Harry Turtledove - Aftershocks

Lucie laughed. Monique didn’t know what, if anything, that did to Keffesh; it certainly would have got any human male’s complete and undivided attention. Lucie said, “That is very simple. There is little profit in food. There is great profit in ginger. Of course ginger will move where food would not.”

“Ah,” Keffesh said. “Yes, that is sensible. Very well, then.”

Monique shook her head and set down the sack of vegetables. She had no doubt Lucie was right. What did that say about the way things worked in the world? That the coming of the Lizards hadn’t changed things much? Of all the conclusions she contemplated, that was odds-on the most depressing.

Rance Auerbach contemplated another perfect Tahitian day. It was warm, a little humid, with clouds rolling across the blue sky. He could look out the window of the apartment he shared with Penny Summers and see the even bluer South Pacific. He turned away from the lovely spectacle and lit a cigarette. Smoking made him cough, which hurt. He’d lost most of a lung and taken other damage from a Lizard bullet during the fighting. Doctors told him he was cutting years off his life by not quitting. Too goddamn bad, he thought, and took another drag.

He limped into the kitchen and got himself a beer. “Let me have one of those, too, will you?” Penny called from the bedroom when she heard him open it.

“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?” Penny grimaced. “I wouldn’t be half surprised. And they’re liable to kill the goose that laid the golden egg if they do.”

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,” Penny answered at once. Her Kansas accent was as harsh as his was soft. “I’m thinkin’ about it. How about you?”

“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,” Penny said. “So what I was figuring was maybe going back to France. It’s a lot bigger than Tahiti, you know? They won’t have half the cops and things they need to keep an eye on everybody, on account of the Nazis have been doing so much of that for so long.”

“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?” Penny asked.

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,” Penny said placidly. “So what?”

“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?”

Penny grinned at him. “Bingo. See? You’re not so dumb after all.”

“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,” Penny answered. “But so what again? Some of the ginger dealers’ll still be around. And if the place got shaken up good, that gives us a better chance to set up shop there.”

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,” Penny exclaimed. “You think I want to sell all the ginger we’ve got to a bunch of cooks in a restaurant?”

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 Penny saw what he was driving at.

“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.”

Penny looked glum. “Can’t do it, goddammit.”

“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 Penny up in South Africa-where they’d gone into the ginger business again, and barely managed to escape a three-cornered firefight with enough gold to come to Tahiti.

But Penny still looked discontented. “We can’t stay here forever, either, even if the real French don’t clamp down on the Free French. We aren’t doing enough business; we’re too small. And everything is expensive as hell.”

“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,” Penny said.

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 Penny’s hide.