“You don’t even know why you did that,” Walsh said.
“Any excuse in a storm,” Devereaux answered.
“The RAF was never like this,” Goldfarb said. The only time he’d known anything even close to such informality in the RAF had been in the days when he was working under Group Captain Fred Hipple, desperately trying to learn all he could about Lizard radars and jet engines. He’d looked back fondly on those days—till Basil Roundbush, who’d worked with him then, came back into his life.
He hadn’t heard anything from Roundbush lately, or from any of Roundbush’s Canadian associates, either. Nor had anybody tried to kill him lately. He approved of that. He would have been hard pressed to think of anything he approved of more than not getting killed, in fact. He would have been happier still had he known Roundbush had given up for good. Unfortunately, he knew nothing of the sort. And Roundbush was not the sort to give up easily.
But every day without trouble was one more day won. He’d thought that way during the war, first during the Battle of Britain when nobody’d known if the Nazis would invade, and then after the Lizards came till they did invade. With the return of peacetime, he’d been able to look further ahead again. But trouble brought him back to counting the days one at a time.
Walsh said, “Shall we see if we can get something more useful than the odd obscene gesture done today?”
“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 Round
bush?” 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 Sturmbannführer Dieter Kuhn, who was sharing the table at the seaside café 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 clichés. 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 République Française 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.”
“We have the same enemies, anyhow,” Rance said. He didn’t want to think of the SS man as being on his side, even if that was how things stood.
“The same enemies, yes, but different reasons,” Dieter Kuhn said. Maybe he wasn’t happy about lining up with a couple of Americans, either. “We want to make Pierre Dutourd want to work with us and not with Roundbush and his associates, while you want to help your friend in Canada.”
“Reasons are not important,” Penny said. “Results are important.”
“Truth.” Auerbach and Kuhn said it at the same time, both in the Lizards’ language. They gave each other suspicious looks. Neither of them used an emphatic cough. Auerbach drank some more wine, then asked the German, “Will you tell your superiors in Flensburg you work with us to help a Jew?”
“Of course not,” Kuhn answered at once. “But I do not think they would care much, not as things are now. I break no secrets in saying that. To rebuild, the Reich needs money. We can get money through selling ginger to the Lizards. If Dutourd works with us, works through us, that helps bring in money. And so, for now, I do not much care about Jews. Getting rid of the Englishman and bringing Dutourd to heel is more important for the time being.”
As things are now. For the time being. Rance eyed the Sturmbannführer as he would have eyed a rattlesnake. Kuhn—and, presumably, Kuhn’s bosses—hadn’t given up. Taking it on the chin—hell, getting knocked out of the ring—had made them change their priorities, but Auerbach didn’t think it had made them change their minds.
He asked, “How goes the rebuilding? How closely do the Lizards watch you?”
“Merde alors!” Kuhn exclaimed in fine pseudo-Gallic disgust. “Their eye turrets are everywhere. Their snouts are everywhere. A man cannot go into a pissoir and unbutton his fly without having a Lizard see how he is hung.”
“Too bad,” Rance said. About half of him meant it. The balance of power between the Lizards and mankind had swung toward the Race when Germany went down in flames. The other half of Auerbach, the part that remembered the days before the Lizards came, the days when Hitler’s goons were the worst enemies around, hoped the Nazis would never get back on their feet.
Maybe a little of that showed on his face. Or maybe Dieter Kuhn was a pretty fair needler in his own right. Deadpan, he asked, “And how is it with Indianapolis these days?”
Auerbach shrugged. “All I know is what I read in the newspapers. Newspapers here say what the Lizards want.”
“The French are whores.” Kuhn didn’t bother keeping his voice down. “They gave to the Reich. Now they give to the Race.” He rose, threw down enough jingly aluminum coins to cover the tab, and strode away.
Penny went back to English: “That’s one unhappy fellow, even if he hides it pretty good.”
“You bet,” Rance agreed. “I’ll tell you, I like him a hell of a lot better by his lonesome than in front of a bunch of soldiers toting submachine guns.”
