Aftershocks (34 page)

“It’s all common sense,” her brother told her. “Common sense and a good ear for what’s true and what’s a lie—and the nerve not to let anyone cheat you. People—and Lizards—have to know you’ll never let anybody cheat you.”

A historian needed the first two traits. The third . . . Monique wondered how many people Pierre and his henchmen had killed. He’d been willing enough—more than willing enough—to use his Lizard friends to try to arrange Dieter Kuhn’s untimely demise. It hadn’t worked; the Lizard assassin, unable to tell one human from another, had gunned down a fish merchant by mistake. Of course, that effort had been in Pierre’s interest as well as Monique’s. She wondered if he ever did anything not in his own interest.

And she didn’t like the way he was eyeing her now. In musing tones, he said, “If I go with the Americans, little sister, you could be useful to me—you know English, after all. Even if I find the Americans don’t work out, I’ll go back to the Englishman—and you could be useful with him, too.”

“Suppose I don’t want to be . . . useful?” Monique had never—well, never this side of Dieter Kuhn—heard a word whose sound she liked less.

Her brother, as she’d already seen, was a relentless pragmatist. With a shrug, he answered, “I’ve carried you for a while now, Monique. Don’t you think it’s time you started earning your keep, one way on another?”

“I’m trying to do just that.” She held up the letter she was working on. “I haven’t had any luck, that’s all.”

“One way or another, I said.” Pierre sighed. “I admire you for trying to go on doing what you had done, truly I do. You can even go on trying to do it. I have no objection whatsoever, and I will congratulate you if you get a position. But if you don’t . . .” His smile was sad and oddly charming. “If you don’t, you can work for me.”

“I was just thinking you hadn’t been cruel enough to say anything like that to me,” Monique replied, her voice bitter. She snapped her fingers. “So much for that.”

“You don’t have to make up your mind right away,” Pierre said. “But do remember, I pulled wires to get you away from the purification police. I hoped you might want to show you were grateful.”

Monique scornfully tossed her head. “If you weren’t my brother, you’d be using that line to get me to go to bed with you.” All of a sudden, the prospect of being a maid of all work didn’t look so bad.

“Thank you, but no. I would not be interested even then—I’ve never had much use for women who argue and talk back all the time,” Pierre replied with wounding dignity. Monique wondered how well he knew himself. Lucie was anything but a shrinking violet.

But that thought flickered in her mind and then was gone. She wanted to hit back, to wound. “I believe you there,” she said. “The only time you’d want them to open their mouths would be to swallow something—just like that damned SS man. I’m surprised you didn’t jump to put on your own black shirt. They’d have paid you well, after all, and what else is there?”

Pierre surprised her with an immediate, emphatic answer: “Not being told what to do, of course. I had a bellyful of orders in the Army. I’ve done my best not to have to take them ever since.”

“You don’t care to take them, that could be,” Monique snarled. “But you don’t mind giving them, do you? No, you don’t mind that a bit.”

Her brother spread his hands in a startlingly philosophical gesture. “If one does not take orders, it is because he can give them,
n’est ce-pas?
Do you see any other arrangement?”

“I
had
another arrangement, till being your sister turned my life upside down,” Monique said. “I taught my classes, and outside of that I studied what I wanted, what interested me. No one made me do it. No one would have been interested in making me do anything. People
let me alone.
Do you understand what that means? Do you have any idea what that means?”

“It means you were very lucky,” Pierre said. “If you get another position, you will be lucky again. But if you are not so lucky, what then? Why, then you have to work for a living, just like everyone else.”

“There is a difference between working for a living and playing the whore,” Monique said. “Maybe you can’t understand that, but the Germans already made me play the whore. I’ll be damned if I let my brother do the same.”

She threw down the letter—why not? it was bound to be useless, anyhow—and stormed out of the tent. She fled not just the tent but the whole tent city as if it were accursed. It might as well have been, as far as she was concerned. If she’d had a little lead tablet and thought inscribing a curse in the name of the gods would have wiped the miserable place from the face of the earth, she would have done it in a heartbeat. As things were, all she could do was storm away.

