Down to Earth c-2

by Harry Turtledove

  Monique tossed her head. “Never mind the advertisements, dammit. We both want this one dead, and we want it done so we can’t be blamed. You have the connections with the Lizards to arrange it, and-” She broke off.

  “And what?” her brother prompted.

  Unwillingly, she went on, “And, since he comes to my flat every couple of nights, we have a place where the Lizards can lie in wait.”

  “Ah,” Pierre said. “You want him to die happy, I comprehend.”

  “I want him to die dead,” Monique ground out. “I don’t care how. He won’t stay happy, by God.”

  “I suppose not,” Pierre said, with the air of a man making a sizable concession. He sat down on a wooden bench with rusty iron arm rests. Monique stood there, hands on hips; in his own way, her brother could be almost as infuriating as Dieter Kuhn. Pierre continued, “Well, I will see what I can do. When will the Nazi be at your flat again? Tonight?”

  Monique grimaced. Having to admit that Kuhn came there at all was humiliating enough. Having to admit that she knew his schedule was somehow worse. But she did, and could hardly pretend otherwise. Reluctantly, she answered, “No, he was there last night, and that means he isn’t likely to be back till tomorrow, and then a couple of days after that, and so on.”

  “Nice regular fellow, eh?” Pierre chuckled. Monique wanted to hit him. In that moment, she wouldn’t have minded seeing him dead. But then he said, “All right, my little sister, I’ll pass the word along. And who knows? It could be that, one day before too long, someone scaly will be waiting for your German when he comes outside.”

  “He’s not my German, and you can go straight to hell if you call him that again,” Monique said. She didn’t have to worry about keeping Pierre sweet. He had his own good reasons for wanting Kuhn dead. That let Monique take a certain savage pleasure in turning her back on him and stamping past the oleanders that screened the traffic noise and out of the Jardin Puget.

  She would have taken even more pleasure if she hadn’t heard Pierre laughing as she stalked away.

  Since she didn’t have to entertain Dieter Kuhn that evening, she actually managed to get some research done. Reading Latin, especially the abbreviation-filled Latin of her inscriptions, helped ease some of her fury. Scholars would be poring over these texts a thousand years from now, long, long after she and Dieter Kuhn were both dead. Thinking in those terms gave her a sense of proportion.

  She bared her teeth in something that wasn’t a smile. With any luck at all, a thousand years from now Dieter Kuhn would be dead a great deal longer than she was. Outliving him is the best revenge, she thought. But she shook her head a moment later. Revenge was the best revenge.

  When he knocked on her door a night later, she was almost eager to see him. He’d brought along a bottle of red wine, too; he didn’t try to make himself hateful to her. He could only have succeeded, though, by leaving her alone. He didn’t feel like doing that.

  As usual, she endured his attentions without enjoying them. As usual, that bothered him not in the least. Men, she thought. She’d known a couple of Frenchmen who’d cared for her pleasure as little as Dieter Kuhn did. But she hadn’t had to go to bed with them, and she’d stopped going to bed with them as soon as she realized what sort of men they were. The German didn’t give her that choice.

  Monique didn’t mind drinking his wine. Having him spend a few Reichsmarks was revenge of a sort, even if only of the tiniest sort. It turned out to be pretty good wine, too. And, if she got a little drunk, if her thinking got a little blurry, so much the better.

  “Well, my dear,” Kuhn said as he buttoned the fly to his trousers, “I must be off. I will see you again day after tomorrow, I think.”

  I am not your dear, Monique thought. She hadn’t got so blurry as to be confused about that; there wasn’t enough wine in the world to leave her confused about that. With any luck at all, I’ll never see you again, except, it could be, your bleeding corpse.

  “Yes, I suppose you will,” she answered aloud, and gave him a sweet smile. “Au revoir.”

  “Au revoir,” the SS man answered, and he smiled, too. “You see, you are coming to care for me after all. I knew you would, even if it took a while.”

  Monique didn’t say anything to that. She couldn’t, not unless she cared to give the game away. She did manage another smile. It was a smile of gloating anticipation, but Dieter Kuhn didn’t need to know that.

