“That is the idea,” Hesskett said smugly.
“I’ve got a little French and a little German,” Rance said. “They’re rusty as hell, but they might still work some. I’ll be able to read some, anyway, even if I can’t do much talking.”
“You Tosevites would be better off with one language for all of you instead of languages in patches like fungus diseases on your planet,” Hesskett said. “But that is not to be changed today. Do you both agree to aid the Race in putting out of business the smuggler Pierre Dutourd?”
Penny nodded at once. Auerbach didn’t. Going into Nazi-occupied France after a smuggler the Reich was propping up wouldn’t be a walk in the park. He wanted some reassurance he’d come out again. Of course, if he went into jail, he had Hesskett’s reassurance he wouldn’t come out again. That made up his mind for him. With a rasping sigh, he said, “I’ll take a shot at it.”
Things moved very quickly after that. Hesskett put Rance and Penny in a Lizard airplane from the air base near Monterrey to Mexico City. When they got out of the plane a little more than an hour later (it seemed much longer to Auerbach; his seat was cramped and not made for the shape of his rear end), more Lizards who fought ginger-smuggling took charge of them. Only moments after their photographs were taken, they got handed copies of U.S. passports that Auerbach couldn’t have told from the real McCoy to save himself from the firing squad. Stamps showed visas issued by the Reich’s consulate in Mexico City. Auerbach knew they had to be as phony as the passports, but didn’t ask questions.
The next morning, after a Lizard-paid shopping spree to get them more than the clothes they’d had on when they were captured, they boarded the small human-adapted section of an airplane bound from Mexico City to Marseille. “Well, now,” Penny said, glancing over to Rance beside her, “you can’t tell me this worked out so bad. We got caught, and what did we get? A trip to the Riviera, that’s what. Could be a heck of a lot worse, if anybody wants to know.”
“Yeah, it could,” Auerbach agreed. “And if we don’t do whatever we’re supposed to do about this Dutourd guy, it’ll get worse, too. The damn Lizards’ll lock us up and forget about us.”
Penny leaned over and gave him a big, wet kiss. It felt good—hell, it felt great—but he wondered what had brought it on. She breathed in his ear. Then, very low to defeat possible (no, probable) listening devices, she whispered, “Don’t be dumb, sweetheart. If we can’t make the damn Lizards happy, we start singing songs for the Nazis.”
Rance didn’t say anything. He just shook his head, as automatically as if at a bad smell. In spite of occasional correspondence he’d had, the Nazis had been the number-one enemy before the Lizards came, the enemy the USA was really gearing up to fight. Oh, the Japs were nasty, but Hitler’s boys had been trouble with a capital T. As far as he was concerned, they still were.
The flight was far and away the longest one he’d ever taken. Sitting cooped up in an airplane hour after hour turned out to be a crashing bore. He necked a little with Penny, but they couldn’t do anything more than neck a little, not with Lizards strolling through every so often. The Lizards didn’t act quite so high and mighty as they had before the colonization fleet brought their females. He wondered how many of them had found a female who’d tasted ginger.
After what seemed like forever, water gave way to land below the airplane. Then came more water: the improbably blue Mediterranean Sea. And then the plane rolled to a stop more smoothly than a human aircraft was likely to have done, at the airport northwest of Marseille.
When Rance and Penny got off the plane and went into the terminal to get their baggage and clear customs, spicy smells filled the air: laurel, oleander, others Auerbach couldn’t name so readily. The sky tried to outdo the sea for blueness, but didn’t quite succeed.
Some of the customs officials were Frenchmen, others Germans. They all spoke English. They also all seemed interested in why Americans should have come to Marseille aboard a Lizard airplane. They went through the suitcases with microscopic attention to detail and even had them X-rayed. Finding nothing made the Germans more suspicious than contraband would have; the French didn’t seem to give two whoops in hell.
“Purpose of this visit?” demanded a customs man in a uniform that would have made a field marshal jealous.
“Honeymoon,” Auerbach answered, slipping his good arm around Penny’s waist. She snuggled against him. They’d concocted the story on the airplane. Penny had shifted one of her rings to the third finger of her left hand. It didn’t fit very well there, but only a supremely alert man would have noticed that.
