Upsetting the Balance (44 page)

“I’ll tell you what I like about this countryside,” Jäger said suddenly. “It’s the first I’ve seen in the past four years that hasn’t been fought over to a fare-thee-well.”

“Aber natürlich,”
Skorzeny answered. “And when we find a café, you can order yourself some vichyssoise, too.”

“Vichyssoise?” Jäger said, and then, a moment too late. “Oh.
Ja.
The French gave up before we got down here, and this part of France wasn’t occupied. Then the Lizards came, and they gave up to them, too. They’re good at it.” He grunted. “And a whole lot of them are alive now who would be dead if they’d fought more. Does that make them cowards, or just smarter than we are?”

“Both,” Skorzeny answered. “Me, though, I’d rather stand up on my hind legs and not lie down till somebody knocks me over—and I’ll try and kick the feet out from under him as I’m falling, too.”

Jäger thought that over. He slowly nodded. A bell sounded behind him. He stepped aside to let a French policeman on a bicycle roll past. With his kepi and little dark mustache, the fellow looked like a cinema Frenchman. In the carrying basket under the handlebars, he had a couple of long, skinny loaves of bread and a bottle of red wine. Perhaps his mind was more on them than on anything else, for he rode by the Germans without a second glance.

They strode past the little hamlet of Ambialet. A long time ago, a lord had built a castle on a crag that stuck out into the Tarn. Later, a church and a monastery sprang up close by. They were all ruins now, but the hamlet remained.

Not far beyond it, they came to a farmhouse screened off from the road by a stand of willows. Ducks quacked in a pond close by. From off in a barn, a pig grunted. A stocky, stoop-shouldered Frenchman in a straw hat that almost made him look American put down the bucket he was carrying when the two Germans approached.

“Bonjour, monsieur,”
Jäger said in his halting, heavily accented French.
“Avez-vous une cigarette? Peut-être deux?”

“I regret,
monsieur,
that I have not even one, let alone two.” The farmer’s shrug was so perfectly Gallic that Jäger forgot about the straw hat. The fellow went on, “You will be from Uncle Henri?”

“Oui,”
Jäger said, completing the recognition phrase. He didn’t know who Uncle Henri was: perhaps a Frenchified version of Heinrich Himmler.

“Come in, both of you,” the farmer said, waving toward the building. “My wife and daughter, they are staying with my brother-in-law down the road for a few days. They do not know why, but they are glad to visit René for a time.” He paused. “You may call me Jacques, by the way.”

That didn’t necessarily mean his name was Jacques, Jäger noted. Nonetheless, he said,
“Merci,
Jacques. I am Jean, and this is François.” Skorzeny snickered at the alias he’d been given. François was a name for a fussy headwaiter, not a scar-faced fighting man.

Jacques’ eyes had heavy lids, and dark pouches under them. They were keen all the same. “You would be Johann and Fritz, then?” he said in German a little better than Jäger’s French.

“If you like,” Skorzeny answered in the same language. Jacques’ smile did not quite reach those eyes. He, too, knew aliases when he heard them.

The interior of the farmhouse was gloomy, even after Jacques switched on the electric lamps. Again, Jäger reminded himself no one had fought a war in this part of France for generations; the amenities that had been here before 1940 were still likely to work.

Jacques said, “You will be hungry, yes? Marie left a stew I am to reheat for us.” He got a fire going in the hearth and hung a kettle above it. Before long, a delicious aroma filled the farmhouse. Jacques poured white wine from a large jug into three mismatched glasses. He raised his. “For the Lizards—
merde
.”

They all drank. The wine was sharp and dry. Jäger wondered if it would tan his tongue to leather inside his mouth. Then Jacques ladled out the stew: carrots, onions, potatoes, and bits of meat in a gravy savory with spices. Jäger all but inhaled his plateful, yet Skorzeny finished ahead of him. When drunk alongside the stew, the wine was fine.

“Marvelous.” Jäger glanced over at Jacques. “If you eat this well all the time, it’s a wonder you don’t weigh two hundred kilos.”

“Farming is never easy,” the Frenchman answered, “and it has grown only harder these past few years, with no petrol at hand. A farmer can eat, yes, but he works off his food.”

“What kind of meat is it?” Skorzeny asked, looking wistfully back toward the kettle.

