Street Sleeper

Two

Ishmael’s Ten Prerequisites for a traveller.

A good heart — yes, it’s that simple.

A few clean pairs of underpants. (What if he had an accident?)

One of those polystyrene cooler things in which you put a little plastic container that’s been in a freezer overnight, that keeps things cool for up to twelve hours. (Actually, he soon realized this was not one of his better ideas since you’re seldom in a position to put the little plastic container in a freezer when you spend most of your nights sleeping in lay-bys.)

Canned goods. Fruit cocktail, corned beef, smoked mussels, steak and kidney pudding, guavas, baked beans with miniature pork sausages, artichoke hearts, Royal Game soup, cling peaches, mandarin segments, Irish stew, and many others.

A tin-opener. (He thought of everything.)

A blue leather motorcycle suit. (This wasn’t strictly a prerequisite, but he felt it added to his image and it was in a sale at Lewis Leathers. So far he hadn’t had the nerve to wear it.)

A copy of How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive — A Manual of Step-by-step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot. This is the most thoroughly ‘right-on’ car manual the world has ever seen, its good advice includes tying back your long hair before tampering with the fan-belt. (Ishmael couldn’t understand it.)

A vibrator with four interchangeable heads — three of which he couldn’t envisage any possible use for, but perhaps he would encounter some warm and wonderful soulmate with whom to explore the possibilities.

A copy of Ian Fleming’s The Man with the Golden Gun. (He knew that it would have been more appropriate to have had some Herman Hesse but it was the only book on the rack at the Watford Gap Services that he liked the look of.)

A mind that listens. And a mind that hears. (OK, eleven prerequisites.)

Renata Caswell is writing the editorial for next month’s Cult Car magazine.

‘Why me?’ she has already protested. ‘Isn’t the editor supposed to be in charge of writing the editorial? Or am I being too pedantic?’

‘You’re being too pedantic,’ says Terry, the editor.

She slides a new sheet of paper into her manual typewriter and tries again.

We here at Cult Car believe we cater for the true motoring enthusiast, the true car lover, and we set no hard and fast rules about what kind of car you’re allowed to love. Oh, sure, it’s easy to love your Jensen, your Austin-Healey, your E-Type, and we’ve run articles on all those models; but we know that our readers are just as likely to be enthusiastic about Austin A40^s, Morris Travellers, even 2CVs. We aim to satisfy those readers too. What we care about is cars with style, cars with soul. Why, take this issue…

§

And then she stops. It isn’t easy to take this issue. The freelancers haven’t come up with the goods yet. They’ve been promised one article about a man in Cumbria who has spent several years’ wages restoring a Vauxhall Velox to showroom condition and beyond. They’re hoping for three thousand words on a Coventry man who claims to have put a Rover V8 into a Datsun Cherry. Those who work on Cult Car and who are of a technical frame of mind have variously claimed that this is madness, suicide and impossible. So maybe the three thousand words will never appear. There is a whisper that a Lamborghini Countach is to be delivered so that Cult Car can take it for a test-drive, but this is the kind of magazine where nobody ever believes whispers. Then they’ve been promised a definitive piece on the Ford Edsel, but Terry swears the Edsel is old hat. Renata is not so particular. She is only the ‘staff writer’ after all. She is paid an hourly rate. She seems to spend most of her working life turning press releases into copy, sometimes improving the grammar, but most often her creative effort comes to no more than retyping.

♦

Nineteen thirty-three, Berlin, Dr Ferdinand Porsche arrives for his four o’clock appointment with Adolf Hitler. He knows that they will be discussing ‘motoring topics’ and that Herr Hitler has a special interest in small car engineering, a thing that Porsche has worked at desultorily throughout his career. What surprises Dr Porsche is just how specific Herr Hitler’s ideas are.

Hitler is not interested in theory. He wants a car designed, or rather he has designed it himself, in his head, and now he just needs someone to concern themselves with the dreary practicalities of production.

The car is to appeal to the German working-class family man, must therefore be able to carry two adults and three children, must be capable of forty miles to the gallon, must be able to sustain high speeds for long periods on the autobahnen, and since the working man will have no garage facilities it must be easy to maintain and must be air-cooled to withstand the rigours of the German winter.

All this Dr Porsche can do, but at a price. Adolf Hitler names his price: one thousand Marks — about fifty pounds.

♦

Ishmael woke up in a lay-by. He had slept on the back seat of the Beetle. The windows were steamed up. He had twinges in various remote parts of his body. His feet were hot and sticky in his shoes. He had four days’ growth of beard and a mouth like a holy man’s loincloth.