This Aryan superman—actually, a blond dumpling who wore his fancy uniform about as badly as he could—wasn’t that alert. He did remain dubious. “Honeymoon in Mexico and Marseille?” he said. “Strange even for Americans.”
Auerbach shrugged, which hurt his bad shoulder. Penny knew when to keep her mouth shut. The customs official muttered something guttural. Then he stamped both their passports with unnecessary vehemence. He didn’t know what they were up to, but he wouldn’t believe they weren’t up to something.
Outside the terminal, a cab driver with a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth stuffed their bags into the trunk at the front of his battered Volkswagen. He spoke in bad, French-accented German: “Wo willen gehen Sie?”
“Hôtel Beauveau, s’il vous plaît,” Auerbach answered, and went on in slow French: “It is near the old port, n’est-ce pas? ” If he’d impressed the cabby, the fellow didn’t let on. He slammed down the trunk lid—what would have been the hood on any self-respecting car—got in, and started to drive.
Getting to know her brother turned out to be less of a pleasure than Monique Dutourd had imagined it would. Pierre might not have planned to be a smuggler when he was young, but he’d lived in the role so long that it fit him tighter than his underwear. And all his acquaintances came out of the smugglers’ den of Porte d’Aix, too. Having met Lucie, his lady friend with the sexy voice, Monique came away convinced her voice was the best thing she had going for her.
Pierre spent much of his time cursing the Nazis in general and Sturmbannführer Dieter Kuhn in particular. “They are cutting my profit margin in half, it could be even more than in half,” he groused.
He seemed to have forgotten that the Lizards would have cut his life in half. Monique had more general reasons to loathe the Germans—what they’d done to France, for instance. Pierre didn’t care about that. He dealt with people all over the world, but remained invincibly provincial at heart: if something didn’t affect him in the most direct way, it had no reality for him.
Between Pierre and Sturmbannführer Kuhn, Monique’s work suffered. The paper on the epigraphy relating to the cult of Isis in Gallia Narbonensis remained unfinished. The SS man started asking her out again. “Dammit, you have my brother in your hip pocket,” she flared. “Aren’t you satisfied?”
“That is business,” Kuhn replied. “This is, or would be, or could be, pleasure.”
“For you, perhaps,” Monique said. “Not for me.” But not even the direct insult was enough to keep him from asking her to lunch or dinner every few days. She kept saying no. He kept asking. He kept being polite about it, which gave her no more excuse to lose her temper—not that losing her temper at an SS officer was the smartest thing she might have done under any circumstances.
Once more, she grew to hate the telephone. She had to answer it, and too often it was the German. Whenever it rang, she winced. And it kept ringing. One night, just as she was starting to make some fitful progress on the inscriptions, it derailed her train of thought with its insistent jangle. She called it a name unlikely to appear in any standard French dictionary. When that didn’t make it shut up, she marched over to it, picked up the handset, and snarled, “Allô? ”
“Hello, is this Professor Dutourd?” The words were in German, but it wasn’t Dieter Kuhn. For that matter, it wasn’t standard German, either; it differed at least as much from what she�
�d learned in school as the Marseille dialect differed from Parisian French.
“Yes,” Monique answered. “Who’s calling, please?” Her first guess was, another SS man from some backwards province.
But the fellow on the other end of the line said, “I’m a friend of some friends of your brother’s. I’m looking to do him a good turn, if I can.”
She almost hung up on him then and there. Instead, she snapped, “Why are you calling me? Why aren’t you bothering the SS?” Then she added insult to injury: “But don’t worry. They probably hear you now, because they listen on this line whenever they choose.”
She’d expected that would make the caller hang up on her, but he didn’t. He muttered something that wasn’t German at all, whether standard or dialect: “Oh, bloody hell.”
Monique read English, but had had far fewer occasions to speak it than she’d had with German. Still, she recognized it when she heard it. And hearing it made her revise her notion of who Pierre’s “friends” were: probably not Nazi gangsters after all. Not this batch, anyhow, she thought. “What do you want?” she asked, sticking to German.
