Second Contact (57 page)

His father laughed, which irked him till Moishe remarked, “If you know where to look and which questions to ask, you can find out almost anything almost anywhere—you don’t need computers to do it.”

Reuven’s twin sisters came out of the kitchen to announce supper would be ready in a few minutes. Fixing Judith and Esther with a mild and speculative eye, he remarked, “You’re right, Father. They already know everything already.”

“What is he talking about now?” Esther asked, at the same time as Judith was saying, “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

“If you’d listened carefully, he was paying you a compliment,” their father said.

They both sniffed. One of them said, “I’d sooner get a compliment where I don’t have to listen carefully.”

“I’ll give you one,” Reuven said. “You’re the most—” His father coughed before he could say anything more. That probably kept him out of trouble. Even so, he didn’t appreciate it. His sisters rarely gave him such a golden opportunity, and here he couldn’t even take advantage of it.

A moment later, his mother quelled the budding argument for the time being, calling, “Supper!” The ploy might not have been so subtle as Solomon’s, but it did the job. Next to boiled-beef-and-barley soup with carrots and onions and celery, squabbling with his sisters suddenly seemed less important.

His father approved, too, saying, “This is fine, Rivka. It takes me back to the days before the fighting all started, when we were living in Warsaw and things . . . weren’t so bad.”

“Why would you want to remember Warsaw?” Reuven asked with a shudder. His own memories of the place, such as they were, began only after the Nazis had taken it. They were filled with cold and fear and hunger, endless gnawing hunger. He couldn’t imagine how a pleasant bowl of soup took anyone back there in memory.

But his mother’s smile also looked into the past. She said, “Don’t forget, your father and I fell in love in Warsaw.”

“And if we hadn’t,” Moishe Russie added, “you wouldn’t be here now.” He glanced over to the twins. “And neither would you.”

“Oh, yes, we would,” Esther said. Judith added, “Somehow or other, we would have found a way.” Reuven was about to blast the twins for logical inconsistency when he saw they were both holding in giggles. He went back to his soup, which evidently disappointed them.

“What did Cousin David say?” Rivka Russie asked. “I heard you talking about his letter out in the front room, but I couldn’t make out everything you were saying.” Moishe explained. Rivka frowned. “That’s very bad,” she said, shaking her head. “That such trouble should happen in England . . . Who would have dreamt such trouble could happen in England?”

Moishe Russie sighed. “When you and I were small, dear, who would have dreamt such trouble could happen in Germany? In Poland, yes. We always knew that. In Russia, yes. We always knew that, too. But Germany? David’s wife is from Germany. She and her family were lucky—they got out in time. But when she was small, Germany was a good place to be a Jew.”

“America, now,” Reuven said. “America, and here, and maybe South Africa and Argentina. But if you want to live under human beings and not the Race, America is about the only place left where you can breathe free.”

“Mosley’s bill failed, thank heaven,” his father said. “It’s not against the law to be a Jew in England, the way it is in the
Reich
. It’s only that you’d better not, or people will make you wish you weren’t.”

“Poland was like that,” Reuven’s mother said. “I don’t think England is as bad as Poland was, but it could be one of these days.”

Reuven watched his sisters stir. He waited for one of them to ask why gentiles persecuted Jews. He’d asked that himself, till finally deciding it wasn’t worth asking. That it was so mattered. Why it was so . . . Ask a thousand different anti-Semites and you’d get a thousand different answers. Which of them was true? Were any of them true?
Why
questions too often lost you in a maze of mirrors, each reflecting back on another till you weren’t sure where you stood, or if you stood anywhere.

And, sure enough, one of the twins did ask a
why
question, though not the one Reuven expected: “Why does it matter if anyone—especially anyone Jewish—lives under people or under the Race? It doesn’t look like Jews will ever live under other Jews, and the Lizards do a better job of keeping people from bothering us than just about any human beings do—you said so yourself.”

“That is an important question,” Moishe Russie said gravely. Reuven found himself nodding. It was a more important question than he’d thought his sisters had in them. His father went on, “Who the rulers are matters because they set the tone for the people who live under them. The Nazis didn’t
make
the Germans anti-Semites, but they
let
them be anti-Semites and
helped
them be anti-Semites. Do you see what I mean?”

Both twins nodded. Judith, who hadn’t asked the question, said, “The Lizards would never do anything like that.”

“
Never
is a long time,” Reuven said before his father could speak. “Jews are useful to them right now. One of the reasons we’re useful to them is that so many people treat us so badly—we haven’t got many other places to turn. But that could change, or the Lizards could decide they need to make the Arabs happy instead of us. If either one of those things happens, where are we? In trouble, that’s where.”

He waited for Esther and Judith to argue with him, not so much because of what he’d said as because he’d been the one who said it. But they both nodded solemnly. Either he’d made more sense than usual, or they were starting to grow up.

His father quoted the Psalm: “Put not your trust in princes.”

“Or even fleetlords,” Reuven added.

“If we don’t trust princes, if we don’t trust fleetlords, whom do we trust?” Esther asked.

“God,” Moishe Russie said. “That’s what the Psalm is talking about.”

“Nobody,” Reuven said. He’d been raised in the Holy Land, in the cradle of Judaism, but was far less observant than either of his parents. Maybe it was because he’d been persecuted less. Maybe it was because he had a better secular education, though his father had had a good one by the standards of his time. Maybe he just had a hard time believing in anything he couldn’t see.

“Reuven,” his mother said reprovingly.

And maybe he had reasons for doubt his parents hadn’t had when they were young. “What’s the use of believing in a God Who lets His chosen people go through what the
Reich
has put them through?”

