In the Balance w-1

by Harry Turtledove

  Did that make him better or worse? Russie couldn’t decide. He said, “As may be. He wants some sort of consensus from us before he acts-you’ll have noticed that the Lizards think we must have someone who can make binding decisions for our whole community.”

  Now Mordechai Anielewicz let out a snort of genuine amusement. “Has he ever watched anyone trying to get three Jews to agree about anything?”

  “I would say not. But I would also say something else: we used the Lizards to save our own lives, because nothing they did to us could be worse than what the Nazis were already doing. Well and good thus far, Mordechai. No one who knows the truth of what we suffered could blame us for that-a drowning man grabs any plank in the sea.”

  One of the fighters growled, “What about the ones who won’t believe the truth even, when it’s shoved in their fat faces?”

  “If you’d believed the Nazis would do all they said they’d do, would you have stayed in Poland?” Russie asked. Like a lot of Polish Jews, Russie had relatives in England and more distant ones in the United States. His parents had got letters after Hitler came to power, urging them to get out while they could. They hadn’t listened-and they were dead now.

  The fighter grunted. He was in his late thirties; maybe he’d made the choice to stay himself instead of having his parents do it for him.

  Anielewicz put the conversation back on track. “Were you coming to some sort of point about the Lizards, Reb Moishe? I do hope so, for you’ve said nothing to convince me thus far.”

  “Think about this, then: we did what we had to do with the Lizards, I grant you that. But are we wise to do any more than we have to do? Telling them to shoot their German prisoners for us plays into their hands, and into the hands of the rest of the Germans as well. If you do not think well of mercy for mercy’s sake, look at that before you urge a slaughter.”

  “Are you sure you intended to be a doctor? You argue like a reb, that’s certain.” But Anielewicz really did think about what Russie’d said; Russie could see it in his face. Slowly, the fighting leader said, “You’re telling me you don’t want us to be the Lizards’ cat’s-paws.”

  “That’s it exactly.” Maybe Russie had found the key to reaching the fighting leader after all. “We have to be, to some extent, because we’re so much weaker than they are. But when we let them put our name on their wickedness, it becomes ours as well in the eyes of the world.”

  The fighter who’d spoken before said, “He may have something there, boss.” He sounded reluctant to admit it; Moishe admired him the more for speaking.

  “Yes, he just may.” The glance Anielewicz shot Russie was no more friendly for that. “By God, Reb Moishe, I want vengeance on those Nazi bastards. When the Lizards bombed Berlin, I cheered, do you know that? I cheered.”

  “I would be lying if I said I was as sorry as I should have been,” Russie said.

  “Well, there you are,” Anielewicz said, as if he’d proven something. Maybe he had.

  If so, Russie did not care to concede it. “Cheering, though, was wrong, don’t you see? Most of those Germans had done nothing more to the Lizards than we’d done to the Germans. They just happened to be in Berlin when the Lizards dropped their bomb. The Lizards didn’t care that they weren’t soldiers; they went ahead and killed them anyhow. They aren’t angels, Mordechai.”

  “This I know,” Anielewicz answered. “But better our devils than the devils on the other side.”

  “No, that’s not the lesson.” Moishe stubbornly shook his head. “The lesson is, better that we not become devils ourselves.”

  Anielewicz’s scowl was fearsome. Russie felt the fear. If the leader of the Jewish fighting forces chose to ignore him, what could he do about it? But before Anielewicz replied, he glanced at the fighters who accompanied him. A couple of them were nodding at Russie’s words. That seemed only to make Anielewicz angrier.

  “All right!” He spat on the filthy cobblestones. “We’ll keep the stinking Germans alive, then, if you love them so well.”

  “Love them? You must be out of your mind. But I hope I still know what justice is. And,” Russie added, “I hope I still know that what mankind thinks of me is more important than any Lizard’s good opinion-and that includes Zolraag’s.” His own vehemence surprised him, the more so because he got on well with the aliens’ governor.

  Anielewicz also surprised him. “There for once we agree, Reb Moishe. There, in fact, we might even find common ground with General Bor-Komorowski, should the need ever arise.”