Still, he thought, it was good to be alive.

What he needed to set himself up was a good English breakfast — bacon, sausages, eggs, mushrooms, fried bread, all moving around in a sea of grease.

He drove back to the motorway. The next services were twelve miles away.

Enlightenment ate up the miles with all the eagerness he would soon be applying to his breakfast. He arrived at the services and parked. He went in through the swing doors. It was early, yet already there were kids playing on the electronic games in the foyer.

Ishmael was saddened.

♦

Dr Porsche, and for that matter the rest of the German motor industry, know that Hitler’s plan is more or less impossible. In England William Morris has managed to produce a highly austere and denuded Morris Minor, but even that costs £100.

Porsche must have been aware that even in 1933 one did not tell Adolf Hitler that he was crazy, but he may also have enjoyed the challenge of the impossible, perhaps it may even have been that Porsche and Hitler genuinely shared a benevolent dream of mass mobility and freedom.

♦

‘You know another reason why the Edsel was such a failure?’ asks Terry.

‘Surprise me,’ Renata replies.

‘Because the automatic didn’t have a gear-lever. It had bloody push buttons. Men and women, they all like to get something thick and meaty in their hand.’

Renata knows she does. She is thirty-five, still willing in flesh and spirit, still single, still an enthusiast for fast cars and fast men; and still, though who knows for how much longer, the owner of a driving licence. It has been endorsed a couple of times, which hasn’t stopped her driving very fast and occasionally very dangerously, and she does have a clever mouth that runs away from her when talking to fuzz. Her brain is telling her to use her charm while her mouth is calling the nice policeman a stunted fascist.

At the same time she realizes that a motoring journalist who has been banned from driving is a luxury that Cult Car would probably force itself to do without.

‘I need a drink,’ she says.

‘And I need that editorial,’ says Terry.

♦

A stop on the motorway, Ishmael reasoned, ought to be a chance to stop and reflect on the finer things, a chance to sniff the air, to look at the grass. Yet here in the foyer of the services were kids whose only break from the road was a chance to dice with electronic imitations of death.

Ishmael started to get angry.

What base form of philistinism offers games of death as entertainment? Why couldn’t service stations have foyers full of Blake’s paintings? There need be no musak — there could be Bach and Bartok playing. Travellers could stand in informal groups and discuss art and philosophy.

He went to a tall youth playing one of the games and tried to explain all this to him. He was about seventeen, skinny, failing to grow a moustache. He had on a studded leather jacket, his breath smelled of juicy fruit gum and he had a ghetto-blaster at his feet.

At first he didn’t seem to catch Ishmael’s drift so Ishmael held him firmly by the shoulder and tried to take him into the clear morning air where the point could be made with fewer distractions.

They didn’t get as far as the clear morning air. The moment Ishmael placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder he sprang from the machine and confronted Ishmael in a martial-arts pose.

‘Don’t ever lay a finger on me,’ he said very loudly. ‘Don’t you ever touch me, you wanker. Nobody ever touches me.’

Ishmael was unsure of his next move. A crowd of youthful low-life was gathering round them. Someone shouted, ‘Go on son, hit him. Don’t let him get away with it.’

‘You see,’ Ishmael said after some consideration, ‘violence begets violence. You play on that infernal machine and then you transfer that mindless set of violent reactions to real life. You wouldn’t have reacted like this if you’d just spent the last ten minutes contemplating Picasso’s ‘Weeping Woman’.’

‘Go on, stick one on him. He’s yellow and he talks funny.’

The youth relaxed slightly but the general body language still spoke of alert aggression.

‘What’s your name?’ Ishmael asked him.

‘Davey.’

‘Mine’s Ishmael.’

There was a whoop of derision from the crowd. It came from the person who had been egging Davey on. He looked old enough to know better. He was wearing a yellow cardigan.

‘I think you must be tired of living,’ he said to Ishmael. ‘I reckon this boy’s got deadly weapons for hands.’

‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ Ishmael snapped. ‘He seems to have dead matter for brains.’

‘You shouldn’t talk to a martial-arts expert like that,’ said yellow cardigan.

‘Be reasonable,’ Ishmael said. ‘I put my hand on somebody’s shoulder to show him that there’s a world of truth and beauty waiting for him out there and he reacts like a brute beast. What happened to reason? What happened to human fellowship?’

Davey shifted uneasily from foot to foot.

‘A lot of people forget there’s a large spiritual dimension to the martial arts,’ he said.

