Second Contact (22 page)

Her mouth twisted in annoyance as she pulled out a photograph of an inscription from up near Arles. She’d taken the photograph herself, but it wasn’t so good as it might have been. Had she waited a couple of hours longer, the sun would have filled the letters with shadow instead of washing them out. She bent low over the photo, doing her best to make sure she’d correctly inscribed the inscription.

The telephone rang. She jumped.
“Merde!”
she said; she hated interruptions of any sort. Muttering, she went to the phone.
“Allô?”
Whoever it was, she intended to get rid of him as fast as she could.

That proved harder than she’d hoped.
“Bonjour, Monique. Ici Dieter Kuhn,”
the SS man in her Roman history class said in his good if formal French.
“Comment ça va?”

“Assez bien, merci,”
she answered.
“Et vous?”
He’d taken her out for coffee several times, to dinner and a film once. Had he been a Frenchman, she likely would have slipped into using
tu
with him by now. But she was not ready—she wondered if she would ever be ready—to use the intimate pronoun with a German.

“Things go well enough for me, too, thanks,” Kuhn said. “Would you care to drive down by the seaside with me for lunch?” He also used
vous
, not
tu
; he hadn’t tried to force intimacy on her. She hadn’t had to wrestle with him yet, as she almost surely would have after going out several times with one of her own countrymen. She wondered if he was normal, or if perhaps he squired her about to give the appearance of normality.

A lunch he bought—he always had plenty of cash—would be one she didn’t have to pay for. She liked the idea of soaking the SS. Still . . . “I am working,” she said, and cast a longing eye he couldn’t see back toward her desk.

She sounded halfhearted even to herself. She wasn’t a bit surprised when Dieter Kuhn laughed and said, “You sound like you could use a break. Come on. I will be there in half an hour.”

“All right,” she said. Kuhn laughed again and hung up. So did she, shaking her head. Did he know she was afraid to say no? If he did, he hadn’t used it to his advantage. That was another reason she wondered how normal he was.

He knocked on her front door exactly twenty-nine minutes after getting off the phone. His timing always lived up to every cliché about German efficiency. “Does Chez Fonfon suit you?” he asked.

It was one of the better seafood bistros in Marseille. Monique only knew of it; she couldn’t afford to eat there on her pay. “It will do,” she said, and smiled a little at the regal acquiescence in her tone.

Kuhn held the door open for her to get into the passenger side of his battered green Volkswagen. She’d known he drove one of the buggy little cars since she’d thought him a Frenchman named Laforce. She hadn’t thought anything of it; Volkswagens were the most common cars through the
Reich
and the territories it occupied.

The automobile rattled west toward the sea, past the basilica of St. Victor and Fort d’Entrecasteaux, which had helped guard the port back in the distant days when threats had to be visible to be dangerous. Kuhn drove with as much abandon as any Frenchman, and drove two wheels up onto the sidewalk when he parked near the restaurant. Seeing Monique’s bemused expression, he chuckled and said, “I follow the customs of the country where I am stationed.” He hopped out to open the door for her again.

At Chez Fonfon, she ordered bouillabaisse after a waiter fawned on them at hearing Kuhn’s German accent. The fellow gave them what had to be the best table in the place, one overlooking the blue water of the Mediterranean.

“Et pour moi aussi,”
Kuhn said.
“Et vin blanc.”

“It does have mullet?” Monique asked, and the waiter’s nod sent his forelock—alarmingly like Hitler’s—bouncing up and down on his forehead. He hurried away. Monique turned her attention back to the SS man. “The Romans would have approved. But for the tomatoes in the broth, people were eating bouillabaisse here—maybe on this very spot—in Roman days, too.”

“Some things change very slowly,” Kuhn said. “Some things, however, change more quickly.” He looked to be on the point of saying more, but the waiter came bustling up with a carafe of white wine. Monique was not used to such speedy service. The SS man took it for granted.
Why not?
she thought.
He is one of the conquerors.

Some wine took the edge off her bitterness. She did her best to relax and enjoy the view and the meal—which also came with marvelous promptness—and the company in which she found herself. But the food claimed most of her attention, as it should have. “Very good,” she said, dabbing her lips with a napkin. “Thank you.”

