Striking the Balance w-4

by Harry Turtledove

  “Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t,” Anielewicz said with as much equanimity as he could muster. He didn’t want the Pole to know how shaken he was. Heinrich Jager had stayed with a Jew named Lejb, all right, back when he was carrying explosive metal from the Soviet Union to Germany. The message had to be authentic, then; who else would know about that? It wasn’t even the sort of thing he’d have been likely to mention in a report. Cautiously, Mordechai asked, “What else have you heard?”

  “It’s somewhere in the ghetto,” Mieczyslaw told him. “Don’t have any idea where, so don’t waste time asking. Hadn’t been for the cease-fire, all you kikes’d probably be toasting your toes in hell by now.”

  “I love you, too, Mieczyslaw,” Anielewicz said. The Pole chuckled, not in the least put out. Mordechai kicked at the dirt.“Gottenyu! That man has balls the size of an elephant. Thechutzpah it takes to try something like that-and the luck you need to get away with it… ”

  “What man is that?” Mieczyslaw asked. Mordechai didn’t answer him. He hardly heard him. How had Skorzeny sneaked an explosive-metal bomb past everybody and into Lodz? How had he got it into the Jewish quarter? How had he got out again afterwards? All good questions, the only trouble being that Mordechai had answers for none of them.

  One other question, of course, overrode all of those.Where was the bomb?

  He worried at it every step of the way back to Lodz, like a man worrying with his tongue at a piece of gristle stuck between two molars. The gristle was still stuck when he strode into the fire station of Lutomierska Street. Solomon Gruver was fiddling with the fire engine’s motor. “Why the long face?” he asked, looking up — from his work.

  He wasn’t the only man in earshot. The last thing Anielewicz wanted to do was spread panic through the ghetto. “Come on upstairs with me,” he said, as casually as he could.

  Gruver’s long face turned somber. With his bushy eyebrows, harsh features, and thick, graying beard, he generally looked grim. When he felt grim, he looked as if his best friend had just died. He put down his wrench and followed Mordechai up to the room where the leaders of the Jewish fighters commonly met.

  On the stairwell, he said quietly, “Bertha’s up there. She picked up something interesting-what it is, I don’t know-and she’s passing it along. Is whatever you’ve got something she can know about?”

  “It’s something she’d better know about,” Anielewicz answered. “If we can’t deal with it ourselves, we may have to let Rumkowski’s gang oftukhus-lekhers know it, too, and maybe even the Lizards, though that’s the last thing I want to do.”

  “Oy!”Those eyebrows of Gruver’s twitched. “Whatever it is, it must be bad.”

  “No, not bad,” Mordechai said. Gruver gave him a quizzical look. “Worse,” he explained as they got to the top of the stairs. Gruver grunted. Every time Anielewicz lifted his foot off the worn linoleum of the floor, he wondered if he would live to set it down again. That was not in his hands, not any more. If Otto Skorzeny pushed a button or flicked a switch on a wireless transmitter, he would cease to be, probably so fast he wouldn’t realize he was dead.

  He laughed. Solomon Gruver stared at him. “You’re carrying news like this and you find something funny?”

  “Maybe,” Anielewicz answered. Skorzeny had to be one frustrated SS man right this minute. He’d risked his life getting that bomb into Lodz (Anielewicz who’d despised him on sight, knew how much courage that had taken), but his timing was bad. He couldn’t touch it off now, not without destroying the shiny new cease-fire between the Lizards and theReich.

  A couple of serious-looking Jewish men came out of the meeting room. “We’ll take care of it,” one of them promised Bertha Fleishman.

  “Thank you, Michael,” she said, and started to follow them out. She almost ran into Anielewicz and Gruver. “Hello! I didn’t expect to see you two here.”

  “Mordechai ran into something interesting,” Solomon Gruver said. “What it is, God knows, because he’s not talking.” He glanced over to Mordechai. “Not talking yet, anyhow.”

  “Now I am,” Anielewicz said. He walked into the meeting room. When Gruver and Bertha Fleishman had followed him inside, he closed the door and, with a melodramatic touch, locked it. That made Bertha’s eyebrows fly up, as Gruver’s had before.