He slipped his hands into the side pockets of his jacket. Ishmael wondered briefly if he was going to pull a knife. The crowd looked at him expectantly.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘you might have a point. Come on.’

He jerked his head to indicate that Ishmael should follow him outside. They went together.

♦

Terry is probably ten years Renata’s junior. He has been performing major surgery on cars since he was ten or eleven, been driving them since long before then, and he has one A-level, though admittedly it is in English.

Renata, by contrast, has an English degree and aborted careers in advertising, radio journalism and arts administration behind her. She wrote her first motoring article after a holiday in Mexico, three years ago.

As your flight touches down in Mexico, as you put aside your copy of The Boys from Brazil, and as you gaze out of your aircraft window, your first thought is that you have landed in the centre of a Mexican Volkswagen enthusiasts’ meeting.

Teams of cleaners, mechanics, security men and customs officials are ferried to and fro in Beetles that would be thrown out of the average English scrapyard for making the place look untidy.

All the taxis in Mexico City are Beetles, or at least nearly Beetles. Most of them lack what you would take to be some vital part — like wings, or a driver’s door, or lights, indicators and windscreen. They are held together, not so much with string and chewing gum, more with frayed bootlaces and spit, but under those battered, mutilated, sometimes barely recognizable, exteriors there beats the unmistakable throb of Doc Porsche’s favourite flat-four engine…

And so on. She met an American with a good suntan and a good camera who took slides of the more spectacularly ruined cars, and on her return to England she sold the article to Classic Motoring magazine.

♦

Ishmael and Davey stood in the car-park. There were hills and trees in the distance. There was a grass verge.

‘England,’ said Davey. ‘God’s own country.’

Ishmael agreed. He asked where Davey was travelling to and discovered he was going to his married sister in Stoke. A friend of his mother was giving him a lift. The friend was still in the Gents. Davey didn’t like his married sister much but it was better than being at home with his mother.

‘I think I begin to understand,’ Ishmael said. ‘This violence you express towards the world, be it vented on an electronic game or on an innocent stranger who tries talking to you about higher realities, this is surely a displaced feeling of anger and resentment that you have for your mother.’

Davey thought long and hard.

‘No,’ he said, ‘I think it’s just a phase I’m going through.’

♦

Herr von Opel, head of the largest motor manufacturer in Germany, is present at the signing of the contract whereby Ferdinand Porsche agrees to produce three prototypes, one of which will be developed into the people’s car. Von Opel turns to Porsche and sneers, ‘What a wonderful contract. Ten months of highly paid futile labour, at the end of which you write a simple memorandum stating that the project is impossible, a fact that those of us with the least intelligence are aware of now. How I wish we all had such wonderful contracts.’

Porsche is furious, and that insult to his integrity concentrates the mind wonderfully. Or does he know that he is to be the director of a dream sequence in which everything is possible, except the bargain price? Perhaps the war, with its reshuffling of moral and financial values, will come as a welcome relief. What is unafford-able in times of peace becomes priceless in war, the restaurant menu without prices.

♦

Just to demonstrate good-will Ishmael let Davey show him how to play one of the electronic games, and Ishmael did seem to have a talent for it. First you’re driving a futuristic racing car round an intergalactic grand prix circuit, but at intervals the way is blocked by alien monsters and you have to shoot them out of the way, but at other intervals the monsters mutate, you find your weapons are useless and you have to plunge the car into hyperspace. Ishmael got a higher score than Davey. Then Davey’s mother’s friend came out of the Gents and Davey prepared to leave.

The fellow in the yellow cardigan had watched all this with disapproval.

‘I still think you should have stuck one on him, kid,’ he said to Davey.

‘Hey, do me a favour will you?’ Davey replied. ‘Piss off.’

Yellow cardigan took out his frustration on a pinball machine. Ishmael went into the dining-room for breakfast. He was feeling damn good at having beaten Davey on the machine. Then as he ate it slowly dawned on him that the little bastard might just possibly have let him win. He felt suddenly hollow.

♦

The American with the good camera was called Dick and he insisted on taking Renata to a Mexican live sex show, not that he had to insist very hard. They envisaged a dimly lit stage spread with straw, a big-thighed Señorita fellating a burro. The reality was somewhat different. They sat in a nightclub with expensive drinks in their hands, and watched topless girls dancing behind a smeared glass screen. This went on for longer than anyone could possibly have wanted until Dick asked the waiter when the sex show was going to start. He was told that he had been watching it for the last thirty-five minutes. There were brief, loud protests and a scuffle before Dick and Renata found themselves on the street again, waiters yelling incomprehensible threats after them into the night. A small boy had been watching the episode and asked them if they wanted to watch his mother in a lesbian show. They turned him down. He looked hurt.

