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“Yeah.” Rance nodded. For the first time, Tahiti started to look real to him. He thought about island girls not overly burdened with clothing. A man could get used to that, even if he didn’t do anything but watch. And if he did… well, if he was careful, odds were he could get away with it.
Esteban took a scale out from under the bar and set it on the counter. It looked like the balances Rance had used in chemistry classes at West Point. Penny nodded at it. “We’re gonna be a while, weighing all I got on those litty bitty scales.”
“That’s okay,” Rance said expansively. “We haven’t got anywhere more important we’re supposed to be.” With money or gold or whatever the Lizards paid in straight ahead, all they had to do was get back across the border and into the USA again. And that was the easy part; as a general rule, folks didn’t smuggle things into the United States from Mexico, but rather the other way around.
Penny looked out the window. “Here he comes back again,” she said. “Boy, he didn’t waste any time there, did he? He wants some for himself, and he’ll sell the rest.”
“Sounds good to me,” Auerbach agreed.
In came Kahanass. “I will pay gold at the usual rate,” he said. “Is it good?”
“Superior sir, it is very good,” Penny said.
That was when things went to hell. A couple of Lizards with rifles burst into the tavern behind Kahanass. “You are prisoners!” they shouted, first in their own language and then in English. Three more burst in from a back entrance behind the bar. They also yelled, “You are prisoners! Do not move, or you are dead prisoners!”
Kahanass cried out in horror. Rance’s hand started to slide toward the waistband of his trousers. It didn’t get more than an inch or two before it froze. Unlike the bruisers in his apartment, the Lizards didn’t take him for granted. If he pulled out a pistol, they’d plug him.
He wondered what had gone wrong. Had the Lizards been watching Kahanass? Or had some of Penny’s former friends tipped them off that she might be going into business for herself? He glanced over to her. Her face was set and tense. Like him, she’d looked for a chance to fight and hadn’t seen any. He shrugged, which hurt. “Well, babe, so much for Tahiti,” he said, which hurt even worse.
When her telephone rang these days, Monique Dutourd flinched. Calls were all too likely to be from people with whom she didn’t want to talk. But she had to answer anyhow, on the chance things would be different this time. “Allo?”
“Hello, Monique,” came the quiet, steady voice on the other end of the line. She sighed. As if she didn’t know that voice better than she wanted to, it continued, “Ici Dieter Kuhn. I have an interesting story to tell you.”
“I don’t want to hear it,” she snapped. “I don’t want to hear from you at all. Don’t you understand that?”
“It is relevant,” the SS man said. “You would be well advised to listen to me.”
“Go ahead, then,” Monique said tightly. Kuhn could have done much worse than he had. She kept reminding herself of that. No doubt he wanted her to remind herself of that. If she terrorized herself, she did his work for him. She understood as much, but couldn’t help the fear.
“Merci,” Kuhn said. “I want to tell you about the inventiveness of a certain Lizard.” Monique blinked; that wasn’t what she’d expected. The German officer went on, “It seems a certain female recently agreed to taste ginger and come into season so males could mate with her-provided they first transferred funds from their credit balances to hers.”
It needed a moment to sink in. When it did, Monique blurted, “Merde alors! The Lizards have invented prostitution!”
“Exactly,” Kuhn said. “And what one has thought to do, others will think of before long. This will make the problem they face from ginger even worse than it is already. It will make the pressure on your brother even worse than it is already. He remains uncooperative, you know.”
“There’s nothing I can do about it,” Monique answered. “If you don’t know that, you should. He doesn’t care whether I live or die.” In a way, saying that wounded her. In a different way, her words were like a paid-up life-insurance policy. If Pierre didn’t care what happened to her, and if the SS knew he didn’t care, they wouldn’t have any incentive to start carving chunks off her.
“Unfortunately, I believe you have reason,” Dieter Kuhn said. “Otherwise, we might have made the experiment by now.”
She did not, she would not, let him know he had frightened her. “If that is all you have to say, you wasted your time calling,” she told him, and hung up.
