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Still another crash-this one knocked Russie off his feet and showed daylight through a hole in the far wall. As he curled up into a frightened ball, he wondered what the devil was going on. The Nazis couldn’t have fired three rocket bombs so fast… could they? Or was it artillery? How could they have brought artillery through Lizard held territory to shell Lodz?
His ears rang, but not so much that he couldn’t hear the nasty chatter of gunfire. A Lizard ran down the hall, carrying one of his kind’s wicked little automatic rifles. He fired out through, the hole the shells had made in the wall. Whoever was outside returned fire. The Lizard reeled back, red, red blood spurting from several wounds.
Someone-a human-burst in through the hole. Another Lizard came running up. The man cut him down; he had a submachine gun that at close range was as lethal, as anything the aliens used. More men rushed in behind the first. One of them shouted, “Russie!”
“Here!” Moishe yelled. He uncoiled and scrambled to his feet, hope suddenly overpowering fright.
The fellow who’d called his name spoke in oddly accented Yiddish: “Stand back, cousin. I’m going to blow the lock off your door.”
Spy stories came in handy after all. Russie pointed to the floor of the corridor. “No need. There’s the key. This mamzer”-he pointed to the unconscious Pole-“was about to take me away for more questions.”
“Oy. Wouldn’t that have been a balls-up?” The last wasn’t in Yiddish; Moishe wasn’t sure what language it was in. He had precious little time to wonder, the man grabbed the key, turned it in the lock. He yanked the door open. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”
Moishe needed no further urging. Alarms were clanging somewhere, off in the distance; power here seemed to be out. As he ran toward the hole in the outer wall, he asked, “Who are you, anyway?”
“I’m a cousin of yours from England. David Goldfarb’s my name. Now cut the talk, will you?”
Moishe obediently cut the talk. Bullets started flying again; he ran even harder than he had before. Behind him, somebody screamed. The medical student part of him wanted to go back and help. The rest made him keep running-out through the hole, out through the open space around the prison, out through a gap in the razor wire, out through the screaming, gaping people in the street.
“There are machine guns on the roof,” he gasped. “Why aren’t they shooting at us?”
“Snipers,” his cousin answered. “Good ones. Shut up. Keep running. We aren’t out of this mess yet.”
Russie kept running. Then, abruptly, his companions, those who survived, threw away their weapons as they rounded a corner. When they rounded another corner, they stopped running. David Goldfarb grinned. “Now we’re just ordinary people-you see?”
“I see,” Moishe answered-and, once it was pointed out to him, he did.
“It won’t last,” said one of the gunmen who’d been with Goldfarb. “They’ll turn this town inside out looking for us. Somebody kills a Lizard, they get nasty about that.” His teeth showed white through tangled brown beard.
“Which means it’s a good idea to get away from the net before they go fishing,” Goldfarb said. “Cousin Moishe, we’re going to take you back to England.”
“Without Rivka and Reuven, I won’t go.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Russie realized how selfish and boorish they sounded. These men had risked their lives to save him; their comrades had died. Who was he to set conditions on what they did? But he didn’t apologize, because however selfish what he’d said sounded, he also realized he’d meant it.
He waited for Goldfarb to scream at him, and for the other man-who looked tough enough for anything, no matter how desperate to pound him senseless and then do whatever he chose. Instead they just kept walking along, easygoing, as if he’d made a remark about the weather. Goldfarb said, “That’s taken care of. They’ll be waiting for us along the way.”
“That’s-wonderful,” Moishe said dazedly. Too much was happening too fast for him to take it all in. He let his cousin and the other fighter lead him through the streets of Lodz while he tried to adjust to the heady joys of freedom. It made him giddy, as if he’d gulped down a couple of shots of plum brandy on an empty stomach.
A tattered poster with his face on it peered down from a wall. He rubbed his chin. The Lizards hadn’t let him use a razor, so his beard was coming back. It wasn’t as long as he’d worn it before, but pretty soon he’d look like his pictures again.
“Don’t worry about it,” Goldfarb said when he fretted out loud. “Once we get you out of town, we’ll take care of things like that.”
