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“He was one of the best.” Mordechai Anielewicz eyed Drucker. “You drove a panzer then. What have you been doing since?”
“I stayed in the Wehrmacht, ” Drucker replied. “I ended up in the upper stage of an A-45. The Lizards captured me after I shot two missiles at one of their starships. If they hadn’t knocked both of them down, I don’t suppose they would have bothered taking me alive, but they did. Eventually, they set me down in Nuremberg. I had a devil of a time getting here, but I managed. Now if I could manage to find my wife and kids…”
Anielewicz looked at him as if he’d failed a test. “You served under Heinrich Jager, and you stayed in the Wehrmacht? He had the sense to get away.”
“Don’t get high and mighty with me,” Drucker snapped. “I know something about what the Reich was doing to Jews. I didn’t do any of that. I had it done to me, in fact.”
“You had it done to you?” Anielewicz snarled. “You son of a bitch, you”-he cursed in Yiddish and Polish-“what do you know about it?” He looked ready to grab one of his weapons and start shooting. Drucker had thought him a dangerous man a generation before, and saw no reason to change his mind now. He slid his legs into a position from which he could better open fire, too.
But, instead of grabbing for his pistol, he answered Anielewicz in a low, urgent voice: “I’ll tell you what I know about it. The SS grabbed my wife because they got wind she had a Jewish grandmother, that’s what.” He’d never thought he would tell that to anyone, but who in the Reich ever imagined talking with a Jew?
And it worked. Mordechai Anielewicz relaxed, suddenly and completely. “All right, then,” he said. “You do know something.” He cocked his head to one side. “From what you’ve said, you got her back. How’d you manage that? I know a thing or two about the SS.”
“How?” Drucker chuckled mirthlessly. “I told you-I was an A-45 pilot. I had connections. My CO was General Dornberger-he’s Fuhrer now, wherever the devil he is. I had enough pull to bring it off. Officially, Kathe got a clean pedigree.”
“If you have pull, you should use it,” Anielewicz agreed. His face clouded again. “Back in the 1940s, there were an awful lot of Jews who didn’t have any.”
Drucker didn’t know how to reply to that. All he could do was nod. He hadn’t thought much about Jews, or had much use for them, before Kathe got in trouble with the blackshirts. At last, he said, “The only thing I want to do now is find out if my family is alive, and get them back if they are.”
“Fair enough. We’re in the same boat there, no matter how we got dropped into it.” Anielewicz pointed at Drucker. “If you know the Fuhrer, why aren’t you using your pull now to have him help you look for your kin?”
“Two main reasons, I suppose,” Drucker answered after a little thought. “I wanted to do it myself, and… I’m not sure there’s anyone to find.”
“Yes, knowing they’re dead would be pretty final, wouldn’t it?” Anielewicz’s voice was grim. “Still and all, if you’ve got a card left to play, don’t you think it’s time to play it?”
Drucker considered, then slowly nodded. He raised an eyebrow. “And if I try to find out for myself, maybe I should try to find out for you, too?”
“That thought did cross my mind,” Mordechai Anielewicz allowed. “I’ve got pull with the Lizards, myself. Shall we trade?” Drucker considered again, but not for long. He stuck out his hand. Anielewicz shook it.
Sam Yeager had never imagined that a jail could be so comfortable. His place of confinement didn’t look like a jail. It looked like, and was, a farmhouse somewhere in… nobody had told him exactly where he was, but it had to be Colorado or New Mexico. He could watch television, though no station came in real well. He could read Denver and Albuquerque papers. He could do almost anything he wanted-except go outside or write a letter or use a computer. His guards were very polite but very firm.
“Why are you keeping me here?” he demanded of them one morning, for about the five hundredth time.
“Orders,” replied the one who answered to Fred.
Yeager had heard that about five hundred times, too. “You can’t keep me forever,” he said, though he had no evidence that that was true. “What will you do with me?”
“Whatever we get told to do,” answered the one called John. “So far, nobody’s told us to do anything except keep you on ice.” He raised an eyebrow. “Maybe you ought to count your blessings about that, Lieutenant Colonel.”
By which he no doubt meant they could have buried Yeager in the yard behind the house without anyone’s being the wiser. That was probably-no, that was certainly-true. “But I haven’t done anything,” Sam said, knowing full well he was lying. “And you haven’t even tried to find out whether I’ve done anything,” which was the God’s truth.
Fred looked at John. John looked at the one named Charlie, who hardly ever said anything. He didn’t say anything now, either-he only shrugged. John, who seemed to be the boss, answered, “We haven’t had any orders to interrogate you, either. Maybe they don’t want us knowing whatever you know. I don’t ask questions. I just do what I’m told.”
“But I don’t know anything,” Sam protested, another great, thumping lie.
Fred chuckled. “Maybe they don’t want us catching ignorance, then.” Of the three there that day, and of the other three who spelled them in weekly shifts, he was the only one with even a vestigial sense of humor. He pointed at Sam’s empty cup. “You want some more coffee there?”
“Sure,” Yeager answered, and the-agent? — poured the cup full again. After a couple of sips, Sam tried a question he hadn’t asked before: “By whose orders are you keeping me here? I’m an officer in the U.S. Army, after all.”
He didn’t really expect to get an answer. Charlie just sat there looking sour. Fred shrugged, as if to say he was pretending he hadn’t heard the question. But John said, “Whose orders? I’ll tell you. Why the hell not? You’re here on the orders of the president of the United States, Mister Officer in the U.S. Army.”
“The president?” Sam yelped. “What the dickens does President Warren care about me? I haven’t done anything.”
“He must think you did,” John said. “And if the president thinks you did something, buddy, you did it.”
That, unfortunately, was likely to be correct. And Sam knew only too well what Earl Warren was liable to think he’d done. He’d done it, too, even if these goons didn’t know, or want to know, that. He had to keep up a bold front, though. If he didn’t, he was ruined. And so he said, “Tell the president that I want to talk to him about it, man to man. Tell him it’s important that I do. Not just for me.
For the country.” He remembered the papers he’d given Straha and the things he’d told Barbara and Jonathan. It was important, all right.
“Crap,” Charlie said-from him, an oration.
John said the same thing in a different way: “President Warren’s a busy man. Why should he want to talk to one not particularly important lieutenant colonel?”
“Why should he want to make one not particularly important lieutenant colonel disappear?” Sam returned.
“That’s not for us to worry about,” John answered. “We got told to put you on ice and keep you on ice, and that’s what we’re doing.”
Yeager didn’t say anything. He just sat there and smiled his most unpleasant smile.
Charlie didn’t get it. Yeager hadn’t expected anything else. John didn’t get it, either. That disappointed Yeager. After a few seconds’ silence, Fred said, “Uh, John, I think he’s saying the big boss might want to see him for the same reason he had him put on ice, whatever the hell that is.”
“Bingo,” Sam said happily.
John didn’t sound or look happy. “Like I care what he’s saying.” He sent Sam an unpleasant look of his own. “Other thing he’s been saying all along is that he doesn’t know why he got nabbed. If he’s lying about that, who knows what else he’s been lying about?”
What that translated to was, Who knows what we’re liable to have to try to squeeze out of him? Back in his baseball days, Sam had known a fair number of small-time, small-town hoodlums, men who thought of themselves as tough guys. It had been a good many years, but the breed didn’t seem to have changed much, even if these fellows got their money from a much more important boss.
At this point, Sam had two choices of his own. He could say something like, Anything happens to me, you’ll be sorry. Or he could just sit tight. He decided to sit tight. These guys struck him as the sort who would take a warning as a sign of weakness, not as a sign of strength.
