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“Bring me a beer, will you?” he asked, and she went and got him a Lion Lager from the icebox, and one for herself, too. He took a long pull at his. It helped cool the fire inside him. Then he lit a cigarette. That started it up again, but he didn’t care. He offered Penny the pack-the packet, they called it here in Cape Town. She took one, leaning forward to light it from his.
After a couple of puffs, she said, “You know I wouldn’t do anything stupid like that, Rance.”
He laughed. “There’s a hot one. You’d do anything you thought you could get away with.”
“Who wouldn’t?” Penny said. “But if I don’t think I can get away with it, I’m not going to try it, right?”
“Well, yeah,” Rance admitted. “Trouble is, you always think you’re going to get away with it. If you were right all the damn time, we’d still be in Texas, or more likely in Tahiti.”
She gave him a dirty look. “I didn’t hear you telling me not to run that ginger down into Mexico. I didn’t see you staying back in Texas when I did it, neither. If you had, you’d still be in that apartment by your lonesome, pouring your life down a bottle one day at a time.”
“Maybe,” he said, though he knew damn well she wasn’t wrong. “So I’m here instead. If I hadn’t been along, you’d probably still be in a Lizard jail. Of course, if I hadn’t been around, you’d probably be dead now, but you don’t think about that, not any more you don’t.”
Penny’s scowl got fiercer. “All right, I’ve screwed some up before, but I really don’t see what can go wrong this time.”
Rance laughed again-he laughed till it hurt again, which didn’t take long. “So there’s nothing going on, and there’s nothing that can go wrong with whatever is going on. I like that, I’ll go to hell if I don’t.”
“God damn you,” she said furiously. “You weren’t supposed to know anything about it.” They were both barely remembering the microphones they figured the Lizards had hidden in the apartment, if they were remembering at all.
“That’s what the gal who’s cheating on her husband always says, too, and she never thinks he’s going to find out,” Auerbach said. He didn’t have the energy to get as mad as she was. “Just remember, if your boat springs a leak down here, I drown, too. And I don’t feel like drowning, so you’d better level with me.”
He could tell what was going on behind her blazing blue eyes. She was deciding whether to stay where she was and talk or walk out the door and never come back. Rather to his surprise, she kept on talking to him, even if what she had to say didn’t directly bear on the argument. “Come on down to the Boomslang,” she said. “We can hash it out there.”
“Okay,” he answered, and limped over to pick up his stick. He didn’t feel like hobbling to the tavern, but he didn’t feel like having the Lizards listen in on an argument about smuggling ginger, either. Even with the cane, his bad leg gave him hell as he went downstairs, and kept on barking when he got down onto the sidewalk. It would do worse when he had to go back upstairs, and he knew it. Something to look forward to, he thought.
A Lizard patrol was coming up the street toward him. The male in charge was even newer in town than he and Penny were. Auerbach waved; there were good Lizards and bad Lizards, same as there were good people and bad people, and this male seemed to be a pretty good egg. “I greet you, Gorppet,” Rance called in the language of the Race.
“And I greet you, Rance Auerbach,” the Lizard said. “You are easy to recognize because of the way you walk.” He waved, too, and then led the patrol past Rance and away along the street.
As soon as the Lizards were out of earshot, Penny said, “If you know Gorppet, what are you getting your bowels in an uproar about over this ginger deal? He’s not the kind of Lizard who’d rat on us. Anybody can see that.”
“You’re cooking up a deal with him?” Rance said, and Penny nodded. He stopped in his tracks; standing still hurt marginally less than walking. Before he said anything more, he paused to think. Penny wasn’t wrong. Gorppet struck him as a Lizard who’d done a lot and seen a lot and wouldn’t blab any of it. Still… “He’s not that high-ranking. If he makes a deal with you, can he hold up his end of it?”
“Has he got the cash, you mean?” Penny asked, and Rance nodded. She said, “You don’t have to be a general to be a big-time ginger smuggler, sweetie. A lot of the big ones are just clerks. They don’t buy the stuff with their salaries-they buy it with what they make selling it to their buddies.”
“Okay,” Auerbach said after more thought. “I guess that makes sense. But Gorppet doesn’t strike me as the type who’d do a lot of tasting. Didn’t he get transferred down here on account of he’s some kind of hero?”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t been tasting for years-I asked him,” Penny said. You would, Rance thought. She went on, “He hasn’t been in the selling end of the business till now, though. You’re right about that. Part of what he got for being a hero, along with this transfer and his promotion, was a hell of a big reward for catching some Arab or other.”
“Can he turn it into any kind of cash we can use?” Rance inquired.
“We, huh?” Penny said, and he felt foolish. She let him down easy by answering the question: “It’s not that hard here in South Africa, you know. Everything turns into gold if you work it a little.”
She was right about that. He couldn’t deny it. “Only trouble with gold,” he said slowly, “is that it’s heavy if we’ve got to leave town in a hurry.”
“It’s heavy, yeah, but it doesn’t take up much space,” Penny replied. All of a sudden, she grabbed him and kissed him. A little black kid walking past smoking a cigarette giggled around it. She took no notice. When she was done with the kiss, she said, “And now you’re starting to sound like somebody who might be interested in this deal after all.”
“Who, me?” Auerbach looked back over his shoulder, as if Penny might be talking to somebody else. She made as if to hit him in the head. He ducked, then winced when his shoulder twinged. “I don’t know what the devil gave you that idea.”
“Can’t fool me-I know you too well,” Penny said. Since that was probably true, he didn’t answer. She went on, “We can do it-I know we can. And when we do, Tahiti here we come.”
Not for the first time, Rance thought of warm, moist tropical breezes and warm, moist native girls. But his long-ago West Point days made him also think of logistics. “How do we get there from here? Either way we go, it’s through Lizard-held territory. They sent us down here to be good little boys and girls, remember? They’re liable not to want to let us loose again.”
“If we’ve got the cash to get to Free France and live there,
we’ll have the cash to pay off whoever we need to pay off to get us the hell out of here,” Penny said, and Rance could hardly deny that was odds-on to be true. She continued, “Come on, let’s get over to the Boomslang. I’ve got to talk to Frederick.”
Alarm bells clanged in Auerbach’s mind. “What do you need to talk to him about?” He didn’t like Frederick much, not least because he thought the Negro might like Penny a little too well.
She set her hands on her hips. “I’ve got to get the ginger from somebody, don’t I?” she said patiently. “Frederick’s got ginger, but he doesn’t have the connections with the Lizards for anything more than nickel-and-dime deals. I damn well do.”
“Frederick’s got connections with the local tough guys, though,” Rance said, “or I figure he does, anyhow. He probably would have woke up dead one morning if he didn’t. How’s he going to like you pulling off a big score on his home turf?”
“He’ll get enough to keep him sweet-plenty for everybody,” Penny said. “Rance, honey, this’ll work. It will.”
Her confidence was infectious-and Rance didn’t feel like living in South Africa for the rest of his life. It might be better than a Lizard jail, but it wasn’t a patch on the States. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go to the Boomslang.” He wondered how much trouble he was getting into. He’d find out. He was all too sure of that.
Penny kissed him again. Nobody on the street snickered this time. “You won’t be sorry,” she promised.
“I’m sorry already,” Rance said, which wasn’t quite true but wasn’t quite a lie, either.
Frederick wasn’t in the saloon when Rance and Penny went inside. That surprised him; from everything he’d seen, Frederick damn near lived in the Boomslang. But, sure enough, the big black man breezed in before they’d got very far into their drinks. He sat down beside them as if he expected to talk business. And so he probably did-Penny must have started setting up this deal a while ago.
