Then there were the Lizard tourists. They were as obvious and as obnoxious as any travelers from an English-speaking land. They all carried video cameras and photographed everything that moved and everything that didn’t. Monique kept her head down. She was wearing a new bouffant hairdo and makeup far more garish than she would have dared-or even wanted-to use while teaching at the university, but she didn’t care to be recognized if she showed up on some Lizard’s pictures.

She wondered how many of the hissing tourists were spies for the Race. A moment later, she wondered how many were spies for the Nazis. Ginger, from what she’d seen, was a great corrupter. She wished her brother had never got into the trade, even if it had made him rich. If he hadn’t, she wouldn’t have needed to have anything to do with the Nazis, either.

One of the Lizards, one with fairly fancy body paint, bumped up against her. It spoke in its own language. “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand,” Monique said in French. Along with her own tongue, she had Latin. She had Greek. She had German and English and some Italian. But very little classical scholarship was conducted in the language of the Race.

To her surprise, the Lizard handed her a card printed in pretty good French. It read, You may already be a winner. To find out if you are, come to the consulate of the Race, 21 Rue de Trois Rois. Many valuable prizes.

“What kind of winner?” she asked. “What kind of prizes?”

The Lizard tapped the card with a fingerclaw and said something else in its own language. Evidently it knew no more French than she did of its language. It reached out and tapped the card again, as if certain the little rectangle held all the answers.

“I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re trying to tell me,” Monique said with a shrug. The Lizard shrugged, too, in what seemed to her a sad way. Then it vanished into the crowd.

Monique stared at the card. Her first impulse was to crumple it up and let it fall to the ground, to be trampled underfoot. The Lizards’ consulate was bound to be the most intently spied-upon building in Marseille. If she ever wanted to remake the acquaintance of Dieter Kuhn, that struck her as the way to go about it. All she wanted for Kuhn was a horrible death far away from her.

But, from somewhere, that miserable Lizard had come up with magic words. You may already be a winner. Was the Race running a contest, the way rival laundry-soap makers did when business got slow? Laundry-soap makers sold soap. What were the Lizards selling? She had no idea, but the very notion of the Lizards selling anything piqued her curiosity.

Many valuable prizes. It sounded more like something Americans would say than anything the Lizards were likely to do. What would a Lizard think a valuable prize was? Just how valuable a prize would it be? Valuable enough to let her get away from her brother as she’d got away from Dieter Kuhn? Were there any prizes that valuable?

She didn’t know. But she wanted to find out. She wondered if she could manage it. She started to let the card drop-she knew where the consulate was-but then hesitated. Maybe she would need it. She looked at it again. By what she could see, any French printing house could have done up such cards by the tens of thousands. But she didn’t know what she couldn’t see.

Thoughtfully, she dropped the card into her handbag. If I get the chance, maybe I will go over there. She wondered how many cards the Lizard was giving out, and how many Lizards were giving out cards. If she did go to the Rue de Trois Rois, would she find half of Marseille there ahead of her? And would the valuable prize turn out to be aluminum pans or something else every bit as banal?

She knew she shouldn’t leave the Porte d’Aix for any reason. If she was safe anywhere in Marseille, this was the place. The Germans came in here, yes, but they came in to buy and sell, not to raid and plunder. They didn’t know a half, or even a quarter, of what went on under their noses. And the Lizard authorities didn’t know half of what went on under their snouts, either, or Pierre wouldn’t have thrown her out so he could meet with those two shady, scaly characters.

“Lady, you going to stand there till you grow roots?” somebody demanded in loud, irritable tones.

“I’m sorry,” Monique said, though she wasn’t, not really. She moved, and the annoyed man pushed past her. Then she sank into abstracted study once more. What were the Lizards doing? Did she dare to find out? On the other hand, did she dare not to find out?

Felless looked down from a third-story window at the crowd that had gathered in front of the Race’s consulate in Marseille. The male who stood beside her was a researcher from the conquest fleet named Kazzop. “Save that these Big Uglies have black hair, this puts me in mind of a Tosevite work of fiction called ‘The Red-headed League,’ ”he said.

“Tosevite literary allusions leave me uninterested,” Felless said. “The question is, will this accomplish what we desire?”

“We have certainly stimulated the Big Uglies, superior female,” Kazzop said. “I do not think the Deutsche or the Francais have the least idea how to control this swarm of Tosevites.”

“In that case, they will start brutalizing them soon,” Felless predicted. “It is not what you had in mind for this experiment, but does seem to be the standard Tosevite procedure in case of insecurity.”

“Truth,” Kazzop said. “Of course, the Deutsch Tosevites need little excuse for brutalizing the Francais in any case. They rule them more through forcing fear than through promoting affection.”

“I suppose it is because they only conquered this province of their not-empire shortly before the conquest fleet arrived,” Felless said. “It strikes me as counterproductive, but a great deal the Deutsche do strikes me as counterproductive, so this would be nothing out of the ordinary there.”

“Indeed it would not,” Kazzop said. “We had better go down there and get things under way, or else the Deutsche will disperse that crowd before we can get any use out of it.”

“I suppose so,” Felless said unhappily. This wasn’t her project; she’d been brought here at the bidding of others, just as she’d been sent to Nuremberg. She remained inside the borders of the Greater German Reich. Here, though, she had at least a chance to escape the disgrace that had hovered over her in the capital. That should have made her more enthusiastic about cooperating.

To a point, it did. But only to a point. She had to keep coming out of her office and working not only with Big Uglies but also with females and males of the Race. Working with Big Uglies was merely annoying, though less so than it had been in Nuremberg. Working with females of her own kind was innocuous. Working with males of her own kind she hated, because it meant she dared not taste ginger.

She wanted a taste. How she wanted a taste! As she never had before, she understood what addiction meant. She would crave ginger even on her deathbed, regardless of whether she had another taste between now and then. She knew that. If only she could get a couple of days doing research and data correlation inside the cubicle they’d given her. Maybe that would be long enough to let her taste and to let her raging pheromones subside afterwards.

And maybe she would taste and taste and then humiliate herself with the males who coupled with her after she emerged from the cubicle. She’d done that before. She’d done it more than once, in fact. She was all too likely to do it again.

She still wanted a taste.

Down on the ground floor, males had cordoned off all the passages leading away, from the front entrance. Others stood in front of those cordoned-off passages with weapons in hand, to make sure no snoopy Big Uglies went down them in spite of the barricades.