Down to Earth (47 page)

“But you didn’t see how things turned,” Naomi told him. “When I was a little girl in Germany, before Hitler, having a different religion wasn’t anything special—well, not too special, anyhow. And things . . . everything changed. I don’t want our children to go through that. And my family got out before the worst.” Her laugh was shaky. “If we hadn’t got out before the worst, we wouldn’t have got out at all.”

“That won’t happen here,” Goldfarb said. “That’s something. Whenever I feel the walls closing in around me, I remind myself we got out of Britain. Sooner or later, they have to get sick of holding us here and turn us loose.” He wondered if he was whistling in the dark. He’d been saying the same thing for months now, and it hadn’t happened yet.

Before Naomi could answer, the telephone jangled in the front room. “I’ll get it,” she said; her side of the bed was closer to the door. “Who could be calling at this hour?” Flannel nightgown swirling around her, she hurried away. Goldfarb came up with several possibilities, none of them pleasant. His wife returned a moment later. “It’s for you—someone from the RCAF.”

“At half past ten?” Goldfarb raised an eyebrow. “Someone calling to harass me, more likely. Well, I can always hang up on the blighter.” He got out of bed and went to the telephone. “Goldfarb here.” His voice was hard with suspicion.

Whoever was on the other end of the line sounded more like an Englishman than a Canadian; to Goldfarb’s unpracticed ear, Canadians, however much they pointed out the differences in accent, still sounded like Yanks. “You’re the Goldfarb who used to mess about with radars, isn’t that right?”

“Yes, that’s me,” Goldfarb agreed. “Who’s this?”

He didn’t get a straight answer; he’d grown resigned to not getting straight answers. “You have an appointment at the Defense Ministry at eleven tomorrow. You’d do well to show up fifteen or twenty minutes early.”

“Who is this?” Goldfarb repeated. This time, he not only got no answer, but the line went dead. He scratched his head as he hung up the telephone.

“Who was it?” Naomi asked when he came back to bed.

“Hanged if I know,” he answered, and gave her the abbreviated conversation.

“Are you going to do what he told you?” she asked when he’d finished.

“I don’t know that, either,” he admitted, not very happily. “Fellow might have been trying to set me up.” He saw in his mind’s eye a couple of gunmen waiting outside the Defense Ministry. But they could be waiting as easily at eleven o’clock as at a quarter till. He sighed. “I suppose I will. I don’t see how things could get any worse if I do. Now, though . . .” He turned out the light on the nightstand. “Now, I’m going to bed.”

And, when he left the next morning, he left early enough to get to the Defense Ministry building near the Ottawa River well before the time scheduled for his latest round of grilling. Frigid air smote his face and burned in his lungs as soon as he left the block of flats where he’d been quartered. He turned up his greatcoat collar to protect some of his face from the ghastly weather, but the garment hadn’t really been made to stand up against a Russian-style winter.

Had he been going more than half a dozen blocks up Sussex Drive, he would have tried to flag a taxi. But he might have stood there waiting for one—and, incidentally, freezing—longer than the walk would take him. Ottawa was a national capital, but it was nowhere near so richly supplied with cabs as London, or Belfast, either.

Even the ten-minute walk showed him many other differences between the capital of the country he’d left and that of the country that wasn’t sure it wanted him as a part of it. Most of Ottawa was laid out on a sensible grid pattern, and all of it, to Goldfarb’s eye; was new. No pubs dating back to the fifteenth century—and some looking as if they hadn’t been swept up since—here. It was less than a hundred years since Victoria had chosen this town—till then a little lumbering village—as the capital of the new Dominion of Canada. Everything dated since then, and most since the turn of the century.

Off to the west, on Parliament Hill by the Ottawa River, stood the splendid buildings where the Canadian government deliberated. They weren’t, in Goldfarb’s no doubt prejudiced opinion, a patch on the Houses of Parliament in London, but they did stand out from the square boxes that dominated the city’s architecture.

The Defense Ministry was one of those boxes. It replaced what had probably been a more imposing structure till the Lizards bombed it during the fighting. Ottawa hadn’t suffered too badly then. Nor, for that matter, had most of Canada; just as the winter weather was too chilly to suit Goldfarb’s overcoat, it was also too chilly to suit the Race. The USA had taken a worse beating.

