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Pierre glanced over to her and said, “Do you really think I ought to tell the Englishman to go peddle his papers? He and I have done business for a long time, and who can be sure if these Americans are reliable?”
“You’re asking me about your business?” Monique said, more than a little astonished. “You’ve never asked me about business before, except when it had to do with that cochon from the Gestapo.”
“I knew plenty about him without asking you, too,” her brother said. “But he did make a nuisance of himself when he connected the two of us.”
“A nuisance of himself!” Now Monique had to fight to keep from exploding. Dieter Kuhn might have hounded Pierre, but he’d not only hounded Monique but also subjected her to a full-scale Nazi-style interrogation and then forced his way into her bed. As far as she was concerned, the one good thing about the explosive-metal bomb that had burst on Marseille was that it turned Kuhn to radioactive dust.
“A nuisance,” Pierre repeated placidly. Monique glared at him. He ignored the glare. His thoughts were fixed firmly on himself, on his own affairs. “You did not answer what I asked about the Americans.”
“Yes, I think you should work with them,” Monique answered. “If you have a choice between someone with a conscience and someone without, would you not rather work with the side that has one?”
“You’re probably right,” Pierre said. “If I have none myself, people with a conscience are easier to take advantage of.”
“Impossible man!” Monique exclaimed. “What would our mother and father say if they knew what you’d turned into?”
“What would they say? I like to think they’d say, ‘Congratulations, Pierre. We never expected that anyone in the family would get rich, and now you’ve gone and done it.’ ” Monique’s brother raised an eyebrow. “Getting rich does not seem to be anything you’re in severe danger of doing. When you were teaching, you weren’t getting much, and now you can’t even find a job.”
“I was doing what I wanted to do,” Monique said. “If I weren’t your sister, I’d still be doing what I wanted to do.”
“If you weren’t my sister, you’d be dead,” Pierre said coldly. “You’d have been living back at your old flat, and it was a lot closer to where the bomb went off than my place in the Porte d’Aix was. Next time you feel like calling me nasty names or asking about our parents, kindly bear that in mind.”
He was, infuriatingly, bound to be right. That didn’t make Monique resent him any less-on the contrary. But it would make her more careful about saying what was on her mind. “All right.” Even she could hear how grudging she sounded. “But I have spent a lot of time learning to be a historian. I’ve never spent any time learning the ginger business.”
“It’s all common sense,” her brother told her. “Common sense and a good ear for what’s true and what’s a lie-and the nerve not to let anyone cheat you. People-and Lizards-have to know you’ll never let anybody cheat you.”
A historian needed the first two traits. The third… Monique wondered how many people Pierre and his henchmen had killed. He’d been willing enough-more than willing enough-to use his Lizard friends to try to arrange Dieter Kuhn’s untimely demise. It hadn’t worked; the Lizard assassin, unable to tell one human from another, had gunned down a fish merchant by mistake. Of course, that effort had been in Pierre’s interest as well as Monique’s. She wondered if he ever did anything not in his own interest.
And she didn’t like the way he was eyeing her now. In musing tones, he said, “If I go with the Americans, little sister, you could be useful to me-you know English, after all. Even if I find the Americans don’t work out, I’ll go back to the Englishman-and you could be useful with him, too.”
“Suppose I don’t want to be… useful?” Monique had never-well, never this side of Dieter Kuhn-heard a word whose sound she liked less.
Her brother, as she’d already seen, was a relentless pragmatist. With a shrug, he answered, “I’ve carried you for a while now, Monique. Don’t you think it’s time you started earning your keep, one way on another?”
“I’m trying to do just that.” She held up the letter she was working on. “I haven’t had any luck, that’s all.”
“One way or another, I said.” Pierre sighed. “I admire you for trying to go on doing what you had done, truly I do. You can even go on trying to do it. I have no objection whatsoever, and I will congratulate you if you get a position. But if you don’t…” His smile was sad and oddly charming. “If you don’t, you can work for me.”
