A little boy in rags flashed by. “Running dog!” he squealed at Liu Han, and vanished into the crowd before she got a good look at his face. His mocking laughter was all she could report to the scaly devils, assuming she was foolish enough to bother.
The baby kicked her again. How was he supposed to grow up when everyone down to street urchins scorned his mother so? The easy tears of pregnancy filled her eyes, spilled down her cheeks.
She started back toward the house she’d shared with Bobby Fiore. Though it was a house finer than the one she’d had back in her own village, it seemed as empty as the gleaming metal chamber in which the little scaly devils had imprisoned her on their plane that never came down. The resemblance didn’t end there, either. Like that metal chamber, it wasn’t a home in any proper sense of the word, but a cage where the little devils kept her while they studied her.
Suddenly she had had all the study she could stand. Maybe no scaly devils waited back at the house right now to take photographs of her and touch her in intimate places and ask her questions that were none of their business and talk among themselves with their hisses and pops and squeaks as if she had no more mind of her own than the kang that kept her warm at night. But so what? If they weren’t there now, they would be later today or tomorrow or the day after that.
Back in her village, the Kuomintang was strong; even thinking about being a Communist was dangerous, though Communist armies had done more than most in fighting the Japanese. Bobby Fiore hadn’t had any use for the Reds, either, but he’d willingly gone with them to take a poke at the scaly devils. She hoped he still lived; even if he was a foreign devil, he was a good man—better to get along with than her Chinese husband had been.
If the Communists had fought the Japanese, if Bobby Fiore had gone with them to raid the little devils … they were likely to be doing more against the devils than anyone else. “I owe them too much to let them do whatever they want with me forever,” Liu Han muttered.
Instead of going on to her house, she turned around and went back to the stall of the fellow who sold chickens and chicken-feather fans. He was haggling with a skinny man over the price of a couple of chicken feet. When the skinny man sullenly paid his price and went away, he gave Liu Han an unfriendly look. “What are you doing here? I thought I told you to go away.”
“You did,” she said, “and I will, if that’s what you really want. But if you and your friends“—she did not name them out loud—”are interested in knowing more about the little scaly devils who come to my hut, you’ll ask me to stay.”
The poultry seller’s expression did not change. “You’ll have to earn our trust, show you’re telling the truth,” he said, his voice still hostile. But he did not yell for Liu Han to leave.
“I can do that,” she said. “I will.”
“Maybe we’ll talk, then,” he said, and smiled for the first time.
XVI
Moishe Russie paced back and forth in his cell. It could have been worse; he could have been in a Nazi prison. They would have had special fun with him because he was a Jew. To the Lizards, he was just another prisoner, to be kept on ice like a bream until they figured out exactly what they wanted to do with him—or to him.
He supposed he should thank God they weren’t often in a hurry. They’d interrogated him after he was caught. On the whole, he’d spoken freely. He didn’t know many names, so he couldn’t incriminate most of the people who’d helped him—and he figured they were smart enough not to stay in any one place too long, either.
The Lizards hadn’t bothered questioning him lately. They just held him, fed him (at least as much as he’d been eating while he was free), and left him to fight boredom as best he could. They didn’t put prisoners in the cells to either side of his or across from it. Even if they had, neither the Lizard guards nor their Polish and Jewish flunkies allowed much chatter.
The Lizard guards ignored him as long as he didn’t cause trouble. The Poles and Jews who served them still thought he was a child molester and a murderer. “I hope they cut your balls off one at a time before they hang you,” a Pole said. He’d given up answering back. They didn’t believe him, anyhow.
Some blankets, a bucket of water and a tin cup, another bucket for slops—such were his worldly goods. He wished he had a book. He didn’t care what it was; he would have devoured a manual on procedures for inspecting light bulbs. As things were, he stood, he sat, he paced, he yawned. He yawned a lot.