  He finished dressing, smugly kissed her, even more smugly fondled her, and, at last, headed for the door. Monique, still naked, stayed in the bedroom. That was what she always did when Kuhn left. If she did anything different tonight, she might rouse his suspicions. The last thing she wanted was to rouse Kuhn in any way.

  He turned the knob. Hinges creaked as the door swung open. Back in the bedroom, Monique hugged herself in glee. She didn’t know it would be tonight, but she hoped, she even prayed…

  A burst of gunfire shattered the quiet of the street outside, gunfire and a scream. “Gott im Himmel!” Dieter Kuhn exclaimed. Still in German, he went on, “That was a Lizard weapon, or I’m a Jew.” He slammed the door shut behind him and ran down the hall.

  “No,” Monique said, shaking her head back and forth. “No, no, no.” She had a horrible feeling she knew what had happened. The Race had as much trouble telling human beings apart as people did telling one Lizard from another. If the would-be assassin had been told to kill whoever came out of the block of flats at such-and-such a time, and if some luckless fellow had chosen just that time to go out for a stroll or a glass of wine… if that had happened, the fellow’s blood was on her hands.

  A couple of minutes later, someone pounded on her door. Kuhn, she thought, and then, Dammit. She threw on a nightgown and went to open the door. The SS man pushed past her and into the flat. “I need to use your telephone,” he said.

  “What happened?” Monique asked, though she feared she knew only too well.

  “Someone just shot a man to death outside this building with a Lizard automatic rifle,” Kuhn answered. “Merde alors, if I had gone out a couple of minutes sooner, that could have been me.” He was dialing the telephone as he replied, and began speaking into it in German, too fast and excited for Monique to follow more than one word in three.

  “Quel dommage,” she said distantly. If the SS man heard her, she thought he would think she meant it was a pity the other fellow had got shot, not that he himself hadn’t.

  After a couple of minutes, Kuhn hung up. He turned back to her. “They are on their way,” he said, returning to French. “As long as you have some clothes on, come downstairs with me and see if you can identify the body. The fellow may live here. If we know who he is, we may be able to find out why someone with a Lizard weapon-maybe even a Lizard-wanted him dead.”

  Monique gulped. “Do I have to?” she asked. She knew perfectly well why the poor fellow out there on the street was dead: because of her, and because the drug-dealing Lizard who’d shot him didn’t know what the devil he was doing. Seeing the result of her failed revenge was the last thing she wanted.

  But Dieter Kuhn, as she knew all too well, didn’t care what she wanted. “Come on,” he repeated, and grabbed her by the arm. He wasn’t the typical hulking German; by his looks and compact, wiry build, he might more readily have been French. But he was much stronger than Monique. When he dragged her along with him, she had no choice but to come.

  A little crowd of the curious and the ghoulish had gathered around the corpse on the sidewalk just in front of Monique’s block of flats. Blood, black in the moonlight, streamed down into the gutter. A man had a startling amount of blood in him. Monique could smell it, and the latrine stench that had come when the dead man’s bowels let go.

  Sirens yowled in the distance, rapidly coming closer. Kuhn took a little flashlight off his belt and shone it in the dead man’s face. “Do you know him?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Monique answered, trying not to look at the wound that had torn away one si
de of his jaw. “That’s Ferdinand Bonnard. He lives-lived-downstairs from me, on the second floor. He never bothered anyone that I heard of.” And I killed him, as sure as if I’d pulled the trigger myself. She wondered if she’d be sick.

  Kuhn wrote the name in a little notebook he fished from a trouser pocket. “Bonnard, eh? And what did he do?”

  “He sold fish in a little shop on the Rue de Refuge, not far from the harbor,” Monique answered as a couple of SS vehicles squealed to a stop and uniformed Germans spilled out of them. Everyone but Monique suddenly found urgent business elsewhere.

  “Dealt with fishermen, did he? Maybe he was a smuggler, too,” Kuhn said, and started talking to his Nazi colleagues. He might have forgotten about Monique. But when she started to go back inside the apartment building, Kuhn shook his head. “No-you will come with us to the Palais de Justice and answer more questions.” She must have looked as horrified as she felt, for he added, “It will not be as bad as it was last time. You have my word of honor.”