  Mordechai spoke for about ten minutes, relaying as much as Mieczyslaw had told him. As he passed it on, he realized how little it was. When he was finished, Gruver looked at him and said, “I don’t believe a word of it. It’s just the damned Nazis trying to pull our chains and make us run around like chickens in the fannyard.” He shook his head, repeating, “I don’t believe a word.”

  “If it hadn’t been this Jager who sent us the message, I wouldn’t believe it, either,” Anielewicz said. “If it hadn’t been for him, you know, the nerve-gas bomb would have done us in.” He turned to Bertha. “What do you think?”

  “As far as I can see, whether it’s true or not doesn’t matter,” she answered. “We have to act as if it is, don’t we? We can’t really afford to ignore it.”

  “Feh!”Gruver said in disgust. “We’ll waste all sorts of time and effort, and what will we come up with? Nothing, I tell you.”

  “Alevai omaynyou’re right and there’s nothing to find,” Mordechai said. “But suppose-just suppose-you’re wrong and there is a bomb. Then what? Maybe we find it. That would be good; with a bomb of our own, we could tell the Lizards and Nazis both where to head in. Maybe the Lizards find it, and use it as an excuse to blow up some city somewhere-look what happened to Copenhagen. Or maybe we don’t find it and the Lizards don’t find it. Suppose the truce talks break down? All Skorzeny has to do is get on the wireless and-”

  Solomon Gruver grimaced. “All right. You made your point, damn you. Now all we have to do is try to find theverkakte thing-if, like I say, it’s there to be found in the first place.”

  “It’s somewhere here, in our part of the city,” Anielewicz said, as he had before. “How could the SS man have got it here? Where would he have hidden it if he did?”

  “How big is it?” Bertha asked. “That will make a difference in where he might have put it.”

  “It can’t be small; it can’t be light,” Anielewicz answered. “If it were, the Germans would load these bombs into airplanes or onto their rockets. Since they don’t do that, the bombs can’t be something they’d leave behind a kettle in your kitchen.”

  “That makes sense,” Gruver admitted. “It’s one of the few things about this miserable business that does. Like you say, it narrows down the places where the bomb is liable to be… if there is a bomb.” He stubbornly refused to acknowledge that was anything more than anif.

  “Around the factories,” Bertha Fleishman said. “That’s one place to start.”

  “One place, yes,” Gruver said. “A big one place. Dozens of factories here, all through the ghetto. Straw boots, cartridge casings, rucksacks-we were making all sorts of things for the Nazis, and we’re still making most of them for the Lizards. So where around the factories would you have us start?”

  “I’d sooner not start with them,” Anielewicz said. “As you say, Solomon, they’re too big to know where to begin. We may not have much time; it probably depends on how soon the Lizards and the Nazis quarrel. So where’s the likeliest place that SSmamzer would have hidden a big bomb?”

  “From what you say about him, would he have picked the likeliest place?” Solomon Gruver asked.

  “If he didn’t, we’re going to be in even more trouble than I already think we are,” Mordechai answered. “But I think, I hope, I pray this time he didn’t. He couldn’t have spent much time in Lodz. He’d have wanted to hide this thing for a little while, escape, and then set it off. It wouldn’t have needed to stay hidden very long or be hidden very well. But then the cease-fire came along and complicated his life-and maybe saved ours.”

  “If this isn’t all a load ofdreck to make us spin our wheels,” Gruver said.

 
; “If,” Anielewicz admitted.

  “I know one other place we ought to check,” Bertha Fleishman said: “the cemetery and the ghetto field south of it.”

  Gruver and Anielewicz both looked at her. The words hung in the air of the dingy meeting room. “If I were doing the job, that’sjustwhere I’d put it,” Mordechai exclaimed. “Can’t think of a better place-quiet at night, already plenty of holes in the ground-”

  “Especially in the ghetto field,” Bertha said, catching fire at a suggestion she had first made casually. “That’s where so many mass graves are, from when the sickness and starvation were so bad. Who would pay any special attention to one more hole in the ground there?”

  “Who would notice anybody coming to dig one more hole in the ground in the middle of the night?” Solomon Gruver’s big head bobbed up and down. “Yes. If it’s anywhere, that’s where we need to start looking.”

