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Friedrich laughed in his face. “You Jews took it when you were on the bottom. You think I believe you won’t give it now that you’re on top?”
“We believe in something you Nazis never heard of,” Anielewicz answered. “It’s called justice.”
“It’s calledScheisse, is what it’s called,” Friedrich said. “So in the name of justice, you’re going to-” In the middle of the sentence, without shifting either his eyes or his feet to give warning, he hit Anielewicz in the belly and ran.
“Oof!” Mordechai said, and folded up like a concertina.Shlemiel, he thought as he gasped for air his lungs didn’t want to give him. Friedrich might have started out in a police battalion, but he’d picked up a real soldier’s skills from somewhere-and a partisan’s, as well. Not letting your foe know what you were about to do until you did it ranked high on both lists.
But the German, who knew Anielewicz was dangerous, had not reckoned that Pinchas Silberman might be, too. The Jew from Lipno dashed after him, screaming “Nazi murderer!” at the top of his lungs. Anielewicz made it up to his knees just in time to see Silberman spring on Friedrich’s back. They went down in a thrashing heap. That was a fight in which Silberman was bound to get the worse of it, and quickly, but Friedrich hadn’t beaten and kicked him into unconsciousness before a couple of Mauser-carrying Jewish fighting men put an end to the scrap with peremptory orders.
Silberman gasped out his story. One of the fighting men asked Friedrich a one-word question:“Nu?”
Friedrich gave a one-word answer:“Ja.”
Two rifles barked, almost in the same instant. The gunshots made men who didn’t know what was going on cry out; a couple of women screamed. Pinchas Silberman burst into tears. Joy? Rage? Sadness that yet another death didn’t bring back his slaughtered family? Anielewicz wondered if he knew himself. One of the Jewish fighters said to the other, “Come on, Aaron, let’s get rid of this garbage.” They dragged Friedrich away by the heels. His body left a trail of blood on Lutomierska Street.
Mordechai slowly got to his feet He still bent at the midsection; Friedrich was strong as a mule, and had hit the way a mule kicked, too. He’d been a pretty good companion, but when you set what he’d done before against that-Anielewicz shook his head. The German had probably deserved to die, but if all the people who deserved to die on account of what they’d done in the war dropped dead at once, there’d be hardly more people left alive than after Noah’s flood. The world would belong to the Lizards.
He shook his head again. The Lizards didn’t have clean hands, either. He started slowly and painfully down the street. He was altogether on his own again. One way or another, though, he expected he’d manage to make a nuisance of himself.
“God, I pity the poor infantry,” Heinrich Jager said, putting one foot in front of the other with dogged persistence. “If I haven’t lost ten kilos on this blasted hike, it’s a miracle.”
“Oh, quit moaning,” Otto Skorzeny said. “You’re in the south of France, my friend, one of the prime holiday spots in all the world.”
“Yes, and now you can ask me if I give a damn, too,” Jager said. “When you’re marching across it, it might as well be the Russian steppe. It’s just about as hot as the steppe was in summer, that’s certain.” He wiped the sleeve of his shirt over his face. He wore a workman’s outfit, none too clean. It wouldn’t fool a Frenchman into thinking he was French, but it had done well enough with the Lizards.
“It’s not as cold as the steppe in winter, and that’s a fact” Skorzeny shivered melodramatically. “It’s not as ugly, either. Now shake a leg. We want to get to the next safe house before the sun goes down.” He lengthened his already long stride.
Sighing, Jager kept up. “Were you in such a tearing hurry that you had to march us straight past that Lizard air base the other day?” he grumbled.
“We got by with it, so quit your bellyaching,” Skorzeny said. “The bold line is always the way to go when you mess with those scaly bastards. They’re so cautious and calculating, they never look for anybody to try something risky and outrageous. They wouldn’t be that stupid themselves, so they don’t expect anyone else to be, either. We’ve taken advantage of it more than once, too.”
“All very well, but one of these days you’re going to stick yourSchwantz on the chopping block, and I don’t fancy having mine there beside it,” Jager said.
“Why not? How much use are you getting out of it now?” Skorzeny asked, laughing. He turned back toward the air base. “And did you see the pop-eyed stare that one pilot gave us?” As best he could, he imitated a Lizard’s swiveling eyes.
Jager laughed, too, in spite of himself. Then he sobered. “How could you tell the Lizard was a pilot?”
“Gold and blue bands on his chest and belly, yellow on the arms, and those red and purple squiggles on his head. He’s medium-senior, I’d say-otherwise he’d have fewer of the purple ones. I’ve been studying their paint for a long time, my friend. If I say something along those lines is so, you can take it to the bank.”
“Oh, I will,” Jager said, with some irony but not much.
They trudged on. To their right, the river Tarn chuckled in its banks. Sheep and cattle pulled up grass and shrubs in the fields. Every so often, a dog barked. A hammer rang on an anvil in a blacksmith’s shop in a tiny village, just as it might have done a thousand years before.
“I’ll tell you what I like about this countryside,” Jager said suddenly. “It’s the first I’ve seen in the past four years that hasn’t been fought over to a fare-thee-well.”
“Aber naturlich,”Skorzeny answered. “And when we find a cafe, you can order yourself some vichyssoise, too.”
“Vichyssoise?” Jager said, and then, a moment too late. “Oh.Ja. The French gave up before we got down here, and this part of France wasn’t occupied. Then the Lizards came, and they gave up to them, too. They’re good at it.” He grunted. “And a whole lot of them are alive now who would be dead if they’d fought more. Does that make them cowards, or just smarter than we are?”
“Both,” Skorzeny answered. “Me, though, I’d rather stand up
on my hind legs and not lie down till somebody knocks me over-and I’ll try and kick the feet out from under him as I’m falling, too.”
Jager thought that over. He slowly nodded. A bell sounded behind him. He stepped aside to let a French policeman on a bicycle roll past. With his kepi and little dark mustache, the fellow looked like a cinema Frenchman. In the carrying basket under the handlebars, he had a couple of long, skinny loaves of bread and a bottle of red wine. Perhaps his mind was more on them than on anything else, for he rode by the Germans without a second glance.
They strode past the little hamlet of Ambialet. A long time ago, a lord had built a castle on a crag that stuck out into the Tarn. Later, a church and a monastery sprang up close by. They were all ruins now, but the hamlet remained.
Not far beyond it, they came to a farmhouse screened off from the road by a stand of willows. Ducks quacked in a pond close by. From off in a barn, a pig grunted. A stocky, stoop-shouldered Frenchman in a straw hat that almost made him look American put down the bucket he was carrying when the two Germans approached.
“Bonjour, monsieur,”Jager said in his halting, heavily accented French.“Avez-vous une cigarette? Peut-etre deux?”
“I regret,monsieur, that I have not even one, let alone two.” The farmer’s shrug was so perfectly Gallic that Jager forgot about the straw hat. The fellow went on, “You will be from Uncle Henri?”
“Oui,”Jager said, completing the recognition phrase. He didn’t know who Uncle Henri was: perhaps a Frenchified version of Heinrich Himmler.
“Come in, both of you,” the farmer said, waving toward the building. “My wife and daughter, they are staying with my brother-in-law down the road for a few days. They do not know why, but they are glad to visit Rene for a time.” He paused. “You may call me Jacques, by the way.”
