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“Mine wasn’t odd,” Devereaux said. “I did it right.”
“By dint of long practice, I have no doubt,” his boss replied. Goldfarb expected the French-Canadian engineer to demonstrate the gesture again, but Devereaux refrained. Walsh looked faintly disappointed. Devereaux caught David’s eye and winked. Goldfarb grinned, then coughed to give himself an excuse to put a hand in front of his face so Hal Walsh wouldn’t notice.
Eventually, they did get down to work. David had the feeling it was going to be one of those afternoons where nothing much got accomplished. He turned out to be right, too. He’d had a lot of those afternoons in the RAF, far fewer since coming to Canada. The reason for that wasn’t hard to figure out: the British government could afford them a lot more easily than the Saskatchewan River Widget Works could. But they did happen now and again.
He was, as always these days, wary when he walked home. Nothing like almost getting killed to make you pay attention to the maniacs on the highway, he thought. But nobody tried to run him down. All the maniacs in the big American cars were maniacal because of their native stupidity, not because they wanted to rub out one David Goldfarb.
“Something smells good,” he said when he opened the door.
From the kitchen, Naomi answered, “It’s a roasting chicken. It’ll be ready in about half an hour. Do you feel like a bottle of beer first?”
“Can’t think of anything I’d like more,” he answered. She popped the tops off a couple of Mooseheads and brought them out to the front room. “Thanks,” Goldfarb said, and kissed her. The kiss went on for a while. When it broke, he said, “Well, maybe I can think of something I’d like more. What are the children doing right now?”
“Homework.” Naomi gave him a sidelong look and doled out another word: “Optimist.”
“We made it here to Edmonton, didn’t we?” David said, and then, in what wasn’t quite a non sequitur, “The children are bound to go to bed sooner or later.” As big as they were getting, that marked him as an optimist, too.
He sat down on the sofa and sipped the beer. “That’s not bad,” he said. “It doesn’t match what a proper pub would give you, right from the barrel, but it’s not bad. You can drink it.” He took another sip, as if to prove as much.
“What’s new?” his wife asked.
“I’ll tell you what: my boss is seeing the doctor who sewed up my finger,” he said. “She’s worth seeing, too, I will say.” Smiling sweetly, Naomi put an elbow in his ribs. “Careful, there,” he exclaimed. “You almost made me spill my beer. Now I have to figure out whether to say anything about it the next time I write to Moishe in Jerusalem.”
“Why wouldn’t you say-? Oh,” Naomi said. “This is the doctor who was going with Reuven Russie, isn’t it?”
David nodded. “That’s right. She didn’t want to stay in a country the Lizards ruled, and he didn’t feel like emigrating, and so…” He shrugged. He suspected that, had he been close to marrying Jane Archibald and she told him she wanted to move to Siam, he would have started learning Siamese. Having already got one elbow in the ribs, he didn’t tell that to Naomi.
Instead of another elbow, he got a raised eyebrow. They’d been married twenty years. Sometimes he could get in trouble without saying a word. This looked to be one of those times.
“I’m going to check the chicken,” she said. He’d never heard that sound like a threat before, but it did now.
She’d just opened the oven door when the telephone rang. “I’ll get it,” David said. “Whoever it is, he’s messed it up-he was bound to be trying to call us at suppertime.” He picked up the handset. “Hullo?”
“Hello, Goldfarb.” Ice and fire ran up David’s back: it was Basil Roundbush. Goldfarb looked to the phone-number reader. It showed the call’s origin as the United Kingdom, but no more than that: Roundbush’s blocking device was still on the job.
“What the devil do you want?” Goldfarb snarled.
“I rang to tell you that you can call off your dogs, that’s what,” Roundbush answered. He sounded ten years older than he had the last time he’d blithely threatened Goldfarb’s destruction, or maybe it was just that, for once, his voice had lost its jauntiness.
“What the hell are you talking about?” David asked. He kept his voice low so as not to alarm Naomi. That, of course, was plenty to bring her out of the kitchen to find out what was going on. He mouthed Roundbush’s name. Her eyes widened.
“I told you-call off your dogs,” the RAF officer and ginger dealer said. “I’ve got the message, believe you me I do. I shan’t be troubling you any more, so you need no longer be concerned on that score.”
