Upsetting the Balance полностью

“Pas de quoi,”Jacques answered. His hand started to come up to his mouth, as if with a cigarette. Jager 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 youBoches, you Germans, at Verdun, and never did I think we could be allies, your people and mine.”

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

Jager wondered how Jacques would take that. Some Frenchmen thought well of Petain, 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, Jager would have had no trouble sleeping on a bed of nails.

The blankets were rough, scratchy wool. The one Jager 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. Jager 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. Jager 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. Jager 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. Jager 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, Jager asked, “How far to Albi, Jacques?”

“Twenty kilometers, perhaps twenty-five,” the farmer answered indifferently. Jager 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 Jager 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,” Jager 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. Jager 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.”