Mercedes Lackey - Fiddler Fair (anthology)

She couldn’t see Jimmy’s expression behind the faceplate, but she did see the muscles in his jaw tense. “So they’re going to just give me the win?” he shouted back.

That was not how Jimmy wanted his first Grand Prix to end—and she didn’t blame him.

“Jimmy—they decided you’re the best out there! Not only your peers, but mine! Are you going to throw that kind of vote away?” It was the only way she would win this argument, she sensed it. And she sensed as his mood turned to grudging agreement. “All right,” he said finally. “But you tell them this—” She rapped him on the top of the helmet. “No, you listen. They said to tell you that if you get by Ford early enough, they’re going to do the same for Giorgio with the old Ferrari and Peter for Citroen. And as many more as they can squeeze by.”

She sensed his mood lighten again, although he didn’t answer. But by then the crew was done, and she stood back as he roared back out onto the track.

When he took the track, there were ten laps to go—but five went by without anyone being able to force a break for Jimmy, not even when the Ford wedge lapped slower cars. She had to admit that she had seldom seen smoother driving, but it was making her blood boil to watch Jimmy coming up behind them, and being forced to hold his place.

Three laps to go, and there were two more cars wrecked, one of them from Citroen. Two laps. One.

Flag lap.

Suddenly, on the back stretch, an opening, as one of the Ford drivers tired and backed off a little. And Jimmy went straight for it.

Dora was on the top of the fire-wall, without realizing she had jumped up there, screaming at the top of her lungs, with half the crew beside her. Ford tried to close up the wedge, but it was too late.

Now it was just Jimmy and the lead Ford, neck and neck—down the backstretch, through the chicane, then on the home run for the finish line.

Dora heard his engine howling; heard strain that hadn’t been there before. Surely if she heard it, so would he. He should have saved the engine early on—if he pushed it, he’d blow the engine, he had to know that—

He pushed it. She heard him drop a gear, heard the engine scream in protest—

And watched the narrow-bodied, lithe steel Bugatti surge across the finish-line a bare nose ahead of the Ford, engine afire and trailing a stream of flame and smoke that looked for all the world like a victory ­banner.

Dora was the first to reach him, before he’d even gotten out of the car. While firefighters doused the vehicle with impartial generosity, she reached down and yanked off his helmet.

She seized both his ears and gave him the kind of kiss only the notorious Isadora Duncan, toast of two continents, could have delivered—a kiss with every year of her considerable amatory experience behind it.

“That’s for the win,” she said, as he sat there, breathless, mouth agape and for once completely without any kind of response.

Then she grasped his shoulders and shook him until his teeth rattled.

“And that’s for blowing up my engine, you idiot!” she screamed into his face.

By then, the crowd was on him, hauling him bodily out of the car and hoisting him up on their shoulders to ride to the winner’s circle.

Dora saw to it that young Paul was part of that privileged party, as a reward for his fire-fighting and his listening. And when the trophy had been presented and the pictures were all taken, she made sure he got up to the front.

Jimmy recognized him, as Jimmy would, being the kind of man he was. “Hey!” he said, as the Race Queen hung on his arm and people thrust champagne bottles at him, “You made it!”

Paul grinned, shyly. Dora felt pleased for him, as he shoved the pass and a pen at Jimmy. “Listen, I know it’s awful being asked—”

“Awful? Hell no!” Jimmy grabbed the pen and pass. “Have you made up your mind about what you want to do yet? Acting, or whatever?”

Paul shook his head, and Dora noticed then what she should have noticed earlier—that his bright blue eyes and Jimmy’s were very similar. And if he isn’t a heartbreaker yet, she thought wryly, he will be.

“I still don’t know,” he said.

“Tell you what,” Jimmy said, pausing a moment to kiss another beauty queen for the camera, “you make a pile of money in the movies, then go into racing. Get a good mentor like Dora.”

And then he finished the autograph with a flourish—and handed it back to the young man.

To Paul Newman , who can be my driver when I take over the chief mechanic slot from Dora , best of luck.

And the familiar autograph, James Dean.

Pain was a curtain between Lawrence and the world; pain was his world, there was nothing else that mattered. “Take him out of here, you fools! You’ve spoiled him!” Lawrence heard Bey Nahi’s exclamation of disgust dimly; and it took his pain-shattered mind a moment to translate it from Turkish to English.

Spoiled him; as if he was a piece of meat. Well, now he was something less than that.

He could not reply; he could only retch and sob for mercy. There was no part of him that was not in excruciating pain.

Pain. All his life, since he had been a boy, pain had been his secret terror and obsession. Now he was drugged with it, a too-great force against which he could not retain even a shred of dignity.

As he groveled and wept, conversation continued on above his head. There were remonstrations on the part of the soldiers, but the Bey was adamant—and angry. Most of the words were lost in the pain, but he caught the sense of a few. “Take him out—” and “Leave him for the jackals.”

So, the Bey was not to keep him until he healed. Odd. After Nahi’s pawing and fondling, and swearing of desire, Lawrence would have thought—

“You stay.” That, petulantly, to the corporal, the youngest and best-looking of the lot. Coincidentally, he was the one who had been the chiefest and most inventive of the torturers. He had certainly been the one that had enjoyed his role the most. “Take that out,” the Bey told the others. Lawrence assumed that Nahi meant him.

If he had been capable of appreciating anything, he would have appreciated that—the man who had wrought the worst on his flesh, should take his place in the Bey’s bed.

The remaining two soldiers seized him by the arms. Waves of pain rolled up his spine and into his brain, where they crashed together, obliterating thought. He couldn’t stand up; he couldn’t even get his feet under him. His own limbs no longer obeyed him.

They dragged him outside; the cold air on his burning flesh made him cry out again, but this time no one laughed or struck him. Once outside, his captors were a little gentler with him; they draped his arms over their shoulders, and half-carried him, letting him rest most of his weight on them. The nightmarish journey seemed to last a lifetime, yet it was only to the edge of the town.