“Merci,” Auerbach said, and Penny nodded. Rance would have preferred either real booze or beer, but this was France, so what could you do?
Pierre Dutourd raised his glass in salute. “This is a better meeting than our last one,” he said.
“Amen!” Rance exclaimed, and drank. He fumbled for words. “No Nazis with rifles, no trouble, no fear.”
“Less fear, anyhow,” the ginger dealer said. “Less trouble. The Lizards-the Lizards in authority-still do not love us. With France as she is today, this causes certain difficulties.”
“But you’re getting around them,” Penny said after Auerbach translated for her. He started to turn that back into French, but Pierre’s sister did the job faster and better than he could have.
“Yes, we are.” This time, Pierre Dutourd spoke the language of the Race. “Do we all understand this speech?” Everyone did but Monique, and she seemed not particularly unhappy at being excluded. “Good,” Pierre said. “Now-I am given to understand you have some of the herb you are interested in selling me?”
“Truth,” Penny said.
“Congratulations on getting it into this not-empire,” Dutourd said. “That is more difficult these days. Officials are altogether too friendly with the Race. Some of my former suppliers are having troubles, which is a pity: there are many males and females hereabouts who are longing for a taste.”
“I hope Basil Roundbush is one of those suppliers,” Rance said.
“As a matter of fact, he is,” Pierre said. “You know him?” He waited for Rance to nod, then went on, “He is, I believe, fixing his troubles now.”
“I hope he does not,” Auerbach said, and used an emphatic cough.
“Ah?” Dutourd raised an eyebrow, scenting scandal.
“Dealing with Penny and me will mean you have less need to deal with him,” Rance said. “I aim to hunt his business if I can.” He didn’t wait for the French ginger dealer to ask why, but went on to explain his run-in with Roundbush in Edmonton and the way the Englishman was hounding David Goldfarb.
Pierre Dutourd listened, but didn’t seem much impressed. Business is business to him, the son of a bitch, Auerbach thought. But when he mentioned Goldfarb’s name, Monique Dutourd perked up. She and her brother went back and forth in rapid-fire French, most of it too fast for Rance to keep up with. He gathered Pierre was filling her in on what he’d said.
Then she seemed to slow down deliberately, to give Auerbach a chance to understand her next words: “I think that, if it is possible for you to do without the Englishman and his ginger, you should. Anyone who would send a Jew-and a Jew who did not speak even so much as a word of French-in among the Nazis is not a man who deserves to be trusted. If he has the chance to betray you, he will take it.”
“I have been guarding my back for many years, Monique,” Pierre said with amused affection. “I do not need you to tell me how to do it.”
His sister glared at him. Auerbach was sure he’d lost the play. But then Lucie said, “It could be Monique has reason. I have never trusted this Roundbush, either. He is too friendly. He is too handsome. He thinks too much of himself. Such men are not to be relied upon-and now we have another choice.”
Rance had been trying to keep up with a translation for Penny, but he caught that. With a nod to good old Pierre the Turd, he said, “C’est vrai. Now you have another choice.”
“It could be,” Dutourd said. Auerbach carefully didn’t smile. He knew a nibble on the hook when he felt one.
Monique Dutourd looked up from the letter she was writing. She wondered how many applications she’d sent out to universities all over France. She also wondered how many of those universities still existed at the moment, and how many had vanished off the face of the earth in an instant of explosive-metal fine.
And she wondered how many letters she’d sent to universities still extant had got where they were addressed. The situation with the mail in newly independent France remained shockingly bad. The Nazis would never have tolerated such inefficiency. Of course, the Nazis would have read a lot of the letters in the mailstream along with delivering them. Monique dared hope the officials of the Republique Francaise weren’t doing the same.
She also dared hope department chairmen were reading the letters she sent them. She had very little on which to base that hope. Only three or four letters had come back to the tent city outside Marseille. None of them showed the least interest in acquiring the services of a new Romanist.
Because nobody cared about her academic specialty, she remained stuck with her brother and Lucie. She wished she could get away, but they were the ones who had the money-they had plenty of it. They were generous about sharing it with her: more generous, probably, than she would have been were roles reversed. But being dependent on a couple of ginger dealers rankled.
Not for the first time, Monique wished she’d studied something useful instead of Latin and Greek. Then she could have struck out on her own, got work for herself. As things were, she had to stay here unless she wanted to spend the rest of her days as a shopgirl or a maid of all work.
Pierre glanced over to her and said, “Do you really think I ought to tell the Englishman to go peddle his papers? He and I have done business for a long time, and who can be sure if these Americans are reliable?”
“You’re asking me about your business?” Monique said, more than a little astonished. “You’ve never asked me about business before, except when it had to do with that cochon from the Gestapo.”
“I knew plenty about him without asking you, too,” her brother said. “But he did make a nuisance of himself when he connected the two of us.”
“A nuisance of himself!” Now Monique had to fight to keep from exploding. Dieter Kuhn might have hounded Pierre, but he’d not only hounded Monique but also subjected her to a full-scale Nazi-style interrogation and then forced his way into her bed. As far as she was concerned, the one good thing about the explosive-metal bomb that had burst on Marseille was that it turned Kuhn to radioactive dust.
“A nuisance,” Pierre repeated placidly. Monique glared at him. He ignored the glare. His thoughts were fixed firmly on himself, on his own affairs. “You did not answer what I asked about the Americans.”
“Yes, I think you should work with them,” Monique answered. “If you have a choice between someone with a conscience and someone without, would you not rather work with the side that has one?”
“You’re probably right,” Pierre said. “If I have none myself, people with a conscience are easier to take advantage of.”
“Impossible man!” Monique exclaimed. “What would our mother and father say if they knew what you’d turned into?”
“What would they say? I like to think they’d say, ‘Congratulations, Pierre. We never expected that anyone in the family would get rich, and now you’ve gone and done it.’ ” Monique’s brother raised an eyebrow. “Getting rich does not seem to be anything you’re in severe danger of doing. When you were teaching, you weren’t getting much, and now you can’t even find a job.”
“I was doing what I wanted to do,” Monique said. “If I weren’t your sister, I’d still be doing what I wanted to do.”
“If you weren’t my sister, you’d be dead,” Pierre said coldly. “You’d have been living back at your old flat, and it was a lot closer to where the bomb went off than my place in the Porte d’Aix was. Next time you feel like calling me nasty names or asking about our parents, kindly bear that in mind.”
He was, infuriatingly, bound to be right. That didn’t make Monique resent him any less-on the contrary. But it would make her more careful about saying what was on her mind. “All right.” Even she could hear how grudging she sounded. “But I have spent a lot of time learning to be a historian. I’ve never spent any time learning the ginger business.”
“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.”