Crash!
A splintering sound bolted him to a sitting position. He saw the door fly open with such impact that it nearly tore off its hinges.
“What the hell!”
Three pistols were leveled at him. One man closed the door, the second went to the desk and tore the phone wire out. Warsinski squinted at the third. Knew him from somewhere. Alterman ... Tolek Alterman from the Bathyrans.
Warsinski scowled at them fearlessly.
“I have the pleasure of carrying out the judgment of Joint Forces to execute you as a traitor to the Jewish people,” Tolek said.
Warsinski laughed in contempt. “Guards!” he roared. “Guards!”
“They don’t hear you, Piotr Warsinski. They are all locked up. Pawiak Prison is in the hands of Joint Jewish Forces. The prisoners are being freed at this moment.”
The smirk came off Warsinski’s face. The guns on him were in steady hands. He folded his hands and closed his eyes and lowered his head. “I don’t beg like Jews,” he said. “Go on. I am ready.”
“It is not so simple,” Tolek said. “There are a lot of questions you are going to answer first.”
Warsinski snarled at them. He thought so. Yellow Jews unable to carry out the execution. It is all a bluff. Talk ... negotiate ... bargain ...
Tolek’s boot suddenly came up into Warsinski’s fat stomach, sinking in from toe to heel. The air left Warsinski. He sank from the bed to his knees. A second kick caught him alongside the jaw, thudding his head against the wall. He sat dazed. Tolek nodded to his two comrades. The first, Pinchas Silver, tossed a thumbscrew and a pair of pliers onto the desk. Adam Blumenfeld revealed a barb-tipped whip.
“We picked up a few of your toys from the interrogation room, Warsinski. Get up and sit at the desk.”
Warsinski did not move.
The lash cut through his underwear. Piotr crawled quickly on his hands and knees to the desk and sat.
“Thumb ... let’s have your thumb.”
The lash ripped once more over his neck.
“Thumb!”
He extended a green-ooze-covered paw. Tolek locked Warsinski’s thumb into the screw and slowly turned the top bolt to apply steady pressure.
“You’ve got no guts for torture,” Warsinski snarled in defiance, “no real guts for it. Jews are too weak!”
Tolek slipped his pistol into his belt, grabbed Warsinski’s out-sized mustache in his fist, and ripped it from his face.
“Yaaaaaahhhh!” Warsinski screamed, clutching a gory upper lip with his free hand.
Tolek slipped the pliers onto a big dirty fingernail of Warsinski’s free hand.
“Adam, tighten the thumbscrew. Warsinski can loosen the bolt if he wants to reach for it. It will cost him a fingernail to try.”
Adam Blumenfeld tightened the bolt, crunching the vise into Warsinski’s knuckle. He gasped. The sweat poured from his face and turned his underwear to a soggy rag. Adam turned the thumbscrew a quarter turn.
“Yahhhh!”
Warsinski suddenly tried to reach for the screw, but Tolek held the pliers tight and a fingernail tore loose.
Mucus spurted from his nose, and his eyes ran.
“Will you co-operate?”
“Stop! Stop! I’ll talk!”
As his thumb was freed he stumbled blindly around the room, wailing and bouncing off the walls. He sank in a blubbering, groaning hulk to the floor. A mass of sweaty ugliness.
Tolek and the other two looked down at him with disgust, and Tolek was sick to his stomach with himself for his brutality, but he knew he could not puke in the presence of an enemy who regarded it as a weakness.
“He didn’t even last five minutes,” Pinchas said. “I didn’t think he would.”
They dragged him to the cot and flung him on it.
In a few minutes Alexander Brandel came in and after shuddering at the first sight of Warsinski grilled him for twelve hours from questions and knowledge gained from the Good Fellowship archives. Piotr Warsinski revealed his own crimes, the crimes of his officers, his own fortunes, the places of hidden stores, information about Stutze, Schreiker, Koenig, the Nightingales, and the Reinhard Corps.
Next morning Piotr Warsinski was killed in accordance with the Joint Forces’ judgment by a single bullet through the back of his head.
Chapter Six
THE IMMEDIATE PROBLEM FACING Joint Forces was locating a new command bunker in the central area. The other bunkers were already jammed to capacity, and the hundred people from Mila 19 added to the problem. To build a suitable underground complex for two to three hundred people would take weeks.
Alexander Brandel’s knowledge through his past dealings became invaluable. By one means or another he knew of most hiding places in the ghetto.
Alex suspected there was a large bunker under Mila 18, across the street from his own former headquarters.
He had often done business with a smuggler named Moritz Katz, a rotund little chap who in pre-war Warsaw had been a furrier. His business was always considered on the fringe; a tightrope between the legal and the unlawful. It was difficult to come right out and say that Moritz fenced stolen goods. His clientele was always high class. He carried an ethical concept with him into the ghetto. He was a decent fellow, as smugglers went. After all, smuggling was an honorable necessity in ghetto life. Moritz bought and sold at reasonable prices. Moreover, he was softhearted. When things got particularly desperate, Alex could always get Moritz to make an urgent delivery of essentials at cost price.
Moritz had two distinguishing features. He was in a never-ending card game, and his mouth always chewed sweets, fruit, cake, candy. For the latter frailty, he was known as Moritz the Nasher.
The Bathyrans who guarded the rooftops around Mila 19 detected Moritz the Nasher entering and leaving Mila 18 so many times that it had to be suspected as his headquarters.
These suspicions were advanced after the bunker at Mila 19 was expanded until its rooms stretched to the sewer under the middle of the street. Deborah Bronski had the room next to the sewer pipe with the children from the orphanage. Many times they heard foreign sounds coming from either the inside of the pipe or beyond it.
From this Alex concluded that Moritz the Nasher had a bunker under Mila 18, separated from his own by the twelve-foot pipe. He discussed this possibility with Simon and Andrei.
“I am positive there is a bunker under Mila 18, and if it is what we think, it will be a large one.”
“It would be a perfect location for a command post,” Simon said. “Particularly since the Germans have located and wrecked Mila 19, they’d never suspect we’d be in another location so close.”
“But,” Andrei said realistically, “how the hell do you find the entrance? Moritz Katz is the shrewdest smuggler in the ghetto.”
“Can we get a message to him?” Alex suggested.
“No one has seen him for weeks, since his gang was caught at the Gensia Gate and taken to the Umschlagplatz.”
They mused and pondered. The idea of a large, ready-made command post was terribly appealing.
“Well. What’s to lose if we cut a hole through the children’s room and make another on a direct line across the Kanal? If we’re lucky we might hit the bunker.”
“You know how tricky sound is in the sewers. The children may have been hearing an echo coming from a hundred meters away.”
“What the hell?” Andrei said. “Let’s cut through and look around. Nothing to lose.”
Simon shrugged a dubious okay. No one had a better suggestion.
“I think I’d better go in alone,” Andrei said. “If Moritz is still down there he will panic if he sees an army coming after him.”