A Polish guard stopped in front of the cell. He shifted the club he carried from right hand to left so he could take a key out of his pocket. “On your feet, you,” he growled. “They got more questions for you, or maybe they’re just gonna chop you up to see how you got to be the kind of filthy thing you are.”
As Russie got up, he remembered there were worse things than boredom. Interrogation was one of them, not so much for what the Lizards did as for the never-ending terror of what they might do.
Crash! Something hit the side of the prison like a bomb. At first, as he staggered and clapped hands to ears, Moishe thought that was just what it was, that the Germans had landed one of their rockets right in the middle of Lodz.
Then another crash came, hard on the heels of the first. It flung the Pole headlong against the bars of Russie’s cell. The guard went down, stunned and bleeding from the nose. The key flew from his hand. In a spy story, Moishe thought, it would have had the consideration to land in his cell so he could grab it and escape. Instead, it bounced down the hall, impossibly far out of reach.
Still another crash—this one knocked Russie off his feet and showed daylight through a hole in the far wall. As he curled up into a frightened ball, he wondered what the devil was going on. The Nazis couldn’t have fired three rocket bombs so fast … could they? Or was it artillery? How could they have brought artillery through Lizard-held territory to shell Lodz?
His ears rang, but not so much that he couldn’t hear the nasty chatter of gunfire. A Lizard ran down the hall, carrying one of his kind’s wicked little automatic rifles. He fired out through the hole the shells had made in the wall. Whoever was outside returned fire. The Lizard reeled back, red, red blood spurting from several wounds.
Someone—a human—burst in through the hole. Another Lizard came running up. The man cut him down; he had a submachine gun that at close range was as lethal as anything the aliens used. More men rushed in behind the first. One of them shouted, “Russie!”
“Here!” Moishe yelled. He uncoiled and scrambled to his feet, hope suddenly overpowering fright.
The fellow who’d called his name spoke in oddly accented Yiddish: “Stand back, cousin. I’m going to blow the lock off your door.”
Spy stories came in handy after all. Russie pointed to the floor of the corridor. “No need. There’s the key. This mamzer”—he pointed to the unconscious Pole—“was about to take me away for more questions.”
“Oy. Wouldn’t that have been a balls-up?” The last wasn’t in Yiddish; Moishe wasn’t sure what language it was in. He had precious little time to wonder; the man grabbed the key, turned it in the lock. He yanked the door open. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”
Moishe needed no further urging. Alarms were clanging somewhere, off in the distance; power here seemed to be out. As he ran toward the hole in the outer wall, he asked, “Who are you, anyway?”
“I’m a cousin of yours from England. David Goldfarb’s my name. Now cut the talk, will you?”
Moishe obediently cut the talk. Bullets started flying again; he ran even harder than he had before. Behind him, somebody screamed. The medical student part of him wanted to go back and help. The rest made him keep running—out through the hole, out through the open space around the prison, out through a gap in the razor wire, out through the screaming, gaping people in the street.
“There are machine guns on the roof,” he gasped. “Why aren’t they shooting at us?”
“Snipers,” his cousin answered. “Good ones. Shut up. Keep ru
nning. We aren’t out of this mess yet.”
Russie kept running. Then, abruptly, his companions, those who survived, threw away their weapons as they rounded a corner. When they rounded another corner, they stopped running. David Goldfarb grinned. “Now we’re just ordinary people—you see?”
“I see,” Moishe answered—and, once it was pointed out to him, he did.
“It won’t last,” said one of the gunmen who’d been with Goldfarb. “They’ll turn this town inside out looking for us. Somebody kills a Lizard, they get nasty about that.” His teeth showed white through tangled brown beard.
“Which means it’s a good idea to get away from the net before they go fishing,” Goldfarb said. “Cousin Moishe, we’re going to take you back to England.”
“Without Rivka and Reuven, I won’t go.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Russie realized how selfish and boorish they sounded. These men had risked their lives to save him; their comrades had died. Who was he to set conditions on what they did? But he didn’t apologize, because however selfish what he’d said sounded, he also realized he’d meant it.