  “Really?” Russie was not sure he wanted to find common ground with Bor-Komorowski on anything save the desirability of getting rid of the Germans. Bor-Komorowski was a good Polish patriot, which made him only a little less fascist-or perhaps just less efficiently fascist-than Heinrich Himmler. Still…” That may be useful, one of these days.”

  9

  Moscow! The winter before, German troops had seen the spires of the Kremlin from the Russian capital’s suburbs. None came any closer than that, and then they’d been thrown back in bitter fighting. Yet now Heinrich walked freely through the streets the Wehrmacht had been unable to reach.

  Beside him, Georg Schultz looked this way and that, as he did every day going to and from the Kremlin. Schultz said, “I still have trouble believing how much of Moscow is still in one piece. We bombed it, the Lizards bombed it-and here it is still.”

  “It’s a big city,” Jager answered. “It can take a lot of punishment and not show much. Big cities are hard to destroy, unless…” His voice trailed away. He’d seen pictures of Berlin now, and wished he hadn’t.

  He and Schultz both wore ill-fitting civilian suits of cheap fabric and outdated cut. He would have been ashamed to put his on back in Germany. Here, though, it helped him fit in, for which he was just as glad. He would not have been safe in his tankman’s uniform. In the Ukraine, the panzer troops had sometimes been welcomed as liberators. Germans remained enemies in Moscow, even after the coming of the Lizards.

  Schultz pointed to a poster on a brick wall. “Can you read what that says, sir?”

  Jager’s Russian was better than it had been, but still far from good. Letter by unfamiliar Cyrillic letter, he sounded out the poster’s message. “Smert means ‘death,’ ” he said. “I don’t know what the second word is. Something to do with us.”

  “Something nasty,” Schultz agreed. The poster showed a pigtailed little girl lying dead on the floor, a doll beside her. A footprint in blood led the eye to a departing soldier’s marching boot, on the heel of which was a German swastika.

  Before he got to Moscow, Jager had been certain down to the very core of him that the Wehrmacht would have beaten the Red Army for good this year had the Lizards not intervened. Now he wondered, though he’d never said so out loud. It wasn’t just that Russia was so much bigger than Germany; he had known that all along. But despite the stubbornness of Soviet resistance, he hadn’t believed the Russian people were as firmly behind Stalin as the Germans were behind Hitler. Now he did, and it was a disturbing thought.

  His shoes scuffed on the paving of Red Square. The Germans had planned a victory parade there, timed for the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. It hadn’t happened. Russian sentries still paced back and forth in front of the Kremlin wall in their own stiff version of the goose step.

  Jager and Schultz came up to the gateway by which they entered the Kremlin compound. Jager nodded to the guards there, a group of men he saw every third day. None of the Russians nodded back. They never did. Their leader, who wore a sergeant’s three red triangles on his collar patches, held out his hand. “Papers,” he said in Russian.

  As usual, he carefully examined the documents the Germans produced, compared photographs to faces. Jager was certain that if he ever forgot his papers, the sergeant would not pass him through even though he recognized him. Breaking routine was not something the Russians did well.

  Today, though, he and Schultz had everything in order. The sergeant started t
o stand aside to pass them through when someone else came trotting across Red Square toward the checkpoint. Jager turned to see who was in such a tearing hurry. As he did, his mouth fell open. “I’ll be Goddamned,” Schultz said, which about summed things up.

  Unlike the tankmen, the fellow approaching wore a German uniform-an SS uniform at that-and wore it with panache. His every aggressive stride seemed to warn that anyone who gave him trouble would have a thin time of it. He was tall and broadshouldered and would have been handsome had a scar not seamed his left cheek. Actually, he was handsome anyhow, in a piratical sort of way.

  Instead of bristling at him as Jager had expected, the Russian guards grinned and nudged each other. The sergeant said, “Papers?”

  The SS man drew himself up to his full impressive height. “Stuff your papers, and stuff you, too!” he said in a deep, booming voice. His German held an Austrian accent. The sentries practically hugged themselves with glee. The sergeant came to an attention stiffer than he might have granted Marshal Zhukov, waved the big bruiser into the Kremlin.

