Aftershocks (45 page)

“Life is strange.” Penny’s French, like Auerbach’s, relied on clichés. She went on, “In Canada, we tried to deal with Roundbush. Now we try to kill him.”

“Strange indeed,” Kuhn said with a smile he probably thought was a real ladykiller. “The last time we were all in Marseille, it was part of the
Reich,
and it was my duty to arrest the two of you. Now the
République Française
is reborn, and we are all here as simple tourists.”

Nobody laughed too loudly. That might have drawn more notice than they wanted. Penny said, “Now we are on the same side.”

“We have the same enemies, anyhow,” Rance said. He didn’t want to think of the SS man as being on his side, even if that was how things stood.

“The same enemies, yes, but different reasons,” Dieter Kuhn said. Maybe he wasn’t happy about lining up with a couple of Americans, either. “We want to make Pierre Dutourd want to work with us and not with Roundbush and his associates, while you want to help your friend in Canada.”

“Reasons are not important,” Penny said. “Results are important.”

“Truth.” Auerbach and Kuhn said it at the same time, both in the Lizards’ language. They gave each other suspicious looks. Neither of them used an emphatic cough. Auerbach drank some more wine, then asked the German, “Will you tell your superiors in Flensburg you work with us to help a Jew?”

“Of course not,” Kuhn answered at once. “But I do not think they would care much, not as things are now. I break no secrets in saying that. To rebuild, the
Reich
needs money. We can get money through selling ginger to the Lizards. If Dutourd works with us, works through us, that helps bring in money. And so, for now, I do not much care about Jews. Getting rid of the Englishman and bringing Dutourd to heel is more important for the time being.”

As things are now. For the time being.
Rance eyed the
Sturmbannführer
as he would have eyed a rattlesnake. Kuhn—and, presumably, Kuhn’s bosses—hadn’t given up. Taking it on the chin—hell, getting knocked out of the ring—had made them change their priorities, but Auerbach didn’t think it had made them change their minds.

He asked, “How goes the rebuilding? How closely do the Lizards watch you?”

“Merde alors!”
Kuhn exclaimed in fine pseudo-Gallic disgust. “Their eye turrets are everywhere. Their snouts are everywhere. A man cannot go into a
pissoir
and unbutton his fly without having a Lizard see how he is hung.”

“Too bad,” Rance said. About half of him meant it. The balance of power between the Lizards and mankind had swung toward the Race when Germany went down in flames. The other half of Auerbach, the part that remembered the days before the Lizards came, the days when Hitler’s goons were the worst enemies around, hoped the Nazis would never get back on their feet.

Maybe a little of that showed on his face. Or maybe Dieter Kuhn was a pretty fair needler in his own right. Deadpan, he asked, “And how is it with Indianapolis these days?”

Auerbach shrugged. “All I know is what I read in the newspapers. Newspapers here say what the Lizards want.”

“The French are whores.” Kuhn didn’t bother keeping his voice down. “They gave to the
Reich.
Now they give to the Race.” He rose, threw down enough jingly aluminum coins to cover the tab, and strode away.

Penny went back to English: “That’s one unhappy fellow, even if he hides it pretty good.”

“You bet,” Rance agreed. “I’ll tell you, I like him a hell of a lot better by his lonesome than in front of a bunch of soldiers toting submachine guns.”

“Amen!” Penny said fervently. “You know something, Rance? I’m goddamn tired of having people point guns at me, is what I am.”

After lighting another foul-smelling French cigarette, Auerbach eyed her through the smoke he puffed out. “You know, kid, you might have picked the wrong line of work in that case.”

She laughed. “Now why the hell didn’t I think of that?”

“We’re not doing too bad here this time around,” Rance said. “Better than I expected we would, I’ll say that.”

Instead of laughing again, Penny pretended to faint. That made Auerbach laugh, which made him start coughing, which made him feel as if his chest were coming to pieces. Penny thumped him on the back. It didn’t help much. She said, “Don’t tell me things like that. My heart won’t stand it.”

“Don’t worry. I’m not going to make a habit of it.” Auerbach filled his glass from the carafe of red wine that sat on the table. “This is a complicated deal, you know? We’ve got to stay on Dutourd’s good side on account of we’re doing business with him, and we’ve got to stay on Kuhn’s good side on account of we’re doing business with him, too, and they don’t like each other for beans.”