He waited for Goldfarb to scream at him, and for the other man—who looked tough enough for anything, no matter how desperate—to pound him senseless and then do whatever he chose. Instead they just kept walking along, easygoing, as if he’d made a remark about the weather. Goldfarb said, “That’s taken care of. They’ll be waiting for us along the way.”
“That’s—wonderful,” Moishe said dazedly. Too much was happening too fast for him to take it all in. He let his cousin and the other fighter lead him through the streets of Lodz while he tried to adjust to the heady joys of freedom. It made him giddy, as if he’d gulped down a couple of shots of plum brandy on an empty stomach.
A tattered poster with his face on it peered down from a wall. He rubbed his chin. The Lizards hadn’t let him use a razor, so his beard was coming back. It wasn’t as long as he’d worn it before, but pretty soon he’d look like his pictures again.
“Don’t worry about it,” Goldfarb said when he fretted out loud. “Once we get you out of town, we’ll take care of things like that.”
“How will you get me out?” Moishe asked.
“Don’t worry about it,” Goldfarb repeated.
His nameless friend laughed and said, “Asking a Jew not to worry is like asking the sun not to rise. You can ask all you like, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get what you ask for.” That was apt enough to make Moishe laugh, too.
Before long, they walked into a block of flats. Lodz was already beginning to boil around them. The sound of explosions and gunfire carried a long way; rumor rippled out from around the prison almost as fast as the racket. The two women who went into the building just behind Moishe and his companions were already wondering who had escaped. If only they knew, he thought dizzily.
They climbed stairs. The fellow without a name rapped on a door—one, two, one again. “Spy stuff,” David Goldfarb muttered. The other fellow poked him in the ribs with an elbow, hard enough to make him give back a pace.
The door opened. “Come in, come in.” The skinny little bald man who greeted them looked like a tailor, but tailors did not commonly carry submachine guns. He looked them over, lowered the weapon. “Just you three? Where are the rest?”
“Just us,” Goldfarb answered. “A couple scattered off to the other hidey-holes, a couple others won’t be going anywhere any more. About what we figured.” The casual way he said that chilled Russie. His cousin went on, “We’re not hanging around here, either, you know. You have what we need?”
“You need to ask?” With a scornful sniff the bald little man pointed to bundles on the couch. “There—change your clothes.”
“Clothes are only part of it,” Goldfarb’s tough-looking friend said. “The rest is taken care of, too?”
“The rest is taken care of.” The bald fellow sniffed again, this time angrily. “We wouldn’t be good for much if it weren’t, would we?”
“Who knows what we’re good for?” the nameless fighter answered, but he shrugged off his shabby wool jacket and started unbuttoning his shirt. Moishe had no jacket to shrug off. He shed with a long sigh of relief the clothes he’d been wearing since he was captured. Their replacements didn’t fit as well, but so what? They were clean.
“Good thing the Lizards haven’t figured out prison uniforms; they’d have made it harder for us to do a vanishing act with you,” Goldfarb said as he, too, changed. His Yiddish was plenty fluent, but full of odd turns of phrase he didn’t seem to notice, as if he was using it to express ideas that came first in English. He probably was.
“You’re staying here, right, Shmuel?” asked the nondescript little Jew who kept the flat. The nameless fighter, now nameless no more, nodded. So did the little fellow, who turned to Moishe and Goldfarb. He handed each of them a thin rectangle of some shiny stuff, about the size of a playing card. Moishe looked at his. A picture that vaguely resembled him looked back from it. The card gave details of a life he’d never led. The bald little man said, “Don’t pull these out unless you have to. With luck, you’ll be away before they do a proper job of cordoning off the city.”
“And without luck, we’ll buy a plot,” Goldfarb said, holding up his own card. “This bloke looks more like Goebbels than he does like me.”