He answered in that throaty, guttural dialect: “I already told you. I want to give him as much help as I can. I don’t know how much that will be, or just how I’ll be able to do it.” He laughed without much humor. “I don’t know all kinds of things I wish I knew.”
“Who are you?” she asked. “How do you know Pierre?”
“I don’t know him at all—my friends do,” the stranger answered. “Who am I?” That bitter laugh again. “My name is David Goldfarb.”
“Goldfarb,” Monique echoed. It could have been a German name, but he didn’t pronounce it as a German would have. And he’d cursed in English when provoked. Maybe his dialect wasn’t really, or wasn’t quite, German at all. “You’re a Jew!” she blurted.
An instant too late, she realized she shouldn’t have said that. Goldfarb muttered something pungent in English, then returned to what had to be Yiddish: “If anybody is listening to your phone . . .” He sighed. “I’m a British citizen. I have a legal right to be here.” Another sigh. “I hope the Jerries remember that.”
By the way he said it, Jerries had the same flavor as Boches. Monique found herself liking him, and also found herself wondering if he was setting her up to like him. If he really was a Jew, he was risking his neck to come here. If he was a liar, he was—no, not a smooth one, for there was nothing smooth about him, but a good one. “What do you want with my brother?” Monique asked.
“What do you think?” he answered. He did believe someone was tapping her line, then: he was saying no more than he had to.
She came to a sudden decision. “You know where I teach?” Without waiting for him to say yes or no, she hurried on: “Be there at noon tomorrow with a bicycle.”
He said something in the Lizards’ language. That, unlike French, German, or English, was not a tongue of classical scholarship. A generation of films had taught her the phrase he used, though: “It shall be done.” The line went dead.
When she finished her lecture the next day, she wondered if Dieter Kuhn would try to take her out to lunch. He didn’t. Maybe that meant the Nazis hadn’t been listening after all. Maybe it meant they had, and were seeing what kind of trouble she’d get into if they let her. She left her lecture hall, curious about the same thing.
That fellow standing in the hall had to be David Goldfarb. He looked like a Jew—not like a Nazi propaganda poster, but like a Jew. He was eight or ten years older than she, with wavy brown hair going gray, rather sallow skin, and a prominent nose. Not bad-looking. The thought left her vaguely surprised, and more sympathetic than she’d expected. “How does it feel to be here?” she asked.
She’d spoken French. He grimaced. “English or German, please,” he said in English. “I haven’t got a word of French. Fine chap to send here, eh?” He grinned ruefully. When Monique repeated herself—in German, in which she was more fluent than English—the grin slipped. He returned to his rasping dialect: “Coming here is bad for me. Not coming here would have been bad for me and my family. What can you do?”
“What can you do?” Monique repeated. She’d been asking herself the same thing ever since Sturmbannführer Kuhn let her know Pierre was alive. Too often, the answer was, Not much. “You do have a bicycle?” she asked. He nodded, and then had to brush a lock of hair off his forehead. She said, “Good. Come along with me, then, and we’ll go to a café, and you can tell me what this is all about.”
“It shall be done,” he said again, in the language of the Race.
She led him to Tire-Bouchon, on Rue Julien, in a turn-of-thecentury building not far from her route home. A couple of soldiers in Wehrmacht field-gray were eating there, but they paid her no undue attention. To her relief, they paid Goldfarb no undue attention, either.
She ordered a garlicky beef stew. The waiter turned out to speak German. That wouldn’t have surprised her even if the Wehrmacht men hadn’t been in the place. After some back-and-forth, Goldfarb chose chicken in wine. He turned back to Monique as the waiter left. “This is on me. One thing I will say about my friends”—he gave the word an ironic twist—“is that they’ve got plenty of money.”
“Merci,” Monique said, and then, “So . . . What exactly do your friends want from my brother?”
“They don’t want anything from him,” the Jew from England answered. “They want him to go back into business for himself, buying some of the ginger he sells the Lizards from them and keeping them full of money. They don’t want him to be a German cat’s-paw.”
