Second Contact (70 page)

Every so often, something inside her would snap. Once, she barked, “Damn you, why can’t you leave me alone?”

“Because, my dear, you know such . . . interesting people,” he answered. His grin might have been attractive, had she been able to stand him. “You know smugglers, you know Jews, you know me.”

“My inscriptions are more interesting than you are,” Monique snapped, “and they’re dead.”

Too late to recall the words, she remembered that, at a nod from
Sturmbannführer
Kuhn, she could become as dead as any inscription praising Isis. He didn’t order her arrested and tormented. But he could have. She knew he could have. These days, a lot of fear of the Nazis was based on what they had done and might do, not on what they usually did. That fear sufficed.

“You are still a key to your brother’s good behavior,” Dieter Kuhn said imperturbably. Then something in his face changed. “And you are also an intelligent, good-looking woman. If you think I do not find you attractive, you are mistaken.”

Monique looked around the empty lecture hall as if seeking a place to hide. She found none, of course. She hadn’t been sure whether Kuhn was interested in her that way or not; she’d wondered if he preferred his own sex. Now that she knew the answer, she wished she didn’t.

“It is not mutual,” she said sharply. “And you could keep a perfectly good eye on me without my ever knowing you were doing it. I wish you would keep an eye on me without my knowing it. Then I wouldn’t have to worry about you all the time.”

She hoped she hurt him. She wanted to hurt him. But if she did, he gave no sign. “I do not suggest how you should conduct your research,” he said. “In your area, you are the expert. Leave mine to me.”

She said something venomous in the Marseille dialect. It rocketed over Kuhn’s head: the French he spoke was purely Parisian. Having vented her spleen, she asked, “May I please go now?”

He looked innocent—not easy for an SS man. “But of course,” he said. “I am not holding you here by force. We are only having a conversation here, you and I.”

He wasn’t holding her, but he could. He could do anything he wanted. Yes, the knowledge of his unlimited power was what made him fearsome. Monique said something else she hoped he would not understand before stalking past him. He didn’t interfere. He didn’t follow her as she rode home. But, again, he could have.

A crane with a wrecking ball was demolishing the synagogue on Rue Breteuil. Monique wondered what sort of Teutonic thoroughness that implied. Had the Germans decided to knock the place down because it was on their list of Jewish monuments or to keep any other would-be independent ginger smugglers from meeting behind it? Only they would know, and they would assume it was no one else’s business.

Monique carried her bicycle upstairs and sautéed some mullet in white wine—the Romans would surely have approved—for supper. She kept eyeing the telephone as she did the dishes afterwards, and then as she got to work on her inscriptions. It stayed quiet. She gave it a suspicious look. Why wasn’t Dieter Kuhn calling her to complain about this, that, or the other thing? Or why wasn’t her brother on the line to complain about whatever made Kuhn happy?

The telephone did not ring for four days, which, lately, came close to being a record. When at last it did, it was neither Kuhn nor Monique’s brother, but Lucie, Pierre’s friend with the boudoir voice. The rest of her, Monique knew, was dumpy, and she was acquiring a mustache, but on the phone she might have been Aphrodite.

“He’s back,” she said happily. “He’s made it all up with them.”

“Back where?” Monique asked. By the way Lucie sounded, she meant back in her arms, but she always sounded that way. And it didn’t fit the rest of what she’d said. “Made it up with whom? The Germans?”

“No, no, no,” Lucie said, and Monique could almost see her wagging a forefinger. “With the Lizards, of course.”

“He has?” Monique exclaimed. The Nazis were sure to be listening. She wondered what they’d make of that. She wondered what to make of it herself. “I thought they wanted something bad to happen to him.”

“Oh, they did,” Lucie said airily, “but not any more. Now they’re glad he’s free. Some of them are glad because he’ll deal in ginger again, others because they can use him to smuggle drugs for people into the
Reich
. Many important Lizards want him to do just that.”

Lucie was no fool. She had to know the Germans were listening to Monique’s telephone. That meant she wanted them to hear what she was saying. If she wasn’t thumbing her nose at the Nazis, Monique didn’t know what she was doing.