“Amen!” Penny said fervently. “You know something, Rance? I’m goddamn tired of having people point guns at me, is what I am.”
After lighting another foul-smelling French cigarette, Auerbach eyed her through the smoke he puffed out. “You know, kid, you might have picked the wrong line of work in that case.”
She laughed. “Now why the hell didn’t I think of that?”
“We’re not doing too bad here this time around,” Rance said. “Better than I expected we would, I’ll say that.”
Instead of laughing again, Penny pretended to faint. That made Auerbach laugh, which made him start coughing, which made him feel as if his chest were coming to pieces. Penny thumped him on the back. It didn’t help much. She said, “Don’t tell me things like that. My heart won’t stand it.”
“Don’t worry. I’m not going to make a habit of it.” Auerbach filled his glass from the carafe of red wine that sat on the table. “This is a complicated deal, you know? We’ve got to stay on Dutourd’s good side on account of we’re doing business with him, and we’ve got to stay on Kuhn’s good side on account of we’re doing business with him, too, and they don’t like each other for beans.”
“It’d be a lot easier if you didn’t have anything to do with that damn Nazi,” Penny said. “We don’t need to, not as far as money’s concerned.”
“Oh, I know,” Rance answered. “But I told that Roundbush son of a bitch that I was going to tie a tin can to his tail, and I damn well meant it. He laughed at me. Nobody laughs at me and gets away with it. Nobody, you hear?”
Penny didn’t say anything right away. She lit a cigarette of her own, took a puff, made a face, and took a sip of wine to help get rid of the taste. She studied him through her smoke screen. At last, words did come from her: “Anybody took a look at you or listened to you for just a little while, he’d figure you were a wreck.”
“He’d be right, too,” Rance said at once, with a certain perverse pride.
But Penny shook her head. She drew on the cigarette again. “Goddamn, I don’t know why I smoke these things, except I get so jumpy when I don’t.” She paused. “Where was I? Oh, yeah. You’re like an old crowbar all covered with rust. Anybody looks at it, he figures he can break it over his knee. B
ut it’s solid iron in the middle. You can smash somebody’s head in with it as easy as not.”
Auerbach grunted. He wasn’t used to praise—even ambiguous praise like that—from her. And he enjoyed feeling decrepit; whenever he failed at something, he had a built-in excuse. He said, “Hell, my own crowbar doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to half the time these days.”
Penny snorted. Then she said, “You’re sandbagging,” which held an uncomfortable amount of truth. “You want to head back to the hotel, or you want to come shopping with me?”
“I’ll head back to the hotel,” he said without the least hesitation. “You go shopping the way a big-game hunter goes on safari.” That was also a compliment of sorts.
Penny headed off to pit her bad French and her air of Midwestern naïveté against the merchants of Marseille. Rance took a taxi over to La Residence Bompard. He hadn’t been there long before somebody knocked on the door. The Luger he’d acquired wasn’t legal, but a lot of the things he’d been doing in France weren’t legal. “Who is it?” he asked, his raspy voice sharp with suspicion—he wasn’t expecting company.
To his surprise, the answer came back in English: “It is I—Monique Dutourd.”
“Oh.” He slid the pistol into a pocket before opening the door. “Hello,” he said, also in English. “Come in. Make yourself at home.”
“Thank you.” She looked around the room, then slowly nodded. “Yes. This is what it is like to be civilized. I remember. It has been a while.”
“Sit down,” Auerbach said. “Can I get you some wine?” She shook her head. He asked, “What can I do for you, then?”
“I wish to know”—her English was slow and precise; she had to think between words, as he did for French, though she spoke a little better—“why it is that you are friendly with that SS man, that Dieter Kuhn.” She said several words after that in incandescent French, French nothing like what he’d studied at West Point. He didn’t know exactly what they meant, but the tone was unmistakable.
“Why?” he said. “Because he and I have an enemy who is the same. Do you remember Goldfarb, the Jew that English ginger dealer sent here when this was still part of the Reich?” He waited for her to nod, then went on, “I am using the Nazi to take revenge on the Englishman.”
Colonization: Aftershocks Page 41
