He wondered how his uncles and aunts and cousins were doing in Poland. Thinking about the broadcasts in Yiddish and German over the Warsaw shortwave station the Lizards had set up, he wondered how many-or how few-of his uncles and aunts and cousins were still alive.
He stared down at his empty pint. Would another help him forget his fears or bring them more strongly to the surface? The latter, he suspected. He held out the glass to Daphne anyhow. “Since you’re still on your feet, dear, would you bring me one more?” Enough bitter and he’d stop caring about anything at all-if not this pint, then the next one or the one after that.
Then Jerome asked the aircrew, “And what happens to you lads next?”
Ken Embry said, “I expect we’ll be going up again in another day or two. By all they’ve said, experienced aircrew are getting rather thin on the ground, if you’ll forgive something of a mixed metaphor.”
“How can you be so bloody calm about it?” Jones burst out. “Flying against the Jerries was one thing, but against the Lizards…”
Embry shrugged. “It’s what we do. It’s what we have to do. What else is there for anyone to do, but do what he has to do the best he can for as long as he can do it?”
Goldfarb studied the pilot and the rest of the aircrew. While he worried about his relatives-and from all he’d heard, with reason-they carried on in the face of their own nearly certain deaths. He looked at Sylvia, who might have been trying to squeeze Douglas Bell to death, and suddenly understood, on a level deeper than words, why she and Daphne would sleep with fliers but not with men who stayed on the ground. He remained rueful about that, but his jealousy disappeared.
When Daphne came back with his bitter, he stood up, dug in his pocket, came out with a handful of silver. “Fetch these lads a round, would you?”
Jerome Jones stared at him. “Such largess! Did your rich grandfather just cork off, or have you forgotten you’re a Jew?”
He would have gone for anyone else’s throat, especially with a couple of pints in him. Bagnall and a couple of the other members of the aircrew shifted in their seats to get ready to grab him if he tried. Instead, he started to laugh. “Bloody hell, Daphne, I’ll buy one for this big-mouthed sod, too.”
The aircrew relaxed. Jones’ eyes got even bigger than they had been. “If I’d known calling you names was the way to pry beer out of you, I’d’ve tried it long ago.”
“Geh kak afen yam,” Goldfarb said, and then disgusted everybody by refusing to translate.
Moishe Russie felt his heart pound in his chest. Meeting the Lizard governor whose forces had driven the Nazis out of Warsaw always frightened him, though Zolraag had treated him well enough-certainly better than he would have fared had he fallen under the eye of Hans Frank. He did not know whether Frank was dead or fled. Hoping him dead was sinful. Russie knew that He was willing to make the wish even so.
Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski, the leader of the Home Army, came out of Zolraag’s office. He did not look happy. He looked even less happy on seeing Russie. “What are you going to pry out of him now, Jew?” he growled. “They will give you anything you like, it seems.”
“That is not so,” Russie said. Bor-Komorowski frightened him, too. He hated Germans, yes, but he also hated Jews. The Germans were gone now. That left him only one target.
Scowling still, Bor-Komorowski stamped out, his boot heels ringing on the marble floor. Russie hurried into Zolraag’s office; keeping his people’s protector waiting would not do.
“Your Excellency,” he said in German. He could speak to a Lizard easily enough now. A couple of weeks before, when the Nazis fled, beset from within and attacked from without at the same time, the first of the little, scampering creatures had seemed like demons to him. Though they were allies, they were weird almost beyond his power to take in. There the German propaganda had not lied.
But dealing with Zolraag day by day had begun to make strangeness familiar-and also brought the suspicion that the Lizard found him in particular and humanity in general at least as peculiar as he thought the governor.
“Herr Russie.” Zolraag spoke slowly and with an accent that almost swallowed r’s and turned the middle sound in Russie’s name into a long hiss. “You are well, I hope?”
“Yes, Your Excellency, thank you.” Russie hissed himself, and made a gargling sound: he’d learned how to say “thank you” in Zolraag’s language. He was doing his best to pick up words of the Lizards’ speech; as he was already fluent in Yiddish, Hebrew, German, and Polish, acquiring a new tongue held no terror for him. He got the idea that Zolraag found the idea of there being many languages as alien as anything else about the Earth.
The Lizard was working hard with German, though. While his accent remained (Russie thought part of it due to the shape of his mouth), he’d picked up new words every time he spoke with the Jew, and his grammar, if less than good, was better than it had been. Now he said, “The German prisoners, Herr Russie, what do you think we do with them?”
“They are prisoners, Your Excellency; they ought to be treated like any other prisoners of war.” Russie had walked out to the camp in the ruins of the Rakowiec district, just to see Germans behind the razor strips the Lizards used in place of barbed wire. He wished he hadn’t. Looking at the crowds of dirty, battered, hungry men milling around reminded him overpoweringly of looking down any street when the ghetto was packed tight.
“Not all your people so think, Herr Russie. Who is your emperor here?”
“Our ruler, you mean?”
“Your emperor-he who decides for you,” Zolraag said. He seemed to think it was very simple. Maybe it was, among the Lizards. Russie gathered that their supreme commander-the fleetlord, Zolraag called him-had chosen Zolraag governor of Warsaw, and that was that.
Things in human Warsaw, and especially inside the Jewish quarter, were less simple. The old German-backed ghetto administration still functioned after a fashion, doling out rations from the Lizards now rather than from the Nazis. Russie himself held moral authority because of the night the Lizards came. How that translated varied from day to day, sometimes from minute to minute.
And there was Mordechai Anielewicz. He’d taken a bullet through the left hand during the attack on the Germans, but it hadn’t slowed him down. If anything, the fat white bandage seemed to mark him as a hero. His men swaggered through the streets of the Jewish quarter with captured German rifles on their shoulders. They walked boldly when they went into the rest of Warsaw, too: they were men whose comrades could avenge slights, and they knew it For Jews, the feeling was rich and heady, like a fine new brandy.
The Armja Krajowa hated them. Many of the Mausers they bore had come to them from the Lizards: more arms than the new conquerors gave the Polish Home Army. Of course, the Poles had had far more guns at the start of the Warsaw rebellion than the Jews. Maybe the Lizards were working to balance the two groups in the newly conquered territory.
Maybe too, Russie admitted to himself, Zolraag and the rest of the Lizards were using the Jews and their plight under the Nazi regime as a tool against the rest of mankind. He listened to shortwave radio, just as he’d spoken on it from a studio for the Lizards. Though he’d told no more than the truth-and much less than all the truth-human broadcasters dismissed his reports as obvious propaganda. Even the dreadful pictures that came out of the ghetto brought little belief.
Because of that, Russie said, “Your Excellency, you will hurt yourself if you treat these captured Germans different from any other prisoners of war. People will only say you are cruel and ruthless.”
“This you say, Herr Russie?” Unnervingly, Zolraag looked at Moishe with one eye and down at the papers on his desk with the other. “You, a Jew, a-how do you say it? — a sufferer, no, a victim of these Germans? Not treat them as killers? Why? Killers they are.”