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“Fifty Reichsmarks a kilo,” he answered, and paused to look her up and down. He grinned, not very pleasantly. “Or a blow job, if you’d rather.”
“For green beans? That’s outrageous,” Monique said.
“I have ham, too,” the farmer said. “If you want to blow me for ham, we can work something out, I expect.”
“No, your price in money,” Monique said impatiently. She didn’t have to give this bastard anything she didn’t want to; he wasn’t an SS man. “I’ll pay you thirty Reichsmarks a kilo.” German money was the only kind in circulation; new francs were promised, but had yet to appear.
“Fifty, take it or leave it.” The farmer didn’t sound put out that she’d failed to fall to her knees. But he went on, “For once in my life, I don’t have to haggle. If you won’t pay me what I want, somebody else will-and you won’t get a better price from anyone else around.”
He was almost certainly right. “When the roads and railroads get fixed, you’ll sing a different tune,” Monique said.
“All the better reason to get what I can now, “he answered. “Do you want these beans, or don’t you? Like I say, if you don’t, somebody will.”
“Give me two kilos.” Monique had the money. Her brother Pierre had more money than he knew what to do with, even at the obscene prices for which things were selling nowadays. The Lizards had bought a lot of ginger from him over the years, and Germans and Frenchmen had bought a lot of goods he’d got from the Lizards.
After Monique paid the peasant, she held out her stringbag-a universal French shopping tool-and he poured haricots verts into it. When he stopped, she hefted the sack and glared at him. Grudgingly, he doled out a few more beans. Getting cheated on price was one thing. Getting cheated on weight was something else. Hefting the stringbag again, Monique supposed he’d come close to giving her the proper amount.
She bought potatoes from another farmer, one who refrained from offering to take his price in venery. Of course, his wife, a woman of formidable proportions, was standing beside him, which probably had something to do with his restraint. Then Monique headed back to the vast tent city outside of town that housed the many survivors who’d come through even when their homes hadn’t.
The tent city smelled like a barnyard. She supposed that was inevitable, since it had no running water. The Romans, no doubt, would have taken such odors as an inevitable part of urban life. Monique didn’t, couldn’t. She wished her nose would go to sleep whenever she had to come back.
A boy who couldn’t have been older than eight tried to steal her vegetables. She walloped him on the bottom, hard enough to send him off yowling. If he’d asked her for some, she probably would have given them to him. But she wouldn’t put up with thieves, not even thieves in short pants.
As she’d had to share a flat with her brother and his lover, now she had to share a tent with them. When she ducked inside, she discovered they had company: a Lizard with impressively fancy body paint. He jerked in alarm when she came through the tent flap.
Lucie spoke reassuringly in the Lizards’ language. Monique didn’t speak it, but caught the tone. She wondered if it worked as well on the Lizard as it would have on a human male. Lucie wasn’t much to look at, being pudgy and plain, but she had the sexiest voice Monique had ever heard.
Pierre Dutourd was also pudgy and plain, so they made a good pair, or at least a well-matched one. He was ten years older than Monique, and the difference looked even wider than it was. “How did you do?”
She hefted the stringbag. “Everything is too expensive,” she answered, “but the haricots verts and the potatoes looked pretty good, so I got them.”
“Excuse me,” the Lizard said in hissing French. “Is it that these foods were grown in the local soil?”
“But of course,” Monique answered. “Why?”
“Because, in that case, they are liable to be in some measure radioactive,” the Lizard replied. “Your health would be better if you did not eat them.”
“They are the only food we can get,” Monique said, acid in her voice. “Would our health be better if we starved to death?”
“Well, no,” the Lizard admitted. “But why can you not get more healthful alimentation?”
“Why?” Monique wanted to hit him over the head with the stringbag. “Because the Race has dropped explosive-metal bombs all over France, that’s why.” She turned to Pierre. “Do you always deal with idiots?”
“Keffesh isn’t an idiot,” her brother answered, and patted the Lizard on the shoulder. “He’s just new in Marseille, and doesn’t understand the way things here are right now. He’s been buying and selling down in the South Pacific, till the war disrupted things.”
“Well, he ought to think a little before he talks,” Monique snapped.