“I am sure he would like that very much,” Monique said. “The only trouble is, the Lizards will kill him if he stays in business for himself. They, or their leaders, do not want to put up with ginger now, not with what it does to their females and how it upsets their males. The Nazis can keep him in business and protect him. Can your friends do the same?”
She expected him to blanch at the blunt question. French opinions of England had not been high in the fighting or after it, and many Frenchmen laughed to see Britain fight so hard to retain her independence and then be shorn of the empire that made such independence genuine. But Goldfarb said, “I’m not sure. I think we’d have a better chance to get the Lizards to call off their dogs. I have a cousin with good connections—he’s even one of the fleetlord’s advisors every now and then.”
Monique’s wave of disbelief almost caught the waiter who was bringing them their lunches. After he’d set the food on the table and left again, she said, “You cannot expect me to think you are telling the truth.”
“Think whatever you want,” David Goldfarb told her. “My cousin’s name is Moishe Russie. Your brother ought to know it.” He cut off a bite of chicken. A smile lit up his lean, melancholy face. “This is very, very good.”
Monique resolved to remember the name; if Goldfarb was a liar, he’d been well prepared. The way he attacked his plate amused her. Tire-Buchon served hearty bourgeois fare, but surely nothing to cause such ecstasy. Then she recalled he came from England, poor fellow, and so no doubt had lower standards than hers.
After a bit, he looked astonished to have no more chicken left. “Is it possible for me to meet your brother?” he asked. “I’m staying at Le Petit Nice.” He butchered the name, but she understood it.
She also understood he was not a professional agent or anything of the sort. Someone more skilled would have been more careful about telling her where he was staying. His English associates must have chosen him for whom he knew, not for what he knew. But his very lack of skill at intrigue, oddly, made him more convincing. If he wasn’t what he said he was, he had to be something close to it.
“It could be that you might see my brother,” Monique said, picking her way through the German conditionals. “I do not yet know, of course, whether he would want to see you.”
“If he wants to get back into business for himself, I’m the best hope he has,” David Goldfarb said.
/> “I’ll tell him you said so,” Monique answered. “He will know better than I how far to trust you.”
Goldfarb paid for lunch with crisp new Reichsmarks. He stayed even more thoroughly a gentleman than Dieter Kuhn had, and seemed to have to remember to wave as he rode off on his bicycle. Unlike the SS man, he wore a wedding band, but experience had taught Monique how little the lack of one had to do with anything.
Once she’d got back to her block of flats, she sighed as she lugged her bicycle upstairs. Maybe, just maybe, she could get some work done. But when she opened the apartment door, she let out a gasp. Dieter Kuhn was sitting on the sofa.
“Bonjour, Monique,” he said with a pleasant smile. “Now, what did the damned kike have to tell you?”
David Goldfarb was astonished to discover how much he liked Marseille. He liked the weather, he loved the food, and the people—even the Germans—were nicer to him than he’d expected. What the Germans would have done to him had he been one of theirs rather than one of the Queen’s was a question on which he preferred not to dwell.
He hadn’t lived in such luxury as at Le Petit Nice before. It wasn’t even his money. That made him spend it less recklessly, not more, as it might have with a lot of men. He didn’t need to be extravagant to have a good time, and so he wasn’t.
Three days after he’d had lunch with Monique Dutourd—who was, without a doubt, the most interesting professor he’d ever met—the telephone in his room rang as he was trying not to cut his throat while shaving. “Hello?” he said, getting shaving soap on the handset as he held it to his mouth.
A man spoke in the language of the Race: “I greet you. Meet me tomorrow at midday behind the old synagogue. Do you understand? Is it agreed?”
“It shall be done,” Goldfarb said, and only then, “Dutourd?” He got no answer; the line was dead.
Maybe it was a trap. In fact, the odds were depressingly good it was a trap. That had nothing to do with anything. David had to stick his head into it. If he went home without doing whatever he could to get the ginger dealer out from under the Germans’ muscular thumbs, his family would regret it. Group Captain Roundbush hadn’t said so in so many words, but he hadn’t needed to, either.
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