Monique gulped. “Do I have to?” she asked. She knew perfectly well why the poor fellow out there on the street was dead: because of her, and because the drug-dealing Lizard who’d shot him didn’t know what the devil he was doing. Seeing the result of her failed revenge was the last thing she wanted.

But Dieter Kuhn, as she knew all too well, didn’t care what she wanted. “Come on,” he repeated, and grabbed her by the arm. He wasn’t the typical hulking German; by his looks and compact, wiry build, he might more readily have been French. But he was much stronger than Monique. When he dragged her along with him, she had no choice but to come.

A little crowd of the curious and the ghoulish had gathered around the corpse on the sidewalk just in front of Monique’s block of flats. Blood, black in the moonlight, streamed down into the gutter. A man had a startling amount of blood in him. Monique could smell it, and the latrine stench that had come when the dead man’s bowels let go.

Sirens yowled in the distance, rapidly coming closer. Kuhn took a little flashlight off his belt and shone it in the dead man’s face. “Do you know him?” he asked.

“Yes,” Monique answered, trying not to look at the wound that had torn away one side of his jaw. “That’s Ferdinand Bonnard. He lives-lived-downstairs from me, on the second floor. He never bothered anyone that I heard of.” And I killed him, as sure as if I’d pulled the trigger myself. She wondered if she’d be sick.

Kuhn wrote the name in a little notebook he fished from a trouser pocket. “Bonnard, eh? And what did he do?”

“He sold fish in a little shop on the Rue de Refuge, not far from the harbor,” Monique answered as a couple of SS vehicles squealed to a stop and uniformed Germans spilled out of them. Everyone but Monique suddenly found urgent business elsewhere.

“Dealt with fishermen, did he? Maybe he was a smuggler, too,” Kuhn said, and started talking to his Nazi colleagues. He might have forgotten about Monique. But when she started to go back inside the apartment building, Kuhn shook his head. “No-you will come with us to the Palais de Justice and answer more questions.” She must have looked as horrified as she felt, for he added, “It will not be as bad as it was last time. You have my word of honor.”

And it wasn’t-quite.

Once he started getting used to it, Rance Auerbach discovered Cape Town’s District Six wasn’t such a bad place after all. Yes, he had to treat Negroes as if they were as good as anybody else. He even had to take orders from them every now and then. That wasn’t easy for a Texan. But after he leaped the hurdle, he started having a pretty fair time.

Everybody in District Six, black and white and colored (a distinction between full-blooded blacks and half-breeds the USA didn’t bother drawing) and Indian, was hustling as hard as he or she could. Some people had honest work, some work that wasn’t so honest. A lot of people had both kinds of jobs, and ran like maniacs from long before the sun rose over Table Mountain till long after it set in the South Atlantic.

Rance couldn’t have run like a maniac even if he’d wanted to. Getting up and down the stairs to the flat he and Penny Summers shared was plenty to leave him sore and gasping. When he shuffled along the streets near the apartment building where he lived, kids of all colors laughed at his shuffling gait. They called him Stumpy, maybe because of his stick, maybe just because of the way he walked.

He didn’t care what they called him. Kids back in the States had thought he walked funny, too. Hell, even he thought he walked funny. But he could get to the Boomslang saloon a couple of blocks from his apartment building, and most of the time that was as far as he wanted to go.

Boomslang, he found, meant tree snake, and one particular, and particularly poisonous, kind of tree snake at that. Considering some of the rotgut the place served up, he could understand how it got its name. But it was close, it was cheap, and the crowd, despite being of all colors, was as lively and interesting as any he’d ever found in a bar.

To his surprise, he found he was interesting to the Boomslang’s other patrons. His American accent made him exotic to both whites and blacks. So did his ruined voice. When people discovered he’d been wounded fighting the Lizards, he won respect for courage if not for sense.

But when they found out how he’d wound up in South Africa, he won… interest. One evening, somewhat elevated from a few hours at the saloon, he came home and told Penny, “Half the people in this goddamn country are either in the ginger-smuggling business or want to be, if you listen to ’em talk.”

His girlfriend threw back her head and laughed. “You just figured that out, Rance? Hell, sweetheart, if I’d’ve wanted to, I could’ve gotten back into business long since. But I’ve been taking it easy, you know what I mean?”

“You?” Auerbach felt the whiskey singing in him. It didn’t make him stupid, but it did make him care less about what he said. “Since when did you ever believe in taking it easy?”

Penny Summers turned red. “You really want to know? Since those damn Nazis pointed every gun in the world right at my head and carted you and me off to that jail in Marseille, that’s when.” She shuddered. “And then, after the Lizards got us back, they could’ve locked us up in their own jail and thrown away the key. So I’m not real hot to give ’em another shot at doing that. Thanks, but no thanks.”

Auerbach stared. Of all the things he’d expected, Penny cautious was among the last. “You mean you like living like this?” His wave took in the cramped little flat. If he hadn’t been careful, he would have barked his knuckles on the wall.

“Like it? Hell no,” Penny answered. “Like it better than a nice, warm, cozy cell with nothing but Lizards to look at for the rest of my days? Hell, yes.”

“I’ll be damned,” he said wonderingly. “They really did put the fear of God in you, didn’t they?”

She walked up to him and set her hands on his shoulders. It wasn’t the prelude to a kiss, as he’d hoped at first it might be. “Listen to me,” she said, as serious as he’d ever heard her. “Listen to me good. We caused those scaly bastards a lot of trouble, I mean a lot of trouble. If you don’t think they’re keeping an eye on us to make sure we’re good little boys and girls, you’re smack out of your mind. Want to bet against me? How much have you got?”

Auerbach thought about it. He thought slower than he should have, but still thought pretty straight. When he was done, he shook his head, even though it made his ruined shoulder ache. “Nope. That’d be like raising with a pair of fives against a guy who’s got four diamonds showing.”

Now Penny did kiss him, a peck on the lips that had nothing to do with lust and everything to do with gratitude. “See, Rance?” she said. “I knew you weren’t dumb.”

“Only about you,” he answered, which made her laugh, though he hadn’t been more than half joking. He sighed and went on, “But if you listen to them, half the guys in the Boomslang have sold the Lizards a taste one time or another.”

Penny laughed again. “How much have you had to drink, babe? Must be a hell of a lot, if you’re dumb enough to believe what a bunch of barflies say. And even if they have sold some poor damn Lizard a taste or two, so what? That’s nickel-and-dime stuff. If I ever do start playing the game down here, it won’t be for nickels and dimes, and you can bet your bottom dollar on that.”

“If you get in trouble, you want to get in a whole lot of trouble-that’s what you’re telling me.” Now Rance nodded; that did sound like the Penny Summers he’d known for the past twenty-odd years. Penny… you could say a lot about her, but she never did things by halves.

She knew it, too. “I stiffed my pals for plenty before I came running back to you,” she said. “If I ever take a shot at it again, I’ll do it once-once and then it’s off to Tahiti or one of those other little islands the Free French run.”