bet

wedge. He shook his head, and Dora elbowed him.
“You don’t approve?” she asked.
“It’s not that,” he said, as if carefully choosing his words. “It’s just not my kind of driving. I like handling; I like to slip through the pack like—like I was a fish and they were the water. Or I was dancing on the track—”
She had to smile. “Are you quoting that, or did you not know that was how they described my French and Monte Carlo Grand Prix wins?”
His eyes widened. “I didn’t know—” he stammered, blushing. “Honest! I—”
She patted his shoulder, maternally. “That’s fine, Paul. It’s a natural analogy. Although I bet you don’t know where I got my training.”
He grinned. “Bet I do! Dodging bombs! I read you were an ambulance driver in Italy during the war. Is that when you met Ettore Bugatti?”
She nodded, absently, her attention on the cars roaring by. Was there a faint sound of strain in her engine? For a moment her nerves chilled.
But no, it was just another acceleration; a little one, just enough to blow Jimmy around the curve ahead of the Mercedes.
Her immediate reaction was annoyance; he shouldn’t have had to power his way out of that, he should have been able to drive his way out. He was putting more stress on the engine than she was happy with.
Then she mentally slapped her own hand. She wasn’t the driver, he was.
But now she knew how Ettore Bugatti felt when she took the wheel in that first Monte Carlo Grand Prix.
“You know, Bugatti was one of my passengers,” she said, thinking aloud, without looking to see if Paul was listening. “He was with the Resistance in the Italian Alps. You had to be as much a mechanic as a driver, those ambulances were falling apart half the time, and he saw me doing both before I got him to the field hospital.”
Sometimes, she woke up in the middle of the night, hearing the bombs falling, the screams of the attack-fighters strafing the road— Seeing the road disintegrate in a flash of fire and smoke behind her, in front of her; hearing the moans of the wounded in her battered converted bread-truck.
All too well, she remembered those frantic moments when getting the ambulance