Speed Kings Read Online Free Page B

Lancut, in Galicia, where a man named Prince Alfred Potocki met them. Potocki walked them down a red carpet, then drove them to his castle “through streets lined with peasants, heads bowed in supplication.” Potocki was still living in nineteenth-century splendor. His wife and daughters apparently sent their lingerie to Paris by coach so that they wouldn’t have to suffer the indignity of knowing the local laundresses had touched their underwear.
    Years later, the son of one of Fiske’s colleagues, Ferdinand Eberstadt, recalled his father’s stories about the visits to Potocki’s castle: “When they arrived a sumptuous ball was under way with scores of beautiful women, lavishly dressed, footmen carrying champagne and great heaps of caviar and other exotic food on silver trays, all accompanied by music from wandering minstrel groups and string orchestras playing waltzes. Everyone was dancing, eating and drinking and having a fine old time which continued to dawn . . . The following daythe men mounted their horses and went off to hunt wild boar for exercise and to rid themselves of their hangovers from the night before. The following evening another gala took place; revelry appeared to be the normal state of life in the castle—contrasting sharply with the austere peasant surroundings outside the castle grounds. The Polish cavaliers rode out early each morning, eager for sport, in spite of night after night of drinking and wenching.”
    This, then, was the kind of company the Fiskes were keeping. Even Dillon seemed a little overwhelmed by their high living. Billy’s father was entirely at ease in their company. The Polish government rewarded him with a medal, the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta, “for furthering good relations between Poland and the United States.” He was in his element.
    While his father was swanning about Europe, and his mother was making a home in Paris, Billy was packed off to boarding school in England. He was thirteen when he arrived in the village of Sutton Courtenay, just outside Oxford, to study at what he called “a somewhat unorthodox school.” The boys were allowed to keep pets, and he got himself a little Welsh terrier. Billy wasn’t there long, but these teenage years shaped him. At Sutton Courtenay, he began to grow into a man with the kind of independent mind that his father had always encouraged him to have. Billy came to settle down there, saying, “Altogether my roots are almost stronger here than any place I know.” He thought of it as home, perhaps because it was during the school holidays that he first started to travel on his own.
    When Billy turned fifteen, his father arranged for him to go to South America to spend a summer working on a sheep farm in the countryside outside Buenos Aires. He sailed in May, with a chaperone, and spent the summer with family friends his father had made through his work in the region with Dillon, Read & Co. “My first real trip by myself was when I went to South America,” Billy later said. “And I have commuted between continents ever since.” He did it, he explained, “just to see what it was like.” He didn’t seem to learn much about sheep farming, but he did feel the first stirrings of the wanderlust that would later lead him to travel around the world. He came back from Argentina through Rio, a city that made such an impression on him that he was idolizing it a decade later. When he first saw Sydney, he wrote that the harbor there “vies with Rio de Janeiro for the honor of being the most beautiful in the world. Any Australian will tell you Sydney is by far the winner whether he has seen Rio or not. But in spite of this I think Rio comes in a fairly easy first. Sydney Harbor seems to have more little ‘high-ways’ and ‘by-ways’ than Rio, but it has not gotthe marvelous sugar-loaf mountain or the