“Who is this bad-tempered person?” the Lizard named Keffesh asked Pierre.
“My sister,” he answered. “She is bad-tempered, I agree, but she will not betray you. You may rely on that.”
By the way Keffesh’s eye turrets swung back and forth, he didn’t want to rely on anything. He stuck out his tongue at Pierre, as a human being might have pointed with an index finger. “It could be,” he said. Now that he’d started speaking French, he seemed content to stick with it. “But may I rely on you? If you cannot bring in food and have to eat supplies that are possibly contaminated, how is it that you will be able to bring in supplies of the herb my kind craves so much?”
Lucie laughed. Monique didn’t know what, if anything, that did to Keffesh; it certainly would have got any human male’s complete and undivided attention. Lucie said, “That is very simple. There is little profit in food. There is great profit in ginger. Of course ginger will move where food would not.”
“Ah,” Keffesh said. “Yes, that is sensible. Very well, then.”
Monique shook her head and set down the sack of vegetables. She had no doubt Lucie was right. What did that say about the way things worked in the world? That the coming of the Lizards hadn’t changed things much? Of all the conclusions she contemplated, that was odds-on the most depressing.
Rance Auerbach contemplated another perfect Tahitian day. It was warm, a little humid, with clouds rolling across the blue sky. He could look out the window of the apartment he shared with Penny Summers and see the even bluer South Pacific. He turned away from the lovely spectacle and lit a cigarette. Smoking made him cough, which hurt. He’d lost most of a lung and taken other damage from a Lizard bullet during the fighting. Doctors told him he was cutting years off his life by not quitting. Too goddamn bad, he thought, and took another drag.
He limped into the kitchen and got himself a beer. “Let me have one of those, too, will you?” Penny called from the bedroom when she heard him open it.
“Okay.” His voice was a ruined rasp. He popped the top off another beer. Walking back to give it to her hurt, too. Another bullet from the same burst of fire had left him with a shattered leg. “Here you go, babe.”
“Thanks,” she told him. She was also smoking a cigarette, in quick, nervous puffs. She grabbed the beer and raised it high. “Here’s to crime.”
He drank-he would have drunk to anything-but he laughed, too. “Didn’t know there was any such thing in Free France.”
“Ha,” she said, and brushed a lock of dyed blond hair back off her cheek. She was in her early forties, a few years younger than Rance, and could pass for younger still because of the energy she showed. “Now, the next interesting question is, how much longer will there be a Free France now that there’s a real France again?”
“You expect the froggies to sail out here with gunboats and take over?” After a long sentence, Rance had to pause and suck in air. “I don’t think that’s awful goddamn likely.”
“Gunboats? No, neither do I. But airplanes full of clerks and cops?” Penny grimaced. “I wouldn’t be half surprised. And they’re liable to kill the goose that laid the golden egg if they do.”
As far as power went, Free Fran
ce was a joke. It couldn’t hold out for twenty minutes if the Empire of Japan or the USA or the Race decided to invade it. But none of them had, because a place under nobody’s thumb, where people and Lizards could make deals without anybody looking over their shoulders, was too useful to all concerned. How would that look, though, to a pack of functionaries back in Paris?
Not good. “We came here to get out from under,” Rance said in his Texas drawl. “What do we do if that doesn’t work?”
“Go somewheres else,” Penny answered at once. Her Kansas accent was as harsh as his was soft. “I’m thinkin’ about it. How about you?”
“Yeah.” He was surprised at how readily he admitted it. Tahiti, with no laws to speak of, with shameless native girls who didn’t bother covering their tits half the time, had been awfully attractive-till he got here. One thing nobody mentioned about the native girls was how often they had hulking, bad-tempered native boyfriends. And, with no law to speak of, he often felt like a sardine in a tank full of sharks. “Where have you got in mind?”
“Well, like you said, if the froggies get their hands on this place, they’ll squeeze it till its eyes pop,” Penny said. “So what I was figuring was maybe going back to France. It’s a lot bigger than Tahiti, you know? They won’t have half the cops and things they need to keep an eye on everybody, on account of the Nazis have been doing so much of that for so long.”
