Down to Earth

Monique gulped. “Do I have to?” she asked. She knew perfectly well why the poor fellow out there on the street was dead: because of her, and because the drug-dealing Lizard who’d shot him didn’t know what the devil he was doing. Seeing the result of her failed revenge was the last thing she wanted.

But Dieter Kuhn, as she knew all too well, didn’t care what she wanted. “Come on,” he repeated, and grabbed her by the arm. He wasn’t the typical hulking German; by his looks and compact, wiry build, he might more readily have been French. But he was much stronger than Monique. When he dragged her along with him, she had no choice but to come.

A little crowd of the curious and the ghoulish had gathered around the corpse on the sidewalk just in front of Monique’s block of flats. Blood, black in the moonlight, streamed down into the gutter. A man had a startling amount of blood in him. Monique could smell it, and the latrine stench that had come when the dead man’s bowels let go.

Sirens yowled in the distance, rapidly coming closer. Kuhn took a little flashlight off his belt and shone it in the dead man’s face. “Do you know him?” he asked.

“Yes,” Monique answered, trying not to look at the wound that had torn away one side of his jaw. “That’s Ferdinand Bo

Kuhn wrote the name in a little notebook he fished from a trouser pocket. “Bo

“He sold fish in a little shop on the Rue de Refuge, not far from the harbor,” Monique answered as a couple of SS vehicles squealed to a stop and uniformed Germans spilled out of them. Everyone but Monique suddenly found urgent business elsewhere.

“Dealt with fishermen, did he? Maybe he was a smuggler, too,” Kuhn said, and started talking to his Nazi colleagues. He might have forgotten about Monique. But when she started to go back inside the apartment building, Kuhn shook his head. “No-you will come with us to the Palais de Justice and answer more questions.” She must have looked as horrified as she felt, for he added, “It will not be as bad as it was last time. You have my word of honor.”

And it wasn’t-quite.

Once he started getting used to it, Rance Auerbach discovered Cape Town’s District Six wasn’t such a bad place after all. Yes, he had to treat Negroes as if they were as good as anybody else. He even had to take orders from them every now and then. That wasn’t easy for a Texan. But after he leaped the hurdle, he started having a pretty fair time.

Everybody in District Six, black and white and colored (a distinction between full-blooded blacks and half-breeds the USA didn’t bother drawing) and Indian, was hustling as hard as he or she could. Some people had honest work, some work that wasn’t so honest. A lot of people had both kinds of jobs, and ran like maniacs from long before the sun rose over Table Mountain till long after it set in the South Atlantic.

Rance couldn’t have run like a maniac even if he’d wanted to. Getting up and down the stairs to the flat he and Pe

He didn’t care what they called him. Kids back in the States had thought he walked fu

Boomslang, he found, meant tree snake, and one particular, and particularly poisonous, kind of tree snake at that. Considering some of the rotgut the place served up, he could understand how it got its name. But it was close, it was cheap, and the crowd, despite being of all colors, was as lively and interesting as any he’d ever found in a bar.

To his surprise, he found he was interesting to the Boomslang’s other patrons. His American accent made him exotic to both whites and blacks. So did his ruined voice. When people discovered he’d been wounded fighting the Lizards, he won respect for courage if not for sense.

But when they found out how he’d wound up in South Africa, he won… interest. One evening, somewhat elevated from a few hours at the saloon, he came home and told Pe

His girlfriend threw back her head and laughed. “You just figured that out, Rance? Hell, sweetheart, if I’d’ve wanted to, I could’ve gotten back into business long since. But I’ve been taking it easy, you know what I mean?”

“You?” Auerbach felt the whiskey singing in him. It didn’t make him stupid, but it did make him care less about what he said. “Since when did you ever believe in taking it easy?”

Pe

Auerbach stared. Of all the things he’d expected, Pe

“Like it? Hell no,” Pe

“I’ll be damned,” he said wonderingly. “They really did put the fear of God in you, didn’t they?”

She walked up to him and set her hands on his shoulders. It wasn’t the prelude to a kiss, as he’d hoped at first it might be. “Listen to me,” she said, as serious as he’d ever heard her. “Listen to me good. We caused those scaly bastards a lot of trouble, I mean a lot of trouble. If you don’t think they’re keeping an eye on us to make sure we’re good little boys and girls, you’re smack out of your mind. Want to bet against me? How much have you got?”

Auerbach thought about it. He thought slower than he should have, but still thought pretty straight. When he was done, he shook his head, even though it made his ruined shoulder ache. “Nope. That’d be like raising with a pair of fives against a guy who’s got four diamonds showing.”

Now Pe

“Only about you,” he answered, which made her laugh, though he hadn’t been more than half joking. He sighed and went on, “But if you listen to them, half the guys in the Boomslang have sold the Lizards a taste one time or another.”

Pe

“If you get in trouble, you want to get in a whole lot of trouble-that’s what you’re telling me.” Now Rance nodded; that did sound like the Pe

She knew it, too. “I stiffed my pals for plenty before I came ru