In the Balance & Tilting the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  “So, what are you going to do about getting those cursed creatures out of there?” Marko Petrovic asked in fluent if accented German. The Croatian captain’s khaki uniform contrasted with the field gray the Germans wore. Even though Petrovic wore a uniform, being around him made Jäger nervous—he seemed more bandit chief than officer. His thick black beard only added to the effect. It did not, however, completely conceal facial scars that made the one seaming Skorzeny’s cheek a mere scratch by comparison.

  Skorzeny turned to the Croat and said, “Patience, my friend. We want to do the job properly, not just quickly.”

  Petrovic scowled. His beard and scars made that scowl fearsome, but the look in his eye chilled Jäger more. To Petrovic, it wasn’t just a military problem; he took it personally. That would make him a bold fighter, but a heedless one: Jäger performed the evaluation as automatically as he breathed.

  “What’s the complication?” the Croat demanded. “We’re in easy shelling range of the place now. We move in some artillery, open up, and—”

  The idea of shelling a building that had stood since the start of the fourth century sickened Jäger, but that wasn’t why he shook his head. “Artillery wouldn’t root them all out, Captain, and it would give them an excuse to expand their perimeter to take in these hills. They’re staying in town; I’d just as soon keep them down there as long as they’re willing to sit quietly.”

  “You would not be bleating ‘patience’ if Split were a town in the Reich,” Petrovic said.

  He had a point; Hitler waxed apoplectic over German territory lost. Jäger was not about to admit that, though. He said, “We have a chance to drive them out, not just annoy them. I aim to make certain we don’t waste it.”

  Petrovic glowered—like a lot of the locals, he had a face that was made for glowering: long and bony, with heavy eyebrows and deep-set eyes—but subsided. Skorzeny swatted him on the back and said, “Don’t you worry. We’ll fix those miserable creatures for you.” He sounded breezy and altogether confident.

  If he convinced Petrovic, the Croat captain did a good job of hiding it. He said, “You Germans think you can do everything. You’d better be right this time, or—” He didn’t say or what, but walked off shaking his head.

  Jäger was glad he’d gone. “Some of these Croats are scary bastards,” he said in a low voice. Skorzeny nodded, and anyone who worried him enough for him to admit it was a very rugged customer indeed. Jäger went on, “We’d better get the Lizards out of there, because if we don’t, Ante Pavelic and the Ustashi will be just as happy in bed with them as with us, as long as the Lizards let them go on killing Serbs and Jews and Bosnians and—”

  “—all their other neighbors,” Skorzeny finished for him. He didn’t acknowledge that the Germans had done the same thing on a bigger scale all through the east. He couldn’t have been ignorant of that; he just deliberately didn’t think about it. Jäger had seen that with other German officers. He’d been the same way himself, until he saw too much for him to ignore. To him, a lot of his colleagues seemed willfully blind.

  Skorzeny pulled a flask off his belt, unstoppered it, took a healthy belt, and passed it to Jäger. It was vodka, made from potatoes that had died happy. Jäger drank, too. “Zhiveli,” he said, one of the few words of Serbo-Croatian he’d picked up.

  Skorzeny laughed. “That probably means something like ‘here’s hoping your sheep is a virgin,”’ he said, which made Jäger cough and choke. The SS man had another swig, then stowed the flask again. He glanced around with a skilled imitation of casual uninterest to make sure nobody but Jäger was in earshot, then murmured, “I picked up something interesting in town yesterday.”

  “Ah?” Jäger said.

  The SS colonel nodded. “You remember when I went into Besançon, I had the devil’s own time finding any Lizards to do business with, because one of their high mucky-mucks had gone through there and cleaned out a whole raft of the chaps who’d gotten themselves hooked on ginger?”

  “I remember your saying so, yes,” Jäger answered. “It didn’t seem to stop you.” He also remembered his own amazement and then awe as the bulky Skorzeny writhed his way out of a Lizard panzer several sizes too small for him.

  “That’s my job, not getting stopped,” Skorzeny said with a smug grin that twisted the scar on his cheek. “Turns out the name of that mucky-muck was Drefsab, or something like that. Half the Lizards in Besançon thought he was wonderful for doing such a good job of clearing out the ginger lickers; the other half hated him for doing such a good job.”

