Aftershocks (51 page)

Felless drew back and hesitated before she spoke. She had brains, all right; she knew something was fishy, even if she didn’t know what. After that momentary hesitation, she said, “Very well. Come with me.” Brusquely, she turned away and went down the hallway from which she’d come. Rance and Monique followed.

He didn’t know what he’d expected: that she would take the two humans back to her own quarters, perhaps. She didn’t. The room into which she led them was the obvious Lizard equivalent of an Earthly conference room. Rance didn’t much like the Lizards’ chairs, which were too small and shaped for beings without much in the way of buttocks. With his bad leg, though, he liked standing even less. He sat. So did Monique.

Felless, for her part, paced back and forth. When she spoke, he thought he heard bitterness in her voice: “Now you will tell me what you want. It will be something to do with ginger, I do not doubt.”

“Not directly,” Auerbach said. “My friend here is a scholar. She is grateful that you saved her from the prison of the Français.” He delivered a running translation for Monique, mostly in English, some in French.

“She is welcome,” Felless said. “What is the point of this? It is not directly connected to ginger, you said. How is it indirectly connected?”

“When the explosive-metal bomb destroyed much of Marseille, it destroyed Monique’s university, too,” Rance answered. “Now she has no position. She wants work in what she knows about, not in selling wrappings to other Tosevites.”

“How nice,” Felless said with polite insincerity. “But I do not see how that has anything to do with me.”

“We hoped you could use your connections and your high rank as a female of the Race to help her gain a position somewhere in France,” Auerbach said. “When a female of the Race, especially a high-ranking female of the Race, speaks, Tosevites have to pay attention.”

“Tosevites, from all I have seen, do not ‘have to’ do anything,” Felless answered. “And why should I help her again in any case?”

Before answering her, Rance spoke in English to Monique: “Now we see what we see.” He went back to the language of the Race: “Because you helped her before because of Business Administrator Keffesh.”

Felless flinched. Auerbach hid his smile. The female said, “What do you know of Business Administrator Keffesh?”

“I know he is in trouble for ginger,” Rance said. “I know you do not want authorities of the Race to know you did favors for him.”

“That is—” Felless used a word he didn’t know. He assumed it meant
blackmail.
She went on, “Why should I do anything like that, and how do I know you will not betray me even if I do?”

Now Rance did smile. When she put it like that, he knew he had her. He said, “I do not ask for money.”
Yet,
he thought. “I ask help for a friend, nothing more. She deserves help. She is a good scholar. She should have the chance to work at what she was trained to work at.”

“And what were
you
trained to work at, Rance Auerbach?” Felless demanded.

He smiled again, even if she might not understand exactly what the expression meant. “War,” he said.

“Were you?” Felless said. “Why am I not surprised? And if I refuse you, you will inform my superiors of my unfortunate connections.”

“We do not want to do that,” Rance said. “We want you to help us.”

“But if I do not help you, you will do this,” Felless said.

Rance shrugged. “I hope it is not needed. You are a scholar. Do you not want to help another scholar?”

“What sort of scholar is this Tosevite female?” Felless asked.

When Auerbach asked Monique just how she wanted to answer that, she said, “Tell her I studied—and want to go on studying—the history of the Roman Empire.” He translated her words into the language of the Race.

Felless sniffed. “I find it strange that you Tosevites should speak of empires. You do not really know the meaning of the word. There is only one true Empire, that of the Race.”

“Very interesting,” Rance said, “but it has nothing to do with what we are talking about here. Will you help my friend, or is it necessary for us to embarrass you?”

“ ‘Embarrass’ is not the word.” Felless sighed. “Very well. I will help. As you say, this is a relatively small matter.” She sounded as if she was trying to convince herself of that.

After Auerbach translated that for Monique, he said, “What do you think?”

“I think it is wonderful, if it is true,” she answered in English. “I will believe it is true when I see it, however.”

“If it’s not true, we’ll just have to talk to the Lizards’ authorities,” Rance said, also in English. Then he translated that into the language of the Race for Felless’ benefit. By the way she winced, she didn’t think she was particularly benefited. Rance’s smile got bigger. That wasn’t his worry. It was all hers.

