“Better,” she said, and let down the kickstand. Before she approached the telephone, she looked all around, making certain the coast was clear. She even stuck her head into the market, to make sure Sturmbannfuhrer Dieter Kuhn was not lurking there after outthinking her. The fellow inside washing squashes-rather a handsome young man, with a diabolical little chin beard-waved and blew her a kiss. She ignored him, as she ignored half a dozen casual invitations every day.
Rummaging in her purse, she found a twenty-five pfennig coin and put it in the telephone’s coin slot. She was glad to hear a dial tone; she would not have wanted to place the call through an operator. She still wondered if she ought to be placing it at all. But surely the brother from whom she’d been so long separated got other calls. What was one more?
Everything, Monique thought. Everything, or maybe nothing.
She dialed the number. Finding it had taken a long time, and meant dealing with people of a sort she’d had nothing to do with since the tense days just after the fighting stopped. She hadn’t trusted them then; she still did not. For all she knew, they’d taken her money and given her a number that would connect her with the city pound. And if they had, maybe that was just as well.
The telephone rang… and rang, and rang. Monique was about to hang up, get her quarter-mark back, and give up the whole thing as a bad job when someone answered: “Allo? Who’s there?”
Monique had not expected a woman with a sexy voice on the other end of the line. Flustered, she blurted, “Let me talk to Pierre.”
“And who the devil are you?” From sexy, the voice went to hard and suspicious in the blink of an eye.
“I’m his sister,” Monique said desperately.
“You’re a lying bitch, is what you are,” the other woman snapped. “He hasn’t got a sister. So he’s two-timing me again, is he? He’ll be sorry.”
“I am not. He has. And he isn’t,” Monique said. “Tell him I remember that the name of the dog we had when he went off to war was Alexandre.”
She waited to discover whether the woman would hang up on her. Silence stretched. At last, the woman said, “He has spoken of this dog to me. I do not think-I could be wrong, but I do not think-he would have spoken of it to any of his whores. You wait. I will see if he will speak to you.”
Wait Monique did. The operator frightened her out of a week’s growth by demanding another twenty-five pfennigs. She paid. The operator got off the line again.
Another man came onto it. “Tell me your name,” he said, his voice strange and familiar at the same time.
“Pierre? I am your sister Monique, Monique Dutourd,” she answered.
As she hadn’t expected a woman to answer the phone, so the sigh now also took her by surprise. “Well, I might have known you would catch up with me sooner or later,” he said. “Life at the university finally got boring, eh?”
“You know about me?” That struck her as the most unfair thing she’d ever heard.
He laughed. “My business is knowing things, little sister. The more things you know, the better, and the more you can do with them.”
“You sound just like the SS man who’s looking for you,” Monique said, angry enough to try to blast him out of his complacency.
But he laughed. “He can keep looking. Go on back home. Study your inscriptions. Forget all about it. I wish Kuhn had kept his damned mouth shut, that’s all.” If he knew the German’s name, maybe he did know everything about her.
“Be careful, Pierre,” she said. “Don’t do anything foolish.”
“Don’t you worry about me,” he said. “I-Ah, the bastards are trying to tap the line. So long.” He hung up. The phone rang. The operator demanded yet another quarter of a mark. Monique paid again. She got back on her bicycle and headed home.
How had Pierre known what the Germans were doing? Dieter Kuhn had said he was too cozy with the Lizards to suit the Reich. Maybe they’d given him a gadget that would tell him such things. People had gained on the Lizards since the days when the conquest fleet came, but the aliens’ electronics still outdid anything mere humans made.
Monique was struggling with an intractable inscription when the telephone in her flat rang. She guessed who it might be before she lifted the handset from its cradle. And sure enough, Dieter Kuhn spoke in precise, German-accented French: “Good afternoon, Monique. A very interesting lecture, as always, and a very interesting telephone call as well. It did not help me so much as I might have liked, but it was interesting nonetheless.”
How much of her conversation with her brother had he heard? Had he heard any? Were his gadgets better than Pierre thought they were? Or was he running a bluff, hoping Monique would tell him more than he already knew?
Automatic distrust for Germans made her suspect the latter. She said, “I told you I did not want you calling me any more.”
“My dear Professor Dutourd, I am not calling on a social occasion, I assure you,” Kuhn answered, still precise, still polite, but suddenly with iron in his voice that hadn’t been there before. “I am calling in regard to the security of the Greater German Reich.” French was not in the habit of capitalizing nouns, as German was. Monique heard, or imagined she heard, capital letters thudding into place just the same.
Picking her words with care, she said, “I don’t know anything more about the security of the Great German Reich than I did when you took me to Chez Fonfon, and I knew nothing then. You said as much yourself. The other thing I will tell you is that I do not desire to know anything more, either.”
“Ah, Monique,” he said, trying without much luck to sound playful, “you know at least one thing more than you did then: a certain telephone number.” Before she could do any more than begin to wonder whether he really had it, he rattled it off.
“If you already knew that number, why did you need me?” she demanded. “You could have done whatever you were going to do, and I would never have been the wiser.” Like so many in the lands the Reich occupied, she saw staying out of the eye of the authorities as the highest good.
“For one thing, I did not have that number until the day after you did,” Kuhn answered. “For another, as I already told you, it is not so useful. It does not lead me directly to your brother. He has some verdammte Lizard machinery that relays from that telephone to wherever he happens to be. We know of this machinery, but we cannot match it.”
“What a pity,” Monique murmured, all but hugging herself with glee at having her guess confirmed. She felt extraordinarily clever, as if she’d proved what had killed Augustus’ right-hand man Agrippa.
“Another ten years,” the SS officer said. “Maybe less.” That brought her up short. Humanity had been at least fifty years-maybe twice that far-behind the Lizards when the conquest fleet arrived. Had the gap really narrowed so much so fast? In another generation, would the Lizards fall behind? There was an alarmingly modern thought for a Roman historian.
But then it was gone, replaced by one more urgent at the moment: “Can’t you just leave me alone?”
“I’m sorry,” Dieter Kuhn told her, and he actually did sound sorry. How good an actor was he? Pretty good, by everything she’d seen. He went on, “When we deal with the Lizards here inside the Reich, we want it to be on our terms, not theirs. Your brother makes that harder.”
“When you deal with anyone anywhere, you want it to be on your terms.” Only after the words were out of her mouth did Monique wonder whether Kuhn would take that as politically irresponsible. To her, they’d seemed a self-evident truth, as much a given as tomorrow’s sunrise.