‘There might have been another article in it,’ Renata said later. ‘An expose, something radical, compassionate.’

Or it might have been another rip-off.

She began freelancing on motoring topics with an off-beat or feminine angle. ‘Beauties Who Aren’t Afraid of Beasts; Renata Caswell talks to four women who drive hard to handle macho machines.’ You know the sort of thing.

Then came the offer of a job as staff writer on Cult Car. The magazine had been running for just six months, trying to capture the market sector that likes cars but isn’t made up of boy-racers or Porsche-fanciers. It was even hoped that some women might buy it. Renata couldn’t see it lasting more than another six months, and even if it did she certainly hoped she wouldn’t still be with it.

♦

It was a sadder but wiser man who ate his English breakfast that morning. Yes, thought Ishmael, in many ways life is like a computer game, but he didn’t go into details.

He thought again of body language. You see a youth standing in front of you in a martial-arts pose, teeth set, nostrils flared, right away it says aggression. You see a girl in a magazine — legs splayed, eyes rolled in mock ecstasy, immediately the body language says, ‘I’m only doing this for the money.’

Ishmael was lingering over his pot of tea. The place was crowded yet nobody would come and sit next to him. Their body language was telling him something.

He smelled. It was time to do some laundry.

He had always hated laundrettes, not that it mattered much since Debby’s mother washed most of his clothes. He suddenly missed Debby, but there was nothing for it. He drove along the motorway until he saw a huddle of new houses just off the road. He took the next exit and drove back. He found a clean, smart laundrette and parked outside.

He would put on his blue leathers and wash all his other clothes. There weren’t many. He scrabbled about on the back seat and changed. This was not easy, not in a Volkswagen Beetle, not parked outside a laundrette in the middle of a new housing estate. He was grateful for the smoked glass.

♦

The desire to belong to something more important and greater than ourselves is a very natural, very understandable and very dangerous one.

Within the Nazi Party there were so many groups and sub-groups to which one might belong. The fifteen- to eighteen-year-olds had the Hitler Youth, the younger still had the Deutsches Jungvolk. Girls could join the Bund Deutscher Maedel, women the NS Frauenschaft. There were Nazi organizations for doctors and teachers and civil servants. There was even a place for artists in the Nazi Kulturbund. There was room for everyone. Everyone could be included, more or less. And if you wanted to take part in almost any leisure activity, be it soccer, or chess, or skiing, it was necessary to be a member of a club which was itself a member of, and was directed by, an organization called Kraft-durch-Freude — Strength Through Joy.

♦

Ishmael stuffed his dirty clothes into a pillow-case and entered the laundrette.

A fellow in the corner approached him. Ishmael could tell right away he was not ordinary. He was smoking a wet cigar, which Ishmael found anti-social in the confines of the laundrette, but he didn’t complain. He wanted to avoid conflict, at least for the next half hour or so.

The man looked sixty, had grey hair cut into a young style with a Nero-type fringe. He was overweight but tall enough and big-boned enough to avoid being gross. He wore a blazer and a couple of big gold rings. Ishmael’s mother would have called him a fine figure of a man.

He said to Ishmael, ‘Do you want to share my washer?’

‘Pardon?’

‘I see you don’t have much laundry, and neither do I. Would you care to put your things in with mine? Save money.’

It seemed like a good idea at the time. Hell, thought Ishmael, you hear so much about ‘English reserve’ yet here he was, a complete stranger, being treated with almost Mediterranean good humour by one of the locals.

‘When you’re a single man you don’t ever seem to create enough laundry for these big machines.’

Ishmael agreed with him. It was only small talk. They weren’t having a real sharing of ideas as yet but he had to start somewhere.

♦

There were those, too, who might become members of the SA — Sturm-Abteilung, a storm-trooper, brown shirt. They were close to Hitler, they had their own martyr, Horst Wessel, gone to live in a slum with a prostitute in order to dedicate himself to the Nazi cause, and murdered by communists. But their image was bad — drinkers, street brawlers, homosexuals.

William L. Shirer writes, in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich:

Many of its top leaders, beginning with its chief, Roehm, were notorious homosexual perverts. Lieutenant Edmund Heines, who led the Munich SA, was not only a homosexual but a convicted murderer. These two and dozens of others quarrelled and feuded as only men of unnatural sexual inclinations, with their peculiar jealousies, can.