Marseille was a great racket of bulldozers and jackhammers and saws and ordinary hammers and tools for which she didn’t even have names. Wrecked buildings were coming down. New buildings were going up. Most of those new buildings were supposed to be blocks of flats. Monique didn’t see the tent city shrinking, though. She had a pretty good idea what that meant: somebody’s pockets were getting lined.

She didn’t want to look at the buildings. Looking at them reminded her she wasn’t living in one of them, that she wouldn’t be able to afford to live in one of them. They had things she could buy—unless Pierre cut off all her money.
What would I do then?
she wondered.
Could I stand his business?
She doubted it. And yet . . .

A man smoking a pipe called out a lewd proposition. Monique rounded on him and, in a voice that could be heard all over the square, suggested that he ask his mother for the same service. He turned very red. He turned even redder when people jeered him and cheered her. Puffing furiously at the pipe, he withdrew in disorder.

“Nicely done, Professor Dutourd,” someone behind Monique said. “A boor like that deserves whatever happens to him.”

She whirled. The world whirled around her. There stood
Sturmbannführer
Dieter Kuhn. In civilian clothes, he looked like a Frenchman, but his accent declared who and what he was. “In that case, you deserved to be blown to the devil,” she snapped. “I thought you were. I
prayed
you were.”

He smiled the smile he no doubt thought so charming. “No such luck, I’m afraid. I was sent back to the
Vaterland
two days before the bomb fell here. They were going to put me in a panzer unit, but the
Reich
surrendered before they could.” He shrugged.
“C’est la vie.”

“What are you doing
here
again?” Monique asked.

“Why, I am a tourist, of course. I have a passport and visa to prove it,” the SS man replied with another of those not quite charming smiles.

“And what are you here to see?” Monique’s wave took in ruin and reconstruction. “There isn’t much left
to
see.”

“Oh, but Marseille is still the home of so many wonderful herbs,” Kuhn said blandly.
Christ,
Monique thought.
He’s still in the ginger business. The
Reich
is still in the ginger business. He’ll be looking for Pierre. And if I start working for Pierre, he’ll be looking for me, too.

Every time David Goldfarb crossed a street, he didn’t just look both ways. He made careful calculations. If a car suddenly sped up, could it get him? Or could he scramble up onto the sidewalk and something close to safety? Nothing like almost getting killed to make one consider such things.

Of course, that fellow who’d tried to run him down wasn’t the first driver in Edmonton who’d almost killed him—just the first one who’d meant to. David had a lifetime of looking left first before stepping off the curb. But Canadians, like their American cousins, drove on the right. That was a recipe for attempted suicide. Goldfarb didn’t try to do himself in quite so often as he had after first crossing the Atlantic, but it still happened in moments of absentmindedness.

This morning, he got to the Saskatchewan River Widget Works unscathed by either would-be murderers or drivers he didn’t notice till too late. “Hello, there,” Hal Walsh said. As usual, the boss was there before any of the people who worked for him. He pointed to a Russian-style samovar he’d recently installed. “Make yourself some tea, get your brains lubricated, and go to town.”

As usual, Goldfarb complained about the samovar: “Why couldn’t you leave the honest kettle? That damn thing is a heathen invention.”

“You’re a fine one to talk about heathens, pal,” Walsh retorted. Every now and again, he would make cracks about David’s Judaism. Things being as they were in Britain, that had made Goldfarb nervous. But Hal Walsh, unlike Sin Oswald Mosley and his ilk, didn’t mean anything nasty by it. He gave Jack Devereaux a hand time about being French-Canadian, and also derided his own Anglo-Saxon and Celtic ancestors. Goldfarb had decided he could live with that.

He did get himself a cup of tea. “Bloody miracle you set out milk for it,” he said. “With this contraption, I’d think you’d want us to drink it Russian-style, with just sugar. My parents do that. Not me, though.”

“You’re acculturated,” Walsh said. Goldfarb must have looked blank, because his boss explained: “England was your mother country, so you got used to doing things the way Englishmen do.”

“Too right I did,” Goldfarb said, and explained how he was in danger of doing himself an injury every time he tried to cross the street.

Walsh laughed, then stopped abruptly. “My brother went to London a couple of years ago, and I remember him complaining because he kept looking the wrong way. I hadn’t thought about your being in the same boat here.”

