“We’ll do everything we can to make you comfortable,” Yeager promised.
“So your leaders and you have assured me from the start,” Straha replied. “And, so far as is in your power, so you have done. I cannot complain of your intentions. But intentions go only so far, Sam Yeager. If peace comes, I shall remain here, remain an analyst of the Race and propagandist for this not-empire. Is this not the high-probability outcome?”
“Truth,” Sam said. “You’ve always earned your place here. Don’t you want to go on doing that?”
“I shall—it is the best I can do. But you fail to understand,” Straha said. “I shall stay here, among you Tosevites. Some other males, surely, will also stay. And we shall build our tiny community, for we shall be all of the Race we have. And we shall have to turn our eye turrets toward what the rest of the Race is doing here on Tosev 3, and study it for the leaders of this not-empire, and never, ever be a part of it. How to live with that loneliness? Can it be done? I shall have to learn.”
“I apologize,” Yeager said. “I did not see all of it.” Back before the Germans conquered France, every once in a while you used to read stories in the papers about the doings of Russian emigrés in Paris. If any of them were left alive these days, they would have sympathized with Straha: there they were, on the outside looking in, while the great bulk of their countrymen went about building something new. If that wasn’t hell, it had to be a pretty fair training ground.
Straha sighed. “Before long, too, in the scale of things the Race commonly uses, the colonization fleet will reach this world. Egg clutches will be incubated. Will any be mine? It is to laugh.” His mouth fell open.
Some of the Russian emigrés had Russian wives, others sweethearts. The ones who didn’t could look for willing Frenchwomen. Straha didn’t miss lady Lizards the way a man missed women: out of sight (or rather, out of scent) really was out of mind for him. But, again, he’d be watching the Race as a whole move along, and he wouldn’t be a part of it.
“Shiplord, that’s hard,” Sam said.
“Truth,” Straha said. “But when I came down to this not empire, I did not ask that life be easy, only that it continue. Continue it has. Continue it will, in the circumstances I chose for myself. I shall likely have a long time to contemplate whether I made the correct decision.”
Sam wanted to find the right thing to say, but for the life of him could not come up with anything.
Mordechai Anielewicz walked casually past the factory that, up until a few months before, had housed workers turning out winter coats for the Lizards. Then one of the Nazis’ rocket bombs had scored a direct hit on the place. It looked like any other building that had taken a one-tonne bomb hit: like the devil. The only good thing was that the rocket had come down during the night shift, when fewer people were working.
Anielewicz looked around. Not many people were on the street. He tugged at his trousers, as if adjusting them. Then he ducked behind one of the factory’s shattered walls; any man might have done the same to get some privacy in which to ease himself.
From deeper in the ruins, a voice spoke in Yiddish: “Ah, it’s you. We don’t like people coming in here, you know.”
“And why is that, Mendel?” Mordechai asked dryly.
“Because we’re sitting on an egg we hope we don’t ever have to hatch,” the guard answered, his own tone less collected than he probably would have liked.
“As long as it’s in our nest and not the one the Germans laid for it,” Anielewicz answered. Getting it out of the ghetto field had been an epic in itself, and not one Mordechai ever wanted to repeat. The bomb had not been buried deep, or he and his comrades never would have budged it. As things were, the gaping hole in the ground that marked its presence had remained for the Lizards to spot when morning came. Fortunately, the cover story—that the corpses in that grave were suspected to have died of cholera, and so had to be exhumed and burned—had held up. Like most Lizards, Bunim was squeamish about human diseases.
Mordechai peered out from the gloom inside the ruined factory. None of the people who had been on the street was looking back. Nobody seemed to have taken any notice that he hadn’t come out after going in there for privacy’s sake. He walked farther into the bowels of the building. The way back twisted and went around piles of brick and tumbledown interior walls, but, once out of sight of the street, was free of rubble.
There, sitting in its oversized crate on a reinforced wagon, rested the bomb the Nazis had buried in the ghetto field. It had taken an eight-horse team to get it here; they’d need another eight horses to get it out, it they ever had to. One of the reasons Mordechai had chosen to hide the bomb here was the livery stable round the corner. Eight of the sturdiest draft horses the Jewish underground could find waited there, ready to be quickly brought over here in case of emergency.