“It’d be a lot easier if you didn’t have anything to do with that damn Nazi,” Penny said. “We don’t need to, not as far as money’s concerned.”

“Oh, I know,” Rance answered. “But I told that Roundbush son of a bitch that I was going to tie a tin can to his tail, and I damn well meant it. He laughed at me. Nobody laughs at me and gets away with it. Nobody, you hear?”

Penny didn’t say anything right away. She lit a cigarette of her own, took a puff, made a face, and took a sip of wine to help get rid of the taste. She studied him through her smoke screen. At last, words did come from her: “Anybody took a look at you or listened to you for just a little while, he’d figure you were a wreck.”

“He’d be right, too,” Rance said at once, with a certain perverse pride.

But Penny shook her head. She drew on the cigarette again. “Goddamn, I don’t know why I smoke these things, except I get so jumpy when I don’t.” She paused. “Where was I? Oh, yeah. You’re like an old crowbar all covered with rust. Anybody looks at it, he figures he can break it over his knee. But it’s solid iron in the middle. You can smash somebody’s head in with it as easy as not.”

Auerbach grunted. He wasn’t used to praise—even ambiguous praise like that—from her. And he enjoyed feeling decrepit; whenever he failed at something, he had a built-in excuse. He said, “Hell, my own crowbar doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to half the time these days.”

Penny snorted. Then she said, “You’re sandbagging,” which held an uncomfortable amount of truth. “You want to head back to the hotel, or you want to come shopping with me?”

“I’ll head back to the hotel,” he said without the least hesitation. “You go shopping the way a big-game hunter goes on safari.” That was also a compliment of sorts.

Penny headed off to pit her bad French and her air of Midwestern naïveté against the merchants of Marseille. Rance took a taxi over to La Residence Bompard. He hadn’t been there long before somebody knocked on the door. The Luger he’d acquired wasn’t legal, but a lot of the things he’d been doing in France weren’t legal. “Who is it?” he asked, his raspy voice sharp with suspicion—he wasn’t expecting company.

To his surprise, the answer came back in English: “It is I—Monique Dutourd.”

“Oh.” He slid the pistol into a pocket before opening the door. “Hello,” he said, also in English. “Come in. Make yourself at home.”

“Thank you.” She looked around the room, then slowly nodded. “Yes. This is what it is like to be civilized. I remember. It has been a while.”

“Sit down,” Auerbach said. “Can I get you some wine?” She shook her head. He asked, “What can I do for you, then?”

“I wish to know”—her English was slow and precise; she had to think between words, as he did for French, though she spoke a little better—“why it is that you are friendly with that SS man, that Dieter Kuhn.” She said several words after that in incandescent French, French nothing like what he’d studied at West Point. He didn’t know exactly what they meant, but the tone was unmistakable.

“Why?” he said. “Because he and I have an enemy who is the same. Do you remember Goldfarb, the Jew that English ginger dealer sent here when this was still part of the
Reich?”
He waited for her to nod, then went on, “I am using the Nazi to take revenge on the Englishman.”

“I see,” she said. “If it were me, I would use the Englishman to take revenge on the Nazi, who made me into his harlot. Is that a proper English word, harlot?”

“I understand it, yes,” Rance said uncomfortably. “I’m sorry, Miss Dutourd, but what it looks like to me is, a lot of the people in the ginger business are bastards, and you have to pick the one who will help you the most at any one time. For me right now, that’s Kuhn. Like I say, I’m sorry.”

“You are . . .” She groped for a word again. “Forthright.” Rance smiled. He couldn’t help himself. He’d never heard anybody actually say
forthright
before. He waved for her to go on, and she did: “In this, you are like my brother. He makes no apology for what it is that he does, either.”

“I’m not sorry to do the Lizards a bad turn any way I can,” Rance said. “Turning them into ginger addicts isn’t as good as shooting them, but it will do.”

“I do not love the Lizards, but I feel about the
Boches
as you feel about they—about
them.”
Monique Dutourd corrected herself.

“And how does your brother feel?” Auerbach wasn’t about to waste a chance to gather information on the people with whom he was dealing.

