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And, just in case he hadn’t, Nesseref drove it home: “These other Jews, the ones with the bomb, hate the Reich more than Mordechai Anielewicz does. If that were not true, he would not have come here at all.”
Drucker suspected Anielewicz worried more about further damage to Poland than about damage to the Reich. In Anielewicz’s place, he suspected he would have felt the same way. But that didn’t make the Lizards wrong. With a stiff nod, Drucker said, “I shall report your words to the Fuhrer.”
He went back to the German encampment alongside that of the Race and telephoned Walter Dornberger. After he’d given his old commander the meat of the conversation with the two Lizards, Dornberger let out a long sigh. “What you’re telling me, Hans,” the Fuhrer said, “is that we have to rely on this Jew? There’s more irony in that than I really want to stomach.”
“I understand, sir. I feel the same way, pretty much,” Drucker replied. “But I don’t think Anielewicz will leave Kanth alive without getting those terrorists to give up their bomb. The Lizards seem sure he’ll do everything he can.” He didn’t want to let Dornberger know he knew the Jew well enough to have his own opinion.
“But will it be enough?” Dornberger demanded.
“Right now, sir, we can only hope,” Drucker said. He also suspected he hoped even more urgently than the Fuhrer did. Walter Dornberger, after all, was back in Flensburg. He wouldn’t turn to radioactive dust if something went wrong here in Kanth. But I will, Drucker thought. Dammit, I will.
There were, Mordechai Anielewicz thought, nine Jews holed up with the explosive-metal bomb. That was enough to let them have plenty of guards for him, for any other captives they might have, and for the bomb itself. In the end, though, the probably nine boiled down to only one: the Jews’ leader, a fellow named Benjamin Rubin. Mordechai knew that, if he could reach Rubin, everything else would follow.
But could he reach him? For a long time, Rubin hadn’t even wanted to talk to him. Nobody’d wanted to talk to him. He counted himself lucky that the Jews hadn’t just shot him and tossed his body out on the porch as a warning to anyone else rash enough to think about talking to them.
At first, he’d thought they were going to do exactly that. Nobody called him anything but “traitor” till he’d been there for several days. Finally, that made him lose his temper. “I fought the Nazis before most of you mamzrim were born,” he snapped at one of the trigger-happy young Jews who reluctantly came in pairs to bring him food. “I killed Otto Skorzeny and kept him from blowing up Lodz with the bomb you’re sitting on now. And you call me a traitor? Geh kak afen yam.”
That could have got him shot, too. Instead, it got him what he’d hoped it might: a chance to talk with Benjamin Rubin. He didn’t know Rubin well; the fellow hadn’t been any kind of bigwig till he hijacked the bomb. But he was now. One of the toughs who followed him led Mordechai into his presence as if into that of a rabbi renowned for his holiness.
Rubin didn’t look like a rabbi. He looked like a doctor. He was thin and pale and precise, about as far removed as possible from the ruffians he led. “So you want to convince me I’m wrong, do you?” he said, and folded his arms across his chest. “Go ahead. I’m waiting.”
“I don’t think I need to convince you,” Anielewicz said. “I think you see it, too. The way it looks to me, you just don’t want to admit it to yourself.”
Benjamin Rubin scowled. “You’d better come to the point in a hurry, or I’ll decide you haven’t got one.”
“Fair enough.” Mordechai hoped he sounded more cheerful than he felt. He was doing his best. “Suppose you blow up Kanth. What have you got? A few thousand Germans at the outside. I wouldn’t bet on even that many, though-they’re sneaking away every chance they get. Hardly seems worthwhile, for an explosive-metal bomb.”
“We were heading for Dresden,” Rubin said petulantly. “The truck kept breaking down. That’s how we ended up here.”
“Too bad.” Now Anielewicz did his best to simulate sympathy. “But you could do things in-and to-Dresden you can’t even think about here.”
“Maybe. But we’ve still got the bomb, and we can still do plenty with it, even if it’s not so much as we hoped.” Rubin nodded, as if reassuring himself. “I can die happy, knowing what I’ve done to the damned Nazis.”
“And what will the damned Nazis do once you’re dead?” Mordechai asked. “They’ll hit back with whatever they’ve got left, that’s what. How many Jews in Poland are going to die on account of your stupidity?”
“None,” replied the Jewish leader who’d stolen the bomb. “Not a single one. The Germans know what will happen to them if they try anything like that again.”