“What boat’s that?” asked Jack Devereaux. He made straight for the samovar and got himself a cup of tea. He didn’t worry that the gleaming gadget was un-British; he wasn’t British himself, not by blood, though he spoke English far more fluently than French. “David, did you take the
Titanic?”

“Of course, and you’re daft if you think I didn’t have fun rigging a sail on the iceberg afterwards so I could finish getting over here,” Goldfarb retorted.

Devereaux gave him a quizzical look. “What all have you got in that teacup?” he asked, and then, before David could answer, “Can I have some, too?”

“We don’t need spirits to lift our spirits,” Walsh said, “or we’d damn well better not, anyhow.” He didn’t mind people drinking beer with lunch—he’d drink beer with lunch himself—but frowned on anything more than that. He led by example, too. Since he worked himself like a slave driven, the people who worked for him could hardly complain when he expected a lot from them. He tilted back his cup to drain it, then said, “What’s on the plate for today?”

“I’m still trying to work the bugs out of that
skelkwank
-light reader,” Devereaux answered. “If I can do it, we’ll have a faster, cheaper gadget than the one the Lizards have been using since time out of mind. If I can’t . . .” He shrugged. “You don’t win every time you bet.”

“That’s true, however much you wish you did,” Walsh said. “What about you, David?”

“I’ve got a couple of notions to improve the phone-number reader,” Goldfarb said, “but they’re just notions, if you know what I mean. If I get a chance, I’ll do some drawings and play with the hardware, but odds are I’ll spend a lot of my time giving Jack a hand. I think he’s pretty close to getting where he wants to go.”

“As opposed to getting where you want me to go,” Devereaux said with a grin.

“The climate’s better there in winter than it is here, but probably not in summer,” Goldfarb said.

“That would be funny, if only it were funny,” Walsh said. “It’s not by accident we call our football team the Eskimos.”

Goldfarb didn’t call what the Canadians played football at all. It was, to him, one of the most peculiar games imaginable. Of course, the Canadians didn’t call the game he was used to football, either. To them, it was soccer, and they looked down their noses at it. He didn’t care. More of the world agreed with him than with them.

Walsh fixed himself a second cup of tea, then said, “Let’s get going.”

There were times when David was reminded he was a jumped-up technician, not a properly trained engineer. This morning gave every sign of being one of those times. He got only so far looking at drawings of the phone-number reader he’d devised. Then, muttering, he went back to the hardware and started fiddling with it. Cut-and-try often took him further fasten than study. He knew that could also be true for real engineers, but it seemed more emphatically so for him.

He wasn’t altogether sorry when Jack Devereaux looked up and said, “David, what about that hand you promised?” Goldfarb applauded him. Devereaux groaned. “I suppose I asked for that. Doesn’t mean I had to get it, though.”

“Of course it does,” Goldfarb said, but he made a point of hurrying over to see what he could do for—rather than to—the other engineer.

The motors that turned the Lizards’ silvery
skelkwank
-light disks—a technology mankind had copied widely—all operated at the same speed. As far as anyone human knew, they’d been operating at that same speed for as long as the Race had been using them. It worked. It was fast enough. Why change? That was the Lizards’ attitude in a nutshell, or an eggshell.

People, now, people weren’t so patient. If you could make the disks turn faster, you could get the information off them faster, too. Seeing that was obvious. Getting a motor anywhere near as compact and reliable as the ones the Lizards used was a different question, though. Expectations for quality had gone up since the Race came to Earth. People didn’t come so close to insisting on perfection as the Lizards did, but breakdowns they would have taken for granted a generation earlier were unacceptable nowadays.

“It runs fine,” Devereaux said, “but it’s too goddamn noisy.” He glared at the motor, which was indeed buzzing like an angry hive.

“Hmm.” Goldfarb eyed the motor, too. “Maybe you could just leave it the way it is and soundproof the case.” He knew that was a technician’s solution, not an engineer’s, but he threw it out to see what Devereaux would make of it.

And Devereaux beamed. “Out of the mouths of babes,” he said reverently. “Let’s do it. Let’s see if we can do it, anyhow.”