“Wild rabbit.” Jacques spread his hands. “You must know how it is,
messieurs.
The livestock, it is too precious to slaughter except to keep from starving or
peut-être
for a great feast like a wedding. But I am a handy man with a snare, and so—” He spread his work-gnarled hands.

He made no move to offer Skorzeny more stew, and even the brash SS man did not get up to refill his plate uninvited. Like Jäger, he likely guessed Jacques would need what was left to feed himself after the two of them had moved on.

Jäger said, “Thank you for putting us up here for the night.”

“Pas de quoi,”
Jacques answered. His hand started to come up to his mouth, as if with a cigarette. Jäger had seen a lot of people make gestures like that, this past year. After a moment, the Frenchman resumed: “Life is strange,
n’est-ce pas
? When I was a young man, I fought you
Boches,
you Germans, at Verdun, and never did I think we could be allies, your people and mine.”

“Marshal Pétain also fought at Verdun,” Skorzeny said, “and he has worked closely with the German authorities.”

Jäger wondered how Jacques would take that. Some Frenchmen thought well of Pétain, while to others he was a symbol of surrender and collaboration. Jacques only shrugged and said, “It is late. I will get your blankets.” He took for granted that soldiers would have no trouble sleeping on the floor. At the moment, Jäger would have had no trouble sleeping on a bed of nails.

The blankets were rough, scratchy wool. The one Jäger wrapped around himself smelled of a woman’s sweat and faintly of rose water. He wondered whether it belonged to Jacques’ wife or his daughter, and knew he couldn’t ask.

Skorzeny had already started snoring. Jäger lay awake a while, trying to remember how long it had been since he’d lain with a woman. Occasional visits to a brothel didn’t really count, except to relieve pressure like the safety valve of a steam engine. The last one that mattered had been Ludmila Gorbunova. He sighed—most of a year now. Too long.

Breakfast the next morning was slabs of bread cut from a long, thin loaf like those the policeman had carried in his bicycle basket. Jäger and Skorzeny washed the bread down with more white wine. “You might prefer coffee, I know,” Jacques said, “but—” His Gallic shrug was eloquent.

“By me, wine is plenty good,” Skorzeny said. Jäger wasn’t so sure he agreed. He didn’t make a habit of drinking part of his breakfast, and suspected the wine would leave him logy and slow. Skorzeny picked up the loaf from which Jacques had taken slices. “We’ll finish this off for lunch, if you don’t mind.”

His tone said Jacques had better not mind. The Frenchman shrugged again. Jäger would have taken the bread, too, but he would have been more circumspect about how he did it. Circumspection, however, did not seem to be part of Skorzeny’s repertoire.

To smooth things over, Jäger asked, “How far to Albi, Jacques?”

“Twenty kilometers, perhaps twenty-five,” the farmer answered indifferently. Jäger projected a mental map of the territory inside his head. The answer sounded about right. A good day’s hike, especially for a man who was used to letting panzers haul him around.

The sun beat at the back of his neck and Skorzeny’s when they set out. Sweat started running down his cheeks almost at once.
The wine,
he thought, annoyed. But it was not just the wine. The air hung thick and breathless; he had to push through it, as if through gauze, to move ahead. When the sun rose higher in the sky, the day would be savagely hot.

A stream of Lizard lorries came up the road toward Jäger and Skorzeny. They scrambled off onto the verge; what were a couple of human beings dead by the side of the road to the Lizards? He kicked at the tarmac. If a couple of Russian civilians hadn’t gotten out of the way of a German motor convoy, what would have happened to them? Probably the same thing.

Skorzeny hadn’t been thinking about civilians of any sort. He said, “You know what they’re hauling in those lorries.”

“If it isn’t gas masks, one of us will be the most surprised man in France, and the other will be runner-up,” Jäger answered.

“How right you are,” Skorzeny said, chuckling. “Our job is to make sure they don’t keep shipping them out of there in such great lots.”

He sounded as if that posed no more problems than hiking along this all but deserted road. Maybe he even believed it. After his coups—playing Prometheus by stealing explosive metal from the Lizards, absconding with Mussolini from right under their snouts, doing the same with a Lizard panzer, and driving the aliens out of Split and out of all of Croatia—he had a right to be confident. There was, however, a difference between confidence and arrogance. Jäger thought so, anyhow. Skorzeny might have had other ideas.

