“If you love the English so much, why did you leave London? What are you doing in France?”
She had an impulse to stick out her tongue and say, Yah, don’t you wish you knew? Try and find out. Or to speak of the conflict inside her and the depression of spirit which had sent her across the Channel. Instead she murmured, “England and France are allies. Along with the rest of the world, except the United States and the Soviet Union.”
“Yeh, sure.” For the first time he showed impatience. ‘The Third Force and all the rest of it.”
“Garçon,” she called, “une boc encore, s’il vous plait.”
“How can you drink that swill?” he asked, not scornfully but curiously. “Why don’t you let me buy you an honest drink?”
“Pepsicola?”
“If you like. Or a real martini or some of this Norman applejack.”
“Shall we consider the amenities taken care of? And come down to business?”
“Sure, sure. Here it is, right on the line: restoration of citizenship (after all, it isn’t as though you were a Jew yourself), full compensation for any property confiscated or bought at less than market value, guaranteed protection, freedom to travel in or out of the country and fifty thousand bucks in cash.”
“And my… my husband?”
The prescriptive sympathy on his face made him resemble a beagle who has lost the scent. “Look, I can’t do miracles; nobody can bring back the dead. Like I said, we all make mistakes, don’t we? But hell — excuse me — a good looking girl like you can get all the husbands she wants. Genuine American ones. Especially with fifty grand, along with the body. And, oh yes, we’ll throw in a good job too — maybe nine, ten thousand a year.”
“What am I supposed to do for all this? Shoot a few well-chosen statesmen?”
He leaned back again, making the chair creak. “Kid, you’ve got nothing but blood on your mind. I’ve told you we’re not doing things that way. We don’t want violence. No violence at all. We just want to be left alone. Peaceful coexistence. If the Third Force wants to police the Russians, let them go ahead. We don’t mind. But just leave us alone, see?”
“And if they won’t leave you alone?”
“We’ll fight.” The face which had been uncommitted, fixed in an expression of reasoning and persuasion, became truculent, potentially menacing. Like a policeman or Defender who wears a mask of good nature. He was undoubtedly both.
“What would you fight with?”
“Oh, we’ve got a couple of shots in our locker yet. Maybe the war did hit us pretty hard, but even after you write off Pittsburgh and Gary and Birmingham—”
“And New York, San Francisco, Chicago.”
“Sure, sure. But we won, didn’t we? We can still get a lot of planes in the air and mobilize an army — which is more than the Russkis can. And we hardly lost a sub. And we know your Third Force is too chicken to drop C-bombs on us—”
“Not my Third Force.”
“See?” All menace had been tucked back behind the folds and lines of his face. “I knew you were a good American deep down. Just a little misunderstanding.”
“That’s right,” she replied, thinking of Sol and refusing to think of Sol.
“Pardon, m’sieu, ‘dame.”
Two men had paused by their table in a delicate balance between part of the sidewalk used exclusively by pedestrians and that occupied by the café. The older, paunched, wattled, bald, with a William Howard Taft mustache, was trying to pull the younger away. Except for heavy, decayed teeth, the young man had the face of one of Pope Gregory’s angels: blond, blue-eyed, straight-nosed, pink-cheeked. His lips were red and full, but firm.
The man opposite Maggie set the front legs of his chair soundlessly on the pavement again and put his hands on the table edge, ready for action.
“Yes?” she inquired.
“American, no?” The red lips retained the perfect circle for a perceptible instant after the question was finished.
“No,” said the big man. “Non. Pas du tout. Kenya. Dominion brittanique. Aimée de France—cawmprah?” His accent was as pure Cedar Rapids as she had ever heard. He pulled out a booklet and flipped the pages in front of their eyes.
“Oh yays. Africain. Vairy nice for England, too bad for France. Ah, ah. A joke, is it not? And madame?”
“Are you a cop?” she asked.
“Pardon?”
“Un flic?”
He breathed nastily into her face, his chiseled features subordinate to his bad teeth. They can laugh all they want about American toothpaste, she thought, but I’d rather smell peppermint any time than yesterday’s pot-au-feu. “You insult!”
“Beat it, Chester. I have no passport to show you and I wouldn’t if I had. Call a gendarme if you want action; meanwhile leave us alone. See?” She drank some of her beer — Pepsicola might have been an improvement after all — ignoring them until the older man finally succeeded in coaxing the younger to leave.
“That wasn’t bright,” remarked the agent, tilting his chair again.
“Wasn’t it?’ she asked indifferently. “I just happen to be fresh out of phony documents.”
“The bottom dropped out of the hero market during the war,” he said. “Glory was running in the streets. If you’d been home you’d have died with the rest of the eagle scouts. We’re in business to survive now, not to sing ‘God Bless America’ and run up the flag on the Eiffel Tower. But I can see you’re our girl. How about it?”
“How about what? What do you want?”
“Hardly anything at all. Nothing dangerous. You still in that long hair committee?”
It would be so easy to upstage him; all the formulas walked through her mind: What committee? Oh, you mean Americans Exiled for Freedom — the AEF? Well, naturally… Of course a man like you… I suppose you’ve run out of local victims; now you’ve gone into the overseas trade. . let’s end this little chat right here, shall we?. . Any one of these gambits would lead to the same end game. Was it conceivable she could be betrayed by simple biological weakness? Could she find herself in bed with a Defender? (Will Rock Hudson get girl?) Why, he was not even faintly physically attractive. When you had been living alone for a long time — for such an interminably long time — you began thinking like a man, feeling as a man does. Disgusting. “Yes. I suppose you want their names, addresses, letter-drops?”
(What an absurdity; it only went to show how far nature imitated pulp fiction. As though the AEF were a cohesive, dedicated body instead of a number of wrangling, petulant groups, forming and reforming, changing factions, dissatisfied and impotent. The Defenders, having conspired melodramatically and achieved power through their ludicrous conspiracy, believed their opponents must have remodeled themselves in their image. A government which could imagine the dilettantes of the AEF a threat wasn’t competent to run Outer Baldonia or one of the smaller Micronesian atolls.)
“Not to harm them. Believe me, kid, they’re worth their weight in isotopes to us. We want to work with them, convince them they’re making a mistake to criticize their country. Look, I’m not going to hand you a line, I’m not going to tell you the Defenders have thrown their whole program out of the window and the good guys have become bad guys and vice versa. I’m only saying you people never understood politics; now we want to get you back in on the ground floor.”
“A bribe like my fifty thousand dollars and a good job?”
“Bribe? It’s how you look at it. We’re all Americans— exiles, committee, Defenders — and we’re on the spot. No matter what, you wouldn’t want to see a bunch of limeys or frogs telling us how to run our country, would you?”