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“It depends on just where the bomb goes off, David,” Mordechai answered. “I don’t know for sure how much good it will do. I do know we’ve got a better chance in the cellar than upstairs.”
By the time he and his family got in, the cellar was already packed. People talked in high, excited voices. Mordechai didn’t talk. He did worry. The cellar didn’t hold enough food and water to let people last very long before being forced to go out. He’d complained to the manager, who’d nodded politely and not done a thing. If the worst came…
It didn’t, not this evening. Instead, the all-clear blew, a long, steady blast of sound. “Thank God,” Bertha said quietly.
“Just another drill,” Mordechai agreed. “But with things the way they are, we can’t know ahead of time, so we have to treat every one like the real thing. Let’s go upstairs. Supper won’t even be cold.” He took off his mask. Breathing unfiltered air, even in the cramped quarters of the cellar, felt far better than the seemingly lifeless stuff he got through the rubber and charcoal of the mask.
After supper, Bertha was washing dishes with Miriam helping her when the telephone rang. Mordechai picked it up. “Hello?”
“Just another drill.” David Nussboym sounded wryly amused with the world.
“Yes, just another drill,” Mordechai agreed. “Nu?” He didn’t know how to respond to the man whose hirelings had come unpleasantly close to killing him a couple of times.
“When do you suppose the real thing will come along?” Nussboym asked. He didn’t seem to feel the least bit guilty about what he’d done.
“What, Molotov didn’t tell you before he sent you out here?” Anielewicz jeered.
“No, as a matter of fact, he didn’t,” replied the Jew from Lodz who’d become an NKVD man. “He told me I would be the best man on the spot because of my old connections here, but that was all.”
Anielewicz wondered how to take that. “You know Molotov personally?” he said. “Sure you do, just like I know the Pope.”
“Say hello to him for me next time you see him,” Nussboym answered imperturbably. “Know Molotov personally? I don’t think anyone does, except maybe his wife. But I deal with him, if that’s what you mean. I’m the one who got him out of his cell in the middle of Beria’s coup.”
He spoke matter-of-factly enough. If he was lying, Anielewicz couldn’t prove it by his tone. “If he sent you here thinking there’d be a war, he didn’t do you any favors,” he observed.
“This thought also occurred to me,” Nussboym said. “But I serve the Soviet Union.” He spoke without self-consciousness. He’d been a Red before Anielewicz and some of the other Jewish fighters in Lodz spirited him off to the USSR because he was also too friendly with the Lizards. They’d been playing a double game with the Race and the Germans. They’d got away with it, too, but Mordechai didn’t ever want to have to take such chances again.
He said, “And what does serving the Soviet Union mean about your being here now?”
“I volunteered for this, because I know Lodz and because your interests and the Soviet Union’s coincide for the time being,” David Nussboym answered. “We both want to stop the war any way we can. This is what you get for going to bed with the fascists during the fighting.” No, he hadn’t forgotten what had happened all those years ago, either.
With a sigh, Anielewicz answered, “If the Race had beaten the Nazis then, odds are they’d have beaten the Russians, too. And what Soviet Union would you be serving these days if that had happened?”
“I don’t deal in might-have-beens,” Nussboym said, as if Mordechai had accused him of a particularly unsavory vice. “I deal in what’s real.”
“All right,” Anielewicz said amiably. “What’s real here? If the Germans come over the border, what do we do about it? Do we start yelling for Soviet soldiers to help drive them away?”
He chuckled under his breath, figuring that would get a rise out of his former colleague if anything could. And it did. “No!” Nussboym exclaimed. Had he been a Lizard, he would have used an emphatic cough. “Formally, the USSR is and will stay neutral in case of conflict.”
“Molotov doesn’t want the Germans and the Race landing on Russia with both feet, eh?” Behind that cynical tone, Mordechai felt a certain amount of sympathy for the Soviet leader’s position.
“Would you?” Nussboym returned, which showed he was thinking along similar lines.
