Then Noviliano, the great automobile maker, had come to him and offered him a fresh shot. A new car, experimental, temperamental, but insanely fast and stable. ‘It needs a man of experience,’ Noviliano told him. ‘I cannot trust this machine to some youngster.’
It was the beginning of the most successful relationship in racing history. Noviliano and Marza and the Aquila 333, a revolutionary automobile with heated baffles on the rear deck to ‘boil the air’ for stability, a cutback design, and a unique alcohol jet-injection fuel system that gave the car a fifty-mile range on everything else on the track, reducing its pit stops by at least a third.
It was a bitch, make no mistake, and Marza drove it like he was part of the frame. Nobody could touch him, and he was absolutely fearless, a man who scorned death. In an interview he once said, ‘I have seen death, two, three times, sitting on the fence waving at me. I say, “Fuck you, man, not yet. You don’t get Marza this time.” I think, if you are afraid of death, you should maybe be a cashier. This is not your game.’
When he met her, he was still on the way back up, and they were saying he would quit or be dead in a year, and besides, she was only twenty and how could he hope to keep her when every male between puberty and senility wanted her?
Marza and the Aquila 333 made racing history, and the car was to spawn one of the most exciting automobile ventures in modern times.
The faster her star rose, the faster he drove. For every hit film she made, he took another chequered flag. There was no competition between them. He delighted in her success and she saw in Marza what few others were ever permitted to see, a champion in every way, who loved her and respected her and treated her as a friend and a lover, not as a movie star. Others were intimidated by her beauty and her success. ‘Intimidation’ was a word he did not know. It was not part of his vocabulary. For Marza, intimidation was unthinkable.
And she adored him for it.
He drove with frightening skill, a man possessed, until Milena finally asked him to quit. He was rich beyond all dreams. There was nothing else for him to prove. And besides, Noviliano wanted him to work on a new idea, a new car that would have speed and grace and drive like a champion with a remarkable jet-injection engine that ‘would triple normal gas mileage. Not a racing car, but a Street car employing all the commercially practical aspects of the racer. Marza’s job was to test it and test it and test it until it was perfect.
The car was to be called the Aquila Milena because, as the Professor — the great Di Fiere, its designer — said, the car was like a rare and beautiful woman. It ‘was a tribute to Marza, having the car named after the thing he loved most in life. And what a car it was — it just might revolutionize the industry. The patent on the injection system alone could make them all millionaires again.
So he quit racing. And she quit acting. He found the perfect place for their new home, a knoll outside Malcontenta, on the edge of Laguna Veneta, overlooking her beloved Venezia, and he built a Greek villa for her, just twenty miles from the factory at Padua.
Turning his head, he gazed through the arched doorway, beyond the terrace and across the lagoon, toward Venezia, watching the sun edge from behind the church spire and slowly bathe the room with a translucent red glow. The best time of day for him. Always had been. He felt good. Today would be the perfect day to test the Milena. After all, he was taking its namesake to Monte Carlo for New Year’s Eve. Running the initial test would be his New Year’s present to himself.
She moved beside him, rolling over on her back; the satin sheet fell away and she lay sleeping before him, naked. He marvelled at her body, as he always had, longed for it again, but dawn was definitely not her time of day. A chill draft swept through the doors, moving the lace drapes in slow motion, as though they were underwater. He pulled the sheet gently back over her so she would not get cold.
Ten years she had given him, and there was not a moment he was sorry for. Grazie,’ he said softly. ‘ Tante grazie.’
He leaned over and kissed her gently on the cheek, and then, after one final look at the blazing sunrise, went in to take a shower and dress. And before he left he went back and leaned over her and kissed her once more on the cheek and she opened one eye and smiled up at him and said, it, her imperfect English, Doan drive too fass.’
II
When Falmouth was first assigned the job by his section chief he made a list. It took him several days. First he wrote out his objectives, then he broke the job down into segments: on one side of the paper he listed the segments in chronological order; on the other side he listed the same segments in the order of the risk involved, starting with the high risk first. Then he very carefully edited them, combining both lists into what he felt was the safest and best way to execute the assignment.
They had provided excellent intelligence reports. Everything he had asked for. Plans of the car. A detailed map of the plant showing all the security positions. Photographs of the track itself. MO sheets on Marza, Noviliano Di Fieri and the three relief drivers, sheets which emphasized their personal as well as their work habits. And a rundown on the town of Padua: picturesque, highly provincial, known riot only for the Aquila Motor Works but also for the basilica of Sant’ Antonio and the Giotto frescoes, which attracted visitors from all over the world.
That was good. A tourist place. And there would be pilgrimages there, to start the New Year right. Much easier to operate, and it provided good opportunity for a cover.
It had taken them a month to put all that together. He planned the operation in Paris, in a small tourist hotel on the rue Fresnel, just below the rue de Longchamp and half a block from the river. It was near the heart of things but still quiet. He converted the flat into a private war room, with maps on the walls, train and plane schedules, photographs of the principals, plans of the car and the factory and the town.
He began by studying his road maps and transportation schedules. Falmouth put first priority on getting in and out of a place. Like any good intelligence agent, he put self-preservation on top of the list. After that he would concentrate on the job itself.
From Paris he could fly to Nice, then take the night train along the coast and across to Milan. There he would get a car and drive to Padua, a distance of perhaps one hundred and twenty-five miles.
Getting out would be more ticklish. Once the job was done, he would have to move fast without attracting too much attention. He would drive to Verona, take the train north through Trento and the Brenner Pass to Innsbruck and from there to Munich. Then he would fly back to Paris.
The only risky part would be the drive from Padua to Verona. But that was only forty-five miles, an easy hour’s drive. Hell, it would be an hour before the shock wore off, and If the job went the way he planned, nobody would be looking for him anyway.
He fed it all into the computer in his head, letting it simmer. revising the list each night, then memorizing it and destroying the written copy, and starting his emendations in the morning. Each time he revised the list, he memorized it and then destroyed it. Falmouth had been in the business a long time; he did not make mistakes.
It took ten days to devise what he felt was the perfect plan.
The toughest part of the job was getting to the car; plant security at Padua was impossible. Oh, it could be done, but the risk factor was high. There had to be a better way. He sat for hours studying the blueprints of the factory, then poring over the plans of the car itself, examining every part of the machine and the list of subcontractors.
And suddenly there it was, the perfect answer. An elaborate electronic computer system had been devised for the test runs. Instruments built into the dashboard would immediately provide digital readouts on every key part of the automobile, with the same readings transmitted to a board in the control tower at the track. Memory for the system was contained in a mini-computer the size of a small stereo tape deck located between the firewall of the car and the cockpit. At the press of a button, the digital readout would reveal speed which could instantly be converted into miles per gallon, miles elapsed, average speed per mile, gallons remaining, oil pressure, even stress on certain parts of the car, like the suspension system, the transmission and the front and rear axles.