“Yes,” Monique answered. “Who’s calling, please?” Her first guess was, another SS man from some backwards province.

But the fellow on the other end of the line said, “I’m a friend of some friends of your brother’s. I’m looking to do him a good turn, if I can.”

She almost hung up on him then and there. Instead, she snapped, “Why are you calling me? Why aren’t you bothering the SS?” Then she added insult to injury: “But don’t worry. They probably hear you now, because they listen on this line whenever they choose.”

She’d expected that would make the caller hang up on her, but he didn’t. He muttered something that wasn’t German at all, whether standard or dialect: “Oh, bloody hell.”

Monique read English, but had had far fewer occasions to speak it than she’d had with German. Still, she recognized it when she heard it. And hearing it made her revise her notion of who Pierre’s “friends” were: probably not Nazi gangsters after all. Not this batch, anyhow, she thought. “What do you want?” she asked, sticking to German.

He answered in that throaty, guttural dialect: “I already told you. I want to give him as much help as I can. I don’t know how much that will be, or just how I’ll be able to do it.” He laughed without much humor. “I don’t know all kinds of things I wish I knew.”

“Who are you?” she asked. “How do you know Pierre?”

“I don’t know him at all-my friends do,” the stranger answered. “Who am I?” That bitter laugh again. “My name is David Goldfarb.”

“Goldfarb,” Monique echoed. It could have been a German name, but he didn’t pronounce it as a German would have. And he’d cursed in English when provoked. Maybe his dialect wasn’t really, or wasn’t quite, German at all. “You’re a Jew!” she blurted.

An instant too late, she realized she shouldn’t have said that. Goldfarb muttered something pungent in English, then returned to what had to be Yiddish: “If anybody is listening to your phone…” He sighed. “I’m a British citizen. I have a legal right to be here.” Another sigh. “I hope the Jerries remember that.”

By the way he said it, Jerries had the same flavor as Boches. Monique found herself liking him, and also found herself wondering if he was setting her up to like him. If he really was a Jew, he was risking his neck to come here. If he was a liar, he was-no, not a smooth one, for there was nothing smooth about him, but a good one. “What do you want with my brother?” Monique asked.

“What do you think?” he answered. He did believe someone was tapping her line, then: he was saying no more than he had to.

She came to a sudden decision. “You know where I teach?” Without waiting for him to say yes or no, she hurried on: “Be there at noon tomorrow with a bicycle.”

He said something in the Lizards’ language. That, unlike French, German, or English, was not a tongue of classical scholarship. A generation of films had taught her the phrase he used, though: “It shall be done.” The line went dead.

When she finished her lecture the next day, she wondered if Dieter Kuhn would try to take her out to lunch. He didn’t. Maybe that meant the Nazis hadn’t been listening after all. Maybe it meant they had, and were seeing what kind of trouble she’d get into if they let her. She left her lecture hall, curious about the same thing.

That fellow standing in the hall had to be David Goldfarb. He looked like a Jew-not like a Nazi propaganda poster, but like a Jew. He was eight or ten years older than she, with wavy brown hair going gray, rather sallow skin, and a prominent nose. Not bad-looking. The thought left her vaguely surprised, and more sympathetic than she’d expected. “How does it feel to be here?” she asked.

She’d spoken French. He grimaced. “English or German, please,” he said in English. “I haven’t got a word of French. Fine chap to send here, eh?” He grinned ruefully. When Monique repeated herself-in German, in which she was more fluent than English-the grin slipped. He returned to his rasping dialect: “Coming here is bad for me. Not coming here would have been bad for me and my family. What can you do?”

“What can you do?” Monique repeated. She’d been asking herself the same thing ever since Sturmbannfuhrer Kuhn let her know Pierre was alive. Too often, the answer was, Not much. “You do have a bicycle?” she asked. He nodded, and then had to brush a lock of hair off his forehead. She said, “Good. Come along with me, then, and we’ll go to a cafe, and you can tell me what this is all about.”

“It shall be done,” he said again, in the language of the Race.

She led him to Tire-Bouchon, on Rue Julien, in a turn-of-thecentury building not far from her route home. A couple of soldiers in Wehrmacht field-gray were eating there, but they paid her no undue attention. To her relief, they paid Goldfarb no undue attention, either.

She ordered a garlicky beef stew. The waiter turned out to speak German. That wouldn’t have surprised her even if the Wehrmacht men hadn’t been in the place. After some back-and-forth, Goldfarb chose chicken in wine. He turned back to Monique as the waiter left. “This is on me. One thing I will say about my friends”-he gave the word an ironic twist-“is that they’ve got plenty of money.”

“Merci,” Monique said, and then, “So… What exactly do your friends want from my brother?”

“They don’t want anything from him,” the Jew from England answered. “They want him to go back into business for himself, buying some of the ginger he sells the Lizards from them and keeping them full of money. They don’t want him to be a German cat’s-paw.”

“I am sure he would like that very much,” Monique said. “The only trouble is, the Lizards will kill him if he stays in business for himself. They, or their leaders, do not want to put up with ginger now, not with what it does to their females and how it upsets their males. The Nazis can keep him in business and protect him. Can your friends do the same?”

She expected him to blanch at the blunt question. French opinions of England had not been high in the fighting or after it, and many Frenchmen laughed to see Britain fight so hard to retain her independence and then be shorn of the empire that made such independence genuine. But Goldfarb said, “I’m not sure. I think we’d have a better chance to get the Lizards to call off their dogs. I have a cousin with good connections-he’s even one of the fleetlord’s advisors every now and then.”

Monique’s wave of disbelief almost caught the waiter who was bringing them their lunches. After he’d set the food on the table and left again, she said, “You cannot expect me to think you are telling the truth.”

“Think whatever you want,” David Goldfarb told her. “My cousin’s name is Moishe Russie. Your brother ought to know it.” He cut off a bite of chicken. A smile lit up his lean, melancholy face. “This is very, very good.”

Monique resolved to remember the name; if Goldfarb was a liar, he’d been well prepared. The way he attacked his plate amused her. Tire-Buchon served hearty bourgeois fare, but surely nothing to cause such ecstasy. Then she recalled he came from England, poor fellow, and so no doubt had lower standards than hers.

After a bit, he looked astonished to have no more chicken left. “Is it possible for me to meet your brother?” he asked. “I’m staying at Le Petit Nice.” He butchered the name, but she understood it.

She also understood he was not a professional agent or anything of the sort. Someone more skilled would have been more careful about telling her where he was staying. His English associates must have chosen him for whom he knew, not for what he knew. But his very lack of skill at intrigue, oddly, made him more convincing. If he wasn’t what he said he was, he had to be something close to it.

“It could be that you might see my brother,” Monique said, picking her way through the German conditionals. “I do not yet know, of course, whether he would want to see you.”