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“Isn’t that interesting?” Goldfarb said. Oh, yes, Roundbush remembered he was a Jew, all right, and knew just how tenuous things were for Jews in Britain these days. “And what would you want me to do?” he asked.
“Nose about a bit, see if you can find out how those shipments went wrong,” Roundbush answered. “It’s safe as houses.”
Goldfarb hadn’t asked if it was safe as houses. Half a lifetime in the RAF convinced him that, if anyone told him it was safe as houses without his asking, it was most unlikely to be anything of the sort. If someone looked him up after some years to assure him it was safe as houses, it couldn’t possibly be.
He took a pull at his Guinness. “No, thank you, sir,” he said.
“Tut, tut,” Basil Roundbush said. “That’s the wrong answer. Believe you me, old man, whatever might happen to you if you say yes, something worse will happen to you if you say no. And you wouldn’t want it to happen to your lovely family, too, now would you? That would be very sad.”
A nasty chill of alarm ran through Goldfarb. Roundbush and whatever friends he had were ideally placed to wreck his career if they wanted to badly enough. And if they wanted to play other sorts of games, how much help from the authorities could Goldfarb count on? The answer seemed only too plain. He gulped down the rest of his stout in a couple of swallows. “I think I’ve changed my mind,” he said.
“Ah, capital.” Roundbush beamed. “You won’t regret it.”
“I regret it already,” Goldfarb said. The other RAF man laughed, just as if he’d been joking.
These days, Monique Dutourd was concentrating more on carved stones than on the Lizards’ colonization fleet. She couldn’t do anything about the fleet. If she pieced together enough interesting inscriptions, she could finally finish that paper on the cult of Isis hereabouts. She did look forward to reactions when it saw print. It was a more thorough synthesis than anyone had tried before, and might eventually lead to a promotion.
She was glad her field of specialization centered on the Mediterranean provinces in the early days of the Roman Empire rather than, for instance, the Germanic invasions. No matter what a French scholar had to say about the Germanic invasions, the modern Germanic invaders were only too likely to decide it was wrong. And the Germans were not in the habit of giving those with whom they disagreed a chance to revise their opinions.
Her mouth twisted in annoyance as she pulled out a photograph of an inscription from up near Arles. She’d taken the photograph herself, but it wasn’t so good as it might have been. Had she waited a couple of hours longer, the sun would have filled the letters with shadow instead of washing them out. She bent low over the photo, doing her best to make sure she’d correctly inscribed the inscription.
The telephone rang. She jumped. “Merde!” she said; she hated interruptions of any sort. Muttering, she went to the phone. “Allo?” Whoever it was, she intended to get rid of him as fast as she could.
That proved harder than she’d hoped. “Bonjour, Monique. Ici Dieter Kuhn,” the SS man in her Roman history class said in his good if formal French. “Comment ca va?”
“Assez bien, merci,” she answered. “Et vous?” He’d taken her out for coffee several times, to dinner and a film once. Had he been a Frenchman, she likely would have slipped into using tu with him by now. But she was not ready-she wondered if she would ever be ready-to use the intimate pronoun with a German.
“Things go well enough for me, too, thanks,” Kuhn said. “Would you care to drive down by the seaside with me for lunch?” He also used vous, not tu; he hadn’t tried to force intimacy on her. She hadn’t had to wrestle with him yet, as she almost surely would have after going out several times with one of her own countrymen. She wondered if he was normal, or if perhaps he squired her about to give the appearance of normality.
A lunch he bought-he always had plenty of cash-would be one she didn’t have to pay for. She liked the idea of soaking the SS. Still… “I am working,” she said, and cast a longing eye he couldn’t see back toward her desk.
She sounded halfhearted even to herself. She wasn’t a bit surprised when Dieter Kuhn laughed and said, “You sound like you could use a break. Come on. I will be there in half an hour.”
“All right,” she said. Kuhn laughed again and hung up. So did she, shaking her head. Did he know she was afraid to say no? If he did, he hadn’t used it to his advantage. That was another reason she wondered how normal he was.
