“Hotel Beauveau, s’il vous plait,” Auerbach answered, and went on in slow French: “It is near the old port, n’est-ce pas? ” If he’d impressed the cabby, the fellow didn’t let on. He slammed down the trunk lid-what would have been the hood on any self-respecting car-got in, and started to drive.
Getting to know her brother turned out to be less of a pleasure than Monique Dutourd had imagined it would. Pierre might not have planned to be a smuggler when he was young, but he’d lived in the role so long that it fit him tighter than his underwear. And all his acquaintances came out of the smugglers’ den of Porte d’Aix, too. Having met Lucie, his lady friend with the sexy voice, Monique came away convinced her voice was the best thing she had going for her.
Pierre spent much of his time cursing the Nazis in general and Sturmbannfuhrer Dieter Kuhn in particular. “They are cutting my profit margin in half, it could be even more than in half,” he groused.
He seemed to have forgotten that the Lizards would have cut his life in half. Monique had more general reasons to loathe the Germans-what they’d done to France, for instance. Pierre didn’t care about that. He dealt with people all over the world, but remained invincibly provincial at heart: if something didn’t affect him in the most direct way, it had no reality for him.
Between Pierre and Sturmbannfuhrer Kuhn, Monique’s work suffered. The paper on the epigraphy relating to the cult of Isis in Gallia Narbonensis remained unfinished. The SS man started asking her out again. “Dammit, you have my brother in your hip pocket,” she flared. “Aren’t you satisfied?”
“That is business,” Kuhn replied. “This is, or would be, or could be, pleasure.”
“For you, perhaps,” Monique said. “Not for me.” But not even the direct insult was enough to keep him from asking her to lunch or dinner every few days. She kept saying no. He kept asking. He kept being polite about it, which gave her no more excuse to lose her temper-not that losing her temper at an SS officer was the smartest thing she might have done under any circumstances.
Once more, she grew to hate the telephone. She had to answer it, and too often it was the German. Whenever it rang, she winced. And it kept ringing. One night, just as she was starting to make some fitful progress on the inscriptions, it derailed her train of thought with its insistent jangle. She called it a name unlikely to appear in any standard French dictionary. When that didn’t make it shut up, she marched over to it, picked up the handset, and snarled, “Allo? ”
“Hello, is this Professor Dutourd?” The words were in German, but it wasn’t Dieter Kuhn. For that matter, it wasn’t standard German, either; it differed at least as much from what she’d learned in school as the Marseille dialect differed from Parisian French.
“Yes,” Monique answered. “Who’s calling, please?” Her first guess was, another SS man from some backwards province.
But the fellow on the other end of the line said, “I’m a friend of some friends of your brother’s. I’m looking to do him a good turn, if I can.”
She almost hung up on him then and there. Instead, she snapped, “Why are you calling me? Why aren’t you bothering the SS?” Then she added insult to injury: “But don’t worry. They probably hear you now, because they listen on this line whenever they choose.”
She’d expected that would make the caller hang up on her, but he didn’t. He muttered something that wasn’t German at all, whether standard or dialect: “Oh, bloody hell.”
Monique read English, but had had far fewer occasions to speak it than she’d had with German. Still, she recognized it when she heard it. And hearing it made her revise her notion of who Pierre’s “friends” were: probably not Nazi gangsters after all. Not this batch, anyhow, she thought. “What do you want?” she asked, sticking to German.
He answered in that throaty, guttural dialect: “I already told you. I want to give him as much help as I can. I don’t know how much that will be, or just how I’ll be able to do it.” He laughed without much humor. “I don’t know all kinds of things I wish I knew.”
“Who are you?” she asked. “How do you know Pierre?”
“I don’t know him at all-my friends do,” the stranger answered. “Who am I?” That bitter laugh again. “My name is David Goldfarb.”
“Goldfarb,” Monique echoed. It could have been a German name, but he didn’t pronounce it as a German would have. And he’d cursed in English when provoked. Maybe his dialect wasn’t really, or wasn’t quite, German at all. “You’re a Jew!” she blurted.
An instant too late, she realized she shouldn’t have said that. Goldfarb muttered something pungent in English, then returned to what had to be Yiddish: “If anybody is listening to your phone…” He sighed. “I’m a British citizen. I have a legal right to be here.” Another sigh. “I hope the Jerries remember that.”
By the way he said it, Jerries had the same flavor as Boches. Monique found herself liking him, and also found herself wondering if he was setting her up to like him. If he really was a Jew, he was risking his neck to come here. If he was a liar, he was-no, not a smooth one, for there was nothing smooth about him, but a good one. “What do you want with my brother?” Monique asked.
“What do you think?” he answered. He did believe someone was tapping her line, then: he was saying no more than he had to.
She came to a sudden decision. “You know where I teach?” Without waiting for him to say yes or no, she hurried on: “Be there at noon tomorrow with a bicycle.”
He said something in the Lizards’ language. That, unlike French, German, or English, was not a tongue of classical scholarship. A generation of films had taught her the phrase he used, though: “It shall be done.” The line went dead.
When she finished her lecture the next day, she wondered if Dieter Kuhn would try to take her out to lunch. He didn’t. Maybe that meant the Nazis hadn’t been listening after all. Maybe it meant they had, and were seeing what kind of trouble she’d get into if they let her. She left her lecture hall, curious about the same thing.
That fellow standing in the hall had to be David Goldfarb. He looked like a Jew-not like a Nazi propaganda poster, but like a Jew. He was eight or ten years older than she, with wavy brown hair going gray, rather sallow skin, and a prominent nose. Not bad-looking. The thought left her vaguely surprised, and more sympathetic than she’d expected. “How does it feel to be here?” she asked.
She’d spoken French. He grimaced. “English or German, please,” he said in English. “I haven’t got a word of French. Fine chap to send here, eh?” He grinned ruefully. When Monique repeated herself-in German, in which she was more fluent than English-the grin slipped. He returned to his rasping dialect: “Coming here is bad for me. Not coming here would have been bad for me and my family. What can you do?”
“What can you do?” Monique repeated. She’d been asking herself the same thing ever since Sturmbannfuhrer Kuhn let her know Pierre was alive. Too often, the answer was, Not much. “You do have a bicycle?” she asked. He nodded, and then had to brush a lock of hair off his forehead. She said, “Good. Come along with me, then, and we’ll go to a cafe, and you can tell me what this is all about.”
“It shall be done,” he said again, in the language of the Race.
She led him to Tire-Bouchon, on Rue Julien, in a turn-of-thecentury building not far from her route home. A couple of soldiers in Wehrmacht field-gray were eating there, but they paid her no undue attention. To her relief, they paid Goldfarb no undue attention, either.