Anielewicz laughed in his face. Rubin looked astounded. None of his henchmen would have done anything so rude. Maybe, having henchmen, he’d forgotten there were people who didn’t think so well of him. Mordechai said, “You’re here. You’re willing to die to take revenge on the Nazis. You think there won’t be plenty of Nazis willing to die to take revenge on a pack of kikes?”
He used the slur deliberately, to rock Rubin back on his heels. The other Jew said, “They’d never have the nerve.”
That only made Mordechai laugh some more. “You can call the Nazis all sorts of things, Rubin. I do, every day. But you’re an even bigger idiot than I think you are if you think they don’t know how to die well. Dying well is half of what fascism is all about, for God’s sake.”
“And how do you know so much about it? You’ve been in bed with them, that’s how,” Rubin said.
“Yes, and that’s a load of shit, too,” Mordechai said. “Anybody who’s not blind can see as much.”
One of the bully boys who’d brought him in to Benjamin Rubin tapped him on the shoulder. When he turned, the fellow hit him in the belly and then in the face. He folded up and sank to the floor. He tasted blood in his mouth, but none of his teeth seemed broken when he ran his tongue over them. Somehow, that mattered very much to him. If by some accident he came through this alive, he didn’t care to spend any time sitting in a dentist’s chair.
Slowly, painfully, he got to his feet. What he wanted to do was kill the bastard who’d slugged him. But he couldn’t, not when said bastard’s pal was pointing a rifle at his chest. That being so, he didn’t even waste time glaring at the bully boys. Instead, he turned back toward Rubin. “If you don’t want to listen to me, you don’t have to. If you want your bully boys here to pound on me, they can do that. That’s what I bought when I came through the door. But it doesn’t mean I’m not telling you the truth, even so.”
“Maybe you call it that,” Rubin said. “I don’t. I call it a pack of lies and foolishness. I’d sooner go out like Samson in the temple.”
“I’ve noticed,” Mordechai answered. He’d also noticed that, unlike Samson, Rubin and his pals hadn’t killed themselves as soon as they got in trouble. He didn’t say anything about that, not wanting to goad them into anything. Instead, he went on, “You’re like Samson one way: you don’t worry about what’ll happen to the rest of the Jews once you’re gone.”
“They’ll get by,” Benjamin Rubin said. “They always have. And we’ll punish the Nazis for all they’ve done to us.”
Anielewicz sighed. “You keep saying that. I keep telling you to look out the windows here. You just won’t do them all that much harm.”
Rubin glowered at him. “I don’t have to listen to this. I don’t have to, and I don’t intend to.” He nodded to his henchmen. “Take him away.”
“Come on, pal,” said the fellow who’d slugged Anielewicz. “You heard the boss. Get moving.”
With a rifle pointed at him, Mordechai had no choice. The boss, he thoug
ht as they led him away. Why don’t they just call him the Fuhrer? It’s only one step up. He didn’t say that; he judged it too likely to get him killed.
When the bully boys got him back to the basement room where they kept him on ice, they slammed the door behind him with needless violence. Maybe they hoped the bang would make him jump. It did, a little, but they didn’t have the satisfaction of seeing as much.
Nobody could have seen much in that room. It had no lamps and no windows. He got colossally bored when they parked him there. He didn’t know how long at a time they left him in cold storage. He did know, or thought he knew, that he spent inordinate stretches of time asleep. He had nothing better to do. No matter how much he slept, though, he always felt logy, not well-rested.
He tried the door every so often when he was awake. It never yielded. Had he been the hero of an adventure novel or film, he would have been able to pick the lock-either that, or to break down the door without making a sound. Being only an ordinary fellow, he remained stuck where the terrorists had stowed him.
A couple of times, he heard them speaking the language of the Race, and a Lizard answering them. They didn’t mention to him who the Lizard was. He hoped it wasn’t Nesseref. Enough that he was in trouble without dragging his friend in with him. He also hoped it wasn’t Gorppet. If the male from Security hadn’t taken in Heinrich’s beffel, he never would have found his family again. He owed the Lizard too much to want him endangered.
But he didn’t know. He never got the chance to find out. The terrorists efficiently kept him and the Lizard, whoever it was, from having anything to do with each other. In their place, he would have done the same. That didn’t keep him from wishing they’d proved less professional.
And then-it couldn’t have been more than a couple of hours after he’d reluctantly admired their professionalism-they all started screaming at one another. It was like listening to a horrible family row. But everybody in this family packed an assault rifle, and the explosive-metal bomb sat only a few meters away. A family row here could have extravagantly lethal consequences.