To her astonishment, Monique Dutourd found that she enjoyed selling dresses. In her academic days, she’d learned how to deal with people without panicking. That served her in good stead now. She’d also learned to dress reasonably well without spending an arm and a leg: on a professor’s salary, she could barely afford to spend fingernail clippings. And so she could help other women look as good as they could without helping them to go broke doing it.

Her boss was a fellow named Charles Boileau. After she’d been working at the dress shop for a couple of weeks, he said, “I had my doubts about hiring you,
Mademoiselle
Dutourd. I thought you would either be too educated to work with the customers, or that you wouldn’t be able to learn the business. I was wrong both ways, and I’m not too proud to admit it.”

“Thank you very much.” Monique was pleased and, again, surprised to admit it to herself. “I’m glad you think I fit in.”

Boileau nodded. “I knew you knew what you were doing when you talked
Madame
du Cange out of that green dress without insulting her or making her ashamed of her own judgment.”

“I had to, sir, even though the sale we got was for a little less,” Monique said.
“Madame
du Cange is a woman of . . . formidable contours.” Her gesture said what she wouldn’t: that the customer in question was grossly fat. “If she’d bought that dress, she would have looked like nothing so much as an enormous lime with legs.”

Her boss was a sobersided man. He fought—and lost—a battle against laughter. “I wouldn’t have put it that way,” he said, “but I won’t tell you that you’re wrong.”

“And if she did that,” Monique said earnestly, “it would have reflected badly on her, and it would have reflected badly on us. People would have said, ‘Where did you get that dress?’ She would have told them, too—she would have thought it a compliment. And none of the people she told would have come here ever again.”

“It wouldn’t have been quite so bad as that, I don’t think,” Boileau said, “but your attitude does you credit.”

Her attitude turned out to do rather more than that. When she got her paycheck at the end of the week, it had an extra fifty francs in it. That wasn’t enough to make her rich. It wasn’t even enough to make her anything but very dubiously middle-class. But every one of those francs was welcome and more than welcome.

She’d found herself a tiny walk-up furnished room a couple of blocks from the dress shop. It had a hot plate and a sink. No stove, no toilet, no bathtub, no telephone. The toilet and tub were down at the end of the hall. In the whole building, only the landlady had a phone and a stove.

After cooking in the tent, Monique had no trouble cooking on a hot plate. And she discovered she didn’t miss a telephone. Dieter Kuhn couldn’t call her, assuming he was still in Marseille. Lucie couldn’t get hold of her, either. Neither could Rance Auerbach, but she could always reach him on a public telephone whenever she needed to.

She kept waiting for news that Felless had managed to persuade a university to give her a position. The news didn’t come. Once when she telephoned, Auerbach asked, “Shall we turn her in now?”

But Monique, not without regret, said, “No. She helped me out of prison. I do not wish to betray her unless it is very plain she is betraying us.”

“Okay,” Auerbach said—they were speaking English. “I still think you’re too damn nice for your own good, but okay.”

Monique had to work out exactly what that meant in French. When she did, she decided it was a compliment. “Things could be worse,” she said. Remembering Dieter Kuhn, she shivered a little. “Yes, things could be much worse. Believe me, I know.”

“Okay,” Rance Auerbach said again. “You know best what you want. I’m just trying to help.”

“I know. I thank you.” Monique hung up then, scratching her head. She’d seen that Auerbach was partial to such gestures. He’d given David Goldfarb a hand, even if that meant going to the Nazis to put pressure on the Englishman who was giving Goldfarb a hard time. So no wonder the American would squeeze a vulnerable Lizard to help her.

Did he have an ulterior motive? With most men, that added up to, did he want to go to bed with her? She wouldn’t have been surprised, but he wasn’t obnoxious about it if he did. He wasn’t making it a
quid pro quo,
as so many men would have. Kuhn certainly had, damn him—if she gave him her body, he kept his fellow SS goons from interrogating her. The worst of that was, she still felt she’d made the best possible bargain there, no matter how she loathed the
Sturmbann führer.

Maybe she shouldn’t have thought of Kuhn on the way back to her roominghouse. Maybe if she hadn’t, he wouldn’t have been sitting on the front steps waiting for her. Monique stopped so short, she might have seen a poisonous snake there. As far as she was concerned, she had.