Oh really? But it is not surprising that Peter Baldung, a young man of Aryan appearance and with the desire to belong to a winning side, is delighted when instead of becoming a mere SA he can become a Schützstaffel, SS, a member of Hitler’s personal army, with their smart distinctive uniform and their oath of personal loyalty to the Führer. Peter feels he has come a long way since he was that small boy who pressed his face against the glass of the Benz showroom in Munich all those years ago.

♦

‘Love the leather suit,’ the man said.

‘It’s the first time I’ve worn it, actually. It’s a bit warm.’

‘My name’s Howard by the way.’

‘Call me Ishmael.’

The man looked puzzled at first.

‘Oh, as in Moby Dick.’

And then he laughed in a way that Ishmael found incomprehensible and a bit coarse.

They sat for a while and watched the laundry go round.

‘It’s very outlaw.’

Ishmael assumed he was still talking about the leather suit.

‘It was in a sale.’

They continued in this disconnected way for some time until, out of the blue, Howard said, ‘Look, do you give or take?’

At last, Ishmael thought, they were getting down to some spiritual basics.

‘I do both,’ he said. ‘Naturally. It seems to me that if there’s one basic thing that would make the world a happier place it’s a genuine bit of give and take.’

Ishmael got the impression that Howard had stopped listening, an impression confirmed when he jumped to his feet and started to pace the laundrette.

‘Look,’ he said in a loud whisper, ‘my place is just round the corner. Let’s go and have a stiff gin and tonic.’

Gin and tonic at ten in the morning! This was real Bohemianism. Poor old Debby. She thought two Baby-chams and a bag of pork scratchings were the first steps on the road to becoming an absinthe drinker. His mother too. If he’d suggested anything more extreme than a glass of sherry on Christmas morning she’d have thought he was the Antichrist. How far he had come.

♦

By 1944 Peter Baldung will be a trusted high-flyer at Buchenwald, an intimate friend of Frau Use Koch, wife of the commandant there, also known as the Bitch of Buchenwald. Peter will learn to put up with her tantrums, her hysterical whims, and will aid her in her new hobby of making lampshades from human skin. He will seek out for her skin that is young, healthy, unblemished by age or disease. But the first time he offers her a skin that is smooth, clear but also embellished with a tattoo of a matador, she is beside herself with delight. She is thrilled beyond all reason.

But in 1935 Peter is merely part of the retinue that accompanies Adolf Hitler to a race meeting at Avus, along with Jacob Werlin who is now Hitler’s official adviser on motoring matters. Werlin and Hitler have had no chance to talk, indeed Hitler has not been able to speak to anyone, having lost his voice after some intensive oratory. But Hitler is keen to know the latest details of Dr Porsche’s developing Type 30. They slip into the garden of a local Reichskanzler and Hitler summons Peter. He commands him to turn around and he uses Peter’s broad black, uniformed back as a writing desk. On a piece of paper Hitler jots down urgent questions about the project. How many horsepower has the engine? Air-cooled? Weight of car? Is the test model ready?

♦

Before Ishmael could say, ‘What about my laundry?’, Howard was out of the door. Politely, Ishmael followed. He offered Howard a lift in Enlightenment. He declined.

‘I’m afraid I have to be discreet,’ he said.

Ishmael shrugged. He had no idea what Howard was talking about.

Howard’s flat was, Ishmael supposed, actually quite nice. To be honest, it wasn’t really to his taste. It seemed a bit middle class. It smacked too much of materialism. He knew that was a terrible thing to think about anyone but he would have had to say what he thought.

There was a rattan three-piece suite and a nest of rattan tables with glass tops. There were lots of art deco bits and pieces — lamps in the shape of boy shepherds, a clock with an enamel sunset, and a cocktail cabinet with carved fauns for legs. There were more mirrors on the walls than anyone could possibly find any use for, art books were spread around conspicuously, and there was a massive collection of videotapes.

Howard mixed a potent gin and tonic.

♦

Werlin answers Hitler as best as he can. Peter listens intently to it all even though he cannot know what questions are being asked, but above all he feels proud to be of such a direct use to the Führer.

♦

Ishmael was sitting in a rattan chair looking out of the window on to a patch of communal lawn when Howard drew the curtains.

‘Too, too bright,’ he said.

Ishmael was about to encourage him to let the sun shine in, but Howard said, ‘Do you like this table?’

