And Pierre himself was out of the German jail and doing his best to set up his business again, even if he could no longer operate independent of the Reich. So far as Monique knew, the Gestapo wasn’t particularly aggrieved with him at the moment. Everything should have been fine, or as fine as it could get in a France under the Germans’ control for so long.
But Dieter Kuhn remained enrolled in her classes. As far as she was concerned, that in and of itself meant trouble hadn’t yet disappeared. Monique wished the SS man gave her an excuse to fail him; that might have got him out of her hair. But he was-he would be, she thought with resigned anger-a good student, easily in the top quarter of the class.
Every so often, something inside her would snap. Once, she barked, “Damn you, why can’t you leave me alone?”
“Because, my dear, you know such… interesting people,” he answered. His grin might have been attractive, had she been able to stand him. “You know smugglers, you know Jews, you know me.”
“My inscriptions are more interesting than you are,” Monique snapped, “and they’re dead.”
Too late to recall the words, she remembered that, at a nod from Sturmbannfuhrer Kuhn, she could become as dead as any inscription praising Isis. He didn’t order her arrested and tormented. But he could have. She knew he could have. These days, a lot of fear of the Nazis was based on what they had done and might do, not on what they usually did. That fear sufficed.
“You are still a key to your brother’s good behavior,” Dieter Kuhn said imperturbably. Then something in his face changed. “And you are also an intelligent, good-looking woman. If you think I do not find you attractive, you are mistaken.”
Monique looked around the empty lecture hall as if seeking a place to hide. She found none, of course. She hadn’t been sure whether Kuhn was interested in her that way or not; she’d wondered if he preferred his own sex. Now that she knew the answer, she wished she didn’t.
“It is not mutual,” she said sharply. “And you could keep a perfectly good eye on me without my ever knowing you were doing it. I wish you would keep an eye on me without my knowing it. Then I wouldn’t have to worry about you all the time.”
She hoped she hurt him. She wanted to hurt him. But if she did, he gave no sign. “I do not suggest how you should conduct your research,” he said. “In your area, you are the expert. Leave mine to me.”
She said something venomous in the Marseille dialect. It rocketed over Kuhn’s head: the French he spoke was purely Parisian. Having vented her spleen, she asked, “May I please go now?”
He looked innocent-not easy for an SS man. “But of course,” he said. “I am not holding you here by force. We are only having a conversation here, you and I.”
He wasn’t holding her, but he could. He could do anything he wanted. Yes, the knowledge of his unlimited power was what made him fearsome. Monique said something else she hoped he would not understand before stalking past him. He didn’t interfere. He didn’t follow her as she rode home. But, again, he could have.
A crane with a wrecking ball was demolishing the synagogue on Rue Breteuil. Monique wondered what sort of Teutonic thoroughness that implied. Had the Germans decided to knock the place down because it was on their list of Jewish monuments or to keep any other would-be independent ginger smugglers from meeting behind it? Only they would know, and they would assume it was no one else’s business.
Monique carried her bicycle upstairs and sauteed some mullet in white wine-the Romans would surely have approved-for supper. She kept eyeing the telephone as she did the dishes afterwards, and then as she got to work on her inscriptions. It stayed quiet. She gave it a suspicious look. Why wasn’t Dieter Kuhn calling her to complain about this, that, or the other thing? Or why wasn’t her brother on the line to complain about whatever made Kuhn happy?
The telephone did not ring for four days, which, lately, came close to being a record. When at last it did, it was neither Kuhn nor Monique’s brother, but Lucie, Pierre’s friend with the boudoir voice. The rest of her, Monique knew, was dumpy, and she was acquiring a mustache, but on the phone she might have been Aphrodite.
“He’s back,” she said happily. “He’s made it all up with them.”
“Back where?” Monique asked. By the way Lucie sounded, she meant back in her arms, but she always sounded that way. And it didn’t fit the rest of what she’d said. “Made it up with whom? The Germans?”
“No, no, no,” Lucie said, and Monique could almost see her wagging a forefinger. “With the Lizards, of course.”
“He has?” Monique exclaimed. The Nazis were sure to be listening. She wondered what they’d make of that. She wondered what to make of it herself. “I thought they wanted something bad to happen to him.”
“Oh, they did,” Lucie said airily, “but not any more. Now they’re glad he’s free. Some of them are glad because he’ll deal in ginger again, others because they can use him to smuggle drugs for people into the Reich. Many important Lizards want him to do just that.”
Lucie was no fool. She had to know the Germans were listening to Monique’s telephone. That meant she wanted them to hear what she was saying. If she wasn’t thumbing her nose at the Nazis, Monique didn’t know what she was doing.
Monique also didn’t know how she felt about the news Lucie gave her. She had taken Pierre’s ginger-smuggling more or less in stride. She didn’t mind his selling drugs to the Lizards, no matter what those drugs ended up doing to them. In principle, then, she didn’t suppose she ought to mind if the shoe went on the other foot. Principle, she discovered, went only so far.
“What will the Germans do when they find out Pierre is working for the Lizards again?” she asked, and then answered her own question: “They will kill him, that’s what.”
“They can try,” Lucie said airily-yes, she had to be expecting, and hoping, the Gestapo was tapping the telephone line. “They have been trying for a long time. They haven’t done it yet. I don’t think they can, not with the Lizards helping us. Your brother will call you soon.” With a last breathy chuckle, Lucie hung up.
My brother, Monique thought. The brother I thought was dead. The brother who smuggles drugs. If Pierre didn’t care about the difference between selling drugs to Lizards and selling them to human beings… what did that prove? That he was generous enough to treat everyone alike? Or that he simply didn’t care where he made his money, so long as he made it? After growing reacquainted with him, Monique feared she knew the answer.
She returned to her inscriptions with a heavy heart. Aside from everything else, this had to mean the Nazis would stay on her brother’s tail. And it had to mean Dieter Kuhn would stay on her tail. Not for the first time, she wished her tail were the main thing he was after. Even if he’d ended up in bed with her, she wouldn’t have felt so oppressed as she did now.
When the telephone rang again a few minutes later, she ignored it. She had the feeling she knew who it would be, and she didn’t want to talk to him. But he, or whoever was on the other end, wanted to talk to her. The telephone rang and rang and rang. At last, its endless clanging wore her down. Cursing under her breath, she picked it up. “Allo?”
“Good evening, Monique.” Sure enough, it was Kuhn. “I suppose you know why I’m calling you.”
“No, I haven’t the faintest idea,” she answered.
The SS officer ignored her. “You may tell your brother that the Reich showed him mercy once by not turning him over to the Lizards when they demanded that we do so. Instead, we released him from prison-”
“So he could do exactly what you told him,” Monique broke in.
Kuhn went on ignoring her, except that he had to repeat, “We released him from prison. And how does he repay us? By going back to his old ways, as a dog returns to its vomit.” Monique hadn’t expected him to allude to Scripture. If he knew any verse, though, she supposed that would be the one. He went on, “You are to tell him that, when we take him again, we will give him justice, not mercy.”