“Maybe yes, maybe no.” Anielewicz was damned if he’d admit anything. “And that brings me back to what the devil you’re doing here. If Russia’s neutral, why aren’t you back in Moscow twiddling your thumbs?”
“Formally, the Soviet Union is neutral,” David Nussboym repeated. “Informally…”
“Informally, what?” Mordechai demanded. “Do you want to split Poland with the Germans again, the way you did in 1939?”
“That was proposed, I am given to understand,” Nussboym answered. “General Secretary Molotov rejected the proposal out of hand.”
“Was it? Did he?” Mordechai thought about what that was likely to mean. “He’s more afraid of the Race than of the Nazis, then. Fair enough. If I were living in the Kremlin, I would be, too.” He thought a little more. “If Russia gives informal help here, you might even end up on the Lizards’ good side. Nobody ever said Molotov was a fool. Anybody who stayed alive all the way through Stalin’s time couldn’t be a fool.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Nussboym said softly. “You haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. And if you still believe in God, you can thank Him you don’t.”
Mordechai’s voice went harsh: “All right, then. Tukhus afen tish, Nussboym. What will you do? What won’t you do? How much can we count on you?” Privately, he didn’t intend to count on Nussboym at all. Counting on the USSR, though, was, or at least might be, something else again.
“We will not do anything that makes it look as though the Soviet Union is interfering in Poland,” replied the NKVD man who’d grown up in Lodz. “Short of that… Well, there’s always been a lot of smuggling along the border between White Russia and Poland. We can get you weapons. We can even get you a cadre of Polish-speaking soldiers to train new recruits.”
“Oh, I’ll bet you can,” Anielewicz said. “And you’d train them to be just the finest little Marxist-Leninists anybody could want, wouldn’t you?” He hadn’t used the jargon much since the fighting stopped, but he still remembered it.
“One of these days, the revolution will come to Poland,” Nussboym said. “One of these days, the revolution will come to Home.” He might not believe in God any more, but he still had a strong and vibrant faith.
Arguing with him struck Anielewicz as more trouble than it was worth. Instead, he asked, “How much good is all this likely to do if the Reich hits us with explosive-metal bombs and poison gas?”
“They won’t kill everyone.” Nussboym spoke with a peculiar cold-blooded confidence. German generals doubtless sounded much the same way. “Soldiers will have to come into Poland and seize the land. When they do, the survivors from among your forces can make life difficult for them.”
“You’re leaving the Lizards out of your calculations,” Anielewicz said. “Whatever else they do, they won’t sit quietly.”
“I know that,” Nussboym said. “My assumption is that they will give the Reich exactly what it deserves. That ought to make the fight in Poland easier, don’t you think? The Nazis won’t be able to support their troops the way they could in 1939.”
Again, cold calculation weighing the probable result of thousands-no, millions-of deaths. Again, that calculation, however horrific, struck Mordechai as reasonable. And wasn’t making reasonable calculations about millions of deaths perhaps the most horrific thing of all?
“The next question, of course, is what happens after the Race finishes destroying the Reich, ” Mordechai said.
“Then the Soviet Union picks up the pieces-provided there are any pieces left to pick up,”
Nussboym answered. “The other half of the question is, how much damage can the Nazis do to the Lizards before going down?”
“However much it is, too much of it will be in Poland,” Mordechai predicted gloomily. “So, from my point of view, that leads to a different question: can we do anything to keep the war from starting? You’d better think about that, too, Nussboym, as long as you’re here.”
“I have been thinking about it,” David Nussboym answered. “What I haven’t been able to do is come up with anything to stop the war. And neither, I gather, have you.” He hung up before Mordechai could either curse him or tell him he was right.
Tahiti wasn’t what Rance Auerbach had expected. Oh, the weather was gorgeous: always warm and mild and just a little muggy. And he could walk along the beach under the palm trees and watch the gentle surf roll in off the blue, blue Pacific. That was all terrific, even if he did get a hellacious sunburn the first time he tried it. He’d had to slather zinc-oxide ointment all over his poor medium-rare carcass. As far as setting went, he’d had everything straight.
