“Yes.” Stalin puffed out more smoke. His eyes narrowed. He looked through Molotov rather than at him. It was not quite the hooded look he gave when mentally discarding a favorite, consigning him to thegulag or worse. He was just thinking hard. After a while, he said, “Let us be flexible, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich. Let us, instead of demanding withdrawal before negotiations, propose a cease-fire in place while negotiations go on. Perhaps this will work, perhaps it will not. If we are no longer subject to raids and bombings, our industry and collective farms will have the chance to begin recovery.”
“Shall we offer this proposal alone, or shall we try to continue to maintain a human popular front against the alien imperialists?” Molotov asked.
“You may consult with the Americans and Germans before transmitting the proposal to the Lizards,” Stalin said with the air of a man granting a great boon. “You may, for that matter, consult with the British, the Japanese, and the Chinese-the small powers,” he added, dismissing them with a wave of his hand. “If they are willing to make the Lizards the same offer at the same time, well and good: we shall go forward together. If they are unwilling… we shall go forward anyway.”
“As you say, Comrade General Secretary.” Molotov was not sure this was the wisest course, but imagining von Ribbentrop’s face when he got the despatch announcing the new Soviet policy-and, better yet, imagining von Ribbentrop’s face when he had to bring Hitler the news-came close to making it all worthwhile. “I shall begin drafting the telegram at once.”
Heinrich Jager was getting to be a pretty fair horseman. The accomplishment filled him with less delight than it might have under other circumstances. When you had to climb on a horse to go back and visit corps headquarters, that mostly proved you didn’t have enough petrol to keep your utility vehicles operational. Since theWehrmacht barely had enough petrol to keep its panzers operational, the choice lay between visiting corps headquarters on a bay mare or on shank’s mare. Riding beat the devil out of walking.
The road through the forest forked. Jager urged the mare south, down the right-hand fork. That was not the direct route back to his regiment. One of the good things-one of the few good things-about riding a horse as opposed to aVolkswagen was that you did it by yourself, without a driver. Jager didn’t want anyone to know he was turning down the right-hand fork. If anyone found out, in fact, he would soon be having intimate discussion with the SS, the SD, theGestapo, theAbwehr, and any other security or Intelligence service that could get its hands (to say nothing of assorted blunt, sharp, heated, and electrically conductive instruments) on him.
“Why am I doing this?” he said in the middle of forest stillness broken only by the distant rumble of artillery. The mare answered with a snort.
He felt like snorting himself. He did know the answer: partly the debt he felt to Anielewicz personally, partly that Anielewicz and his Jewish fighters had kept their side of the bargain they’d made with him and didn’t deserve incineration, partly the way his stomach knotted whenever he thought about what the forces of theReich had done to the Jews of eastern Europe before the Lizards came-and were still doing to the Jews remaining in the territory they controlled. (He remembered all too vividly the Jewish and homosexual prisoners who worked on the atomic pile underSchloss Hohentubingen till they died, which seldom took long.).
Was all that reason enough to violate his military oath? The head of the SS and theFuhrer himself had authorized Skorzeny to visit atomic fire upon Lodz. Who was Colonel Heinrich Jager to say they were wrong?
“A man,” he said, answering the question no one had asked aloud. “If I can’t live with myself, what good is anything else?”
He sometimes wished he could turn off his mind, could numb himself to everything that happened in war. He knew a good many officers who were aware of the horrors theReich had committed in the east but who refused to think about them, who sometimes even refused to admit they were aware of them. Then there was Skorzeny, who knew but didn’t give a damn. Neither path suited Jager. He was neither an ostrich, to stick his head in the sand, nor a Pharisee, to pass by on the other side of the road.
And so here he was riding down this side of this road, a submachine gun on his knee, alert for Lizard patrols, German patrols, Polish brigands, Jewish brigands… anyone at all. The fewer people he saw, the better he liked it.
His nerves jumped again when he came out of the forest into open farm country. Now he was visible for kilometers, not just a few meters. Of course, a lot of men got around on horseback these days, and a lot of them were in uniform and carried weapons. Not all of those were soldiers, by any means. The times had turned Poland as rough as the cinema made the America Wild West out to be. Rougher-the cowboys didn’t have machine guns or panzers.
His eyes swiveled back and forth. He still didn’t see anybody. He rode on. The farm wasn’t far. He could leave his message, boot the mare up into a trot, and be back with his regiment at the front only an hour or so later than he should have been. Given how erratic any sort of travel was these days, no one would think twice over that.
“Here we go,” he said softly, recognizing the well-kept little grove of apple trees ahead. Karol would pass the word to Tadeusz, Tadeusz could get it to Anielewicz, and that would be that.
Everything was quiet ahead. Too quiet? The hair prickled up on the back of Jager’s neck. No chickens ran in the yard, no sheep bleated, no pigs grunted. For that matter, no one was in the fields, no toddlers played by the house. Like a lot of Poles, Karol was raising a great brood of children. You could always spot them-or hear them, anyhow. Not now, though.
His horse snorted and sidestepped, white showing around her eyes. “Steady,” Jager said, and steady she was. But something had spooked her. She was walking forward, yes, but her nostrils still flared with every breath she took.
Jager sniffed, too. At first he noted nothing out of the ordinary. Then he too smelled what was bothering the mare. It wasn’t much, just a faint whiff of corruption, as if aHausfrau hadn’t got round to cooking a joint of beef until it had stayed in the icebox too long.
He knew he should have wheeled the horse around and ridden out of there at that first whiff of danger. But the whiff argued that the danger wasn’t there now. It had come and gone, probably a couple of days before. Jager rode the ever more restive mare up to the farmhouse and tied her to one of the posts holding up the front porch. As he dismounted, he flipped the change lever on his Schmeisser to full automatic.
Flies buzzed in and out through the front door, which was slightly ajar. Jager kicked it open. The sudden noise made the mare quiver and try to run. Jager bounded into the house.
The first two bodies lay in the kitchen. One of Karol’s daughters, maybe seven years old, had been shot execution-style in the back of the neck. His wife lay there, too, naked, on her back. She had a bullet hole between the eyes. Whoever had been here had probably raped her a few times, or more than a few, before they’d killed her.
Biting his lip, Jager walked into the parlor. Several more children sprawled in death there. The visitors had served one of them, a little blond of about twelve whom Jager remembered as always smiling, the same way they had Karol’s wife. The black bread he’d had for breakfast wanted to come back up. He clamped his jaw and wouldn’t let it.
The door to Karol’s bedroom gaped wide, like his wife’s legs, like his daughter’s. Jager walked in. There on the bed lay Karol. He had not been slain neatly, professionally, dispassionately. His killers had taken time and pains on their work. Karol had taken pain, too, some enormous amount of it, before he was finally allowed to die.