“It is my pleasure,” Kuhn answered. “I do not suppose they would cook the mullet alive in a glass vessel here, to let us watch it change colors as it perished.”

She pointed an accusing finger at him. “You have been studying too much.”

“I believe it is impossible to study too much,” he said, serious as usual. “One never knows when a particular piece of information may be useful. Because of this, one should try to know everything.”

“I suppose this is a useful attitude in your profession,” Monique said. She did not really want to think about his profession. To keep from thinking about it, she emptied her wineglass. The waiter, who hovered around the table like a bee around a honey-filled flower, filled it again.

“It is a useful attitude in life,” Kuhn said. “Do you not find this to be so?”

“It could be,” Monique answered. Had anyone but the SS man suggested it, she would have agreed without hesitation. She drank more white wine. As she drank, she discovered the wine had taken the edge off her caution, too, for she heard herself saying, “One piece of information I would like to have is what you think you see in me.”

Kuhn could have evaded that. He could simply have refused to answer. The idea that she could force anything from him was absurd, and she knew as much. He sipped at his own wine and looked out at the Mediterranean for a few seconds before saying, “You have a brother.”

Now she stared at him in frank astonishment. “I may have a brother,” she said. “I don’t even know if I do or not. I haven’t seen Pierre in more than twenty years, not since he was called to the front in 1940. We heard he was captured, and then we never heard again.” Excitement flowed through her. “For a long time, I have thought he was dead. Is this not so?”

“No, it is not so,” Dieter Kuhn said. “He is not only alive, he is living here in Marseille. I was hoping—I admit I was hoping—you would be able to lead me to him. But everything I have learned about you makes me believe you are telling the truth, and have no contact with him.” He sighed.
“C’est la vie.”

“And what has my brother done to make you want to find him?” Monique inquired, before she could ask herself whether she really wanted to know.

“This town—it is not an orderly town,” the SS officer said, his voice stern with disapproval. “Parts of this town might as well be thieves’ markets, such as they have in the Arab towns of Africa.”

“It is Marseille,” Monique said. Where Kuhn was stern, she was amused. “Marseille has always been like this, in France but not of it. The folk of Marseille have always traded where and in what they could get the best bargains.”

That had sometimes—often—included people. During and right after the fighting, Jews with money and connections had made it out of the
Reich
by the thousands from Marseille. Jews had a hard time of it nowadays, but other contraband still came in and went out. No one but the smugglers knew the details, but everybody had a notion of the broad outlines.

“You are familiar with the Porte d’Aix?” Kuhn asked.

“I don’t think anyone is truly familiar with the Porte d’Aix, not with all of it,” Monique answered. “It is a
souk
, a marketplace of sorts like those in Algeria, as you said. Everyone goes into the edges now and then. I have done that. Why?”

“Because your brother, my dear Professor Dutourd, is the uncrowned king of Porte d’Aix,” Kuhn told her. “It is my duty to attempt to arrange his abdication.”

“And why is that?” Monique asked. “Is it not that whoever takes his place will be no different? If you ask the opinion of anyone who has studied history, he will tell you the same, I think.”

“It could be,” Kuhn said. “But it could also be that whoever takes your brother’s place will be more inclined to remember he is a human being and less inclined to be so friendly to the Lizards.”

Monique’s first impulse was to drop everything she was doing and try to get hold of the brother she had not seen for so long, to warn him of his danger. Her second thought was that that was exactly what the SS man would want her to do. He would let her do the hunting, and then snatch Pierre once she’d guided him to his quarry. Doing nothing was not easy, but it was the best thing she could do if she wanted to go on having a brother, even one she did not know.

No. She could do one other thing, and she did it: “Please be polite enough to take me back to my apartment. Please also be polite enough not to call on me again. And please have the courtesy no longer to attend the class I offer at the university.”

“The first, of course,” Kuhn said. “I am not a barbarian.” Monique held her tongue, which was no doubt just as well. The SS man went on, “As for the second, it shall also be as you wish, although I have enjoyed your company aside from any, ah, professional considerations. The last—no. Even if I learn nothing about your brother, I do learn about the Roman world, which interests me. I shall continue to attend—without, of course, making a nuisance of myself.”