“How will you get me out?” Moishe asked.
“Don’t worry about it,” Goldfarb repeated.
His nameless friend laughed and said, “Asking a Jew not to worry is like asking the sun not to rise. You can ask all you like, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get what you ask for.” That was apt enough to make Moishe laugh, too.
Before long, they walked into a block of flats. Lodz was already beginning to boil around them. The sound of explosions and gunfire carded a long way; rumor rippled out from around the prison almost as fast as the racket. The two women who went into the building just behind Moishe and his companions were already wondering who had escaped. If only they knew, he thought dizzily.
They climbed stairs. The fellow without a name rapped on a door-one, two, one again. “Spy stuff,” David Goldfarb muttered. The other fellow poked him in the ribs with an elbow, hard enough to make him give back a pace.
The door opened. “Come in, come in.” The skinny little bald man who greeted them looked like a tailor, but tailors did not commonly carry submachine guns. He looked them over, lowered the weapon. “Just you three? Where are the rest?”
“Just us,” Goldfarb answered. “A couple scattered off to the other hidey-holes, a couple others won’t be going anywhere any more. About what we figured.” The casual way he said that chilled Russie. His cousin went on, “We’re not hanging around here, either, you know. You have what we need?”
“You need to ask?” With a scornful sniff the bald little man pointed to bundles on the couch. “There-change your clothes.”
“Clothes are only part of it,” Goldfarb’s tough-looking friend said. “The rest is taken care of, too?”
“The rest is taken care of.” The bald fellow sniffed again, this time angrily. “We wouldn’t be good for much if it weren’t, would we?”
“Who knows what we’re good for?” the nameless fighter answered, but he shrugged off his shabby wool jacket and started unbuttoning his shirt. Moishe had no jacket to shrug off. He shed with a long sigh of relief the clothes he’d been wearing since he was captured. Their replacements didn’t fit as well, but so what? They were clean.
“Good thing the Lizards haven’t figured out prison uniforms; they’d have made it harder for us to do a vanishing act with you,” Goldfarb said as he, too, changed. His Yiddish was plenty fluent, but full of odd turns of phrase he didn’t seem to notice, as if he was using it to express ideas that came first in English. He probably was.
“You’re staying here, right, Shmuel?” asked the nondescript little Jew who kept the flat. The nameless fighter, now nameless no more, nodded. So did the little fellow, who turned to Moishe and Goldfarb. He handed each of them a thin rectangle of some shiny stuff, about the size of a playing card. Moishe looked at his. A picture that vaguely resembled him looked back from it. The card gave details of a life he’d never led. The bald little man said, “Don’t pull these out unless you have to. With luck, you’ll be away before they do a proper job of cordoning off the city.”
“And without luck, we’ll buy a plot,” Goldfarb said, holding up his own card “This bloke looks more like Goebbels than he does like me.”
“Best we could do,” the bald Jew said with a shrug. “That’s why you don’t want to wave it around unless somebody asks for it. But if somebody does, he probably won’t look at it; he’ll feed it into a Lizard machine-and it sh
ows you’ve been authorized for the past two weeks to leave Lodz on a buying trip.” He clucked mournfully. “Cost us plenty to pay off a Pole who works for the Lizards to make these for us, and he’d only take the best.”
“Gold?” Russie asked.
“Worse,” the fellow answered. “Tobacco. Gold at least stays in circulation. Tobacco, you smoke it and it’s gone.”
“Tobacco.” Goldfarb sounded even more mournful than the bald Jew had. “What I wouldn’t give for a fag. It’s been a bloody long time.”
Russie didn’t care one way or the other about tobacco. He’d never got the habit, and his medical studies made him pretty sure it wasn’t good for you. But it did show how far the underground had gone to rescue him. That warmed him, especially since some people thought him a traitor for broadcasting for the Lizards. He said, “Thank you more than I know how to tell you. I-”
Shmuel cut him off: “Listen, you’d better get out of here. You want to thank us, broadcast from England.”
