Tilting The Balance (44 page)

“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 Judenfrei-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?”

He had no way of knowing how close he came to dying in the middle of the muddy road without ever learning why. Mordechai Anielewicz took a tight grip on his temper; it wasn’t as if he hadn’t known plenty of Poles were anti-Semites – and a murder here was liable to make it easier for pursuers to trace him. So he just said, “They’re still hungry in there. I expect you’ll get a good price.”

“Hungry? Why should the Jews be hungry? They’ve got their mouths pressed to the Lizards’ backsides, and they eat their-” The Pole spat into the roadway in lieu of finishing, but left no doubt about what he’d meant.

Again Anielewicz forced himself to coolness. If the Pole thought he was a countryman rather than a Jew on the dodge, his presence here would attract no notice. So he told himself. But oh, the temptation-

“Here, wait,” The turnip seller undid a Polish Army canteen from his belt, yanked out the cork which had replaced the proper stopper. “Have a belt of this to help you on your way.”

This was vodka, obviously homemade and strong enough to scar the lining of Anielewicz’s throat as it went down. After a small nip, he handed the canteen back to the Pole. “Thank you,” he said, wheezing a little.

“Any time, pal.” The Pole tilted his head back for a couple of long swallows. “Ann! Jesus, that’s good. Us Catholics got to hang together. Ain’t nobody gonna do it for us, am I right? Not the damned Jews, not the godless Russians, not the stinking Germans, and sure as hell not the Lizards. Am I right?”

Anielewicz made himself nod. The worst thing was that the Pole was right, at least from his parochial perspective. No one would give his people any special help, so they’d have to help themselves. But if every people helped itself at the expense of its neighbors, how would any people – or all the peoples together – withstand the Lizards?

With a wave, Anielewicz headed down the road, leaving the Pole to trundle his turnips on toward Warsaw. The Jewish fighting leader (Jewish refugee, he corrected himself – someone new would head the fighters now) wondered what the peddler would have done, knowing he was a Jew. Probably nothing much, since he had a gun and the Pole didn’t, but he didn’t think he would have got the turnips, let alone the belt of vodka.

A Lizard jet flew by, high overhead. Its vapor trail caught Anielewicz’s eye before he heard the thin,

attenuated bellow of its engines. It probably carried a load of destruction. He hoped someone, would shoot it down… after it had dropped the load of destruction on a Nazi’s head.

The road ran through fields of barley, potatoes, and beets. Peasants and their animals plowed those fields as they had every spring for the past thousand years. No tractors snorted or chuffed alongside the horses and mules – gasoline was next to impossible to come by. That had been true under the Germans and was even truer under the Lizards.

Overall, though, the aliens’ rule lay lightly on the land. Alter that armored troop carrier splattered past him, Anielewicz didn’t see another Lizard vehicle for the rest of the day. The Lizards garrisoned Warsaw and other towns like Lublin (to which Anielewicz intended to give a wide berth, for just that reason), but used the threat of their power rather than the power itself to hold down the countryside.

“I wonder how many Lizards there are altogether, not just in Poland, but all over the world,” he mused aloud. Few enough so that they were stretched thin trying to hold it down and run it, that seemed clear.

He wondered how humanity could best exploit such a weakness. That musing quickly turned to one more practical: he wondered what he was going to do about supper and a place to sleep. Sure, he had hard bread and cheese in his pack to go with the turnips, but none of that was inspiring fare. Similarly, he could roll himself in a blanket on the ground, but he didn’t want to unless he had to.

The problem soon solved itself: a farmer coming in from the fields waved to him and called, “Are you hungry, friend? Always happy to feed an Armija Krajowa man. Besides, I killed a pig yesterday, and I’ve got more meat than my family can eat. Join us, if you care to.”

Anielewicz hadn’t touched pork since the ghetto walls came down, but to decline such a feast would only have made the farmer suspicious. “Thank you very much,” he said. “You’re sure it’s no trouble?”

“Not a bit. Come in, wash up, sit and rest your feet.”

The farmhouse stood between two thatch-roofed outbuildings. The farmer shooed some chickens away from the woodpile and into a henhouse in one of those outbuildings, then slammed the door on them. At the fellow’s urging, Anielewicz clumped up the wooden stairs and into the foyer.

A big brass basin there served for a sink. He washed his hands and face, dried them on a linen towel hung on a nail above the basin. The farmer courteously waited for him to use the water first, then cleaned himself off. After that, introductions were in order: the farmer gave his own name as Wladyslaw Sawatski; his wife was Emilia (a pleasant-looking woman who wore a kerchief over her hair), his teenage son Jozef, and his daughters Maria and Ewa (one older than Jozef, one younger).

Anielewicz said he was Janusz Borwicz, giving himself a good Polish name to go with his Polish looks. Everyone made much of him. He got the seat at the head of the table in the parlor, he got a mug of apple brandy big enough to make three people shikker. and he got the family’s undivided attention. He gave them all the Warsaw gossip he had, especially the part pertaining to the Polish majority.

“Did you fight the Germans when the Lizards came?” Jozef Sawatski asked. He and his father – and both his sisters, too – leaned forward at that.

They wanted war stories, Mordechai realized. Well, he could give them some. “Yes, as a matter of fact, I did,” he said truthfully. Again, he edited the tales to disguise his Jewishness.

Wladyslaw Sawatski, who had a brandy mug the size of Anielewicz’s, slammed it down on the table with a roar of approval. “Well done, by God!” he exclaimed. “If we’d fought like that in ‘39, we wouldn’t have needed these – creatures – to get the Nazis off our backs.”

Anielewicz doubted that. Sandwiched between Germany and Russia, Poland was going to get walloped every so often. Before he could come up with a polite way to disagree with his host, Emilia Sawatski turned to her daughters and said, “Why don’t you go and bring in the food now?” Alone in the family, she hadn’t cared about tales of conflict.

In came supper, mountains of it: boiled potatoes, boiled kielbasa sausage, big pork steaks, headcheese, fresh-baked bread. Warsaw might be hungry, but the countryside seemed to be doing pretty well for itself.

As Maria, the older girl, plopped a length of sausage onto Anielewicz’s plate, she gave him a sidelong glance, then spoke in silky tones to her father. “You’re not going to send a hero like Janusz out onto the road after supper, are you, Papa? He’ll sleep here tonight, won’t he?”

She wants to go to bed with me, Anielewicz realized with some alarm. That alarm had nothing to do with Maria’s person: she was eighteen or nineteen, and quite pretty in a wide-faced, blue-eyed way. Anielewicz didn’t particularly worry about angering her father either. But if he took off his trousers for her, he wouldn’t be able to hide being a Jew.

Wladyslaw Sawatski looked from Maria to Mordechai and back again. The glance was full of understanding: whatever else he might be, Sawatski was no fool. He said, “I was going to let him rest in the barn, Maria, but as you say, he is a hero, and too good for straw. He can sleep on the sofa in the front room there.”