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Monique tossed her head. “Never mind the advertisements, dammit. We both want this one dead, and we want it done so we can’t be blamed. You have the connections with the Lizards to arrange it, and-” She broke off.
“And what?” her brother prompted.
Unwillingly, she went on, “And, since he comes to my flat every couple of nights, we have a place where the Lizards can lie in wait.”
“Ah,” Pierre said. “You want him to die happy, I comprehend.”
“I want him to die dead,” Monique ground out. “I don’t care how. He won’t stay happy, by God.”
“I suppose not,” Pierre said, with the air of a man making a sizable concession. He sat down on a wooden bench with rusty iron arm rests. Monique stood there, hands on hips; in his own way, her brother could be almost as infuriating as Dieter Kuhn. Pierre continued, “Well, I will see what I can do. When will the Nazi be at your flat again? Tonight?”
Monique grimaced. Having to admit that Kuhn came there at all was humiliating enough. Having to admit that she knew his schedule was somehow worse. But she did, and could hardly pretend otherwise. Reluctantly, she answered, “No, he was there last night, and that means he isn’t likely to be back till tomorrow, and then a couple of days after that, and so on.”
“Nice regular fellow, eh?” Pierre chuckled. Monique wanted to hit him. In that moment, she wouldn’t have minded seeing him dead. But then he said, “All right, my little sister, I’ll pass the word along. And who knows? It could be that, one day before too long, someone scaly will be waiting for your German when he comes outside.”
“He’s not my German, and you can go straight to hell if you call him that again,” Monique said. She didn’t have to worry about keeping Pierre sweet. He had his own good reasons for wanting Kuhn dead. That let Monique take a certain savage pleasure in turning her back on him and stamping past the oleanders that screened the traffic noise and out of the Jardin Puget.
She would have taken even more pleasure if she hadn’t heard Pierre laughing as she stalked away.
Since she didn’t have to entertain Dieter Kuhn that evening, she actually managed to get some research done. Reading Latin, especially the abbreviation-filled Latin of her inscriptions, helped ease some of her fury. Scholars would be poring over these texts a thousand years from now, long, long after she and Dieter Kuhn were both dead. Thinking in those terms gave her a sense of proportion.
She bared her teeth in something that wasn’t a smile. With any luck at all, a thousand years from now Dieter Kuhn would be dead a great deal longer than she was. Outliving him is the best revenge, she thought. But she shook her head a moment later. Revenge was the best revenge.
When he knocked on her door a night later, she was almost eager to see him. He’d brought along a bottle of red wine, too; he didn’t try to make himself hateful to her. He could only have succeeded, though, by leaving her alone. He didn’t feel like doing that.
As usual, she endured his attentions without enjoying them. As usual, that bothered him not in the least. Men, she thought. She’d known a couple of Frenchmen who’d cared for her pleasure as little as Dieter Kuhn did. But she hadn’t had to go to bed with them, and she’d stopped going to bed with them as soon as she realized what sort of men they were. The German didn’t give her that choice.
Monique didn’t mind drinking his wine. Having him spend a few Reichsmarks was revenge of a sort, even if only of the tiniest sort. It turned out to be pretty good wine, too. And, if she got a little drunk, if her thinking got a little blurry, so much the better.
“Well, my dear,” Kuhn said as he buttoned the fly to his trousers, “I must be off. I will see you again day after tomorrow, I think.”
I am not your dear, Monique thought. She hadn’t got so blurry as to be confused about that; there wasn’t enough wine in the world to leave her confused about that. With any luck at all, I’ll never see you again, except, it could be, your bleeding corpse.
“Yes, I suppose you will,” she answered aloud, and gave him a sweet smile. “Au revoir.”
“Au revoir,” the SS man answered, and he smiled, too. “You see, you are coming to care for me after all. I knew you would, even if it took a while.”
Monique didn’t say anything to that. She couldn’t, not unless she cared to give the game away. She did manage another smile. It was a smile of gloating anticipation, but Dieter Kuhn didn’t need to know that.