He pointed at the largest of the glass-topped tables. Ishmael didn’t like it especially, but he saw no reason to be hurtful.

‘It’s fine,’ he said.

‘It’s my very favourite,’ Howard said, chuckling. ‘If this table could talk…’

By now Ishmael was convinced that Howard was raving. He just wanted to get out of there and retrieve his laundry. Oh, Howard was one of God’s creatures and all that, unique and special and worthy of respect, but Ishmael felt Howard’s path to spiritual redemption might be a long one, and on this occasion at least he wasn’t offering himself as a guide.

‘Thanks for the drink but I’d really better be…’

‘Oh no you don’t. Just you wait here.’

Howard rushed out of the room. He was trembling and sweating. You had to feel sorry for the poor chap. A middle-aged man, living alone, probably his wife had died or had left him, it was bound to make you a bit inward-looking and weird. He was probably just lonely. He shouldn’t be ashamed to go to one of those agencies and meet a good woman to keep him company in his autumnal years. Ishmael thought he’d find a way of suggesting this when Howard returned.

♦

In early 1937 Haupt Sturmf¨hrer Albert Liese is recruiting members of the SS to form a large team of drivers to test Dr Porsche’s latest prototype, the car now designated the Kraft-durch-Freudewagen. Since the Avus episode, which is known to and envied by his fellow-soldiers, Peter Baldung seems a natural choice. He wants to be part of the process that brings National Socialism to the working man. He also thinks that being a test driver might be fun.

♦

When Howard returned he was wearing a leather dog-collar, a black latex posing pouch and nothing else. It did not seem the best moment to advise him on personal problems.

‘You know,’ Ishmael started, ‘there are many rooms in the mansion of human sexuality but whatever you’ve got in mind I’d just as soon keep this one locked.’

‘I hope you’re not going to turn out to be a tease,’ Howard said. ‘It’s very, very simple. I lie on the floor with my face under the glass table. You lower your blue leathers and you defecate on to the glass. That’s all, no touching, no sexual contact, no possibility of disease. And you’d make an ageing man very happy.’

♦

Peter is indeed selected, along with perhaps a hundred others. Dr Porsche demonstrates the car to them, and each day they go along to the SS barracks in Kornwestheim, not far from the Porsche villa, and there they collect the motorcars that they will come to know intimately and to despise.

♦

What would Debby have said if she could see her Barry now? Probably she would have sent for an exorcist and the vice squad. Then Ishmael remembered that he had set out on this journey for the sake of new feelings and experiences, and doing what Howard was asking would certainly be a new experience and a half. Howard had been kind with the offer to share a washer, had been free with his gin, and Ishmael was even in need of a bowel movement since the breakfast had worked its way through. But still…He dithered.

‘Pervy sex outside the context of a meaningful relationship would really be a mockery of the values I hold most dear.’

‘Dearie, underneath that cigarette lighter, the one shaped like a boatplane, you’ll find four fifty-pound notes. They’re yours if you do what I ask. And don’t give me any balls about meaningful relationships.’

♦

Peter Baldung’s superiors have made it clear that he is not involved in a perk, in some piece of apolitical joyriding. He is taking part in a rigorous scientific experiment, an experiment which seems above all to exist in conditions of nightmarish security.

Peter is not allowed to discuss the tests, not in any way, except with the management and the SS officers involved with the project; and he must swear an oath to this effect, and this oath will not only apply now but for an indefinite period in the future.

He must report any and every observation or incident. Concerning the car, regardless of how trivial those incidents may appear to him, for he is, after all, not the one to judge. Of course, he is not allowed to take any passenger in the test vehicle, nor must any third party be shown any document or drawing or report or set of results that relate to the vehicle in any way. Smoking and drinking while with the car is naturally forbidden. Photographing the car is not absolutely forbidden, but any film containing an image of the vehicle must be given undeveloped to the management.

The management also retain the right to change any or all of these regulations at any time they see fit, and also to impose any new regulations as and when they seem necessary or desirable. Any breach of the regulations will result in the test driver being instantly reported to the Gestapo.

As Peter Baldung takes his Beetle out for the tenth day of alpine testing he concludes that motoring may not be quite the joy he had always hoped it would be.

♦

An hour later Ishmael was back on the road. He had clean, freshly laundered clothes. He had taken off his blue leathers. He drove to a motor accessory shop and blew most of the two hundred pounds on having bucket seats fitted, and as an extra treat he bought himself a gear knob in the shape of a skull.

Life, Ishmael thought, wasn’t so bad.