A sentry in a uniform about halfway between U.S. and British styles took Goldfarb’s name at the entrance. After checking it against a list, he nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said. “They’ll want you in room 327. Go to the west wing, then take the stairs or the elevator.”

“Thanks,” Goldfarb said, reminded anew he was in a foreign country; back home, someone would have urged him onto the lift. But, back home, too many people would have urged him to a very warm clime indeed because of who his ancestors were.

He hadn’t been to room 327 before, and had to wander the corridors for a little while before he found it. When he went through the door with the frosted-glass window with 327 on it, he found himself in an antechamber. A fellow in RCAF uniform a few years older than he sat there, leafing through a magazine. The officer looked up, then got to his feet, a smile on his face. “Goldfarb, isn’t it?” he said, sticking out his hand.

“Yes, sir,” Goldfarb said. The man’s rank badges proclaimed him a colonel, which still struck Goldfarb as odd; the Canadians had gone their own way on air force ranks a few years before. There were more urgent things he didn’t know, though, such as why this bloke recognized him. “I’m afraid I can’t quite . . .” He stopped and took a second, longer, look at the officer. His jaw dropped. “George Bagnall, by God! Good to see you, sir!” He pumped the proffered hand with enthusiasm.

“That’s right,” Bagnall said, smiling more widely. He was good-looking in the horsey British way, and had the proper accent, too, only slightly diluted by however long he’d spent in Canada. “Been a while since you shoved one of your bloody radars into the Lanc I was flight officer for, hasn’t it?”

“You might say so, yes, sir,” Goldfarb answered. “You were in Russia after that, weren’t you? We met in a Dover pub. Some of the stories you were telling would make anybody’s knees knock.”

“And you joined the infantry when the Lizards invaded England,” Bagnall said, “so you’ve got stories of your own. But that’s all water over the dam. Rather more to the point here, I was in Russia with a certain—often very certain—chap by the name of Jerome Jones.”

Something unfamiliar ran through Goldfarb’s spirit. After a moment, he recognized it: hope. He wondered if he ought to let himself feel it. Disappointment, he knew, would only hurt more now. But he couldn’t help asking, “So you’re in touch with Jones, are you, sir?”

“I wasn’t,” Bagnall answered. “Hadn’t been for years. I came over to this side of the Atlantic in ‘49; I could see the writing on the wall even then. Come to think of it, I was on one of the first ships—maybe
the
first ship—carrying heavy water from German-occupied Norway to England, though I hadn’t the faintest notion what heavy water was in those days. So I knew the
Reich
and the U.K. were getting friendly, and I didn’t like it worth a damn.”

“Who did?” Goldfarb said. But the trouble was, altogether too many people did. He made himself stick to the business at hand: “You weren’t in touch with Jones, you said. But you are now?”

“That’s right.” George Bagnall nodded. “He hunted me down, wrote me about the trouble you’d been having with the ginger smugglers, and about how they’d bollixed up your trip over here.”

That
was
hope, by God; nothing else could produce such a pounding in the chest, such a lump in the throat. But, despite hope, asking the question that wanted asking took every ounce of courage Goldfarb had: “Can you . . . Can you do anything about it, sir?”

“Possibly, just possibly,” Bagnall said, with such maddening English reserve that Goldfarb wasn’t sure whether to take him literally or to think things were in the bag. Then he went on, “You’re here to see Colonel McWilliams, aren’t you?”

“That’s right,” David said. “You know him?”

“Possibly, just possibly,” Bagnall repeated, but this time he couldn’t keep the smile from sneaking back. “He was best man at my wedding, and I was a groomsman at his—his brother was best man for him.”

“God bless Jerome Jones,” David Goldfarb murmured. He’d intended it for a joke, but it came out sounding quite reverent.

Bagnall chuckled. “I hope God’s listening—He probably doesn’t hear that very often. But now, let’s go have a word with Freddy, shall we?” He steered Goldfarb toward Colonel McWilliams’ office, and Goldfarb was glad to let himself be steered.

Rance Auerbach shook his finger at Penny Summers. “You’re getting itchy,” he said. “I can
feel
you getting itchy, goddammit. It’s summertime down here, and you’re looking to make a deal. You’re sweating to make a deal, any old kind of deal.”

“Of course I’m sweating.” Penny took off her straw hat and fanned herself with it. “It’s hot outside.”

