“Colonists here, too.” Now Penny didn’t sound so happy. “I hope the Lizards I knew are still around. If they aren’t, that complicates things.” She shrugged. “Only one way to find out.”
She pulled the Ford to a stop next to one of the shanties of the little human hamlet that had grown up to serve the Lizards and the people who labored for them. When she got out, Auerbach did, too. The fellow behind the battered bar of what turned out to be a tavern looked up and addressed Penny not in Spanish or English but in the Lizards’ language: “I greet you, superior female. I have not seen you for too long.”
“I greet you, Esteban,” Penny answered in the same language. Auerbach followed it haltingly. She went on, “I need to see Kahanass. Is he still here?” When the Mexican nodded, she broke into a grin. “Can you get someone to tell him I am here?”
“It shall be done,” Esteban said, one phrase in the Lizards’ language almost everyone understood. He shouted in Spanish. When a teenage kid stuck his head in the door, he sent him off. Then, to Rance’s relief, he turned out to speak some English: “You want beers?”
“Oh, Christ, yes!” Rance exclaimed. He sucked down a blood-temperature Dos Equis as if it were the nectar of the gods.
Before too long, the teenager came back, a Lizard in tow. “I greet you, Kahanass,” Penny said. “I have things you may want to see, if you have things you can give me.”
Kahanass wore the body paint of a radar operator. “Truth?” he asked, another Lizard word with broad currency among humans. “I did not expect you to come back here with things for me to see, but I will look at them. If I like them, I may have things to give you.” He swung an eye turret toward Auerbach. “Who is this Tosevite? Have I seen him before? I do not think so. Can I trust him?”
“You can trust him,” Penny said. “He and I have mated. He has killed my enemies.”
“It is good,” Kahanass said. “Bring me these things, then, so I may look at them. If I like them…” His voice trailed away. People who bought and sold ginger spoke in circumlocutions. If someone was listening, if someone was recording, that made proving what they were up to harder.
“It shall be done.” Penny went out and opened the Ford’s trunk, returning with a couple of suitcases.
Kahanass recoiled from them. “Phew! What is that horrible stink?”
“Lighter fluid,” she answered in English. The Lizard evidently understood, for he didn’t ask her to explain. She went on, “It keeps the animals from smelling whatever else is inside. None of it got on whatever else is inside.” She opened a suitcase. “You can tell that for yourself, if you like.”
Kahanass took a taste. He hissed with pleasure. “Yes!” He used an emphatic cough. “Yes, I shall have things. I shall indeed. You wait here. Esteban has a scale. He will weigh out these things and weigh out the pay.”
“It shall be done,” Penny said as the Lizard hurried out of the tavern. She turned to Auerbach. “You see, sweetheart? No trouble at all.”
“Yeah.” Rance nodded. For the first time, Tahiti started to look real to him. He thought about island girls not overly burdened with clothing. A man could get used to that, even if he didn’t do anything but watch. And if he did… well, if he was careful, odds were he could get away with it.
Esteban took a scale out from under the bar and set it on the counter. It looked like the balances Rance had used in chemistry classes at West Point. Penny nodded at it. “We’re gonna be a while, weighing all I got on those litty bitty scales.”
“That’s okay,” Rance said expansively. “We haven’t got anywhere more important we’re supposed to be.” With money or gold or whatever the Lizards paid in straight ahead, all they had to do was get back across the border and into the USA again. And that was the easy part; as a general rule, folks didn’t smuggle things into the United States from Mexico, but rather the other way around.
Penny looked out the window. “Here he comes back again,” she said. “Boy, he didn’t waste any time there, did he? He wants some for himself, and he’ll sell the rest.”
“Sounds good to me,” Auerbach agreed.
In came Kahanass. “I will pay gold at the usual rate,” he said. “Is it good?”
“Superior sir, it is very good,” Penny said.
That was when things went to hell. A couple of Lizards with rifles burst into the tavern behind Kahanass. “You are prisoners!” they shouted, first in their own language and then in English. Three more burst in from a back entrance behind the bar. They also yelled, “You are prisoners! Do not move, or you are dead prisoners!”
Kahanass cried out in horror. Rance’s hand started to slide toward the waistband of his trousers. It didn’t get more than an inch or two before it froze. Unlike the bruisers in his apartment, the Lizards didn’t take him for granted. If he pulled out a pistol, they’d plug him.
He wondered what had gone wrong. Had the Lizards been watching Kahanass? Or had some of Penny’s former friends tipped them off that she might be going into business for herself? He glanced over to her. Her face was set and tense. Like him, she’d looked for a chance to fight and hadn’t seen any. He shrugged, which hurt. “Well, babe, so much for Tahiti,” he said, which hurt even worse.
When her telephone rang these days, Monique Dutourd flinched. Calls were all too likely to be from people with whom she didn’t want to talk. But she had to answer anyhow, on the chance things would be different this time. “Allo?”
“Hello, Monique,” came the quiet, steady voice on the other end of the line. She sighed. As if she didn’t know that voice better than she wanted to, it continued, “Ici Dieter Kuhn. I have an interesting story to tell you.”
“I don’t want to hear it,” she snapped. “I don’t want to hear from you at all. Don’t you understand that?”
“It is relevant,” the SS man said. “You would be well advised to listen to me.”
“Go ahead, then,” Monique said tightly. Kuhn could have done much worse than he had. She kept reminding herself of that. No doubt he wanted her to remind herself of that. If she terrorized herself, she did his work for him. She understood as much, but couldn’t help the fear.
“Merci,” Kuhn said. “I want to tell you about the inventiveness of a certain Lizard.” Monique blinked; that wasn’t what she’d expected. The German officer went on, “It seems a certain female recently agreed to taste ginger and come into season so males could mate with her-provided they first transferred funds from their credit balances to hers.”
It needed a moment to sink in. When it did, Monique blurted, “Merde alors! The Lizards have invented prostitution!”
“Exactly,” Kuhn said. “And what one has thought to do, others will think of before long. This will make the problem they face from ginger even worse than it is already. It will make the pressure on your brother even worse than it is already. He remains uncooperative, you know.”
“There’s nothing I can do about it,” Monique answered. “If you don’t know that, you should. He doesn’t care whether I live or die.” In a way, saying that wounded her. In a different way, her words were like a paid-up life-insurance policy. If Pierre didn’t care what happened to her, and if the SS knew he didn’t care, they wouldn’t have any incentive to start carving chunks off her.
“Unfortunately, I believe you have reason,” Dieter Kuhn said. “Otherwise, we might have made the experiment by now.”
She did not, she would not, let him know he had frightened her. “If that is all you have to say, you wasted your time calling,” she told him, and hung up.