  “What about it?” Jäger said, then paused. “Wait a minute, let me guess—this Dref-whoever is down there in Split now?”

  “You’re clever, you know that?” The SS man eyed him half in annoyance at having his surprise spoiled, half in admiration. “I wasn’t stupid to bring you along here, either. That’s it exactly, Jäger: the very same Lizard.”

  “Coincidence?”

  “Anything is possible.” Skorzeny’s tone said he didn’t believe it for a minute. “But by what he did back in France, he’s got to be one of their top troubleshooters. And there aren’t any ginger lickers down there. The locals would be selling to them if there were, and the ten kilos I brought with me is gathering dust here in Klis. And if it’s not about ginger, what’s he doing down there?”

  “Dickering with the Croats?”

  Skorzeny rubbed his chin. “That makes more sense than anything I’ve come up with. The Lizards need to do some dickering, not just to get their toehold here but also because the Italians were occupying Split until they surrendered to the Lizards. Then the Croats threw ’em out. The scaly boys might be making a deal for Italy as well as for themselves. But it’s like a song that’s a little out of tune—it doesn’t seem quite right to me somehow.”

  Jäger was indignant at having his brainchild criticized. “Why not?”

  “What this Drefsab did in Besançon, that was police work, security work—call it whatever you like. But would you send a Gestapo man to negotiate a treaty?”

  Now Jäger looked around to make certain neither Captain Petrovic nor any of his merry men could overhear. “If I were negotiating with Ante Pavelic and his Croatian thugs, I just might.”

  Skorzeny threw back his head and bellowed laughter. A couple of riflemen in the khaki of the Independent State of Croatia glanced over to see what was so funny. Wheezing still, Skorzeny said, “Wicked man! I’ve told you before, you were wasted in panzers.”

  “You’ve told me lots of things. That doesn’t make them true,” Jäger said, which made the SS man give him a shot in the ribs with an elbow. He elbowed back, more to remind Skorzeny he couldn’t be pushed around than because he felt like fighting. Jäger gave away centimeters, kilograms, and nasty attitude in any scrap with him; he didn’t think Skorzeny knew what quit meant, either.

  “Here, dig out those plans again,” Skorzeny said. “I think I know what I want to do, but I’m not quite sure yet.” Jäger obediently dug. Skorzeny bent over the drawings, clucking like a mother hen. “I like these underground galleries. We can do things with them.”

  The halls to which he pointed lay below the southern part of Diocletian’s palace. “There used to be upper halls above them, too, with the same plan, but those are long gone,” Jäger said.

  “Then screw them.” Skorzeny didn’t care about archaeology, just military potential. “What I want to know is, what’s in these galleries?”

  “Back in Roman days, they used to be storerooms,” Jäger said. “I’m not so sure what’s in there now. We need to talk to our good and loyal Croatian allies.” He was proud of himself; that came out without a hint of irony.

  “Yes, indeed,” Skorzeny said, accepting the advice in the spirit in which it was given. “What I’m thinking is, maybe we can dig a tunnel from outside the wall into one of those galleries—”

  “Always making sure we don’t happen to tunnel into the Lizards’ barracks.”

  “That would make things m
ore complicated.” Skorzeny chuckled. “But if we can do that, we have our good and loyal allies make a nice, loud, showy attack on the walls, draw any Lizard who happens to be underground up to the top … and then we bring in some of our lads through the tunnel and up, and—what was that? The horse’s cock up the arse?”

  “Yes,” Jäger said. “I like that.” Then, like a proper devil’s advocate, he started picking holes in the plan: “Moving men and weapons into the city and into the place that houses the tunnel or at least somewhere close by it isn’t going to be easy. And we’ll need a lot of men. That’s a big palace down there, big enough for a church and a baptistry and a museum to fit inside, plus God knows what all else. The Lizards will have packed a lot of fighters into it.”

  “I’m not worried about the Lizards,” Skorzeny said. “If these Croats decide to hop into bed with them, though, that’ll nail our hides to the wall. We have to keep that from happening, no matter what; I don’t give a damn what we have to give Pavelic to keep him on our side.”

