He was altogether alone and on his own. He counted up his assets: he had one grenade, a pistol with an uncertain number of cartridges, and a tiny smattering of Chinese. It didn’t seem like enough.
“Mild bloody climate,” George Bagnall muttered, stamping snow from his boots and brushing it from his shoulders. “Sod Jerome bloody Jones.”
“Not so bad in here,” Ken Embry answered. “Shut the door. You’re letting in the bloody spring.”
“Right.” Bagnall slammed the door with a satisfying crash. He promptly started to sweat, and divested himself of fur cap and leather-and-fur flying suit. As far as he could tell, the Soviet Union in general and Pskov in particular had only two temperatures, too cold and too hot. The wood-burning stove in the corner of the house he and Embry had been assigned was more than capable of keeping it warm: too much more than capable. But none of the windows opened (the notion seemed alien to the Russian mind), and if you let the fire go out, you were facing chilblains again within the hour.
“Want some tea?” Embry asked, pointing to a dented samovar that added its quotient of warmth to the close, tropical air.
“Real tea, by God?” Bagnall demanded eagerly.
“Not likely,” the pilot answered with a sneer. “Same sort of leaves and roots and muck the Bolshies are drinking these days. No milk, either, and no cups, same as always.” The Russians drank tea—and their ersatz, too—from glasses, and used sugar but no milk. Considering that at the moment there was no milk in Pskov, save from nursing mothers and a few officers’ closely guarded cows and goats, the Englishmen had had to get used to it that way, too. Bagnall consoled himself by thinking he was less likely to catch tuberculosis without milk in his tea; the Reds didn’t fret over attestation.
He poured himself a glass of the murky brown brew, stirred in sugar (plenty of beets around Pskov), and tasted. “I’ve had worse,” he admitted. “Where’d you come by it?”
“Bought it from a babushka,” Embry answered. “God knows where she got it—probably grew the herbs herself, then fixed them up to sell. Not what you’d call perfect communism, but then not much here seems to be.”
“No, hardly,” Bagnall agreed. “I wonder if it has to do with the Germans’ having been here most of a year before the Lizards arrived.”
“I have my doubts,” Embry said. “From all I’ve seen, my guess is that the Russians did what they had to do for the collective farm and the factory and then turned around and did all they could for themselves.”
“Mm—you’re likely right.” Even after some weeks in Pskov, Bagnall did not know what to make of the Russians. He admired their courage and resilience. About everything else he had doubts. Had Englishmen so tamely submitted to those above them, no one would ever have questioned the divine right of kings. Only their resilience had let the Russians survive the string of incompetents and tyrants who ruled them.
“And what is the news of the day?” Embry asked.
“I was just thinking I find Russians difficult to fathom,” Bagnall said, “but in one regard they are perfectly comprehensible: they still hate the Germans. And, I assure you, the sentiment is most generously returned.”
Ken Embry rolled his eyes. “Oh, God, what now?”
“Here, wait, let me get some more of this. It isn’t tea, but it isn’t too bad, either.” Bagnall poured his glass full, sipped, and went on, “One of the things we shall have to do, on the unlikely assumption the ground ever unthaws, is build miles upon miles of antitank ditches. Let me merely state that where to site these ditches, the personnel to excavate them, and the troops to defend them once dug are matters which remain in dispute.”
“Do you care to give me the particulars?” Embry asked, with an expression that said he wasn’t particularly eager to hear them but felt he should. Bagnall understood that expression; he suspected his own matched it.
He said, “General Chill is willing to have his Wehrmacht lads do some of the digging, but feels the rest should fall on the shoulders of what he terms the ‘otherwise useless population.’ Typical German tact there, what?”
“I am certain his Soviet colleagues received that in the spirit in which it was intended,” Embry said.
“No doubt,” Bagnall said dryly. “They were also particularly pleased with his proposal that Russian soldiers and partisans be those particularly concerned with stopping the Lizards’ tanks once they traverse said ditches.”
“I can see that they would be. How generous of the distinguished German officer to offer his Soviet allies the opportunity to commit suicide under such distinguished circumstances.”
