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Pe
Things moved very quickly after that. Hesskett put Rance and Pe
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,” Pe
“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.”
Pe
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 Pe
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 Pe
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 Pe
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. Pe
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?”
“Hotel Beauveau, s’il vous plait,” 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 pla
Pierre spent much of his time cursing the Nazis in general and Sturmba
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.
Between Pierre and Sturmba
“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 di
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, “Allo? ”
“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.