  “Free rein would probably do it, and he has that already, pretty much,” Jäger said with distaste. The Independent State of Croatia seemed to have only one plan for staying independent: hammering all its neighbors enough to make sure nobody close by got strong enough to take revenge.

  If Skorzeny felt the same revulsion Jäger did, he didn’t show it. He said, “We can promise him more chunks of the coast that the Italians are still occupying. He’ll like that—it’ll give him fresh traitors to get rid of.” He spoke without sarcasm; he might have been talking about the best way to sweeten the deal for a secondhand car.

  Jäger couldn’t be so cold-blooded. Very softly, he said, “That Schweinhund Pavelic runs a filthy regime.”

  “You bet he does, but he’s our Schweinhund, and we want to make sure he stays that way,” Skorzeny answered, just as quietly. “If it does, every one of these Lizards, that Drefsab included, is ours, too.” He brought a fist down onto his knee. “That will happen.”

  Compared to yielding to the Lizards, making deals with Ante Pavelic seemed worthwhile. Compared to anything else, Jäger found it most repugnant. And yet, before the Lizards came, Pavelic had been a loyal and enthusiastic supporter of the German Reich. Jäger wondered what that said about Germany. Nothing good, he thought.

  Shanghai amazed Bobby Fiore. Much of the town was pure Chinese, and reminded him of a large-scale, rowdier version of the prison camp where he’d lived with Liu Han. So far, so good; he’d expected as much. What he hadn’t expected was the long streets packed full of European-style buildings from the 1920s. It was as if part of Paris, say, had been picked up, carried halfway round the world, and dropped down smack in the middle of China. As far as Fiore was concerned, it didn’t fit.

  The other thing that amazed him was how much damage the city had taken. You walked around, you knew they’d been in a war here. The Japs had bombed the place to hell and gone, and then burned it when they took it in 1937; he still remembered the news photo of the naked little burned Chinese boy sitting up and crying in the ruins. When he first saw it, he’d been ready to go to war with Japan right then. But he’d cooled down, and so had everybody else. Then Pearl Harbor came along and said he’d been right the first time.

  When the Lizards took Shanghai away from the Japs, they hadn’t exactly given it a peck on the cheek, either. Whole blocks were leveled, and human bones still lay here and there. The Chinese weren’t what you’d call eager to bury Japanese remains. Their attitude was more on the order of let ’em rot.

  In spite of everything, though, the town, especially the Chinese part of it, kept right on humming. The Lizards made their headquarters in some of the Western-style buildings; the rest remained ruins. In the Chinese districts, things were going up faster than you could shake a stick at them.

  But since the Lizards mostly stayed in the International Settlement, Bobby Fiore mostly stayed there, too. The job he’d taken on for the Reds was to keep on looking as much like a Chinaman as he could, to keep his ears open, and to report to Nieh Ho-T’ing anything interesting he heard. The Red officer had promised he’d get to go along when the guerrillas tried a raid based on what he’d learned.

  So far, that hadn’t happened. “And I’m not gonna worry about it, neither,” Fiore muttered under his breath. “Yeah, I wouldn’t mind nailing a few of those scaly bastards, but I didn’t hire out to be no hero.”

  He walked across the Garden Bridge over Soochow Creek from the Bund to the Hongkew district to the north. Soochow Creek itself was filled with junks and other small Chinese boats whose names Fiore didn’t know: from all he’d heard, people were born and raised and grew up and died on those boats. Some of them made their living fishing on the creek; others worked on land but didn’t have anyplace else to stay.

  The Hongkew district, in spite of its Chinese name, was part of the International Settlement. The Lizards had an observation post, and probably a machine-gun nest, in the clock tower of the Head Post Office, which lay along Soochow Creek between Broadway and North Szechuen Road.

  Bobby Fiore was tempted to duck into the Temple of the Queen of Heaven just a few yards north of the Garden Bridge, even though the Chinese didn’t mean the Virgin. In the temple’s inner court were the images of the gods Lin Tsiang Ching, who was supposed to see everything within a thousand li of Shanghai, and Ching Tsiang Ching, who was supposed to hear everything within the same distance.

  Fiore glanced up toward heaven. “They’re just patron saints, kind of,” he murmured to the Catholic God he assumed to be glancing down at him. The heavens remained mute. He walked past the Temple of the Queen of Heaven this time, though he’d gone in before.

