Rance didn’t think a lawyer, whether human or Lizard, would have done him much good, but he’d have liked a chance to find out. Penny asked the question uppermost in his mind, too: “What are you going to do with us?”
“With a crime this bad, we can do what we want,” Hesskett said. “We can leave you in jail for many years, many long Tosevite years. We can leave you in jail till you die. No one would miss you. No one of the Race would miss either one of you at all.”
That wasn’t true. A lot of customers, from Kahanass on down, would miss Penny quite a bit. Saying so didn’t strike Rance as likely to help his cause. But he didn’t think Hesskett had brought them here so he could gloat before locking them up and losing the key. The Lizard wasn’t talking that way, anyhow. Auerbach asked, “What do we have to do to keep you from throwing us in jail for life?”
Hesskett’s posture was already forward-sloping. Now he leaned even farther toward the two humans. “You are guilty of smuggling ginger,” he said. “You know other Big Uglies involved in this criminal traffic.”
“That’s right,” Penny agreed at once. She really did. Aside from her, the only ones Rance knew at the moment were the plug-uglies he’d plugged back in Fort Worth.
“Do you know the ginger smuggler and thief called Pierre Dutourd?” Hesskett said the name several times, pronouncing it as carefully as he could.
“Yeah, I do. The big-time dealer in the south of France, isn’t he?” Penny said. Auerbach nodded so Hesskett wouldn’t get the idea-the accurate idea-that he didn’t know Pierre the Turd or whatever the hell his name was from a hole in the ground.
“It is good,” the Lizard interrogator said. “We have tried to end his business with the Race, but we have not succeeded. We believe the Deutsche are protecting him from us. We need his trade stopped. If you help us stop it, we will reward you greatly. We will not put you in jail for long Tosevite years. If you refuse, we will do to you what we have the right to do to you. Do you understand? Is it agreed?”
“How are we going to do anything to this fellow in France?” Auerbach asked. “We’re here, not there.”
“We will fly you to Marseille, his city,” Hesskett answered. “We will give you documents that will satisfy the Reich. You will deal with our operatives already in Marseille and with this Pierre Dutourd. Is it agreed?”
“I’ve got one problem-I don’t speak French for beans,” Penny said. “Apart from that, I’ll do whatever you say. I don’t like jail.”
“That is the idea,” Hesskett said smugly.
“I’ve got a little French and a little German,” Rance said. “They’re rusty as hell, but they might still work some. I’ll be able to read some, anyway, even if I can’t do much talking.”
“You Tosevites would be better off with one language for all of you instead of languages in patches like fungus diseases on your planet,” Hesskett said. “But that is not to be changed today. Do you both agree to aid the Race in putting out of business the smuggler Pierre Dutourd?”
Penny nodded at once. Auerbach didn’t. Going into Nazi-occupied France after a smuggler the Reich was propping up wouldn’t be a walk in the park. He wanted some reassurance he’d come out again. Of course, if he went into jail, he had Hesskett’s reassurance he wouldn’t come out again. That made up his mind for him. With a rasping sigh, he said, “I’ll take a shot at it.”
Things moved very quickly after that. Hesskett put Rance and Penny in a Lizard airplane from the air base near Monterrey to Mexico City. When they got out of the plane a little more than an hour later (it seemed much longer to Auerbach; his seat was cramped and not made for the shape of his rear end), more Lizards who fought ginger-smuggling took charge of them. Only moments after their photographs were taken, they got handed copies of U.S. passports that Auerbach couldn’t have told from the real McCoy to save himself from the firing squad. Stamps showed visas issued by the Reich ’s consulate in Mexico City. Auerbach knew they had to be as phony as the passports, but didn’t ask questions.
The next morning, after a Lizard-paid shopping spree to get them more than the clothes they’d had on when they were captured, they boarded the small human-adapted section of an airplane bound from Mexico City to Marseille. “Well, now,” Penny said, glancing over to Rance beside her, “you can’t tell me this worked out so bad. We got caught, and what did we get? A trip to the Riviera, that’s what. Could be a heck of a lot worse, if anybody wants to know.”
“Yeah, it could,” Auerbach agreed. “And if we don’t do whatever we’re supposed to do about this Dutourd guy, it’ll get worse, too. The damn Lizards’ll lock us up and forget about us.”
Penny leaned over and gave him a big, wet kiss. It felt good-hell, it felt great-but he wondered what had brought it on. She breathed in his ear. Then, very low to defeat possible (no, probable) listening devices, she whispered, “Don’t be dumb, sweetheart. If we can’t make the damn Lizards happy, we start singing songs for the Nazis.”
Rance didn’t say anything. He just shook his head, as automatically as if at a bad smell. In spite of occasional correspondence he’d had, the Nazis had been the number-one enemy before the Lizards came, the enemy the USA was really gearing up to fight. Oh, the Japs were nasty, but Hitler’s boys had been trouble with a capital T. As far as he was concerned, they still were.
The flight was far and away the longest one he’d ever taken. Sitting cooped up in an airplane hour after hour turned out to be a crashing bore. He necked a little with Penny, but they couldn’t do anything more than neck a little, not with Lizards strolling through every so often. The Lizards didn’t act quite so high and mighty as they had before the colonization fleet brought their females. He wondered how many of them had found a female who’d tasted ginger.
After what seemed like forever, water gave way to land below the airplane. Then came more water: the improbably blue Mediterranean Sea. And then the plane rolled to a stop more smoothly than a human aircraft was likely to have done, at the airport northwest of Marseille.
When Rance and Penny got off the plane and went into the terminal to get their baggage and clear customs, spicy smells filled the air: laurel, oleander, others Auerbach couldn’t name so readily. The sky tried to outdo the sea for blueness, but didn’t quite succeed.
Some of the customs officials were Frenchmen, others Germans. They all spoke English. They also all seemed interested in why Americans should have come to Marseille aboard a Lizard airplane. They went through the suitcases with microscopic attention to detail and even had them X-rayed. Finding nothing made the Germans more suspicious than contraband would have; the French didn’t seem to give two whoops in hell.
“Purpose of this visit?” demanded a customs man in a uniform that would have made a field marshal jealous.
“Honeymoon,” Auerbach answered, slipping his good arm around Penny’s waist. She snuggled against him. They’d concocted the story on the airplane. Penny had shifted one of her rings to the third finger of her left hand. It didn’t fit very well there, but only a supremely alert man would have noticed that.
This Aryan superman-actually, a blond dumpling who wore his fancy uniform about as badly as he could-wasn’t that alert. He did remain dubious. “Honeymoon in Mexico and Marseille?” he said. “Strange even for Americans.”
Auerbach shrugged, which hurt his bad shoulder. Penny knew when to keep her mouth shut. The customs official muttered something guttural. Then he stamped both their passports with unnecessary vehemence. He didn’t know what they were up to, but he wouldn’t believe they weren’t up to something.
Outside the terminal, a cab driver with a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth stuffed their bags into the trunk at the front of his battered Volkswagen. He spoke in bad, French-accented German: “Wo willen gehen Sie?”