“I was just thinking you hadn’t been cruel enough to say anything like that to me,” Monique replied, her voice bitter. She snapped her fingers. “So much for that.”
“You don’t have to make up your mind right away,” Pierre said. “But do remember, I pulled wires to get you away from the purification police. I hoped you might want to show you were grateful.”
Monique scornfully tossed her head. “If you weren’t my brother, you’d be using that line to get me to go to bed with you.” All of a sudden, the prospect of being a maid of all work didn’t look so bad.
“Thank you, but no. I would not be interested even then-I’ve never had much use for women who argue and talk back all the time,” Pierre replied with wounding dignity. Monique wondered how well he knew himself. Lucie was anything but a shrinking violet.
But that thought flickered in her mind and then was gone. She wanted to hit back, to wound. “I believe you there,” she said. “The only time you’d want them to open their mouths would be to swallow something-just like that damned SS man. I’m surprised you didn’t jump to put on your own black shirt. They’d have paid you well, after all, and what else is there?”
Pierre surprised her with an immediate, emphatic answer: “Not being told what to do, of course. I had a bellyful of orders in the Army. I’ve done my best not to have to take them ever since.”
“You don’t care to take them, that could be,” Monique snarled. “But you don’t mind giving them, do you? No, you don’t mind that a bit.”
Her brother spread his hands in a startlingly philosophical gesture. “If one does not take orders, it is because he can give them, n’est ce-pas? Do you see any other arrangement?”
“I had another arrangement, till being your sister turned my life upside down,” Monique said. “I taught my classes, and outside of that I studied what I wanted, what interested me. No one made me do it. No one would have been interested in making me do anything. People let me alone. Do you understand what that means? Do you have any idea what that means?”
“It means you were very lucky,” Pierre said. “If you get another position, you will be lucky again. But if you are not so lucky, what then? Why, then you have to work for a living, just like everyone else.”
“There is a difference between working for a living and playing the whore,” Monique said. “Maybe you can’t understand that, but the Germans already made me play the whore. I’ll be damned if I let my brother do the same.”
She threw down the letter-why not? it was bound to be useless, anyhow-and stormed out of the tent. She fled not just the tent but the whole tent city as if it were accursed. It might as well have been, as far as she was concerned. If she’d had a little lead tablet and thought inscribing a curse in the name of the gods would have wiped the miserable place from the face of the earth, she would have done it in a heartbeat. As things were, all she could do was storm away.
Marseille was a great racket of bulldozers and jackhammers and saws and ordinary hammers and tools for which she didn’t even have names. Wrecked buildings were coming down. New buildings were going up. Most of those new buildings were supposed to be blocks of flats. Monique didn’t see the tent city shrinking, though. She had a pretty good idea what that meant: somebody’s pockets were getting lined.
She didn’t want to look at the buildings. Looking at them reminded her she wasn’t living in one of them, that she wouldn’t be able to afford to live in one of them. T
hey had things she could buy-unless Pierre cut off all her money. What would I do then? she wondered. Could I stand his business? She doubted it. And yet…
A man smoking a pipe called out a lewd proposition. Monique rounded on him and, in a voice that could be heard all over the square, suggested that he ask his mother for the same service. He turned very red. He turned even redder when people jeered him and cheered her. Puffing furiously at the pipe, he withdrew in disorder.
“Nicely done, Professor Dutourd,” someone behind Monique said. “A boor like that deserves whatever happens to him.”
She whirled. The world whirled around her. There stood Sturmbannfuhrer Dieter Kuhn. In civilian clothes, he looked like a Frenchman, but his accent declared who and what he was. “In that case, you deserved to be blown to the devil,” she snapped. “I thought you were. I prayed you were.”
He smiled the smile he no doubt thought so charming. “No such luck, I’m afraid. I was sent back to the Vaterland two days before the bomb fell here. They were going to put me in a panzer unit, but the Reich surrendered before they could.” He shrugged. “C’est la vie.”
“What are you doing here again?” Monique asked.