“How do I know I can believe a word of that?” Goldfarb still hadn’t the faintest idea what Basil Roundbush was talking about, but he liked the way it sounded. Letting on that he was ignorant didn’t strike him as a good idea.
“Because I bloody well don’t want to get my sodding head blown off, that’s how,” Roundbush burst out. “Your little friends have come too close twice, and I know they’ll manage it properly sooner or later. Enough is enough. In my book, we’re quits.”
If he wasn’t telling the truth, he should have been a cinema actor. Goldfarb knew he was good, but hadn’t thought he was that good. “We’ll see,” he said, in what he hoped were suitably menacing tones.
“I’ve said everything I’m going to say,” Roundbush told him. “As far as I’m concerned, the quarrel is over.”
“Don’t like it so well when the shoe is on the other foot, eh?” Goldfarb asked, still trying to find out what the devil was going on. A conciliatory Basil Roundbush was as unlikely an item as a giggling polar bear.
“Bloody Nazis haven’t got enough to do now that the Reich has gone down the loo,” Roundbush said bitterly. “I really hadn’t thought you of all people would be able to pull those wires, but one never can tell these days, can one?” He hung up before David could find another word to say.
“Nu?” Naomi demanded as Goldfarb slowly hung up the phone, too.
“I don’t know,” he answered. “I really don’t know. He said he was going to leave me alone, and that I should call my dogs off him. He said they’d almost killed him twice. He said they were Nazis, too.”
“He’s meshuggeh,” Naomi exclaimed. She added one of the Lizards’ emphatic coughs for good measure.
“I think so, too,” David said. “He must have fallen foul of the Germans somehow, and he thinks I’m behind it. And do you know what? If he wants to think so, it’s fine by me.”
“But what happens if these people, whoever they are, keep going after Roundbush?” Naomi asked. “Won’t he blame you and get his friends over here to come after you again?”
“He might,” Goldfarb admitted. “I don’t know what I can do about it, though. Whoever’s going after that mamzer, I haven’t got anything to do with it.” He rolled his eyes. “Nazis. The only Nazis I ever knew were the ones I saw with radar during the fighting.”
“What do you think we ought to do?” Naomi asked.
Goldfarb shrugged. “I don’t know what we can do, except go on the way we’ve been going. As long as we’re careful, dear Basil’s goons won’t have an easy time getting us, anyhow.” One eyebrow climbed toward his hairline. “And who knows. Maybe those blokes, whoever they are, will put paid to him after all. I wouldn’t shed a tear, I’ll tell you that.”
“Neither would I,” Naomi said.
Warm Mediterranean sunshine poured down from a brilliant blue sky. The water was every bit as blue, only two shades darker. Gulls and terns wheeled overhead. Every so often, one of them would plunge into the sea. Sometimes it would come out with a fish in its beak. Sometimes-more often, Rance Auerbach thought-it wouldn’t.
He lit a cigarette. It was a French brand, and pretty vile, but American tobacco, even when you could get it, was impossibly expensive over here. Of course, American tobacco would have set him coughing, too, so he couldn’t blame that on the frogs. He sipped some wine. He’d
never been much for the stuff, but French beer tasted like mule piss. Raising the glass, he grinned at Penny Summers. “Mud in your eye.” Then he turned to Sturmbannfuhrer Dieter Kuhn, who was sharing the table at the seaside cafe with them. “Prost!”
They all drank. The SS man spoke much better French than either Rance or Penny. In that good French, he said, “I regret that Group Captain Roundbush unfortunately survived another encounter with my friends.”
“Quelle dommage,” Rance said, though he didn’t really think it was a pity. “It will be necessary to try again.” For again, he said wieder, because he could come up with the German word but not its French equivalent. He’d taken French and German both at West Point. Because he’d been using his French here in Marseille, it had less rust on it than his German did, but neither was what anybody would call fluent.
“Life is strange.” Penny’s French, like Auerbach’s, relied on cliches. She went on, “In Canada, we tried to deal with Roundbush. Now we try to kill him.”
“Strange indeed,” Kuhn said with a smile he probably thought was a real ladykiller. “The last time we were all in Marseille, it was part of the Reich, and it was my duty to arrest the two of you. Now the Republique Francaise is reborn, and we are all here as simple tourists.”
Nobody laughed too loudly. That might have drawn more notice than they wanted. Penny said, “Now we are on the same side.”
