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“Go ahead,” Jager said. “I’m not an ostrich, to stick my head in the sand.”
Skorzeny grinned at him. The scar on his cheek pulled half his face into a grimace that might have come from a gargoyle sitting somewhere high on a medieval cathedral-or maybe that was just Jager’s mind, pulling horror from the SS man’s words: “I’m going to set off the biggest damned nerve-gas bomb the world has ever seen, and I’m going to do it right in the middle of the Lodz ghetto. So what do you think of that? Are you a colonel, or just a scoutmaster in the wrong uniform?”
“Fuck you, Skorzeny,” Jager said evenly. As the words came out of his mouth, he remembered a Jewish partisan who’d used that invitation about every other sentence. SS men had shot the Jew-Max, his name was-at a place called Babi Yar, outside of Kiev. They’d botched the job, or Max wouldn’t have had the chance to tell his story. God only knew how many they hadn’t botched.
“That’s not an answer,” Skorzeny said, as immune to insult as a Lizard panzer was to machine-gun bullets. “Tell me what you think.”
“I think it’s stupid,” Jager answered. “The Jews in Lodz have been helping us. If you start killing off the people who do that, you run out of friends in a hurry.”
“Ahh, those bastards are playing both ends against the middle, and you know it as well as I do,” Skorzeny said. “They kiss whichever ass is closest to them. It doesn’t matter one way or the other, anyhow. I’ve got my orders, and I’m going to carry them out.”
Jager came to attention and flipped up his right arm.“Heil Hitler!” he said.
He had to give Skorzeny credit: the big bruiser recognized it was sarcasm, not acquiescence. Not only that, he thought it was funny. “Come on, don’t be a wet blanket,” he said. “We’ve been through a lot together, you and I. You can give me a lot of help this time, too.”
“Yes, I’d make a splendid Jew,” Jager said, deadpan. “How long do you suppose a circumcision takes to heal up?”
“You didn’t used to be such a smartmouth,” Skorzeny said, rocking back on his heels and sticking thumbs into trouser pockets so he looked like a young lout on a streetcorner. “Must be senility coming on, eh?”
“If you say so. How am I supposed to help, though? I’ve never been inside Lodz. In fact, the offensive steered wide around it so we wouldn’t get bogged down in street fighting there. We can’t afford to go losing panzers to Molotov cocktails and things like that; we lose too many of them to the Lizards as is.”
“Yeah, that’s the line you sent back to division, and division sent it back to army group headquarters, and the High Command bought it,” Skorzeny said with a nod. “Bully for you. Maybe you’ll get red stripes on your trousers like a General Staff officer.”
“And it’s worked, too,” Jager said. “I saw more street fighting in Russia than I ever wanted. Nothing in the world chews up men and machines like that, and we don’t have them to waste.”
“Ja, ja, ja,”Skorzeny said with exaggerated patience. He leaned forward and glared at Jager. “And I also happen to know that one of the reasons we swung around Lodz in two prongs is that you cut a deal with the Jewish partisans there. What do you have to say to that, Mr. General Staff Officer?”
It might have stopped snowing, but it was anything but warm. All the same, Jager felt his face heat. If Skorzeny knew that, it was in an SS dossier somewhere… which did not bode well for his long-term survival, let alone his career. Even so, he answered as calmly as he could: “I say it was military necessity. This way, we have the partisans on our side and driving the Lizards crazy instead of the other way round. It’s worked out damned well, so you can take your ‘I also happen to know’ and flush it down the WC.”
“Why? What does Winston Churchill want with it?” Skorzeny said with a leer. The joke would have been funnier if the Germans hadn’t been making it on the radio from the day Churchill became prime minister to the night the Lizards arrived. The SS man went on, “You have to understand, I don’t really give a damn. But it does mean you have connections with the Jews. You ought to be able to use those to help me get my little toy right to the center of town.”
Jager stared at him. “And you pay me thirty pieces of silver afterwards, don’t you? I don’t throw away connections like that. I don’t murder them, either. Why not ask me to betray my own men while you’re at it?”
“Thirty pieces of silver? That’s pretty good. Christ was a damn kike, too, remember. And a whole fat lot of good it did him. So.” Skorzeny studied Jager. “The more help we get from your little chums, the easier the job will be, and I’m in favor of easy jobs whenever I can get ’em. They pay me to risk my neck, but they don’t pay me to stick it out when I don’t have to.”
This from a man who’d blown up a Lizard panzer by jumping onto it and throwing a satchel charge between turret and hull. Maybe Skorzeny called that a necessary sort of risk; Jager had no way of knowing. He said, “You touch off a nerve-gas bomb in there, you’re going to kill a lot of people who don’t have thing one to do with the war.”
