Goldfarb inclined his head. “As one damned Jew to another-to a whole family full of others-I thank you.” He poured more wine into his glass, then raised it high. “L’chaim!” he said loudly.
“To life!” Reuven echoed, and was proud to have answered a beat ahead of his father and mother and sister. He drank his wine; it went down sweet and smooth as honey.
Felless felt like a hypocrite as she accompanied Ambassador Veffani into the Reichs Ministry of Justice in Nuremberg. She also felt even smaller than she usually did while entering a building the Big Uglies had built to suit themselves. The Ministry of Justice, like a lot of public buildings of the Reich, was deliberately designed to minimize the importance of the individual, whether that individual was a Tosevite or belonged to the Race.
“They know not the Emperor, so they have to build like this,” Veffani said when Felless remarked on the style. “They hope false splendor will make their not-emperor and his minions seem as impressive to their subjects as generations of tradition have made the Emperor seem to us.”
“That is… a very perceptive remark, superior sir,” Felless said. “I have seen similar speculations, but seldom so pithily expressed.” For a moment, interest made her forget her craving for ginger-but only for a moment. The craving never left for long-and now she and Veffani were visiting the Deutsch minister of justice to plead for harsher treatment of a captured ginger smuggler. If that was not irony, the stuff had never hatched from its shell.
Deutsch soldiers in steel helmets stiffened as Veffani and Felless reached the top of the broad stone stairway leading to the entrance. They clicked their booted heels together, a courtesy rather like assuming the posture of respect. One of them proved to speak the language of the Race: “I greet you, Ambassador, and your colleague. How may I serve you?”
“We have an appointment with Justice Minister Dietrich,” Veffani answered, observing protocol. “Please escort us to him.”
“It shall be done.” The Deutsch guard’s about-turn had none of the smooth elegance a member of the Race would have given it, but possessed a stiff impressiveness of its own. Over his shoulder, the Big Ugly added, “Follow me.”
Follow him Veffani and Felless did, down corridors that dwarfed Big Uglies, let alone the two of them. Deutsch functionaries, some in the business clothes the Tosevites favored, more in the uniform wrappings the Deutsche used to show status in place of body paint (and, Felless realized, to overawe Tosevites not similarly wrapped), bustled here and there. As with the Race, they seemed to feel that the busier they looked, the more important they actually were.
Minister Dietrich had a doorway even larger and higher than any of the others. A Tosevite miscreant hauled before him would surely feel he had committed some crime for which he could never atone. Felless felt the Big Ugly architect had committed a breach of taste for which he could never atone. A great deal of Deutsch monumental architecture inspired the same feeling in her.
The guard escorting Felless and Veffani spoke back and forth with Dietrich’s secretary in the Deutsch language. Felless had picked up a few words of it, but could not follow a conversation. “It is all formality, of no great consequence,” Veffani whispered to her.
She made the hand gesture of agreement. The secretary spoke the language of the Race about as well as a Tosevite could: “Come with me, Ambassador, Senior Researcher. Minister Dietrich will be pleased to hear whatever you may have to say, although, of course, he cannot promise to fulfill all your desires.”
“I understand,” Veffani said. “As always, I look forward to seeing him.”
Veffani is a hypocrite, too, Felless thought. The ambassador’s hypocrisy, luckily for him, had nothing to do with the herb. He merely had to pretend the Big Uglies with whom he dealt not only were but deserved to be his equals. Felless still found that concept outrageous. She had come to Tosev 3 assuming the world would be altogether conquered, subservient to the will of the Race. That hadn’t happened, but she remained convinced it should have.
After more formal pleasantries, the secretary-who would also serve as translator-escorted the male and female of the Race into the presence of Justice Minister Dietrich. His gray hair and flabby face showed him to be an elderly male. “I greet you, Veffani,” he said in the language of the Race. His accent was far thicker than that of his secretary.
“I greet you, Sepp,” Veffani replied. Sepp, he had given Felless to understand, was a nickname for Josef. The Big Uglies, already possessed of too many names from the standpoint of the Race, added to the confusion by using informal versions of them whenever they felt like it. One more piece of Tosevite inefficiency, Felless thought. Veffani went on, “I present to you Senior Researcher Felless, who is also concerned with the problem ginger poses for the Race.”
“I greet you, Senior Researcher,” Dietrich said.
“I greet you, Justice Minister,” Felless answered; using his title let her avoid calling him superior sir, an honorific she did not care to give to any Tosevite.
Dietrich spoke in the Deutsch language. The secretary translated: “And are you intimately concerned with the problem of ginger, Senior Researcher?” He put undue stress on the word intimately. Both he and his superior let out the yips the Big Uglies used for laughter.
Failing to see any joke, Felless answered, “Yes, I am,” which seemed to amuse the Tosevites all over again.
“Shall we begin?” Veffani asked, and Sepp Dietrich, seeming to recall his manners, waved him and Felless to chairs. They were built for Tosevites, and so not comfortable to the male and female of the Race, but refusing would have been most impolite.
“So,” Minister Dietrich said, “we come again to the matter of this Dutourd, do we? The Foreign Ministry has already told the fleetlord that he shall not be surrendered.”
“So it has,” Veffani said. To Felless, his tone indicated strong disapproval. Whether Dietrich and his secretary understood that, she could not tell. The ambassador resumed, “That you seek to use him for your own purposes and against the interests of the Race is, however, not acceptable to us.”
“How can you say such a thing?” Dietrich asked. “We have him in prison. We are keeping him in prison for the time being. If he can do anything against you while in prison, he is a formidable character indeed, not so?”
“You are not keeping him in prison because of what he has done against the Race,” Veffani said. “You are keeping him in prison because he wanted to go on doing it on his own, and not for you.”
“He is in prison,” Dietrich said, not bothering to deny the assertion. “You cannot ask for more, since dealing in ginger is not a crime under the laws of the Reich.”
“Superior sir, may I speak?” Felless asked. When Veffani used the affirmative hand gesture, she turned both her eye turrets toward Sepp Dietrich. “Justice Minister, if under your laws it is not a crime to deal in ginger, we can and will revise our laws to make it no crime to deal in narcotics that appeal to Tosevites, and to make it legal and indeed encouraged to smuggle those narcotics into the independent Tosevite not-empires.”
As one of the ornaments on the wrapping around his torso, Dietrich wore a small silvery pin showing a Big Ugly’s skull with a couple of crossed bones behind it. His own features froze into an expression no more lively than that skull’s. “If you wish to play that game, we can play it,” he said through his interpreter. “No drug you can bring into the Reich will do as much to us as ginger does to you.”
“Truth.” Felless admitted what she could scarcely deny. “But you are already doing all you can to us with ginger.” She knew the truth in that to a degree Dietrich did not realize. “If you keep trying to do all you can to us with ginger, why should we do anything less to you?”