They rested for a while in the heat of midday, going down to the banks of the Tarn to drink some water and to splash some on their faces. Then, under the shade of a spreading oak, they shared the bread Skorzeny had appropriated from Jacques. A kingfisher dove into the river with a splash. Somewhere back in the brush, a bee-eater took off with a cry of
“Quilp, quilp!”

“I should have lifted some of that wine, too,” Skorzeny said. “God only knows how many Frenchmen have been pissing in this river, or what we’re liable to catch from drinking out of it.”

“I used to worry about that, too,” Jäger answered. “I still do, but not so much. Do it often enough and you stop thinking about it.” He shook his head. “Like you stop thinking about killing people, but on a smaller scale, if you know what I mean.”

Skorzeny’s big head bobbed up and down. “I like that. It’s true, too, no doubt about it.”

Cautiously, Jäger said, “Like killing Jews, too, don’t you think, Skorzeny? The more you do, the easier it gets.” There were just the two of them, here in the quiet of southern France. If you couldn’t speak your mind, or at least part of it, here, where could you? And if you couldn’t speak your mind anywhere, was life really worth living? Were you a man or just a mindless machine?

“Don’t start in on me about that,” Skorzeny said. Now he tossed his head like a man shaking flies. “I didn’t have anything to do with it. I fought alongside those Jews in Russia, remember, same as you did, when we raided the Lizards for their explosive metal.”

“I remember,” Jäger said. “I don’t have anything to do with—” He stopped. How many of the prisoners extracting uranium from the failed nuclear pile outside Hechingen and bringing it to Schloss Hohentübingen had been Jews? A good many, without a doubt. He might not have condemned them himself, but he’d exploited them once they were condemned. He tried again: “When the
Reich’s
hands are dirty, how can anyone’s hands be clean?”

“They can’t,” Skorzeny said placidly. “War is a filthy business, and it dirties everything it touches. The whole business with the Jews is just part of that. Christ on His cross, Jäger, are you going to feel clean after we give Albi our little dose of joy and good tidings?”

“That’s different.” Jäger stuck out his chin and looked stubborn. “The Lizards can shoot back—they shoot better than we do. But marching the Jews up to a pit and shooting them a row at a time—or the camps in Poland . . . People will remember that sort of thing for a thousand years.”

“Who remembers the Armenians the Turks killed in the last war?” Skorzeny said. “When they’re gone, they’re gone.” He rubbed his dry palms back and forth, as if washing his hands.

Jäger couldn’t match that callousness. “Even if you were right—”

“I
am
right,” Skorzeny broke in. “Who worries about the Carthaginians these days? Or, for that matter, about the—what’s the right name for them,
Herr Doktor Professor
of archaeology?—the Albigensians, that’s it, from the town just ahead?”

“Even if you were right,” Jäger repeated, “they aren’t all gone and they won’t be all gone, not with the Lizards holding Poland. And those ones who are left will see to it that our name stays black forever.”

“If we win the war, it doesn’t matter. And if we lose the war, it doesn’t matter, either.” Skorzeny climbed to his feet. “Come on. We’ll get into Albi by sundown, and then it’s just a matter of waiting for our toys to arrive.”

That closed out the possibility of more talk. Jäger also got up.
I shouldn’t have expected anything else,
he told himself. Most German officers wouldn’t talk about Jews at all. In a way, Skorzeny’s candor was an improvement. But only in a way. Sighing, Jäger tramped on toward Albi.

Liu Han felt invisible. With a wicker basket in hand, she could wander from one of Peking’s markets to the next without being noticed. She was just one more woman among thousands, maybe millions. No one paid the least attention to her, any more than you paid attention to one particular flea among the many on a dog’s back.

“Think of yourself as a flea,” Nieh Ho-T’ing had told her. “You may be tiny, but your bite can draw blood.”

Liu Han was sick to death of being a flea. She was sick to death of being invisible. She’d been invisible all her life. She wanted to do something bold and prominent, something to make the scaly devils regret they’d ever interfered with her. Of course, the one time she’d not been invisible was when she’d been in the little devils’ clutches. She prayed to the Amida Buddha and any other god or spirit who would listen that she never attain such visibility again.

“Bok choi,
very fresh!” a merchant bawled in her ear. Others hawked barley, rice, millet, wheat, poultry, pork, spices—any sort of food or condiment you could imagine.