  “I agree,” Mordechai said. “Bertha, that’s wonderful. If you’re not right, you deserve to be.” He frowned after he said that, working it through to make sure he’d really given her the compliment he’d intended. To his relief, he decided he had.

  She smiled back at him. When she smiled, she wasn’t plain and anonymous any more. She still wasn’t pretty, not in any ordinary sense of the word, but her smile gave her an odd kind of beauty. She quickly sobered. “We’ll need to have fighters along, not just diggers,” she said. “If we do find this hideous thing, people are going to want to take it away from us. As far as that goes, Lizards are people here.”

  “You’re right again,” Anielewicz said. “Draining the nerve gas out of the Nazi bomb made us dangerous nuisances. If we have this bomb, we won’t be nuisances. We’ll have real power.”

  “Not while it sits in a hole in the ground,” Gruver said. “As long as it’s there, the most we can do is blow ourselves up with our enemies. That’s better than Masada, but it’s not good. It’s not good enough. If we can get the bomb out and put it where we want it, now-that’s good. For us, anyhow.”

  “Yes,” Mordechai breathed. Visions of might floated through his head-hurting the Lizards and getting the Nazis blamed for it, smuggling the bomb into Germany and taking real revenge for what theReich had done to the Jews of Poland. Reality intervened, as reality has a way of doing. “There’s only the one bomb-if there’s any bomb there at all. We have to find it, and we have to get it out of the ground if it’s there-you’re right on both counts, Solomon-before we can even think about what to do with it.”

  “If we go with half the fighters in the ghetto, other people will know we’re after something, even if they don’t know what,” Gruver said. “We don’t want that, do we? Find it first, then see if we can get it out without raising a fuss. If we can’t-” He shrugged.

  “We’ll walk through the cemetery and the ghetto field,” Anielewicz declared-if he was commander here, hewould command. “If we find something, then we figure out what to do next. And if we don’t find anything”-he too shrugged, wryly-“then we figure out what to do next.”

  “And when someone asks us what we’re doing there, what do we tell him?” Gruver asked. He was good at finding problems, not so good at solutions.

  It was a good question. Anielewicz scratched his head. They had to say something, and something both innocuous and convincing. Bertha Fleishman said, “We can tell people we’re looking for areas where no one is buried, so we can dig in those places first in case we have to fight inside the city.”

  Anielewicz chewed on that, then nodded, as did Solomon Gruver. Mordechai said, “It’s better than anything I could have come up with. It might not even be a bad idea for us to do that one of these days, though there are so many graves there I’d bet there isn’t much open space to be had.”

  “Too many graves,” Bertha said quietly. Both men nodded again.

  The cemetery and the ghetto field next to it lay in the northeastern corner of the Jewish district of Lodz. The fire station on Lutomierska Street was in the southwest, two, maybe two and a half kilometers away. It started to drizzle as Mordechai, Bertha, and Solomon Gruver tramped across the ghetto. Anielewicz looked gratefully up at the heavens; the rain would give them more privacy than they might have had otherwise.

  A white-bearded rabbi chanted the burial service over a body wrapped in a sheet; wood for coffins had long since become a luxury. Behind him, amid a small crowd of mourners, stood a stooped man with both hands pressed up to his face to hide his sobs. Was it his wife going into the increasingly muddy ground? Mordechai would never know.

  He and his companions paced among the headstones-some straight, some tilting drunkenly-looking for freshly turned earth. Some of the grass in the cemetery was knee high; it had been poorly tended ever since the Germans first took Lodz, almost five years before.

  “Would it fit in an ordinary grave?” Gruver asked, pausing before one that couldn’t have been more than a week old.

  “I don’t know,” Anielewicz answered. He paused. “No. Maybe I do. I’ve seen regular bombs the size of a man. Airplanes can carry those. What the Germans have has to be bigger.”

  “We’re wasting our time here, then,” the fireman said. “We should go down to the ghetto field, where the mass graves are.”

  “No,” Bertha Fleishman said. “Where the bomb is-that doesn’t have to look like a grave, you know. They could have made it seem as if they’d repaired the sewer pipes or something of that sort.”

