“I can tell you some of what you need to know,” Roundbush said. “I can also give you the names of people down there to ask. They’ll be able to tell you far more.” He signaled to a barmaid: “Two more whiskies, dear.” As soon as she’d gone off to fetch them, he turned back to Goldfarb. “So you’ll take it on, then?”
“What choice have I got?” David asked bitterly.
“A man always has choices,” Group Captain Roundbush replied. “Some may be better than others, but they’re always there.” Thanks so much, Goldfarb thought. Yes, I could stick a gun in my mouth and blow out my brains. That’s the sort you mean. Roundbush was going cheerfully along his own line of thought: “For instance, would you sooner carry a British passport or an American one?”
“With this accent?” Goldfarb shook his head. “No choice there. If I ever run into anyone who can tell the difference-and I might-I’d be made out a liar in less time than it takes to tell.”
“Not necessarily. You could be a recent immigrant,” Roundbush said.
“I wish I were a recent immigrant,” Goldfarb said. “Then you couldn’t be twisting my arm like this.”
“Not personally,” the senior RAF man agreed. “As I told you when we had our last discussion about your possibly leaving the country, though, I do have colleagues in the same line of work on the other side of the Atlantic. They might need your services from time to time. And, because they don’t know at first hand what a sterling fellow you are, they might be rather more importunate than I am in requiring your assistance.”
Goldfarb had no trouble figuring out what that meant. “They’re a pack of American gangsters, and they’ll shoot me if I talk back.”
Basil Roundbush didn’t admit that. On the other hand, he didn’t deny it, either. Instead, he turned the subject, saying, “Jolly good to have you on board again. I expect you’ll do splendidly.”
“I expect I’ll make a bloody hash of it-or I would make a bloody hash of it if I dared, if something dreadful wouldn’t happen to my family,” Goldfarb said. He knocked back his new whiskey, which the barmaid had brought while he and Roundbush were talking. She’d damn near plopped herself down in Roundbush’s lap afterwards, too. After coughing a couple of times, David asked, “Tell me something, sir: did you and your chums blow the ships from the colonization fleet out of the sky?”
He had, for once, succeeded in startling the normally imperturbable Roundbush. “Oh, good heavens, no!” the group captain exclaimed. “We can do a great many interesting things-far be it from me to deny that-but we have no satellites and no direct control over any explosive metal even here on Earth.”
Did he say no direct control because he wanted to imply indirect control? Very likely, Goldfarb judged. He wondered if the implication held any truth. He hoped not. “Do you know who did attack the colonization fleet?” If you do-especially if it’s the Reich, I can pass that on to the Lizards. Doing Heinrich Himmler a bad turn was reason enough and to spare for going down to Marseille.
But Roundbush disappointed him by shaking his head. “Haven’t the foggiest idea, I’m afraid. Whoever did manage that one isn’t letting on. He’d be a fool to let on, but that hasn’t always stopped people in the past.”
“True enough,” David said. The trouble was, too much of what Roundbush said made too much sense to dismiss him out of hand as just a bloke who’d gone bad. From the standpoint of mankind at large-as opposed to the standpoint of one particular British Jew-he might not even have gone bad at all. Something else occurred to Goldfarb: “Did you have anything to do with the ginger bombs that went off over Australia and made the Lizards have an orgy?”
“I haven’t got the faintest notion of what you’re talking about, old man,” Roundbush said, and laid a finger by the side of his nose. That was a denial far less ringing than the one he’d used in connection with the colonization fleet. Goldfarb noticed as much, as he was no doubt intended to. With a chuckle, Roundbush went on, “Only goes to show there really may be such a thing as killing them with kindness.”
“Yes, sir.” The whiskey mounted to Goldfarb’s head, making him add, “That’s not how the Reich kills its Jews.”
“I fought the Reich,” Roundbush said. “I have no love for it now. But it’s there. I can’t very well pretend it’s not-and neither can you.”
“No, sir,” David Goldfarb agreed mournfully. “But Gottenyu, how I wish I could.”
“Another letter from your cousin in England?” Reuven Russie said to his father. “That’s more often than you usually hear from him.”
“He has more tsuris than usual, too,” Dr. Moishe Russie answered. “Some of his friends-this is what he calls them, anyhow-are going to send him to Marseille, to help them in their ginger-trafficking.”
“Send a Jew to the Greater German Reich?” Reuven exclaimed. “If those are Cousin David’s friends, God forbid he should ever get enemies.”
“Omayn,” his father said. “But when all the other choices are worse…” Moishe Russie shook his head. “I know. It hardly seems possible. But he wants me to find out what I can from the Lizards about ginger-smuggling through Marseille, so he doesn’t go in completely blind.”
“How much of that can you do?” Reuven asked.
“There are males who will tell me some,” his father said. “I’ve spent a lot of time getting to know them. For something like that, they will give me answers, I think. And what I cannot learn from them, I may be able to find out from the Lizards’ computers.”
“Yes, that’s true,” Reuven agreed. “You can find out almost anything from them if you know where to look and which questions to ask.”
His father laughed, which irked him till Moishe remarked, “If you know where to look and which questions to ask, you can find out almost anything almost anywhere-you don’t need computers to do it.”
Reuven’s twin sisters came out of the kitchen to announce supper would be ready in a few minutes. Fixing Judith and Esther with a mild and speculative eye, he remarked, “You’re right, Father. They already know everything already.”
“What is he talking about now?” Esther asked, at the same time as Judith was saying, “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
“If you’d listened carefully, he was paying you a compliment,” their father said.
They both sniffed. One of them said, “I’d sooner get a compliment where I don’t have to listen carefully.”
“I’ll give you one,” Reuven said. “You’re the most-” His father coughed before he could say anything more. That probably kept him out of trouble. Even so, he didn’t appreciate it. His sisters rarely gave him such a golden opportunity, and here he couldn’t even take advantage of it.
A moment later, his mother quelled the budding argument for the time being, calling, “Supper!” The ploy might not have been so subtle as Solomon’s, but it did the job. Next to boiled-beef-and-barley soup with carrots and onions and celery, squabbling with his sisters suddenly seemed less important.
His father approved, too, saying, “This is fine, Rivka. It takes me back to the days before the fighting all started, when we were living in Warsaw and things… weren’t so bad.”
“Why would you want to remember Warsaw?” Reuven asked with a shudder. His own memories of the place, such as they were, began only after the Nazis had taken it. They were filled with cold and fear and hunger, endless gnawing hunger. He couldn’t imagine how a pleasant bowl of soup took anyone back there in memory.
But his mother’s smile also looked into the past. She said, “Don’t forget, your father and I fell in love in Warsaw.”
“And if we hadn’t,” Moishe Russie added, “you wouldn’t be here now.” He glanced over to the twins. “And neither would you.”