  “Why didn’t we ever try that?” Schultz said admiringly.

  “I don’t have the balls for it,” Jager admitted.

  The SS man spun toward them. For all his size, he was light on his feet “So you are Germans after all,” he said. “I thought you might be, but what with those rag-pickers’ getups, I couldn’t be sure till you opened your mouths. Who the devil are you, anyway?”

  “Major Heinrich Jager, Sixteenth Panzer,” Jager answered crisply. “Here is my tank gunner, Sergeant Georg Schultz. And now, Herr Hauptsturmfuhrer, I might ask you the same question.” The SS rank was the equivalent of captain; however much brass this fellow had, Jager was his superior.

  The SS man’s brace was almost as rigid-and as full of parody-as the Soviet sergeant’s had been. Clicking his heels, he declared in falsetto, “SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Otto Skorzeny begs leave to report his presence, sir!”

  Jager snorted. The scar on Skorzeny’s cheek partly froze the left corner of his mouth and turned his smile into something twisted. Jager asked him, “What are you doing here, especially in that suit? You’re lucky the Ivans haven’t decided to take your nose and ears.”

  “Nonsense,” Skorzeny said. If he ever had doubts about anything, he didn’t show them in public. “Russians only know how to be one of two things: masters or slaves, if you convince them you’re the master, what does that leave them?”

  “If,” Georg Schultz murmured, too softly for the SS man to hear.

  “You still haven’t said why you’re here,” Jager persisted.

  “I am acting under orders from-” Skorzeny hesitated; Jager guessed he’d been about to say from Berlin. He resumed: “from my superiors. Can you say the same?” He gave Jager’s Russian suit a fishy stare.

  Beside Jager, Schultz stirred angrily. Jager wondered if this arrogant Hauptsturmfuhrer had ever seen action that required him to get those polished boots dirty. But that question answered itself: Skorzeny wore the ribbon for a wound badge between the first and second buttons of his tunic. All right, he had some idea of what was real, then. And his counterquestion made Jager think-what would the authorities have to say about how he was working with the Red Army?

  He briefly summarized how he had come to be in Moscow. Maybe Skorzeny had done some fighting, but could he say he’d taken out a Lizard panzer? Not many had, and not many of those who had still lived.

  When he was through, the SS man nodded. Now he blustered less. “You might say we’re both in Moscow for the same reason, then, Major, whether with official approval or without. We have a common interest in showing the Ivans how to make themselves more effective foes for the Lizards.”

  “Ah,” Jager said. Just as the Soviets no longer treated Germans caught on Russian soil as prisoners of war (or worse), the surviving pieces of the government of the Reich must have decided to do their best to keep the Russians in the fight now and worry about their being Bolshevik Slavic Untermenschen later.

  The three Germans walked together toward the Kremlin. The heart of Soviet Russia still wore the camouflage it had donned after the Russo-German war began. Its bulging onion domes, an architecture alien and oriental to Jager’s eyes, had their gilding covered over with battleship gray paint Walls were mottled with patches of black and orange, yellow and brown, rather like the hide of a leprous giraffe, to confuse attackers from the air.

  Such tricks had not entirely spared it from damage. Stolid, wide-shouldered women in shawls and drab dresses carried bricks and chunks of wood away from a recent bomb hit. The sick-sweet stink of day before yesterday’s battlefield hung over the place. That smell always made Jager’s heart beat faster in remembered fear.

  Skorzeny grunted and put a hand over the right side of his belly. Jager thought the SS man’s reaction similar to his own until he realized Skorzeny’s face held real pain. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “My fucking gall bladder,” the Hauptsturmfuhrer answered. “It had me in the hospital for a while earlier this year. But the doctors say it isn’t going to kill me, and lying around on my backside is a bloody bore, so here I am up and doing again. A good thing, too.”

  “You were here on the Eastern Front before, sir?” Georg Schultz asked.

  “Yes, with Das Reich,” Skorzeny said.

