Beneath a Scarlet Sky

It bucked and died. He tried again, gave it more petrol, and got it rolling. But running on four wheels instead of six, the Daimler was no longer balanced, and they went shambling and shivering down the road. Second gear was gone. He had to rev the engine as high as he dared to get to third gear, but once they reached a decent speed, the vibrations calmed a bit.

When they were eight kilometers on, General Leyers asked for his flashlight, fumbled around in his valise, and came up with a bottle. He opened the top, took a gulp, and handed it over the seat. “Here,” he said. “Scotch whiskey. You deserve it. You saved my life.”

Pino hadn’t looked at it that way, and said, “I did what anyone would have done.”

“No,” Leyers said in a scoff. “Most men would have frozen and driven on into the machine guns, and died. But you—you were not afraid. You kept your wits about you. You are what I used to call ‘a young man of action.’”

“I like to think so, mon général,” Pino said, basking once more in Leyers’s praise as he took the bottle and had a swig. The liquid spread hot through his belly.

Leyers took the bottle back. “That’s enough for you until Milan.”

The general chuckled. Over the vibrations in the Daimler, Pino heard Leyers take several more belts of the scotch straight off the bottle.

Leyers laughed sadly. “In some ways, Vorarbeiter Lella, you remind me of someone. Two people, actually.”

“Oui, mon général?” Pino said. “Who are they?”

The Nazi was quiet, took a sip, and then said, “My son and my nephew.”

Pino hadn’t expected that.

“I did not know you had a son, mon général,” Pino replied, and glanced in the mirror, seeing nothing but the suggestion of the man in the shadows of the backseat.

“Hans-Jürgen. He’s almost seventeen. Smart. Resourceful, like you.”

Pino didn’t know exactly how to react, so he said, “And your nephew?”

There was a moment of silence before Leyers sighed and then said, “Wilhelm. Willy, we called him. My sister’s son. He served under Field Marshal Rommel. Died at El Alamein.” He paused. “For some reason, his mother blames me for the loss of her only child.”

Pino could hear the pain in Leyers’s voice and said, “I’m sorry to learn that, mon général. But your nephew served with Rommel, the Desert Fox.”

“Willy was a young man of action,” the general agreed in a hoarse voice before taking a drink. “He was a leader who sought harm’s way. And it cost him his life at twenty-eight, in the middle of a flea-infested Egyptian desert.”

“Did Willy drive a tank?”

Leyers cleared his throat and said, “With the Seventh Panzers.”

“The Ghost Division.”

General Leyers cocked his head. “How do you know of these things?”

The BBC, Pino thought, but figured that would not go over well. So he said, “I read all the papers. And there was a newsreel at the cinema.”

“Reading newspapers,” Leyers said. “A rare thing for someone so young. But both Hans-Jürgen and Willy read all the time, especially the sports sections. We used to go watch sports together. Willy and I saw Jesse Owens run at the Berlin Olympic Games. Fantastic. How angry the führer was that day when a black man bested our best. But Jesse Owens? Vorarbeiter, that Negro was a physical genius. Willy kept saying that, and he was right.”

He fell off into silence, pondering, remembering, mourning.

“Do you have other children?” Pino asked at last.

“A young daughter, Ingrid,” he said with renewed brightness.

“Where are they? Hans-Jürgen and Ingrid?”

“In Berlin. With my wife, Hannelise.”

Pino nodded and focused on driving while General Leyers continued to drink the scotch at a slow but steady pace.

“Dolly’s a dear friend,” Major General Leyers announced sometime later. “I’ve known her a long time, Vorarbeiter. I like her a great deal. I owe her a great deal. I look out for her, and I always will. But a man like me doesn’t leave his wife to marry a woman like Dolly. It would be like an old goat trying to cage a tigress in her prime.”

He laughed with admiration and some bitterness before drinking again.

Pino was shocked that Leyers was opening up to him this way after eight weeks of maintaining a cold reserve, and with the difference in rank and age. But he wanted the general to keep talking. Who knew what he might let slip next?

Leyers fell into silence, sipping the booze once more.

“Mon général?” Pino said finally. “May I ask you a question?”

Leyers’s tongue sounded thick when he said, “What is it?”

Pino slowed at an intersection, winced at the Daimler backfiring, and then glanced in the rearview before saying, “Do you really work for Adolf Hitler?”

For what seemed like an eternity, Leyers said nothing. Then he replied in a slight slur, “Many, many times, Vorarbeiter, I have sat at the left hand of the führer. People say there is a bond between us because both our fathers worked as customs inspectors. There is that. But I am a man who gets things done, a man to depend on. And Hitler respects that. He does, but . . .”

Pino glanced in the rearview and saw the general taking another draw on the scotch.

“But?” Pino said.

“But it is a good thing I am in Italy. If you stay too close to someone like Hitler, you are going to burn someday. So I keep my distance. I do my work. I earn his respect, and nothing more. Do you see?”

“Oui, mon général.”

Four or five minutes passed before General Leyers took another swig and said, “I am an engineer by training, Vorarbeiter. I have my doctorate. From the beginning, as a younger man, I worked for the government in armaments, awarding contracts. Millions upon millions of kronen. I learned how to negotiate with great men, industrialists like Flick and Krupp. And because of that, men like Flick and Krupp owe me favors.”

Leyers paused, and then said, “I will give you some advice, Vorarbeiter. Advice that could change your life.”

“Oui, mon général?”

“Doing favors,” Leyers said. “They help wondrously over the course of a lifetime. When you have done men favors, when you look out for others so they can prosper, they owe you. With each favor, you become stronger, more supported. It is a law of nature.”

“Yes?” Pino said.

“Yes,” Leyers said. “You can never go wrong in this way, because there will be times when you will need a favor, and it will be right there waiting to come to the rescue. This practice has saved me more than once.”

“I will keep that in mind.”

“You are a smart boy, just like Hans-Jürgen,” the general said, and laughed. “Such a simple, simple thing, the doing of favors, but because of them, I lived well before Hitler, I’ve lived well under Hitler, and I know I’ll live well long after Hitler is gone.”

Pino glanced at the mirror and saw Leyers’s dark silhouette as he drained the scotch bottle. “One last piece of advice from a man older than his years?”

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