“If you stick that tongue any farther into your cheek, you’re liable to bite it off,” Bagnall said. As long as he’d known Embry, he and the pilot had dueled to see which of them could wield the twin scalpels of irony and understatement more effectively. He feared Embry had just taken the lead on points.
The pilot asked, “And why has General Chill been so extraordinarily gracious?”
“His justification is that the Nazis, with their heavier weapons, would be better used as a reserve to meet any possible Lizard breakthroughs.”
“Oh,” Embry said in a slightly different tone.
“Just what I thought,” Bagnall answered. The rationale made just enough military sense to force one to wonder whether Chill’s plan shouldn’t be carried out as proposed. The flight engineer added, “Germans are bloody good at coming up with plausible reasons for things that are to their advantage.”
“To their short-term advantage,” Embry amended. “Setting the Russians up to be massacred will not endear Chill to them.”
Bagnall snorted. “Somehow I doubt that will cause him to lose any great quantity of sleep. He wants to keep his own forces intact first.”
“He also wants to hold Pskov,” Embry said. “He won’t do that without the Russians’ help—nor will they, without his. A lovely muddle, wouldn’t you say?”
“If you want my opinion, it would be even lovelier if viewed from a distance—say from a London pub—than when we’re caught in the middle of it.”
“Something to that,” Embry sighed. “Real springtime … leaves … flowers … birds … a pint pot of best bitter … perhaps even Scotch.”
The pain of longing pierced Bagnall like a stiletto. He feared he’d never see England or its loveliness again. As for Scotch … well, the spirit the Russians brewed from potatoes would warm a man, or send him to sleep if he drank enough of it, but it didn’t taste like anything. He’d also heard that drinking neutral spirits kept you from feeling the effects the next morning. He shook his head. He’d shot that theory right behind the ear more often than he cared to remember.
Embry said, “Speaking of getting stuck in the middle, is there more talk of turning us into infantrymen again?”
Bagnall didn’t blame him for sounding anxious; their one foray against the Lizard outpost south of Pskov had been plenty to put the flight engineer off the life of a foot soldier forever. The choice, unfortunately, did not rest with him. He said, “They didn’t say anything about that when I was in the Krom. But then, they might not have wanted to, either.”
“For fear we’d bugger off, you mean?” Embry said. Bagnall nodded. The pilot went on, “Nothing I’d like better. Only—where would we go?”
It was a good question. The short answer, unfortunately for both of them, was nowhere, not with the woods full of partisan bands, German patrols, and just plain bandits. Next to some of them, the prospect of facing the Lizards seemed less disastrous. The Lizards wouldn’t do anything worse than killing you. Bagnall said, “You don’t really believe those stories about the cannibals in the forest, do you?”
“Let’s just say it’s something I’d sooner not find out by experiment.”
“Too right there.”
Before Bagnall could go on, someone knocked at the door. The plaintive voice that came through the thick boards was London-accented: “Can you let me in? I’m fair frozen.”
“Radarman Jones!” Bagnall threw the door wide. Jerome Jones came in. Bagnall quickly shut the door after him, and waved him over to the samovar. “Drink some of that. It’s fairly good.”
“Where’s the beautiful Tatiana?” Ken Embry asked Jones as he poured himself a glass of herb tea. Embry sounded jealous. Bagnall didn’t blame him. Somehow Jones had managed to connect with a Russian sniper who was even more decorative than she was deadly.
“She’s off trying to kill things, I suppose,” the radarman answered. He sipped the tea, made a face. “Maybe not bad, but it could be better.”
“Being all alone, then, you deigned to honor us with a visit, eh?” Bagnall said.
“Oh, bloody hell,” Jones muttered, then hastily added, “sir.” His position in Pskov was, to put it mildly, irregular. While Bagnall and Embry were both officers and he very much from the other ranks, he had the specialization in which the Russians—and the Nazis—were interested.
Ken Embry said, “It’s all right, Jones. We know they treat you like a field marshal everywhere else in town. Decent of you to remember your military manners around low cannon-fodder types like ourselves.”