Monique also didn’t know how she felt about the news Lucie gave her. She had taken Pierre’s ginger-smuggling more or less in stride. She didn’t mind his selling drugs to the Lizards, no matter what those drugs ended up doing to them. In principle, then, she didn’t suppose she ought to mind if the shoe went on the other foot. Principle, she discovered, went only so far.

“What will the Germans do when they find out Pierre is working for the Lizards again?” she asked, and then answered her own question: “They will kill him, that’s what.”

“They can try,” Lucie said airily—yes, she had to be expecting, and hoping, the
Gestapo
was tapping the telephone line. “They have been trying for a long time. They haven’t done it yet. I don’t think they can, not with the Lizards helping us. Your brother will call you soon.” With a last breathy chuckle, Lucie hung up.

My brother,
Monique thought.
The brother I thought was dead. The brother who smuggles drugs.
If Pierre didn’t care about the difference between selling drugs to Lizards and selling them to human beings . . . what did that prove? That he was generous enough to treat everyone alike? Or that he simply didn’t care where he made his money, so long as he made it? After growing reacquainted with him, Monique feared she knew the answer.

She returned to her inscriptions with a heavy heart. Aside from everything else, this had to mean the Nazis would stay on her brother’s tail. And it had to mean Dieter Kuhn would stay on her tail. Not for the first time, she wished her tail were the main thing he was after. Even if he’d ended up in bed with her, she wouldn’t have felt so oppressed as she did now.

When the telephone rang again a few minutes later, she ignored it. She had the feeling she knew who it would be, and she didn’t want to talk to him. But he, or whoever was on the other end, wanted to talk to her. The telephone rang and rang and rang. At last, its endless clanging wore her down. Cursing under her breath, she picked it up.
“Allô?”

“Good evening, Monique.” Sure enough, it was Kuhn. “I suppose you know why I’m calling you.”

“No, I haven’t the faintest idea,” she answered.

The SS officer ignored her. “You may tell your brother that the
Reich
showed him mercy once by not turning him over to the Lizards when they demanded that we do so. Instead, we released him from prison—”

“So he could do exactly what you told him,” Monique broke in.

Kuhn went on ignoring her, except that he had to repeat, “We released him from prison. And how does he repay us? By going back to his old ways, as a dog returns to its vomit.” Monique hadn’t expected him to allude to Scripture. If he knew any verse, though, she supposed that would be the one. He went on, “You are to tell him that, when we take him again, we will give him justice, not mercy.”

“I don’t think he would expect mercy from you,” Monique said. “I don’t suppose he expected it from you the first time.” That was a dangerous comment, but she knew Kuhn was short on irony.

“And if the Lizards call you,” he went on, “you can tell them what we have told them before: if they want to have a war of drugs, we will fight it. We can hurt them worse than they can hurt us.”

“No Lizard has ever called me,” Monique exclaimed. “I hope to heaven no Lizard ever does call.”

“Your brother is conspiring with them against the Greater German
Reich
,” Kuhn said, sounding every centimeter the
Sturmbannführer
. “Therefore, we must also believe you may be conspiring against the
Reich
. You are on thin ice, Professor Dutourd. If you break it and fall in, you will be sorry afterwards—but that will be too late to do you much good.”

Monique had thought she’d been alarmed when the SS man said he found her attractive. This inhuman drone of warning was infinitely worse. “Why can’t you just leave me alone?” she demanded. “If you hadn’t told me Pierre was alive, I never would have known it. I—I wish I didn’t.” She wasn’t sure that was true, but she wasn’t sure it wasn’t, either.

“I have said what I have to say,” Kuhn told her. “I will see you in class tomorrow. And if I ask you out with me, you would be wise to say yes. Believe me, you would find other watchers less desirable than me—and you may take that however you like. Good night.” He hung up.

“Damn you,” Monique snarled. She wasn’t sure if she meant Kuhn or Pierre or both at once. Both at once, probably.

She returned to the inscriptions—a forlorn hope, and she knew it. Latin seemed spectacularly meaningless tonight. She almost screamed when the telephone rang again. “Hello, little sister,” Pierre Dutourd said in her ear. “By God, it feels good to be on my own again.”

“I’m glad you think so,” Monique said, sounding anything but glad. “I’m on my own, too, but not the way you mean.”

