“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.”
“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 Sturmbannfuhrer 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.