“Isn’t that good?” Liu Han crooned. She thought the dry cake powder had very little flavor of any sort, but babies didn’t like strongly flavored food. So grandmothers said, anyhow, and if they didn’t know, who did?
Liu Mei looked up at Liu Han and let out an emphatic cough. Liu Han stared at her daughter. Was she really saying she liked the dry cake powder today? Liu Han couldn’t think of anything else that cough might mean. Although her daughter had still expressed herself in the fashion of a little scaly devil, she’d done it to approve of something not only earthly but Chinese.
“Mama,” Liu Mei said, and then used another emphatic cough. Liu Han thought she would melt into a little puddle of dry-cake-flour mush, right there on the floor of her room. Nieh Ho-T’ing had been right: little by little, she was winning her daughter back from the scaly devils.
Mordechai Anielewicz looked at his companions in the room above the fire station on Lutomierska Street. “Well, now we have it,” he said. “What do we do with it?”
“We ought to give it back to the Nazis,” Solomon Gruver rumbled. “They tried to kill us with it; only fair we should return the favor.”
“David Nussboym would have said we should give it to the Lizards,” Bertha Fleishman said, “and not the way Solomon meant, but as a true gift.”
“Yes, and because he kept saying things like that, we said goodbye to him,” Gruver answered. “We don’t need any more of such foolishness.”
“Just a miracle we managed to get that hideous stuff out of the casing and into our own sealed bottles without killing anybody doing it,” Anielewicz said: “a miracle, and a couple of those antidote kits theWehrmacht men sold us, for when their own people started feeling the gas in spite of the masks and the protective clothes they were wearing.” He shook his head. “The Nazis are much too good at making things like that.”
“They’re much too good at giving them to us, too,” Bertha Fleishman said. “Before, their rockets would send over a few kilos of nerve gas at a time, with a big bursting charge to spread it around. But this… we salvaged more than a tonne from that bomb. And they were going to have us place it so it hurt us worst. The rockets could come down almost anywhere.”
Solomon Gruver’s laugh was anything but pleasant. “I bet that Skorzeny pitched a fit when he found out he couldn’t play us for suckers the way he thought he could.”
“He probably did,” Mordechai agreed. “But don’t think he’s done for good because we fooled him once. I never thought themamzer would live up to the nonsense Gobbels puts out on the wireless, but he does. That is a man to be taken seriously no matter what. If we don’t keep an eye on him all the time, he’ll do something dreadful to us. Even if we do, he may yet.”
“Thank God for your friend, the other German,” Bertha said.
Now Anielewicz laughed-uncomfortably. “I don’t think he’s my friend, exactly. I don’t think I’m his friend, either. But I let him live and I let him carry that explosive metal back to Germany, and so… I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s just a stiff-necked sense of honor, and he’s paying back a debt.”
“There can be decent Germans,” Solomon Gruver said reluctantly. That almost set Mordechai laughing again. If he had started, the laugh would have carried an edge of hysteria. He could imagine some plump, monocled Nazi functionary using that precise tone of voice to admit,There can be decent Jews.
“I still wonder if I should have killed him,” Mordechai said. “The Nazis would have had a much harder time building their bombs without that metal, and God knows the world would be a better place without them. But the world wouldn’t be a better place with the Lizards overrunning it.”
“And here we are, still stuck in the middle between them,” Bertha Fleishman said. “If the Lizards win, everyone loses. If the Nazis win, we lose.”
“We’ll hurt them before we go,” Anielewicz said. “They’ve helped us do it, too. If they should come back, we won’t let them treat us the way they did before. Not now. Never again. What was the last desire of my life before the Lizards came has been fulfilled. Jewish self-defense is a fact.”
How tenuous a fact it was came to be shown a moment later, when a Jewish fighter named Leon Zelkowitz walked into the room where they were talking and said, “There’s an Order Service district leader down at the entrance who wants to talk with you, Mordechai.”
Anielewicz made a sour face. “Such an honor.” The Order Service in the Jewish district of Lodz still reported to Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, who had been Eldest of the Jews under the Nazis and was still Eldest of the Jews under the Lizards. Most of the time, the Order Service prudently pretended the Jewish fighters did not exist. That the Lizards’ puppet police came looking for him now-he needed to find out what it meant. He got up and slung a Mauscr over his shoulder.
The Order Service officer still wore his Nazi-issue trench coat and kepi. He wore his Nazi-issue armband, too: red and white, with a blackMagen David on it; the white triangle inside the Star of David showed his rank. He carried a billy club on his belt. Against a rifle, that was nothing much.
“You wanted me?” Anielewicz was ten or twelve centimeters taller than the district leader, and used his height to stare coldly down at the other man.
“I-” The Order Service man coughed. He was chunky and pale-faced, with a black mustache that looked as if a moth had landed on his upper lip. He tried again: “I’m Oskar Birkenfeld, Anielewicz. I have orders to take you to Bunim.”
“Do you?” Anielewicz had expected a meeting with Rumkowski or some of his henchmen. To be summoned instead to meet with the chief Lizard in Lodz… something out of the ordinary was going on. He wondered if he should have this Birkenfeld seized and drop out of sight himself. He’d made plans to do that at need. Was the need here? Temporizing, he said, “Does he give me a safe-conduct pledge to and from the meeting?”
“Yes, yes,” the Order Service man said impatiently.
Anielewicz nodded, his face thoughtful. The Lizards were perhaps better than human beings about keeping those pledges. “All right. I’ll come.”
Birkenfeld turned in what looked like glad relief. Maybe he’d expected Mordechai to refuse, and also expected to catch it from his own superiors. He started away with his shoulders back and a spring in his step, for all the world as if he were on a mission of his own rather than a puppet of puppets. Sad and amused at the same time, Anielewicz followed him.
The Lizards had moved into the former German administrative offices in the Bialut Market Square.Only too fitting, Anielewicz thought. Rumkowski’ s offices were in the next building over; his buggy, with its German-made placard proclaiming him Eldest of the Jews, sat in front of it. But Mordechai got only a glimpse of the buggy, for Lizard guards came forward to take charge of him. District Leader Birkenfeld hastily disappeared.
“Your rifle,” a Lizard said to Anielewicz in hissing Polish. He handed over the weapon. The Lizard took it. “Come.”
Bunim’s office reminded Mordechai of Zolraag’s back in Warsaw: it was full of fascinating but often incomprehensible gadgets.
Even the ones whose purpose the Jewish fighting leader could grasp worked on incomprehensible principles. When the guard brought him into the office, for instance, a sheet of paper was silently issuing from a squarish box made of bakelite or something very much like it. The paper was covered with the squiggles of the Lizards’ written language. It had to have been printed inside the box. As he watched, a blank sheet went inside; it came out with printing on it. How, without any sound save the hum of a small electric motor?