“I’m sure men thought the same in the time of Philistines, and in the time of the Greeks, and in the time of the Romans, and in the Middle Ages, and in the time of the pogroms, too,” his father said. “Jews have gone on anyhow.”

“They didn’t have any other answers in the old days,” Reuven said defiantly. “We have science and technology now. God was a guess that did well enough when there wasn’t any competition. Today, there is.”

He waited for his parents to pitch a fit. His mother looked as if she were on the point of it. His father raised an eyebrow. “The Nazis have science and technology, too,” Dr. Moishe Russie observed. “Science and technology tell them how to build the extermination camps they like so well. But what tells them they shouldn’t like those camps and shouldn’t want to build them?”

Reuven said, “Wait a minute. You’re confusing things.”

“Am I?” his father asked. “I don’t think so. Science and technology talk about
what
and
how
. We know more about
what
and
how
than they did in the days of the Bible. I have to admit that—I could hardly deny it. But science and technology don’t say anything about
why
.”

“You can’t really answer questions about
why
,” Reuven protested: the same thought he’d had not long before. “There’s no evidence.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Moishe Russie said. “In a strictly scientific sense, I suppose you are. But if someone asks a question like ‘Why not slaughter all the Jews we can reach?’—what kind of answer do science and technology have to give him?”

“That Jews don’t deserve to be slaughtered because we aren’t really any different from anybody else,” Reuven said.

It wasn’t the strongest reply, and he knew it. In case he hadn’t known it, his father drove the point home: “We’re different enough to tell apart, and that’s all the Germans care about. And we aren’t the only ones. They know they can do it, and they don’t know why they shouldn’t. How and why should they know that?”

Reuven glared at him. “You’re waiting for me to say God should tell them. You were talking about the Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages, God told the
goyim
to go out and slaughter all the Jews they could catch. That’s what they thought, anyhow. How do you go about proving they were wrong?”

His father grimaced. “We’re not going to get anywhere. I should have known we wouldn’t get anywhere. If you won’t believe, there’s nothing I can do to make you believe. I’m not a
goy
, to convert you by force.”

“And a good thing, too,” Reuven said.

His twin sisters looked at each other. He didn’t believe in telepathy. The Lizards thought the idea was laughable. But if they weren’t passing a message back and forth without using words, he didn’t know what they were doing. They both spoke at the same time: “Maybe you should convert Jane instead, Father.”

Moishe Russie raised an eyebrow. “How about that, Reuven?” he asked.

Glaring at Esther and Judith failed to help. They laughed at Reuven, their eyes wide and shining. He couldn’t strangle them, not with his parents watching. In a choked voice, he said, “I don’t think that would be a good idea.” It wasn’t quite true, but he wouldn’t admit as much. He went on, “Maybe I’ll bother you two when you have boyfriends.” It didn’t do a bit of good. The twins just laughed.

 15

Living in Texas since the fighting stopped, Rance Auerbach had heard a lot of horror stories about Mexican jails. The one in which the Lizards kept him didn’t live up to any of them, much to his surprise. It was, in fact, not a great deal less comfortable than his apartment, if a lot more cramped. The Lizards even let him have cigarettes.

Every so often, they’d take him out and question him. He sang like a canary. Why not? The only person he could implicate was Penny, and he couldn’t get her in any deeper than she was already, not when they’d caught her with lime-cured ginger in her fists.

One day—he’d lost track of time, lost track and stopped worrying about it—a pair of Lizard guards with automatic rifles opened the door to his cell and spoke in the language of the Race: “You will come with us at once.”

“It shall be done,” Auerbach said, and slowly rose from his cot. The Lizards backed away so he couldn’t grab their weapons. That was standard procedure, but he still found it pretty funny. However much he might have wanted to, he couldn’t have leapt at them to save his life.

They took him to the interrogation chamber, as he’d expected. Like the rest of the jail, it was well-lighted and clean. Unlike the rest, it boasted a chair built for human beings. Unlike people, the Lizards didn’t seem to go in for the third degree. That did nothing but relieve Rance; had they felt like working him over, what could he have done about it?

Today, he noticed, the interrogation chamber held two human-made chairs. That gave him hope of seeing Penny, which the Lizards hadn’t let him do since capturing the two of them. She wasn’t there now, though. Only the guards and his chief interrogator, a male named Hesskett, were. With Rance’s bad leg and shoulder, assuming the posture of respect was painful for him. He did it anyway, then nodded to Hesskett human-style and said, “I greet you, superior sir.” Politeness didn’t hurt, not in the jam he was in.

“I greet you, Prisoner Auerbach.” Hesskett knew enough to keep reminding him he was in a jam. Having done so, the Lizard pointed to a chair. “You have leave to sit.”

“I thank you,” Auerbach said. Once, he’d sat without leave. The next time, he hadn’t had a chair. Standing through a grilling came closer to torture than his captors perhaps realized. He’d minded his manners ever since.

As he sank into the chair now, two more guards escorted Penny into the chamber. She looked tired—and, without any makeup, older than she had—but damn good. He grinned at her. She blew him a kiss before going through the greeting ritual with Hesskett.

Once she was in the other chair—too far away to let Auerbach touch her, dammit—Hesskett started speaking pretty fluent English: “You are both found guilty of trafficking in ginger with the Race.”

“You can’t do that! We haven’t had a trial,” Auerbach exclaimed.

“You were caught with much of the herb in your possession,” the Lizard said. “We can find you guilty without a trial. We have. You are.”

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?”

“Hôtel Beauveau, s’il vous plaît,”
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
Sturmbannführer
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.