“Hello, sweetheart,” he said in his German-accented French. “How are you today?”

“Go away,” she snarled. “Get out. I never want to see you again. If you don’t leave right now, I’m going to scream for the police.”

“Go ahead,” Kuhn answered. “I’m just a tourist, and I’ve got the papers to prove it.”

“You’re a damned SS man, no matter what your papers say,” Monique retorted. Her mouth twisted in a bitter quirk that was not a smile. “You’ve got the little tattoo to prove it. I ought to know. I’ve seen it too often.”

His smile was a long way from charming. “Go ahead. Tell them you were fucking an SS man. If you don’t, I will—and then see how much fun you have.”

Laughing in his face gave Monique almost as much pleasure as she’d ever had in bed—certainly far more than she’d ever had with him. “Go ahead. See how much good it does you. I’ve already been to jail for that, and I got out again, too. I proved you made me do it. Go away right now and don’t come back, or I
will
yell for the police.”

“You’d sooner screw that American, the cripple,” Kuhn said scornfully.

“Any day,” she answered at once. “Twice on Sundays. Go away.” She took a deep breath. She really did intend to scream her head off.

Dieter Kuhn must have seen that, for he got to his feet with the smooth grace of an athlete. “All right,” he said. “I’ll go. Sleep with the American. Sleep with the Lizards, for all I care. But I tell you this: the
Reich
isn’t done. The Lizards haven’t heard the last of us. Neither have you.” Off he went, arrogant as ever.

Monique took hold of the iron banister and sagged against it with relief. Up till this second round of fighting, she’d lived her whole adult life in a country under the Nazis’ thumb, a country where the
Gestapo
could do whatever it pleased. She’d lived that way so long, she’d come to take it for granted. Now, for the first time, she saw what living in her own country, an independent country, meant. If she yelled for the police, they could arrest Kuhn instead of having to knuckle under to him.

She went up the stairs and into the roominghouse. As she walked up to her own room, she realized things weren’t quite so simple. The purification squad from her own independent country had arrested her and thrown her into prison, too. Her brother hadn’t got her out because her case was good or her cause just. He’d got her out because he’d pulled wires with the Lizards. France was almost as much obliged to do what they wanted as it had been to do what the Germans wanted.

“Almost,” Monique murmured. The difference was enormous, as far as she was concerned. For one thing, the Lizards did formally respect French freedom. And, for another, they weren’t Nazis. That alone made all the difference in the world.

She was sauteeing liver and onions on the hot plate when she realized she ought to be doing more to help get Pierre out of the Lizards’ jail. He’d pulled wires for her, after all. But she didn’t have any wires to pull, not really. Rance Auerbach might, but he was already pulling them on her behalf. How could she ask him to do more? The answer, unfortunately, was plain: she couldn’t.

If she bribed him with her body, would he help her with Pierre? Angrily, she flipped the liver over with a spatula and slammed it down into the pan. She never would have started thinking like that if it hadn’t been for Dieter Kuhn. And she never would have had to worry about Kuhn if she hadn’t been Pierre’s sister. That struck her as a good reason to let her brother stay right where he was.

A couple of evenings later, she was writing yet another letter of application—who could guess whether or not Felless would come through?—when someone knocked on the door. She didn’t hesitate about answering it, as she would have before the Nazis had to leave France. The only thing she worried about was robbers, and robbers, she reasoned, had to know there were more lucrative targets than an upper-floor room in a cheap boardinghouse.

When she opened the door, she stared in astonishment. Her brother nodded to her. “Aren’t you going to ask me if I want to come in?” Pierre Dutourd asked.

“Come in,” Monique said automatically. As automatically, she shut the door behind him. Then, a little at a time, her wits started to work. She asked the first question that popped into them: “What are you doing here?”

“I came to say thank you,” Pierre answered, as seriously as she’d ever heard him speak. “I’m not going to ask you what you had to do to get Dieter Kuhn to help me get out of that damned cell. I probably don’t want to know. You probably don’t want to tell me. I’m sure it wasn’t anything you wanted to do—I know what Kuhn is. But you did it anyway, even though you’ve got to think I’m more a nuisance than a brother. So thank you, from the bottom of my heart.” His nod was almost a bow.