As if by magic, a couple of Schmeisser-toting guards appeared from out of the shadows. They nodded to Anielewicz. He set his hand on the wagon. “When we have the chance, I want to get this damned thing out of Lodz altogether, take it someplace where there aren’t so many Lizards around.”
“That would be good,” said one of the guards, a skinny, walleyed fellow named Chaim. “Put it somewhere without so many people around, too. Everybody who isn’t one of us could be one of—them.”
He didn’t specify who they were. Likely he didn’t know. Mordechai didn’t know, either, but he had the same worries Chaim did. The enemy of your enemy wasn’t your friend here—he was just an enemy of a different flavor. Anybody who found out the bomb was here—Lizards, Poles, Nazis, even the Jews who followed Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski (and wasn’t that an odd juxtaposition of names? Anielewicz thought)—would try to take it away and take advantage of it
Anielewicz rapped gently on the crate again. “If we have to, we can play Samson in the temple,” he said.
Chaim and the other guard both nodded. That other fellow said, “You’re sure the Nazis can’t set it off by wireless?”
“Positive, Saul,” Anielewicz answered. “We made certain of that. But we have the manual detonator not far away.” Both guards nodded; they knew where it was. “God forbid we have to use it, that’s all.”
“Omayn,” Chaim and Saul said together.
“See anything unusual around here?” Mordechai asked, as he did every time he came to check on the bomb. As they always did, the guards shook their heads. The job of guarding the crate was turning into routine for them; neither was a man of much imagination. Anielewicz knew he had more than was good for him.
He made his way out toward the street, pausing to ask Mendel the question he’d just put to Saul and Chaim. Mendel affirmed that he hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary, either. Anielewicz told himself he was worrying over nothing: nobody but the Jewish underground (and the Nazis, of course) knew the bomb had come into Lodz, and nobody but his own people knew where it was now. The Nazis wouldn’t have tried to set it off, not with their cease-fire with the Lizards still holding.
He’d told himself that a great many times. He still had trouble believing it. After almost five years of war, first against the Germans and then sometimes against the Germans and Lizards both, he had trouble believing any counsel of safety.
As he emerged onto the street, he fumbled at his trousers to show why he had gone back behind the wall, then looked up and down to see if anyone was taking any special notice either of him or of the wrecked factory building. He didn’t spot anyone like that, so he started up the street.
There maybe fifteen meters ahead of him, striding along briskly, was a tall, broad-shouldered man with light brown hair. The fellow turned a corner. Anielewicz followed, not thinking much of him except that his black coat was too short: it flapped halfway down his calves instead of at his ankles as it should have. Not many men in Lodz were so big, which no doubt explained why the fellow couldn’t find a coat to fit him. He lacked only six or eight centimeters of two meters’ height.
No, Anielewicz hadn�
�t seen many men that size in the ghetto. Big, beefy men, because they needed more food, had a way of dying faster on bad rations than small men did. But Anielewicz had seen a man about that tall some time in the not too distant past. He frowned, trying to remember when and where. One of the Polish farmers who sometimes passed information on to the Jews? It had been outside of Lodz: he was fairly sure of that.
All at once, he started to run. When he got to the corner at which the tall man had turned, he paused, his head swiveling this way and that. He didn’t see the fellow. He walked over to the next corner, where he peered both ways again. Still no sign of the man. He kicked at a paving stone in frustration.
Could that have been Otto Skorzeny on the streets of the Lodz ghetto, or was he starting at shadows? The SS man had no rational reason to be here; so Anielewicz tried to convince himself he’d spied someone else of about the same size and build.
“It’s impossible,” he muttered under his breath. “If the Nazis blow up Lodz in the middle of peace talks, God only knows what the Lizards will drop on their heads: reap the wind, sow the whirlwind. Not even Hitler’s that meshuggeh.”
As with his earlier, more general fears, he had trouble dismissing this one. When you got right down to it, who could say just how meshuggeh Hitler was?