  Schultz nodded and said nothing more. Jager could guess what he was thinking. A lot of people who saw action on the Eastern Front would fall down on their knees and thank God for an illness that got them sent back to Germany and safety. Skorzeny, by the way he talked, would sooner have stayed and fought He didn’t sound as though he were bluffing, either. Jager’s respect for him went up a notch.

  In spite of the Lizards’ air raids, the Kremlin still swarmed with life. Occasional holes merely showed Jager the soldiers and bureaucrats bustling about within, in the same way as he could have seen the humming life inside an anthill with its top kicked off.

  He was not surprised to find Skorzeny heading for the same doorway as he and Jager used: naturally, the SS man would also be meeting with officers from the Defense Commissariat. The doorway into the Kremlin itself, like the one into the compound around it, was guarded. The lieutenant who headed this detachment put out his hand without a word. Without a word, Jager and Schultz gave him their documents. Without a word, he studied and returned them.

  Then he turned to Skorzeny, his hand still outstretched. An impish grin lit the big man’s face. He seized the Russian lieutenant’s hand, vigorously pumped it up and down. The guards stared in disbelief. The lieutenant managed to return a sickly smile. A couple of his men had raised their submachine guns. When he smiled, they lowered them again.

  “Talk about balls, one of these days he’s going to get his blown off, playing games like that,” Schultz said out of the side of his mouth.

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Jager answered. He’d known a few people who simply bulled their way through life, charging at the world with such headlong aggression that it gave way before them. Skorzeny seemed to be of that stripe. On a larger scale, so did Adolf Hitler… and Stalin.

  It was easier to think of the Soviet leader than of Hitler as Jager let the immensity of the Kremlin swallow him and Schultz. Skorzeny followed. Just inside the doorway stood a pair of Russian lieutenant colonels: no Germans would go wandering unescorted through the Red Army’s holy of holies.

  One of the Russian officers wore a tankman’s black collar patches. “Good morning, Major Jager, Sergeant Schultz,” he said in excellent German.

  “Lieutenant Colonel Kraminov,” Jager said, nodding back politely. Viktor Kraminov had been assigned to Schultz and him since they came to Moscow. They might have traded shots with each other the year before, for Kraminov had been part of Marshal Budenny’s southern Soviet army before being transferred to staff duty in Moscow. He had an old man’s wise eyes set in a face of childlike innocence, and knew more about handling panzers than Jager would have expected from the Russians’ battle performa
nce.

  The other lieutenant colonel, a fellow Jager had not seen before, wore green collar patches. Georg Schultz frowned. “What’s green stand for?” he whispered.

  Jager needed a minute to think. Russian infantry patches were maroon; tanks, artillery, and engineers black; cavalry dark blue; air force light blue. But what Soviet service wore green as its Waffenfarbe? Jager stiffened. “He’s NKVD,” he whispered back.

  Schultz flinched. Jager didn’t blame him. Just as no Russian soldier would want to run across the Gestapo, so the Germans naturally grew nervous at the sight of an officer of the People’s Commissariat for the Interior, if he’d come across the NKVD man a year ago, he would have shot him at once; German orders were to take no secret policemen or political commissars alive, regardless of the laws of war.

  After one brief glance, the NKVD lieutenant colonel ignored the two Germans in civilian clothes; he’d been waiting for Otto Skorzeny. “A very good day to you, Herr Hauptsturmfuhrer,” he said. His German was even better than Kraminov’s. He sounded fussily precise, like about half of Jager’s old Gymnasium teachers.

  “Hello, Boris, you skinny old prune-faced bastard,” Skorzeny boomed back. Jager waited for the heavens to fall. The NKVD man, who really was a skinny old prune-faced bastard, just gave a tight little nod, from which Jager inferred he’d been working with Skorzeny for a while and had decided he’d better make allowances.

  The NKVD man-Boris-turned toward Lieutenant Colonel Kraminov. “Perhaps all five of us will work together today,” he said. “In chatting before you gentlemen arrived, Viktor Danielovich and I discovered that we all may be able to contribute to an operation which will benefit both our nations.”