He got more than he bargained for. “Pierre?” Monique Dutourd’s lip curled in fine contempt. “As long as he can get his money, he does not care whence it comes.” Auerbach hadn’t heard
whence
very often, either. He got the idea she’d learned English from books. She added, “And if he does not get his money when he should, then unfortunate things, it could be, would happen.”

Sure as hell, that was worth knowing. All the same, Rance might have been happier not hearing it. He and Penny remained small fish in a tank full of sharks.

Peking
was
home. Liu Han hadn’t been sure, not when she first came back to the city, but it was. To her real astonishment, she even found herself glad to be eating noodles more often than rice.

“This is very strange,” she said to Liu Mei, using her chopsticks to grab a mouthful of buckwheat noodles from their bowl of broth and slurping them up. “Noodles felt like foreign food to me when I first came here.”

“They’re good.” Liu Mei took noodles for granted. Why not? She’d been eating them all her life.

Talking about noodles was safe. This little eatery wasn’t one where Party members gathered. The scrawny man at the next table might have been a Kuomintang operative. The fat fellow on the other side, the one who looked as if he’d bring in a good sum if rendered into grease, might have worked for the little scaly devils. That was, in fact, pretty likely. Men who worked for the scaly devils made enough to let them eat well.

“Hard times,” Liu Han said with a sigh.

Her daughter nodded. “But better days are coming. I’m sure of it.” Saying that was safe, too. All sides—even the little devils—thought their triumph meant better times ahead for China. Liu Han raised the bowl of noodles to her face and took another mouthful. She hoped that would cover the outrage she might show when thinking of what a triumph by the little scaly devils would mean.

They finished eating and got up to go. They’d already paid—this wasn’t the sort of place where the proprietor would trust people to leave money on the counter. As they went out onto the
hutung—
the alley—in front of the little food shop, Liu Han said, “We finally have enough tea in the city.”

“Do we?” Liu Mei said as men and women, all intent on their own affairs, hurried past. The
hutung
was in shadow; it was so narrow that the sun had to be at just the right angle to slide down into it. A man leading a donkey loaded with sacks of millet had people flattening themselves against the walls to either side to let him by. Liu Mei didn’t smile—she couldn’t—but her eyes brightened at what her mother said. “That’s good. It took us long enough.”

Before Liu Han could answer, a fly lit on the end of her nose. Looking at it cross-eyed, she fanned her hand in front of her face. The fly flew off. It was, of course, only one of thousands, millions, billions. They flourished in Peking as they did in peasant villages. Another would probably land on her somewhere in a minute.

She said, “Well, this is special tea, you know, not just the ordinary sort. It took a long time to pick the very best and bring it up from the south.”

“Too long.” Liu Mei was in one of those moods where she disapproved of everything. Liu Han understood that. Staying patient wasn’t easy, not when every day saw the little scaly devils sinking their claws ever deeper into the flesh of China. Liu Mei went on, “We’ll have to boil the fire up really hot.”

“Can’t make good tea any other way,” Liu Han agreed.

They came out of the alley onto
Hsia Hsieh Chieh,
Lower Slanting Street, in the western part of the Chinese City, not far from the Temple of Everlasting Spring. Bicycles, rickshaws, wagons, foot traffic, motorcars, buses, trucks—Lower Slanting Street was wide enough for all of them. Because it was, and because everyone used it, traffic moved at the speed of the slowest.

More often than not, that was an annoyance. The little scaly devils in a mechanized fighting vehicle must have thought so; they had to crawl along with everyone else. Scaly devils were impatient creatures. They hated having to wait. They ran their own lives so waiting was only rarely necessary. Moving along jammed Chinese streets, though, what choice did they have?

When Liu Han said that aloud, Liu Mei said, “They could just drive over people or start shooting. Who would stop them? Who could stop them? They are the imperialist occupiers. They can do as they please.”

“They can, yes, but they would touch off riots if they did,” Liu Han said. “They are, most of them, smart enough to know that. They don’t want us to get stirred up. They just want us to be good and to be quiet and to let them rule us and not to cause them any trouble. And so they’ll sit in traffic just as if they were people.”

“But they have the power to start running people over or to start shooting,” Liu Mei said. “They think they have the right to do those things, whether they choose to do them or not. There’s the evil: that they think they have the right.”