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“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?”
“Hotel Beauveau, s’il vous plait,” 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 Sturmbannfuhrer 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 Sturmbannfuhrer 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, “Allo? ”
“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 h
ad 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.