As Dieter Kuhn had, her brother ignored her. “I had to play both ends against the middle,” he boasted, “but I pulled it off.”

“How lucky for you.” This time, Monique got the last word and hung up. But it did her little good. Thanks to Pierre, she was stuck between the Nazis and the Lizards, too, and the only thing to which she could look forward was getting crushed when they collided.

Vyacheslav Molotov wished for eyes in the back of his head. They might not have done him any good; plotters were generally too subtle to show up under even the most vigilant inspection. But that didn’t mean the plotters weren’t there. On the contrary. He’d found that out, and counted himself lucky to have survived the lesson.

Stalin, now, Stalin had seen plotters everywhere, whether they were really there or not. He’d killed a lot of people on the off chance they were plotters, or in the hope that their deaths would frighten others out of plotting. At the time, Molotov had thought him not just wasteful but more than a little crazy.

Now he wasn’t so sure. Stalin had died in bed, without anyone having seriously tried to overthrow him. That was no mean achievement. Molotov admired it much more now that he’d weathered an attempted coup.

His secretary poked his head into the office. “Comrade General Secretary, Comrade Nussboym is here to see you.”

“Yes, I was expecting him,” Molotov said. “Send him in.”

In came David Nussboym: Jewish, skinny, nondescript—except for the golden star of the Order of Lenin pinned to his breast pocket. He nodded to Molotov. “Good morning, Comrade General Secretary.”

“Good morning, David Aronovich,” Molotov answered. “What can I do for you today? You have asked for so little since the day of the coup, it rather makes me nervous.” From another man, that might have been a joke, or at least sounded like one. From Molotov, it sounded like what it was: a statement of curiosity tinged with suspicion.

“Comrade General Secretary, I can tell you what I want,” Nussboym said. “I want revenge.”

“Ah.” Molotov nodded; Nussboym had picked a motivation he understood. “Revenge against whom? Whoever it is, you shall have it.” He made a sour face, then had to amend his words: “Unless it is Marshal Zhukov. I am also in his debt.”
And if I try to move against him, he will move against me, and the outcome of that would be . . . unfortunate.

“I have nothing against the marshal,” Nussboym said. “He could have quietly disposed of me after we came out of NKVD headquarters, but he didn’t.”

He could have quietly disposed of me, too,
Molotov thought.
Maybe it is that he is like a German general—too well trained to meddle in politics.
In the USSR, that made Zhukov a rarity. “All right, then,” Molotov said. “I asked you once; now I ask you again: revenge against whom?”

He thought he knew what Nussboym would say, and the Polish Jew proved him right: “Against the people who sent me to the Soviet Union against my will twenty years ago.”

“I cannot order the Jews of Warsaw punished, you know, as I could with citizens of the Soviet Union,” Molotov reminded him.

“I understand that, Comrade General Secretary,” Nussboym said. “I have in mind the Jews of Lodz, not Warsaw.”

“That will make it harder still: Lodz is closer to the borders of the
Reich
than it is to us,” Molotov said. “Had you said Minsk, life would be simple. Infiltrating Minsk is child’s play.”

“I know. I have done it,” David Nussboym replied. “But I come from the western part of Poland, and that is where my enemies live.”

“As you wish. I keep my promises,” Molotov said, conveniently forgetting how many he had broken. “I give you a free hand against your enemies there in Lodz. Whatever resources you require, you have my authorization to utilize. The only thing you may not do is embarrass the Soviet Union’s relations with the Lizards. If you do that, I will throw you to the wolves. Is it agreeable? Do we have a bargain?”

“It is agreeable, and we do have a bargain,” Nussboym said. “Thank you, Comrade General Secretary.” Despite having saved Molotov’s life, he did not presume to address him by first name and patronymic. The USSR was officially a classless society, but that did not change who was on top and who below.

“Good enough, then, David Aronovich,” Molotov said. “So long as you do not embroil us with the Race, do what you will.” He realized he sounded rather like God sending Satan out to afflict Job. The conceit amused him—not enough for him to let it show on the outside, true, but he found very few things that amusing.

Nussboym also knew better than to linger. Having got what he wanted from Molotov, he rose, nodded, and took his leave. After he was gone—but only after he was gone—Molotov nodded approval.