The radarman winced. Even Bagnall, used to such sarcastic sallies, had trouble being sure how much was intended as wit and how much fired with intent to wound. A spell as an infantryman in an attack that got crushed was enough to jaundice anyone’s outlook.
Giving the pilot the benefit of the doubt, Bagnall said, “Don’t let him faze you, Jones. Our mission was to get you here, and that we’ve done. What came afterwards, the Lanc getting bombed—well, nichevo.”
“There’s a useful word, eh, sir?” Jones said, anxious to change the subject. “Can’t be helped, nothing to be done about it—that the Russians pack it all into one word says a lot about them, I think.”
“Yes, and not all of it good, either,” Embry said, evidently willing to drop his bitterness. “These people have spent their entire history being stepped on. Tsars, commissars, what have you—it’d be a miracle indeed if that didn’t show in the language.”
“Shall we put Mr. Jones’ knowledge of Russian to more practical use?” Bagnall said. Without waiting for a reply from Embry, he asked the radarman, “What do you hear, going up and down in the city?”
“The name is Jones, sir, as you noted, not Job,” Jones replied with a grin which rapidly slipped. “People are hungry, people are battered. They don’t love the Germans or the Bolsheviks. If they thought the Lizards would feed them and leave them alone otherwise, a lot would just as soon see them as top dogs.”
“If I’d stayed safe at home in England, I’d have trouble imagining that,” Bagnall said. Of course, flying bomber missions first against the Germans and then against the Lizards had been anything but safe, but Jones and Embry both nodded, understanding what he meant. He went on, “After the Jews rose for the Lizards and against the Nazis, I thought they were the blackest traitors in the history of the world—until their story started coming out. If a tenth part of what they say is true, Germany has more blood on her hands than a thousand years of Hitler’s Reich can wash away.”
“And they and we are allies,” Embry said heavily.
“And they and we are allies, yes,” Bagnall agreed. “And so are they and the Russians, and so are we and the Russians, and Stalin, by all that’s said, matches Hitler for butchery any day of the week, even if he’s not so showy about it.”
“It’s a rum old world,” Embry said.
Not far away, somebody fired a rifle in the street. Somebody else fired another one, with a report that sounded different: one weapon was German, the other Soviet. Another handful of shots followed, then silence. Bagnall waited tensely, wondering if the shooting would start up again. That would be all anyone needed—war inside Pskov between alleged allies to accompany war outside against foes. But silence held for a couple of minutes.
Then the shooting started again, worse than ever—one of those new German machine guns, the ones with the terrifyingly high cyclic rate that made them sound even more dreadful than they really were, added to the chaos. Several Russian submachine guns gave answer. Through the raucous racket of gunfire came hoarse screams. Bagnall couldn’t tell if they were Russian or German.
“Oh, bloody hell,” Jerome Jones said.
Embry took hold of one end of a chest of drawers and started pushing it toward the front door, saying, “Best we put up something of a barricade, wouldn’t you say?”
Bagnall didn’t say anything, but did put his back into helping the pilot manhandle the heavy wooden chest into place. Then he picked up a chair and, grunting, set it on top of the low chest. Together, he and Embry leaned a table against the window by the doorway.
“Jones, you have your pistol with you?” Bagnall asked, then answered himself: “Yes, I see you do. Good.” He went into the bedroom and returned with his Mauser, Ken Embry’s, and as much ammunition as they had left from the raid on the Lizard base. “I hope we shan’t have to use these, but—”
“Quite,” Embry said. He glanced over at Jones. “No offense, old man, but I’d sooner Tatiana were here than you. She’d be likelier to keep us safe.”
“No offense taken, sir,” the radarman answered. “I’d sooner Tatiana were here, too. Given any choice at all, I’d sooner be back in Dover, or better yet, London.”
Since Bagnall had had almost the same thought not long before, he could only nod. Embry went into the bedroom. He came back with their pair of coal-scuttle helmets. “I don’t know whether we ought to put these on. They’ll keep out splinters or glancing bullets, but they’ll also make the Russians take us for Jerries, which might prove less than ideal under the circumstances.”