  And it wasn’t-quite.

  Once he started getting used to it, Rance Auerbach discovered Cape Town’s District Six wasn’t such a bad place after all. Yes, he had to treat Negroes as if they were as good as anybody else. He even had to take orders from them every now and then. That wasn’t easy for a Texan. But after he leaped the hurdle, he started having a pretty fair time.

  Everybody in District Six, black and white and colored (a distinction between full-blooded blacks and half-breeds the USA didn’t bother drawing) and Indian, was hustling as hard as he or she could. Some people had honest work, some work that wasn’t so honest. A lot of people had both kinds of jobs, and ran like maniacs from long before the sun rose over Table Mountain till long after it set in the South Atlantic.

  Rance couldn’t have run like a maniac even if he’d wanted to. Getting up and down the stairs to the flat he and Penny Summers shared was plenty to leave him sore and gasping. When he shuffled along the streets near the apartment building where he lived, kids of all colors laughed at his shuffling gait. They called him Stumpy, maybe because of his stick, maybe just because of the way he walked.

  He didn’t care what they called him. Kids back in the States had thought he walked funny, too. Hell, even he thought he walked funny. But he could get to the Boomslang saloon a couple of blocks from his apartment building, and most of the time that was as far as he wanted to go.

  Boomslang, he found, meant tree snake, and one particular, and particularly poisonous, kind of tree snake at that. Considering some of the rotgut the place served up, he could understand how it got its name. But it was close, it was cheap, and the crowd, despite being of all colors, was as lively and interesting as any he’d ever found in a bar.

  To his surprise, he found he was interesting to the Boomslang’s other patrons. His American accent made him exotic to both whites and blacks. So did his ruined voice. When people discovered he’d been wounded fighting the Lizards, he won respect for courage if not for sense.

  But when they found out how he’d wound up in South Africa, he won… interest. One evening, somewhat elevated from a few hours at the saloon, he came home and told Penny, “Half the people in this goddamn country are either in the ginger-smuggling business or want to be, if you listen to ’em talk.”

  His girlfriend threw back her head and laughed. “You just figured that out, Rance? Hell, sweetheart, if I’d’ve wanted to, I could’ve gotten back into business long since. But I’ve been taking it easy, you know what I mean?”

  “You?” Auerbach felt the whiskey singing in him. It didn’t make him stupid, but it did make him care less about what he said. “Since when did you ever believe in taking it easy?”

  Penny Summers turned red. “You really want to know? Since those damn Nazis pointed every gun in the world right at my head and carted you and me off to that jail in Marseille, that’s when.” She shuddered. “And then, after the Lizards got us back, they could’ve locked us up in their own jail and thrown away the key. So I’m not real hot to give ’em another shot at doing that. Thanks, but no thanks.”

  Auerbach stared. Of all the things he’d expected, Penny cautious was among the last. “You mean you like living like this?” His wave took in the cramped little flat. If he hadn’t been careful, he would have barked his knuckles on the wall.

  “Like it? Hell no,” Penny answered. “Like it better than a nice, warm, cozy cell with nothing but Lizards to look at for the rest of my days? Hell, yes.”

  “I’ll be damned,” he said wonderingly. “They really did put the fear of God in you, didn’t they?”

  She walked up to him and set her hands on his shoulders. It wasn’t the prelude to a kiss, as he’d hoped at first it might be. “Listen to me,” she said, as serious as he’d ever heard her. “Listen to me good. We caused those scaly bastards a lot of trouble, I mean a lot of trouble. If you don’t think they’re keeping an eye on us to make sure we’re good little boys and girls, you’re smack out of your mind. Want to bet against me? How much have you got?”

  Auerbach thought about it. He thought slower than he should have, but still thought pretty straight. When he was done, he shook his head, even though it made his ruined shoulder ache. “Nope. That’d be like raising with a pair of fives against a guy who’s got four diamonds showing.”

  Now Penny did kiss him, a peck on the lips that had nothing to do with lust and everything to do with gratitude. “See, Rance?” she said. “I knew you weren’t dumb.”