He finished dressing, smugly kissed her, even more smugly fondled her, and, at last, headed for the door. Monique, still naked, stayed in the bedroom. That was what she always did when Kuhn left. If she did anything different tonight, she might rouse his suspicions. The last thing she wanted was to rouse Kuhn in any way.
He turned the knob. Hinges creaked as the door swung open. Back in the bedroom, Monique hugged herself in glee. She didn’t know it would be tonight, but she hoped, she even prayed…
A burst of gunfire shattered the quiet of the street outside, gunfire and a scream. “Gott im Himmel!” Dieter Kuhn exclaimed. Still in German, he went on, “That was a Lizard weapon, or I’m a Jew.” He slammed the door shut behind him and ran down the hall.
“No,” Monique said, shaking her head back and forth. “No, no, no.” She had a horrible feeling she knew what had happened. The Race had as much trouble telling human beings apart as people did telling one Lizard from another. If the would-be assassin had been told to kill whoever came out of the block of flats at such-and-such a time, and if some luckless fellow had chosen just that time to go out for a stroll or a glass of wine… if that had happened, the fellow’s blood was on her hands.
A couple of minutes later, someone pounded on her door. Kuhn, she thought, and then, Dammit. She threw on a nightgown and went to open the door. The SS man pushed past her and into the flat. “I need to use your telephone,” he said.
“What happened?” Monique asked, though she feared she knew only too well.
“Someone just shot a man to death outside this building with a Lizard automatic rifle,” Kuhn answered. “Merde alors, if I had gone out a couple of minutes sooner, that could have been me.” He was dialing the telephone as he replied, and began speaking into it in German, too fast and excited for Monique to follow more than one word in three.
“Quel dommage,” she said distantly. If the SS man heard her, she thought he would think she meant it was a pity the other fellow had got shot, not that he himself hadn’t.
After a couple of minutes, Kuhn hung up. He turned back to her. “They are on their way,” he said, returning to French. “As long as you have some clothes on, come downstairs with me and see if you can identify the body. The fellow may live here. If we know who he is, we may be able to find out why someone with a Lizard weapon-maybe even a Lizard-wanted him dead.”
Monique gulped. “Do I have to?” she asked. She knew perfectly well why the poor fellow out there on the street was dead: because of her, and because the drug-dealing Lizard who’d shot him didn’t know what the devil he was doing. Seeing the result of her failed revenge was the last thing she wanted.
But Dieter Kuhn, as she knew all too well, didn’t care what she wanted. “Come on,” he repeated, and grabbed her by the arm. He wasn’t the typical hulking German; by his looks and compact, wiry build, he might more readily have been French. But he was much stronger than Monique. When he dragged her along with him, she had no choice but to come.
A little crowd of the curious and the ghoulish had gathered around the corpse on the sidewalk just in front of Monique’s block of flats. Blood, black in the moonlight, streamed down into the gutter. A man had a startling amount of blood in him. Monique could smell it, and the latrine stench that had come when the dead man’s bowels let go.
Sirens yowled in the distance, rapidly coming closer. Kuhn took a little flashlight off his belt and shone it in the dead man’s face. “Do you know him?” he asked.
“Yes,” Monique answered, trying not to look at the wound that had torn away one si
de of his jaw. “That’s Ferdinand Bonnard. He lives-lived-downstairs from me, on the second floor. He never bothered anyone that I heard of.” And I killed him, as sure as if I’d pulled the trigger myself. She wondered if she’d be sick.
Kuhn wrote the name in a little notebook he fished from a trouser pocket. “Bonnard, eh? And what did he do?”
“He sold fish in a little shop on the Rue de Refuge, not far from the harbor,” Monique answered as a couple of SS vehicles squealed to a stop and uniformed Germans spilled out of them. Everyone but Monique suddenly found urgent business elsewhere.
“Dealt with fishermen, did he? Maybe he was a smuggler, too,” Kuhn said, and started talking to his Nazi colleagues. He might have forgotten about Monique. But when she started to go back inside the apartment building, Kuhn shook his head. “No-you will come with us to the Palais de Justice and answer more questions.” She must have looked as horrified as she felt, for he added, “It will not be as bad as it was last time. You have my word of honor.”