A random bullet smashed through the wooden front wall, just missed Jones and Bagnall, and buried itself in plaster next to the samovar. “I’ll wear a helmet,” Bagnall said. “The Russians may ask questions about who we are and whose side we’re on, but their ammunition doesn’t.”
He heard the pop of a mortar and, a moment later, the much louder bang as its bomb went off. He found cover behind another chair and aimed his rifle at the doorway. “The Lizards may not need to take Pskov,” he said. “Seems to me more as if the Russians and Germans want to give it to them.”
A tracked Lizard troop carrier rattled down the wet dirt road, splattering mud in all directions. Some of it splashed Mordechai Anielewicz as he trudged along on the soft shoulder. The Lizards in the tracked carrier took no special notice of him: to them, he was just another gun-toting Big Ugly on the move.
His lips skinned back from his teeth in a humorless smile. The motion set his whole face itching. Moishe Russie, when he fled the Lizards, had been able to get rid of his beard in one fell swoop. Growing one took longer and, as far as Anielewicz was concerned, was a lot less comfortable.
Also uncomfortable was the Gewehr 98 slung across his back. He valued the rifle all the same: he’d promised himself Zolraag and his minions would not take him alive, and it was the means by which he could keep that promise. He’d also had the sense to take German marching boots a size too large when the time came to disappear from Warsaw. His feet had swollen in them, yes, but he could still take them off and put them on without trouble.
He’d sent Russie west to Lodz. Now that it was his turn to escape the Lizards, he was walking south and east, into the part of Poland the Russians had occupied in 1939 before the Germans ran them out less than two years later. His chuckle sounded anything but mirthful. “Sooner or later, the people who used to work with the Lizards are going to be scattered all over the countryside,” he said, and waved his arms to show what he meant. The motion startled a magpie, which flew away, chattering angrily.
He sympathized with the bird. Till he’d moved suddenly, it had taken him as harmless. He’d thought the same about the Lizards, or at least that they were a better bargain than the Nazis. For the Jews of Poland, he still thought them a better bargain than the Nazis; had they not come, Poland would have been Judenfre
i—without Jews—by now.
But he was coming to see that the world was a wider place than Poland. The Lizards might not be out to exterminate mankind, as the Nazis aimed to exterminate Polish Jewry, but they intended to do to humanity as the Germans had done to the Poles themselves: turn them into hewers of wood and drawers of water forever. Anielewicz couldn’t stomach that.
A Pole came up the road, heading toward Warsaw with a wheelbarrow full of turnips. The wheel of the wheelbarrow got stuck in a patch the Lizards’ troop carrier had chewed to slime. Anielewicz helped the Pole free it from the clinging ooze. It was quite a fight; the wheelbarrow seemed to think it ought to be a submarine.
Finally, though, the two men wrestled it up onto firmer ground. “God and the Black Virgin of Czestochowa, that was tough,” the Pole said, shedding his tweed cap so he could wipe his forehead with a frayed sleeve. “Thank you, friend.”
“Any time,” Anielewicz answered. Back before the war, he’d been much more fluent in Polish than Yiddish. He’d thought himself secular then, not so much denying his Judaism as ignoring it, until the Nazis showed him it couldn’t be ignored. “Those are good fat turnips you’ve got there.”
“Take a couple for yourself. You hadn’t been here, I might have lost the whole load,” the fellow said. His grin showed a couple of missing front teeth. “Besides, you’ve got a rifle. How am I supposed to stop you?”
“I don’t steal,” Anielewicz answered. Not now I don’t, anyway. I’m not starving at the moment. When the Nazis ran the Warsaw ghetto, though…
The Pole’s grin got wider. “Armija Krajowa fighter, are you?” It was a reasonable guess; Anielewicz’s looks were more Polish than Jewish, too. Without waiting for an answer, the man went on, “Better I should give you the turnips than sell ’em to the damned Yids in Warsaw, anyhow, eh?”
In the Balance & Tilting the Balance Page 106