  “Only about you,” he answered, which made her laugh, though he hadn’t been more than half joking. He sighed and went on, “But if you listen to them, half the guys in the Boomslang have sold the Lizards a taste one time or another.”

  Penny laughed again. “How much have you had to drink, babe? Must be a hell of a lot, if you’re dumb enough to believe what a bunch of barflies say. And even if they have sold some poor damn Lizard a taste or two, so what? That’s nickel-and-dime stuff. If I ever do start playing the game down here, it won’t be for nickels and dimes, and you can bet your bottom dollar on that.”

  “If you get in trouble, you want to get in a whole lot of trouble-that’s what you’re telling me.” Now Rance nodded; that did sound like the Penny Summers he’d known for the past twenty-odd years. Penny… you could say a lot about her, but she never did things by halves.

  She knew it, too. “I stiffed my pals for plenty before I came running back to you,” she said. “If I ever take a shot at it again, I’ll do it once-once and then it’s off to Tahiti or one of those other little islands the Free French run.”

  Free France was a joke, but a useful joke. The Japanese Empire could have run the French off their South Pacific islands. So could the USA. So could the Lizards, flying out of Australia. Nobody bothered. Neutral ground where nobody asked a whole lot of questions was too useful to everyone.

  “I could go for that,” Rance agreed. The ginger he and Penny had run down into Mexico should have got them a stash that would have taken them to Tahiti. Auerbach liked the notion of island girls not overburdened with clothes or prudery. But things hadn’t worked out the way they’d had in mind, and so…

  Penny said, “I’ll tell you one more time, sugar: you won’t find anything that could head us toward Free France there in the goddamn Boomslang. And if you do find it in the Boomslang, it’s dollars to doughnuts somebody’s trying to set us up. You want to be a sucker, go ahead, but leave me out, okay?”

  “Okay,” Auerbach said, and then he yawned. “Let’s go to bed.”

  “How do you mean that?” Penny asked.

  “Damned if I know,” he answered. “Meet me in the bedroom and we’ll both find out.” Five minutes later, two sets of snores rose from the bed.

  A couple of evenings afterwards, Rance and Penny went to the Boomslang together. She didn’t go with him all the time, but then, she wasn’t in constant pain, either. When she did come into the saloon, she always drew admiring glances, not just from whites but from blacks
as well. That was one more thing Auerbach had had to get used to in a hurry here. Those kinds of looks from Negroes in Texas might have touched off a lynching bee. He gathered the same thing had been true in South Africa before the Lizards came. It wasn’t true any more.

  Rance drank scotch that had never been within five thousand miles of Scotland. Penny contented herself with a Lion Lager. A barmaid took one of the other regulars upstairs. “Don’t even think about it, buster,” Penny murmured.

  “I won’t,” Rance promised. “She’s homely.” Penny snorted.

  After a while, a big, broad-shouldered black fellow whom Auerbach knew only as Frederick-emphatically not as Fred-came over and sat down beside him. “It is the ginger man,” he said in a rumbling bass. His smile was broad and friendly. Too broad and friendly to be convincing? Rance had never quite figured that out, which meant he stayed wary where Frederick was concerned. The black man inclined his head to Penny. “And this is the ginger lady?”

  His musical accent made the question less offensive than it might have been otherwise. Penny tossed her head. “There’s plenty of ginger in me, pal,” she said, “but I’m spoken for.” She put a hand on Rance’s arm.

  In a way, Rance was annoyed that she thought she needed to say such a thing, especially to a Negro. In another way, he was relieved. He wouldn’t have wanted to tangle with Frederick even if he’d had two good arms and two good legs. With things as they were, the black man could have broken him in half without working up a sweat.

  But Frederick shook his head. “No, no, no,” he said. “Not that kind of ginger, dear lady. The kind that makes the Lizards dance.”

  “Ixnay,” Rance muttered to Penny. South African English was different enough from the kind he’d grown up with that he didn’t worry about Frederick’s knowing what that meant.

  Penny nodded slightly, but leaned forward so she could see Frederick around Rance and said, “Yeah, I’ve done that. But so what? If I hadn’t done it, I wouldn’t have ended up here, and so I’m not going to do it any more.”