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Since Himmler’s death, though, Mordechai had started paying more attention to German propaganda. He’d never imagined he would miss the SS chief and Fuhrer who’d done the Jews so much harm. With something approaching horror, he realized he did. Himmler had been a known quantity-a known mamzer much of the time, certainly, but not someone who was likely to go off half-cocked. The Committee of Eight, on the other hand…
“Look at this!” Anielewicz exclaimed. His wife came over to the sofa in front of the television and dutifully looked. Mordechai pointed at the clumsy-looking panzers with crosses painted on them rolling across the screen. “Do you see what they’re doing, Bertha?”
“Looks like another war film to me,” she answered with a yawn. “May I go back and finish the dishes now?”
“Well, it is.” Anielewicz clicked his tongue between his teeth. “But I don’t like it when they start showing films about invading Poland. It’s liable to mean they’re gearing up to try it again.”
“They wouldn’t!” Bertha said. “They have to know they’ll get smashed if they try.”
“If they’ve got any sense, they have to know that,” Mordechai answered. “But who says they’ve got any sense? When they start going on about provocations and insults, what are they doing but getting their people ready for trouble? That’s what they did in 1939, after all.”
On the screen, the German panzers mowed down charging Polish lancers wearing square hats. Bertha said, “It won’t be that easy this time, if they’re meshuggeh enough to try again.”
“You know that. I know that. I think even Himmler knew that,” Anielewicz said. “From what I’ve heard, the Lizards warned him off not so long ago, and he listened to them. But these fools?” He shook his head.
“What can we do?” Bertha asked.
That was more easily asked than answered. “I don’t know,” Mordechai said unhappily. “I know what I’d like to do-I’d like to put Jewish fighters on alert, and I’d like to get in touch with the Poles, too, so I know they’ll be ready to move in case the Nazis really do intend to go after us here.”
“Will the Poles listen to you?” his wife asked.
Anielewicz shrugged. “I don’t know that, either. As far as they’re concerned, what am I? Just a damned Jew, that’s all. But they certainly won’t listen to me if I don’t get in touch with them.” His smile looked cheerful, but wasn’t. “Gottenyu, I don’t even know if the Jews in Warsaw will pay any attention to me. As far as they’re concerned, Poland is Warsaw, and the rest of the country can geh in drerd.”
“But you came from Warsaw!” Bertha’s voice quivered with indignation.
“I’ve been away a long time-plenty long enough for them to forget where I came from,” Mordechai replied. His laugh didn’t sound amused, either. “Of course, with some of those people you can walk around the corner for a loaf of bread and they’ll forget about you by the time you get back.”
“Ingrates, that’s what they are?” Bertha made a wife as loyal as any man could want. She was also a long way from a fool, asking, “Do you suppose they’ve forgotten about the explosive-metal bomb?”
“No, they’ll remember that,” Mordechai admitted. “I’m the one who wishes he could forget about it.” He went into the kitchen and came back with a couple of glasses of slivovitz. Sipping from one, he handed Bertha the other. “I don’t know if it will work, and God forbid I should ever have to find out.”
“If you do, it won’t be the only explosive-metal bomb going off, will it?” Bertha asked. When Anielewicz shook his head, she knocked back her plum brandy like a farm laborer. She said, “That won’t be all that happens, either.”
“Oh, no. Poison gas and panzers and who can say what all else?” Anielewicz poured down his brandy, too. “The other thing I’d better do is, I’d better talk with Bunim. I’m about as happy with that as I am with a trip to the dentist, and that Lizard loves me every bit as much as I love him. But if we’re going to fight on the same side, we’d better have some notion of what we’ll be trying to do.”
“That makes good sense.” His wife’s mouth twisted. “Of course, if the whole world goes mad, whether or not anything makes sense stops mattering very much, doesn’t it?”
Before Mordechai could answer her, the telephone rang. He walked over to the shabby end table on which it sat and picked it up. Everything in the flat was shabby: other people’s hand-me-downs, charity after the arson fire that had forced the Anielewiczes from the building where they’d lived so long. “Hello?” he said, and then spent the next ten minutes in intense conversation, some in Yiddish, some in Polish.
When he hung up, his wife asked, “Was that Warsaw? Have they decided they need to worry about the Reich after all?”
He shook his head in some bemusement. “No. You would have thought so from the way I was talking, wouldn’t you? That was the Armia Krajowa, the Polish Home Army. They want to cooperate with us, even if the learned fellows back in Warsaw haven’t figured out there’s anybody to cooperate against.”
“The Poles want to cooperate with us?” Bertha sounded astonished. Mordechai didn’t blame her; he was astonished himself. Her gaze sharpened. “You’d better go see Bunim-do it first thing tomorrow morning, too. If you don’t get there ahead of the Home Army, who knows how much mischief the Poles may be able to stir up?”
“You’re right,” Mordechai said at once. “You always were the best politician we ever had in Lodz.”
“Feh!” Bertha tossed her head, a most dismissive gesture. “You don’t need to be a politician to see this. As long as you’re not blind, it’s there.”
With tea warm inside him, with his greatcoat pulled tight around him, Anielewicz strode through snow-clogged streets to the Race’s administrative offices overlooking the Bialut Market Square. As soon as the Lizards let him in, he shed the coat, folded it, and carried it over his arm: the Race kept their buildings heated not only to but past the point humans found pleasantly warm.
That Bunim was willing to see him with essentially no advance notice told him the Lizards were worried about the Greater German Reich, too. “I greet you, Regional Subadministrator,” Mordechai said in the language of the Race.
“Good day,” Bunim answered in fair Polish. The human language he spoke best was German. Neither he nor Anielewicz seemed to want to use it now. Having politely used a human language, the Lizard went back to his own: “And what is it you want to see me about?”
“What do you suppose?” Mordechai answered. “The increasing threat from the Reich, of course. Do you not agree that we will be better off if we prepare joint action well in advance of any certain need?”
More often than not, Bunim looked down his snout at the idea of cooperating with humans. Now, though, he said only, “Yes, that might be wise. What sort of notions do you have for unifying your forces, those of the Armia Krajowa, and our own to withstand whatever attacks may come from the west and south?”
Mordechai Anielewicz stared at him. “You do take these threats seriously,” he blurted.
“Yes,” Bunim said, and underscored that with an emphatic cough. “You know as well as I that the Deutsche can destroy this region. We cannot prevent it. We can only make it unpleasantly expensive.”
“You are blunt about it,” Mordechai said.
“Truth is what truth is,” the regional subadministrator answered. “We do not change it by turning our eye turrets away from it. Tosevites sometimes seem to have trouble understanding this. The Deutsche, for example, see that they can overrun and wreck Poland. They refuse to see the price they will pay for doing so. If you have any suggestions for getting the point across to them, I would be grateful.”
“I am the wrong Tosevite to ask, I fear,” Anielewicz said. “As you know, the only thing that would delight the Deutsche is my death. I do not know how to dissuade them, or if anyone or anything can dissuade them. What I wanted to plan with you was how best to fight them.”
“I understand,” Bunim said. “Tal
ks are also ongoing with your colleagues in Warsaw, and with the various Polish Tosevite factions. Had you not come to me, I would have called you in a few days.”
“Would you?” That surprised Anielewicz, too. “After all the time you have spent saying that Big Uglies have no place in the defense of Poland?”
Bunim made the affirmative gesture. “You too are a leader, Mordechai Anielewicz. Have you never had to hold a position with which you did not personally agree? Have circumstances never forced you to change a position?”
“Many times,” Mordechai admitted. “But I did not think it would also be so for the Race.”
