Second Contact (58 page)

Between Pierre and
Sturmbannführer
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,
“Allô?
”

“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
Sturmbannführer
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 café, 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.

She ordered a garlicky beef stew. The waiter turned out to speak German. That wouldn’t have surprised her even if the
Wehrmacht
men hadn’t been in the place. After some back-and-forth, Goldfarb chose chicken in wine. He turned back to Monique as the waiter left. “This is on me. One thing I will say about my friends”—he gave the word an ironic twist—“is that they’ve got plenty of money.”

“Merci,”
Monique said, and then, “So . . . What exactly do your friends want from my brother?”

“They don’t want anything
from
him,” the Jew from England answered. “They want him to go back into business for himself, buying some of the ginger he sells the Lizards from them and keeping them full of money. They don’t want him to be a German cat’s-paw.”

“I am sure he would like that very much,” Monique said. “The only trouble is, the Lizards will kill him if he stays in business for himself. They, or their leaders, do not want to put up with ginger now, not with what it does to their females and how it upsets their males. The Nazis can keep him in business and protect him. Can your friends do the same?”

She expected him to blanch at the blunt question. French opinions of England had not been high in the fighting or after it, and many Frenchmen laughed to see Britain fight so hard to retain her independence and then be shorn of the empire that made such independence genuine. But Goldfarb said, “I’m not sure. I think we’d have a better chance to get the Lizards to call off their dogs. I have a cousin with good connections—he’s even one of the fleetlord’s advisors every now and then.”

Monique’s wave of disbelief almost caught the waiter who was bringing them their lunches. After he’d set the food on the table and left again, she said, “You cannot expect me to think you are telling the truth.”

“Think whatever you want,” David Goldfarb told her. “My cousin’s name is Moishe Russie. Your brother ought to know it.” He cut off a bite of chicken. A smile lit up his lean, melancholy face. “This is very, very good.”

Monique resolved to remember the name; if Goldfarb was a liar, he’d been well prepared. The way he attacked his plate amused her. Tire-Buchon served hearty bourgeois fare, but surely nothing to cause such ecstasy. Then she recalled he came from England, poor fellow, and so no doubt had lower standards than hers.

After a bit, he looked astonished to have no more chicken left. “Is it possible for me to meet your brother?” he asked. “I’m staying at Le Petit Nice.” He butchered the name, but she understood it.

She also understood he was not a professional agent or anything of the sort. Someone more skilled would have been more careful about telling her where he was staying. His English associates must have chosen him for whom he knew, not for what he knew. But his very lack of skill at intrigue, oddly, made him more convincing. If he wasn’t what he said he was, he had to be something close to it.

“It could be that you might see my brother,” Monique said, picking her way through the German conditionals. “I do not yet know, of course, whether he would want to see you.”

“If he wants to get back into business for himself, I’m the best hope he has,” David Goldfarb said.

“I’ll tell him you said so,” Monique answered. “He will know better than I how far to trust you.”

Goldfarb paid for lunch with crisp new
Reichsmarks
. He stayed even more thoroughly a gentleman than Dieter Kuhn had, and seemed to have to remember to wave as he rode off on his bicycle. Unlike the SS man, he wore a wedding band, but experience had taught Monique how little the lack of one had to do with anything.

Once she’d got back to her block of flats, she sighed as she lugged her bicycle upstairs. Maybe, just maybe, she could get some work done. But when she opened the apartment door, she let out a gasp. Dieter Kuhn was sitting on the sofa.

“
Bonjour,
Monique,” he said with a pleasant smile. “Now, what did the damned kike have to tell you?”

David Goldfarb was astonished to discover how much he liked Marseille. He liked the weather, he loved the food, and the people—even the Germans—were nicer to him than he’d expected. What the Germans would have done to him had he been one of theirs rather than one of the Queen’s was a question on which he preferred not to dwell.

He hadn’t lived in such luxury as at Le Petit Nice before. It wasn’t even his money. That made him spend it less recklessly, not more, as it might have with a lot of men. He didn’t need to be extravagant to have a good time, and so he wasn’t.

Three days after he’d had lunch with Monique Dutourd—who was, without a doubt, the most interesting professor he’d ever met—the telephone in his room rang as he was trying not to cut his throat while shaving. “Hello?” he said, getting shaving soap on the handset as he held it to his mouth.

A man spoke in the language of the Race: “I greet you. Meet me tomorrow at midday behind the old synagogue. Do you understand? Is it agreed?”

“It shall be done,” Goldfarb said, and only then, “Dutourd?” He got no answer; the line was dead.

Maybe it was a trap. In fact, the odds were depressingly good it was a trap. That had nothing to do with anything. David had to stick his head into it. If he went home without doing whatever he could to get the ginger dealer out from under the Germans’ muscular thumbs, his family would regret it. Group Captain Roundbush hadn’t said so in so many words, but he hadn’t needed to, either.

With a camera slung around his neck, dark glasses on his nose, and a preposterous hat shielding his head from the Mediterranean sun, Goldfarb hoped he looked like a man on holiday. He walked along the hilly streets of Marseille, peering down at a city map to make sure he didn’t get lost.

When he found the synagogue on Rue Breteuil, he grimaced. Rank weeds grew in front of the building. The boards nailed across the door had been in place long enough to grow grainy and pale, except for the streaks of rust trailing down from the nailheads. More boards kept men without better homes from climbing through the windows. Vandals—or, for all David knew, Nazi officials— had painted swastikas and anti-Semitic slogans on the bricks of the front wall.

Passersby gave Goldfarb curious looks as he kicked his way through the weeds toward the back of the synagogue. He ignored them. Not least because he proceeded as if he had every right to be doing as he did, the passersby stopped paying attention to him almost at once. In the Greater German
Reich
, no one questioned a man who acted as if he had the right to do what he was doing. Basil Roundbush had told him it would be so, and it was.

Other buildings huddled close on either side of the synagogue. In their shadows, the weeds did not flourish quite so much. Behind the closed and desecrated shrine, though, they grew even more vigorously than in front, growing almost as tall as a man. Anything or anyone might be lurking there. Goldfarb wished for a pistol. Softly, he called, “Dutourd?” For good measure, he tacked on an interrogative cough.

The weeds stirred. “I am here,” a man answered in the language of the Race. He did have a pistol, and pointed it at Goldfarb. Under his beret, his sad-eyed face was nervous. “Did anyone follow you here? Anyone at all? Germans? Males of the Race? Were you careful?”

“I think so,” Goldfarb answered. “I am not a spy. I am a soldier, and not so used to sneaking here and there.”

“Then you may well die before your time,” Pierre Dutourd remarked. He took from his belt a gadget probably of Lizard manufacture. After glancing at it, he relaxed a little. “I do not detect any electronics planted in or aimed at this place. That means—I hope that means—no one is listening to us. Very well, then—say your say.” Even speaking the Lizards’ language, Dutourd sounded like a Frenchman.

“Good,” Goldfarb said, though he wasn’t sure how good it was. “My friends back in Britain want to see if they can return you to doing business for yourself. They do not think you should have to subordinate yourself to the
Reich
.” The Race’s language was made for distinguishing subtle gradations of status. The relationship Goldfarb described was one of menial to master.