He had to remind himself he needed to answer. “Yes, we are the Americans,” he said in his slow, Texas-flavored Parisian French. “And you?”
“I’m Lucie,” she told him. “I’m Pierre’s friend. Come with me.”
They came. Even without running water, the tent city had better order than Rance would have guessed from the smell on his arrival. There were latrine trenches off in the distance. Just too many people, and they’ve been here too long, he thought. He knew about that; he and Penny had been stuck in a refugee camp for a while after the first round of fighting ended. Kids in short pants ran by, making a godawful racket. Rance almost tripped over a yappy little dog.
The tent in which Lucie and Pierre lived was a good-sized affair whose canvas had been bleached by sun and rain. Ducking through the tent flap wasn’t easy for Rance, either, but he managed, leaning on the stick. When he straightened up again, he said, “Oh, hello,” rather foolishly, in English, because another woman was in the tent with Pierre and Lucie. She was younger than the ginger dealer, but they had a family look to them-though she was better looking than old Pierre the Turd ever dreamt of being.
She surprised him by answering in English: “Hello. I am Monique Dutourd, Pierre’s soeur- his sister.”
He went back to his own bad French: “How is it that you speak English?”
“I am a professor of Roman history,” she said, and then, with a flash of bitterness, “A professor too long without a position. I read English and German much better than I speak them.” Her mouth narrowed into a thin line. “I hope never to speak German again.”
“Any language can be useful,” Pierre Dutourd said, first in English and then in the language of the Race. He went on in the latter tongue: “Is that not a truth?”
Rance and Penny had spent too much time in the company of Lizards over the past few years. They both made the Race’s affirmative hand gesture at the same time. Lucie laughed, which raised a couple of goosebumps on Rance’s arms. Penny gave him a sour look; she must have known what the Frenchwoman’s voice was doing to him.
Lucie hefted a green glass bottle. “Wine?” she asked.
“Merci,” Auerbach said, and Penny nodded. Rance would have preferred either real booze or beer, but this was France, so what could you do?
Pierre Dutourd raised his glass in salute. “This is a better meeting than our last one,” he said.
“Amen!” Rance exclaimed, and drank. He fumbled for words. “No Nazis with rifles, no trouble, no fear.”
“Less fear, anyhow,” the ginger dealer said. “Less trouble. The Lizards-the Lizards in authority-still do not love us. With France as she is today, this causes certain difficulties.”
“But you’re getting around them,” Penny said after Auerbach translated for her. He started to turn that back into French, but Pierre’s sister did the job faster and better than he could have.
“Yes, we are.” This time, Pierre Dutourd spoke the language of the Race. “Do we all understand this speech?” Everyone did but Monique, and she seemed not particularly unhappy at being excluded. “Good,” Pierre said. “Now-I am given to understand you have some of the herb you are interested in selling me?”
“Truth,” Penny said.
“Congratulations on getting it into this not-empire,” Dutourd said. “That is more difficult these days. Officials are altogether too friendly with the Race. Some of my former suppliers are having troubles, which is a pity: there are many males and females hereabouts who are longing for a taste.”
“I hope Basil Roundbush is one of those suppliers,” Rance said.
“As a matter of fact, he is,” Pierre said. “You know him?” He waited for Rance to nod, then went on, “He is, I believe, fixing his troubles now.”
“I hope he does not,” Auerbach said, and used an emphatic cough.
“Ah?” Dutourd raised an eyebrow, scenting scandal.
“Dealing with Penny and me will mean you have less need to deal with him,” Rance said. “I aim to hunt his business if I can.” He didn’t wait for the French ginger dealer to ask why, but went on to explain his run-in with Roundbush in Edmonton and the way the Englishman was hounding David Goldfarb.
Pierre Dutourd listened, but didn’t seem much impressed. Business is business to him, the son of a bitch, Auerbach thought. But when he mentioned Goldfarb’s name, Monique Dutourd perked up. She and her brother went back and forth in rapid-fire French, most of it too fast for Rance to keep up with. He gathered Pierre was filling her in on what he’d said.
Then she seemed to slow down deliberately, to give Auerbach a chance to understand her next words: “I think that, if it is possible for you to do without the Englishman and his ginger, you should. Anyone who would send a Jew-and a Jew who did not speak even so much as a word of French-in among the Nazis is not a man who deserves to be trusted. If he has the chance to betray you, he will take it.”
“I have been guarding my back for many years, Monique,” Pierre said with amused affection. “I do not need you to tell me how to do it.”
His sister glared at him. Auerbach was sure he’d lost the play. But then Lucie said, “It could be Monique has reason. I have never trusted this Roundbush, either. He is too friendly. He is too handsome. He thinks too much of himself. Such men are not to be relied upon-and now we have another choice.”
Rance had been trying to keep up with a translation for Penny, but he caught that. With a nod to good old Pierre the Turd, he said, “C’est vrai. Now you have another choice.”
“It could be,” Dutourd said. Auerbach carefully didn’t smile. He knew a nibble on the hook when he felt one.
Monique Dutourd looked up from the letter she was writing. She wondered how many applications she’d sent out to universities all over France. She also wondered how many of those universities still existed at the moment, and how many had vanished off the face of the earth in an instant of explosive-metal fine.
And she wondered how many letters she’d sent to universities still extant had got where they were addressed. The situation with the mail in newly independent France remained shockingly bad. The Nazis would never have tolerated such inefficiency. Of course, the Nazis would have read a lot of the letters in the mailstream along with delivering them. Monique dared hope the officials of the Republique Francaise weren’t doing the same.
She also dared hope department chairmen were reading the letters she sent them. She had very little on which to base that hope. Only three or four letters had come back to the tent city outside Marseille. None of them showed the least interest in acquiring the services of a new Romanist.
Because nobody cared about her academic specialty, she remained stuck with her brother and Lucie. She wished she could get away, but they were the ones who had the money-they had plenty of it. They were generous about sharing it with her: more generous, probably, than she would have been were roles reversed. But being dependent on a couple of ginger dealers rankled.
Not for the first time, Monique wished she’d studied something useful instead of Latin and Greek. Then she could have struck out on her own, got work for herself. As things were, she had to stay here unless she wanted to spend the rest of her days as a shopgirl or a maid of all work.
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.”