This time, Skorzeny’s laugh was rude. “You fought in Russia, same as I did. So what?” He thumped Jager in the chest with a forefinger. “Listen and listen good. I’m going to do this with you or without you. It’d make my life easier if it was with you. But my life has been tough before. If it’s tough again, believe me, I’ll cope. So what do you say?”
“I don’t say anything right now,” Jager answered. “I’m going to have to think this one over.”
“Sure. Go ahead.” Skorzeny’s big head bobbed up and down in a parody of sweet reason. “Think all you want. Just don’t take too long doing it.”
The guard pointed a Sten gun at Moishe Russie’s middle. “Come on, get moving,” he said, his voice harsh and merciless.
Russie rose from the cot in his cell. “The Nazis put me in the ghetto, the Lizards put me in gaol,” he said. “I never thought Jews would treat me the same way.”
If he’d hoped to wound the guard, he was disappointed. “Life’s tough all over,” the fellow answered indifferently. He gestured with the submachine gun. “Now put it in gear.”
He might have been an SS man. Moishe wondered if he’d learned his military manner from the genuine article. He’d seen that in Poland, after the Jews and Poles helped the Lizards chase out the Germans. Quite a few Jews, suddenly become soldiers, imitated the most impressive, most ferocious human warriors they’d known. If you tried pointing that out to them, though, you were liable to get yourself killed. Moishe maintained a prudent silence here.
He didn’t know exactly wherehere was. Somewhere in Palestine, of course, but he and his family had been brought in tied and blindfolded and concealed under straw. The outer walls of the compound were too high for him to see over them. He could tell he was in a town from the noises that came through the golden sandstone: smiths pounding on metal, wagons rattling by, the distant babel of a marketplace. Wherever he was, he was surely walking on soil mentioned in the Torah. Whenever he remembered that, awe prickled through him.
Most of the time, other things were on his mind. Chief among them was how to keep the Lizards from walking on this holy soil. He’d quoted the Bible at the Jewish underground leaders: Thou trustest in the staff of this broken reed. Isaiah had been talking about the Egyptians, and the Lizards were in Egypt now. Russie didn’t want them to follow Moses across the Sinai and into Palestine.
Very few people cared about what he wanted, worse luck. The local Jews, fools that they were, reckoned the British here as oppressive as the Nazis in Poland-or so they said, anyhow. Some of them had escaped from Poland after the Nazis conquered it, so they should have known better.
“Turn,” the guard said: unnecessarily, for Moishe knew the way to the interrogation chamber as well as a rat knew how to run through a familiar maze. He never got rewarded with a piece of cheese for doing it right, though; maybe his handlers hadn’t heard of Pavlov.
When he got to the right doorway, the guard stood back
and motioned for him to work the latch. That never failed to amuse him: his captors took him for a dangerous man who would seize a weapon and wreak havoc with it if he got the slightest chance. Ifonly it were so,he thought wryly. Give him a swatter and he might be dangerous to a fly. Past that… past that, the members of the underground were letting their imaginations run away with them.
He opened the door, took one step into the room, and stopped in surprised dismay. There at the table, along with Begin and Stern and the other usual questioners, sat a Lizard. The alien swung an eye turret toward him. “This is the one? I have a hard time being sure,” he said in fair German.
Moishe stared at him. The body paint he wore was far drabber than that which Moishe remembered, but no denying the voice was familiar “Zolraag!”
“He knows me,” the former Lizard governor of Poland said. “Either you have coached him well or he is indeed the male who gave the Race such a difficult time in Poland.”
“He’s Russie, all right,” Stern said. He was a big, dark fellow, a fighter rather than a thinker if looks mattered, which wasn’t always so. “He says we should steer clear of you, no matter what.” He spoke German, too, with a Polish accent.
“And I say to you that we will give you quite a lot to have him in our claws again,” Zolraag answered. “He betrayed us-he betrayed me-and he should pay for this betrayal.” Lizards didn’t have much in the way of facial expressions, but Moishe didn’t like the way Zolraag looked or sounded. He hadn’t thought the Race worried about such things as revenge, either. If he was wrong there, he would have been happier not knowing it.
“Nobody said anything about turning him over to you,” Menachem Begin said in Yiddish. “That was not why we brought you here.” He was short and slight, not a whole lot bigger than a Lizard himself. He was nothing much to look at, but when he spoke you had to take him seriously. He shook a finger at Zolraag. “We hear what you have to say, we hear what he has to say, and then we decide what to do.”
“You would be well advised to take the Race and its desires more seriously,” Zolraag answered, his voice cold. As he had back in Poland, he assumed his concerns were more important than mankind’s simply because they were his. Had he been blond and blue-eyed instead of green-brown and scaly, he would have made a good SS man himself: the Race certainly had the notion of theHerrenvolk down solid.
