Aftershocks

He limped into the kitchen and got himself a beer. “Let me have one of those, too, will you?” Pe

“Okay.” His voice was a ruined rasp. He popped the top off another beer. Walking back to give it to her hurt, too. Another bullet from the same burst of fire had left him with a shattered leg. “Here you go, babe.”

“Thanks,” she told him. She was also smoking a cigarette, in quick, nervous puffs. She grabbed the beer and raised it high. “Here’s to crime.”

He drank-he would have drunk to anything-but he laughed, too. “Didn’t know there was any such thing in Free France.”

“Ha,” she said, and brushed a lock of dyed blond hair back off her cheek. She was in her early forties, a few years younger than Rance, and could pass for younger still because of the energy she showed. “Now, the next interesting question is, how much longer will there be a Free France now that there’s a real France again?”

“You expect the froggies to sail out here with gunboats and take over?” After a long sentence, Rance had to pause and suck in air. “I don’t think that’s awful goddamn likely.”

“Gunboats? No, neither do I. But airplanes full of clerks and cops?” Pe

As far as power went, Free France was a joke. It couldn’t hold out for twenty minutes if the Empire of Japan or the USA or the Race decided to invade it. But none of them had, because a place under nobody’s thumb, where people and Lizards could make deals without anybody looking over their shoulders, was too useful to all concerned. How would that look, though, to a pack of functionaries back in Paris?

Not good. “We came here to get out from under,” Rance said in his Texas drawl. “What do we do if that doesn’t work?”

“Go somewheres else,” Pe

“Yeah.” He was surprised at how readily he admitted it. Tahiti, with no laws to speak of, with shameless native girls who didn’t bother covering their tits half the time, had been awfully attractive-till he got here. One thing nobody mentioned about the native girls was how often they had hulking, bad-tempered native boyfriends. And, with no law to speak of, he often felt like a sardine in a tank full of sharks. “Where have you got in mind?”

“Well, like you said, if the froggies get their hands on this place, they’ll squeeze it till its eyes pop,” Pe

“If I had a hat, I’d take it off to you,” Rance said. “That’s one of the sneakiest things I ever heard in all my born days. Of course, there’s a good deal to France, if you know what I mean. You have any place in particular in mind, or just sort of all over the country?”

“How’s Marseille sound to you?” Pe

Auerbach made motions of tipping the hat he wasn’t wearing and sticking it back on his head. “Are you out of your ever-loving mind?” he demanded. “Do you remember what happened to us the last time we were in Marseille? The Germans almost gave us a blindfold and a cigarette and lined us up against the wall and shot us.”

“That’s right,” Pe

“So what?” Rance would have screamed, but he didn’t have the lungs for it. Perhaps because he couldn’t make a lot of noise, he had to think before saying anything else. After thinking, he felt foolish. “Oh,” he said. “No more Nazis, right?”

Pe

“Maybe not. But maybe I am. And maybe you are, too,” Rance said. “Didn’t Marseille have an explosive-metal bomb land on its head?”

“Yeah, I think it did,” Pe

Rance thought about it. At first, it sounded pretty crazy. Then he liked the idea. After that, though, he hesitated again. “Going to be plenty of Lizards in Marseille, or in whatever’s left of it,” he remarked.

“I hope so,” Pe

But Rance was shaking his head. “That’s not what I meant. You wait and see-there’ll be lots of Lizards all over France, pretending they’re not telling the Frenchmen what to do. If they weren’t there, how long would it be before the Nazis were telling the Frenchmen what to do again?”

“Oh.” Now Pe

“That’s right,” Auerbach said. “If there are official-type Lizards all over France-and you can bet your bottom dollar there will be-they aren’t going to be real happy with us. Go ahead-tell me I’m wrong.”

Pe

“Good.” Rance knew he had relief in his voice. The Lizards had arrested both of them in Mexico for selling ginger, and tried to use them in Marseille to trap a smuggler (Rance still thought of him as Pierre the Turd, though he knew that couldn’t possibly have been the guy’s right name). The Germans had fouled that up, but the Race had been grateful enough to set Rance and Pe

But Pe

“Do you want to try going back to the States?” Auerbach asked. “We haven’t done anything illegal there. American law doesn’t care about ginger one way or the other.”

“If we went home, I wouldn’t be worrying about the law,” Pe

Rance could only nod about that. She’d come back into his life, years after they broke up, because she was on the run from ginger-smuggling associates she’d stiffed; they hadn’t been happy with her for keeping the fee she got from the Lizards instead of turning it over to them. And they weren’t happy with Rance, either: he’d killed a couple of their hired thugs who’d come to his apartment to take the price for that ginger out of Pe

He sighed, which made him cough, which made him wince, which made him take another swig of beer to try to put out the fire inside him. It didn’t work. It never worked. But he drank an awful lot, as he had ever since he was wounded. Enough hooch and he didn’t feel things so much.

Pe

“We can stay here quite a while, if we sit tight,” Auerbach answered. “We can go back to the States, too, and not have anybody notice us-if we sit tight.”

“I don’t want to sit tight.” Pe

“I might have known you were going to say that,” Rance remarked. “Hell, I did know you were going to say it. But it doesn’t help right now, you know?”

Pe

“If I had my druthers, I’d go back to the States,” Auerbach said slowly. “I’ve got a little pension waiting for me, and-”

Pe

His ears heated. He’d had that miserable little apartment in Fort Worth, and he’d been drinking himself to death an inch at a time there. For excitement, he’d go down to the veterans’ hall and play poker with the other fellows who’d been left wrecked but not quite dead. They’d all heard one another’s stories endless times: often enough to keep a straight face while pretending to believe the juiciest parts of the lies the other fellows told.

If he went back, he’d fall into that same rut again. He knew it. That was how he’d lived for a long time. Life with Pe

“Tahiti just won’t be the same,” he said mournfully. “No matter what happens, it won’t be the same. And our gold won’t stretch as far as we hoped it would.” Down in Cape Town, he’d almost got killed on account of that gold. But it wasn’t enough, no matter how much blood had been spilled over it.

“What does that leave, then?” Pe

He pointed an accusing finger at her. “I know what’s up. You want to go back to France, and you don’t give a good goddamn how stupid it is.”

For once, he caught Pe

“If I was younger and dumber, I’d be a lot happier. Either that or dead, one.” Rance drank the last beer in the bottle. “You want to take me to bed anyhow? Who knows how dumb I’ll be afterwards?”

Pe

Afterwards, they lay side by side, sweaty and sated. Auerbach reached out with a lazy hand and tweaked her nipple. “What the hell,” he said. “You talked me into it.”

“How about that?” Pe