“Best we could do,” the bald Jew said with a shrug. “That’s why you don’t want to wave it around unless somebody asks for it. But if somebody does, he probably won’t look at it; he’ll feed it into a Lizard machine—and it shows you’ve been authorized for the past two weeks to leave Lodz on a buying trip.” He clucked mournfully. “Cost us plenty to pay off a Pole who works for the Lizards to make these for us, and he’d only take the best.”
“Gold?” Russie asked.
“Worse,” the fellow answered. “Tobacco. Gold at least stays in circulation. Tobacco, you smoke it and it’s gone.”
“Tobacco.” Goldfarb sounded even more mournful than the bald Jew had. “What I wouldn’t give for a fag. It’s been a bloody long time.”
Russie didn’t care one way or the other about tobacco. He’d never got the habit, and his medical studies made him pretty sure it wasn’t good for you. But it did show how far the underground had gone to rescue him. That warmed him, especially since some people thought him a traitor for broadcasting for the Lizards. He said, “Thank you more than I know how to tell you. I—”
Shmuel cut him off: “Listen, you’d better get out of here. You want to thank us, broadcast from England.”
“He’s right,” David Goldfarb said. “Come on, cousin. Standing around chattering doesn’t up the chances of our living to collect an old-age pension—not that we’re in serious danger of it at any rate, things being as they are.”
Out of the flat, out of the block of flats, they went. As they walked north, they listened to rumors swirl around them: “All the prisoners free—” “The Nazis did it. My aunt saw a man in a German helmet—” “Half the Lizards in Lodz killed, I heard. My wife’s brother says—”
“By tomorrow, they’ll be saying the Lizards dropped an atomic bomb on this place,” Goldfarb remarked dryly.
“Did you hear what he said?” someone going the other way exclaimed. “They used an atomic bomb to blow up the prison.” Russie and Goldfarb looked at each other, shook their heads, and started to laugh.
Less than an hour had gone by since the first blast (piat, Goldfarb called it, which sounded more Polish than either Yiddish or English) hit the prison, but the streets heading out of the ghetto already had checkpoints on them; the Lizards and their human henchmen, Order Service thugs and Polish bullies, had wasted not a moment. Some people took one look and decided they didn’t need to leave after all; others queued up to show they had the right.
Moishe started to get into a line that led up to a couple of Poles. Goldfarb pulled him out of it. “No, no,” he said loudly. “Come on over here. This line is much shorter.”
Of cour
se that line was much shorter: at its head stood three Lizards. Nobody in his right mind wanted to trust his fate to them when human beings were around. Humans might be thugs, but at least they were your own kind of thugs. But Moishe couldn’t drag Goldfarb back from the line he’d chosen without making a scene, and he didn’t dare do that. Convinced his cousin was leading them to their doom, he took his place in the queue that led up to the aliens.
Sure enough, the wait to get to them was short. A Lizard turned one eye turret toward Russie, the other toward Goldfarb. “You is?” he asked in bad Yiddish. He repeated the question in worse Polish.
“Adam Zilverstajn,” Goldfarb answered at once, using the name on his new, forged identity card.
“Felix Kirshbojm,” Moishe said more hesitantly.
He waited for alarms to go off, for guns to be pointed and maybe fired. But the Lizard just stuck out his hand and said, “Card.” Again, Goldfarb promptly surrendered his. Again, Moishe paused almost long enough to draw suspicion to himself before he handed his over.
The Lizard fed Goldfarb’s card into a slot on a square metal box that sat on a table next to him. The box gulped it down as if alive. While still collaborating with the Lizards, Russie had seen enough of their astonishing gadgetry to wonder if perhaps that wasn’t so. It spat out Goldfarb’s phony card. The Lizard looked at a display—like a miniature movie screen, Moishe thought—it held in its hand. “You go on business? You be back—seven days?” it said as it returned the card to Moishe’s cousin.
“That’s right,” Goldfarb agreed.
In the Balance & Tilting the Balance Page 125