Harry Turtledove: Down to Earth

Too logy with sleep to be as frightened as she should, she staggered out of bed and went to the door. “Go away,” she said, as she had to the Lizard. “You damned drunk, you’re trying to get into the wrong apartment.”

“You will open at once, in the name of the Security Service of the Greater German Reich,” a cold voice from the hall replied. After that, she wasn’t sleepy any more, and was as frightened as anyone could reasonably have expected her to be.

Numbly, she opened the door. One of the Germans standing in the hall aimed a pistol at her. Another one shone a bright flashlight in her face. Two more stepped forward and grabbed her by the arms. They hustled her down the stairs and into their waiting van. She hoped they’d closed the door after her, but didn’t get the chance to look back and see. If they hadn’t, her apartment would be picked clean by the time she got back.

Of course, that assumed she would be coming back. The glares the Nazis gave her made such an assumption look worse by the minute.

The Palais de Justice lay on the Rue Breteuil; she cycled past it every day. What the German occupiers meant by justice was liable to be different from what the builders of the Palais had in mind.

Her captors frogmarched her into the building, then shoved her at a trio of hard-faced blond women in field-gray. “Search her,” one of the men said in German, and the women did, with a thoroughness none of her doctors, not even her gynecologist, had ever come close to matching. They enjoyed probing her at least as much as men would have, and didn’t bother hiding it. She was smarting in more than one sensitive spot when they flung her into a cell.

Humiliated, terrified, she lay down on the hard, lumpy cot and dozed off. She was in the middle of a nightmare when another brilliant light pried her eyelids open. A couple of German troopers hauled her off the cot with effortless strength. “Time for questions now,” an SS man said cheerfully.

They sat her down and started grilling her. The questions were what she might have expected: about her brother, about his dealings with the Lizards, about the Lizard who’d tried to use her to reach him. Her chief interrogator grinned at her. “Your precious Pierre won’t be very happy when he hears we’ve nabbed you, will he?”

“I don’t know. He might not even care,” she answered. If the Germans were using her as a lever against her brother, they were liable to be disappointed. She hadn’t even known he was alive till Dieter Kuhn told her, and the milk of human kindness ran thin in his veins.

But her answer wasn’t what the German wanted to hear. “Lying bitch!” he snarled, and backhanded her across the face. Things rapidly went downhill from there.

She told the Germans everything they asked, everything she knew. It wasn’t enough to satisfy them. Nothing, she thought, would have been enough to satisfy them. At one point, she moaned, “At least let me telephone the university and let them know I won’t be in today.” Whatever happened to her, she-and her administrators-reckoned classes sacred.

Her interrogator didn’t. He slapped her again, and painfully squeezed her breast through the thin cotton of her nightgown. “I hope they fire you, whore,” he said with a laugh. “Then you can turn tricks for a living, the way you did with that kike of a Goldfarb. Who put him on to you, anyhow?”

“I don’t know,” she answered. “He never told me.” That got her another slap.

After some endless time-long enough for Monique to piss herself, for they made her go through that humiliation rather than pausing long enough for her to use a toilet-they took her back to the cell, without food, without water, without anything worth having. She didn’t care. She was past caring. She lay down and fell asleep, or perhaps passed out.

And then, of course, someone shook her awake. Blearily, blurrily, she looked up (one eye was swollen nearly shut) and saw Dieter Kuhn standing over her. “Bonsoir, Monique,” the SS man said with a pleasant smile. “Would you care to take supper with me tomorrow night?”

She knew what she wanted to tell him. She almost did. But now she also knew what could happen to anyone who made the Germans unhappy. She’d thought she knew before, but now she understood the difference between academic knowledge and personal experience. Though she hated herself, what passed her bruised, dry lips was one croaked word: “Yes.”

Group Captain Burton Paston, the commander of the RAF radar station on the outskirts of Belfast, looked from the papers on his desk to Flight Lieutenant David Goldfarb, who sat across the desk from him. “You truly wish to resign your commission in the Royal Air Force?” Paston sounded incredulous, as if Goldfarb were coming to him for permission to commit some particularly sordid crime.

“Yes, sir,” Goldfarb said firmly.

Paston scratched at his salt-and-pepper mustache. “And why, might I ask, do you seek to do such a thing?”

“It’s in the forms I filled out, sir,” David Goldfarb answered. Group Captain Paston should have read them. That he hadn’t was a bad sign. “My family and I have the opportunity to emigrate to Canada, but the Dominion won’t accept any serving officers in Her Majesty’s forces.”

“A policy of which I heartily approve, I might add.” Paston peered at Goldfarb through the top half of his bifocals. “Why would you want to emigrate, in any case?”

“Sir…” David stared at the station commander in dismay. Group Captain Paston hadn’t come along yesterday. He was no fool; Goldfarb knew as much. If he was deliberately acting obtuse, that had to mean trouble ahead. Taking a deep breath, Goldfarb laid it on the line: “Sir, you know I’m a Jew. And you have to know that things have been getting harder and harder for Jews in Britain the past few years…”

His voice trailed off again. His parents had fled to England from what was then Russian-held Poland to escape pogroms before the First World War. But now, with the United Kingdom shorn of its empire by the Lizards, with the Greater German Reich across the Channel, Britain was slowly accommodating herself to the masters of the Continent. That left little room for people like David Goldfarb and his family.

“And you want to get out while the getting is good, is that it?” Paston asked.

“Yes, sir, I’m afraid that is about it,” David answered.

“Caring nothing whatever for the service that took you out of East End London and made you into someone worthy of respect,” Group Captain Paston said.

Goldfarb’s cheeks and ears heated. “I’ll care for the RAF till my dying day. But I must say, sir, I haven’t always got whatever respect I may be worth from some RAF officers-not you, sir, I hasten to add. But there are some in this service who think one of Her Majesty’s officers has nothing better to do than help smuggle ginger, which is how I ended up in the Nazis’ gaol in Marseille.”

“If we can hurt the Lizards in no other way than with ginger for the time being, then ginger we must use,” Paston said. “I do admit, the line between official and unofficial can grow blurry in those circumstances, but-”

“Not half!” Goldfarb broke in. “Some of those blokes”-he had Group Captain Basil Roundbush, a former colleague and current oppressor, in mind-“have got themselves rich off the smuggling trade.”

“None of which has anything to do with you,” the group captain told him, his voice suddenly distant and chilly. “Nor can I in good conscience accept a resignation based on petty personal problems. Accordingly, your request is denied, and you will return to your normal duties at once.”

“What?” David yelped. “You can’t do that!”