  Streets and sidewalks were crowded. No cars and trucks were running except Lizard models and human-made ones taken over by the Lizards, but people, rickshaws, pedicabs, and draft animals took up the slack. Beggars staked out squares of sidewalk; some of them chalked on the paving stones messages of woe Fiore couldn’t read. They reminded him of the poor out-of-work bastards who’d hawked apples on streetcorners when the Depression was at its worst.

  If the streets had been crowded, the Hongkew marketplace, at the corner of Boone and Woosung Roads, was jammed. Fishermen from Soochow Creek, farmers, butchers—all cried their wares at something just over the top of their lungs. If the market in the prison camp where he’d stayed with Liu Han was Fan’s Field in Decatur, this place had to be Yankee Stadium.

  Not only locals shopped here, either. Lizards made their skittering, herky-jerky progress from one stall to another. They could simply have taken whatever they wanted; from what Nieh Ho-T’ing had said, they’d done that at first.

  “Now they pay,” he’d said. “They learn that if they give nothing to get something, it is not in the market square the next time they want it.”

  Sure enough, a Lizard bought a live, kicking lobster and paid the stall keeper in Chinese silver dollars, which, for reasons Fiore could not fathom, were also called Mex dollars. The Lizard’s companion said to him, “These are tasty creatures. Go on, Ianxx, buy several more. We can cook them for the commandant’s midday reception tomorrow.”

  “It shall be done, superior sir,” said the lobster buyer, presumably Ianxx. He went back to bargaining with the fisherman.

  Fiore bent his head down and did his best to look Chinese. The brim of his conical straw hat covered his nose and too- round eyes; he wore drab, dark cottons that reminded him of pajamas, just like most other people. The Lizards should have no reason to notice his skin wasn’t exactly the right color.

  They didn’t. They went off with their purchases, holding them carefully to avoid the lobsters’ flailing claws. Bobby Fiore followed them back across the Garden Bridge. The Lizards paid no attention to him; as far as they were concerned, he was just another Big Ugly.

  Now which commandant were you talking about? he asked them silently. They went through the Public Garden near the south edge of the Garden Bridge, and then on to the British Consulat
e. Fiore skinned back his teeth in a fierce grin; that was where the Lizard commandant for all Shanghai had his headquarters.

  Not all of the International Settlement was posh buildings full of foreigners—or rather, now, full of Lizards. In an alley off Foochow Road, jammed in between other equally unpretentious erections, was a dilapidated place called the Sweetheart; the door had the name in English and what he presumed to be its equivalent in Chinese characters. When Fiore went inside, he was greeted by a blast of scratchy jazz from a phonograph and by the multilingual chatter of the working girls in the front lounge.

  He snorted laughter. Nieh Ho-T’ing was one smart cookie. The Reds had a reputation for being bluenoses. Who would have figured one of their big wheels would set up shop in a whorehouse?

  As far as Bobby knew, Nieh didn’t go to bed with any of the girls. He didn’t mind if Fiore enjoyed himself, though, and some of the Russians, girls whose parents had been on the losing side of the Revolution and had to get out one step ahead of Lenin’s bully boys, were simply gorgeous. He wondered what they thought of being in cahoots with a Red now. He hadn’t tried finding out; he’d learned to keep his mouth shut when he wasn’t sure about the person he was talking to.

  He opened the door to the lounge. The jazz got louder. The chatter, on the other hand, suddenly stopped. Then the girls recognized him and started gabbing again.

  He looked around like a kid in a candy store. Russians, Eurasians, Chinese, Koreans, some in European-style lingerie, others in clinging dresses of Chinese silk slit up to here and sometimes down to there, too … just being a fly on the wall at the Sweetheart was almost as good as getting laid at some of the dismal sporting houses he’d been to back in the States.

  “Is Uncle Wu around?” he asked; that was the name Nieh Ho-T’ing used hereabouts. Another wonderful thing about the Sweetheart was that he could speak English. Almost all the girls understood it, and two or three of them were about as fluent as he was.

  One of the Russians, a blonde in a silk dress slit up to here and then a couple of inches farther, pointed to the stairway and said, “Da, Bobby, he is in his room now.”