  Gruver scratched at his chin, then finally nodded. “You’re right”

  An old man in a long black coat sat by one of the graves, a battered fedora pulled down low over his face against the drizzle. He closed the prayerbook he’d been reading and put it in his pocket. When Mordechai and his friends went by, the fellow nodded but did not speak.

  A walk through the cemetery didn’t show any new excavations of any sort bigger than ordinary graves. Gruver had an I-told-you-so look in his eye as he, Mordechai, and Bertha headed south into the ghetto field.

  Grave markers got fewer there, and many of them, as Solomon Gruver had said, marked many corpses thrown into one pit: men, women, and children dead of typhus, of tuberculosis, of starvation, perhaps of broken hearts. Grass grew on a lot of those mounds, too. Things were not so desperate now. With the Nazis gone, times had improved all the way up to hard, and burials were by ones, not by companies at a time.

  Bertha paused in front of one of the large interments: the board that was all the marker the poor souls down there would ever get had fallen over. When she stooped to straighten it, she frowned. “What’s this?” she said.

  Mordechai couldn’t see what “this” was till he came close. When he did, he whistled softly under his breath. A wire whose insulator was the color of old wood ran the length of the board, held to it by a couple of nails pounded in and bent over. The nails were rusted, so they didn’t stand out. The wire stopped at the top of the memorial board, but kept going from the bottom. There, it disappeared into the ground.

  “Wireless aerial,” he muttered, and yanked at it. It didn’t want to come out. He pulled with all his strength. The wire snapped, sending him stumbling backwards. He flailed his arms to keep from falling.“Something’s under there that doesn’t belong,” he said.

  “Can’t be,” Solomon Gruver rumbled. “The ground’s not torn up the way it… ” His voice trailed away. He got down on his hands and knees, heedless of what the wet grass would do to his trousers. “Will you look at this?” he said in tones of wonder.

  Mordechai Anielewicz got down beside him. He whistled again. “The grass has been cut out in chunks of sod and then replaced,” he said, running his hand along one of the joins. If it had rained harder and melted the mud, that would have been impossible to notice. In genuine admiration, Anielewicz murmured, “They made a jigsaw puzzle and put it back together here when they were done.”

  “Where’s the dirt?” Gruver demanded, as if Anielewicz had stolen it himself. “I don’t care if they didn’t bury the thing deep
, they were going to have some left over-and they would have spilled it to either side of the grave as they were digging.”

  “Not if they set canvas down first and tossed the spoil onto that,” Mordechai said. Gruver stared at him. He went on, “You have no idea how thorough the Nazis can be when they do something like this. Look at the way they camouflaged their antenna wire. They don’t take chances on having something this important spotted.”

  “If the board hadn’t fallen over-” Bertha Fleishman said in a dazed voice.

  “I’ll bet it was like that when the SS bastards got here,” Anielewicz told her. “If you hadn’t had the keen eyes to notice the aerial-” He made silent clapping motions and smiled at her. She smiled back. She really was quite extraordinary when she did that, he thought.

  “Where’s the dirt?” Solomon Gruver repeated, intent on his own concerns and not noticing the byplay between his comrades. “What did they do with it? They couldn’t have put it all back.”

  “You want me to guess?” Mordechai asked. At the fireman’s nod, he went on, “If I were running the operation, I would have loaded it onto the wagon they used to bring in the bomb and hauled it away. Throw canvas over it and nobody would think twice.”

  “I think you’re right. I think that’s just what they did.” Bertha Fleishman looked over to the detached wire. “The bomb can’t go off now?”

  “I don’t think so,” he answered. “Or, anyhow, they can’t set it off by wireless now, which is good enough for us. If they hadn’t needed the aerial, they wouldn’t have put it there.”

  “Thank God,” she said.

  “So,” Gruver said, sounding as if he still didn’t believe it. “We have a bomb of our own now?”

  “If we can figure out how to fire it,” Anielewicz said. “If we can get it out of here without the Lizards’ noticing. If we can move it so that if, God forbid, we have to, we can fire it without blowing ourselves right out of this world. If we can do all that, we have a bomb of our own now.”