He had radio and telephone codes warning the Jews who kept an eye on the bomb of an emergency. He hadn’t used them. He hoped he wasn’t making a mistake by not using them. He’d feared those warnings might be intercepted. If he brought the alert himself, it couldn’t very well be. He didn’t think Lizard commandos would rush the shed where the bomb lay hidden before he could get up to it. He wasn’t sure they would rush it at all. But he’d run his mouth when he shouldn’t have, and now he was paying the price in worry. And he wanted to be on the spot if the alarm came-that was the other reason he hadn’t used his codes.
He dug his fingers into the backs of his calves, trying to loosen up the muscles there. The rest of him could be philosophical about breathing in nerve gas. His legs hurt. As if in sympathy, his shoulders started aching, too. Trying to rub one’s own back was among the most unsatisfactory procedures ever devised.
Pain or no pain, he got rolling again. Ludmila Jager lived with more discomfort every day than he felt when his aches and pains were at their worst. But, again, that was philosophy. It might spur him on, but didn’t make his body feel any better.
Grunting, he leaned forward and put his back into the work. No matter what he did, he couldn’t recapture the ease of motion he’d known the last time he went up to Glowno. By the time he got to the small Polish town, he was about ready to fall off his bicycle.
Before he went to the shed where the bomb hid, he walked into a tavern to wash the dust of the road from his throat. “A mug of beer,” he said to the Pole behind the bar, and set down a coin.
“Here you go, pal.” The fellow slid the mug to him without a second glance. He looked no more Jewish than the half dozen or so men already in the place. As usual, he had his Mauser on his back. Compared to them, he was underdressed. A couple of them wore crisscrossed bandoleers, giving themselves a fine piratical aspect. One had an old Polish helmet on his head, another a German model with the swastika-bearing shield on one side painted over.
“Yeah, we’ll take it,” the tough in the Polish helmet said, knocking back some plum brandy. “We’ll take it, and we’ll get it the hell out of here.”
One of his pals sighed. It might have been the sigh of a lover pining for his beloved. “And when we’ve got it, we’ll be the big shots,” he crooned.
Mordechai sipped his beer, wondering what sort of robbery the roughnecks were plotting. Finding out seemed a bad idea. They had a lot more firepower than he did. He wondered how much cash the local bank held. Then he wondered if Glowno boasted a local bank.
“We’ll be big, all right,” another ruffian said. “And about time, too. The kikes will all burn in hell, but they act like cocks o’ the walk here. Been going on too damn long, anybody wants to know.”
“Won’t last forever,” said the first tough, the one with the helmet. “As soon as they lose it and we get it, everybody’s going to have to listen to us.”
After that, Anielewicz didn’t think they were going to knock over a bank any more. He knew how Nesseref had found out the explosive-metal bomb was here: he’d talked too damn much. He had no idea how these Poles had found out, but how they’d found out didn’t matter. That they’d found out did.
He finished the beer and slipped out of the tavern. The ruffians paid him no attention. They had no idea they’d said anything he might understand-or care about if he did. He looked like a Pole. If he knew what they were talking about, they’d figure he’d be cheering them on.
A lot of Poles would have cheered. The Lizards in Poland did lean toward the Jews. That was partly because the Jews had leaned toward them and against the Nazis in 1942. It was also because there were a lot more Poles than Jews; the Lizards got more benefit from supporting small faction against large than they would have the other way round.
Furthermore, Jews did not dream of an independent Poland strong enough to defy all its neighbors. Poles did. Anielewicz thought the dream a delusion even if the Poles got their hands on an explosive-metal bomb. They didn’t, for which he could hardly blame them-except that they wanted his bomb.
His legs groaned when he got back on the bicycle. He didn’t think the Polish nationalists could touch off the bomb even if they got it, but he didn’t want to find out. He wasn’t sure the Jews could touch it off, either. He didn’t want to find that out any more than the other. Pulling down the Philistines’ temple while he was in it had made Samson famous, but he never got to hear about it.
The shed in which the bomb was stored lay at, or rather just beyond, the northern edge of Glowno. Before the war, it had been attached to a livery stable. Livery stables, these days, were in no greater demand in Glowno than anywhere else. That part of town had taken damage in the fighting between the Nazis and the Poles, too, and then again in the fighting between the Nazis and the Lizards. Rubble and scrubby second growth surrounded the shed. There were only a couple of houses in the area, both owned by Jews. The Poles were just as glad the Jews had chosen an area where they didn’t draw attention to themselves.
Anielewicz swung off his bicycle as soon as the poplars and birches and bushy plants of whose names he wasn’t sure screened him from most of the town. “Good thing you did that,” somebody remarked, “or you’d have been mighty sorry you were ever born.”
That warning might have been in Yiddish, but Anielewicz had all he could do to keep from laughing out loud: it came straight from a U.S. Western film he’d watched the week before dubbed into Polish. He fought down the temptation to respond in kind. Instead, he said, “How many guards can we get in a hurry, Joshua? We’re about to be attacked.”
“Oy!” the unseen Jew said. “There’s Mottel and there’s me, and we can get Pinkhas, I guess. Benjamin and Yitzkhak would be around, but their cousin got hit by a bus in Warsaw, so they’re there.”
“Get everybody here, fast but quiet,” Mordechai ordered. “Who’s on the switch?” If that switch was tripped, the bomb would go up-if it could go up. Somebody always had to be ready to use it.
“You are, now,” Joshua answered. “You know the bomb better than anybody, and-” He broke off. He’d undoubtedly been about to say something like, and you’d have the nerve to do it. Anielewicz didn’t know if he would or not. One more thing he wasn’t anxious to discover by experiment. After a moment, Joshua asked, “How much time have we got?”
“I don’t know, not exactly,” Anielewicz answered. “I saw six Poles drinking in a tavern. I don’t know how long it’ll be before they do what they came to do. I don’t know if they have any friends along, either.”
“It would be nice if you did know a few things,” Joshua remarked.
Ignoring that, Anielewicz picked his way up the twisting path to the shed. The wooden building looked weathered and sad. The two locks on the door seemed to have seen better days. Anielewicz opened them in the right order. Had he unlocked the top one first, something unpleasant would have happened to him.
He went inside. It was dark and dusty in there; a cobweb caught in his hair. But the interior was very different from the exterior. Inside the rainand sun-faded timbers the shed showed the world was reinforced concrete thick enough to challenge medium artillery. It had firing slits for a German-made machine gun; the MG-42 was at least as good a weapon as any the Lizards manufactured.
Also keeping Anielewicz company was the big crate that housed the bomb. He wondered what those half-dozen Poles would do with it if they got it. Did they think they could put it in their back pocket and walk off with it? That would need to be a big, sturdy pocket, considering the size and weight of the thing.