He knocked on her front door exactly twenty-nine minutes after getting off the phone. His timing always lived up to every cliche about German efficiency. “Does Chez Fonfon suit you?” he asked.
It was one of the better seafood bistros in Marseille. Monique only knew of it; she couldn’t afford to eat there on her pay. “It will do,” she said, and smiled a little at the regal acquiescence in her tone.
Kuhn held the door open for her to get into the passenger side of his battered green Volkswagen. She’d known he drove one of the buggy little cars since she’d thought him a Frenchman named Laforce. She hadn’t thought anything of it; Volkswagens were the most common cars through the Reich and the territories it occupied.
The automobile rattled west toward the sea, past the basilica of St. Victor and Fort d’Entrecasteaux, which had helped guard the port back in the distant days when threats had to be visible to be dangerous. Kuhn drove with as much abandon as any Frenchman, and drove two wheels up onto the sidewalk when he parked near the restaurant. Seeing Monique’s bemused expression, he chuckled and said, “I follow the customs of the country where I am stationed.” He hopped out to open the door for her again.
At Chez Fonfon, she ordered bouillabaisse after a waiter fawned on them at hearing Kuhn’s German accent. The fellow gave them what had to be the best table in the place, one overlooking the blue water of the Mediterranean.
“Et pour moi aussi,” Kuhn said. “Et vin blanc.”
“It does have mullet?” Monique asked, and the waiter’s nod sent his forelock-alarmingly like Hitler’s-bouncing up and down on his forehead. He hurried away. Monique turned her attention back to the SS man. “The Romans would have approved. But for the tomatoes in the broth, people were eating bouillabaisse here-maybe on this very spot-in Roman days, too.”
“Some things change very slowly,” Kuhn said. “Some things, however, change more quickly.” He looked to be on the point of saying more, but the waiter came bustling up with a carafe of white wine. Monique was not used to such speedy service. The SS man took it for granted. Why not? she thought. He is one of the conquerors.
Some wine took the edge off her bitterness. She did her best to relax and enjoy the view and the meal-which also came with marv
elous promptness-and the company in which she found herself. But the food claimed most of her attention, as it should have. “Very good,” she said, dabbing her lips with a napkin. “Thank you.”
“It is my pleasure,” Kuhn answered. “I do not suppose they would cook the mullet alive in a glass vessel here, to let us watch it change colors as it perished.”
She pointed an accusing finger at him. “You have been studying too much.”
“I believe it is impossible to study too much,” he said, serious as usual. “One never knows when a particular piece of information may be useful. Because of this, one should try to know everything.”
“I suppose this is a useful attitude in your profession,” Monique said. She did not really want to think about his profession. To keep from thinking about it, she emptied her wineglass. The waiter, who hovered around the table like a bee around a honey-filled flower, filled it again.
“It is a useful attitude in life,” Kuhn said. “Do you not find this to be so?”
“It could be,” Monique answered. Had anyone but the SS man suggested it, she would have agreed without hesitation. She drank more white wine. As she drank, she discovered the wine had taken the edge off her caution, too, for she heard herself saying, “One piece of information I would like to have is what you think you see in me.”
Kuhn could have evaded that. He could simply have refused to answer. The idea that she could force anything from him was absurd, and she knew as much. He sipped at his own wine and looked out at the Mediterranean for a few seconds before saying, “You have a brother.”
Now she stared at him in frank astonishment. “I may have a brother,” she said. “I don’t even know if I do or not. I haven’t seen Pierre in more than twenty years, not since he was called to the front in 1940. We heard he was captured, and then we never heard again.” Excitement flowed through her. “For a long time, I have thought he was dead. Is this not so?”
“No, it is not so,” Dieter Kuhn said. “He is not only alive, he is living here in Marseille. I was hoping-I admit I was hoping-you would be able to lead me to him. But everything I have learned about you makes me believe you are telling the truth, and have no contact with him.” He sighed. “C’est la vie.”