David Goldfarb and Basil Roundbush climbed off their bicycles and made their eager way toward the White Horse Inn like castaways struggling up to the edge of a desert oasis. “Pity we can’t bring Mzepps with us,” Roundbush remarked. “Do the poor blighter good to have a night out, don’t you think?”
“Me?” Goldfarb said. “I’ve given up thinking for the duration.”
“Commendable attitude,” Roundbush said with a nod. “Keep that firmly in mind, lad, and you’ll go far—though thinking about not thinking does rather spoil the exercise, eh?”
Goldfarb had the sense not to get stuck in that infinite regress. He opened the door to the White Horse Inn and was greeted by a cloud of smoke and a roar of noise. Basil Roundbush shut the door after them. As soon as he’d done so, Goldfarb pushed aside the black cloth curtains that screened off the short entryway and went inside.
He blinked at the bright electric lamps. “I liked the place better when it was all torchlight and hearthfire,” he said. “Gave it more atmosphere: you felt Shakespeare or Johnson might drop in for a pint with you.”
“If Johnson dropped in, it would be for more than one, and that’s a fact,” Roundbush said. “All the fires did take one back to the eighteenth century, I must say. But remember, old boy, the eighteenth century was a filthy, nasty place. Give me electricity every day.”
“They seem to be doing just that,” Goldfarb said, making his way toward the bar. “Amazing how quickly you can get a system of electricity up and running again when you’re not being bombed round the clock.”
“Makes a bit of a difference,” Roundbush agreed. “I hear the blackout regulations will be going soon, if this truce holds up.” He waved to Naomi Kaplan, who stood behind the bar. She smiled and waved back, then turned up the wattage of that smile when she spotted the shorter Goldfarb behind him. Roundbush chuckled. “You are a lucky fellow. I hope you know it.”
“You’d best believe I do,” Goldfarb said, so enthusiastically that Roundbush laughed again. “And if I didn’t, my family would tell me too often to let me forget.” His parents and siblings approved of Naomi. He’d been certain they would. To his great relief, she approved of them, too, though their crowded East End flat was far from the upper-middle-class comforts she’d known growing up in Germany before Hitler made life there impossible.
They found a narrow opening at the bar and squeezed in to widen it. Roundbush slapped silver on the damp, polished wood. “Two pints of best bitter,” he said to Naomi, and then set out more coins: “And one for yourself, if you’ve a mind to.”
“Thank you, no,” she said, and pushed those back at the RAF officer. The others she scooped into the cash box under the bar. Goldfarb wished she didn’t have to work here, but she was making much better money than he was. The landlord of the White Horse Inn could raise prices to keep up with the inflation galloping through the British economy, and raise wages almost as much. Goldfarb’s meager RAF salary ran several bureaucratic lurches behind. He would have thought it a princely sum when he enlisted in 1939; what had been princely now left him a pauper.
He gulped down his pint and bought a round in return. Naomi let him get her a pint, too, which set Basil Roundbush to making indignant noises through his mustache.
They were just lifting the pint pots when someone behind Goldfarb said, “Who’s your new chum, old man?”
Goldfarb hadn’t heard those Cantabrian tones in a long time. “Jones!” he said. “I haven’t seen you in so long, I’d long since figured you’d bought your plot.” Then he got a good look at Jerome Jones’ companions, and his eyes went even wider. “Mr. Embry! Mr. Bagnall! I didn’t know they’d declared this old home week.”
Introductions followed. Jerome Jones blinked with surprise when Goldfarb presented Naomi Kaplan as his fiancée. “You lucky dog!” he exclaimed. “You found yourself a beautiful girl, and I’d lay two to one she’s neither a sniper nor a Communist”
“Er—no,” David said. He coughed. “Would I be wrong in guessing you’ve not had a dull time of it this past little while?”
“Not half dull,” the other radarman said with unwonted sincerity. He shivered. “Not half.” Goldfarb recognized that tone of voice: someone trying hard not to think about places he’d been and things he’d done. The more he looked at it, giving up thought for the duration seemed a good scheme.