“Not so bad,” Auerbach said. “It’s a dry kind of heat, more like L.A. than Fort Worth.” He coughed, which hurt, and which also brought him back to what he’d been saying. “You’re not going to distract me. You want to make a deal with you-know-who for you-know-what.”

He wished he could have been more specific than that, but—when he remembered to—he operated on the assumption that the Lizards were likely to be listening in on whatever Penny and he said in their apartment. So did she; she exclaimed, “I’d never do any such thing. I’ve learned my lesson.”

Lizards often missed the tone in human conversations. Any Lizard monitoring this one, though, would have to be extraordinarily tone-deaf to miss the obvious fact that Penny was lying through her teeth. Rance didn’t miss it. His rasping laugh turned into a rasping cough that felt as if it were going to tear his chest apart from the inside out. One day, maybe it would. Then he’d stop hurting.

“Serves you right,” Penny said, which showed him how much sympathy he was likely to get from her.

“Bring me a beer, will you?” he asked, and she went and got him a Lion Lager from the icebox, and one for herself, too. He took a long pull at his. It helped cool the fire inside him. Then he lit a cigarette. That started it up again, but he didn’t care. He offered Penny the pack—the packet, they called it here in Cape Town. She took one, leaning forward to light it from his.

After a couple of puffs, she said, “You know I wouldn’t do anything stupid like that, Rance.”

He laughed. “There’s a hot one. You’d do anything you thought you could get away with.”

“Who wouldn’t?” Penny said. “But if I don’t think I can get away with it, I’m not going to try it, right?”

“Well, yeah,” Rance admitted. “Trouble is, you always think you’re going to get away with it. If you were right all the damn time, we’d still be in Texas, or more likely in Tahiti.”

She gave him a dirty look. “I didn’t hear you telling me not to run that ginger down into Mexico. I didn’t see you staying back in Texas when I did it, neither. If you had, you’d still be in that apartment by your lonesome, pouring your life down a bottle one day at a time.”

“Maybe,” he said, though he knew damn well she wasn’t wrong. “So I’m here instead. If I hadn’t been along, you’d probably still be in a Lizard jail. Of course, if I hadn’t been around, you’d probably be dead now, but you don’t think about that, not any more you don’t.”

Penny’s scowl got fiercer. “All right, I’ve screwed some up before, but I really don’t see what can go wrong this time.”

Rance laughed again—he laughed till it hurt again, which didn’t take long. “So there’s nothing going on, and there’s nothing that can go wrong with whatever is going on. I like that, I’ll go to hell if I don’t.”

“God damn you,” she said furiously. “You weren’t supposed to know anything about it.” They were both barely remembering the microphones they figured the Lizards had hidden in the apartment, if they were remembering at all.

“That’s what the gal who’s cheating on her husband always says, too, and she never thinks he’s going to find out,” Auerbach said. He didn’t have the energy to get as mad as she was. “Just remember, if your boat springs a leak down here, I drown, too. And I don’t feel like drowning, so you’d better level with me.”

He could tell what was going on behind her blazing blue eyes. She was deciding whether to stay where she was and talk or walk out the door and never come back. Rather to his surprise, she kept on talking to him, even if what she had to say didn’t directly bear on the argument. “Come on down to the Boomslang,” she said. “We can hash it out there.”

“Okay,” he answered, and limped over to pick up his stick. He didn’t feel like hobbling to the tavern, but he didn’t feel like having the Lizards listen in on an argument about smuggling ginger, either. Even with the cane, his bad leg gave him hell as he went downstairs, and kept on barking when he got down onto the sidewalk. It would do worse when he had to go back upstairs, and he knew it.
Something to look forward to,
he thought.

A Lizard patrol was coming up the street toward him. The male in charge was even newer in town than he and Penny were. Auerbach waved; there were good Lizards and bad Lizards, same as there were good people and bad people, and this male seemed to be a pretty good egg. “I greet you, Gorppet,” Rance called in the language of the Race.

“And I greet you, Rance Auerbach,” the Lizard said. “You are easy to recognize because of the way you walk.” He waved, too, and then led the patrol past Rance and away along the street.

As soon as the Lizards were out of earshot, Penny said, “If you know Gorppet, what are you getting your bowels in an uproar about over this ginger deal? He’s not the kind of Lizard who’d rat on us. Anybody can see that.”