“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.”

“You’re cooking up a deal with him?” Rance said, and Penny nodded. He stopped in his tracks; standing still hurt marginally less than walking. Before he said anything more, he paused to think. Penny wasn’t wrong. Gorppet struck him as a Lizard who’d done a lot and seen a lot and wouldn’t blab any of it. Still… “He’s not that high-ranking. If he makes a deal with you, can he hold up his end of it?”

“Has he got the cash, you mean?” Penny asked, and Rance nodded. She said, “You don’t have to be a general to be a big-time ginger smuggler, sweetie. A lot of the big ones are just clerks. They don’t buy the stuff with their salaries-they buy it with what they make selling it to their buddies.”

“Okay,” Auerbach said after more thought. “I guess that makes sense. But Gorppet doesn’t strike me as the type who’d do a lot of tasting. Didn’t he get transferred down here on account of he’s some kind of hero?”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t been tasting for years-I asked him,” Penny said. You would, Rance thought. She went on, “He hasn’t been in the selling end of the business till now, though. You’re right about that. Part of what he got for being a hero, along with this transfer and his promotion, was a hell of a big reward for catching some Arab or other.”

“Can he turn it into any kind of cash we can use?” Rance inquired.