“Come on, Jew boy. Two hundred zlotys or you’ll take a walk to Gestapo House.”
Chris’s blood boiled. “Go to hell,” he snapped, and walked straight at the pair ahead of him.
One from behind hooked his arm and turned him around. Chris drove his fist into the figure’s mouth and the man fell backward, hit the curb, and landed on the flat of his back.
Damn! Damn my temper!
Two leaped on him, and while he struggled to free himself the third brought a blackjack to the side of his cheek.
A surge of raw strength threw the men from him. As he shook himself free, the first one got up and caught him in the eye with a hamlike fist, and for an instant Chris was blinded. He reeled, then stopped abruptly as his back hit the ghetto wall.
Chris grunted as the blackjack found its mark again. He sank to his hands and knees and wobbled on all fours and the ground spun around him.
“Get up, Jew boy!”
Chris looked up. They hovered over him. One with the blackjack, another with a jagged broken bottle. Another, bloody-mouthed from his blow. He could not see the fourth man.
His head cleared and the ground steadied. Chris lurched up, ramming his shoulder into the one with the glass bottle to crack out of the ring. With the air suddenly smacked from his lungs, the hoodlum fell and sat on the ground, gasping.
And then Chris sank under a rain of fists and boots. He was jerked to his feet and propped against the wall, his arms spread-eagled as in the position of a crucifixion. The leader could not resist one last smash into the stomach of his helpless victim. A light was held to Chris’s face. His dark Italian features were studied. “He’s a Jew, all right.”
Chris’s head rolled up and his eyes opened and he snarled. The leader pressed the jagged glass close to his eye, so he dared not move.
Chris brought his knee up into the man’s groin and the man shrieked and staggered back, then came forward, enraged and intent on cutting up his face.
“Wait. He fights too good to be a Jew. We had better make sure he is.”
“What’s the difference now? Just take his money.”
“Holy Mother! Look at these papers! He isn’t a Jew.”
“Let’s get out of here.”
Footsteps ... faded ... they’re gone ...
Chris slipped down to the ground, bloody, and pawed around to pull himself up.
Someone stood over him. He managed to hold his head up enough to see the faces of a frightened middle-aged couple.
“Help me ...”
“Don’t touch him, Poppa. Can’t you see he’s a Jew? He jumped over the wall. Leave—leave before the guard comes.”
Chapter Twenty-seven
A WEEK PASSED BEFORE Horst von Epp returned to Warsaw. He entered the Holy Cross Church, spotted Chris kneeling in the first row, and knelt beside him.
“Good Lord,” Horst said, “what happened to you?”
“I was mistaken for a Jew.”
“Bad mistake, these days.”
“You should have seen me a week ago.”
“I thought we’d better meet out of the office,” Horst said, nodding in the direction of the little black box on the altar containing Chopin’s heart. “Let’s take a walk. That box may have a microphone hidden in it. Matter of fact, I bit into a microphone planted in my breakfast bun this morning.”
They shaded their eyes from the sun. Chris put on dark glasses to cover the bruises, and they strolled down New World Street. Across the street a pair of men began to follow them, and Von Epp’s car drifted alongside at a crawl. “Lovely system,” Von Epp said. “This way no one knows exactly who is watching who. How did you find the Russian front?”
“Nothing but victory for the Fatherland. Trouble is, I’m having a time getting my dispatches through about your glorious achievements.”
“Sorry about that. Your line to Switzerland was restored this morning. Bloody blockheads. I knew the moment I left Warsaw there would be a panic.”
“Restoring Rosenblum to me too?”
They crossed the street.
“Your silence is deafening, Horst.” Chris pressed.
“Be reasonable.”
“He’s like my right arm.”
“I told you I didn’t know how long I’d be able to keep him out of the ghetto.”
They walked in quiet unison for the rest of the block, then stopped at the junction where Jerusalem Boulevard turned into the Third of May Boulevard. A screaming set of sirens froze all movement. A pair of motorcycles followed by a command car followed by a convoy of a hundred trucks filled with fresh soldiers poured past them. From two or three of the trucks they were able to catch a note or two of a marching song. The convoy swept toward the newly reconstructed bridge to Praga.
Meat for the eastern front, Chris thought. The blitzkrieg had swept over the steppes. The fantastic military machine was slicing up the vastness of Russia from the Black Sea to the gates of Moscow. Horst and Christ drifted in the wake of the convoy to the bridge, and they stopped in the middle and leaned on the rail.
“Schreiker called me in and questioned me about Rosenblum. They were all on me about him. For both of your welfares it is better this way. It is impossible to have him out of the ghetto without casting all sorts of suspicion on you. Obviously he’s mixed up in some sort of contacts around Warsaw and probably two steps ahead of being hauled into Gestapo House. Now don’t press me on this matter, Chris.”
Von Epp was right. Rosenblum was in thick as a courier. The Germans would be fools to allow him to continue to run loose.
“If you need another man, for Christ sake, find yourself a nice untainted Aryan.”
Chris nodded. The Vistula River was filled with barges bearing the tools of war for transfer to the eastern front.
“Any of all this bother you, Horst?”
“Everyone knows the Jews started the war,” Horst recited from the principal dogma.
“I saw a few things out there behind your lines that may be pretty hard to explain.”
“Believe me, Goebbels will find explanations. And the rest of us? Hell, we’ll all shrug with blue-eyed innocence and say, ‘Orders were orders—what could we do?’ Thank God the world is blessed with short memories.”
“Where does it end?”
“End? We can’t stop until we either own it all or get blown up into a billion pieces. Besides, don’t be too hard on us. Conquerors have never won prizes for benevolence. We are no worse than a dozen other empires when they ran the show.”
“Does this make it right?”
“My dear Chris, right is the exclusive property of the winning side. The loser is always wrong. Now, if I were you, I’d string along with us for awhile because the way things are going we may be Rome, Babylon, Genghis Khan, and the Ottomans combined for many hundred years.”
“Christ, what a prospect.”
Horst laughed and slapped Chris on the back vigorously. “Trouble with you, you bastard, you’ve been out on the front looking at the seamy side of things. Warsaw is the warriors’ reward. Unbend a little. How about a private party tonight? You, me—a pair of ladies. Hildie Solna said you were rather nice to her last time out.”
“Once in a while my chemicals get out of balance. Hildie restores them. Usually when I’m tailing off a drunk.”
“Tell you what. To hell with Hildie. Tonight I’m lending you number one from my private stock. Eighteen, built like a ripe peach. And where this dear girl picked up so many tricks in her short life—fantastically beautiful muscle control, and she does a thing of rubbing on baby oil ...”
A roaring truck blotted out further dissertation on the orgy.
Chris again became entranced by the river barges. Horst von Epp was correct. “Right” was the winning side. He sure was with the winner. Five hundred years of Germany? Could be. The trip to the eastern front was the clincher. No matter how dark things had been in Spain, in Poland he always felt that the pendulum would swing back the other way. But would it? A breakthrough in Egypt would put Rommel on an unstoppable path to India. Moscow was digging in for a siege. The frantic preparations in America—too little, too late. He had seen the German power unleash a fury that made the conquest of Poland look like child’s play. Kiev, a half million Russian soldiers trapped. What could stop them?