Sylvia came back to the bar carrying a tray crowded with empty pint pots. “Good Lord,” she said, staring at the new arrivals. “Look what the breeze blew in.” Of itself, her hand went up to smooth her hair. “Where the devil have you lads been? I thought—” She’d thought the same thing Goldfarb had, but didn’t want to say it out loud.
“Beautiful, romantic Pskov.” George Bagnall rolled his eyes to show how seriously the adjectives were meant to be taken.
“Where’s whatever-you-call-it?” Sylvia asked, beating everyone else to the punch.
“If you draw a line from Leningrad to Warsaw, you won’t be far off,” Bagnall answered. That let Goldfarb put it on his mental map.
Jerome Jones added, “And all the time we were there, the only thing sustaining us was the thought of the White Horse Inn and the sweet, gentle, lovely lasses working here.”
Sylvia looked down under her feet. “Fetch me a dustpan,” she said to Naomi. “It’s getting pretty deep in here.” She turned back to Jones. “You’re even cheekier than I recall.” He grinned, not a bit abashed. Looking him, Embry, and Bagnall over with a critical eye, Sylvia went on, “You must be the lot who were in here last week looking for me. I was in bed with the influenza.”
“I never thought to be jealous of a germ,” Jones said. Sylvia planted an elbow in his ribs, hard enough to lift him off his feet She went on behind the bar, emptying the tray of the pints it had carried, and started filling fresh ones.
“Where’s Daphne?” Ken Embry asked.
“She had twin girls last month, I hear,” Goldfarb answered, which effectively ended that line of inquiry.
“I do believe I’d kill for a bit of beefsteak,” Bagnall said, in a tone of voice implying that wasn’t meant altogether as a joke. “One thing I’ve found since we got here is that we’re on even shorter commons than they are on the Continent. Black bread, parsnips, cabbage, spuds—it’s like what the Germans were eating the last winter of the Great War.”
“You want beefsteak, sir, you may have to kill,” Goldfarb said. “A man who has a cow stands watch over it with a rifle these days, and it seems rifles are easy to come by for bandits, too. Everybody got a rifle when the Lizards came, and not all of them were turned back in, not by a long chalk. You’ll hear about gunfights over food in the papers or on the wireless.”
Sylvi
a nodded emphatic agreement to that. “Might as well be the Wild West, all the shooting that goes on these days. Chicken, now, we might come up with, and there’s fish about, seeing as we’re by the ocean. But beef? No.”
“Even chicken costs,” Basil Roundbush said. Goldfarb had been thinking the same thing, but hadn’t said it, though with his tiny pay he had more justification than the officer. But, when you were a Jew, you thought three times before you let others perceive you as cheap.
Jerome Jones slapped himself in the hip pocket. “Money’s not the biggest worry in the world right now, not with eighteen months’ pay dropped on me all at once. More money than I thought I’d get, too. How many times have they raised our salaries while we were gone?”
“Three or four,” Goldfarb answered. “But it’s not as much money as you think. Prices have gone up a lot faster than pay. I was just thinking that a few minutes ago.” He glanced down the bar toward Naomi, who had just set a pint pot in front of a slicker-clad fisherman. His shoulders heaved up and down in a silent sigh. It would be so good to get her out of here and live on his pay—except he could barely do that himself, and two surely couldn’t.
He caught his fiancée’s eye. She came back over with a smile. “A round for all my friends here,” he said, digging into his pocket to see what banknotes lay crumpled there.
By immemorial custom, everyone would buy a round after that. He’d want a radar mounted on the front of his bicycle by the time he had to go back to barracks, but he expected he’d manage. He’d have a thick head come morning, but he’d manage that, too. Beefsteak might be thin on the ground, but they’d never yet run short on aspirin tablets.
The Tosevite negotiators rose respectfully when Atvar entered the chamber where they waited. He flicked one eye turret toward Uotat. “Give them the appropriate greetings,” he said to Uotat.
“It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord,” the translator answered, and switched from the beautiful, precise language of the Race to the mushy ambiguities of the Big Ugly tongue called English.
Worldwar: Striking the Balance Page 63