Free Black Sun Reich by Trey Garrison Page B

message, about RED INDIANS .
    â€œI thought you said there was no segregation here,” Deitel said, indicating the signs.
    â€œThere’s not,” Rucker said. Then he saw what prompted the remark and sneered. “But there’s also no law against being a jackass. It ain’t right, but it’s the owner’s right.”
    Deitel drank in the cityscape. High rises were lighted like it was a festival, and airships of all sizes and models sailed about the skies. He wondered at the maze of electric signs, neon signs, the billboards and Art Nouveau advertisements along the gaslight streets. They touted all manner of goods from all over the world. It bespoke the decadent indulgence that made this society soft.
    At least that’s what his Prussian schoolmasters said. On the other hand, advertising seemed a sign of prosperity. It wasn’t so much that it was banned behind the Black Iron Curtain, just that there was little to advertise and not a lot in the way of disposable income.
    Here, though, the merchants had to compete for all the disposable income these people had, which they spent on everything from French cigarettes to motorcycles imported from the Confederacy.
    But what Deitel noticed as they “moseyed” along was what was missing from this place. It was something he hadn’t realized he’d come to expect as the norm until he first arrived in Rio, where it, too, was missing. It was an all-pervasive, chronic sense of fear and anxiety. People here didn’t walk at a hurried pace, eyes downcast. There were no police—secret or otherwise—checking papers. No watchtowers. People greeted one another on the street and they smiled. They did not march quietly and quickly to their destination. They strode. They meandered. They looked one another in the eye. They claimed their own space.
    It took a second for Deitel to realize Rucker was speaking.
    â€œI was saying, it was nothing personal. Lysander hears stories like yours more often than you’d reckon. Anytime someone wants you to do something you wouldn’t normally do, they always bring up the end of the world or wave some other bloody shirt,” Rucker said. “Heard that back before the Great War your own folks were telling stories to the Union States about Frenchmen bayoneting babies or some damn thing. When someone waves the bloody shirt, you have to do your due diligence. Caveat emptor.”
    Deitel nodded. That seemed reasonable. “Ja.”
    â€œPlus, there’s plausibility. You don’t exactly strike me as the intelligence type. No offense.”
    â€œVas?” Deitel said with an insulted tone, not realizing he’d slipped into his native tongue.
    â€œIntelli gence . Not intelli gent .”
    â€œHerr Rucker, I resent the impli—”
    â€œOh, don’t get your knockwurst in a knot, Wilhelm.”
    â€œKurt.”
    â€œRight. It’s just, from what I hear around the campfire, Himmler’s been shoveling out more disinformation than Goebbels does horse apples every week on the radio. Planting stories all over. Who’s to say he’s not trying a different tack here, sending us someone who doesn’t even know who’s pulling the strings, or getting us looking at the left hand while the right hand is up to no good?”
    This, too, was a reasonable surmise, Deitel thought, in the unreasonable and Byzantine world of spycraft.
    â€œAnd that’s why, Doc, I say you don’t strike me as the intelligence type. There’s no hardness to you.”
    Deitel didn’t argue.
    â€œYou’re pale-ish.”
    Well, yes.
    â€œYou have soft hands.”
    Deitel looked at his hands.
    â€œYou’re powerful fussy. You’re—”
    â€œEnough,” Deitel said. “I am aware of my appearance.”
    â€œWhat I mean is you seem bookwise and range blind. Which, you being a doctor, isn’t surprising. You may not even know if