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And so, even as Penny and he went to meet Richard along with Jean-Claude and several other large, beefy pieces of hired muscle, Auerbach saw half a dozen Lizards on the streets of Papeete, all of them in conversation with humans who looked shady. Takes one to know one, he thought.
Richard was small and lithe and surrounded by bodyguards who looked a lot nastier than the ones Rance and Penny had along. He spoke English with an accent partly French, partly southwestern, as if he’d learned the language by watching a lot of horse operas. “You got the goods?” he asked-the subject under discussion might have been wagon wheels, not gold.
“Sure do,” Penny answered. “Do you?”
“You bet,” Richard said, and gestured to one of his henchmen. The burly Tahitian held up a parcel wrapped in twine. At Richard’s gesture, he opened it. The spicy tang of ginger tickled Rance’s nose. Richard gestured again, this time to Penny. “Check it-go right ahead. No false weight. No false measure. I’m a straight dealer.”
Had he said he was a straight shooter, Auerbach would have believed that, too. Penny did check, tasting the herb and probing to make sure the package held nothing but ginger. When satisfied, she turned to Auerbach. “Pay him, Rance.”
With a nod, he passed a little case-it didn’t have to be a big one-holding ten pounds of gold to Richard. This was the nasty moment. As soon as the case was out of his hand, that hand slid down toward his own pistol. The temptation to keep the ginger and grab the gold had to be there-had to be there on both sides, in fact, for Richard and his bodyguards were awfully intent themselves.
But here, unlike the Cape Town park, everything went smoothly. The Frenchman examined the gold as carefully as Penny had checked the ginger. When he said, “C’est bon,” his bully boys visibly relaxed. Then he returned to English: “Good luck unloading that stuff. Enjoyed doing business with you.” And off he went.
“We’d better unload it,” Rance muttered. They’d just traded away a lot of what they were living on. They couldn’t buy groceries with ginger, not directly. If things went wrong…
“Relax,” Penny said. “We’re in business again.” She sounded confident. But then, she always sounded confident. Rance sighed. He had to hope she was right.
“Two, please,” Reuven Russie said in Hebrew to the ticket-seller at the cinema. The man gave him a blank stare. He repeated the request in Arabic and handed the fellow a banknote. The ticket-seller’s face lit up. He passed Reuven two tickets, then quickly and accurately made change. “Thanks,” Reuven told him, again in Arabic. He switched to English: “Come on, Jane. Still should be plenty of good seats.”
“Right,” Jane Archibald said, also in English. She went on, “That bloke should know more Hebrew.”
“He’s probably just come from some little country village in the middle of nowhere,” Reuven answered. “He’ll learn, I expect.”
He paused at the snack counter inside the building to buy a couple of rolled papers full of fried chickpeas and two glasses of Coca-Cola. Nibbling and drinking, he and Jane went through the curtains and into the theater itself. They did get good seats, but it was filling faster than Reuben had expected. The crowd was about two-thirds Jews, one-third Arabs. And…
“Will you look at that?” Reuven pointed to three or four Lizards who sat in the front row so they wouldn’t have to peer over and around taller people in seats in front of them. “Why do you suppose they want to watch The Battle of Chicago? Their side lost, after all.”
“Maybe they think it’s funny. But them losing is good enough reason for me to want to see it.” Jane’s voice took on the grim edge it always held when she talked about the Lizards. She sighed. “I only wish they could make that kind of film about the fighting in Australia.”
“I know.” Reuven didn’t have the same attitude about the coming of the Race. But then, the Lizards had conquered Jane’s homeland, while they’d freed his people from almost certain death when they drove the Nazis out of Poland. He reached out and took her hand. She smiled at him and squeezed his. He went on, “What surprises me is that the Lizards are letting people here see the film.”
Jane shrugged. “If the Americans ever conquer the world, it’ll be on account of their cinema, not their guns.”
Before Reuven could find a good answer for that, the house lights dimmed and the cartoon started. It too was American, with Donald Duck rampaging across the screen. He spoke-spluttered, rather-in English, with Hebrew and Arabic subtitles. Children obviously too young to read, who obviously didn’t speak English, giggled at his antics. So did Reuven. Anybody who couldn’t laugh at Donald Duck had to have something wrong with him somewhere.