Monique could hardly order him to stay away. Recognizing as much, she shrugged and got to her feet. Kuhn slapped banknotes on the table—he was not such a boor as to make her pay for her own lunch. As they went back out to his illegally parked Volkswagen, she thought she knew what was in his mind: as long as he stayed close to her, he might get a line on her brother.
You won’t,
she thought fiercely, but at the same time she wondered how she would ever be able to keep from looking for Pierre now that she knew he dwelt in Marseille, too.

These days, the Communist Party hierarchy did not usually meet inside Peking, but out in the country. That lowered the risk of the little scaly devils wiping out the whole central committee at one stroke. The first time a meeting in a small town northwest of the city was called, Liu Han had eagerly looked forward to it, thinking it would take her back to the days of her youth and let Liu Mei see how she had lived then.

She’d ended up disappointed. Peasants hereabouts knew nothing of rice paddies like the ones she had tended near Hankow. They raised wheat and barley and millet, and ate noodles and porridge, not bowl after endless bowl of rice. The land was dry, not damp: a desert in summer, with yellow dust always in the breeze, and a frozen wasteland during the long winter.

Only one thing was the same among these peasants as among those with whom she’d grown up: their toil never ended.

Ducks and chickens and dogs and children made a racket in the narrow, dusty streets of Fengchen as Liu Han and Liu Mei came into the town in the foothills to talk with their comrades. “Eee, my feet are weary,” Liu Han said. “I feel I have walked ten thousand
li
.” She knew that would have taken her almost all the way across China, but wasn’t the least bit embarrassed to exaggerate.

“And mine, Mother,” Liu Mei said dutifully. She looked around. “I see no scaly devils here in Fengchen.”

“No, and I do not think you will,” Liu Han said. “There are not enough little devils for them to garrison every town. They have the same trouble the Japanese had before them, and they rule the same way: they hold down the cities and they control the roads from one city to the next. All they do—all they can do—in the countryside is raid and steal.”

“Now that they have ships landing, though, there will be more of them.” Liu Mei spoke seriously, as she usually did. When she spoke of the little scaly devils, she spoke even more seriously than usual. She rarely smiled, but her frown was fierce and stormy.

A middle-aged man came out of one of the buildings on the main street: a tavern, by the pair of drunks who snored in front of it. The man was not drunk. Though dressed in a peasant’s dark blue tunic and trousers, he carried himself with a soldier’s erectness. “Welcome,” he called. “Welcome to you both.”

“Thank you, Nieh Ho-T’ing,” Liu Han said. Liu Mei nodded a greeting.

“It is good to have you here,” Nieh said. “Mao has been asking after you. There are a couple of points on which he will be glad to have your views.” He hesitated, then went on, “And I am glad to see you, too.”

“I am always glad to see you,” Liu Han said, more or less truthfully. They had been lovers for several years, fighting the little scaly devils side by side till Mao sent Nieh Ho-T’ing to the south to command resistance against the imperialism of the scaly devils there and Liu Han stayed behind to help radicalize the proletarian women of Peking. They’d both found other partners since.

Nieh smiled at Liu Mei. “How lovely your daughter has become,” he said.

Liu Mei cast down her eyes in fitting modesty. Liu Han studied her. Her nose was too big, her face too long and narrow, her hair too wavy for her to conform to perfect Chinese standards of beauty: all tokens of her father. But Nieh was right—in her own way, she was lovely.

“So Mao is here?” Liu Han said, and Nieh Ho-T’ing nodded. “Who else?”

“Lin Piao and Chu Te from the People’s Liberation Army,” Nieh answered. “Chou Enlai has not been able to get out of the south; the little devils are being very difficult down there.” He paused, grimaced, and added, “And Hsia Shou-Tao is here with me.”

“Wherever you go, you have to bring your lapdog?” Liu Han asked, acid in her voice. Hsia Shou-Tao was a tireless and able revolutionary. He was also a tireless drinker and womanizer. He’d once tried to rape Liu Han; she still sometimes wished she’d cut his throat when she had the chance.