Before he could reach for the next report in the stack, his secretary said, “Comrade Khrushchev is here to see you.”
Molotov glanced at his watch. Khrushchev was fifteen minutes late-not bad at all, by his standards. “Send him in,” Molotov said.
“Good day, Comrade General Secretary,” Khrushchev said, shaking hands with Molotov. He spoke Russian with a strong Ukrainian accent, turning g’s into h’s, and had a peasant drawl to boot.
“Good day, Comrade General Secretary,” Molotov echoed with a wintry smile. The rank he held in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev held in the Communist Party of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. “And how are the pacification efforts progressing?”
Khrushchev made a remarkably sour face. He was ugly as sin to begin with: squat, bullet-headed, snaggle-toothed, with a couple of prominent warts. When he got angry, he got uglier. “Not so good,” he answered. “The Reich keeps shipping the robbers arms across the Romanian border. You ought to call the sons of bitches on it.”
“I have done so, Nikita Sergeyevich,” Molotov answered. “The Reich states that Romania is an independent nation pursuing an independent foreign policy.” He held up a hand. “And I have protested to the Romanians, who say they are helpless to keep the Germans from shipping arms through their territory.”
“Fuck ’em,” Khrushchev said. “Fuck ’em all. The Lizards are sneaking shit in from Poland, too. We hold things down, but it’s a damn pain in the arse.”
“So long as you do hold things down,” Molotov said. “That is why you have your job, after all.”
“Don’t I know it,” Khrushchev said. “Stinking nationalist bandits. As soon as we pull one band up by the roots, another one sprouts.” He raised an eyebrow. “Anybody would think they didn’t fancy taking orders from Moscow.”
“Too bad,” Molotov said coldly. Khrushchev laughed out loud. They didn’t always agree on means, but they stood together on keeping the Ukraine a part of the USSR. Molotov asked, “You can document the fact that some of the bandits’ weapons come from the Lizards and not the fascists?”
“Oh, hell, yes, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich,” Khrushchev exclaimed.
“Good. Give me your evidence, and I will protest to the Lizards,” Molotov said. Khrushchev nodded. Molotov went on, “When confronted with evidence, the Lizards often draw back-unlike the fascists, who are strangers to shame.”
“Unlike us, too,” Khrushchev said with a grin. “But we have the dialectic on our side, and the goddamn Nazis don’t.”
“Neither do the Lizards,” Molotov said. And a good thing, too, or they would surely beat us, he thought somewhere down deep.
Khrushchev departed in due course, loudly and profanely promising to give Molotov the evidence he needed to protest to the Lizards. Based on his previous performance, Molotov figured the chances he would were a little better than even money. Molotov was reaching for another report when the telephone rang. His secretary said, “Comrade General Secretary, Marshal Zhukov wishes to speak with you.”
“Put him through,” Molotov said at once, and then, “Good day, Georgi Konstantinovich.”
“Good day, Comrade General Secretary,” Zhukov said politely. “I wonder if you might be able to stop by my office some time today, to review the revised projections for the military budget in the upcoming Five-Year Plan.”
Revised upwards, he meant-revised sharply upwards. Zhukov might not want to rule the USSR, but he was taking his pound of flesh for suppressing Beria. And Molotov could not-did not dare-do anything about it. Things could have been worse, and he knew as much, but they also could have been a great deal better. With the resigned sigh of an animal in a cage too small, he answered, “I will be there directly, Marshal,” and took a petty revenge by hanging up the phone very hard.
Of all the Lizards Rance Auerbach had hoped never to see again, Hesskett topped the list. The interrogator had threatened to lock him and Penny Summers in jail and lose the key if they didn’t put that French ginger smuggler out of business for good. Rance would have liked his trip to the south of France a hell of a lot better if it hadn’t ended up in a Nazi jail.
He still didn’t think that was his fault. Hesskett took a different view of things, though, and his would be the one that counted. He turned one eye turret toward Rance, the other toward Penny. “You failed,” he said in a voice that somehow held echoes of slamming metal doors.
Penny spoke quickly: “We didn’t fail all the way, superior sir. The Germans still have that Dutourd in jail, or they did when they let us go. That puts him out of business, doesn’t it?”
“It does not,” Hesskett said, and Auerbach imagined he heard more slamming doors. “The Deutsche released him some time ago. No doubt he will soon be selling the Race ginger again.”
“That’s not our fault, dammit!” Rance said. “Now that you flew us back here to Mexico, we can’t do anything about what happens on the other side of the ocean, and you can’t hold it against us.”
“Who says I cannot?” Hesskett returned. His English wasn’t usually idiomatic. He probably didn’t intend it to be idiomatic here. “Who says I cannot?” he repeated. “The agreement was to reduce your punishment if you acted to further the interests of the Race. Can you say you have furthered the interests of the Race?”
“The agreement was to reward us if we did that,” Penny said. “You told us we’d get a big reward if we did it. Well, we did some of it-maybe not as much as you wanted, but some. So we deserve some reward, anyway.”
“That’s right,” Auerbach said. Whether it was right or not, though, he didn’t expect it to do him a plugged nickel’s worth of good.
Hesskett took him by surprise, then, by saying, “Perhaps. This Big Ugly will now also be selling drugs we supply to the Tosevites of the Reich. So your mission may have accomplished something, even if it was something small.”
“In that case, why are you saying we failed?” Penny demanded. “Okay, we don’t deserve the whole great big reward, but you’ve got no business keeping us locked up like this.”
“Your efforts did not bring Dutourd over to the side of the Race,” Hesskett answered. “The Deutsche released him to continue his role as a destructive menace. They did not know we would be able to turn him-to turn him to some partial degree-to our own purposes.”
“Well, what are you going to do with us, then?” Auerbach asked. “This teasing gets stale.”
“What to do with you is a puzzlement,” the Lizard said. “You did not completely fail, but you were far from complete success. And, if you are set at liberty, you are only too likely to return to your own noxious habit of ginger-smuggling.”
I wouldn’t! Rance almost shouted it. He hadn’t had anything to do with smuggling ginger for years till Penny came back into his life. If they let him go and kept her in the calaboose, they wouldn’t hurt themselves one bit.
Without turning his head to look at her, he felt Penny’s eyes on him. She had to know what was going through his mind. She also had to know he hadn’t asked her to come back to him. She’d done it on her own, because she couldn’t find any other choice. If he walked away and sold her down the river, how much guilt would he have on his conscience?
He asked himself the same question. Just how big a son of a bitch are you, Rance? How low have you fallen? The clean-cut West Point cavalry officer he’d been once upon a time wouldn’t have let a pal down for anything. But he hadn’t been that fellow for a lot of years. A couple of Lizard bullets had made sure he’d never be that fellow again. And afterwards, he hadn’t even been able to make a go of it as a ginger smuggler after Penny left him the first time, even if some of his buddies had stayed in touch with him on the off chance he might be able to do something for them. He’d turned into a petty grifter, a loser, a drunk. Christ, what else had he turned into on the way down? A Judas?