He also kept glancing over at Jane, her elegant profile illuminated by the flickering light from the screen. She was laughing, too. But after the cartoon ended and the main feature started, her features grew solemn, intent. As far as Reuven was concerned, The Battle of Chicago was just another shoot-’em-up, with tanks and airplanes instead of galloping horses and six-shooters. He paid more attention to the pretty blond French actress who played a nurse in an improbably tight, improbably skimpy uniform than he did to rattling machine guns and spectacular explosions.
Not so Jane. Whenever the Lizards looked as if they were on the point of breaking through, she squeezed his hand hard enough to hurt. And she whooped and cheered every time the Americans rallied. When the explosive-metal bomb went off and blew the Lizards’ army to kingdom come, she leaned over and kissed him. For that, he would have put up with a much longer, much duller film.
“If only we could have done it to them in a lot more places,” she said with another sigh as the credits rolled across the screen.
“Well, the Germans may try it again,” Reuven answered. “Do you really like the notion of air-raid drills and more nuclear explosions and poison gas and who can guess what all else? I don’t, not very much.”
Jane thought for several seconds before saying, “If another war would get rid of the Lizards once and for all, I’d be for it no matter what else it might do. But I don’t think that will happen, no matter how much I wish it would. And the bloody Nazis wouldn’t be any better than the Race as top dogs, would they?”
“Worse, if you ask me,” Reuven said. “Of course, they’d throw me in an oven first and ask questions later.”
Jane got up and started for the exit. “Hard to believe they really did that to people-that it’s not just Lizard propaganda, I mean.”
“I wish it were.” Reuven said. “But if you don’t believe me, talk to my father. He saw a couple of their murder factories with his own eyes.” This was, he knew, not the ideal sort of conversation when out for a good time with a very pretty girl. But The Battle of Chicago and the present world situation had put such thoughts in both their minds. He went on, “If the Lizards hadn’t come, there probably wouldn’t be any Jews left in Poland.” I wouldn’t be alive, was what that meant, though he shied away from thinking of it in those terms. “If the Germans had won the war, there probably wouldn’t be any Jews left anywhere.”
They walked out into the night, past people coming in for the next show. Slowly, Jane said, “When I was a little girl, we used to think Jews were traitors because they got on so well with the Lizards. I never really understood why you did till I came here to Palestine to study at the medical college.”
Reuven shrugged. “If the only choices you’ve got are the Reich and the Race, you’re caught between-between…” He snapped his fingers in annoyance. “What are you caught between in English? I can’t remember.”
“The devil and the deep blue sea?” Jane suggested.
“That’s it. Thanks,” Reuven said. “What would you like to do now? Shall I walk you back to the dormitory?”
“No,” Jane said, and used one of the Race’s emphatic coughs. “Between the dorm and the college, I feel like I’m in gaol half the time. This is your city; you get to go out and about in it. I don’t, not nearly enough.”
“All right, then,” Reu
ven said. “Let’s go to Makarios’ coffeehouse. It’s only a couple of blocks away.” Jane nodded eagerly. Smiling, Reuven slid his arm around her waist. She snuggled against him. His smile got broader.
Run by a Greek from Cyprus, Makarios’ was as close to neutral ground as Jerusalem had. Jews and Muslims and Christians all drank coffee-and sometimes stronger things-there, and ate stuffed grape leaves, and chatted and argued and dickered far into the night. Lizards showed up there, too, every now and again. Rumor was that Makarios sold ginger out the back door of the coffeehouse; Reuven didn’t know if that was true, but it wouldn’t have surprised him.
He and Jane found a quiet little table off in a corner. The coffee was Turkish style, thick and sweet and strong, served in small cups. Jane said, “Well, I won’t have to worry about sleeping any more tonight.” She opened her eyes very wide to show what she meant.
Reuven laughed. He drained his own demitasse and waved to the waiter for a refill. “Evkharisto,” he said when it arrived. He’d learned a few words of Greek from children he’d played with in London during the fighting. Thank you was one of the handful of clean phrases he remembered.
He and Jane didn’t leave Makarios’ till after midnight. The streets of Jerusalem were quiet, almost deserted; it wasn’t a town that hummed around the clock. Reuven put his arm around Jane again. When she moved toward him instead of pulling back, he kissed her. Her arms went around him, too. She was as tall as he was and very nearly as strong-she all but squeezed the breath out of him.
