The Female of the Species by Lionel Shriver Read Free Book Online

if you’ll be disappointed or not. Whose side were you on?”
    Charles considered, leaning farther back in his chair and setting his boots up on the railing. “Adolf isn’t my style. I don’t like the way he moves, know what I mean? The guy’s too excitable.”
    “And maybe you didn’t like like the way his uniform was tailored.”
    “Actually,” said Charles, looking over at her with his black eyes gleaming quietly under the looming ridge of his brow, “the tie—with the shirt buttoned all the way up to the neck—I prefer a dictator with an open collar.”
    “Clearly,” said Gray. Charles’s own shirt was unbuttoned to the middle of his chest, where the hair was thick and black like his eyes, and gleamed just as defiantly in the lantern light, with drops of honey wine.
    “You did use the past tense,” Charles observed.
    “Adolf isn’t that excitable anymore.”
    “And Benito? Hirohito?” Gray shook her head. Charles shrugged. “Just as well. Me, I’m a Napoleon man.”
    “Why’s that?”
    “Those losers wouldn’t know what to do with a joint once they’d got hold of it. Bonaparte had plans. I liked his projects. But that slouch Speer built some nasty, hulking places. What a no-talent. Everything he put together looked like a goddamned morgue.”
    Charles pulled out a packet and rolled himself a cigarette in a leaf, quickly and expertly into a long, tight spleef. “Tobacco ran out first week,” he explained. “But I found a weed—sweet, but with an edge to it. Wasn’t common, though, so I’ve got the flock growing some over there. Doing pretty well, too. They dry it and crush it and wrap it up in packets. I miss my tins of Prince Albert, but what can you do?” Charles lit up with the lamp, then exhaled in a long, slow whistle. “The laymen aren’t supposed to smoke any, but they do. I’ll let them get away with it, as long as it doesn’t get out of hand. Catch one occasionally and make an example. See, they think this stuff gives them knowledge. Actually, it doesn’t even get you doped up.” Charles took another hit. “Besides,” he said with a smile, “it suits me if they keep looking for knowing with smoke.”
    “So you have them growing weeds instead of crops they could eat.”
    Charles rolled his eyes. “Let’s not talk about agriculture. Ilike you better as the voice of the free world than as an anthropologist. So,” said Charles, leaning back with an imperial air, “did Franklin D. string our boy Adolf from the top of the Washington Monument?”
    “Roosevelt is dead. Hitler killed himself. —This is like Reader’s Digest Condensed World Wars ,” said Gray with frustration.
    “Go on.”
    Gray decided to save the atomic bomb for later.
    Then she realized she could leave it out altogether if she felt like it. She could even have told Charles that Hitler now ruled Eurasia, the United States, and South America, and then this would be the truth in Toroto. It was a curious little moment of power.
    “A number of Nazis are on trial right now in Nuremberg for war crimes,” she continued, thinking it was a little late in the day for inventing a whole new ending to an awfully big story.
    “On trial ?”
    “Why not?”
    “Seems pretty feeble is all. Why not shoot the guys and be done with it?”
    “Out of respect for legal process. To reinstitute order.”
    “Come on. Laws are just to give you an excuse for shooting somebody when you were going to shoot them anyway.”
    “That’s ridiculous,” said Gray.
    “Nope. I know about laws. I make them.”
    “Is there anything you don’t know about?”
    “Not that I know about.” He added, “Except. I don’t know about you.”
    Whenever he turned the conversation to her, Gray got inexplicably nervous. They sat in silence again.
    “Hitler—” she ventured.
    “Hmm?”
    “He killed six million Jews.”
    Charles looked up. “No shit,” he said noncommittally.
    “Not in battles. In factories.”
    “Huh,” said