow waist.

‘Oh, I think I did the bullying,’ Anna said. ‘Come sit here by me, Grant. Tell me who I suck up to for a ride on the Weissach track.’

‘Just let me put a list of my enemies in order of who I hate most.’

Later there was food. It was an impromptu party. Roderick and his sidekicks moved easily in the Armitage crowd. If any specific business was being done here I didn’t notice. Roderick may have been flying the flag, showing interest in associates important to Simpresi, or he may have been on an inspection trip for Lydia Simpresi. Or he may simply have come to play tennis with keen competitors. Wives and children appeared.

‘What do you test?’ I asked a young man who introduced himself only as ‘Richie, the test driver’.

‘What we race ourselves out of here, NASCAR stock cars and Indy Racing League open wheelers. We also test Le Mans type endurance sports-racers for races in Europe and here