But going back to work after a call like that was almost impossible. The Latin inscriptions might have been composed in Annamese, for all the sense they made to Monique. And whatever she had been on the point of saying about them had gone clean out of her head. She cursed Kuhn both in standard French and with the rich galejades of the Marseille dialect.
Having done that, she spent a while cursing her brother. If he’d chosen a more reputable profession than smuggler, she wouldn’t be in trouble now. With a sigh, she shook her head. That probably wasn’t so. She might not be in this particular trouble right now. She would probably be in some other trouble. Trouble, her whole life argued, was part of the human condition-and an all too prominent part, at that.
She went back to the inscriptions. They still didn’t mean much. The Lizards thought humans very strange because the past of less than two thousand years before was different enough to be of interest. Almost all their history was modern history: history of well-known beings who thought much like them.
The knock on her door came two nights later. She was brushing her teeth, getting ready for bed. At that sharp, peremptory sound, she had to grab desperately to keep from dropping the glass. The Nazis did not let late-night knocks appear in books or films or televisor or radio plays. Such silence fooled no one Monique knew. The knock came again, louder than before.
Monique thanked heaven that she hadn’t yet changed into her nightclothes. Still in the day’s attire, she kept a shred of dignity she would have lost. Even so, she went to the door as slowly as she could. Had she not been sure the SS men outside would kick it in, she would not have gone at all.
She opened it. Of course none of the neighbors had come out to see what the racket was; they would be glad it wasn’t their racket. To her surprise, there in the hallway stood neither Dieter Kuhn nor his friends in field-gray uniforms and black jackboots but a dumpy, middle-aged Frenchman in baggy trousers and a beret that sat on his head like a cowflop.
“Took you long enough,” he grumbled in accents identical to her own.
Despite that, she needed a moment before she realized who he was, who he had to be. “Pierre!” she whispered, and grabbed him by the arm and pulled him inside. “What are you doing here? Are you out of your mind? The Boches will be watching this place. They may have microphones in here, and-”
“I can find out about that.” Her brother took from a pocket a small instrument of obvious Lizard manufacture. He used a pencil point to poke a recessed button. After a moment, a light at the end glowed amber. “Unless the Germans have come up with something new, they aren’t listening,” he said. “For the love of God, Monique, how about some wine?”
“I’ll get it,” she said numbly. She poured a glass for herself, too. When she brought the wine back from the kitchen, she stared at the brother she hadn’t seen in two-thirds of a lifetime. He was shorter than she remembered, only a few centimeters taller than she. Of course, she’d been shorter the last time she saw him.
He was looking her over, too, with a smile she thought she remembered. “You look like me,” he said, his voice almost accusing, “but on you it looks good.” He glanced around the flat. “So many books! And have you read them all?”
“Almost all,” she answered. A lot of people who saw the crowded bookshelves asked the same question. But then she gathered herself and asked a question of her own: “What are you doing here? When we talked on the telephone, you wanted nothing to do with me.”
“Times change,” he answered, resolutely imperturbable. He had, no doubt, seen a lot of changes. With a shrug, he went on, “You must know what ginger does to female Lizards, n’est-ce pas?”
“Yes, I know that,” Monique said. “If you will recall”-she could not resist letting her voice take on a sardonic edge-“I was here when the SS man warned you the Lizards in authority would be more upset about your trade than you thought.”
“So you were.” No, Pierre was not easy to unsettle. In that, though Monique did not think of it so, he was very much like her. He went on, “Kuhn is not stupid. If the Nazis were stupid, they would be much less dangerous than they are. If they were stupid, we would have beaten them in 1940. Instead, we were stupid, France was stupid, and see what it got us.” Almost as an aside, he added, “The trouble with the Nazis is not that they are stupid. The trouble with the Nazis is that they are crazy.”
“And what,” Monique inquired, “if you would be so kind as to inform me, is the trouble with the Lizards?”
“The trouble with the Lizards, my dear little sister?” Pierre Dutourd finished his wine and set the glass on the table in front of him. “I should think that would be obvious. The trouble with the Lizards is that they are here.”
Startled, Monique laughed. “So they are. But would we be better off if they were not? The Nazis-the crazy Nazis-could have conquered the whole world by now, and then where would we be?”
“Trying to get along, one way or another,” Pierre answered. “That is all I ever wanted to do. I did not intend to become a smuggler. Who grows up saying, ‘I, I shall become a smuggler when I am a man’? I was working in a cafe in Avignon when it became clear the male Lizards were mad for ginger. I helped them get it and”-a classic Gallic shrug-“one thing led to another.”
“What do you want from me?” Monique asked. “You still have not told me that.”
“If I go home… if I go to any of the places I might call home, I believe I will end up slightly dead,” her brother answered with what was, under the circumstances, commendable aplomb. “As you will have gathered, the Lizards are less than happy with me and others in my trade right now. If they get their tongues on what I sell, then they are happy, but that is a different matter.”
“Do you want help from the Germans, then?” Monique asked. “I don’t know how much I can do. I don’t know if I can do anything.”
“Even though you are so fond of this Kuhn?” Pierre said. He sounded serious, damn him.
Monique was serious, too, and seriously furious. “If you weren’t my brother, I’d throw you out of here on your arse,” she snapped. “I ought to do it anyway. Of all the things you could have said-”
“It could be that I do not have reason here,” Pierre said. “If I am mistaken, I can only apologize.”
Before Monique could answer, someone else knocked on her door. This knock was soft and casual. It could have come from a friend, even a lover. Monique didn’t think it did. By the way he stiffened, neither did Pierre. His hand darted into a trouser pocket and stayed there. Monique said, “For what may be the first time in the history of the Reich, I hope that is the SS out there.”
“Yes, that is a curiosity, isn’t it?” her brother agreed. “Well, you had better find out, hadn’t you?”
She went to the door and opened it. Sure as sure, there stood Dieter Kuhn, bold as the devil. Behind him were three uniformed SS men, all carrying submachine guns. “May I come in?” he asked mildly. “I know who your company is. I assure you, I shall not be jealous.”
Too much was happening too fast. Monique stood aside. The SS men tramped into her flat and closed the door behind them. One spoke in German to Kuhn: “Now we do not have to look as if we captured you, Herr Sturmbannfuhrer.” Monique’s spoken German was rusty but functional.
“Ja,” Kuhn agreed. “But if I came here in uniform, Professor Dutourd’s reputation among her neighbors would suffer.” He shifted back to French as he turned toward Pierre Dutourd: “We meet at last. Your scaly friends are less friendly now than they used to be. Did I not predict this?”
“Sometimes anyone can be right,” Pierre replied. “But yes, there are leading Lizards who want me out of the business I have been in.”