But going back to work after a call like that was almost impossible. The Latin inscriptions might have been composed in Annamese, for all the sense they made to Monique. And whatever she had been on the point of saying about them had gone clean out of her head. She cursed Kuhn both in standard French and with the rich galejades of the Marseille dialect.
Having done that, she spent a while cursing her brother. If he’d chosen a more reputable profession than smuggler, she wouldn’t be in trouble now. With a sigh, she shook her head. That probably wasn’t so. She might not be in this particular trouble right now. She would probably be in some other trouble. Trouble, her whole life argued, was part of the human condition-and an all too prominent part, at that.
She went back to the inscriptions. They still didn’t mean much. The Lizards thought humans very strange because the past of less than two thousand years before was different enough to be of interest. Almost all their history was modern history: history of well-known beings who thought much like them.
The knock on her door came two nights later. She was brushing her teeth, getting ready for bed. At that sharp, peremptory sound, she had to grab desperately to keep from dropping the glass. The Nazis did not let late-night knocks appear in books or films or televisor or radio plays. Such silence fooled no one Monique knew. The knock came again, louder than before.
Monique thanked heaven that she hadn’t yet changed into her nightclothes. Still in the day’s attire, she kept a shred of dignity she would have lost. Even so, she went to the door as slowly as she could. Had she not been sure the SS men outside would kick it in, she would not have gone at all.
She opened it. Of course none of the neighbors had come out to see what the racket was; they would be glad it wasn’t their racket. To her surprise, there in the hallway stood neither Dieter Kuhn nor his friends in field-gray uniforms and black jackboots but a dumpy, middle-aged Frenchman in baggy trousers and a beret that sat on his head like a cowflop.
“Took you long enough,” he grumbled in accents identical to her own.
Despite that, she needed a moment before she realized who he was, who he had to be. “Pierre!” she whispered, and grabbed him by the arm and pulled him inside. “What are you doing here? Are you out of your mind? The Boches will be watching this place. They may have microphones in here, and-”
“I can find out about that.” Her brothe
r took from a pocket a small instrument of obvious Lizard manufacture. He used a pencil point to poke a recessed button. After a moment, a light at the end glowed amber. “Unless the Germans have come up with something new, they aren’t listening,” he said. “For the love of God, Monique, how about some wine?”
“I’ll get it,” she said numbly. She poured a glass for herself, too. When she brought the wine back from the kitchen, she stared at the brother she hadn’t seen in two-thirds of a lifetime. He was shorter than she remembered, only a few centimeters taller than she. Of course, she’d been shorter the last time she saw him.
He was looking her over, too, with a smile she thought she remembered. “You look like me,” he said, his voice almost accusing, “but on you it looks good.” He glanced around the flat. “So many books! And have you read them all?”
“Almost all,” she answered. A lot of people who saw the crowded bookshelves asked the same question. But then she gathered herself and asked a question of her own: “What are you doing here? When we talked on the telephone, you wanted nothing to do with me.”
“Times change,” he answered, resolutely imperturbable. He had, no doubt, seen a lot of changes. With a shrug, he went on, “You must know what ginger does to female Lizards, n’est-ce pas?”
“Yes, I know that,” Monique said. “If you will recall”-she could not resist letting her voice take on a sardonic edge-“I was here when the SS man warned you the Lizards in authority would be more upset about your trade than you thought.”
“So you were.” No, Pierre was not easy to unsettle. In that, though Monique did not think of it so, he was very much like her. He went on, “Kuhn is not stupid. If the Nazis were stupid, they would be much less dangerous than they are. If they were stupid, we would have beaten them in 1940. Instead, we were stupid, France was stupid, and see what it got us.” Almost as an aside, he added, “The trouble with the Nazis is not that they are stupid. The trouble with the Nazis is that they are crazy.”
“And what,” Monique inquired, “if you would be so kind as to inform me, is the trouble with the Lizards?”
